Live Wires (1946)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
The first of forty-eight films in The Bowery Boys series follows familiar grounds but in the end the film delivers enough cheap laughs to make it worth seeing. In the film 'Slip' Mahoney (Leo Gorcey) keeps getting fired from one job after another due to his short temper and willingness to throw a punch. This eventually gets under the skin of his sister who pretty much gives up on him but Slip finds work as a skip tracer and hopes that this will get him on the right path. This first film in the series could easily be mistaken for one of the East Side Kid entries as there's really not much difference. This is certainly to be expected but the one big difference here is that the budget appears to be slightly higher and the overall production seems to have stepped up a notch. The 65-minute running time begins to wear a little thin towards the end but fans of the group will probably stay entertained throughout. The opening credits read "Leo Gorcey and The Bowery Boys", which is pretty much correct as there's no doubt the film belongs to Gorcey and it's pretty clear that this was an attempt to take everything over. At least in this first entry the "gang" takes a backseat to Gorcey's one-man show. That might sound like a negative thing but Gorcey can certainly handle carrying the film and he ends up delivering a fun and fast performance. He continues the mangling of big words, which was quite familiar by this point in his career but as childish as it is I can't help but laugh at it. The hot temper stuff would seem to be growing old but he still manages to put some fire behind it and makes it fun. Huntz Hall, Mike Mazurki, Bobby Jordan, William Benedict and William Frambes bring up the support and aren't too bad even if the screenplay doesn't do them any favors. The screenplay itself is pretty familiar stuff and it never tries to be too original but it still works due to the train that is Gorcey. The highlight of the film is the sequence where Gorcey tries to get a break into the "stain removal" business.
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