NOTHING VENTURE (1948)
Article #1280 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-15-2004
Posting Date: 2-12-2005
Directed by John Baxter
Featuring Jackie, Peter and Philip Artemus

Three boys help a detective unravel a crime involving a tower, a girl who raises racehorses, and a dotty old man.

The credits prominently feature the preseince of the Artemus boys in the story. I don’t know who they are, but that appears to be their names as performers; Peter, Phillip and Jackie Artemus play the parts of three boy detectives named Tom, Dick and Harry. These three boys appear to have only appeared in two movies; the other was called THE GRAND ESCAPADE, which was made two years earlier and did not appear to have them in starring roles.

At any rate, what we have here is a boy’s detective story. It’s entertaining at first, but it does a fairly poor job of letting the viewer know what’s going on, and I found myself rather confused and finally bored. Eventually, you find it’s centered around spies trying to get hold of a new invention; a ray that kills the engines of planes, which puts it into the realm of science fiction, though the invention only comes into play towards the end (in a very disappointing sequence). This one is minor and forgettable. I also suspect that the title doesn’t mean anything at all.