I can see it took so long just to realize

The Chance Of A Lifetime has Boston Blackie arguing that criminals should be given this so-called ``parole'' for matters like war work, and despite Inspector Farraday's skepticism they go ahead with a test program, twelve criminals released into Blackie's custody for war work. This film --- directed by William Castle, to inspire many interesting movie-themed gimmicks, by the way --- makes an interesting character step on the way for Blackie and his quest to reform from his safecracking past.

The plan goes wrong immediately as one guy, Dewey Watson, who has a wife and child, skips out the first day of work so he can get the payroll he'd stolen and tries to return it rather than split it with his partners and you have to wonder whether criminals really are this stupid. His absence is immediately noticed at War Plant Manager Arthur Manleder's --- played by one of those character actors who look like Muppets who have Grover as their waiter, you know the kind I mean --- by Farraday, who's for a change given good reason to suspect Blackie and Watson. Anyway, Blackie as well as Watson's partners converge on his apartment, there's a scuffle, one's killed, and Blackie figures the best way to defuse the situation is to hide the dead body.

One of the interesting elements of the series is measuring how credible Farraday's suspicions of Blackie are, considering they're proved wrong every time. In this case Farraday's got excellent reason to suspect Blackie: he finds Blackie and Runt holding the dead body of one of Watson's partners in the payroll robbery, and there is after all $60,000 at stake. So Blackie tries confessing to Farraday's whole scheme and trusting that the parolee partners will be able to figure something out --- and that makes an interesting, fairly plausible way to make an ``adventures of the Blackie Street Irregulars'' story. But after faking things out that way it does another direction: Blackie feigns giving a little chat to his parolees, and makes an escape while they pretend to have all been caught and tied up by him, while Farraday listens from the other room. After his general smartness this time around, the stupidity of this action really stands out, even if Blackie is using one of those slick record players that records your own voice.

After that bit, though, Farraday resumes competent intelligence levels, particularly in seeing through Blackie's attempts to scam the police department into doing what he needs.

I note this movie features an attempt to escape by way of dumbwaiter, which stands out because I spotted it in another film in this series (Boston Blackie Booked On Suspicion) and that it was also used in a Lone Wolf series. Clearly, the ability for B-movie rogue ex-criminals to escape the police has shrunk dramatically since dumbwaiters stopped being normal things in buildings.

The highly variable level of character intelligence drags down this story, really. Individual scenes are fine, but after a couple bits of Blackie or Farraday or Muppet Guy being ingenious, something dopey such as their failing to read the whole headline (``BOSTON BLACKIE CAPTURED -- ALMOST'', because the ALMOST was folded over) grates; and after a couple scenes of their being goofy the characters suddenly pulling off a slick scam feels almost as jarring. Farraday and his top officers don't notice Blackie and Runt in disguise walking through their building, but they have in the evidence room a windowshade with, on the window-facing front, ``WHEN THIS BLIND IS DOWN THE SAFE IS BEING ROBBED'', and Runt pulls the shade down even after Blackie said don't do that, as that would make them more suspicious. And when Farraday finds Blackie and Runt he still trusts the costume, blaming the underlings for accidentally gassing the cleaning women, rather than notice that the cleaning women aren't the regular cleaning women or technically speaking women. They really need to pick an intelligence level and stick with it.

There's also one really odd moment where Blackie for reasons too involved to explain is drinking champagne with some charwomen and to drink it they roll paper up into cups. I know in elementary school we were taught how to make origami paper cups, but I didn't know people were expected to do that in real life for, like, ever.

The actual bad guy is coerced into confession, in one of those moves that reminds you that even in the 1940s, before the Bill of Rights was discovered, courts wouldn't just accept anything as evidence.

Trivia: The first time the New York Stock Exchange saw 20 million shares traded in a single day was on April 10, 1968. By the end of 1968 there had been five more 20-million-share days. Source: The Go-Go Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: The First Space Race: Launching The World's First Satellites, Matt Bille, Erika Lishock.

PS:
Just One More Ride?, about how many more times I could expect to ride Disaster Transport using the coin flipping scheme to decide whether to ride again.