Low budget film noir is a mixed bag. Some truly follow the details of what the perfect film noir is, while others are simply just detective stories which have one or two similar aspects. In the case of this two part Lippert "streamlined" feature, it seems totally like a T.V. detective show, featuring Hugh Beaumont ("Leave It to Beaver") as a man who has the innate ability to seem to being always at the wrong place at the wrong time. He's first seen walking the streets of San Francisco, discussing through narration his plans for the day, and all of a sudden, he's sitting in an auction shop where the beauty next to him asks him to bid on a mysterious leather suitcase for her. What's inside is unknown as there is a bundle of keys that come with it, and the auctioneer has not had the chance to go inside. This leads to a fight between him and others who want the suitcase that simply contains a saxophone. But when this musical instrument leads to murder, Beaumont finds himself up against the S.F.P.D. in proving his innocence.In case two, he's involved in a divorce case where he ends up being made a suspect in the murder of the husband. He then must question the widow's niece and try to find out from the femme fatal widow what really happened. Nefarious characters once again get him into trouble with the same S.F.P.D. detectives, and at just a total of 55 minutes, this is obviously T.V. type viewing minus the commercials. The best sequences come when Beaumont has discussions with a classier than normal Edward Brophy, totally disguising his New York accent here and being less than frenetic in nature. The women are pretty indistinguishable from one another which makes it seem at times that they are the same performers even though they are not. But of the many films released in the VCI "Forgotten Noir" series, this one is perhaps a lot closer to Noir than many of the others.

Long before he was Beaver Cleaver's father, Hugh Beaumont had an earlier television series in TV's infancy where he played a private detective complete with Raymond Chandler patter. Lippert managed to get three feature films from this series by stringing two of the half hour episodes together.Beaumont works out of San Francisco where he lives on his charter boat when he's not sleuthing for a fee. This episode concerns him getting in trouble twice because a woman asked him for a favor. The man is not Sam Spade he's more like Miles Archer.Favor one is Virginia Dale who asks him to bid on a suitcase at a public auction. That gets him involved with a smuggling racket and a saxophone. Favor two is when another private eye Tom Neal gets him to 'escort' a young lady to a private party on a boat. That gets him involved with a murder and a divorce. Is anyone sensing a pattern here?Nothing special here though Beaumont is good in a part that's a quantum leap from Ward Cleaver.

This film was so bad it was good. Fireign Theater must have drawn upon Danger Zone when they concocted Nick Danger. The hilariously corny metaphors (e.g., "...about as interesting as Mother's Day at an orphanage..."), the sudden right turns in the plot, characters stiffly showing up out of nowhere, the wise cracking, police taunting leading man. Oh, this is indeed a tarnished gem. And the names. Spadely (shades of Sam Spade) and the rummy bloodhound human mascot, Shicker. (Shicker, of course, is Yiddish for drunkard.) The flatness of the scenes reminded me of the early Superman TV series. Let's all stand around and deliver our lines one at a time. OK, I said my line. Now you say yours. Everybody get a turn? Good. Next scene. It takes about a half hour to solve the mystery, so they introduce a brand new plot with some of the same characters. Oy, what a mess.

Danger Zone is an odd little double-truck of a movie; it tells two entirely independent stories, one after the other, though with three recurring characters. The only plausible explanation is that the stories were pilot episodes of a television series that never got picked up, but were salvaged by packaging as a twofer and farming out as a programmer to theater chains.A troubleshooter who earns his keep renting boats on the San Francisco waterfront, O'Brian (Hugh Beaumont) picks up spare change by taking on freelance assignments; his usual fee is $50, for which he is usually set up. He shares his nautical digs with an old souse called (of course) The Professor (Edward Brophy), a Runyonesque character with a Thesaurus instead of a voicebox -- he never says "I had the chance" if he can proclaim "The opportunity befell me." Then there's the dim-witted and antagonistic police detective (Richard Travis), always ready to clap the cuffs on Beaumont just before the truth emerges.Neither of the stories -- the first about a woman who pays Beaumont to bid an exorbitant amount on a locked suitcase that turns out to contain a saxophone, the second about a private detective (Tom Neal, of Detour notoriety) who sets up Beaumont as correspondent, and murderer, in a society divorce case -- gets worked out in any satisfying way. The half-hour allotted to each allows little room for extra characters or unexpected bends in the road (television was to prove that the most successful mystery/detective shows thrived in a hour format). Danger Zone, viewed as early television, is perhaps a tad better than such pioneers as Martin Kane, Private Eye -- at least it's filmed, not done live in studio -- but was nonetheless passed over by the networks in 1951. Beaumont would have to wait six more years, until Leave It To Beaver, to hit his personal jackpot.