On the evening of his decoration for bringing a murderer to justice, Washington DC Police Captain Frank Matthews' wife, and her lover are murdered in bed. Jailed as the prime suspect, with the aforementioned murderer released on a technicality Matthews escapes in search of the man he believes to be the real killer.
The rise of a raucous hayseed named Lonesome Rhodes from itinerant Ozark guitar picker to local media rabble-rouser to TV superstar and political king-maker. Marcia Jeffries is the innocent Sarah Lawrence girl who discovers the great man in a back-country jail and is the first to fall under his spell.
In 1956, BLOOMER GIRL was presented in a live television production starring the magnificent Barbara Cook, whose star was then on the rise, with leading roles in CANDIDE and THE MUSIC MAN still in her future. A solid success when it opened on Broadway in 1944, BLOOMER GIRL boasts a glorious score by the legendary team of Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg (THE WIZARD OF OZ). The book by Fred Saidy is set at the brink of the Civil War and addresses issues of women's equality (priorities were the right to vote and to wear bloomers, a liberating alternative to hoop skirts) and racial equality.
An upper-class female reporter is (despite herself) attracted to a hulking laborer digging a tunnel under the Hudson River.
A waitress falls for a foreign businessman (Mohr), while receiving attention from a pair of motorcycle cops, Curtis and Defore. She soon realizes that Mohr is actually a crook and goes back to flirting with her fast cop friends.
When the elderly woman sponsoring a treasure hunt is murdered on board her docked ship, Charlie Chan must deal with a treasure map in four pieces, the ghost of a hanged pirate, a talking parrot, a recalcitrant sea captain and several suspicious passengers - and a second murder.
Two professional people marry, but the wife insists that they be celibate for the first three months to make sure they are truly compatible.
This expose of the U.S. parole system, as seen through the eyes of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, takes dead aim on lawyers who manipulate the justice system in order to get undeserving convicts parole from prisons. The point is made when FBI agents are assigned to track down "Big Boy" Bradmore, who after getting an undeserved parole, via the efforts of a shyster lawyer, promptly murders an FBI agent.