City of Missing Girls

Elmer Clifton's City of Missing Girls (1941), produced by Max Alexander and George Merrick (with Arthur Alexander serving as an assistant director), must have seemed pretty dated in its own time, with a script filled with old-fashioned, sentimental sensibilities, relatively static camerawork, crude, predictable editing, and slow pacing. It has one slightly interesting shot at nine minutes in, involving the use of a mirror, but otherwise, this is the kind of movie that likely helped ruin Edward D. Wood Jr. (if he didn't see it, he saw something exactly like it) by making him think this was what real crime movies were about and giving him something to shoot for. The source print is in decent, if not perfect, shape, with no major flaws, and the audio is remarkably high in volume, clean, and consistent. The usual Alpha Video six-chapter breakdown is more than adequate for a 74-minute movie of this simplicity. The disc opens automatically on a simple three-selection menu with the "play" option in the default position.