Teala Loring, poverty row starlet

Teala Loring (1922-2007) was the first of three beautiful sisters to enter show business. The daughters of a vaudeville performer, Marcia, Debralee and Lezlie Gae Griffin became Teala Loring, Debra Paget and Lisa Gaye, respectively, the latter two arguably having more success than Teala, who toiled mostly in low-budget programmers. At first billing herself Judith Gibson only to be constantly confused with another starlet, Julie Gibson, she became Teala Loring for Delinquent Daughters (1944), the moniker, “a good Irish name,” conjured up by producer Irwin Allen. She is actually quite good in Daughters, playing the glamorous and totally unrepentant juvenile delinquent, whose demise becomes the climax of the little thriller. Loring went on to work with everybody on poverty row, from the Bowery Boys to Charlie Chan to Rex Allen. She left the screen after The Arizona Cowboy , with Allen, to become a mother to a brood of six. Luckily, writers Boyd Magers and the late Michael Fitzgerald were able to track down the-then septuagenarian Teala Loring for their fine book “Westerns Women” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1999).

Dark Alibi (Monogram, 1946)

In Dark Alibi, Teala's poor father, Thomas Harley (Edw. Earle) is sent directly to death row after allegedly killing a guard during a bank robbery. Daddy, you see, had been in prison many years before, a fact that catches poor Teala unaware, and his fingerprints are found on the crime scene. The desperate girl seeks help from Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) and his bumbling sidekicks, Tommy (Benson Fong) and Birmingham (Mantan Moreland), and the Hawaiian detective immediately hones in on the suspicious array of flotsam and jetsam that constitutes the occupants of the Harleys' boarding house. Which, not coincidentally, comes with its very own Mrs. Danvers type (Edna Holland who had replaced that old favorite, Minerva Urecal). Did someone actually manage to plant poor innocent Mr. Harley's fingerprints on the crime scene? Is the pope German? While not exactly prime Chan, this is not too bad at all and the main culprit is not easily spotted. Teala Loring is suitably panicky, and there is a very funny comedy routine involving Moreland and his inmate brother (Ben Carter) that alone is worth the price of admission.

Amira Moustafa (Dangerous Money)

Leave it to a Hollywood B-movie like Monogram's Dangerous Money (1946) to cast an Egyptian starlet as a Polynesian half-caste married to a part Swedish, part Polynesian character played by a Russian (Rich Vallin). Not to mention a Britisher (Sidney Toler) portraying a Hawaiian-Chinese detective – Charlie Chan of course. This mishmash of ethnicity was typical for the period and it was equally accepted that the only cast members playing their own nationality, Chinese Victor Sen Young and African-American Willie Best, were asked to provide comic relief only. But at least Amira Moustafa, as the Polynesian half-caste, got to perform a little belly-dancing while tripping the light fantastic with the star-billed Mr. Toler. Said belly-dancing, of course, meant to suggest Island exotica and not Middle Eastern culture. All in all, Dangerous Money is not one of the best Chan – in fact, Chan connoisseur Ken Hanke ranks it as the nadir of the long series – not so much because of the cross-eyed ethnic portrayals and generally uneven performances but more due the aforementioned “comedy relief” which is no relief at all and a plot that goes nowhere fast. Is Amira the culprit in the killing of a treasury agent (B-Western and serial regular Tristram Coffin, incidentally)? By the time of the unveiling you wouldn't really care.

Amira Moustafa did indeed hail from Cairo, Egypt and was in Hollywood courtesy of her husband, Walter E. Beck, a Douglas Aircrat executive formerly stationed in North Africa. And that, alas, is basically what we have managed to learn about this exotic presence in a few Hollywood potboilers of the 1940s that included the title role in Queen of the Amazons (1947).