The best Chester Conklin’s crime movies

A lottery win of $5,000 forever changes the lives of a miner turned dentist and his wife.

In New York, a bank robbery of $300,000 goes unsolved for a year, until some of the marked bills are found in a Los Angeles drugstore theft. Police detectives Cal Bruner and Jack Farnham investigate and are led from the drugstore to a nightclub, where singer Lili is another recipient of a stolen bill. With Lili's help, the partners track down the remaining money, but both Lili and Frank are dismayed when Cal decides he wants to keep part of it.

Jed Marlowe is a brilliant, scheming, unscrupulous criminal lawyer whose specialty is defending criminal he knows is guilty but gets them off through loop-holes or bribery. Then his daughter, misled by her father’s courtroom performance, but unaware of his back-room tactics, marries the killer her father has just unjustly save from the electric chair. What’s a poor father to do?

In "Shakedown," Howard Duff plays a photographer who will stop at nothing to climb his way to the very top of the success ladder. On the strength of his sheer tenacity, he gets a job with a major newspaper, and it's not long before he's made a name for himself by charming a notorious crime boss (Brian Donlevy) into allowing himself to be photographed. Donlevy takes him under his wing, but Duff decides to bite the hand that feeds him and sets Donlevy and another crime boss, Lawrence Tierney, against one another. He uses photos to blackmail Tierney into providing him with a steady income while he sidles up to Donlevy's wife on the sly, all the while romancing the photo editor of the paper at which he works.

Biff Jones is a driver/salesman for the Good Humor ice-cream company. He hopes to marry his girl Margie, who works as a secretary for Stuart Nagel, an insurance investigator. Margie won't marry Biff, though, because she is the sole support of her kid brother, Johnny. Biff gets involved with Bonnie, a young woman he tries to rescue from gangsters. But Biff's attempts to help her only get him accused of murder. When the police refuse to believe his story, it's up to Biff and Johnny to prove Biff's innocence and solve the crime.