***Out In The Not Philip Marlowe Or Sam Spade Night-Lloyd Nolan’s Private Investigator Michael Shayne In  Dressed To Kill 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Dressed to Kill, starring  Lloyd Nolan, 20^th Century Fox, 1941

Truth. I like my black and white film and literary detectives all filled to the brim with noir-ish attributes. You know like the ultra-cool Sam Spade in the film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon where it was touch and go whether he would let that femme fatale off the hook and spent the rest of his life looking over his shoulder to see whether she would put a slug or two in him just for kicks or just cut his losses and turn her and her stuff that dreams were made of notions over to the coppers to take the fall, to take the big step off if they could ever get a jury to squeeze her pretty little head. Or the world-weary and wary Philip Marlowe in the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep trying to paste together an old man’s last requests, trying to find an old reprobate guy, trying to keep a cheap hood from cleaning up the old man’s fortune, yeah, and grab some bad guys in the bargain. Or any of the several other Chandler crime novels that have been turned into film.

Yeah, I like my detective guys chasing after windmills for the good of the cause and where money places a distance second to that pursuit, like them willing to take a few hits on the noggin or a stray bullet or two for that same good cause, and of course I want my guys to go right to the very edge with some forgetful double-crossing trigger-happy  femme fatale and then walk away without a murmur when justice has to rear its head even if that means many lonely winter nights alone thinking about the vagaries of love. So it was a little disconcerting, made me a little ticked off really, to have a black and white film detective (oops, private investigator as he preferred to be called), Michael Shayne, hustling to solve first two murders and eventually three murders for filthy lucre. To not only not be in pursuit of some hot off the press femme but to be planning on the very day of first murders to get married, get married against all wise advise, to go way out of his way to avoid taking a few hits or a random slug, and worse, worse than all of that is that he takes everything with a certain detached humor and nonchalance giving the profession a bad name, making everybody think these PIs are nothing peep-hole peepers or  repo guys in the film under review, 1941s  Dressed to Kill.

But then I got to thinking about what a film or crime novel private investigator is supposed to do, why he in the end can pursue his profession with his head held up high, can blow off the cynics who think he or she lives under some rock when not looking through keyholes, and that is to outsmart, easily outsmart the coppers, the public coppers, New York City’s finest in this film set around the environs of Broadway and peopled with guys and dolls who could have come straight out of Damon Runyon’s pen. Yeah, every self-respecting PI, and Michael Shayne is no exception, lives to have the whole case wrapped up and tied with a ribbon and still have time to see a Broadway show, make bets with his bookmaker, file his nails or have them filed, empty a bottle of bottom drawer cheap low-shelf scotch or filch half the evidence which was laying around, while the cops are still scratching their heads and finishing up their coffee and crullers. And one Michael Shayne certainly does all of that, or could, almost baiting the public cops to beat him to the punch in the process.                    

Here is the way Shayne sewed the thing up without any heavy breathing, how he had the coppers sucking up air in his wake (and in the process remained a black and white film pure detecti0ve unmarried and unattached ready to worry those long winter nights alone and think about the vagaries of the love game when his honey takes a powder on him with some other Joe, and good riddance). This old time Lothrop character, something of a ladies’ man in his day doing the old love them and leave them routine like guys have been doing since Adam and Eve, maybe before, leaving a trail of forlorn women and vengeful husbands and boyfriends, a has-been show producer and owner of the Broadway hotel where Shayne’s bride to be lives, got himself   gruesomely and obscurely (found by Shayne dressed in medieval livery which counts in my book as obscure in the 20^th century) murdered in his suite along with an old time flame, Desiree, and nobody can figure out how it happened since the set-up looked like a murder-suicide by one of the two. But Shayne after a few minutes looking around the place and musing things up against all good police procedure is wise to that caper. Knows in his bones that this dastardly deed has been done by a third party for his or her own sordid reasons.  

So the chase is on once Michael gets the filthy lucre offered by a venal newspaper editor looking as always for an exclusive. Thus charged up Shayne in his casual off-beat way figures out that the murderer knew a thing or two about fake set-ups himself once he scoped to the fact that the killer used a hairpin trigger on a rifle to kill one of the pair one while killing the other with a revolver. Nice work. Naturally Shayne worked his way through to who had motive to use such a set-up staying one step, no about five steps, ahead of the coppers who are assigned to the case, including and inspector who must have had political pull to get the job because no other explanation figures for how he got it. Speaking of jobs, everything Shayne uncovered pointed to an inside job, or somebody who knew how to get in and out of Lothrop’s apartment (which had several entrances to the adjoining theater he owned and operated) without being seen (although despite the caution the murderer it turned out was seen and was being blackmailed by an ex-actor on the outs with Lothrop, a guy needed some ready cash to keep up his life-style which with one thing or another had fallen on hard times).

But the big question was who would have had the motive to set-up such a weird set of killings and then subsequently murder Lothrop’s maid for the trifecta (by the way an old theater flame of Lothrop’s who couldn’t let go of her man when he moved on to the next best thing or just got tired of her whom the killer thought knew too much, and might do some squealing about the matter to the coppers, or Shayne). Once Shayne did a simple little test involving lipstick on a glass on one of the suspects it was all downhill from there. And of course along the way he was wise-cracking and setting up red herrings with abandon. And those cops were still scratching their heads and waiting for their orders of coffee when he tagged his man.  The last we saw of Shayne after he had been jilted by that hard-hearted showgirl he had been running around with he was walking with a spring in his step up Broadway. We know too he will be back in the private investigator saddle again, one jump, no, four jumps ahead of the local constabulary. Yeah, Shayne was no Sam or Philip but that is about the right number.