Homicide

A cop is drawn rather inexplicably into an apparent suicide, leading him into a meandering investigation.

Despite a promising start, the movie descends into a lackluster crime drama with little to salvage it from the celluloid wastebasket. The plot's neither tight nor coherent, plodding along in uninspired fashion, with the usual bruising fist fights where no one gets marked up and a wounded hero who quickly recovers in true Hollywood fashion. In a better movie, these clichés could be overlooked, but here they simply add to the general contrivance. What surprises me is that this is a studio production (Warner Bros.). I could understand the slipshod results coming from a cheap indie outfit, but not from the gangster experts at Warners. Still, no film with that great tough-talking slattern Esther Howard (the landlady) can be a total loss. My suggestion-- catch the movie if the only alternative is a political speech.

A talky disappointment, HOMICIDE is decently reasonably well-acted, but there's not much more to say about it. The detective lead, Robert Douglas is quite good. However he lacks on-screen appeal. It may have been better to cast Warren Douglas (no relation) who plays the unfortunate victim, in that role. We do see Helen Westcott--an underrated Warners player, Robert Alda, and the always colorful Esther Howard as a flop-house owner. The interaction between Howard and Douglas are among the best things in the picture. Also pretty good are the flirtation scenes with Douglas and Westcott, while a desert fight between Douglas and Alda is a highlight. So it's not a total letdown. But it certainly isn't a Film Noir by any stretch of anyone's imagination, just because it's a crime drama in b&w from 1949.

This is a totally unrealistic film. It is full of foolishness, illogical and stupid actions. Absolutely impossible behaviors and dialogues of real people. A squalor in all categories.

A serviceable police procedural from 1949, Homicide veers from the mildly absorbing to the silly. Its opening shows promise: A drifter just out of the Navy, looking for work as a farm hand, stumbles across a murder in an orange grove. The killers pay him off to testify that he witnessed an accident, then dispose of him too, making it look like he hanged himself in a cheap Los Angeles boarding house (its landlady is Esther Howard, best remembered as Jessie Florian in Murder, My Sweet).

One police detective (Robert Douglas) thinks there's something fishy and, going by a book of matches and a saccharin tablet, takes a leave of absence to pursue his investigation to a desert spa, where the bartender (Robert Alda) suffers from diabetes. A clue! The plot involves an underground wire used by a nationwide gambling syndicate. But Douglas, operating on his own, finds that his cover is burned and his life is in danger....

Homicide's worst misstep is in the casting of its lead. The ostentatiously British Douglas (40 at the time and looking comfortably middle-aged) is passed off as a Canadian to somehow explain his working for the LAPD. A better explanation would be why they hired a detective who's thick as a brick. The most entertaining part of the movie is listening to him try to sling American slang in his brittle B.B.C. accent; it's like watching a movie with subtitles.

This begins auspiciously but becomes implausible.

Still, it's always a treat to run into Robert Alda. And the character actress playing the landlady is the real McCoy, as are the farm folk earlier in the movie.

So many noirs are lost and forgotten, I tip my hat -- fedora, of course -- to the major cable channel that unearthed this one! May it do so with many more.