Blind Spot

I saw "Blind Spot" at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago as part of a noir festival hosted by TCM's Eddie Muller. Under those circumstances, and with a live audience, I enjoyed it more than I probably would have if I had stumbled across this in my living room. It's slow and bit too talky, and while its story about a man wrongfully accused of murder is right out of the noir canon, not a lot of other noir tropes are present to satisfy die-hard fans of the genre.

Chester Morris plays the main character, an alcoholic writer, as a slurry, stumbling drunk, but he does it quite charmingly and in a way that prevents it from getting old. But the real reason to see this film is for Constance Dowling, an absolute stunner, reminiscent of Veronica Lake but with a unique and exotic look all her own.

I saw this as a double feature with "The Unsuspected," and much to my surprise, my nine and seven year old sons liked this one more, despite it having much less action. Go figure.

Grade: B

This was the directorial debut of Robert Gordon, whose debut is however not of earth-shaking importance, as he never shook the earth later on. The film is an entertaining low-budget B murder mystery, and Chester Morris and Constance Dowling both overact. Morris especially over-does it as a particularly obnoxious drunk early in the film. This is unfortunate, as the story requires us to have sympathy for him later on, and those who find abusive drunks hard to tolerate will have to be strong. The chief merit of this film is an extraordinarily ingenious twist to the 'murder in a locked room' motif. Several films have been made on the theme: 'how did the murderer escape from the room containing the corpse when the room was locked from the inside?' In this version, however, another ingenious layer is added to the conundrum. Here we have the drunken author (just mentioned) inventing a plot solution for this while he is intoxicated and forgetting it when he has sobered up. However, by that time, someone who heard his idea has actually carried out the clever plan and implicated Morris as the murderer! When Morris tries to track down the people he told the idea to when he was drunk, in the hope that they will remember it and enlighten him, so that he can clear himself of a murder charge, he runs into difficulties. The bartender to whom he told the idea is murdered, to stop him telling the solution of the crime. Those of us who like to solve things will inevitably be interested in this film, and will disregard the inadequacies of the production as being beside the point. Hence, murder mystery fans will find much in this film to intrigue them. And perhaps they will wish, as I found myself doing, that the excellent story idea had been carried out with a better film version, or indeed that someone would remake it and do it properly this time.

This film has poor production values, but the script is not one of them; it is engrossing. I had bad vibes in the first ten minutes of this film because Chester Morris did such a horrible job playing a drunk. He recovers, however, and finally becomes the tough guy he was known for in similar films.

The plot centers upon a writer who may have killed his publisher (how many thousand suspects could that bring?). There is, of course, the romantic interest, the innocent? Blond who was the secretary of the publisher, a gentle detective story writer who was a friend of the publisher, and a bartender, as well as an elevator operator.

There is also a not-to-bright detective working on the case, who is very good at jumping to conclusions and sniffing red herrings.

The film is both entertaining and amusing at the same time and worth viewing from a mystery standpoint.

Like Decoy, this distinctive low-budget noir has fallen through the cracks and deserves resurrection. It's another masterly essay in irony from the pen of Martin Goldsmith of Detour fame. The plot involves a desperate, alcoholic writer who sarcastically pitches a "locked room" murder mystery to his publisher, then sees the plot occur in real life (with himself as chief suspect, of course). Despite the lack of his presence in the credits, Cornell Woolrich's novels are an obvious influence here - themes of urban paranoia, loss of memory, disconnected characters, etc, were his stock-in-trade. The ripe dialogue borders on self-parody, and the entire exercise could have easily been directed as a satire of the genre. Instead it becomes a double-density noir. Morris and Geray are rather miscast, but peek-a-boo blonde Dowling is striking (particularly visually) as a potential femme fatale. The moody cinematography is engagingly oppressive, lingering on beads of sweat and trapping us in confined spaces. Director Robert Gordon worked mainly in TV and never had much success in film. The "locked room" mystery, a staple of the detective novel genre, was most memorably committed to celluloid in the early talkie classic The Kennel Murder Case.

... and it even made an appearance on Eddie Muller's Noir Alley. But even he seemed to think it was a weird bit of business.

Jeffrey Andrews (Chester Morris) is a writer of good books that don't sell, so he's trying his hand at cheap crime fiction that perhaps will. He's going to see his publisher about an advance and tearing up his contract. Why he thinks the publisher would do both I have no idea. While he's in his publisher's office, to try and get that advance, he relates to him a tale that he devises off the cuff about a murder victim found in a room locked and bolted from the inside. How did the murderer escape? The audience doesn't hear that part and we only see Andrews after the encounter when he goes into the bar on the ground floor and proceeds to get even more drunk than he already was.

Then the publisher's secretary, Evelyn Green (Constance Dowling), stops by the same bar for an after work drink. This is where things get really weird. She falls all over Andrews. She only knows him from when he tried to burst in on her boss, the publisher, several hours before. Andrews is drunk, an alcoholic even when he's not technically drunk, flat broke, and apparently got dressed up in his best suit that morning without bothering to shower or shave so he is sweaty and his face is covered in stubble. In short, he's disgusting. What does this pretty and classy looking woman want with this guy?

Andrews says he's going back up to the publisher's office and try again to get his contract torn up, then cut to the police interrogating Andrews. Why? Apparently the publisher was found murdered in his office on the 32nd floor with the door bolted from the inside.

Andrews thinks that maybe the secretary did it since he thinks he told her his "locked room" plot, but he doesn't know. What's worse, he doesn't remember the conclusion of his story himself, or how the murderer escaped since he was drunk at the time he told the tale. Complications ensue.

This little B film is just full of weirdness. For one, at some point, Andrews gets in a struggle with someone who has a gun, and gets shot in the shoulder. He gets away, but for the next five minutes he narrates about the horrible pain and how he feels faint from loss of blood. Then the story takes a different direction and Andrews seems to forget all about the bullet in his shoulder for the rest of the film. And on it goes.

It was never clear to me WHY the police were so sure Andrews did this. They didn't even know about Andrews and his "locked door mystery" plot when they arrested him, and the victim was widely disliked. I can see why Andrews thought he did this, but nobody else.

I did like the classic noir atmosphere and especially James Bell as the homicide detective. Bell played it most unconventionally like a world weary preacher who has forgotten why he is even in this line of work at this point. But as for the plot - Most of Chester Morris's Boston Blackie scripts seem to have had more work put into them.