The Crooked Road

Edmund Lowe is a successful businessman, about to marry Irene Hervey. In steps Arthur Loft. They were in prison together in England; Lowe was there for manslaughter, even though Loft had done the deed. Lowe escaped and now Loft wants a lot of money or he'll tell the authorities. Once that's done, he figures, his wife, Claire Carleton, will stop playing around with Paul Fix. So Lowe kills Loft and frames Fix.

But Miss Carleton and her lawyer, Charles Lane, aren't letting it go at that. They enroll lawyer Henry Wilcoxon, who is a friend of Lowe's and falling in love with Miss Hervey, to get him out. At that point, the story becomes complicated.

This high-speed Republic murder mystery has some film noir touches, like shadows thrown by Venetian blinds in the courtroom, but it's not actually noir, but a complicated murder-and-law mystery, with a plot that's a lot of moving parts. Director Phil Rosen started out as a cameraman, so the visuals on his films was important to him; with the coming together of film noir in the late 1930s, he was probably intrigued, and cinematographer Ernest Miller -- the American one, usually stuck in B westerns -- and art director John Victor Mackay were happy to oblige.

The actors are good, the story interesting, and it moves along at such a clip that it is consistently entertaining. Even if this title was a frequently used one over the years, it's striking on its own terms.