Up for Murder

This was directed by Monta Bell, the cameraman was Karl Freund and it starred Lew Ayres and Genevieve Tobin. The story was no great shakes, as cub reporter Ayres falls in love with Tobin, the paper's society editor and mistress of the publisher. When Ayres and the publisher confront each other in Tobin' swank apartment, Ayres kills him by accident. The paper's lawyer decides to cover it up to save the paper's reputation, and blame Ayres without any mention of Tobin. They go along with this nonsense.

After the death, Ayres is out wandering the street, and the lighting gets very Gemanic, I remarked that in Afraid to Talk, Freund shot sequences in primitive but definite noir fashion. Here, a year earlier, the lighting style refers to older works. Has anyone written anything on the position of Karl Freund in film noir, or do they concentrate on his work for I Love Lucy and how to light William Frawley?

Given the problems with the story logic and some clangorous and ill-timed lines, I don't find this one particularly great, but it is certainly more interesting on a technical level and Tobin is great.