Bodyguard

For what it is,this is a thoroughly enjoyable 40's detective flick.

Mike Carter (Tierney),gets sacked for punching his superior in an office fracas and becomes tempted into protecting a rich,meat packing business woman from some unscrupulous characters.......oh and gets framed for the murder of his previous superior in the process.

Assisting him is Doris Brewster (Lane),his girlfriend who still works in the police station he once frequented,and is able to provide Carter with valuable info from police files now out of his reach.

At a runtime of just over an hour,a movie like this needs to have a cracking pace,and this movie doesn't disappoint. It has all the action,intrigue,humour and suspense you could need,including some great one liners delivered by Tierney,all thanks to Richard Fleischer's direction.

You really cannot go wrong with this one.

BODYGUARD (1948) is a snappy 62-min. b&w noir programmer directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Lawrence Tierney. Rather than repeat what others have said here, I'd rather emphasize a couple of things that truly distinguish this film. For one thing, it was filmed largely on location at sites all over Los Angeles. Ex-policeman Mike Carter (Lawrence Tierney), trying to clear himself of a false murder charge, moves around L.A. quite vigorously in the course of his investigation, sometimes by car, sometimes by cab, and sometimes on foot, traveling to shops, offices, back alleys, factories, piers, and amusement arcades all over the city. If you like seeing film footage of L.A. in the 1940s, there are many films with abundant footage, but none quite like this one.

Also, I'd like to single out a very clever scene that offers an ingenious method of secretly transmitting key information from one location to another in the era before fax machines, cell phones, or e-mail. Carter needs the contents of a case file kept by the police officer whose murder he's been framed for. Only his girlfriend, Doris (Priscilla Lane), who works in the department, can find the file for him. He tells her over the phone to write down all the important cases handled by the officer in the past year and then go to an amusement arcade on 3rd Street, find a "Record Your Own Voice" booth and read all the cases into the microphone onto as many vinyl records (78 rpm) as needed, and then to leave the stack of records for him at the cashier's counter under an assumed name. Carter's plan is to go to the arcade, give the assumed name, enter an available booth and listen to the records until he finds the case he's looking for. There are wonderful little details of character and street life woven into the scene (and just about every scene in the movie). When Carter first enters the arcade, the brassy blonde at the counter is flirting with two sailors and claims not to know anything about a stack of records for a "Mr. Nolan." An anxious Carter gets insistent and the two sailors turn on him, spoiling for a fight. Only then does the manager come over and defuse the situation and find the package of records for Carter. It's just a brief moment but it not only adds to the suspense, but captures so much of the tenor of the time and place.

The basic plot itself-corrupt industrialist covers up shady business practices via murder and convenient frame-ups-would get recycled ad infinitum on TV cop shows in the 1970s. But it might have seemed somewhat fresh back in 1948, especially after ALL MY SONS (also 1948), based on Arthur Miller's play, raised a similar issue in a drama of a wartime industrialist who sends out defective airplane parts with tragic results.

Tough-talking mug Lawrence Tierney is the hero of this quick and dirty cheapy from 1948. He plays a detective who's kicked off the force for being a hot head, and gets a job moonlighting as the bodyguard for an elderly lady (Elizabeth Risdon), matriarch and acting manager of a large and successful meat-packing company, whose life is being threatened for unknown reasons. Of course it's not long before we and Tierney realize that he's been set up to be the fall guy for a crooked plot to swindle the company away from the old lady, and he helps crack the case with the help of his girl Friday Priscilla Lane.

"Bodyguard" is almost laughingly short and inconsequential, but it's an awful lot of fun. There's nothing especially striking about the writing or visual style, but yet it doesn't feel anonymous either. There are some clever set pieces to distinguish the film, most notably a scene that takes place in an optometrist's office and that uses some clever lighting and framing. And Tierney has a cute relationship with Lane, and it's refreshing to see a woman in a film like this take an active role in solving the crime rather than simply be someone the leading man has to rescue.

Robert Altman (credited as Robert B. Altman) wrote the story for this film at the ripe old age of 25.

Far from a must see, but enjoyable if you can find it.

Grade: B-

Up until a few weeks ago, I only knew cult 40s tough guy Lawrence Tierney from his role in Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS (1991); recently, however, I managed to watch his 2 vehicles released on DVD by Warners as part of their "Film Noir Collection Vol. 2", namely DILLINGER (1945) and BORN TO KILL (1947). This Richard Fleischer film, then, would be my third from Tierney's short period of glory.

Actually, the actor is the best thing about the whole movie - whose story, amazingly, was co-written by a very young Robert Altman! - as it's certainly a minor noir, albeit an enjoyable one; indeed, Tierney's cynical, no-nonsense attitude (reminiscent of Bogart, Mitchum and Robert Ryan) provides a good deal of amusement throughout. Still, the plot - a discredited cop uncovering corruption in a meat-packing company, when appointed to protect the elderly female proprietor - is nothing special and also kind of dreary; besides, the jovial personality of leading lady Priscilla Lane is as much unsuited to Tierney's hard-boiled façade as she is to the inherent bleakness of the genre!

They sure don't make 'em like "Bodyguard" anymore. No. They sure don't.

This tough-as-nails, 1948, Crime/Thriller certainly packed a lot of story into its 62 minute running time.

Containing some really priceless "tough-guy" dialog, "Bodyguard" has no-nonsense actor Lawrence Tierney playing Mike Carter, a real macho-man, L.A. police detective (with a hair-trigger temper) from the Homicide Squad.

When Mike gets bounced off the force for brawling with his superior officer, who is later found dead, he becomes Suspect #1.

Scrambling to clear his name, Carter soon finds himself up against a whole big mess of police corruption.

"Bodyguard", filmed in b&w, is a solid, fast-paced, little B-movie with striking direction from Richard Fleischer.

Nope. They sure don't make 'em like this anymore.