Fingerprints Don't Lie

This film, Fingerprints Don't Lie, ran a little over an hour. Yet somehow I felt as if it was longer than Gone with the Wind.

What a horror. A man sits in prison, convicted of murder, insisting he didn't do it. Yet his fingerprints are on the murder weapon, a telephone. His fiancée believes him innocent and begs the man who helped put him away with his fingerprint evidence (Richard Travis) to investigate the case further.

The music in this movie -- the organ -- sounded like what they used to play on the old soap operas. It was APPALLING. When someone was knocked off and came to, a choir of angels sang.

I thought the two lead women looked alike, which made things even more confusing.

Imagine - Lyle Talbot was in this and even he didn't come off that well. Lyle Talbot - a 56-year career, never out of work - I guess he must have owed someone a favor.

Richard Travis wasn't a bad actor, at least. He did very well in television.

I always liked Sid Melton. After this I may hate him. He played a doofus photographer whose flashbulb never went off. Kind of like this movie. I can only assume he was in the film to pad the script.

If someone told me this was a television drama, I would have bought it. I assume it was a B movie. I'd have been gone from the theater by then.

Paul Moody is blamed for the murder of Major Palmer by fingerprint expert Jim Stover, since Moody's fingerprints were found on the murder weapon. When journalist Brad Evans doubts Stover's conclusion, he decides to investigate the murder case further with the assistance of Carolyn, the daughter of the murdered Major Palmer.

This is a true low-budget crime story with little atmosphere, but the story isn't all that bad and there's quite a bit to enjoy. The film is also very short. The photographer, who has no interest in photography at all, is there for a bit of comedy, but it's not very funny.

This movie was clearly made on a low budget. Its idea of action is having a character open a balsa wood door. Rarely have I seen a movie so obvious in its poverty.

The lot has potential: A fingerprint expert's testimony sends a man to the chair. He is sure of himself and we don't like him. But he is convinced to reconsider and he does so. Indeed, he tries to solve the mystery. He knows he initially made a mistake.

The actors are rather wooden but OK. What really sinks it are the recurring attempts at comic relief: Sid Melton (of whom I have never before heard) keeps turning up. Generally he is an inept photographer.

Not only do his scenes defy logic: The police know he can't handle a camera. They wouldn't let him keep trying to snap photos at crime scenes. Also, though, he simply is not funny. He pushes so hard as to make Abbott and Costello seem like Restoration Comedy.

(He's demanding, too. It seems as if he keeps wanting us to say how adorable he is. As I say, I have never seen or heard of him before this but he is most unappealing here. And I in fact don't find him adorable.)

The studio must have done what it could to get this thing an audience. But they miscalculated. A terrible product, after all, does not lie.

When the mayor is bumped off, the local police force conclude that it must have been "Moody" (Richard Emory) because all the fingerprint evidence points to him. He, of course, protests his innocence and luckily local journalist "Evans" (Rory Mallinson) takes up the cudgels creating just enough doubt in the forensic expert's mind to have him think twice. "Stover" (Richard Travis) has every faith in his science but gradually, working with "Carolyn" (Sheila Ryan) - the daughter of the murdered man - he is faced with the prospect that there has been some manipulation going on. Back to square one? Who is the real culprit? This is a perfectly watchable crime drama that tries to develop the role of new technology in policing, and one that also points out that the infallible is rarely that. It can't have had much of a budget, so neither the acting nor the writing is particularly noteworthy, and I found the ending to be just a little too convenient, but it passes an hour effortlessly enough.

The movie concerns a young man (Emory) who stands accused of murdering the mayor over a dispute between the two. After being crucified by a police fingerprint expert (Travis) who testified that his fingerprints were all over the murder weapon, the condemned man pins his only hope for proving his innocence on the daughter of the murder victim and the very man whose testimony could send him to the gas chamber!

The writer who previously reviewed this movie and said this movie is worse than Plan 9 From Outer Space was totally wrong. Although this movie was a low budget movie, it wasn't really a bad movie at all.

One more thing. The writer said that he recalled that a scene from a railroad station showed smoke going the wrong way. That's funny as there wasn't any railroad scene in this movie. I guess he must have had it confused with another movie.