Decoy

I have to say that Decoy was one interesting cinematic experience. The story had a lot of holes in it and the plan that was made by the bad guys had a lot of faults in it.

But what makes this film get as high a rating from me as I give it is the presence of Jean Gillie who made only one more film after this one before dying at 33. Just like another British beauty Kay Kendall.

Gillie is one devil woman and she's got one devilish plan to $400,000.00 of stolen loot that Robert Armstrong has hidden away. She's been Armstrong's moll for years, but he's going to the gas chamber. Never mind Gillie's found a way to beat the gas chamber. But it involves getting a doctor and another hoodlum to pull it off.

The key is Dr. Herbert Rudley who supervises the executions. There's a chemical if administered within a short time that can counteract the effects of cyanide. Gillie puts on quite a campaign to vamp Rudley and soon he's just putty. Her other hoodlum boyfriend Edward Norris is amused at Rudley, but he's also thinking with his crotch.

Even Sheldon Leonard playing a cop instead of gangster for once is also not immune to Gillie when she turns it on. If some company could have bottled what Gillie had and sold it to the government it would be quite a formidable weapon.

The script isn't all that great, but Gillie and the cast of sex struck males really put this Monagram classic over.

(April, 2000): Just saw a rare print at the American Cinematheque Noir festival and the film knocked my socks off. As evidenced by this performance, Jean Gillie would have been one of the greats of Noir had she not died in 1949. She powers through this film, getting man after man to do her bidding, never taking no for an answer. And the obstacles that would stop a lesser character don't bother her in the least. The problem confronting her: her boyfriend is on death row. Only he knows where $400,000 from a robbery is. And she uses her feminine wiles to persuade him, and two other men, to discern the location of that dough because, *she wants that money.* Even the gas chamber doesn't slow her down ... which is where the slight sci-fi element is introduced. If this turns up on late-night video, set your VCR. You will be amazed.

When Jean-Luc Godard dedicated Breathless to Monogram Pictures, foremost in his memory must have been Decoy. It's a movie whose reputation, over the years, has grown into folklore, because it's all but impossible to view or obtain. For aficionados of film noir, it has attained the stature of a Holy Grail (or Maltese Falcon), a fabulous treasure the quest for which seems doomed to futility. It has, however, showed up at festival screenings, and now circulating, in samizdat as it were, is a subtitled copy taped from Croatian television.

While probably it can't ever live up to the inflated legend that trails in its wake, it's decidedly no disappointment. Monogram and its raffish rivals on Poverty Row shot fast and cut corners, working from fast-and-loose scripts full of implausible chunks of plot for viewers either to swallow or choke on. Usually, the results were shoddy and forgettable. But now and again enough elements came together to generate unexpected chemistry. Decoy marks one such serendipitous occasion.

The key element in this explosive reaction is Jean Gillie, an English actress whose early death in 1949 deprived cinema of one of its darkest Jezebels. Like her compatriot Peggy Cummins (Annie Laurie Starr in Gun Crazy), she makes no attempt, as Margot Shelby, to Americanize her origins; in explanation, Decoy lets her spit out her contempt for poverty in an eloquent aria about that 'dingy, dirty street' that 'runs all over the world,' and through the sooty mill town in England she came from. She vows never to go back to want, and her unquenchable greed powers the plot.

Tricked out in haut-forties snoods, stoles, muffs and dead-serious hats, Gillie cuts a swath through the various men who stand between her and the $400-grand stolen by her gangster boyfriend (Robert Armstrong. Trouble is, he's the only one who knows where it's stashed but won't tell even though he's on death row.

But her days as a high-maintenance moll have taught her a thing or two, one of them that a tincture called Methylene Blue can reverse an execution by cyanide. She works her wiles on maverick mobster Edward Norris and an idealistic doctor who does prison autopsies (Herbert Rudley), enlisting them in her gruesome scheme. They hijack the fresh corpse, en route to an 'oven job,' and, in a sequence reminiscent of Frankenstein, bring it back to life.

Still, the tight-fisted old zombie won't trust them, instead roughing out a map to the buried strongbox but keeping half (why just half?) against the prospect of this second coming's failing to take. It's a turn of events that kicks Gillie's avarice into lethal overdrive....

Though the movie wouldn't be remarkable without Gillie, it shows a fair amount of craft. From his 11 recorded directorial credits, Jack Bernhardt couldn't have been expected to contribute much, but he adds some arresting details (a sprung window shade in the doctor's office among them) and an offbeat pace. He splits the ending in two, leaving half in its proper place and opening the movie with the other, in a gas-station men's room where the shattered mirror and filthy sink outdo one another as emblems of last-ditch squalor. Police detective Sheldon Leonard figures prominently in those two segments; the rest of the movie is told in extended flashback.

There's barely a moment when Gillie isn't front and center, for which gratitude should be fulsome. She delivers a go-for-broke performance, short on nuance but long on the flamboyant gesture. She coldly guns the motor to run down one of her victims, skitters into hysterical giggles when she shoots the next, and, dying, laughs in Leonard's face after coaxing him to kiss her ('Jo Jo, just this once, come down to my level'). She's a knockout, and because of her the elusive Decoy, despite the inevitable shortcomings of its Monogram origins, can be counted a knockout, too – film noir with no frills.

A stingingly bizarre noir entry every fan should seek out. Why? First, this ultra-rare crime drama has one of the two or three most ruthless and irredeemable femme fatales in B+W history, Margot Shelby, as blisteringly portrayed by standout brit Jean Gillie. Second, it features one of the strangest hybrid sci-fi/noir premises, introducing an exotic chemical to reincarnate the dead as the conceit to get Margot's man-slaughtering act started. Third, it all actually comes together in this strangely involving prison breakout cum road picture, which takes us all the way from the death chamber to a grove of trees in the woods (another death chamber) and back to where it all began, in a family's quiet suburban house (still another death chamber).

Once you get past the reincarnation, the plot is fairly conventional set pieces which mostly hold up and which benefit from a honey of a twist at the end. Along the way there, we get to see greed, betrayal, spinelessness, insanity, bravery, more betrayal, submission, redemption and more Jean Gillie, whose gin blossom charm and hyena-like guffaw at once blends Richard Widmark's killing debut in KISS OF DEATH with the murderous cackle of SPECTRE in the mirrored killmaze in MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN. Either way, she is death and she is irresistible. As is this movie. Find it and you'll see.

What a great B movie. In the powerful opening minutes, a wounded man hitchhikes to a San Francisco hotel, where he shoots an unarmed woman (Jean Gillie) and dies. While she lay dying, the woman tells a police detective (Sheldon Leonard) the events that led up to this. Her killer was a doctor she had duped into helping her bring her executed convict boyfriend back to life (!) so she could find out where he had stashed some loot. All through her story, it becomes clear this woman is pretty heartless and sadistic.

Jean Gillie was married to this film's director. This was his attempt to make her a star. Unfortunately nobody really became a star making pictures for Monogram, no matter how good they may have been. A short time later the pair divorced and Gillie moved back to England. She died there of pneumonia at the age of 33, just 3 years after this was released. Gillie showed how much potential she had in this movie. It's a shame her life was cut so short. Nice to see Sheldon Leonard playing a detective. He was usually playing tough gangsters. He's plenty tough here, even if he is on the right side of the law. Edward Norris and Herbert Rudley are both good. Robert Armstrong, the biggest name in the picture at the time, has little screen time as the executed boyfriend but does well with what he has.

Exceptional film noir from Monogram, a Poverty Row studio not known for much that was exceptional. There are a lot of memorable moments in this one. The beginning and ending are really great. The atmospheric scene where Armstrong is brought back to life is another highlight. With a couple of changes this could have easily been turned into a horror movie like The Man They Could Not Hang. It's definitely one you'll want to check out.