Backlash

This is a lightweight noir from 20th Century Fox's B division -- competent players, no major stars, Eugene Forde directing, with a nicely tangled plot. John Eldredge is dead and the obvious suspects are his wife, Jean Rogers, and his his business partner, Robert Shayne. His doctor reports he's been dosed with poison a couple of times, but he has not reported it at Eldredge's insistence, and Shayne owed him a lot of money. But there are some complicating factors and as cops Richard Benedict and Larry Blake follow the clues, the district attorney takes an interest. Is that actually Eldredge's corpse?

Fox would shut down B production the next year -- Sol Wurtzel, the division head, was almost universally despised as a vulgarian, and only the fact that his movies always made money kept him in business. However, the long post-war downturn in movie-going was starting, and Wurtzel would retire in 1948.

I wasn't really familiar with any of the cast members in Backlash but despite a rather verbose script, I thought they all did a decent job and I found most of them likeable. I'm new to Jean Rogers but I liked her here. As for the male cast members, they seemed to all be styled to look exactly alike. So the story premise is good but it just doesn't go anywhere. I think there are just too many moving parts and characters to keep track of them all, particularly for a film with a comparatively short running time. Despite a solid cast Backlash just can't create enough momentum to make it worth the viewers time.

Backlash is a pretty decrepit programmer built upon a nifty premise: A jealous husband so hates his wife that he frames her for his own murder. He's a successful lawyer, middle-aged, grey and sporting a Thomas E. Dewey mustache, and, as such, indistinguishable from just about every other adult male in the cast (which may be among the most anonymous in the history of movies; the collective Q-rating of Backlash would be in the negative numbers).

When a burned-out car with a body in it turns up in a ravine, the police potter around trying to find out first who was killed and then who killed him. There was a cop-killer the lawyer saved from a murder charge; his law partner who owned him big money; the district attorney who may have been seeing his restless younger wife; another temptress connected to both the partner and the cop-killer; and so on. In fact there are a few too many red herrings squeezed into this compact (66-minute) can.

Surprisingly, Backlash boasts one fine scene which looks as though it was cut from a much better movie and spliced in by mistake. In a railroad yard at night, one of the principals meets up with a drifter who offers to share his bottle and some philosophical musings. It's filmed as an extended, highly shadowed two-shot that grows tighter and more oppressive as the talk turns to the murder case that dominates the headlines - and then to more urgent concerns. It's a sequence that makes Backlash almost worth a look.

Yikes, but there's a load of dialogue in this film-noir. It's almost exhausting to listen to after a period of relentless chatting and precious little actual action. "Moreland" (John Eldrdge) features much more prominently in this detective yarn about his own murderer than you might expect. That's because it's told via a series of flashbacks as the pursuing police detective "McMullen" (Larry J. Blake) interviews all the suspects and tries to piece together the evidence from his widow "Catherine" (Jean Rogers), the DA "Conroy" (Richard Travis) and just about everyone else from within a ten mile radius of the crime. Thing is - there is a twist, and one hell of twist at that, and that leaves "McMullen" and his theories all well and truly up in the air. We are given enough clues to anticipate the denouement, but Eugene Forde still manages to keep us guessing for some of this - it's just that there's way too much verbiage and the retrospective style of storytelling is a bit repetitive after a while. None of the acting, or the writing, really sets the heather on fire and at times it felt like quite a long hour-long watch. Watchable, but forgettable.

Backlash" from 1947 stars John Eldredge, Robert Shayne, Jean Rogers, Richard Travis, and Louise Currie.

Shayne, Inspector Henderson from the '50s Superman, has a larger part than usual.

John Eldredge is an attorney named John Moreland. When he appears to have died in a fiery car crash, his wife (Rogers) is a main suspect. Moreland has been poisoned not once but twice, probably at her hand, but insists that the doctor not report it. However, his law partner (Shayne) owes him $40,000, so there's another suspect.

The detectives in charge (Richard Benedict and Larry Blake) find the whole thing suspicious. If your wife is trying to kill you, why wouldn't you say so?

There are some other complicating factors, making for a muddled story with a lot of unnecessary dialogue. Also, the acting was very stiff.

This is a 20th Century Fox film, in fact, one of the last, as the B movie section would shut down and the head of it, Sol Wurtzel, eventually retired.

You can really see why after viewing this.