This 1947 potboiler starts out with a bang. Dan Turner (William Marshall) pulls up to a mansion in southern California, has a few curt words with a chauffeur, and the next moment he is punching the man to the ground. Our immediate response is to assume Dan is a thug, a gangster of sorts. That is the first of many mysteries this film will present to us in the course of barely an hour. This is yet another film that jam-packs its running time with plenty of action and mystery with barely a moment to breathe. It works with this story and the character of Dan who speaks in a rat-a-tat-tat rapid staccato that matches the energy of the film. It keeps the energy high, but it also keeps his character at arms-length. We get little sense of him as a person other than he is a man who cannot be bought off.
It turns out that he has been hired by a wealthy entertainment executive, Ziggy Cranston (Ricardo Cortez) to stop a blackmail plot. While he is being briefed by Ziggy, another man arrives and a fight breaks out that ends when the intruder has been shot and falls dead into the swimming pool. Everything looks like Ziggy pulled the trigger but when Dan takes Ziggy into custody and calls for the police, the body disappears with only Ziggy’s mistress, Sylvia Duane (Adele Mara), claiming there never was a body. With no signs of a crime, Ziggy is free to go but Dan isn’t as easy to convince as the police; after all, he saw the body, himself.
Dan’s witty dialogue isn’t the only thing that’s snappy in this film. So are the action set-pieces. There are many fights over the course of the movie and they are all staged in such a way as to sell the visceral and brutal nature of them. At times it feels like the camera has been sped up to increase the effect of the stunts. If that is the case, it is done decently and to good effect. On top of that, the mystery, while no great shakes, does offer some twists that come as a surprise, especially the final reveal.
Ultimately, though, while there is a lot to enjoy in this film, it does get bogged down in some truly poor performances. William Marshall is chewing the scenery and throwing out quips like there is no tomorrow but he cannot hide that he is visibly acting. It just isn’t convincing in any way. Adele Mara, whose role becomes increasingly more important to the plot the further in we get, doesn’t fare much better. She is supposed to be cold and calculating and she cannot sell that well. There are times when this feels more like a high school production than a legitimate motion picture. While it doesn’t sink the film, it does pull you out of the movie more often than not. 1947 - 67 minutes
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