Blue, White and Perfect (1942)

January 6, 1942, release date

Directed by Herbert I. Leeds

Screenplay by Samuel G. Engel

Based on the story by Borden Chase and the character Michael Shayne created by Brett Halliday

Music by Cyril J. Mockridge

Edited by Alfred Day

Cinematography by Glen MacWilliams

Lloyd Nolan as Michael Shayne

Mary Beth Hughes as Merle Garland

Helene Reynolds as Helen Shaw

George Reeves as Juan Arturo O’Hara

Steven Geray as Vanderhoefen

Henry Victor as Rudolf Hagerman

Curt Bois as Friedrich Gerber, alias Nappy Dubois

Marie Blake as Ethel

Emmett Vogan as Charlie

Mae Marsh as Mrs. Bertha Toby

Frank Orth as Mr. Toby

Ivan Lebedeff as Alexis Fournier

Wade Boteler as the judge

Charles Trowbridge as Captain Brown

Edward Earle as First Officer Richards

Cliff Clark as Inspector Peterson

Arthur Loft as Joseph P. McCordy

Ann Doran as Ms. Hoffman

Charles Williams as Theodore H. Sherman Jr., printer

Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox

Blue, White and Perfect is the fourth in a series of twelve films. Lloyd Nolan starred as Shayne in seven of the films until the series was dropped by Twentieth Century Fox. These seven films were released from 1940 to 1942. When the series was picked up by Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), Hugh Beaumont took over the role of Shayne for five more films, which were released in 1946 and 1947.

These Michael Shayne films starring Lloyd Nolan have become a guilty pleasure for me. I put them in the avant noir category (what many call proto-noir, a precursor to noir), but that’s getting to be more and more of a stretch, especially in 1942, past the point in time (1940) that many modern viewers consider the cutoff for categorizing film noir. There’s no doubt that all these Michael Shayne films so far, including Blue, White and Perfect, are a lot of fun to watch, and I am not going to quibble with anyone who disagrees with my categorization!

Click on each film title below to see my blog post about the Michael Shayne films I have written about so far.

◊ Michael Shayne, Private Detective

◊ Sleepers West

◊ Dressed to Kill

After the credits, the film starts with a taxi driving through the city streets of Los Angeles. It stops and leaves Michael Shayne in front of the Merle Garland Beauty Shoppe. On the sidewalk, Shayne runs into Officer Barney, who lends him a buck for his cab fare. Michael Shayne may be a successful investigator who solves his cases (and entertains viewers so beautifully), but he is always scrambling to be paid for his investigative work and to pay his debts. This is an overarching characteristic of Michael Shayne that forms part of the plot in each film.

When Shayne enters the beauty shop, one of the employees, Ethel, is reading the magazine True Detective (click on the magazine title for more information about the magazine from Wikipedia). Ethel tells Michael Shayne that his girlfriend (Merle Garland) is off at city Hall to marry Alexis Fournier. Shayne runs off to thwart the wedding: He brings two police officers and a detective to arrest Alexis Fournier.

The film cuts to Shayne’s apartment, where Shayne is having a discussion with his landlady about the rent he owes. When Merle shows up at his front door, Shayne gets rid of the landlady, and Merle and Michael have an argument about Shayne’s intrusion into Merle’s love life and her engagement to Alexis. In the middle of the argument, Inspector Peterson calls to say that Shayne was right about Fournier: Fournier has a long police record. Michael Shayne is very happy, of course, to be proven right and to relay this bit of news to Merle. Merle and Shayne make up, but she tells him that she will marry him only if he gives up his private investigation practice. Shayne agrees.

(This blog post about Blue, White and Perfect contains most of the spoilers.)

Shayne gets a job at the Thomas Aircraft Corporation. He calls Merle from Joe McCordy’s office at Thomas Aircraft and tells her that he has been hired as a riveter, but this is a lie to placate her: He is really working as a private investigator for the aircraft corporation. He has not been hired to spy on the workforce (he says that he refuses to be a “finger man”). No, Shayne’s job is to prevent sabotage. The film was released in 1942 but was probably filmed at the end of 1941, that is, during World War II. Enemy spies could be lurking anywhere and everywhere, including manufacturing plants and especially in plants making war materiel. Shayne’s relationship with Merle is put on hold while he does what he loves most: being a private investigator.

As usual, the plot is convoluted, with Shayne explaining it all—or almost all—at the end. Some of the details elude him, although the actions of other characters bring everything to light for viewers. Shayne himself adds to some of the confusion: He lies to Merle about the nature of his job at the Thomas Aircraft Corporation, and he dupes her out of $1,000 so that he can pay for his passage on board the S. S. Princess Nola and follow several trunks from Los Angeles to Honolulu. The trunks are part of his solid lead about smuggling between the two locations that might or might not involve international intrigue.

Shayne does find international intrigue in the form of industrial diamonds being smuggled out of the United States. The title of the film comes from Shayne’s description of the diamonds when he finds them: “There’s nothing blue, white and perfect about those.” Industrial diamonds don’t have—and don’t need—the same luster and glitter that diamonds intended for use in jewelry do. I suspect that viewers in 1942 knew something about this because of wartime industrial production, but I had to search for more information online.

For more information about industrial diamonds, click here and scroll down to the section called “Industrial-grade diamonds.”

The expression “blue, white and perfect” may help Shayne’s investigation, but it doesn’t describe the state of his romance with Merle. At the end of the film, Shayne goes to Merle Garland’s hotel room. She is angry with him naturally about the money he stole and because he lied to her. She throws a lot of breakable items at him before he can get through the door to her room. Shayne finally enters holding up a newspaper with a headline praising his work in breaking up the smuggling ring. He tells Merle that they should get married. She agrees, but when she opens her closet door to pack, a dead body, with its ankles tied and a knife in its back, falls out. Shayne is off on his next case, and he leaves Merle behind, fainted and jilted again.

I found myself wondering at the end of Blue, White and Perfect whatever happened to Shayne’s job at the Thomas Aircraft Corporation. If he was fired permanently, I missed it. But complete clarity is not the point of these Michael Shayne films. Humor, fun, and murder cases solved by Shayne himself are!

The DVD that I watched came with a featurette entitled “Nabbing the Crooks the Mike Shayne Way.” I have yet to find anything about the Michael Shayne films that isn’t fun, and I’m not the only one: Stuart Kaminsky, Alain Silver, and James Ursini discuss the differences between the Michael Shayne in print, as created by Brett Halliday, and the Michael Shayne versions portrayed on radio, on television, and in film. The featurette is definitely worth a look, especially for those of you who, like me, enjoy comparisons between stories in print and the film versions.