The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

The Lady from Shanghai is one of those films that I find a little intimidating. It is directed by Orson Welles, and almost everyone, especially if they are film noir fans, has seen it. It also has a well-deserved reputation for a plot that is hard to follow, and many claim that it doesn’t make sense. It didn’t do well at the box office when it was first released in 1947, but its stature has grown in the years hence. And apparently audiences in France have loved it all along. The film does have a convoluted plot, perhaps more convoluted than other films noir. Today, audiences can rewatch the film several times on DVD or Blu-ray (as I did), and the plot does make more sense with repeat viewings, which is so true of many films noir.

The narrative begins in New York City, where Michael O’Hara (played by Orson Welles) spots Elsa Bannister (played by Rita Hayworth) riding past him in Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage. He is immediately smitten with her, and he tells viewers as much in his voice-over narration using an adopted Irish brogue. In this narration, he admits to not being in his right mind for quite some time after seeing Elsa Bannister and that once he saw her, he wasn’t thinking except to think of her. Elsa Bannister’s carriage is waylaid by three men in Central Park, and Michael O’Hara is there to save her.

Michael soon learns that Elsa is married to Arthur Bannister, who calls himself the greatest criminal lawyer. Now, Michael wants to avoid her, and he refuses her invitation to work on her yacht. He goes to the pier to find work on a boat sailing out of New York City, but Arthur Bannister comes looking for him, determined to hire him as part of his yacht crew. He and his wife are traveling to San Francisco by way of the Panama Canal. Michael refuses at first, but Arthur Bannister gets drunk with Michael and two of his sailor friends, and Michael and one of his friends, Chaim (Goldie) Goldfish, are forced to take the too-drunk Arthur Bannister to his yacht.

The trip aboard the Bannisters’ yacht in The Lady in Shanghai ends in San Franciso with many on-location shots. Click here to visit “Reel SF: San Francisco movie locations from classic films” for comparisons (then and now) of various location shots for The Lady from Shanghai. The list is extensive, both for The Lady from Shanghai and for the other movies spotlighted at the website. Click on MOVIE LIST at the top right of the site to see the full list of films.

When they arrive at the yacht, Elsa comes to Michael, claiming to need help and protection. Michael doesn’t know what to make of her, but Goldie is anxious to get work, and he convinces Michael that both of them could probably be hired to work for the Bannisters. Michael reluctantly agrees; he is hired as bosun, and Goldie is also hired as part of the crew.

It doesn’t take long for the tense atmosphere aboard the yacht to be revealed, especially after the arrival of Arthur Bannister’s law partner, George Grisby. Grisby appears to be baiting Michael and also seems smitten with Elsa. Arthur Bannister repeatedly calls his wife Lover, although it is implied that he and she no longer have sex, if they ever did. (Arthur has braces on both legs and walks with two canes.) Elsa tells Michael that Sidney Broome, the yacht’s steward, is not a steward at all but a private detective hired by her husband to spy on her so he can cut her off without any money if they ever get a divorce. When the yacht stops in Acapulco, Mexico, George Grisby offers $5,000 to Michael to kill him, Grisby. And according to Michael, the story just gets crazier and crazier as time goes on.

Michael O’Hara’s voice-over narration continues at times throughout the narrative, and Michael tells his story in hindsight. The entire film could be called a flashback, and flashbacks are one of the many features of film noir. The story is told by Michael from his perspective, and he relies on his own memory to tell it. He starts by telling viewers that he wasn’t in his right mind once he met Elsa Bannister, and this theme of insanity is repeated throughout the film.

The Blu-ray that I watched came with three audio commentaries, one of them by film historian Imogen Sara Smith, who mentions that Orson Welles showed the expressionistic film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to the cast. He wanted something off-kilter and fantastic, which is definitely true of this expressionistic German film. Welles wanted insanity, characters acting like somnambulists, and a break with reality. Smith also mentions that the interior amusement park scenes at the end of the film were created by Orson Welles himself, and he was inspired by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari once again and by modern art. So the next time that I watched The Lady from Shanghai, I decided to focus on the theme of insanity, which I think is one of the reasons the plot seems so convoluted.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is another great film that explores the theme of insanity. It utilizes expressionistic techniques to tell its story, and German expressionism is a large influence on film noir in general. Click here to learn some basics about German expressionism, and click here to see my blog article about the film.

(This article about The Lady from Shanghai contains spoilers.)

The theme of insanity and not being in one’s right mind is mentioned directly several times in The Lady from Shanghai. Michael O’Hara saying at the start of the film that he is not in his right mind after seeing Elsa Bannister is just the beginning, and this particular example is easy to dismiss because many people would use Michael’s words to describe the feeling of infatuation and even love. In this example, not being in one’s right mind could be taken as a euphemism. After he and Goldie set sail on board the Bannisters’ yacht, however, things start to change. Michael says to Bessie, another member of the crew who is also the Bannister’s domestic servant on land, “Talk of money and murder. I must be insane. Or else all these people [the Bannisters, George Grisby] are lunatics.” Michael is a little unnerved at this point, but more insanity is ahead.

When the yacht makes a stop in Acapulco, Michael tells a story to Elsa, Arthur, and George Grisby about fishing “off the hump of Brazil.” He caught a shark in a sea that was already dark with blood. The shark got loose and bled into the sea, and the blood drove the rest of the sharks mad. They started attacking and killing each other, which, he tells the Bannisters and Grisby, reminds him of them.

Michael at least is aware that things aren’t right and that the Bannisters and Grisby aren’t telling him everything they know. He tells Elsa about Grisby’s offer to pay him if Michael will kill him (Grisby), and he also tells her, “I’m sure he’s out of his mind.” After Grisby and Broome are murdered, Michael begins to have some doubts about almost everything: “I began to ask myself if I wasn’t out of my head entirely. The wrong man was arrested. The wrong man was shot. Grisby was dead and so was Broome. And what about [Arthur] Bannister? He was going to defend me in a trial for my life. And me, charged with a couple of murders I did not commit. Either me or the rest of the whole world is absolutely insane.”

Michael escapes from the courthouse where his murder trial takes place by pretending to take some of Arthur Bannister’s painkillers. He takes more than he intended to and passes out in a theater in Chinatown. Li Gong, another of the Bannisters’ servants, and his Chinatown gang take him to the Crazy House at the amusement park, which is closed for the season and thus a perfect place to hide him. When Michael comes to, he is disoriented at first, but he is able to regain his senses: “Well, I came to . . . in the Crazy House! And for a while there, I thought it was me that was crazy. After what I’d been through, anything crazy at all seemed natural. But now, I was sane on one subject: her [Elsa Bannister] . . . I knew about her.”

Out of all the main characters—Elsa and Arthur Bannister, George Grisby, and Michael O’Hara—Michael is the only one alive at the end of the film. His story, his metaphor, about the sharks and their feeding frenzy was more accurate than he could have predicted earlier in the story. The insanity is finally over, but at great cost. Perhaps the cost was inevitable. The Bannisters’ and Grisby’s murderous insanity would have continued forever, it seems, if they hadn’t been stopped. Elsa Bannister admits this to Michael as she lays dying in the Crazy House. Michael, on the other hand, tells her that he refuses to play a part in any more insanity.

As I noted, the Blu-ray version of The Lady from Shanghai, published by Kino Lorber in 2023, comes with three audio commentaries: one each by film historian Imogen Sara Smith, novelist and critic Tim Lucas, and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. I have to be honest: I have never been a big fan of Bogdanovich or his films, and I found his commentary to be the least interesting of the three. He literally reads from his notes and recorded conversations that he used for a book about Orson Welles, which was published after Welles’s death. And he also reads from a long letter from Welles to Harry Cohn at Columbia, the studio responsible for distributing The Lady from Shanghai. He did make some interesting points, such as Welles liked on-location shooting because he liked surprises and dealing with challenges. (In contrast, the director Alfred Hitchcock preferred studio shooting because he could control everything.) But Bogdanovich glosses over Rita Hayworth’s childhood abuse and its effect on her marriage to Welles, and he tries to make the case that Welles did his best to deal with it, but Welles and Hayworth were married for only four years. It’s probably best to remember that Bogdanovich thought of Welles as a personal friend.

But the other two commentaries by Smith and Lucas provide lots more information and details. Imogen Sara Smith’s commentary focuses mostly on the film’s production, background, and shooting. Tim Lucas’s focuses quite a bit on the novel, If I Die Before I Wake by Raymond Sherwood King, which is the basis of the film. Both commentaries are well worth a listen because of all the detail they provide. Here are some highlights from each.

Blu-ray audio commentary by film historian Imogen Sara Smith

◊ Orson Welles always intended the film to be offbeat, but Columbia wanted a vehicle for Rita Hayworth, their biggest star.

◊ Rita Hayworth wanted to work with Orson Welles, even though they were no longer living together. They were still married but living separately.

◊ Suicide is another recurring theme in the film.

◊ The court scenes in which Michael O’Hara is tried for the murders of George Grisby and Sidney Broome are staged as a circus. The audience is raucous, and its members are looking to be entertained.

◊ The Lady from Shanghai is told mostly from Michael O’Hara’s point of view, and viewers are just as confused as he is. Disorientation is a feature of film noir.

◊ George Grisby ogles Elsa Bannister. Smith wonders if this is perhaps a comment on studio executives. The scene with him watching her through a telescope while she sunbathes and dives is funny, but it is pushed to the extreme. Hayworth was abused by her father, and her first husband tried to bolster his career by sending her to studio executives.

◊ George Grisby mentions the end of the world and nihilism, which is a reference to the atomic bomb. Welles is one of the first filmmakers to mention the atomic bomb and nuclear destruction in a film. Grisby wants to escape nuclear destruction by moving to a South Sea Island, but the United States tested the bomb on a South Sea Island: Bikini Atoll.

Blu-ray audio commentary by novelist and critic Tim Lucas

◊ Tim Lucas gives a lot of background information about Raymond Sherwood King and the publication of his novel If I Die Before I Wake. He talks about its long path to publication and to its adaptation first as a radio play before it was put on film by Orson Welles. The novel was originally published in May 1938.

◊ The film’s release date in the United States was April 14, 1948. Its release was delayed by one year after production.

◊ Orson Welles refused to take credit or responsibility for the film. There is no credit for the director.

◊ There is no mention in the film’s credits of which novel by Sherwood King is the basis of the film.

◊ The novel takes place only in New York and on Long Island. The film goes from New York to Acapulco, to San Francisco.

◊ The characters in the film are more sinister than they are in the novel. In the novel, Elsa Bannister is portrayed like a lost child. In the film, she is more cunning and conniving. She is really the femme fatale of the film.

◊ Lucas erroneously states that the group of well-dressed Asians listening to the biased radio broadcast about Michael O’Hara and his murder trial seemingly have no link to the courtroom drama, but they do foreshadow the subsequent scenes in Chinatown and at an amusement park, where one of them works. But Tim Lucas is wrong about one thing: one of the Asian men, Li Gong, works for the Bannisters, and he and his gang take Michael O’Hara to the amusement park at the request of Elsa Bannister.

◊ Elsa Bannister’s last scene, her death scene, shows that Rita Hayworth was a good actress.

The Lady from Shanghai is not the only film noir to have a convoluted plot. It’s true that its plot seems more opaque than those of other films, but I have written many times before about other films noir needing repeat viewings to catch all the details and make sense of the plot. And the same can be said for The Lady from Shanghai. It’s well worth the effort. It is a remarkable story and an amazing example of Orson Welles’s particular style of filmmaking. And it is a great chance to see Rita Hayworth meet the challenge of a difficult role. So many films noir have complicated plots that reward repeat viewings, and The Lady from Shanghai is no exception. I have seen the film several times now, and I enjoy it more and more each time.

December 24, 1947 (France), April 14, 1948 (United States), release dates  •  Directed by Orson Welles  •  Screenplay by Orson Welles, William Castle, Charles Lederer, Fletcher Markle  •  Based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Raymond Sherwood King  •  Music by Heinz Roemheld  •  Edited by Viola Lawrence  •  Cinematography by Charles Lawton Jr, Rudolph Maté, Joseph Walker

Rita Hayworth as Elsa (aka Rosalie) Bannister  •  Orson Welles as Michael O’Hara  •  Everett Sloane as Arthur Bannister  •  Glenn Anders as George Grisby  •  Ted de Corsia as Sidney Broome  •  Evelyn Ellis as Bessie  •  Gus Schilling as Chaim (aka “Goldie”) Goldfish  •  Erskine Sanford as the judge  •  Carl Frank as District Attorney Galloway  •  Louis Merrill as Jake  •  Harry Shannon as the cab driver  •  Wong Chung as Li Gong  •  Philip Morris as port steward Officer Peters  •  Anita Kert Ellis as the singer dubbed for Rita Hayworth

Distributed by Columbia Pictures  •  Produced by Mercury Productions

The Green Glove (1952)

I had wanted to see The Green Glove for a long time. I’m sure other film fans find themselves in the same predicament: so many films to see, so little time. Glenn Ford in the starring role of Michael Blake was a big draw for me. Ford is one of my favorite film noir actors, and the producers of this film must have thought he was big box office draw because he gets top billing (unless you count the producers’ credits).

You can find The Green Glove online. Click here to see it for free at the Internet Archive. I saw the film on DVD, and the film quality wasn’t great but not the worst I have ever seen. I’m not sure it is better at the Internet Archive, but viewing it at the archive is free.

The Green Glove was an international coproduction between the United States and France, and many of the supporting actors are British or French. It was filmed on location in southern France and in Monaco. Michael Blake’s story has a starting point in World War II, specifically Operation Dragoon, which was a real-life Allied invasion of France in August 1944. The fictional Blake is a veteran of that operation, and the narrative starts with his experience as a paratrooper landing in France as part of it.

Flashbacks are typical of noir, and the flashback structure of The Green Glove is very noir: It starts in the present (1952) with a little background information about the green glove of St. Elizar, also known as the gauntlet of St. Elizar. The green glove has been returned to the church in the small coastal village of St. Elizar, France, and no one knows how or why, or who is responsible. Then a flashback takes viewers to August 1944, with paratrooper Blake landing in the south of France. Then the narrative jumps forward (but still in the flashback) to Blake’s postwar return to France in 1952. The rest of the story is also told in flashback until it catches up with the introduction of the green glove. At that point, the narrative proceeds from the present, and viewers learn how the green glove found its place again in the church of St. Elizar.

The film starts with a voice-over narrator telling viewers that The Green Glove is the story of Michael Blake. But before Blake makes his first appearance, the narrative starts with Father Goron walking along the seaside cliff of St. Elizar in France. He hears the church bells tolling for the first time since the green glove was stolen during the war. The bells were not to be rung again until the return of the green glove. Father Goron wonders why the bells are ringing and who is ringing them. He rushes to the church to find out.

Father Goron doesn’t find anyone alive in the bell tower, but he does find a man’s dead body, and he does find the green glove in the shrine of the church, where it was originally showcased. The villagers come running at the sound of the bells ringing, and he tells them that he didn’t find anyone alive in the church or in the bell tower. Everyone wonders if the return of the green glove might be a miracle. (I don’t think it’s giving anything away to point out that the return of the glove is not a miracle, as the local priest and the villagers of St. Elizar are starting to believe.)

Then the narrator says that the story really began in August 1944, and this introduces an extended flashback. As part of the invasion of the south coast of France, Michael Blake gets behind enemy lines and finds Paul Rona, who claims to be an artist for news services. Rona is also carrying the green glove, which he admits is a valuable art piece. He is willing to give it to Blake in return for his freedom. Blake refuses and wants to take Rona prisoner. Rona insists that the Germans will attack again at dawn and drive back the Americans. Before Blake can leave with Rona, a bomb blast levels some of the building; he is injured and knocked unconscious, and Rona escapes. Michael Blake is saved by members, including a countess, of the French underground who also find the satchel that Rona had been carrying.

Blake is taken to the countess’s chateau to recover. The countess’s son offers to send a message to the Americans about the German attack that Rona talked about with Blake. But he is killed, and it seems that Rona was lying about the German attack. When the countess learns that her son is dead, she is driven to despair with grief. When Michael recovers enough to leave, the other members of the French underground lead him out of St. Elizar. They also promise to keep the satchel until the war is over and Blake can return for it.

The narrator is essential in helping viewers follow the leap in time that is still part of the flashback and the characters’ movements around France in 1952. He explains that Michael Blake returns to France, to Paris, after the war, because he keeps thinking of the valuable green glove. (I kept thinking why he went to Paris instead of the south of France, but that wasn’t explained in the film. Maybe it was taken for granted at the time that viewers would know the reason. Maybe transatlantic flights always landed in the capital city.) He is followed in Paris: Someone (presumably Paul Rona) has been waiting for his return. He asks a tour guide at the Eiffel Tower to help him evade the man following him, and she does. Michael Blake is successful at getting away.

Later in the evening, Michael goes to a bar for a drink and meets the tour guide, Chris Kenneth, again. Michael and Chris seem to be attracted to each other immediately. They leave the bar together, but a police detective, Inspector Faubert, interrupts them on the street to bring Michael back to his hotel room, where police are investigating the murder of a man lying dead in Michael’s room. It’s the body of the man who was following Michael at the Eiffel Tower earlier in the day. Next to the body is a sketch of Michael. Inspector Faubert wants him to stay in Paris because he is now a person of interest in this murder, and he plans to keep him under surveillance.

What follows is one escapade after another, with Michael and Chris traveling back and forth between Monte Carlo and St. Elizar, trying to stay one step ahead of Paul Rona and his henchmen, and avoiding Inspector Faubert and his police officers. Paul Rona and his men follow Chris and Michael and stop them while they are visiting the chateau where Michael recuperated during the war. Rona wants the green glove and offers to pay Michael’s way out of France now that Michael is a murder suspect. Michael refuses, and Chris is restrained by one of Rona’s henchmen. A fistfight breaks out, and Michael tries to escape, but he falls through some rotten timbers. He and Chris are found by the countess who saved him during the war. She is so stricken with grief still about her son’s death that she barely recognizes Michael. When she sees that Michael has the green glove, she grabs it. The glove is supposed to have healing powers, and grabbing it cures the countess about her delusions: She realizes now that her son is never coming back and that he is really dead.

Chris and Michael leave the countess’s chateau with the green glove. But they are still murder suspects, and Chris’s picture is on the front page of the local paper. They stop at a small French inn because they get caught in a rainstorm, but they have to spend the night because there isn’t another train out of town until the next morning. What follows is more like a romantic comedy, with the husband-and-wife innkeepers believing that Michael and Chris are newlyweds, Michael getting drunk, and Chris not wanting to let Michael anywhere near her. The innkeepers are amused by what they believe is Michael’s and Chris’s hesitancy and trepidation about consummating their marriage, when Chris only wants to defend her honor because she and Michael aren’t married and don’t know yet that they care about one another.

The Green Glove is consistently categorized as a film noir, but I found it had a lot of 1950s-style romance, too. Michael and Chris are attracted to one another, and the sequence when they are forced to spend the night at a small French inn is more like a romantic comedy. Geraldine Brooks plays Chris Kenneth, and she and Glenn Ford have plenty of on-screen chemistry. Their relationship has nothing of the love-hate chemistry that Ford and Rita Hayworth have in Gilda (1946), but that doesn’t mean it’s not a successful pairing. Brooks and Ford are charming, and it’s easy to root for them and the success of their romance.

The Green Glove is a reunion of sorts for Glenn Ford and George Macready. In Gilda, Macready plays the part of Ballin Mundson, who is definitely a Nazi and even more threatening than Paul Rona. Rona denies being a German, that is, on the wrong side of the war, but he is an opportunistic art thief in The Green Glove. He is still unsavory, and he is still a threat to Glenn Ford as Michael Blake.

I wrote about Gilda (1946) in October 2017. Click here for my article.

Comparing The Green Glove and Gilda shows how talented Glenn Ford was: He is believable as the hateful Johnny Farrell in Gilda and equally believable as the gallant Michael Blake in The Green Glove. The Green Glove may be a more romantic film than Gilda, but it’s still a film noir, and a fun one at that. I enjoyed the twists and turns of the postwar intrigue. The film’s resolution that clarified the mystery of the green glove and its reappearance in the church on St. Elizar is satisfying. And a little romance between the two leads doesn’t hurt one bit.

January 31, 1952 (Los Angeles premiere), February 28, 1952, release dates  •  Directed by Rudolph Maté  •  Screenplay by Charles Bennett  •  Based on the novel The Green Glove by Charles Bennett  •  Music by Joseph Kosma  •  Edited by Lola Barache, Louis Sackin  •  Cinematography by Claude Renoir

Glenn Ford as Michael (aka Mike) Blake  •  Geraldine Brooks as Christine (aka Chris) Kenneth  •  Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Father Goron  •  George Macready as Count Paul Rona  •  Gaby André as Gaby Saunders  •  Jany Holt as the countess  •  Roger Tréville as Police Inspector Faubert  •  Geprges Tabet as Jacques Piotet  •  Meg Lemonnier as Madame Piotet  •  Paul Bonifas as the inspector  •  Jean Bretonnière as the singer  •  John Dehner as the narrator

Distributed by United Artists  •  Produced by Benagoss Productions, Union Générale Cinématographique

Bury Me Dead (1947)

It pays to ignore first impressions, especially when they are several years old. I saw Bury Me Dead several years ago and, to be honest, I really didn’t remember enjoying it a whole lot. But I decided to see it again, and I am really glad I did. True, it is a B film with a very low budget, and this lack of money shows in almost everything about the film, including the first time that the star, June Lockhart (playing Barbara Carlin), appears on-screen. She is supposed to be dead, and she shows up to attend her own funeral. The veil she is wearing looks like a thin piece of untrimmed burlap died black, pleated with pins, and thrown over her head!

In spite of the low budget, Bury Me Dead portrays a tight story of less than seventy minutes. It is deadly serious (pun alert!) about its murder and other crimes, but a lot of the story is told with humor that makes the film surprisingly fun to watch. The cinematographer John Alton does a fantastic job making the best of the budget to create shadowy sets that emphasize the action and the characters’ emotions. The film is worth watching just to see a master’s lighting techniques. Just imagine what it would have looked like if the print was restored to its original condition.

Bury Me Dead is available for free online. Click here to watch it at the Internet Archive. I watched the film on DVD because it came with audio commentary (by Jay Felton), but the print quality is rather poor both on the DVD and at the Internet Archive.

The opening credits appear over a minimalist shot of a bare, leafless, dead-looking tree that looks more like an artist’s rendering, then the film cuts right away to a conflagration. A barn is supposed to be burning, but Jay Fenton says in his commentary that it is stock footage used with rear projection. (I found it convincing.) Horses neighing and running, with some being rescued, add to the chaos. Viewers learn that someone, Barbara Carlin, is unaccounted for and presumed dead. Right away, before the fire is even out, the housekeeper, Mrs. Haskins, points the finger at Rod Carlin; she thinks he is responsible for his wife’s death. She has no evidence to back up her suspicions, so Rod is free to go when his lawyer Mike Dunne (played by Hugh Beaumont) shows up to take charge.

Barbara Carlin and her husband Rod are having some problems in their marriage, and she had decided to take a break and spend time at Arrowhead, her summer place, at the time of the fire. She reads about the fire and her own death in the newspaper. (This film was released in 1947, way before the Internet and social media were introduced.) Rather than rush back to reveal that she is alive and well, Barbara decides to show up at her own funeral to find out what she can. Who is in the casket at the burial? Was her death an accident, or was it really murder? And if it was murder, who wanted her dead?

(This article about Bury Me Dead contains some spoilers.)

After the ceremony, Barbara asks for a ride with Mike Dunn. He doesn’t recognize her behind the tacky black veil, nor does he recognize her voice (which was a bit unbelievable for me, quite honestly). But when she lifts her veil and reveals her true identity, Mike is in a state of shock. He asks her, reasonably enough, why let the funeral go on? But Barbara wants to know if someone really is trying to kill her, and she wants that person or persons to think that she is dead. Mike says that it was an accident, but Barbara has her doubts.

Next, Barbara and Mike visit Rusty, Barbara’s adopted sister, because Barbara noticed that she did not come to the funeral. Rusty is not home, but they get an idea of her current state of mind by examining the books she has left lying around: Misconceptions of Psychoanalysis and The Neurotic Personality. (Later in the film, Rusty tries her hand at amateur psychology and tries to convince Rod Carlin that he is really in love with her.)

In a flashback, Barbara explains to Mike the shock she and Rusty both suffered when their father died: Rusty was never adopted by the father, and Barbara and Rusty aren’t related by blood. They aren’t the sisters that they both thought they were. Rusty’s insecurities were heightened by this revelation. Rusty was in love and is still in love with Barbara’s husband Rod. There’s a bit of competition and jealousy between them, but it seems to come mostly from Rusty. Or was Barbara always insincere about her feeling for her younger sister?

Rusty wasn’t the only complicating factor in Barbara and Rod Carlin’s marriage. Rusty became infatuated with a prizefighter named George Mandley, but Barbara disapproved of him. George is mostly beefcake and not too bright, but Barbara falls for him anyway, much to Rusty’s and Ron’s consternation. But it isn’t too long before George Mandley’s secretary Helen Lawrence becomes Rod Carlin’s mistress.

It quickly becomes evident through the flashbacks and their many revelations that there is no shortage of suspects if Barbara’s death is indeed a murder. Each flashback fills in details and casts suspicion on different characters as they are introduced. A lot of the story is told in flashback, and almost everyone could have a motive for killing Barbara. The remainder of the film follows Barbara’s investigation of her own murder. It also includes more humor than is typical for film noir: lots of puns, physical slapstick, dark banter between Rod and Barbara Carlin about her death, and the fight scenes between Barbara and Helen and between George and Rod.

The DVD commentary by Jay Fenton, a film restoration consultant, has lots of great information about the film, the actors, and the production. Here are just a few of the points that he made:

◊ Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) was considered the lowest of the B studios, but it managed to attract talent in all departments.

◊ PRC had no interest in preservation or restoration. The company did not renew the copyrights for its films, including Bury Me Dead.

◊ Bury Me Dead is a comic noir and has many comic moments. The first one is the double-take by the cab driver taking Barbara Carlin to her own funeral. It lets viewers know that the film will have comic elements. The humor also deflects suspicion: Viewers find it hard to believe that a comical character can commit murder.

◊ Many don’t consider Bury Me Dead a noir at all because of the humor. But the humor serves a purpose (see above). The comic noir is the most unusual subgenre of noir.

◊ Sets from Bury Me Dead were also used in The Amazing Mr. X.

◊ The cinematography is beautiful, especially the indoor scenes. John Alton put the same effort into all his films, both B and A.

◊ Alton liked to light the good women so that their lips and eyes glow, their hair is backlit. The femme fatale, if there is such a character, is lit with darker lighting.

◊ The fight scenes are well staged. The fight scene between Rod Carlin and George Mandley used stunt performers.

For viewers who have watched June Lockhart and Hugh Beaumont in television shows like Lassie, Lost in Space, and Leave It to Beaver, it’s a pleasant change to see them in a darker film, even if it does include more comedy than is typical of film noir. The cinematography and the lighting give it a polish that minimizes the tight budget, especially once Barbara Carlin gets rid of that awful burlap veil.

So there really is plenty to recommend Bury Me Dead. It’s free to watch online, and it’s a great way to spend about seventy minutes.

October 18, 1947, release date  •  Directed by Bernard Vorhaus  •  Screenplay by Dwight V. Babcock, Karen DeWolf  •  Based on the radio play Bury Me Dead by Irene Winston  •  Music by Emil Cadkin  •  Edited by W. Donn Hayes  •  Cinematography by John Alton

Cathy O’Donnell as Rusty  •  June Lockhart as Barbara Carlin  •  Hugh Beaumont as Michael Dunn  •  Mark Daniels as Rod Carlin  •  Greg McClure as George Mandley  •  Milton Parsons as Jeffers, the butler  •  Virginia Farmer as Mrs. Haskins, the housekeeper  •  Sonia Darrin as Helen Lawrence  •  Cliff Clark as Detective Archer  •  Charles Lane as District Attorney Brighton

Distributed by Eagle-Lion Films  •  Produced by Ben Stoloff Productions, Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC)