Shield for Murder (1954)

August 27, 1954, release date

Directed by Edmond O’Brien, Howard W. Koch

Screenplay by Richard Alan Simmons, John C. Higgins

Based on the novel Shield for Murder by William P. McGivern

Music by Paul Dunlap

Edited by John F. Schreyer

Cinematography by Gordon Avil

Edmond O’Brien as Lieutenant Barney Nolan

Marla English as Patty Winters

John Agar as Sergeant Mark Brewster

Emile Meyer as Captain Gunnarson

Carolyn Jones as Beth, the woman in the restaurant

Claude Akins as Fat Michaels

Lawrence Ryle as Laddie O’Neil (as Larry Ryle)

Herbert Butterfield as Cabot, police reporter for the local newspaper

Hugh Sanders as Packy Reed

David Hughes as Ernst Sternmueller

William Schallert as Assistant District Attorney Andy Tucker

Produced by Aubrey Schenck Productions

Distributed by United Artists

Shield for Murder: Postwar Existentialism and Police Corruption

Shield for Murder is in the public domain, and you can watch it online at the Internet Archive by clicking here.

The film opens at night with a man (Detective Barney Nolan) walking down a rainy street. He grabs a man, bookmaker Perk Martin, and pulls him down Crab Alley. Perk Martin is getting nervous, and with good reason. Nolan shoots Martin in the back and takes the money that he was carrying for his boss Packy Reed. A witness, Ernst Sternmueller, in an upper-level apartment sees Nolan shoot Martin, and then shoot his gun into the air, even though Martin is already dead in the alley. When officers show up to investigate, one of them is Mark Brewster, someone Barney Nolan mentored. Brewster believes Nolan’s story that Perk Martin ran and that Nolan was forced to shoot him.

Cabot, a police reporter working in the police detectives’ room, suspects that Lieutenant Barney Nolan is corrupt. When the officers and detectives return to the station, he reminds Brewster about Nolan’s past: Last year Nolan killed two people in a market burglary. Three years ago, Nolan killed a tramp on Sullivan Street. Now, he has shot Perk Martin with a “shot gone wild.” Cabot also reminds Brewster that Nolan is an expert shot.

(This blog post about Shield for Murder contains spoilers.)

Detective Nolan wants his piece of the postwar American dream. He takes his girlfriend Patty Winters to see a model home that he wants to purchase for both of them with the money that he just stole, and he proposes marriage. While at the model home, Nolan leaves Patty for several minutes to bury the money that he stole from Martin. Patty accepts Nolan’s proposal, but he doesn’t treat Patty very well. She even complains to him that he bullies her friends and coworkers. He’s not a very sympathetic character, and I found it hard to understand why Patty agrees to marry him. Maybe it’s because she is portrayed as young and impressionable. But Detective Nolan treats everyone poorly as he gets more and more desperate. He takes the law into his own hands, and viewers see the extent of his brutality toward witnesses, suspects, and other bookmaker friends of Martin and Reed.

Mark Brewster realizes the inconsistencies in Nolan’s story before Patty does, and he gently questions her about Nolan’s recent activities and whereabouts. She doesn’t want to betray the man she loves, but once she acknowledges the inconsistencies in Nolan’s story, she agrees to help the police detectives find him.

By this time, I was rooting for Patty Winters and Mark Brewster. Nolan may be doomed because of his bad choices, but I was hoping that maybe Patty will realize Mark is the better man. Viewers don’t see any more of this plot thread; they can only infer what might come from the brief interactions between Mark and Patty.

Late in the film, when Detective Nolan is on the run and desperate to leave the country, he goes back to the model home that he showed to Patty Winters to get the stolen money. But he’s met by several officers, including Captain Gunnarson and Detective Mark Brewster, and the police reporter Cabot. Nolan shoots, even though he is vastly outnumbered. The officers return his fire and kill him in front of the model home, where he dies of his gunshot wounds.

Shield for Murder is noir in theme through and through: Nolan and the American dream are dead. At least the dream is dead for Nolan. It might be dead for his girlfriend Patty Winters, too. Maybe I would have felt more dismayed by the film’s ending if I had had any sympathy at all for Nolan. His death is a grim reminder that the American dream—or any dream, for that matter—cannot last if one is caught trying to buy it through murder and robbery. But Shield for Murder is very satisfying: It remains true to the characters and the plot right to the end.