User Reviews

The audience is led on a path that ends with a unemployed ex-sailor hanging himself in a fleabag hotel he just checked into. The one detective that has some good forensic skills and plan good smarts thinks otherwise. The audience knows some of the details as to who did kill the ex-sailor but not why.

Robert Douglas played some very big bad guys in "The Flame and the Arrow", "Ivanhoe", "The Prisoner of Zenda" with Stewart Granger, and "The Adventures of Don Juan" with Errol Flynn. In this film he is a wise-cracking Canadian (to explain the accent) that works out step-by- step how and why and who killed a relatively innocent and innocuous young man in his town of LA.

There are some "CSI" and "NCIS" moments of scientific skills used to explain evidence items. And this was 1949! A good film with some good character actors, one of whom is Alan Alda's dad, Robert Alda as one of the bad guys.

I like good actors whether they play "good" guys or "bad" guys. But the ones who play bad guys always seem to say that they have more fun. Enjoy this movie with a well know bad guy playing the lead good guy and how he uses his head, his personality and excellent voice to make viewing a very pleasurable experience.

****SPOILERS**** British actor Robert Douglas is as convincing as a snowman in the Gobi desert playing transplanted Canadian L.A homicide detective Let.Michael Landers in the film. Landers gets on the case of drifter Brad Clifton's, Warren Douglas, suicide after he had testified at the inquiry of Farmer Webb's tragic death. It's Clifton who claimed that he saw Farmer Webb fall off his tractor dead drunk and smash his skull on on a rock killing himself. What in fact really happened is that Farmer Webb was murdered by L.A bookies Kimmel & Foster, John Harmon & Richard Benedict, for threatening to turn them and their bookie operation over to the police. That in them using his farm to lay cable on his property that pipes in the latest horse-racing results from tracks like Santa Anita Hollywood Park & Del Mar.

Taking his vacation time to track down Clifton's killers Let. Landers in finding a pack of matches from the place in Clifton's hotel room travels down to the out of the way and nearly deserted Glorietta Hotel in the heart of the Mojave Desert to find who in fact murdered him. Acting like an pot smoking and espresso drinking Greenwich village hipster with a very pronounced British accent didn't help Let.Landers either. His actions made Landers look silly at best or utterly annoying at worse to those in town that he ran into or dealt with.

Let. Landers foolishly runs around town like a chicken with its head chopped off claiming that he's an insurance investigator looking for a Brad Cliffton in paying him a $5,000.00 insurance policy left to him by an aunt of his. This act on Let. Landers part is so ridicules and obvious as well that no one in town, in them thinking that he's suffering from a serious case of heat stroke, takes the guy seriously! Except for both Kimmel and Foster as well as the hotel bartender the diabetic Andy, Robert Alda, who were all involved in Clifton's murder. Also as a love interest Landers gets romantically involved with cigarette girl Jo Ann Rise, Helen Westcott, who thinks he's not just interesting, in just how off the wall he acts, but cute as well.

****SPOILERS**** It's a miracle that Let. Landers wasn't offed as soon as he got to the Glorietta Hotel in just how nuts he acted in alerting Clifton's stone cold killers, Andy Kimmel & Forster, that he was out to bust them. Despite getting shot and left for dead in a blinding rainstorm Landers with the help of his girlfriend Jo Ann manages to get the upper hand and get diabetic and need for insulin Andy, the weak link in the chain, to break down and admit his involvement in Clifton's murder with Kimmel & Foster checking out of town as well as the movie never to be seen or heard from again. Which all made the bulldog like and go it along Let. Landers efforts in catching the two of them both useless and ineffective.

The first five minutes or so if this movie got me excited, as I felt like I'd discovered a solid minor noir. After a montage with voice over narration about the different motives for homicide, we're presented with a classic noir scenario of an Average Joe being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in this case witnessing a murder, with disastrous consequences. But the movie does a quick nosedive into improbability, as even though the Average Joe does exactly what the killers want, lie for them at an inquest, they still murder him, therefore bringing on a police investigation when they were already in the clear.

I wasn't bothered by actor Robert Douglas' English accent as other reviewers were. What bothered me was that his character was arrogant, smarmy, and for me really unlikeable. He's also, we're supposed to believe, one hell of a detective. A fellow cop refers to him as Sherlock, but Sherlock Holmes based his deductions on scientific evidence. In this movie our hero makes one giant supposition after another, all without a shred of actual evidence, and in every instance he's right. He's not a detective so much as a psychic.

We're also supposed to believe that he's a suave ladies' man, despite his seduction technique consisting of slinging a bunch of corny, third rate Romeo lines. Pretty Helen Westcott inexplicably falls head over heels in love with him. It was so inexplicable that I thought we might find out she was working for the bad guys and pretending, but no, it's true love, until he dumps her at the end. His farewell line to her is something that Humphrey Bogart might've been able to bring off, but he's no Bogie. (Though he might be Superman. Even after getting shot in the head and lying in a muddy ditch in a pouring rain for hours, he's quickly out of bed against doctor's orders and traipsing across the desert after the bad guys. What a hero!)

By the time we got to the explanation of what the crooks were up to, something involving buried telegraph wires conveying race results to bookies, I was only half listening, so I couldn't tell you if it made any sense or not. Actually, in this kind of movie that doesn't really matter, as long as you've been reasonably well entertained. I wasn't. (Too bad the Average Joe killed off early on wasn't the main protagonist. I liked him a lot better than the detective.)