csteidler A neat set up: Chester Morris is an author of "serious" books. He hates his publisher, but is forced to go to him and ask for an advance. Having worked up his nerve by downing several drinks, Morris arrives at the office to find the publisher in conference with a popular mystery writer—whom Morris promptly insults as a writer of pap. Writing a mystery is simple work, Morris drunkenly insists…he could invent a murder plot in a snap. A murder in a locked room.Some hours later, the publisher is found dead….murdered in his locked office. And Morris can't quite remember two things—the locked room murder plot he had invented, and whether or not he actually did the murder. He sets about investigating—but it's not easy with the police figuring him as the prime suspect.Morris is very good, especially after his character sobers up and we can watch him piece together events and the motives and actions of other characters. (During the first fifteen minutes his slurring and stumbling get a bit tiresome….as drunk people tend to do.)Steven Geray is fun as the rival author; his thick accent adds to his vaguely exotic and sinister aura. Constance Dowling is hard and slick as a possibly dangerous blonde—the publisher's secretary who eventually teams up with Morris. She may be seeking the truth; she may be running away from it. Both the mystery writer and the secretary have their own reasons for wishing that publisher ill.The film develops some great situations—like when Morris and Dowling meet up in his dark basement apartment, each thinking the other committed the murder. Some great camera shots: she steps slowly from the shadows, pausing where all is dark except her ankles in the light. Some cheesy but undeniably fun dialog: thinking she's trying to fool him with romance, Chester tells the girl, "You've got the wrong chump. Violins hurt my ears. And when the temperature's up I drink a bottle of beer…." An excellent B mystery that moves fast, contains plenty of suspense and never takes itself more seriously than a murder mystery should."Do you really think I killed Small?" – A pause, then a hard kiss, finally an answer.... "Yes."

robert-temple-1 This was the directorial debut of Robert Gordon, whose debut is however not of earth-shaking importance, as he never shook the earth later on. The film is an entertaining low-budget B murder mystery, and Chester Morris and Constance Dowling both overact. Morris especially over-does it as a particularly obnoxious drunk early in the film. This is unfortunate, as the story requires us to have sympathy for him later on, and those who find abusive drunks hard to tolerate will have to be strong. The chief merit of this film is an extraordinarily ingenious twist to the 'murder in a locked room' motif. Several films have been made on the theme: 'how did the murderer escape from the room containing the corpse when the room was locked from the inside?' In this version, however, another ingenious layer is added to the conundrum. Here we have the drunken author (just mentioned) inventing a plot solution for this while he is intoxicated and forgetting it when he has sobered up. However, by that time, someone who heard his idea has actually carried out the clever plan and implicated Morris as the murderer! When Morris tries to track down the people he told the idea to when he was drunk, in the hope that they will remember it and enlighten him, so that he can clear himself of a murder charge, he runs into difficulties. The bartender to whom he told the idea is murdered, to stop him telling the solution of the crime. Those of us who like to solve things will inevitably be interested in this film, and will disregard the inadequacies of the production as being beside the point. Hence, murder mystery fans will find much in this film to intrigue them. And perhaps they will wish, as I found myself doing, that the excellent story idea had been carried out with a better film version, or indeed that someone would remake it and do it properly this time.

bmacv A hoary locked-room murder mystery retooled in full noir trim for the post-war era, Blind Spot sports the grungy, wrong-side-of-the tracks look of early, low-budget entries in the noir cycle, like Suspense and Fall Guy and The Guilty. It compensates (or overcompensates) with hopped-up performances and some particularly gaudy patter (`a 45-caliber toothache').A clutch of his books is the only mark of achievement in mystery-writer Chester Morris' squalid basement apartment; he's on the losing end of an extortionate contract drawn up by his publisher (William Forrest). Before heading uptown to confront him, Morris swigs some false courage from the heel of a bottle, telling himself `It isn't easy to beg money from a man you'd rather kick in the teeth.' Nor is it such a good idea to ask for favors reeking of booze and with a couple days worth of beard stubble, but he charges ahead anyway. Morris muscles past the Veronica-Lake-ish secretary (Constance Dowling) to barge into Forrest's office, where the publisher is playing carpet golf with one of his successful authors (Steven Geray). Barely coherent, Morris claims that even drunk he can dream up a top-notch plot, and begins to pitch his locked-room mystery before he's shown the door. Down in the ground-floor bar, he continues recounting his story idea to the heard-it-all bartender (Sid Tomack), when he's joined by a suddenly fascinated Dowling.Next morning, the police arrest Morris for the murder of Forrest, who was found dead in his office, bolted from within. Of course, he's lost the whole evening in a blackout. Curiously, two unlikely advocates rally to his side – Geray, who praises the psychological realism of Morris' writing, and Dowling, whose motives remain murkier (gal pal or femme fatale?). Circumstances take an even darker turn when the bartender, too, is found murdered in his bed....Blind Spot feels a lot like a Cornell Woolrich knockoff (writers, blackouts, homicides), yet it's not quite cheesy. (The script reveals itself to be a keen student of the not-yet-identified noir cycle, with a couple of Hollywood in-jokes, including a veiled reference to The Lost Weekend.) Morris made the movie as a break from the ‘40s programmers which are his chief claim to fame, the Boston Blackie series, after which his career swiftly petered out. His biography includes one arresting detail, however: `In 1951, Morris received the deathbed confession of his friend Roland West for the murder of actress Thelma Todd in 1935.' Sounds like the beginning of another Boston Blackie script.

goblinhairedguy Like Decoy, this distinctive low-budget noir has fallen through the cracks and deserves resurrection. It's another masterly essay in irony from the pen of Martin Goldsmith of Detour fame. The plot involves a desperate, alcoholic writer who sarcastically pitches a "locked room" murder mystery to his publisher, then sees the plot occur in real life (with himself as chief suspect, of course). Despite the lack of his presence in the credits, Cornell Woolrich's novels are an obvious influence here - themes of urban paranoia, loss of memory, disconnected characters, etc, were his stock-in-trade. The ripe dialogue borders on self-parody, and the entire exercise could have easily been directed as a satire of the genre. Instead it becomes a double-density noir. Morris and Geray are rather miscast, but peek-a-boo blonde Dowling is striking (particularly visually) as a potential femme fatale. The moody cinematography is engagingly oppressive, lingering on beads of sweat and trapping us in confined spaces. Director Robert Gordon worked mainly in TV and never had much success in film. The "locked room" mystery, a staple of the detective novel genre, was most memorably committed to celluloid in the early talkie classic The Kennel Murder Case.