Shed No Tears

A shrewd woman helps her husband fake his death to collect life insurance. He plans on them running away together to live the high life. What he doesn't know is that she has a life of her own.

Shed No Tears was a product of short lived Eagle-Lion Pictures. Too bad this one was not done by even a studio like RKO. The thing looks like it was shot with my father's old Bell&Howell movie camera, the sets are threadbare. But it's a fascinating story about how things can go wrong when you hook up in a confidence game.

Wallace Ford fakes his own death in a fire and wife June Vincent and his insurance policy names her the beneficiary. So he hides, she collects the money and they run off to live large anonymously. Only Ford really has picked a winner in two timing June Vincent. She's been two timing Ford with Mark Roberts and she plans to have him bumped off and the two of them go to Rio by the sea-o.

All this doesn't sit well with Ford's son by his first marriage Dick Hogan. He hires a private detective, a Nero Wolfe like character in Johnston White. But White's also a two timer. In fact he steals the film whenever he's on screen.

Quite a lot of plot is packed into this short B picture. It's a shame it had such an amateurish production.

The 1948 book's dust jacket states: "Using a brutal pen, Don Martin (the author) has etched a novel-sized portrait of EDNA, a woman without heart or conscience. Edna has only glands, greed and beauty.... It is an earthy, sordid story which must occasionally become indelicate. It is a book to be admired or loathed". Indeed, the icy if slightly 2-dimensional femme fatale (June Vincent) is the central character here who schemes to get her way no matter what, while those around her seek to either investigate or thwart her plans. Fast-paced and twisted (perverted even for a moment or two), her schemes start to unravel and she flails around to try to save what she can. The movie also features a certain detective, an overly verbose, oily and clever maneuverer who gets caught up in the cogs of the plot only to start to pull the levers somewhat himself (while also providing some subtle humour). Keeps you holding on till the end as June Vincent gives a great (if minor) performance as the spiky, brittle, shallow and depraved Edna. Distributed by the short-lived Eagle-Lion Films, whose roster of other B-noirs are also worth a look (e.g. T-Men 1947) - see Wikipedia or the IMDB page for a list.

Shed no tears is a 1948 noir starring June Vincent and Wallace Ford, directed by Jean Yarbrough.

Vincent and Ford are Edna and Sam Grover. In the first scene, we see a fire break out in a hotel room and a body emerge from the window. The room was registered to Sam; the corpse was from an undertaker. Sam is i. The car with Edna.

The plan is that he is going to Washington D. C. to await his wife after she collects on his $50,000 insurance policy. In today's dollars, that's $659,000 today. Considering you could buy a house for 7 grand and a car for 1800, wow.

What Sam doesn't realize is that Edna is having an affair with Ray Belden (Mark Roberts) and they are off to Hawaii as soon as the money comes through.

A bit sharper than dear old dad, Sam's son Tom (Dick Hogan) dislikes his stepmom and thinks his father's death was not accidental. His fiance (Elena Verdugo) brings him to a detective (Johnstone White) so the death can be investigated.

The detective is out for himself and soon learns Sam is still alive and wants money from Edna. Sam gets sick of waiting and reappears. Then there is an actual murder. Edna is in trouble up to her neck.

Decent noir, with Vincent convincing as a manipulative woman, giving a noir femme fatale performance and Ford a believable patsy. Johnstone White as the detective has the best role and makes the most of it, supplying both humor and oiliness.

One small thing - a phone number was traced in seconds while in a later film, it seemed to take forever.

Wallace Ford fakes his death in a hotel room fire. He hooks up with his much younger wife (who came up with the idea of the deception), June Vincent, and together they plan on bilking the insurance company for the payoff of 50 grand which will reunite them once she collects. She watches as he gets on the bus, then meets her boyfriend in the parking lot and they talk of how they're going to spend the money.

All this happens in the first ten minutes or so - there's no fat on this baby.

But meanwhile, Ford's son thinks that something is amiss, he thinks that Vincent killed Ford herself and he hires an investigator to prove it. This is where things really start perking as the Clifton Webb-like sleuth, played wonderfully by Johnstone White, soon figures out what's going on and he starts playing the supposed widow and the son against each other as well as Ford himself who comes back to town and discovers his wife in a clinch with her boyfriend.

But wait - there's still more but you're going to have to find out for yourself. Jean Yarbrough, veteran of just about every kind of movie and TV genre, manages to keep one's interest despite a lack of noirish touches. It's likely that he had to get this done in a week or so, so there wasn't any time for complicated camera set-ups. The story here is the main thing, you probably will not be disappointed.