Jigsaw

JIGSAW (1949)

** 1/2 (out of four)

After his reporter friend is murdered, a D.A. goes off looking for the killers. Once again, the 1940's delivered all sorts of gems within the noir genre. This film here has quite a good reputation but I personally found it to be quite slow and boring in spots. The performances are all good but the director isn't able to get much out of the story and in the end nothing makes too much sense. Seeing stars like John Garfield and Henry Fonda is always great but their cameos add very little to the film.

Available on DVD through various PD companies.

Combining elements of a political thriller with elements of a mystery story, "Jigsaw" ends up being somewhat uneven, but certainly interesting enough to make you keep watching. The mystery angle is the part that works the best, keeping you guessing much of the time. Most of the production is strictly B-quality, but the performance of Franchot Tone, some cameo appearances worth watching for, and some interesting plot ideas bring up the overall quality.

The initial story idea is a bit routine, with Tone as an Assistant DA who is concerned about the activities of an extremist political group. While not entirely predictable, this side of it is never all that interesting either. The group remains too vague to seem like more than a small-scale threat. What perks things up is when Tone begins meeting a series of interesting characters from an assortment of backgrounds, with each of them either a potential friend or a potential enemy.

The finale of all this intrigue sets up a very interesting showdown between a number of groups in an art museum. The low production values keep it from being as memorable as it could have been, but it is still a good idea. Likewise, the movie overall never quite comes together as well as it could have, but it does have a number of positive things to offer.

This little, low-budget noir mystery is marred by crude direction, cutting, and editing, reminiscent of and no more polished than most live television productions of the same period, and hampered by a heavy handed political script that leaves huge gaps in plot logic.

Its chief interest is as a rare curiosity. Its paranoid politics and style mirror the anti-Communist films of the period, but it was made by a group of primarily liberal and leftist New Yorkers (exemplified by the famous actors who contributed cameo appearances), who turned the usual premise on its head. Franchot Tone plays a liberal crusading "special prosecutor" who investigates a shadowy secret organization that is menacing and killing its own members, whom they think may expose them. But this organization isn't Communist or leftist; rather it's a vaguely racist group that is really just a financial scam, run only to collect membership dues and gather other profits. As a result, even the political statement turns out to be rather weak compared with films of the period that explicitly opposed discrimination, such as "Pinky," "Gentlemen's Agreement," "Crossfire," "Lost Boundaries," "No Way Out," and so on.

I got this film from one of those public domain mega-packs on DVD. While this is not a bad film, I can see why the film makers didn't bother renewing the copyright--it just wasn't all that interesting. Most of the problem seems to be with the writing. The plot seems to bounce all over the place and where the film began seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with where it ended. Had all the dull moments and irrelevant plots been eliminated or polished, I really would have enjoyed the film a lot more than I did.

Franchot Tone plays a prosecutor with the DA's office who is initially looks into the case of a White supremacist who might have been murdered. Whether or not this is the case is uncertain, but when Tone's newspaper friend is killed when he tries investigating (again, it was made to look like a suicide), he knows that there is some sort of conspiracy afoot. However, instead of trying to bash heads and get to the bottom of it, he infiltrates an organization that might be behind all this--as well as buying and selling public officials.

As I said, the writing was pretty poor. However, for film nuts like myself, it's still worth seeing for all the strange and unexpected cameos, such as Henry Fonda and John Garfield (among others). Not a good movie but it has enough to it that it isn't a total waste of time seeing it--not exactly a glowing review, huh?!

This picture tries hard to recommend itself and tries hard to be a good Noir. It really does. And I tried hard to like it and recommend it and give it a good rating. Honest. But it won't let you. The plot is too muddled and the Director is not good enough to put it over.

Granted, he had some good actors in Franchot Tone and Myron McCormick. He also had a love interest who was a knockout in Jean Wallace, but she was a chore as an actress - in a climactic scene she flops badly - but what a knockout, to borrow a '40's phrase.

Well, that's about it. Confusing plot and a tepid, preachy story. I stuck with it because it was pouring outside. I gave it a rating of 5, but I gave Jean Wallace a 10...aesthetically speaking.