La mano siniestra

This is a quickie and a cheapie which at the time went under the genre heading of a 'gag and gangster comedy'. In fact, there aren't any gangsters in it, and the only crime is white collar crime by businessmen. The leading lady is Iris Adrian, who despite being only 32 was already making her fiftieth film. She is one of those wise-cracking dames, but her voice is so loud and rasping, the wisecracks can be injurious to your health. Best to wear ear plugs. Despite the fact this film was made for about ten dollars, and shows it, it is amusing and diverting. I call a picture a C picture when it was made for ten dollars or less. B pictures can cost as much as a hundred dollars. (That was a joke.) Well, they cranked these things out to make double-bills and that is why they were about an hour long and nobody took much trouble over them. Maybe they made them in the lunch hour. They threw in a glamour guy, a few spooky looking guys, a wise-cracking dame, her sidekick whose jokes never quite make the grade, a couple of heavies, a respectable citizen or two, and thought of something to happen. A story idea helped from time to time. In this one, Iris Adrian is actually the lead player as a female bail bond broker. Naturally, she has to be a bit tough because she is bailing hoods all the time. But as we know from the movies, tough gals always have wilting romantic hearts buried somewhere deep inside, covered in the dust of having been trampled on too many times. Oh yes, the plot. Somebody has stolen some bonds from a financial company, and it is one of the board members. Then the Chairman is strangled because he is onto the crook. Follow the dots from there.

No stars in this PRC film, but a nice group of character players take center stage in Shake Hands With Murder. As business partners and possibly a romantic couple Frank Jenks and Iris Adrian provide a lot of laughs.

Adrian and Jenks are in the bail bond business and clearly Adrian is the brains. Jenks comes up with the marvelous idea that if they get a higher class of criminal to go bail for, the business will get bigger. So he goes bail for Douglas Fowley who's been charged with embezzlement of some high yield bonds. As this has taken just about all the capital the firm has, Adrian appoints herself to locate Fowley and stick to him like glue.

Fowley will need friends especially after the head of his firm Herbert Rawlinson is found dead. As Adrian and Jenks were also in the vicinity they are all three in the same leaky boat of criminal justice.

Shake Hands With Murder is your typical paper thin PRC production. But the three leads and the rest of the cast keep it entertaining and lively.

You always have to wonder though when you see a film like this what it might have become with a major studio doing it.

Darn tootin' they were and that was high cotton for two players usually delegated to the bottom half of the cast list, and sometimes not credited at all.

But it ends up as being mostly an Iris Adrian and Douglas Fowley movie, when Patsy Brent (Iris Adrian), girl bail bondsman...bondswoman...the heck with it...girl bail bond broker, finds that her partner, Eddie Jones (Frank Jenks), who is trying to acquire a better class clientele has invested all of their capital to bail Steve Morgan (Douglas Fowley), investment company executive who has been framed on an embezzlement charge out of jail. And Morgan has disappeared.

Trying to find Morgan, Patsy stumbles across the body of John Clark (Herbert Rawlinson), Morgan's ex-boss, not to mention now late boss. Patsy spots Morgan and catches up with him at a mountain lodge, where he convinces her of his innocence. They spend a week searching together for the missing bonds Morgan was accused of stealing, and spending a week at a mountain lodge with a man is nothing new for characters played by Iris Adrian, and the suspicion is she really wasn't in that much of a hurry to find the bonds.

They finally find the bonds hidden in a secret compartment which has been rigged as a booby trap. Well,that's what Fowley called it while looking squarely at Adrian and keeping a square face all the while, which wasn't that easy for Fowley, who was not known for overlooking a chance to smirk. Anyway, this booby trap is rigged so that when the panel is opened a wire leading from the panel to a suit of armor, causes the arm of the armor to raise and fire a gun hidden within it to fire at the person opening the panel. And, no, I don't care to explain it again. Even Iris understood it explained that way.

Morgan tricks the board of directors into coming to the lodge and, when they arrive, he asks them alone one by one to open the panel, telling them that's where the missing bonds are hidden. He knows the guilty person will, knowing the panel is still booby-trapped, refuse. The board includes characters played by Gene Roth, I. Stanford Jolley, Forrest Taylor and George Kirby, so there is no shortage of usual suspects. But the film has zipped right along and is now in need of some padding, so Morgan gets to test them all and the culprit is the last tested. The suspect listing above may or may not have anything to do with which one was tested last.

Iris Adrian and Frank Jenks are partners in a bail bond business. Adrian is happy bailing out small time crooks but Jenks dreams big and rashly drops $25,000 on a single client. When Adrian points out that if the client jumps bail, it will put them out of business, the pair quickly agree that they had better track down that client and keep an eye on him.

Douglas Fowley is the expensive client. Accused of embezzling, he is doing a little investigating, hoping to find the real culprit. When his former boss is found strangled in his office, Fowley is a suspect again, and (after much confusion) he joins forces with Adrian and Jenks to capture the real killer.

It's a super cheap production but the chemistry is actually pretty good among the three leads, who do their best to give life to some really silly dialog. (Jenks: "We're sitting on top of the world!" Adrian: "Yeah, well, go on before we fall off.")

Eventually our heroes and the five suspects wind up at a lodge where the stolen securities may be hidden. A secret vault and a suit of armor figure into the story, which doesn't offer many surprises but certainly moves along quickly.

Not bad, really--it's nothing profound but makes for a fun hour.

Iris Adrian is partner with Frank Jenks as bail bondsmen. Jenks has closed what he thinks is a great deal; he's collected $2,500 from Douglas Fowley against a $25,000 bail. The trouble is that Fowley is accused of stealing $100,000 in bearer bonds, and if he takes the stolen money and scarpers, they're on the hook for more than they have. So Miss Adrian follows him to his office, and discovers a corpse.

It's a rough little mystery from PRC, but it shows what they could do with a decent script, a competent director like Albert Herman, and good performers: turn out a watchable comedy-mystery. It's a subgenre made for a direly cheap production company, because you don't have to be a good writer to turn out a good mystery, you need to play fair with the rules and the audience -- Agatha Christie certainly proved that. You won't hail this as a classic, but you'll watch it painlessly to the end.