Strange Bargain

Don't mistake brevity and low budget for lack of quality. This movie is very well scripted and conceived. Harry Morgan gives a terrific performance as the policeman and Jeffrey Lynn is appropriately perplexed as the devoted husband who suddenly finds himself holding the bag when he is tricked by his boss into an ill-fated endeavor. Martha Scott is marvelous as his well-grounded wife. Strange Bargain is well-paced and well-acted throughout.

Interestingly, this later served as a basis for a Murder She Wrote episode with Jeffrey Lynn, Martha Scott, and Harry Morgan recreating their roles. It actually makes for a fascinating "sequel."

For any Murder She Wrote fans, this movie may be familiar. It was the main feature for an episode entitled 'The Days Dwindle Down', aired in April of 1987. Jeffrey Lynn, Harry Morgan and Martha Scott resurrected their roles for the episode. I have yet to see the movie, however after seeing this episode, I am now intrigued to see what the movie was actually like.

An interesting note about this movie: The TV Series "Murder, She Wrote" produced a "sequel" to it in a 1987 episode, "The Days Dwindle Down," (episode # 3.21). Several actors, including Harry Morgan, reprise their roles. Jessica Fletcher re-solves the original crime by interviewing several of the original characters some 30 years after the fact (actually closer to 40 years!). The episode makes nice use of scenes from the original movie as flashbacks to explain the plot. Imagine the surprise of watching a typical MSW episode about an old murder, and then a 34-year-old Harry Morgan suddenly pops up in B&W interviewing the same (though younger) witnesses about the same murder!

Assistant bookkeeper Sam Wilson (Jeffrey Lynn) can't make ends meet for himself, his wife, and two children, so he goes to his boss Mr. Jarvis asking for a raise. Instead of a raise he finds out from Jarvis that he is going to be let go shortly because the firm cannot afford him. It is then that Jarvis tells Wilson that he is broke and that, rather than see his wife and son destitute, he intends to kill himself so that they can collect the insurance money - 250K. But he needs Sam's help to cover up the suicide so that it looks like a murder/robbery so that the insurance will pay off. In return he will give Sam ten thousand dollars. Sam refuses.

The following night Jarvis calls Sam anyways and tells him the password for the suicide he plans to commit. Sam races over to his house to try and stop him, but he is too late. Jarvis is dead on the floor. So, realizing it is too late to stop the suicide, seeing the 10K on the desk, and reading Jarvis' written plea to Sam to help him cover the suicide, he decides that not helping him now will do no good, and so he does make it look like a robbery, takes the 10K, and throws the gun into the bay. What Sam doesn't realize is that everything he has just done not only makes it look like a murder, it makes it look like a murder he could have committed.

Besides the rather clever plot and red herrings thrown all over the place for such a short B feature with no A list stars, this is really a museum piece of post war middle class life and even business values of the time. The USA is headed into HUAC/Red Scare land at this point, so time is taken to show the Wilson family praying before eating, there is talk of going to church like it would ordinarily be a weekly event, and note that even people who had desk jobs worked half a day on Saturday at this point in time. As for business values, Mr. Jarvis knows his employees and they know him. Even down to Sam the assistant bookkeeper for twelve years - Jarvis couldn't have found him THAT valuable to keep him in a lower level position all of that time.

Harry Morgan plays Lt. Webb, a police detective whose only job at this point is to find Jarvis' murderer. He even comes to Jarvis' company and fingerprints all of the employees! I can't believe if someone like workaday cog in the machine Sam had been murdered there would have been much more than a police report. Since Morgan has been playing lots of bad guys and moral cowards up to this point in time, quite a bit of unlikability bleeds into his performance to where I want somebody to drag him away by that cane of his.

Finally I have to give Jeffrey Lynn his due. He carries off being the central character in this film very well, often just telegraphing his feelings by posture and facial expression, particularly when he comes across Jarvis' suicide scene. This is time well spent at just over an hour.

When JEFFREY LYNN had to leave his career during WWII for the armed services, it seemed to cut into whatever momentum he had built up at Warner Brothers. By the time he did STRANGE BARGAIN for RKO, his dwindling career wasn't exactly in high gear. Nevertheless, he gives a good performance here as a man unwillingly caught up in a chain of events that almost lands him in a great deal of trouble.

He's an assistant bookkeeper at a law firm that is going through hard times. On the day that he gets up enough courage to ask for a raise, he's told that because of all the cuts being made, he has to be let go. His boss, however, has a strange bargain to make with him and that's the nub of the story without giving any more of the plot away.

MARTHA SCOTT is fine as his loving wife who never suspects anything is wrong until she makes a certain discovery. HARRY MORGAN is the detective who knows something isn't quite right when Lynn's boss is found not a victim of suicide, as had been planned, but a victim of murder. KATHERINE EMERY, an interesting actress who had been used well in THE LOCKET, has a pivotal role as the dead man's widow but plays the role so stiffly that it's not easy to believe the film's ending.

It's a story that catches interest from the start and maintains that suspense throughout. JEFFREY LYNN, never an actor given to much emotion, is calm and stalwart as the innocent victim of circumstances beyond his control.

A B-film worth catching if you can.