Scene of the Crime

They're all here. Lovelorn wife, old cop trying to stick around, gangsters with neat nicknames, forensic lab work, stool pigeons, etc. There is also an uninteresting back story about a job the wife is trying to get for her husband-cop, to "keep him safe". Think of a familiar plot device and it's here in "Scene Of The Crime".

That said, this picture holds your interest - it's a good story, when all is said and done. Good acting from start to finish and there are lots of good character actors; John McIntyre, Norman Lloyd, Gloria DeHaven, Jerome Cowan, and many others. I disagree with a reviewer above in that the picture held my interest right to the end, although I am a big fan of noir films. I did think that Van Johnson was a curious choice for the title role. I always thought there wasn't a mean bone in his body, not tough enough to play a detective in a gritty noir.

Lastly, the music director was Andre Previn, and the theme music at the beginning and end was good. He also wrote two songs that were unworthy of him, but they were played in a strip joint and fit into the setting with their trite tunes and lyrics. Despite all of the preceding, I rated it a seven, which means I think it's worth your time.

Van Johnson plays it a lot rougher than usual when cast as a hardboiled police detective in Scene Of The Crime. He's got reason to be hard in this case. A fellow detective has been murdered, shot down in the mean streets of Los Angeles. The victim had a thousand dollars in his pocket and may have been doing some off duty guard duty for some bookmakers. Which would make the cop and incidentally Van's friend a crooked cop.

Which among other things is what Captain Leon Ames wants Van to find out as well as bring in the killer. What Van and his squad uncover is a gang of crooks who are robbing these illegal gambling establishments, be they bookmaking parlors, dice games, poker games, whatever.

This case is the main concern of this film, but Johnson has a whole lot of other things on his plate. A partner, John McIntire, who is slowing up with age, a young detective Tom Drake who is learning the ropes as fast as Van can teach him, and his wife Arlene Dahl who would like very much for her husband to get out of the cop business.

Two other performances really stand out in this film. First Gloria DeHaven as singer/gangster girl friend who's definitely the most hardboiled character in the film. Her reasons for her actions tread into adult areas that the Code frowned on, but are still implied. Secondly Norman Lloyd you will not forget as one of Van's stool pigeons who might just be missing a whole suit in his deck of cards. Lloyd will definitely make your skin crawl.

Scene Of The Crime is a good cop drama, atypical for MGM at that time, but they would soon be doing more of these.

This is a very good film noir, well directed by Roy Rowland and with strong casting. It is based on a story called 'Smashing the Bookie Gang Marauders', which provided a run of the mill plot. But the strongest aspect of this film is its intelligent and witty screenplay by Charles Schnee. The film has many quick ripostes and lots of snappy dialogue. But unlike many such films, where gag writers have inserted the gags, there are no gags in this film, and instead Schnee has written his own text with plenty of quick zippy wit. One particularly good line is when Van Johnson says to floozy Gloria DeHaven: 'You know, when girls have your kind of looks, it's hard to see them.' That was because he had misread her character. Van Johnson is at his best as the stalwart cop in this detective tale. His beautiful wife is played by Arlene Dahl, to great effect. Gloria DeHaven is the gangster's moll, and she is some looker. She almost had me fooled too. All that soft soap concealing the hard steel underneath is enough to make any guy doubt the reliability of dames sometimes. The story concerns some wild thugs who are wiping out the bookies and killing people without compunction, in an attempt to 'take over'. The main murderer is a man with a twisted hand and a blotchy face. But no one can find him. It is interesting from the dialogue in the film that at that time tough guys did not say: 'Where is he holed up?' but merely: 'Where is he holed?' And another linguistic surprise is that Van Johnson talks of people spending time together as 'hanging', as in the phrase 'hanging out' used by young people today. I had no idea that people in 1949 were already talking about 'hanging' with each other. It all goes to show how important movies can be for one's historical education in the evolution of slang. In fact, there is no substitute for them. And that is yet another reason for watching old movies nonstop.

This is a very entertaining look at big city cops and robbers with shades of film noir showing though. The standout performance in a potentially femme fatale role is Gloria DeHaven. I suspect the writers, John Bartlow Martin and Charles Schnee, along with director Roy Rowland, had experiences with untrustworthy women, for Lili (Gloria DeHaven) could turn any man's heart to putty, then fool him over and over. Van Johnson too turns in a subdued performance which is called for in the character (Mike Conovan) he plays. Conovan's very liberal wife, especially for 1949, is played by Arlene Dahl, who is fed up with the demands of her husband's job but who also trusts her husband to be with a vixen and still stay true to her. This is an effective counterbalance to the untrustworthiness of Lili. Great supporting roles abound filled with standout performances from John McIntire's "too old to cut the mustard" part all the way to the Sleeper, Norman Lloyd. Yuk, Yuk, it's great. There is a lot of realistic blood and guts thrown in complete with car chases that foretell things to come in action movies. Heat up some popcorn, get a cold one, then sit back and enjoy the ride.

I guess the lesson here is that you can take the crime drama out of MGM, but you can't take MGM out of the crime drama. With noirish location shots, the new Dore Schary regime changed the usual MGM look somewhat, yet the movie still boasts a string of stars and star power for which the studio was known. The trouble is that working Van Johnson, Arlene Dahl, Tom Drake, Gloria DeHaven, Donald Woods, and a string of "name" supporting players into the screenplay with sufficient screen time for each overstretches the results. Despite some effective moments (the hotel room fistfight, the fright screams from the burning car), the movie suffers from too much flab for overall effect. For example, the two rather lengthy scenes with Norrie Lorfield (Tom Helmore), the rival for Conovan's (Johnson) wife, are simply a needless distraction from the main plot, and work to dilute the overall effect. In fact, the entire marital subplot should have been dropped or at least minimized, but it seems that the studio was not satisfied with the kind of fast, efficient little crime drama that RKO, for one, routinely turned out.

I'm tempted to say that just as movie spectaculars and historical epics depend on big budgets for optimal effect, crime dramas and noirs depend on the tight disciplining constraints of small ones. That way, production values don't interfere with the story line. Here it appears that MGM's celebrated production values over-produced the number of feature players, which, in turn, multiplied the various subplots, or vice-versa. In either case, it's too bad the script didn't eliminate a few of these in favor of giving Norman Lloyd's truly memorable character, Sleeper, more screen time. He's the kind of unique character that could have transformed this otherwise forgettable exercise into a memorable one.