Il colpevole è tra noi

In Shield for Murder (a movie he co-directed with Howard Koch), Edmond O'Brien plays a Los Angeles cop `gone sour.' Bloated and sweaty, he's a sneak preview of another bad apple – Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. In a pre-title sequence, he guns down a drug runner in cold blood, relieves the corpse of an envelope crammed with $25-thou, then yells `Stop or I'll shoot' for the benefit of eavesdroppers before firing twice into the air. When his partner (John Agar) arrives, there's only a few hundred dollars left on the body, and it looks like a justifiable police action – though O'Brien's shock tactics have already drawn the unwelcome attention of his new captain (Emile Meyer).

O'Brien wants the money to buy into the American Dream – to put a down-payment on a tract house, furnished (oddly enough) right down to the table settings. It's a bungalow to share with his girl, Marla English, as well as a handy place to bury his cash in its yard. But a couple of things go wrong. First off, a local crime boss wants back the loot O'Brien ripped off and dispatches a couple of goons to retrieve it. Then, though there were no eye-witnesses to the murder, there was in fact an eavesdropper – an old blind man whose acute hearing picked up a sequence of shots that don't add up to the official story. When this good citizen decides to tell the police what he heard, O'Brien decides to pay him a nocturnal visit....

Based on a novel by William McGivern (who also wrote the books from which The Big Heat, Rogue Cop and Odds Against Tomorrow were drawn), Shield For Murder embodies some of the shifts in tone and emphasis the noir cycle was showing as it wound down. Its emphasis is less on individuals caught up in circumstance than on widespread public corruption; its tone is less suggestive than ostentatiously violent. The movie ratchets up to a couple of brutal set-pieces.

In one, O'Brien, knocking back doubles at the bar in a spaghetti cellar, is picked up by a floozie (Carolyn Jones, in what looks like Barbara Stanwyck's wig from Double Indemnity). `You know what's the matter with mirrors in bars?' she asks him. `Men always make hard faces in them.' While she eats, he continues to drink. When the goons track him down there, O'Brien savagely pistol-whips one of them (Claude Akins) to the horror of the other patrons who had come to devour their pasta in peace. Later, there's an attempted pay-off (and a double-cross) in a public locker-room and swimming-pool that ends in carnage. It's easy to dismiss Shield For Murder – it has a seedy B-picture look and a literalness that typified most of the crime films of the Eisenhower administration. But it's grimly effective – almost explosive.

This noir from the mid-50's is very watchable, even though it bears more resemblance to a TV series than a film. Some scenes could have been filmed by the unit that shot Dragnet for example. O'Brien is good in his sweaty beefy way that you remember from D.O.A., John Agar is stolid, Marla English capable but no more. The only standout is Carolyn Jones as Girl in Bar, and why her character has no name I don't know. She reminds me of Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge, that level of sad understanding.

One of those B movies of the fifties, while not great, that is always enjoyable. O'Brien plays detective who is sick of struggling and wants some big dough quick and easy. He murders a stoolie who has $25,000 on him. His longtime partner and friend, Agar, doesn't want to believe his friend could commit such a heinous crime, but all evidence points in that direction. Agar is good as frustrated detective. The funniest scene in the film is Akins pursuing O'Brien through school corridors with his head all bandaged up from blows O'Brien inflicted earlier. Marla English is almost Elizabeth Taylorian in her looks as girlfriend of O'Brien, although I'm not sure what his appeal is.

Unfortunately roles for talented middle-aged actors like Edmond O'Brien and Ida Lupino were drying-up in the mid-1950's, with TV replacing the old black-and-white B-movie. Lupino carried on with a successful career behind the camera, and it appears O'Brien was exploring that option too, by co-directing this independent production. The results however are pretty uneven. O'Brien gets to sweat his usual bucket-load, playing a cop corrupted by the allure of a tract house in burgeoning suburbia. (Now there's a departure!-- in fact, one of the curious attractions is a tour through the well-appointed tract home of the period, something that glitzy Hollywood never had much time for.) There's also some well-staged scenes-- the shoot-out around the public pool is both unusual and well-executed, while the beating in the bar reaches a jarringly brutal pitch that registers on the stricken faces of the patrons and O'Brien's contorted brow.

However, the pacing fails to generate the excitement or intensity a thriller like this needs. Plus the performance level really drops off with English and Agar. Their conversation around the pool, in fact, amounts to a seminar in bad acting. Too bad, O'Brien didn't have the budget to surround himself with a calibre of actors equal to his own. In passing-- the guy playing the deaf-mute really jarred me. He looks so unlike the usual bit-player and is so well cast that the scene in his room with O'Brien comes across as more than just a little poignant. Also, more than just a hint of kink emerges with Carolyn Jones' well-played barfly nympho. She's clearly on her way up the casting ladder. Anyway, there's probably enough compensation here to make up for Agar and English and the listless scenes in the station house, particularly for those curiosity seekers wondering about Better Homes and Gardens 1950's style.

In Shield For Murder Edmond O'Brien is tired of being a straight arrow cop. One night he murders a numbers runner and steals %25,000.00 from him. Of course his official version is that he was resisting arrest, but the bookmaker played by Hugh Sanders knows he's out all that money and he'll get it back one way or another.

O'Brien is perfectly cast as the aging detective sick and tired of seeing crooks grow rich. His problem is that he's grown such contempt for the human race he thinks that he's the smartest guy out there. Never credits the crooks or the cops with an ounce of intelligence. That is his downfall.

John Agar is his protégé and still a straight arrow. The undercurrent running through the film is that while Agar is trying to catch O'Brien will he fall victim to the same cynicism?

Some other noteworthy performances in Shield For Murder are from Marla English as O'Brien's troubled girlfriend, Carolyn Jones as a bar girl he has a small fling with, Claude Akins as one of Sanders's hoods and Emile Meyer as the precinct captain.

But Edmond O'Brien is something to see here. In a really crackerjack noir thriller.