Blind Spot

This film has poor production values, but the script is not one of them; it is engrossing. I had bad vibes in the first ten minutes of this film because Chester Morris did such a horrible job playing a drunk. He recovers, however, and finally becomes the tough guy he was known for in similar films.

The plot centers upon a writer who may have killed his publisher (how many thousand suspects could that bring?). There is, of course, the romantic interest, the innocent? Blond who was the secretary of the publisher, a gentle detective story writer who was a friend of the publisher, and a bartender, as well as an elevator operator.

There is also a not-to-bright detective working on the case, who is very good at jumping to conclusions and sniffing red herrings.

The film is both entertaining and amusing at the same time and worth viewing from a mystery standpoint.

Like Decoy, this distinctive low-budget noir has fallen through the cracks and deserves resurrection. It's another masterly essay in irony from the pen of Martin Goldsmith of Detour fame. The plot involves a desperate, alcoholic writer who sarcastically pitches a "locked room" murder mystery to his publisher, then sees the plot occur in real life (with himself as chief suspect, of course). Despite the lack of his presence in the credits, Cornell Woolrich's novels are an obvious influence here - themes of urban paranoia, loss of memory, disconnected characters, etc, were his stock-in-trade. The ripe dialogue borders on self-parody, and the entire exercise could have easily been directed as a satire of the genre. Instead it becomes a double-density noir. Morris and Geray are rather miscast, but peek-a-boo blonde Dowling is striking (particularly visually) as a potential femme fatale. The moody cinematography is engagingly oppressive, lingering on beads of sweat and trapping us in confined spaces. Director Robert Gordon worked mainly in TV and never had much success in film. The "locked room" mystery, a staple of the detective novel genre, was most memorably committed to celluloid in the early talkie classic The Kennel Murder Case.

This film is a must for fans of noir and b-movies. The hero is a semi-alcoholic writer, wrongly accused of a murder committed while he was drunk.

The actor plays this drunk so obnoxiously that he will have you cringing in your seat, begging for him to finally pass out. It's the acting equivalent of fingernails on a chalk board. What saves the movie and makes it worth seeing are the incredibly over-the-top lines the writer cooked up.

These include: "the heat sapped my vitality like ten thousand blood-thirsty dwarves," "a ghost-writer is like drugs," "plagiarism is inscribing my name on another man's pen," and "when I want poetry, I read Walt Whitman."

Good for a laugh.

I saw "Blind Spot" at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago as part of a noir festival hosted by TCM's Eddie Muller. Under those circumstances, and with a live audience, I enjoyed it more than I probably would have if I had stumbled across this in my living room. It's slow and bit too talky, and while its story about a man wrongfully accused of murder is right out of the noir canon, not a lot of other noir tropes are present to satisfy die-hard fans of the genre.

Chester Morris plays the main character, an alcoholic writer, as a slurry, stumbling drunk, but he does it quite charmingly and in a way that prevents it from getting old. But the real reason to see this film is for Constance Dowling, an absolute stunner, reminiscent of Veronica Lake but with a unique and exotic look all her own.

I saw this as a double feature with "The Unsuspected," and much to my surprise, my nine and seven year old sons liked this one more, despite it having much less action. Go figure.

Grade: B

Jeffrey Anders is a down-on-his luck mystery writer who drunkenly blunders into his publisher's office one day with an idea for a new story. He has concocted a story where a dead body is found inside a locked, bolted room. He also has a simple solution for the mystery. Unfortunately, later his publisher is found dead inside a locked, bolted room and Anders can't remember the solution he told when he was drunk! Of course, Jeffrey is the main suspect since he was the last one to see the guy alive. He starts seeking out people he may have told the solution to. Then, those people start turning up dead as well. I liked this movie a lot. The suspects are pretty easy to narrow down once the love interest is cleared (she was the receptionist for the dead publisher and he always put the moves on her), but there's enough to keep your interest for 70 minutes and the acting is pretty good. Worth seeking out.