Twenty Plus Two

In Hollywood, Julia Joliet is murdered. She's a small time secretary answering fan mail for a movie star. What catches the attention of private investigator Tom Alder is that she has collected clippings from the Doris Delaney case. Delaney was a missing heiress and her parents spared no expense to find her with no success. Alder decides to follow the clue.

I generally like the hard-boiled detective style and this has an intriguing start. I don't particularly like his meandering investigation. It seems a little slow and I'm never sure about his moves. Then it loses me in a flashback. The problem is that the flashback happens without much context since the audience isn't shown the old photographs. She's also a little older than I expect. The case is over a decade old but it may need to double that. It is also very coincidental. It's unlikely that he would be investigating the case without any pictures at the start. The whole thing is a house of cards built on a knife's edge.

This certainly should not be classified as a real "thriller" but, as a mystery film it was a decent watch. I was intrigued to hear the story behind special investigator Tom Adler's (David Janssen) American born geisha girl Nicki Kovacs (Dina Merrill). The story has flashback scenes to when Tom Adler was a lieutenant stationed in Japan when he meets Nicki Kovacs at a Japanese nightclub.. Nicki is one of the private dancers/geisha girls at the nightclub who provides the sombre looking Tom with an ear to listen to his woes, and a couch to sleep on overnight. By morning Tom has fallen in love with the mysterious Nicki but he loses touch with his war time crush and over the following decades he cannot get her beautiful mysterious face out of his dreams and thoughts.

Do not expect any James Bond or Mike Hammer physical action scenes as David Janssen is not your action Jackson type of detective. No, Tom Adler is more a wussy heartbroken type of detective who is good at his job at finding missing persons to which his firm gets a handsome reward for finding long lost loved ones. In this film, ironically enough Tom Adler is having a difficult time finding his own long lost love, his American born geisha girl Nicki Kovacs.

No spoiler here. Suffice to say that Twenty Plus Two is a decent mystery film with a decent ending to which I give the film a decent 6 out of 10 rating.

This disjointed film noir is hobbled by a rambling narrative that spends too much time on a flashback and then devolves into a silly ending in North Dakota (with some hideous rear projection).

David Janssen stars as a finder of missing persons, especially heirs. He gets involved in a decade-old mystery in which a movie star vanished. Seems her rich daddy paid lots of hush money and she's long forgotten until her name comes up again after a woman is murdered.

Somehow, the case seems to involve a famous movie actor who seems to show up in odd places. Then there's an erudite fat man following him as well as an ex-wife who suddenly pops up.

Janssen gets hooked after visiting a a boozy ex-reporter who lets slips a few juicy details about the dead movie star. After a visit to her mother, he's on the trail that takes him, ultimately, to a shack in North Dakota.

The mystery isn't much and is given away in the flashback, after which the viewer just waits it out. But there are several excellent performances in this film. Janssen is solid. Jeanne Crain is wasted as the ex-wife. Dina Merrill is surprisingly good as Nikki. William Demarest is excellent as the boozy reporter as is Agnes Moorehead as the flinty mother. Jacques Aubuchon is also very good as the fat man, and Will Wright has a nice bit as the records keeper. Robert Strauss is good as Janssen's pal. That's TCM host Robert Osborne as the sailor with dance tickets. Brad Dexter is badly cast as the movie actor.

Certainy worth a look for some great acting and Gerald Fried's driving jazz score.

"Twenty Plus Two" is a stylish, ambitious movie with a great look. It's a shame that it's filmed after the height of film noir, but it still has a few great scenes that are noir-ish, and plenty of night scenes in general. The movie starts off in Hollywood 1961 and follows Tom Alder (actor David Janssen) from coast to coast as he figures out a murder mystery and finds a missing person, all the while dealing with a LOT of different characters. I thought it was really well made.

The main problem with "Twenty Plus Two" is the casting of Dina Merrill as the female lead. Her character is about 30 years old at the time of the movie, and in flashback scenes, she's about 20. Merrill was 37 when she made this movie and she looked older. She was hardly believable as a 30-year-old woman, and definitely not as a young 20-year-old. She was badly miscast and it affected the movie.

Jeanne Crain fares better as a sort of "girl next door" but fifteen years down the line. She plays Linda, who was engaged to Tom before he was sent to Korea, but married someone else while he was away. Now, 11 years after they last saw one another, she wants him back, but he doesn't want her, and she spends half the movie chasing him. She and Janssen are kind of funny in their scenes together.

Agnes Moorehead as the missing girl's mother was superb in her scene with David Janssen. It's a long, pivotal scene. I give credit to both actors as their give-and-take was spot on. There's a lot of dialogue in this movie and these two could really deliver lines.

The most stylistic and atmospheric scene in the entire movie is a shot of Tom sitting alone in his hotel room, thinking about the past, smoking, and the camera follows the smoke as it rises to the ceiling. It is fantastic.

David Janssen is very, very good in this movie. He's cool, and the film's black and white visuals and jazzy score help to underline this. He should have become a major feature film star. As it was, he became a major TV star, and deservedly so.

"Twenty Plus Two" is an unusual film in that I re-started it about 20 minutes into the story. This is because although I was watching, I was distracted by other things....and this is NOT a film to watch when there are any distractions! It's complicated...and still worth seeing.

David Janssen plays Tom Alder, a man much like his TV character Richard Diamond, the detective. But Alder is not quite as smooth and isn't quite as irresistible to the ladies...though two women in the film clearly adore him.

Alder makes his living finding lost people. One old case that has been unsolved for well over a decade involved a rich young lady who just disappeared. The film shows the steps Alder takes to eventually find this woman and solve the mystery of her disappearance.

While I'd quickly admit that Janssen's acting is sometimes a bit wooden, I like him in his various shows and movies. He's quite good here and the story is good but almost needs a map to help you keep up with all the twists and turns. My only complaint, and it's minor, is that too many things seem coincidental...but this is a small matter. Well worth seeing.