Shake Hands with Murder (PRC, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 10 p.m. yesterday my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly entertaining “B” movie from PRC, the 1944 production Shake Hands with Murder, directed by Al Herman from an “original” story by Martin Mooney and a script from it by John T. Neville. Shake Hands with Murder was a comedy-mystery, a genre rather long in the tooth by 1944 – three years after the smash success of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon in 1941 launched the film noir cycle and turned crime back into serious business on screen. (As I’ve noted in these pages before, the 1930’s made great gangster movies but seemed at sea in depicting more prosaic forms of crime, and one of the things Hollywood routinely did wrong in thrillers in the 1930’s is saddle them with overextended and not particularly funny “comic relief”: characters.) Shake Hands with Murder proved to be a quite literate and genuinely fun movie, with Herman’s direction more than usually disciplined (Don Miller in his book “B” Movies made fun of Herman for the way his characters broke down doors – instead of swinging open on their hinges they fell forward, top first – but fortunately no such scene occurred here), and Mooney won his Hollywood spurs by gaining his 15 moments of fame when he, as a reporter, was subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating organized crime and went to jail rather than rat out on his sources. When Warner Bros. lured him to write the script for the 1936 film Bullets or Ballots, starring Edward G. Robinson as a New York police detective who infiltrates organized crime, they billed him in the trailer as, “Written by MARTIN MOONEY – The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk!”

Shake Hands with Murder opens in the office of small-time bail bondsmen Patsy Brant (Iris Adrian, playing the sort of hard-boiled “dame” role that a decade earlier at Warner Bros. would have gone to Joan Blondell or Glenda Farrell) and Eddie Jones (Frank Jenks, the comic-relief guy for Universal’s three “Crime Club” movies based on Jonathan Latimer’s drunken slacker detective Bill Crane, played by Preston Foster, here promoted to a lead but still played mostly for laughs). Patsy collects $5 to $10 fees for bailing out small-time offenders but Eddie ls looking for a big score – and thinks he’s found it when he has the chance to put up a $25,000 bond for accused embezzler Steve Morgan (Douglas Fowley, a first-rate actor, especially in PRC’s superb thriller Lady in the Death House, whose overall homeliness mostly kept him mired in the “B”’s but he did get a minor role in a major film, as the director in Singin’ in the Rain). Only when he shows up in their office with Morgan’s check for $2,500 (the usual nonrefundable 10 percent of the bail), Patsy is upset because not only is Morgan maintaining his innocence, she’s heard he has no intention of showing up for his court date – and that will wipe out the small capital of their business. Both Patsy and Eddie determine to track down Morgan, and Patsy does exactly that; she runs into him at a bar in the building housing the Clark Investment Company, for which Morgan used to work and from which he allegedly stole the money in easily negotiable bonds. Morgan is in the building for a secret meeting with the firm’s CEO, John Clark (played by veteran silent-era leading man Herbert Rawlinson).

While he isn’t absolutely sure that Morgan didn’t steal the bonds, Clark is convinced that one of the members of his board did the crime based on a scrap of paper, torn from one of the missing bonds, he found at the company’s mountain lodge (which is too remote to have electricity or telephone service – an interesting forerunner of the Lifetime writers’ gimmick of having the climaxes of their scripts take place in locations off the cell-phone grid). Since his board members, including Morgan, are the only ones with keys to the lodge, Clark deduces that one of them must be the thief. Only Clark is quietly strangled to death in his office on the afternoon he’s summoned his board members for a meeting – and so now Morgan is suspected not only of embezzlement but murder. There’s a great scene in which Patsy and Morgan meet in the Clark building’s bar, but neither knows who the other is – and we get to savor the irony that she’s being cruised by the man she’s looking for but doesn’t know it because Eddie didn’t bother to show her a photo of Morgan until after they had their meeting. Later there’s a car chase between Patsy and Morgan, set against a backdrop that to me looked like a bad process shot and to Charles looked like an even worse painted background inside a soundstage, which ends with Patsy’s car breaking down and her bumming a ride from Morgan – who knows he’s wanted for embezzlement but has no idea he’s now a murder suspect because he doesn’t know Clark is dead until Patsy tells him so.

The film’s climax takes place at the lodge, where the other Clark Investment board members – George Adams (George Kirby), William Howard (Gene Stutemoth, who unsurprisingly later shortened his last name to just “Roth”), Kennedy (Forrest Tucker), Haskins (PRC “regular” I. Stanford Jolley), and Stanton (Juan de la Cruz). From the moment we hear Stanton’s thickly accented voice (which actually sounds German despite the actor’s Hispanic name), we’re sure he’ll turn out to be the killer, and he duly does so. The title of Shake Hands with Murder appears to come from an ingenious trap in the lodge’s living room set to go off whenever anyone tries to open the secret panel behind which the stolen bonds (ya remember the stolen bonds?) are stashed. A life-sized suit of medieval armor is attached to a wire that fires a gun at anyone who tries to open the doors to the panel. In the end it’s not clear whether Patsy pairs up with the well-to-do and now-exonerated Morgan or goes back to small-timer Eddie Jones (much like the ending of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, in which Glenda Farrell’s reporter character helps exonerate a rich playboy but ends up marrying her editor, played by Frank McHugh – a terrible fate for an intelligent and attractive young woman), but overall Shake Hands with Murder is a delight, one of those diamonds in the rough we hope for when we scour through the surviving output of Hollywood’s Poverty Row studios looking for just such gems as this!