Decoy (Bernhard-Brandt Productions, Monogram, 1946)

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

My husband Charles and I eventually settled in and watched a Warner Archive DVD of the 1946 movie Decoy, a strange little film from Monogram starring Jean Gillie and Edward Norris. At least there are some familiar “names” in the supporting cast, including Robert Armstrong from King Kong and Sheldon Leonard from It’s a Wonderful Life, and the director was a young man who was then Jean Gillie’s husband, Jack Bernhard, who though born in the U.S. (in Philadelphia in 1914) enlisted in Britain’s Royal Air Force during World War II and met Gillie when he was stationed in London. Gillie had already made a number of films in her native Britain, of which the only one I’d heard of was The Tawny Pipit (the title is the name of a bird), which James Agee had ridiculed in his film column for The Nation in the mid-1940’s) when she met and married Bernhard, who took her home with him to the U.S. after the war and sought to build her a career as a major star. Bernhard co-produced Decoy with a business partner named Bernard Brandt and directed it on his own. The script was based on a radio play of the same title by Stanley Rubin, though the actual screenwriter was Nedrick Young, a former actor who’d played the romantic lead in the haunting film Strangler of the Swamp for PRC in 1945. (Strangler of the Swamp was one of the five best films PRC ever made, along with Lady in the Death House, Bluebeard, Out of the Night and Detour, and interestingly all five were made by foreign directors: Frank Wisbar on Strangler, Steve Sekely on Lady in the Death House and Edgar G. Ulmer on the other three.)

I’d wanted to watch Decoy on its airing on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies, but alas it was on December 3 while Charles and I were visiting his mother, and her cable provider offered TCM only as a special subscription channel. So I bought the DVD, which paired it with another film noir, Crime Wave (1953), and finally got a chance to watch it with Charles on December 22. We were able to see Muller’s intro and outro before and after we watched the movie – they were posted on YouTube even though we had the film itself on DVD and watched it on our normal TV – and I’m a bit surprised that despite their usual obsession about “spoiler alerts,” IMDb actually gave the big plot twist away on their home page for this film [spoiler alert!]: “A mortally wounded female gangster recounts how she and her gang revived an executed killer from the gas chamber, to try and find out where he buried a fortune in cash.” This had me wondering whether I’d been committing “first-itis” in insisting that the first science-fiction film noir was not Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) but the original Don Siegel-directed version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956, 26 years before Blade Runner. Now here was a science-fiction film noir a decade earlier!

Actually, though, the science-fiction element in Decoy doesn’t last long. The man who’s revivified after being executed for murder committed during an armed robbery that netted him $400,000 is Frankie Olins (Robert Armstrong), and his return to life lasts only long enough for femme fatale Margot Shelby (Jean Gilles) and her sort-of boyfriend Jim Vincent (Edward Norris) to get Frankie to draw them a map to where he hid the loot from the robbery. They get him to do this in the presence of the man who’s revived him, Dr. Lloyd L. Craig (Herbert Rudley), who did it by administering a gas containing a chemical called methylene blue. Methylene blue really exists, and one of its properties is it functions as an antidote to cyanide, and Stanley Rubin ran with that and posited that it could be used to revive someone who’s been executed with cyanide gas, as was the standard in California then and for years after until, like all other states that still have the death penalty, they switched to lethal injections. Then, once they’ve wormed the secret out of him, Margot and Jim shoot him in the back, killing him permanently.

The film actually begins with a long sequence during which a heavy-set man hitchhikes his way to San Francisco, where most of the film takes place, and he moves so stiffly and almost never speaks. At first I thought he would be the revivified execution victim, but eventually he turns out to be Dr. Craig, whom Margot and Jim forced to drive them to the hiding place on Frankie’s treasure map. Only once Margot got the treasure, she ran down Jim and shot Dr. Craig and left him for dead by the side of the road. Dr. Craig is tracked down in San Francisco by police sergeant Joe Portugal (Sheldon Leonard), who stood by outside Margot’s door and watched as Dr. Craig let himself in with a drawn pistol and shot her. As she lays dying she tells Portugal the whole story and then, when he moves in to try to kiss her, she laughs in his face and says all she was ever interested in was the money. She appears to last long enough for Portugal to open the satchel containing the loot, only in a scene obviously derived from the end of The Maltese Falcon [spoiler alert!], it turns out to contain a one-dollar bill, a few stones to fill out the weight, and a note from Frankie saying that he set this up as a decoy for anyone who tried to get his secret stash and “I leave the rest of the loot to the worms.”

rDecoy is a quite accomplished movie that for the most part makes the most of a Monogram-sized budget, though most of it takes place in confined spaces and the one street exterior we get looks so familiar from other Monogram movies we expect Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall to show up any moment. Decoy was filmed during down time from Jean Gillie’s role in a much more prestigious production, The Macomber Affair, based on Ernest Hemingway’s story “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and starring Gregory Peck, Joan Bennett, Robert Preston and Reginald Denny. (Gillie was billed fifth, after them.) Gillie was able to make both films simultaneously because The Macomber Affair was filmed over three months and Decoy in eight days. One of the most fascinating things about Decoy is that Jack Bernhard evidently thought that he could make a major star out of his wife by casting her as a black-hearted bitch with utterly no redeeming qualities whatsoever. We were also supposed to believe that the mere appearance of Gillie would get the various men in her life to give up their careers and their integrity while she went merrily on her way, single-mindedly focuses only on getting the money and doing nothing even to hint at reciprocating their sexual interest in her. One wonders if this is what Jack Bernhard eally thought of her and if that explains why their marriage didn’t last long; they divorced in 1947 and Gillie moved back to Britain, where she died of pneumonia in February 1949 at the age of just 33 without making another film. One also wonders whose idea it was to give her such a silly last name as “Gillie”; the name she was born with was Jean Mabel Coombes, and quite frankly “Jean Coombes” would have made a better screen name as well.