No Questions Asked (MGM, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 29), after my husband Charles had come home from work and I’d already started a dinner for us (frozen tilapia filets and baked potatoes with salad), I ran the movie No Questions Asked from a YouTube post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjMwO6RD-9A). Eddie Muller had run it on last night’s “Noir Alley” program on Turner Classic Movies (and he’d shown it on at least one prior occasion sometime around March or April, since his intro and outro were also posted on YouTube and the outro contained a reference to Easter being next week), but I looked for it on YouTube instead of watching it “live” partly because I wanted to see all of The Killer Inside on Lifetime (the showings overlapped by an hour) and partly because I wanted to share it with Charles. No Questions Asked was a 1951 MGM attempt at film noir – the sort of movie that in the past I’ve called film gris because it tried for film noir but really didn’t achieve it. It was produced by Nicholas Nayfack, a protégé of recently appointed MGM studio head Dore Schary, and directed by Harold F. Kress, who’d just been promoted from film editor to director and had recently made one of the worst movies of all time, The Painted Hills, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Lassie. (Yes, you read that right; MacDonald’s co-stars had descended from Maurice Chevalier to Nelson Eddy to Lassie.)

It was based on a story by Berne Giler, who quit feature films shortly after this project and ended up writing for series television, though the actual script was by Sidney Sheldon (who later became a blockbuster novelist in the 1970’s with his best-seller The Other Side of Midnight; it was turned into a mini-series and Harold F. Kress was its film editor!). It starred Barry Sullivan as Steve Kiever, a young attorney with an insurance company, who goes to his boss for a raise in salary so he can marry his girlfriend, Ellen Sayburn (Arlene Dahl), who’s just returned from a vacation in Sun Valley. Alas, Steve gets the predictable turn-down from his boss, Henry Manston (Moroni Olsen), and when he goes to Ellen’s apartment with an engagement ring he’s bought with a bonus from his boss for recovering some stolen furs with “no questions asked,” he finds from her landlady (Madge Blake) that she’s already got married to a wealthy man, Gordon Jessman (Dick Simmons), she met on her Sun Valley trip. Steve, who in the course of this movie gets involved with at least two other women, “good girl” Joan Brenson (Jean Hagen, just before entering movie immortality as the barely competent vamp actress Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain) and bar singer Natalie (Mari Blanchard, warming up for her big role replacing Marlene Dietrich in the 1954 remake of Destry Rides Again), decides to continue brokering insurance company-sponsored buybacks of various stolen goods and demanding a cut of the proceeds for himself.

Though what he’s doing is not technically illegal, he arouses the ire of the police in general and two policemen in particular, Inspector Matt Duggan (an outrageously miscast George Murphy) and Detective Walter O’Bannion (Richard Anderson). These two cops believe Kiever’s activities are encouraging crimes that otherwise wouldn’t happen because without Kiever’s help it would be too hard for the crooks to fence the loot and turn it into freshly laundered cash. Things come to a head when Kiever takes Joan to the opening of a Broadway show, only during the intermission the ladies’ powder room is raided and the patrons robbed of their jewels by two “women” who turn out to be men in drag. Charles and I had advance warning that something unusual was going to happen in the powder room because I wasn’t able to turn off the YouTube auto-play of Muller’s outro in time, but I had thought only the taller of the two men, Roger (William Phipps), was a man in drag and I’d assumed his assistant, Floyd (William Reynolds), was genuinely female and the two were a straight crime couple. Given a 48-hour deadline by his former boss Henry Manston to recover the jewels, Kiever traces the crooks to the costume shop where they got their drag makeups and confronts them, saying they must have been professional female impersonators in burlesque. “Vaudeville,” an insulted Roger says, “We’re artists!” (This plot twist reminded me of a mid-1950’s Dragnet episode, “The Big Girl,” in which a tall man dresses in drag to get picked up as a hitchhiker by lonely male drivers he then robs.)

Meanwhile, Steve has also resumed his affair with Ellen, who tells him she only married Gordon for his money and never really loved him. Only, in yet another bizarre reversal Messrs. Giler and Sheldon indulged in, while he’s in his apartment with the box of stolen jewels awaiting his payoff, Steve is knocked out and when he comes to, Detective O’Bannion has been shot dead on his floor (and, like typical idiot movie characters, instead of leaving the gun where it lay, he picks it up, obligingly gets his fingerprints all over it, and puts it in his pocket) and he realizes he’s been framed for O’Bannion’s murder. Steve realizes that very few people knew when and where the exchange of money for jewels was supposed to take place, and at first he suspects his cab driver, Harry Duyker (Danny Dayton), of being the hijacker and cop-killer. When Harry denies it, Steve realizes that Ellen was the only other person who knew when and where the exchange was to take place, and he discovers not only that she was in on it but so was her husband Gordon. Gordon killed O’Bannion and framed Steve for the crime, only crime boss Franko (Howard Petrie) kidnaps them both and tortures them to get where they’ve stashed the jewels. Franko, who it’s previously been established is world-class at the skill of holding one’s breath under water, not only kills both Gordon and Ellen but wrestles Steve under the swimming pool at the gym where he runs his business as a front. Duggan and a squad of other cops arrive in time to arrest Franko, and a police diver is able to dive into the pool and rescue Steve before he drowns. In the end he’s alive, well and united with nice-girl Joan at the fade-out.

As Charles pointed out, the first hour or so of this 80-minute film is a pretty straightforward gangster drama – one could readily imagine the story being made at Warner Bros. in the 1930’s with James Cagney in Sullivan’s role – and it’s only at the point two-thirds of the way through where O’Bannion is killed that it even starts to look like film noir. All of a sudden cinematographer Harold Lipstein starts shooting in noir style, with chiaroscuro nighttime effects and deep-focus shadows as well as the underbelly of urban decay for which fans of film noir come to the genre. But by then it’s too late, and the schlocky happy ending doesn’t help; frankly, I think the film would have been stronger if Steve had been killed by Franko inside the pool, as indeed seems at first to have been what happened!