A Gun In His Hand (MGM "Crime Does Not Pay" Series, 1945)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 14) I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies: a Crime Does Not Pay short called A Gun In His Hand (1945) and a feature, A Lady Without Passport. Despite its generic “crime-y” title, A Gun In His Hand actually turned out to be quite good and highly unusual. Written by Richard H. Landau (an “original” story credit that for once seems genuinely original) and Charles F. Royal (screenplay), and directed by the up-and-coming Joseph Losey (who had a meteoric rise to major directorial jobs in features and an equally meteoric fall due to the Hollywood blacklist, though he salvaged his career by moving to Britain and making some great films, including The Servant and Accident, there), A Gun In His Hand is about a career criminal, Dennis Nordell (Tom Trout, who judging from his performance here should have had much more of a career than he did), who applies to the local police department in his mid-sized Midwestern city. His intent is to learn police tactics from the inside and thereby figure out how to avoid detection when he and his gang actually commit crimes. He and his assistant Frankie (Anthony Caruso) pull off a series of meticulously planned robberies of liquor warehouses (one wonders how they sell the stuff after they’ve stolen it, but in a 20-minute running time we don’t have much time to think about that). In order to evade detection they first show up at a nearby warehouse and trip its burglar alarm, thereby distracting the (honest) cops on duty in the neighborhood and keeping them away from the real target. Police Inspector Dana (Richard Gaines) tries a variety of tactics, including switching the system by which patrol officers are assigned to their beats, to stop the robberies, but to no avail.

Then one cop, McGuinnes [sic] – played by, who else, Robert Emmet O’Connor (this is one of those movies from classic Hollywood which makes it seem like all police officers are Irish) – figures it out and not only goes to the right warehouse but catches Nordell in action as part of the gang. Nordell shoots and kills him, and Dana, who’s become convinced that the robbers have inside help from a corrupt officer but has no idea who the officer might be, orders all his cops to turn in their weapons for ballistic checks against the bullet that killed McGuinnes. Nordell had planned ahead for such an eventuality by swapping out his police-issued revolver for another gun, with which he’d shot McGuinnes, and in order to avoid being found out he hits on the idea of framing a street criminal with a long record, Calvin “Whitey” Foster (Arthur Space), for the crime. He plants the murder weapon in Whitey’s room and fakes a set of fingerprints taken from Whitey’s prison record. Only Nordell is found out when the real Whitey is arrested – and shows that he couldn’t have possibly left the fingerprints on the gun because since those prints were taken, he’d suffered an industrial accident in the prison’s jute mill and lost the middle finger on one hand. (My husband Charles read the above and said that when he was growing up in Florida he’d seen so many grownups with missing fingers from mill accidents he didn’t realize for years that virtually all adult men had 10 fingers.) Dana thereby arrests Nordell and he is subsequently executed. I wonder if MGM and the Crime Does Not Pay producer, Chester Franklin, got the idea of having a crook sneak onto the police force from the film A Scandal in Paris, which was being made independently at the same time and starred George Sanders as Lecocq, a real-life French criminal who became the founding chief of the Surété, or if the two groups of filmmakers hit on the idea independently, but be that as it may, A Gun In His Hand is a nice bit of short filmmaking and a cut above most of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts in its sheer audacity as well as the power of Losey’s direction.