Shoot to Kill (Robert L. Lippert Productions, Screen Guild Productions, 1947)

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

Last night (Friday, November 29) I ran my husband Charles and I a YouTube post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KchloG1DKFc) of a 1947 movie called Shoot to Kill, an ordinary crime drama with film noir pretensions directed by William Berke (who went back to his indie origins after the end of the Falcon detective series at RKO in 1946) from an “original” story and screenplay by one Edwin V. Westrate. I put “original” in quotes because the script seemed less written than merely compiled from older, better movies. In fact, the movie was so derivative that through most of the opening reel Charles kept asking, “Haven’t we seen this before?” We hadn’t seen this particular assemblage of clichés before, but we had certainly seen the basic situations many times over. The film begins with an auto chase, with a police car in pursuit of a lumbering black sedan (as often in late-1940’s movies, one marvels at how big and unmaneuverable the cars were, as if you were watching a chase scene between two tanks). The lumbering black sedan ultimately drives off a cliff, and when the police who were chasing it find the wreckage they’re surprised to find the newly elected local district attorney, Lawrence Dale (Edmond MacDonald), and his wife Marian (Luana Walters, long-time “B” movie queen, here billed as “Susan Walters”), in the same car as escaped criminal Dixie Logan (played by Robert Kent, though billed as “Douglas Blackley”). When the police find the wreckage, the two men are dead but Marian is alive, though comatose. Eventually she comes to in the hospital and she starts narrating a flashback to her friend, New York Tribune reporter George Mitchell (Russell Wade, top-billed), that takes up most of the movie. Actually writer Westrate isn’t content to give us just one extended flashback; periodically he inserts flashbacks within flashbacks, and even one flashback in a flashback in a flashback, as if he went to the Casey Robinson School of Screenwriting.

It seems that Lawrence Dale was just another assistant district attorney until he rose to take over from the retiring current D.A., John Foresythe (Charles Trowbridge), on the strength of the murder conviction he obtained against Dixie Logan – only what nobody realized was that Dale was really a secret associate of gangster Gus Miller (Nestor Paiva). We learn this when Marian, who’s got a job as Dale’s secretary after Mitchell persuaded him to hire her, accidentally flips on the intercom in the office and hears Dale on the phone to Miller receiving his instructions. Though Marian was sort-of Mitchell’s girlfriend, she starts going out with Dale and eventually he proposes to her – and she accepts. He frames his proposal to her in a letter he’s supposedly dictating, which is supposed to explain not only that he wants to marry her but he wants to keep her on the job despite Miller’s insistence that he fire her because she might expose their association. Then, in a bizarre series of reversals that suggest Westrate was not only a scion of Casey Robinson but an ancestor of Tony Gilroy, we learn that a) Marian is collecting evidence of Dale’s corruption and is forwarding it to the police; b) the only reason Dale wanted to get Marian to marry him is because a wife can’t testify against her husband; c) Dale and Marian aren’t really married at all because she was already the wife of Dixie Logan; d) Marian only took the job as Dale’s secretary to amass the evidence that Dale had framed Logan for the specific crime he got him convicted of; and e) the ultimate purpose behind all this was to expose Miller so Logan, who’d escaped from prison, could take over and run the city’s rackets himself.

Ultimately Marian, who’d been portrayed as a nice girl all along until that head-snapping series of reversals, apparently reverts to being a nice girl again and accepts Mitchell’s marriage proposal now that the other two men in her life are conveniently eliminated by the car crash ex machina. (Given what both he and we now know of her past, one wonders why he still wants her.) What makes Shoot to Kill worth watching despite the lameness of the plot and the insufficient star power of the cast (Luana Walters is a nice actress who deserved better parts than she got, but she’s hardly up to the challenges Westrate and Berke put her through in their Frankenstein-like script), is the amazing cinematography of Benjamin H. Kline. Throughout the movie, Kline shoots this rather sorry assemblage of familiar gangster and corrupt-city tropes as all-out film noir, cleverly using shadows to conceal the cheapness of the sets. Between that and the hot boogie-woogie piano number we get early on from Black jazz pianist Gene Rodgers (who actually plays two songs in the film, a boogie that we’re allowed to see and hear all of and a slower, softer song that’s heard under dialogue; imdb.com lists “Ballad of the Bayou” and “Rajah’s Blues” as the titles of Rodgers’s songs but doesn’t specify which is which), there are items in Shoot to Kill that make the movie watchable despite Westrate’s highly unoriginal script and Berke’s capable but just O.K. direction. Incidentally Charles thought the restaurant in which Rodgers played was supposed to be Chinese because he saw an Asian-looking person on the waitstaff, but there’s no evidence (like the signage on the exterior or the actual food) that it’s a Chinese restaurant. Charles just didn’t think a non-Chinese restaurant in the U.S. would have had an Asian waiter in 1947!