Quiet Please: Murder! (20th Century-Fox, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 23) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing but ultimately not very satisfying 1942 20th Century-Fox “B” called Quiet Please: Murder! The odd typography of the title is explained by the fact that most of the film takes place in a library. It was both written and directed by John Francis Larkin – even in the often surprisingly experimental world of “B” filmmaking, where because “B” movies were sold like yard goods (the studio got the same flat fee from the theatres that showed them whether or not they were any good, or whether or not audiences liked them) studios often allowed “B” directors a lot of latitude as long as they brought their films in on time and under budget, it was rare for a studio to allow the same person to write and direct the same movie. It stars George Sanders, Gail Patrick, and Richard Denning, and was based on a story by Lawrence G. Blochman called “Death from the Sanskrit,” which because it had a different title I’m presuming was a previously published story instead of a screen original. It begins with a chilling scene in which Jim Fleg (George Sanders) goes to visit a library that is about to put on exhibit the original copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet used by Richard Burbage, who played the title role in Shakespeare’s world premiere production. (What we see is a neatly bound book even though it’s more likely that Burbage worked either from a handwritten copy or just rough prompt notes. Remember that another Hamlet play by Thomas Kyd had been premiered in London in 1580, 20 years before the 1600 date usually accepted for Shakespeare’s, and in those days before copyright laws Shakespeare probably just put Kyd’s play through a series of rewrites and performed it until by 1600 it was entirely his own work except for the basic plot.)

Fleg tells the librarian who’s showing him the display (Pat O’Malley) how much he’d like to own that book, and as the librarian turns his back to him, Fleg brings out a silencer-equipped pistol and shoots him in the back. Then he smashes the glass case the book was in and steals it. The film flash-forward to six months later, in which Fleg, a master forger, has made 20 fake copies of the book and is offering them for sale under the table to rich collectors, all of whom think they’re getting the stolen original. A key participant in his racket is rare-book dealer Myra Blandy (Gail Patrick), whose role in the scheme is to give Fleg’s would-be buyers authentication that the book is the real deal. At one point Blandy sells a copy of the book to Martin Cleaver (Sidney Blackmer) without Fleg’s prior authorization, only when Fleg hears the news he freaks out. It seems that Cleaver is an agent buying rare objets d’art for one of the Nazi bigwigs, and if Hermann Göring (or whoever) finds out he’s been swindled he’ll send over a contract killer to knock off Fleg for having deceived him. As the film’s second act begins, the library has just acquired five more rare books, including a handwritten letter by Thomas Jefferson, which Fleg would love to get his hands on to pull the same stunt he did with the Shakespeare/Burbage Hamlet. American private detective Hal McByrne (Richard Denning) enters the action when an American collector who bought one of the fake Hamlets hires him to find out what was going on and who had swindled him. As soon as he appears, Myra starts vamping him while he’s far more interested in the “nice girl,” Kay Ryan (Lynne Roberts), who’s off limits to him because she already has a husband who’s off serving in combat in World War II.

When Martin Cleaver gets knifed to death inside the library and takes a spectacular fall from the second-story balcony, Fleg audaciously poses as “Lt. Flavin” from the local police department’s homicide division and surrounds the library with members of his gang, posing as cops. He demands and immediately receives custody of the rare books, including the Jefferson letter, which the preposterously accommodating librarian offers him. Fleg a.k.a. “Flavin” also orders the library patrons to stay put inside, despite the usual protests, including one man whose wife will get jealous if he’s late coming home and a young woman who had a date scheduled for later that night. Myra steals the books herself and hides them inside the library, writing on a slip of paper the Dewey decimal code for the innocuous books behind which she hid the ultra-rare ones. Just then an air raid warden named Edmund Walpole (Byron Foulger, playing a good guy for a change) orders all the lights in the library turned out as part of a blackout. McByrne, who’s twice escaped Fleg’s attempts to hold him, tricks Walpole into putting the library’s lights back on. This attracts the attention of a whole squad of authentic police, who arrest Fleg and his imposters. Myra thinks she’s hoodwinked McByrne into thinking she had nothing to do with the scheme, but he isn’t fooled by her protestations of love – and neither are we, having heard similar speeches from all too many femmes fatales in other movies. Knowing that one of Fleg’s henchmen, a deaf-mute named Eric Pahsen (Kurt Katch) who seems to have been the result of an experiment to cross-breed Erich von Stroheim and Peter Lorre, is waiting outside the library to kill Myra for allegedly betraying them, McByrne drives Myra out of the library much the way Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) would to gangster Eddie Mars (John Ridgely) at the end of The Big Sleep four years later. Pahsen kills Myra and is then arrested by the real police who are still there, and at the end McByrne asks Kay the married “good girl” out for a dinner date, and she accepts.

That alone was pushing it under the Production Code, but Quiet Please: Murder! has some even more radical Code-bending than that. Jim Fleg is allowed to boast that he’s a sadomasochist who enjoys both dishing out and receiving punishment – as the cops finally handcuff him he seems almost to be having an orgasm right there on screen. He’s also allowed to strike Mona physically and knock her across the room of their apartment at least twice. Charles thought Quiet Please: Murder! was one of those frustrating movies whose basic premise had the potential for a much better film than the one we got. I had that feeling about it, too, though I loved the unusual gimmick of having the super-villain pose as a police lieutenant with no one the wiser. (Apparently no one thought to ask to see his badge, though he might have been carrying a fake one just to make his impersonation more credible.) What I didn’t much care for was the way George Sanders was playing an out-and-out villain with no redeeming qualities whatsoever; I like him best either in his entirely heroic roles (like The Saint and The Falcon, or in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, in which he benefited from Hitchcock’s love of anti-type casting: in Foreign Correspondent Sanders is a hero and Herbert Marshall a super-villain!) or in parts where even if he’s evil overall, he has some good qualities. He was especially good as the Philistine King in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah, where he stole the movie right out from its nominal stars, Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr.