Fingerprints Don't Lie (Sigmund Neufeld Productions, Spartan Productions, Lippert Pictures, 1951)

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

My husband Charles came home about midway through last night’s (Saturday, August 23) Lifetime movie and later we watched a film together from YouTube: Fingerprints Don’t Lie (1951), a sort of PRC production in exile since the producer, Sigmund Neufeld; the director, Sam Newfield (they were brothers, but Sam “Anglicized” the name and Sigmund didn’t); and the cinematographer, Jack Greenhalgh, were all PRC stalwarts. Having been cut adrift when J. Arthur Rank took over PRC in 1947 and changed its name to Eagle-Lion to symbolize the union of American and British interests (Rank wanted a guaranteed U.S. distributor for his British films and had an enormous hit off the bat with the 1948 ballet melodrama The Red Shoes), the Newfields (including Sigmund’s son Stanley Neufeld, who gets a credit as second-unit or assistant director) set off to make movies for whatever cheap-jack producer would have them. Fingerprints Don’t Lie begins in the middle of the murder trial of Paul Moody (Richard Emory) for allegedly killing the city’s reform mayor, Wendell Palmer (Ferris Taylor), by clubbing him to death with a telephone. (The earliest example I know of with a telephone as a murder weapon was Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel, written in 1928, filmed in 1932, and apparently based on a real-life case Baum had read about.)

The chief witness against him is forensic expert James Stover (Richard Travis, top-billed), who reports and testifies in court that he lifted five perfect fingerprints off the phone that were an obvious match to Moody’s. After the trial, a reporter comes up to Stover and asks how it feels for him to have killed another person, perfectly legally. Stover starts to have second thoughts about the case when he’s lobbied to reopen it by Carolyn Palmer (Sheila Ryan), the late Mayor’s daughter. But he’s torn between his personal doubts that Moody, an artist with a growing reputation for cheesecake (we see him with two models, including one played by an actress billed merely as Syra – her full name was Syra Marty – with a thick but nationalistically unclassifiable accent) who allegedly lost the contract to paint a new mural at City Hall because Mayor Palmer didn’t approve of his daughter dating him. Fortunately, there’s another suspect: Frank Kelso (Michael Whalen), police chief under the former administration aligned with political boss King Sullivan (George Eldredge). Carolyn Palmer suspects that Kelso either killed her dad personally or had a hand in it because he was upset that Mayor Palmer was determined to fire him after he caught him taking bribes from liquor interests and casino owners. There’s also a really disgusting so-called “comic relief” character named Hypo Dorton (Sid Melton, amazingly billed third), a newspaper photographer who keeps trying to take action shots of the principals and whose flashbulbs never work. (I can remember when cameras had to have separate flashbulbs for indoor shots; Charles, nine years younger, remembered the flash cubes that replaced them and gave you four shots before you needed to change them. Later, of course, film cameras started coming with built-in flash units, and still later digital photography took over and flashes were no longer needed since digital could record nearly as well in indoor light levels as it could in daylight.)

Ultimately Stover realizes that in his days as a police detective, Kelso had done an in-depth study of fingerprint technology, and if anybody could forge a set of fake fingerprints and plant them on a murder scene, he could. Kelso catches on to the way his scheme is unraveling and plans to flee to Mexico with his mistress, hard-boiled dame type Connie Duval (Dee Tatum, easily the strongest actor in the piece and the one person who truly gets to play a multidimensional character), only Connie refuses to run away with Kelso because she’s been Sullivan’s love (or at least lust) interest all along and she just seduced Kelso because Sullivan wanted to compromise him so he could get the department to leave Sullivan’s illegal enterprises alone. The confrontation takes place in Connie’s apartment, where Sullivan orders his henchman Rod Barenger (an actor with the appropriate nickname, at least for this role, of Karl “Killer” Davis) to kill Kelso, The two of them move the body from Connie’s place to Kelso’s to make it look like he committed suicide by filling his apartment with gas, but in nothing flat Stover notices the strangulation marks on Kelso’s neck and says he was murdered. In the end Sullivan takes a header off an open window to his death on the ground below, Rod is arrested, and the finale takes place at a restaurant/nightclub with Paul Moody and Carolyn Palmer reunited, while Stover is there with Moody’s other model, Nadine Connell (Margia Dean). Sid Melton’s unfunny “comic relief” scenes really drag this movie down, though at least we get some fascinating glimpses of Stover’s lab work that make this movie seem like a CSI episode nearly 50 years early.

Greenhalgh shoots it plainly and in full light when the story could have used some of the visual trappings of film noir even though it doesn’t qualify morally (it’s either all-good good guys or all-bad bad guys, except for Connie, who doesn’t seem to have had a hand in Sullivan’s sordid manipulations besides seducing Kelso on Sullivan’s orders and who walks away scot-free at the end). It’s a perfectly decent movie (except for Melton, who just gets so annoying one wishes someone would kill him before the end), but also a quite ordinary product of the Neufeld family with little to recommend it besides a fairly audacious premise (and how did Kelso get his phony fingerprints onto the phone? He certainly had access to Moody’s prints since Rod had broken into his art studio and stolen them, but how he got them on the phone and fooled a fingerprint expert like Stover at least temporarily is beyond me). And I also wondered about the really cheesy organ score that accompanied the movie (the credited composer was Dudley Chambers and imdb.com lists Bert Shefter as well), sometimes with a piano or chorus but usually with no other instruments at all. These kinds of organ accompaniments were fairly common in radio shows, especially really cheap ones from stations that couldn’t afford full orchestras (or even partial ones), but really? Couldn’t they at least have got a rent-a-score from somewhere? The only really good music in this movie is a solo jazz piano piece that signals the introduction of Connie Duval into the action – the sleaziest character would get the best music – which reminded me vaguely of Duke Ellington’s “Black Beauty.”