Blind Spot (Columbia, copyright 1946, released 1947)

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

The third film my husband Charles and I watched on Turner Classic Movies November 8 was Blind Spot, a 1947 Columbia “B” film noir directed by Robert Gordon (his first feature) and written by Martin Goldsmith (who also wrote the script for the 1946 Edgar G. Ulmer film noir masterpiece Detour; supposedly he co-wrote the original story for 1952’s The Narrow Margin with Hollywood veteran Jack Leonard as well, though Earl Felton wrote the actual script and was given sole credit on the original poster). TCM showed it on the “Noir Alley” program hosted by Eddie Muller, who chose this of all films to make the Schreiber case for the screenwriter, not the director, as the true creator of a film. The director in this case was Robert Gordon, making his first feature, though alas most of his subsequent work would be for TV. Goldsmith didn’t create the original story for Blind Spot; Barry Perowne did. (I’m still irritated by the tendency of Schreiber critics to make the screenwriters the real creators of a film and ignore, especially in adaptations, the writers who thought of the story and characters in the first place. I remember a particularly obnoxious article in the Los Angeles Times from a Schreiber theorist who credited Raymond Chandler with the excellence of the 1944 film Double Indemnity – only Chandler didn’t create that film’s plot, characters, and situations: James M. Cain did.)

One particularly annoying thing Eddie Muller did in his introduction to Blind Spot was repeat the myth that American movies didn’t depict alcoholism seriously until Billy Wilder’s and Charles Brackett’s The Lost Weekend (1945). In my moviemagg blog post on The Dance of Life (1929), based on the hit Broadway play Burlesque (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/06/dance-of-life-paramount-1929.html), I compiled a list of previous Hollywood movies that had depicted alcoholism seriously, including The Dance of Life, Applause and Lord Byron of Broadway, all from 1929; What Price Hollywood? from 1932; Dinner at Eight from 1933; the original A Star Is Born from 1937; Johnny Eager from 1940; and Ziegfeld Girl — Lana Turner’s character arc — from 1941. I had also mistakenly assumed that Blind Spot was part of the Boston Blackie detective series Columbia was cranking out with the same star, Chester Morris, which had enabled Morris to mount a partial comeback even though this tough, nuanced actor never achieved the superstardom he deserved (and other actors working the same good-bad territory, like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, did). In fact it’s a one-off with Morris as Jeffrey Andrews, an acclaimed but poor-selling novelist in hock to an exploitative publisher, Henry Small (William Forrest), who has him under a terrible contract. Andrews is also a chronic alcoholic – though he more or less sobers up in mid-movie, as we learn from him finally shaving and abandoning the unattractive “drunk” voice with which he spoke his lines in the first half – who crashes the office of Small despite the attempt of Small’s secretary, Evelyn Green (Constance Dowling, younger sister of Doris Dowling, who indelibly played Alan Ladd’s faithless wife in The Blue Dahlia, Raymond Chandler’s only original screen story that was actually produced), to stop him.

Andrews interrupts a meeting between Small and his most profitable writer, mystery specialist Lloyd Harrison (Steven Geray), who advises Andrews to take up mystery writing and start making himself money instead of writing deep psychological novels almost no one buys. Accordingly the drunken Andrews outlines the plot of a locked-room mystery, but because he was so far from sobriety when he thought of the denouement, he can’t remember it. This becomes a real life-or-death matter for Andrews when Small is found dead in the locked room of his office the next day, and Andrews immediately assumes whoever killed him copied his story idea, only he can’t for the life of him remember what it was. It’s not much of a mystery given that there are only three possible suspects: the people who were in the room with Small when Andrews outlined his plot. They were Andrews himself, Evelyn Green, and Lloyd Harrison. Much to absolutely no one’s surprise [spoiler alert!], Harrison turns out to be the murderer – it’s not hard to figure it out, mainly because if Steven Geray ever made a U.S. film in which his character didn’t turn out to be a killer at the end, I haven’t seen it. His motive does have an interesting twist, however; it’s because Small had learned that Harrison wasn’t actually writing his best-selling books but was using a ghostwriter. Once word got around that his big successes had been ghosted, Harrison’s career would be finished (though plenty of successful genre writers today, including James Patterson and the late Tom Clancy, have used ghosts; often the “name” writer delivers an outline to someone else and the someone else writes the book from the outline and gets small-print credit on the cover) and he’d end up in the gutter from whence he came.

What made this a particularly bizarre film to offer in support of the Schreiber theory is that the good stuff in Blind Spot is almost totally the work of Robert Gordon and his cinematographer, George B. Meehan. The essence of the visual style of film noir is chiaroscuro imagery, and Gordon and Meehan go to the max on it, especially in the later reels, to make up for Perowne’s and Goldsmith’s improbable plot line. It ends pretty much as you expect it to, with Harrison tricked into confessing his guilt, the previously clueless official police arresting him, and Andrews and Evelyn together at last after a bizarre love-hate relationship in which he’s alternated kissing her and beating her up. (The beatings are the result of his anger at her for allegedly trying to frame him for Small’s murder.) Like her sister, Constance Dowling plays the character in sheer acid, and it’s a wonder both she and Doris didn’t become major stars. They didn’t because shortly after Constance made this movie, both she and Doris high-tailed it to Italy to continue their careers there. Once there Constance started an affair with a pathologically jealous Italian writer, Cesare Pavese, who committed suicide after she broke up with him. Then she moved back to the U.S., married producer Ivan Tors (best known these days for Flipper), appeared in his 1954 science-fiction film Gog, and retired from acting. She bore Tors four children and died in 1969 at the relatively young age of 49.