Shield for Murder (Camden Productions, United Artists, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 24) I watched an intriguing and surprisingly good film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” show: Shield for Murder, produced by Aubrey Schenck in 1954 and starring Edmond O’Brien, who also co-directed with Howard W. Koch (not the writer who, along with the Epstein brothers and an uncredited Casey Robinson, wrote Casablanca but one who went on to a less illustrious career churning out “B” horror films in the 1950’s). In a film based on a novel of the same title by William P. McGivern (whose other stories about corrupt or morally dubious cops that got filmed around the same time included The Big Heat and Rogue Cop) and scripted by Richard Allan Simmons and John C. Higgins, O’Brien plays Los Angeles police detective Barney Nolan. He’s been on the force for 16 years but he’s edging closer to outright corruption. As the film opens, he accosts a courier for the bookmaking ring led by Packy Reed (Hugh Sanders), shoots and kills him in the back with a silencer-equipped gun, then fires two more shots without the silencer into the air to make it appear that there was a gun battle between the two, and lifts the $2,500 the victim was carrying to Reed’s gang. Nolan works out of a precinct whose captain is Gunnarson (Emile Meyer, an amateur actor in New Orleans Elia Kazan had discovered when he shot the 1950 plague drama Panic in the Streets there and cast in his movie, after which he got a low-level career in Hollywood mostly playing character villains) and his partner is Mark Brewster (John Agar, better than usual), who like Howard Duff’s role in Don Siegel’s very similar Private Hell 36 that year is the honest cop to O’Brien’s corrupt one. There’s also a press reporter named Cabot (Herb Butterfield) hanging around the police station hoping to get the real story of the shooting; he’s convinced Nolan may be guilty because there were rumors of two previous officer-involved shootings that may have been extra-judicial executions by Nolan.

Unfortunately for Nolan, Ernst Sternmueller (David Hillary Hughes), a deaf-mute who lived in the neighborhood of the shooting, literally saw the whole thing and wrote down a description of how it went that would incriminate Nolan. So Nolan pays him a visit and, not knowing the man is deaf, accosts him, beats him and accidentally kills him, then throws him down the flight of stairs leading up to his apartment to make it look like he died in an accident. But he doesn’t get the written description of the crime the man put down in his notepad. Investigating the suspicious death, Mark Brewster recovers the notebook and leaves it with the police in the precinct office. Then he goes to arrest Nolan, who pistol-whips Brewster but hasn’t fallen so far morally as to be willing to shoot his partner in cold blood. Before that we’ve seen Nolan take his girlfriend, Patty Winters (Marla English), to an open house in a new suburban development (according to Eddie Muller’s outro, it was a real one going up in the rapidly sprawling L.A. suburbs), where he buries the $2,500 loot behind a sideboard outside the house. Also complicating Nolan’s life are a couple of private detectives, Fat Michaels (Claude Akins) and Laddie O’Neal (Lawrence Ryle), sent by Packy Reed to recover his money, who turn up in odd places and demand it from him. When they assault Patty, Nolan confronts them in a bar and pistol-whips both of them. Nolan gets into an argument with Patty and hits her, knocking her over, then goes to a combination Italian restaurant and bar and hits on a woman named Beth (Carolyn Jones in an electric blonde wig), who notices how much he’s drinking and orders him something to eat – which he’s too out of it to touch.

Realizing that his fellow officers are now on to him – Gunnarson is particularly upset because a criminal cop discredits police officers everywhere – he plots to flee to Argentina and demands that Patty leave with him, which she refuses to do because she’ll need time to think about uprooting herself from the only life she’s ever known. He cuts a deal with a couple of other crooks, one of whom, “The Professor,” is played by Richard Deacon (Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show), to buy a ticket to Argentina and a U.S. passport for $18,000, but tries to palm them off with a fake envelope containing clipped newspapers in the size of U.S. currency. The crooks confront him at a public swimming pool, where there are a lot of both male and female bystanders wearing swimming outfits (so we get a lot of cheesecake and beefcake in this movie!) who are forced to flee for their lives to avoid becoming collateral damage in the shootout between Nolan, Michaels, and O’Neal. Ultimately the real police deduce where Nolan hid the money and corner him at the site of the model home, where in scenes that indicate O’Brien and Koch had seen the 1940 High Sierra and were ripping off some of its setups, Nolan futilely tries to resist the police dragnet and commits what today is called “suicide by cop.”

Shield for Murder is a surprisingly well-constructed film, and the biggest triumph of Messrs. McGivern, Simmons, and Higgins is the care with which they depict Nolan’s gradual descent into outright criminality and psychopathology. He starts out as a basically decent and competent cop in the backstory, though by the time we see him he’s already sank so low in his morality that he’s willing to kill a crook in cold blood for his loot, and when his crime unravels he becomes a rage-filled unscrupulous monster. While Orson Welles, likewise as both director and star, would write the book on corrupt-cop movies four years later with Touch of Evil, Shield for Murder is quite a good one. We know from Don Siegel’s account of working with O’Brien on the 1953 film China Venture that by then O’Brien suffered from cataracts that had rendered him nearly blind; he’d have his wife read him the script pages he was supposed to shoot the next day and he’d memorize them from that. It’s a testament to both O’Brien’s skill and determination that he was able, despite his rotten eyesight, not only to act in a film that had so many strenuous action scenes but to co-direct it as well. Before the film, Eddie Muller said the part had originally been offered to Dana Andrews, who’d turned it down – possibly, Muller suggested, because of its similarities to the 1950 film Where the Sidewalk Ends – though to my mind the only other actor around in 1954 who could have played it as well was Bogart. Muller also joked about how many of O’Brien’s films – including his greatest noir, the original 1949 film D.O.A. and this one – show him sweating big-time. He wondered if O’Brien just sweated that much normally or if there was an assistant with a spray bottle of water on set spritzing him before each take to make him look that sweaty.