Bury Me Dead (Benjamin Stoloff Pictures, PRC, 1947)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 23) my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube showing of a 1947 film from PRC called Bury Me Dead (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzFgrVk86p0) that was an intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying combination of romantic melodrama, screwball comedy, and film noir. Bury Me Dead started life in 1946 as a radio play by Irene Winston for a short-lived anthology series called Molle Mystery Theatre before PRC producer Charles F. Riesner (who’d briefly worked as an assistant to Charlie Chaplin in the early 1920’s; among the Chaplin films he worked on was 1922’s The Pilgrim, in which Riesner cast his son Dean as a bratty kid who bedevils Chaplin; years later Dean Riesner grew up to be a screenwriter whose most famous credit was Dirty Harry: Chaplin and Clint Eastwood, one degree of separation!) bought the rights and made it into a movie a year later. The film’s credits included John Alton as cinematographer (always a good sign) and Bernard Vorhaus as director, while Dwight V. Babcock (also the name of the principal villain in Auntie Mame) and Karen DeWolf turned Winston’s radio play into a screenplay. They also filled it so full of flashbacks they seemed to be worshiping at the shrine of St. Casey Robinson (Casey Robinson was a screenwriter notorious for doing flashbacks within flashbacks), though Charles said it reminded him of Christopher Nolan’s Inception (not one of his better films).

Bury Me Dead begins with one of the most provocative premises ever cooked up for a film: we see a stock shot of a building burning down, and we soon learn it’s the horse stable of Barbara Carlin (June Lockhart), a well-to-do woman married to a not-so-well-to-do man named Rod Carlin (Mark Daniels). Barbara Carlin is presumed to have died in the fire, and she’s given a fancy funeral at which Rod and a family friend, attorney Michael Dunn (Hugh Beaumont, best known as the father on the TV series Leave It to Beaver), are among the mourners. Also on deck for the funeral is a mystery woman dressed in black, with a black veil across her face. She gets into a cab driven by character actor Sumner Getchell, and when he asks whose funeral she has just attended, she says, “Mine.” It turns out the body in the burned stable was too charred to be identifiable and Rod made the I.D. on the basis of some jewelry the corpse had been wearing, including a necklace and a compact inscribed with an ambiguous legend about somebody loving someone else. So it becomes not only a whodunit but a whodidtheydunitto as the surviving characters, including Barbara, try to figure out just who the impossibly mangled corpse they buried in Barbara’s place was. At first suspicion settles on “Rusty” Carlin (Cathy O’Donnell, inexplicably top-billed), whom everybody had assumed was Barbara’s adopted sister until on the death of Barbara’s dad it was revealed that dad never completed the adoption and therefore she’s no legal relation at all and isn’t entitled to any share of dad’s estate. Out of pity Barbara offers her an allowance, which “Rusty” steadfastly refuses, though she stays on the estate and moves into a guest house that formerly housed a woman horse trainer. There’s also a flashback sequence in which “Rusty” is shown romantically involved with a musclebound boxer named George Mandley (Greg McClure, who though not drop-dead gorgeous is sufficiently impressive as a hunk of man-meat the many shots of him clad only in Everlast boxing trunks and shoes are fun to look at) who’s also dating his supposed “secretary,” Helen Lawrence (Sonia Darrin), the closest this film gris has to a femme fatale.

Barbara is determined to break up “Rusty” and George, especially since “Rusty” is underage, and she manages to do that by showing her George making love to Helen – only Barbara’s husband Rod (ya remember Rod?) is also sexually involved with Helen, while Barbara herself has a brief fling with George. It turns out that “Rusty” is still alive and the real woman who burned in the barn is Helen, who had tried on one of Barbara’s necklaces at Rod’s behest and had gone to her death while wearing it. For the second half of the movie the writers dispense with the dramatized flashbacks (though they still have the characters narrate stories about their pasts) and it all leads up to an ending in which [spoiler alert!] the real killer, who not only crushed Helen’s skull with a hammer and then set the barn on fire so her death would look like an accident but also attacked Barbara in her home with a fireplace poker, is the attorney Michael Dunn. He was worried that if Rod and Barbara divorced, Michael’s financial ripoffs of the Carlin estate would come to light in the settlement negotiations, so he was determined to kill Barbara to conceal his financial crimes. There’s a marvelously cynical scene in which Rod is being held by a squad of police officers and given a third-degree interrogation while he pleads with the police to take him to the Carlin home where he’s become convinced Barbara is in mortal danger from Michael. In the end Michael is shot, first by “Rusty,” who finds Michael’s gun on the floor of the Carlin living room and shoots him to save Barbara’s life; and then by the real cops, who arrived just in time to finish Michael off. Early on I joked that this would be an appropriate movie for Lifetime to remake, since there are enough sexual intrigues in enough different directions this would be good fodder for a Lifetime producer.

Cathy O’Donnell had a sad career; she was under contract to Sam Goldwyn, who in 1948 lent both her and Farley Granger out to RKO (which was Goldwyn’s distributor at the time) for her one truly great film in a leading role, Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night. Unfortunately she fell in love with and married Robert Wyler, director William Wyler’s brother, and Goldwyn was so angry with William Wyler for having run out his contract and leaving for greener pastures that he demanded O’Donnell and Robert Wyler divorce. When O’Donnell refused, Goldwyn fired her. She spent the rest of her career mostly working on television, though William Wyler occasionally gave his sister-in-law minor parts in his big movies. O’Donnell died in 1970 at age 46 after a long battle with cancer. Leonard Maltin in his Classic Movie Guide gave Bury Me Dead three stars out of five; he had good words for Alton’s stunning cinematography (even though all too much of the movie takes place outdoors during bright sunlight and therefore there were too few opportunities for Alton to work his noir magic) but dissing the film for its “talky treatment and abundance of light comedy.” The light comedy comes mostly from two servant characters, maid Mrs. Haskins (Virginia Farmer), who comes off like she went to the Judith Anderson School of Housekeeping; and butler Waters (Milton Parsons, who turned in some great campy supporting performances in RKO’s four mid-1940’s Dick Tracy movies but here just seems out of place. One also wonders just what PRC’s casting directors were thinking when they tried to turn Hugh Beaumont first into a noir hero in their short-lived Michael Shayne series and then into a noir villain here. He’s just too milquetoast a personality to fit in cinema’s dark side as it existed in the mid- to late-1940’s.