Blue, White and Perfect (20th Century-Fox, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2002, 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Late last night, after all the news shows on MS-NBC and PBS, I ran Charles a movie, Blue, White and Perfect, the fourth in the cycle of seven movies from 20th Century-Fox made between 1940 and 1942 starring Lloyd Nolan as Michael Shayne. Muchael Shayne was the hard-boiled detective character created by writer Davis Dresser under the pseudonym “Brett Halliday” – apparently he was a writer in all the major pulp genres but he signed his stories with different names for each, but it was his “Brett Halliday” mysteries that really caught on with the public and produced 12 movies – the seven at Fox with Lloyd Nolan as Shayne, five additional ones from PRC in the late 1940’s with Hugh Beaumont, a TV series with Richard Denning and several other adaptations. Blue, White and Perfect opens with a bang: Michael Shayne’s long-suffering fiancée, beauty salon owner Marie Garland (Mary Beth Hughes – one peculiarity of the Shayne series at Fox is they regularly used the same actresses, like Hughes and Helene Reynolds, but not in the same parts!), is leaving him to marry someone else. To stop the wedding before it can take place, Shayne calls in a tip to the police that the prospective groom, Alexis Fournier (Ivan Lebedeff), is a forger and a bigamist. It’s B.S., at least as far as he knows, but when the police arrest him they find he has a long criminal record and is indeed a forger and a bigamist.

Marie is so grateful to Shayne for sparing her the indignity of marrying someone who’s already married that she reconciles with him on condition that he give up his detective career and find a normal job. Accordingly, he gets a job as a riveter with the Hughes Aircraft Company – but he’s really been hired as an industrial spy to find Axis saboteurs. In a nice touch from screenwriter Samuel Engel, who worked from a story by Borden Chase – whose best-known screen credits are the Western classics Red River and Winchester .73 – Shayne is initially inclined to walk out on the job when he thinks he’s being hired to bust workers for trying to organize, and it’s only when he’s assured that his job is to go after saboteurs that he agrees to take it. Just as Shayne is about to start his first day at riveting school – with the U.S. having just entered World War II, war production workers were at a premium and a lot of people were being hired for riveting and other butch blue-collar jobs they’d never done before – the factory is stuck up and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of industrial diamonds are stolen. Shayne deduces from the fact that he rolled his eyes when he was supposedly unconscious that the security guard who apparently was knocked out by the thieves, was actually part of the gang and he faked his own injury to allow the gang access to the safe. This was easy enough to guess because his name was Vanderhoefen and he was played by Steven Geray (let’s see, we have a Russian playing a Frenchman and a Frenchman playing a Dutchman) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Geray movie in which he wasn’t a bad guy!

The diamonds are being smuggled to Hawai’i aboard an ocean liner and, in order to get the money to get on it, Shayne embezzles $1,000 from Merle (she thinks the money is going to buy them a ranch where’ll they’ll live as a couple) and ends up in a shipboard romance with an old flame, Helen Shaw (Helene Reynolds), who’s also being chased by a half-Latino, improbably named Juan Arturo O’Hara and even more improbably played by future Superman George Reeves, decked out with a moustache and a lot of shoe polish in his hair to make him look appropriately swarthy and dark. The overall tenor of this film isn’t that different from the Saint and the Falcon movies RKO was churning out at the same time, but it seems wrong because Michael Shayne isn’t a debonair, romantic character; he’s a grungier sort of guy being played by an American actor and this rather superficial style of mystery film doesn’t really play to the strengths either of Brett Halliday’s (t/n: Davis Dresser) character or Nolan’s performance. Like its immediate predecessor, Dressed to Kill (unfortunately not in the 20th Century-Fox boxed set of four of their Nolan Shayne movies, though Charles and I recently caught it on YouTube), Blue, White and Perfect is much more in the style of the comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s than the darker, richer noir style of the 1940’s – though ironically both cycles were kicked off by hit films based on novels by Dashiell Hammett. The 1934 The Thin Man kicked off the engaging fusion of screwball comedy and murder mystery that dominated in the next seven years, while the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon set the parameters for film noir even though there had been noir precursors made before that.

One thing that bothered me about Blue, White and Perfect this time around is that, for a studio like Fox that had made so many movies largely or totally set aboard cruise ships, the sets in the shipboard scenes are singularly unconvincing. You really have to look (and listen) hard for any clue in the dialogue that you’re anywhere else than a totally land-based hotel. Still, there are nice touches throughout this film, including the opening dialogue in which Merle’s assistant Ethel (Marie Blake), asked by Shayne how Merle got together with Fournier in the first place, Ethel explains that he came by the shop to get her to carry his one-hour wart remover. She also says he demanded that his last name be pronounced, not the usual “Furn-Yay” but “Fo-Nay,” and she says of his alleged wart remover, “Boy, is it fo-nay!” There’s also a nice scene in which Shayne and O’Hara, who’s supposed to be an undercover FBI agent, are nearly drowned inside a water-tight compartment on the ship and they muse that they’re about to drown on board a ship that is still afloat. (It reminded me of the sequence in the second “Harper” film, The Drowning Pool, in which Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward come close to a similar fate.) And there’s a nice moment for Helene Reynolds, whose character, Helen Shaw, turns out to be a member of the ring that stole the diamonds but who turns against them when she realizes they’re not just ordinary crooks out to make a dishonest dollar, but Axis saboteurs stealing the diamonds so Nazi Germany can use them for their war production. It reminded me of the marvelous moment in the 1942 film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror in which Kitty (Evelyn Ankers), a member of London’s underworld, nonetheless rallies her fellow crooks to help Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) to find the Nazi spy living among them because even criminals have a right to be patriotic.

In the end, Helen gets shot and killed for her pains by the real secret head of the ring, Freidrich Gerber (Curt Bois), who [spoiler alert!] has been masquerading as a particularly obnoxious comic-relief character named Nappy Dubois. (For some reason the other actors pronounced “Gerber” as if it were “Goebbels,” the name of the infamous Nazi Minister of Propaganda.) Shayne discovers the stolen diamonds when he accidentally tries to eat one of the candies containing them and nearly breaks a tooth on it. Charles said he wondered why the Nazis were smuggling the diamonds the long way around via the Pacific instead of taking them through the Atlantic. One imdb.com “Goofs” commentator red-flagged that one and another suggested that, “because with the submarine war sinking cargo ships in the Atlantic, it made sense to take the longer route through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific.” That still didn’t make much sense to Charles, who said that given the fact that the war was just as active in the Pacific as in the Atlantic, it would have made more sense to send the diamonds via South America, where there were still a number of governments reasonably friendly to the Nazis. The whole thing was an example of how ill-prepared screenwriters were to incorporate the real war into their scripts, and how much catching=up they had to do geographically!