Dressed to Kill (20th Century-Fox, 1941)

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

Afterwards, my husband Charles got back from work and we watched a YouTube video of the third film in the seven-picture Michael Shayne detective series produced at 20th Century-Fox between 1940 and 1942 and featuring the marvelous Lloyd Nolan in the role. It was called Dressed to Kill, which was also used as the title for at least two considerably better-known films: a 1946 entry that was the last in Universal’s series of Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson’ and a 1980 suspense thriller directed by Brian De Palma more or less in the style of Alfred Hitchcock. The 1941 Dressed to Kill takes its title from the opening scene, in which Michael Shayne is being fitted for a new suit by a tailor who’s so proud of his handiwork he tells Shayne that by wearing this suit he’ll be “dressed to kill.” He also makes a crude joke about how he hopes the new case Shayne is about to take won’t be too dangerous because “it’s so hard to reclaim a suit from the morgue.” Shayne is ordering the suit for his upcoming marriage to burlesque star Jessica La Marr (Mary Beth Hughes, powerful as usual but once again wasted in a good-girl role; her best film was The Great Flamarion, a 1945 film noir from Republic directed by Anthony Mann and co-starring Erich von Stroheim and Dan Duryea, in which she played a femme fatale) despite Jessica’s continued interest in her former off-stage as well as on-stage partner, Gus (whom we never see).

Shayne is visiting Jessica in her room at the Hotel du Nord (a fancy name for a pretty humdrum establishment) when he hears a shot coming from another room. He goes in to investigate and finds that two people, theatrical producer Louis Lathrop (Tom Monk) and his former star, Desiree Vance (Catherine Price), have been shot dead. Decades earlier,just before the U.S. got involved in World War I, Lathrop had produced a stage musical called Sweethearts of Paris in a theatre that’s part of his apartment building. (There's a neat running gag in which several people turn up at random between the theatre and Lathrop's apartment, and it turns out that Lathrop wanted easy access to the chorus girls in his shows, so he had these secret passageways built so he could make his way back and forth between the theatre and his apartment.) Desiree was its female star; he had signed her after seeing her audition with her vaudeville partner, stage magician Carlo Ralph (Erwin Kaiser), only Lathrop had fallen in love (or at least in lust) with her and so he made her the star of Sweethearts of Paris while relegating him to literally playing a horse on stage. Lathrop regularly hosts dinner parties for the surviving cast members of Sweethearts of Paris – and not only the surviving ones either: he regularly sets out place settings for the deceased ones as well, which Shayne notices when he sees the dinner table set for eight while only four of the places had actually been used. There are the usual red herrings, including Lynne Evans (Viginia Brissac), who had been Lathrop’s star until Desiree replaced her and now is relegated to working as his maid under the name “Emily,” and a homeless drifter and drunk with a highly theatrical manner who in an early scene tries to hit up Shayne for a $2 handout, only Shayne turns him down because the last time he gave the guy money, the guy went and spent it on beer.

Other red herrings include former Sweethearts of Paris cast member David Earle (Henry Daniell – though Fox took off one of the letters in his last name and billed him as “Henry Daniel”) and his daughter Connie (Sheila Ryan, who like Hughes was a highly talented actress pretty much wasted in a nothing role here), who calls Lathrop’s apartment while both Shayne and police inspector Pierson (William Demarest, an odd name to find in a cast like this until you realize that another crotchety old man best known for a 1950’s TV sitcom, William Frawley, also played cops in the Ellery Queen and Crime Doctor movies at Columbia, and played them quite well!) are there investigating. Connie Earle is worried that her father David is going to dislike the young man she’s dating, presumably because David will think he’s after their money (what money, we wonder based on what we’ve seen of them so far), but that plot line gets dropped pretty quickly and we barely hear or see from Connie again. Shayne deduces that though Lathrop and Deiree were killed simultaneously, the hiller used different guns: Desiree was killed wtih a revolver while Lathrup was shot with a hunting rifle that hung on the wall of Lathrop’s living room and which Shayne could tell had recently been fired. The killer rigged up one of those elaborate James Bond-ish schemes to be able to fire the rifle remotely from the kitchen, held in place by a household appliance, and shot Lathrop through a pantry window by polling a string tied to the gun’s trigger.

Eventually it’s revealed that the killer was Carlo Ralph, whom the other principals had assumed was killed in World War I. Instead he was captured by the Germans and spent the rest of the war ini a POW camp, where he was so excruciatingly tort- – oops, I’m sorry, given “enhanced interrogation techniques” – he lost his mind and returned home seeking revenge against the woman who had left him and the big producer she had left him for. Despite the sheer improbability of the ending – Charles was particularly put off by the gap between the mental basket case we see on screen and the highly elaborate scheme he worked out to commit the murders – Dressed to Kill is a delight from start to finish. It was made by the same people who did the first film in the series, Michael Shayne, Private Detectiveˆ– director Eugene Forde and writers Stanley Rauh and Manning O’Connor – but this time, instead of adapting a novel by Michael Shayne’s creator, Davis “Brett Halliday” Dresser, they were working from a book called The Dead Take No Bows by Richard Burke, a name otherwise unknown to me but who seems on the evidence of these two movies to have been a better plot constructionist than Dresser a.k.a. “Halliday.” Though firmly in the realm of a 1930’s comedy-mystery rather than the darker film noir style that was displacing it thanks to the enormous commercial and critical success of The Maltese Falcon, the 1941 Dressed to Kill is a delight from start to finish, easily one of the best films in the series (of the five we’ve seen so far, only the last, Time to Kill, based on Raymond Chandler’s The High Window, matches or exceeds its quality) and a tribute to the acting skills of Lloyd Nolan, who on the basis of his work here really could have done well as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. A pity he didn’t get the chance, though he appeared as Marlowe-turned-Shayne in Time to Kill and in a marvelous movie-stealing performance as a corrupt cop in a Marlowe film, The Lady in the Lake.