Jigsaw (Tower Pictures, Inc., United Artists, 1949)

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

Last night at 10:15 or so my husband Charles and I watched an odd movie from 1949, Jigsaw, directed by Fletcher Markle from a script he co-wrote with Vincent McConnor based on an “original” story (quotes definitely intended!) by John Roebert. Jigsaw centers around assistant district attorney Howard Molloy (Franchot Tone, top-billed but already on the downgrade), who stumbles on a radical Right-wing organization called “The Crusaders” when he investigates the suspicious death of printer named Berg who was doing work for them. Howard is dating Caroline Riggs (Betty Harper, later known as Doe Avedon), sister of newspaper columnist Charlie Riggs (Myron McCormick), who is determined to expose “The Crusaders” as a front for organized crime. It seems like the mysterious leaders of “The Crusaders” don’t really believe in their racist cause but are doing it just to make money off individual memberships, donations, merchandise sales and other fundraising strategies. Given what we’re learning from the House Select Committee on January 6, 2021 and the connections it’s uncovering between the U.S. Capitol riots that day and Trump’s overall strategies for reversing his election loss and staying in power despite losing both the popular and the electoral vote, Jigsaw seemed in its opening minutes like an unexpectedly timely movie, though the idea of a hate group being run as a front for money-making by a bunch of grifters had been done better 12 years earlier by Warner Bros. in the film Black Legion, with Humphrey Bogart turning in one of his best early performances as the sucker who falls for the Black Legion’s hate-mongering hook, line and sinker and ultimately turns state’s evidence against the group.

One problem with Jigsaw is that the writers seem to have lost interest in their central premise after the first reel or two; instead their film becomes just another dreary plot line in which Our Hero falls for femme fatale Barbara Whitfield (Jean Wallace, who copies the visually striking blonde hairdo of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity – and Stanwyck got it in turn from Marlene Dietrich in Warner Bros.’ Manpower in 1941) and jeopardizes his recent appointment as special prosecutor in the “Crusaders” case when he’s seen and gets photographed in nightclubs with Barbara on his arm. Howard’s boss, district attorney Walker (Walter Vaughan) threatens to fire him if he keeps embarrassing himself in public that way. But while Howard is out nightclubbing with Barbara he’s also making progress on the investigation, and he’s traced the “Crusaders” posters to an artist named Sigmund Kosterich (Hedley Rainnie), who at first indignantly and hotly denies having done any poster work – he says he’s a fine artist and painter exclusively – but eventually he admits to having done the posters in exchange for a one-man show at an art gallery run by a friend of Grace Hartley (Winifred Lenihan), who up until now has been presented merely as a widow and an old, close friend of D.A. Walker. The moment she turns up at Kosterich’s studio it’s clear to us, at least, that Mrs. Hartley is the big boss behind the Crusaders, and in a final sequence at the gallery where Kosterich’s big show is supposed to take place, Grace shoots both Kosterch and Barbara after overhearing Kosterich reveal to Howard that he’s collected evidence against the Crusaders and hidden it in back of one of his paintings in the show.

It’s clear that Barbara dies – after all, the writers had to eliminate her so Howard and Catherine could get back together – but not so much about Kosterich. The interesting things about Jigsaw are that it was not only set in New York but actually shot there – and cinematographer Don Malkames (a go-to guy for people shooting films moir in New York at the time) is able to light the real New York streets to make them look like studio sets built for a film noir – and the extent to which it defies the political Zeitgeist of the time by making the villains supposed Right-wingers rather than Left-wingers, as in the similar film The Red Menace the ferociously anti-Left, anti-labor boss at Republic, Herbert Yates, made at the same time. The other noteworthy aspect of Jigsaw is the presence of several star cameos. In fact, I first heard about this film via one such sequence, a shot of Marlene Dietruch exiting New York’s real Blue Angel nightclub (whose owners got a special acknowledgment in the opening credits), which of course had been named after the fictional one in which Dietrich’s character, Lola Lola, performed in her star-making film The Blue Angel from 1930.

I first encountered this film via a Madacy two-tape collection on VHS that was advertised as featuring Dietrich, which contained The Blue Angel (in the 1937 reissue print in German with English subtitles – The Blue Angel was filmed in both German and English but the English version was thought lost for decades and only turned up in the early 2000’s – and with the order of the final shots reversed so the film would end with Dietrich in her cabaret act instead of the film’s male nead, Emil Jannings, dying in the old schoolroom in which he used to teach until Dietrich’s character ruined him) with this, in which Dietrich appears for all of about 29 seconds. The film alst features a number of cameo appearances by New York-based stars, including Burgess Meredith (as a bartender), John Garfield (as a man reading a newspaper), and Henry Fonda (as a waiter at the Blue Angel who helps Dietrich put on her fox-fur jacket as she leaves the club – one wonders if this was influenced by Fonda’s casting as a busboy with a crush on star entertainer Lucille Ball who sees his chance when her gangster boyfriend pushes her down a flight of stairs and he becomes her caregiver in the 1942 film The Big Street), as well as real New York columnist Leonard Lyons, who takes up the Crusader investigation after his fictional friend Charlie Riggs is murdered.

Jigsaw is a mediocre film that could have been a lot better if they’d had the money to stage a Crusaders rally and if the writers had worked harder to show the real social evil of such a group the way the makers of The Red Menace (an endearingly silly film; when I showed it to Charles I said, “As Right-wing cinema goes, this is not The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will”) did with the Communist Party. It’s just a curio, one of those frustrating bad (or semi-bad) movies which seems to have a good film inside is trapped and struggling to get out.