Just Off Broadway (20th Century-Fox, 1942)

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

Last night at 11 I ran my husband Charles the sixth of the seven Michael Shayne movies made by 20th Century-Fox from 1940 to 1942, Just Off Broadway. Like the fifth movie in the series, The Man Who Wouldn’t Die, it was written by Armand d’Usseau, though it also contains a credit, “Based on an idea by Jo Eisinger,” and Eisinger has solid film noir credentials as one of the writers on a seminal noir, Gilds (1946), co-written witl Marion Parsonnet and Ben Hecht; Eisinger got credit for “adaptation” of an original (more or less) story by one E. A. Ellington. (Ellington has only three writing credits on imdb.com: Gilda, Irish Eyes are Smiling and a Playhouse 90 TV episode called “Natchez.”) I’d like to think that it was Eisinger, not d’Usseau, who had most to do with the relatively high quality of Just Off Broadway, and in particular the Gilda-sque character of Rita Darling (Joan Valerie), nightclub singer at the Dolphin Club owned by George Dolphin (Don Costello). Rita is a diva in every sense of the word, and she’s seen in the opening sequence being sworn in as a witness in the trial of Lillian Hubbard (Janis Carter) for murdering Harley Foresythe (whom we never see, alive or dead). It seems both women were having affairs with Foresythe as well as Dolphin, though Dolphin celebrated his engagement to Rita by giving her a custom-made pin of a dolphin (as in the marine mammal).

Michael Shayne (Lloyd Nolan, tough and acerbic as usual) gets involved when he’s seated as a juror in the Lillian Hubbard trial; he becomes convinced that Lilllan is innocent but he can’t do anything about it because the jury is sequestered and Shayne is forced to spend his nights in the same room as a fellow juror, a chronically ill middle-aged man whom Shayne drugs with two powerful sleeping pills he’s bummed from the sheriff’s deputy responsible for incarcerating him. He sneaks out of the room where he’s supposed to be staying and hooks up with reporter Judy Taylor (Marjorie Weaver), who herself is being followed by an annoying free-lance photographer named Roy Higgins (Phil Silvers – another of those actors, including Lucille Ball, Raymond Burr, Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason, who’d had decent but unspectacular careers as character players in low-budget movies and then suddenly burst into superstardom in the early days of TV, though when Charles read the above he said that Jackie Gleason was nowhere near the level of stardom of Lucille Ball). Shayne is worried about Higgins because if he takes Shayne’s photo while Shayne is supposed to be sequestered, that would earn Shayne a jail sentence for contempt of court. Shayne and Judy Taylor go to the Dolphin Club and hear Rita Darling doing her cabaret act, singing a song called “It Happened, It’s Over, Let’s Forget It” by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin (long-time songwriters at Paramount until Darryl Zanuck lured them over to Fox, where because of Zanuck’s obsession with not wanting the songs from his films to be commercially recorded the two almost totally disappeared from the Hit Parade until Rainger died in a plane crash in 1942) which she describes as her specialty. (There’s no indication on the imdb.com page for this film whether it’s Jean Valerie’s voice or a double.)

Shayne’s determination to escape sequestration and use his professional skills to solve the crime himself is fueled when Foresythe’s butler, Henry Randolph (Leyland Hodgson), is killed by a well-aimed throwing knife just as he’s about to take the stand and deliver testimony that might clear Lillian Hubbard. Shayne finds that a professional knife thrower, Edmond Telmachio (Alexander Lockwood), threw the knife inside the courtroom but then was himself murdered, and his body stuffed in a storage locker. He had once performed at the Dolphin Club, which leads Shayne briefly to suspect that George Dolphin and/or Rita Darling hired him to do the deed and then silence him permanently, but the real killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Lillian’s attorney, John Logan (Richard Derr), whose motive isn’t very well explained but it appears to be that Logan was in unrequlted love with Lillian and, though pretending to help her, was really throwing the case so she’d burn for a murder he himself had committed. (Six years later Orson Welles would use this device far better in his 1948 classic film noir, The Lady from Shanghai, in which Everett Sloane played a crippled super-attorney who takes on Welles as a client but really wants to throw the case because Welles’ character was having an affair with Sloane’s wife, Rita Hayworth.)

Just Off Broadway is a reasonably entertaining movie, a good deal better than The Man Who Wouldn’t Die though not in the same league as Time to Kill (which had the benefit of Raymond Chandler’s The HIgh Window as a story source; though William K. Everson didn’t analyze it in depth the way he did with Chandler’s other excursion into the world of “B” detective series, The Falcom Takes Over, what he said of that film – “Some of Philip Marlowe’s integrity even seems to rub off on the superficial Falcon” – he could have easily said about Time to Kill, in which some of Marlowe’s sense of justice seemed to rub off on the superficial Shayne). Certainly there are common denominators in all three films – the use of stage performers as dei ex machinae (a magician who identifies the prime suspect in The Man Who Wouldn’t Die and a professional knife-thrower here) and the use of women nightclub singers as prime suspects in both Just Off Broadway and Time to Kill – though Time to Kill benefitted from the absence of Marjorie Weaver’s reporter character (she would have been hard to fit into Raymond Chandler’s plot line). It makes me want to dig up the 20th Century-Fox boxed set of the first four Lloyd Nolan Shaynes (which I bought some years ago and Charles and I watched back then) and also makes me want to see the Shayne films PRC made in 1947 with Hugh Beaumont as Shayne.