The Man Who Wouldn't Die (20th Century-Fox, 1942)

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

Last night I looked for a movie on YouTube and found it in The Man Who Wouldn’t Die, a 1942 20th Century-Fox “B” starring Lloyd Nolan as private investigator Michael Shayne. Michael Shayne was the creation of pulp writer Davis Dresser, though he published the Shayne stories under the pseudonym “Brett Halliday.” In fact, Dresser wrote in all the standard pulp genres but used different names for each one, though the Michael Shayne mysteries he wrote as “Brett Halliday” were his most popular works and he even paid the character a back-handed tribute when he named his son “Halliday Dresser.” (Halliday Dresser’s sister was named Chloe.) 20th Century-Fox started a Michael Shayne mystery series in 1940 and kept it going for seven films, though only the first one, Michael Shayne: Private Detective, was actually based on a Dresser/”Halliday” story. Some years ago 20th Century-Fox put out a boxed set of the first four Shayne movies on DVD and Charles and I watched them together, though The Man Who Wouldn’t Die was the fifth in the series and therefore it wasn’t included in the box. (The one I most wanted to see was the seventh and last, Time to Kill, because it was based on the Philip Marlowe novel The High Window by Raymond Chandler, and like Chandler’s Fareewll, My Lovely – first bought by RKO for an entry in the Falcon “B” series called The Falcon Takes Over in 1942 and then filmed more or less come scritto as Murder, My Sweet two years later – The Hign Window was remade by Fox in 1947 as The Brasher Doubloon, after the rare coin that features prominently in the plot.)

The Man Who Wouldn’t Die was based on a novel by Clayton Rawson called Death from a Top Hat that had already been filmed by director Tod Browning at MGM as Miracles for Sale in 1939 (the Miracles for Sale title references Robert Young’s business; he’s an ex-magician who devises tricks for other performers and actually calls his enterprise “Miracies for Sale.”) The “sleuth” character in Rawson’s book was a magician called “The Great Merlini” who helped solve crimes, but both Miracles for Sale and The Man Who Wouldn’t Die reduced him to a character part, a sort of deus ex machina for the central character. The plot of The Man Who Wouldn’t Die involves Dudley Wolff (Paul Harvey), a super-rich man who in the opening scene leads a team of himself and two other people to dig a grave on the grounds of the Wolff estate and secretly bury a coffin in it. They drive out in a “woodie” station wagon, and when I told Charles what sort of vehicle they were using, he joked in reference to the previous night’s movie, “So you still can’t get away from the Beach Boys!” Only the person in the coffin turns not not to be dead at all: he escapes from the grave and takes a pot-shot at the film’s heroine, Dudley’s daughter Catherine Wolff (Marjorie Weaver, who appeared in most of the Michael Shayne films but played different parts in each).

Catherine sees him in the half-light but only as a hulking shadow lurking in the dark, and without any evidence – like a bullet – to back up her story, her dad and stepmother Anna (Helene Reynolds) tell her she was hallucinating and there was no such shot. All this takes place on one of those proverbial “dark and stormy nights” beloved of mystery fiction writers everywhere, and the assailant wore a hood under which his eyes literally flicker in the dark. Catherine calls in detective Michael Shayne (Lloyd Nolan) to investigate the murder, and she pays him with a series of $100 bills. In order to explain his presence, she decides to pass him off as Roger Smith (Richard Derr), a federal government official whom she met in Washington, D.C. and married without anyone in her family knowing. The reason for her secrecy is her dad Dudley is incredibly suspicious of any man who’s interested in Catherine because he thinks they’re just after his money, and he’s paid off at least six of her previous boyfriends to get out of her life. There’s some nice Production Code envelope-pushing in Arnaud d’Usseau’s script (pieced together, Frankenstein-style, from bits and pieces of “Halliday,” Rawson and himself) involving the masquerade of Shayne and Catherine as husband and wife, and the tricks they have to resort to to make it look like they’re newlyweds even though they’re not. Things get even more complicated when the real Roger Smith turns up and Catherine has to do some fancy explaining as to just who he is and why there are two men around both claiming to be her husband.

There’s also a strange little subplot in which Dudley Wolff has built a basement laboratory for Dr. Haggard (Henry Wilcoxon) to conduct his researches in life extension, because Dudley wants to see if he can buy his way out of this dying business – though in the end Dr. Haggard gets killed, not a very good advertisement for someone claiming to achieve immortality. In the end Shayne solves the mystery by recalling a trick Harry Houdini used to do, called “shallow breathing,” in which he could slow down his respiration so much he would appear to be dead, and he could be lowered into a grave and then come to at the appropriate moment to astonish his audience. Shayne seeks out The Great Merlini (Charles Irwin), a vaudeville magician of his acquaintance, and asks him if he knows of any other magician who learned and perfected the “shallow breathing” trick. Merlini says he knows of just one: Zorah Bey (LeRoy Mason). He shows Shayne a photo of Zorah Bey performing his magic act with the obligatory female assistant – and Shayne recognizes the woman as Anna Wolff, who’s obviously out to murder her husband for his money and then presumably live happily ever after with her Middle Eastern magician boyfriend.

The most remarkable thing about The Man Who Wouldn’t Die is how much it looks like a film noir even though it isn’t one thematically; Herbert I. Leeds was never any great shakes as a director, but he and cinematographer Joseph MacDonald create a fully convincing chiaroscuro atmosphere and fill the sets full of tantalizing shadows and rich dark spaces. It could have come closer to noir if d’Usseau had done more to develop the character of Anna more and turned her into a true femme fatale – clearly d’Usseau was savoring the irony that Dudley Wolff is so hyper-concerned about his daughter marrying a gold-digger when he himself has done that – but by delaying the revelation of Anna’s involvement in a murder plot until the very end d’Usseau didn’t give himself the chance to depict the character as full-fledged evil. Nor did he give Helene Reynolds the chance to deliver a truly acid-edged villainess performance the way Barbara Stanwyck did in Double Indemnity or Claire Trevoir in Murder, My Sweet, also about no-good women who latch on to well-to-do husbands and then seek to knock them off for their money.

In his book The Detective in Film William K. Everson lamented that Lloyd Nolan never got the chance to make a major film noir as Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe or another major detective character from noir fiction. He particularly praised Nolan’s work as the honest cop in an otherwise lumbering, over-long major-studio noir called Somewhere in the Night (1946), as well as his fascinating performance as the corrupt “bad cop” in the film of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake (1947). Though I’m not sure whether Nolan could have pulled off Spade or Marlowe with the acting chops of Humphrey Bogart or Dick Powell, he was a fascinating character actor whom I first discovered as the cranky old doctor in the 1968 TV series Julia, who hires Black war widow Julia Baker (Diahann Carroll) as his nurse. Nolan’s performance on that show impressed me and later inspired me to seek out the movies he’d made in his younger years, and though the Michael Shayne mysteries are hot great films, they are quite interesting even though burdened by the supposedly obligatory “comic relief” that generally got inflicted onto crime thrillers until the huge success of the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon blew away the comedy-mystery conventions and launched the film noor genre.