Time to Kill (20th Century-Fox, 1942)

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

My husband Charles got home last night at 10:45 p.m. and at 11 I squeezed in a movie on YouTube that I’ve been curious about literally for decades: Time to Kill, a 1942 film that was the seventh and last in the series of Michael Shayne mysteries based on the pulp character by “Brett Halliday” (t/n Davis Dresser) 20th Century-Fox started in 1940. What makes this one particularly interesting is that it was based on a novel by Raymond Chandler, The High Window, and screenwriter Clarence Upson Young simply changed Philip Marlowe to Michael Shayne. Otherwise Young did a quite close adaptation of Chandler’s novel, keeping most of the other character names the same and getting as many of Chandler’s key story points in as he could fit in a film with a one-hour running time. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, but he did considerably better than he had with the last Michael Shayne film Charles and I had watched, The Man Who Wouldn’t Die, mainly because Raymond Chandler was a much better writer than Armand d’Usseau, who concocted The Man Who Wouldn’t Die out of bits and pieces of Clayton Rawson’s novel Death in a Top Hat and “Halliday”’s character, and Clarence Upson Young did a good deal better by him than Dorothy Bennett and Leonard Praskins in The Brasher Doubloon, 20th Century-Fox’s return to the Chandler story after the successes of Murder, My Sweet and The Big Sleep had proved that Philip Marlowe was a marketable screen property.

In fact, much to my surprise Time to Kill turned out to be a much better movie than The Brasher Doubloon all the way around; particularly in the casting of the detective hero. Lloyd Nolan brought a legitimate toughness to the role without sacrificing Chandler’s dry wit; in The Brasher Doubloon George Montgomery was simply terrible. It’s true that of all the on-screen Marlowes there was Dick Powell (triumphantly establishing his chops as a serious actor after his long stringi of musicals as a boy crooner; RKO signed him in the first place to make musicals, but Powell insisted on one serious dramatic film before being returned to the musical salt mines, and Murder, My Sweet transformed him from boy crooner to noir icon) and Humphrey Bogart, and then far below them are all the rest. But George Montgomery was so unspeakably awful one wouldn’t think the role could be cast worse – until we got the horrors of James Garner in the 1960’s and Elliott Gould in the 1970’s. Indeed, after watching Time to Kill I found myself wishing 20th Century-Fox had cast Nolan as Philip Marlowe in The Brasher Doubloon as well: I found myself agreeing (more than I had after watching The Man Who Wouldn’t Die or the previous films in the Michael Shayne series) with William K. Everson’s regret that no one ever thought to cast Nolan as Marlowe or Sam Spade. (In between The Big Sleep and The Brasher Doubloon MGM did an adaptation of Chandler’s fourth Marlowe novel, The Lady in the Lake, with Robert Montgomery – no relation – as Marlowe. This was hampered by the decision of Montgomery, who directed as well as starred, to shoot the whole thing from Marlowe’s point of view, and also because screenwriter Steve Fisher eliminated all the scenes actually taking place at the lake, and thereby got rid of the honest country sheriff Patton, whom Chandler had carefully contrasted to the corrupt city cop Al Degarmo, played in the 1946 film – brilliantly – by Lloyd Nolan!)

Screenwriter Young made three interesting tweaks in his adaptation; he transformed Chandler’s character of youthful detective George Anson Phillips (Ted Hecht) from Chandler’s naïve young twerp to a genuinely sinister figure, and he made Linda Conquest (Doris Merrick), nightclub entertainer who married Leslie Murdock (James Seay), son of grande dame Mrs. Murdock (Ethel Griffies, who’d been superb as a lowlife woman in the 1935 Universal film The Werewolf of London and is equally good at the other end of the class system here), a good deal more sympathetic than Chandler did. Meanwhile, Young made Leslie considerably nastier than he was in the book; Chandler wrote him as an ineffectual young naïf with a penchant for lowlife dames, but Young makes him considerably nastier and has him try to be a tough guy – though when he pulls a gun on Marlowe/Shayne, the detective easily overpowers him and takes his gun away. Despite those changes, Time to Kill remains basically the same story as The High Window: Mrs. Murdock hires Marlowe – oops, I mean Shayne – to recover her copy of the Brasher Doubloon, an ultra-rare pre-Revolutionary coin which Chandler picked for his MacGuffin because he needed a coin that would be valuable but also one of which several copies were known to exist, so it wouldn’t be implausible when a thief stole Mrs. Murdock’s coin and then made several duplicates with chemicals used in dentistry to make molds of the coin and thereby counterfeit it.

It turns out that Leslie stole the Brasher Doubloon from his mom’s collection to pay off some blackmailers, while his mom was being blackmailed herself by a photographer who had been out taking pictures of a Decoration Day parade (in Chandler’s novel and the 1947 film it was the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena) when he caught a shot of Mrs. Murdock pushing her husband out of the titular high window, thereby killing him. There are some campy bits of humor in Time to Kill, notably the way just about every woman in the film aside from Mrs. Murdock and her put-upon secretary Merle Davis (Heather Angel) makes a pass at him, as well as a genuinely amusing gag in which Shayne goes to see one of the gangsters peripherally involved in the intrigue, sees a huge sign saying “Beware of the Dog,” ahd the dog turns out to be a playful white puppy and not at all fearsome. But for the most part Time to Kill is an effective suspense thriller; it doesn’t really qualify as film noir because most of it takes place in broad daylight and, though Herbert I. Leeds is once again the director, his cinematographer, Charles G. Clarke, doesn’t attempt the superb atmospherics Joseph MacDonald brought to The Man Who Wouldn’t Die – but it’s still a marvelously entertaining movie and a much better film than its quasi-remake, The Brasher Doubloon!