br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night my husband Charles and I watched the third of the five PRC films featuring the character of detective Michael Shayne, created in the late 1930’s by pulp writer Davis Dresser under the pseudonym “Brett Halliday.” (I still think Dresser should have used “Brett Halliday” as the name of his character and signed the stories “Michael Shayne,” not toe other way around.) Like the first two in the series, Murder in MLy Busienss and Larceny in Her Heart, Blonde for a Day was produced by Sigmund Neyfeld and directed by Sam Newfield (they were actually brothers, but Sam “Anglicized” their last name and Sigmund didn’t). It helped that, like Murder Is My Business but unlike Larceny in Her Heart, Blonde for a Day was written by Fred Myton (though for some reason his name was misspelled “Miton” on his credit: one wonders why, especially since he’d been working at PRC for years and one would have assumed they’d have known how to spell his name) and based on an original story by “Brett Halliday” himself. Of the first three PRC Shaynes, it’s the best by a pretty wide margin, partly because its story makes sense – three L.A.-area gamblers were shot on successive days and the police connect the killings to a gang led by Hank Brenner (Mauritz Hugo) who’s attempting to move into L.A. and take over the illegal gambling racket.
Michael Shayne (Hugh Beaumont) and his partner/girlfriend Phyllis Hamilton (Kathryn Adams, replacing Cheryl Walker, who played her in the first two PRC Shaynes – in fact, this movie is filled with different actors playing the same characters; Shayne’s reporter friend Tim Rourke is Paul Bryar and Shayne’s antagonist on the police force, Pete Rafferty, is the marvelous character actor Cy Kendall) are in San Francisco when Rourke writes him a letter asking him to come to L.A. and investigate the murders. When Rourke himself is shot and beaten to within an inch of his life, Shayne and Phyllis agree to return to L.A. To say that Rafferty isn’t goad to see them would be a major understatement, but Shayne receives a letter from a housemate of Minerva Dickens (Cl;aire Rochelle) offering him information on the gang. Alas, when Shayne gets her address (by posing as a cop and asking the phone company for it) she turns out to be dead, and that’s just one more morder for Rafferty to pin on Shayne even though,m as Shayne reminds the over-zealous cop, he wasn’t even in town when the murders of the gamblers occurred. Shayne runs into various characters, as by far the best of the first three Hugh Beaumont Shaynes at PRC, including Walter Branson (Peter Ferguson), Rourke’s editor at the (fictitious) Los Angeles Courier who tried to get Rourke to stop printing exposés on the gambling ring (just before he was attacked,
Rourke had sneaked his latest exposé into the paper without Walter’s knowledge or consent); Branson’s wife Mabel (Sonia Sorel, the third Mrs. John Carradine and Keith Carradine’s mother), who for some reason had the hots for Rourke; Dillinghan “Dilly” Smith III (Richard Fraser, who turned in a beautifully wrought performance in Val Lewton’s last RKO film, Bedlam, but for some reason Lewton and his director, Mark Rubson, were able to make Fraser’s restraint seem like quiet dignity and strength; in all his other films, at least the ones I’ve seen, he’s just dull); and Dilly’s wife, Helen Porter (Marjorie Hoshelle), who turns out to have been the murderess at the end. By switching the barrel of her gun every time she used it and having her blonde hair dyed black so she wouldn’t match the witnesses’ description of her (hence the film’s title, though I had thought the killer would turn out to be naturally dark-haired and the “blonde for a day” bit would just be a wig), she thought she’d evade detection. But Shayne told her that in addition to the rifling on the bullets as they’re fired each gun also leaves a distinctive striking pattern on the shell casing, so Shayne was able to identify the bullet shells as coming from Helen’s gun.
Blond for a Daywas the best of the first three PRC Shaynes by a wide margin, not only because the story made sense (though if Myton bothered to explain Helen Porter’s motive, both Charles and I missed it) and visually it looks much better than the two earlier films in the series. Though PRC stalwart Jack Greenhalgh was the cinematographer, as he’d been on the previous episodes, his work here is much more convincingly noir than his work on the previous two PrC Shaynes. The film even ooks more handsomely produced than the first two, and I suspect at least part of that is due to PRC’s decision this time around to use the “half-set” technique. If you’re going to light a scene so half the room is in shadow throughout the scene, you can save money on set construction by building only the hair of the set that will actually be visible. A lot olf the great films noir used this technique – including pioneering efforts like the 1940 film Stranger in the Third Floor, made by RKO’s “B” unit – and surely a budget-conscious studio like PRC would use it whenever they felt they could get away with it.
