Larceny in Her Heart (P?RC/Pathé. 1946)

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

Last night at 10 I ran my husband Charles and I the second of the five movies the cheap little PRC studio (the initials officially stood for “Producers’ Releasing Corporation” but such was the low quality of most of their films Hollywood jokesters said they meant “Pretty Rotten Crap”) made in 1946 and 1947 featuring the character of Michael Shayne. Michael Shayne was a private detective, originally based in and around Miami, Florida but moved to southern California for the films about him, created in 1938 by pulp author Davis Dresser. Dresser wrote in all the established pulp-magazine genres and adopted a different pseudonym for each one, but he became most famous as a mystery writer and therefore the alias that became best known was the one he used on the Shayne books, “Brett Halliday.” (Maybe he should have called his hard-boiled character “Brett Halliday” and signed the books “Michael Shayne.”) After 20th Century-Fox had closed its seven-film Shayne series in 1942, with character actor Lloyd Nolan expertly cast as Shayne, with a quite good adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The High Window called Time to Kill – screenwriter Clarence Upson Young changed Philip Marlowe to Michael Shayne but kept the rest of the character names the same and crowded as much of Chandler’s novel as he could fit into a script for a movie lasting slightly over an hour – PRC picked up the rights to “Michael Shayne” and made a series of five films with Hugh Beaumont (mostly a comic actor best known as the father on the TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver) playing him.

Alas, instead of putting their best people in charge of the Shayne movies (one wonders what director Edgar G. Ulmer could have done with the character), they gave the films – at least the first two – to the bizarre family of producer Sigmund Neufeld, director Sam Newfield (Sigmund’s brother, though he Anglicized the name) and assistant director Stanley Neufeld (Sigmund’s son and Sam’s nephew). Sam Newfield was an all-purpose hack who made some better-than-average horror films for PRC – The Mad Monster, Dead Men Walk and The Monster Maker – but he was hopeless as a thriller director. The present film was called Larceny in Her Heart and was written by Raymond L. Schrock as a screen “original” – though in general the Shayne films that were originals rather than adaptations of either “Halliday’s” or other people’s stories weren’t as interesting – but it’s an odd title indeed because the central female character isn’t a criminal but a victim. She’s Helen Stallings (Marie Hannon), stepdaughter of Burton Stallings (Gordon Richards, a quite good character actor with a similar authority and style to Lionel Atwill). Burton Stallings shows up at Michael Shayne’s office (a storefront that apparently is a live-work space on a single floor) with a check for $500 and a job for Shayne to find his missing stepdaughter Helen. Burton gives Shayne a photo of Helen and tells him she’s disappeared and he wants Shayne to find her. There’s a catch: Shayne was about to take his long-suffering secretary and girlfriend Phyllis Hamilton (Cheryl Walker, repeating the role from the first PRC Shayne, Murder Is My Business, but used much less effectively here) on a vacation to San Francisco, and she was willing to accompany him not only to get out of town for a while but in hopes that he’d marry her.

There are some nice shots of Hugh Beaumont fingering Burton Stallings’ check and trying to decide whether to tear it up, send it back to him in the mail, or cash it and take the job. Eventually, he takes the job (of course!) and sends Phyllis off on their trip alone while he settles in and starts looking for the mystery woman. Then the mystery woman shows up in Shayne’s storefront office, obviously under the influence of something or other (writer Schrock couldn’t get too specific about what it was because of the Production Code ban on drug use in films. but it was a lot more potent than alcohol). She collapses unconscious on Shayen’s office couch, and then Shayne closes his door to admit several members of official law enforcement, including detecdtive sergeant Pete Rafferty (Ralph Dunn , also repeating his character from Murder Is My Business), who’s convinced that private detectives are crooks and Michael Shayne is the biggest crook of all. Once Shayne gets rid of the cops (at least temporarily) and checks on Helen again, he finds out she’s dead. Shayne is able to trace Helen to a sanitarium for alcoholics run by Doc Patterson (Douglas Fowley, who mostly played villains for PRC – though he’s the male lead, an executioner who’s obliged to put his girlfriend to death when she’s convicted of a murder she did not commit, in one of PRC’s few truly great films, Steve Sekely’s 1944 Lady in the Death House, and he occasionally played a minor role in a major film: he’s the director in the 1952 musical classic Singin’ ini the Rain).

It turns out that Burton Stalllings is the villain – he’s holding Helen there under lock and key in a room with bed restraints, and in order to supply a corpse so he can declare Helen “dead” and grab her fortune (presumably from her biological dad), he’s induced another woman patient at the sanitarium, Barbrar Brett (whose resemblance to Helen is so remarkable they’re both played by Marie Hennon) to come out with him so he could kill her, pass her off as Helen, and grab Helen’s fortune for himself. Shayne deduces all this and gets himself admitted to Patterson’s sanitarium by posing as an alcoholic, drenching himself with cheap booze to make it convincing, and he’s duly taken to the place and put through a series of harsh regimens, including being bathed in ice water. Eventually he traces Helen to the locked room where she’s being held, somehow gets in absurdly easily, and signals to his friend, reporter Tim Rourke (Paul Bryan) – we also saw that character in Murder Is My Business, though in that film he was played by a different actor, Richard Keene, and he’s a lot more important here – as well as his faithful girifriend/secretary Phyllis, who it turns out didn’t leave on her vacation without him, where she is. Eventually the cops show up and Dr. Patterson tries to get them to arrest Shayne, but instead Shayne is able to convince Rafferty’s superiors that the sanitarium owner and the stepfather are the real bad guys and they are duly arrested instead.

The finale features Shayne and Phyllis about to leave when a large guard at the sanitarium punches out Shayne for having insulted him earlier, and Phyllis takes advantage of Shayne’s unconsciousness to drive off on their joint vacation and proclaims their destination as “Niagara.” (Given that we’re in the L.A. area and Niagara Falls is in upstate New York, that would be quite a drive!) Charles liked Larceny in Her Heart better than he had Murder Is My Business, though he acknowledged the sheer preposterousness of Schrock’s plotline – particuloarly the coincidence that Barbara Brett just happens to show up at Shayne’s live-work space just in time for Burton Stallings to kill her and frame Shayne for it. I found it excruciatingly dull and lamented that someone with a greater sense of excitement and suspense than Sam Newfield hadn’t directed it (though, let’s face it, PRC could probably have hired one of the homeless guys off Sunset Boulevard and had a director with more of a sense of excitement and suspense than Sam Newfield!). Also, Hugh Beaumont, who had seemed at least partially credible as a tough guy in Mirder Is My Business, seemed just too lightweight this time around, and I would have liked to see more use made of Cheryl Walker’s character than just having her in the background for most of the film, whining that she can’t get Michael Shayne to take her on that long-planned and oft-delayed vacation.