Murder Is My Business (PRC/Pathé, 1946)

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

After that my husband Charles and I watched tie first of five movies made by the cheap PRC studio (their initials actually stood for “Producers’ Releasing Corporation,” though the quality of their movies. with a few surprising exceptions, was generally so bad Hollywood wags joked the initials really meant “Pretty Rotten Crap”) dealing with the character of private detective Michael Snayne. Michael Shayne was the creation of pulp writer Davis Dresser, who wrote in all the major pulp genres and used different pen names for each one, though because his mysteries were by far his most successful works, the name he wrote them under, “Brett Halliday,” became his most famous identity. Michael Shayne first hit the big screen in a series of seven “B”-movies made by 20th Century-Fox between 1940 and 1942 starring veteran character actor Lloyd Nolan as Shayne. Then, as they had with an even longer-running detective series featuring Charlie Chan, 20th Century-Fox canceled the Shayne series in 1942 and let the rights go to a “B” studio, in this case PRC instead of Monogram. PRC’s production team on their first Shayne movie, Murder Is My Business, was producer Sigmund Neufeld, director Sam Newfield (his brother – as one of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 team joked when they showed one of the brothers’ PRC films, “They must have got onto differeent lines at Ellis Isiand”), and with Stanley Neufeld (who, according to imdb.com, was Sigmund’s son and therefore Sam’s nephew) as assistant director. The screenwriter was Fred Myton, who had written several horror films for PRC before taking on the Shayne series, including a creative “take” on the Dracula legend called Dead Men Walk which anticipated Anne Rice’s innovations, notably in having fire rather than a wooden stake be the means of dispatching an undead person.

This was also the first Michael Shayne film since the very first episode at 20th Century-Fox, Michael Shayne, Private Detective, to be based on an actual “Brett Halliday” novel instead of a story either taken from another detective writer (including Raymond Chandler, whose 1942 novel The High Window served as the basis for the last Shayne film at Fox, Time to Kill) or concocted by Fox’s own writers. The “Halliday” novel Murder Is My Business is taken from is one called The Uncomplaining Corpses (note the plural), and one gets the impression that “Halliday’s” story and Myton’s script had the potential for a much better movie than the one that actually got made. Michael Shayne was played by Hugh Beaumont, whose biggest claim to fame is as Ward Cleaver, the father on the 1957-1963 TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver – I’ve never seen the show but Charles has, and he joked that if the kids on Leave It to Beaver saw this movie they’d ask, “Dad, when were you a private detective?” Beaumont isn’t bad in the role; he’s no Humphrey Bogart or Dick Powell (Dick Powell’s career transformation from boy crooner to film noir icon is one of the most successful transitions, artistically and commercially, in Hollywood history), but he acts with enough power and authority to be believable in the role – maybe not at Lloyd Nolan’s level, but certainly a lot better than George Montgomery’s terrible performance in The Brasher Doubloon, Fox’s awful 1947 remake of The High Window/Time to Kill as a Marlowe movie. And he’s got a marvelous co-star in Cheryl Walker as Phyllis Hamilton, Shayne’s secretary and sort-of girlfriend (in “Halliday’s” novel they had just got married, but there’s no indication in the film of anything more than a vague romantic interest between the two).

Shayne’s services are requested by Eleanor Ramsey (Helene Heigh), second wife of Arnold Ramsey (Pierre Watkin), who claims to have received threatening letters from a former boyfriend, Carl Meldrum (George Meeker), whom she had an extra-relational affair with, which she ended when she realized that he was no good. Now Meldrum is paying court to Eleanor’s stepdaughter Dororthy Ramsey (Julia McMillan, who does spoiled rich brat quite well), and when Eleanor tries to warn Dorothy that Meldrum is worthless both financially and as a human being, Dorothy responds by telling Eleanor, “Just because you couldn’t keep him, you want me to dump him, too,” or something along those lines. Eventually Eleanor is found strangled in her bed at home, and shortly thereafter Carl Meldrum turns up dead, too. Police detective Pete Rafferty (Ralph Dunn), who’s long hated private detectives in general and Michael Shayne in particular, suspects Shayne of the murders and makes him the number one suspect. Once Shayne took Eleanor Ramsey’s case, her husband Arnold made him a strange offer of $1,000 to break into his wife’s bedroom and steal her jewels so he could file a phony insurance claim and get $250,000 he needs immediately to close a business deal. (In “Halliday’s” novel Arnold Ramsey was a real-estate developer, but just what his business is is not clear in Myton’s script.)

Shayne turns down the offer but an old friend of his, Joe Darnell (Parker Garvin), is tempted by it and, against Shayne’s advice, decides to visit the Ramsey home and commit the robbery. Joe Darnell is established as an ex-con whom Shayne tried to encourage to go straight, but he’s been unable to find legitimate employment due to hsi criminal record, and he and his wife Dora (Virginia Christine) are in penury, living off occasional handouts from Shayne. Only Joe Darnell is shot dead by Arnold Ramsey, ostensibly in self-defense as Joe tried to rob him, and Dora shows up at Shayne’s office blaming him for her husband’s death and holding a gun on him – Phyllis easily disarms her, but the scene is still the most powerful one in the film. Once we realize that, contrary to our initial expectations that Eleanor was a gold-digger and she married Arnold for his money – the truth is the other way around; it was Eleanor who had money and Arnold who was scrambling financially – it’s no surprise that Arnold Ramsey masterminded the murder of his wife and her one-time lover, which he pulled off with the aid of long-time criiminal turned nightclub owner Buell Renslow (Lyle Talbot, whose presence here puts this entire cast one degree of separation from Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis and Ed Wood). The opening reel of Murder Is My Business promises a much better movie than we get, with nice noir compositions by PRC’s house cinematographer, Jach Greenhalgh (no doubt taking advantage of the lessons he learned from Eugen Schufftan when they worked together on Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard, one of the few truly great movies made by PRC), before it falls into the slovenliness all too typical of the Neufeld brothers’ work.