r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night shortly after 10 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the next-to-last of the five Michael Shayne mystery movies with High Beaumont as Shayne, Three on a Ticket. It was based on an actual novel by Davis Dresser, creator of the Michael Shayne character, under the name “Brett Halliday,” and like most of the films in the series was produced by Sigmund Neufeld, directed b y his brother Sam Newfield, and written by Fred Myton based on the "Halliday" novel. The book was entitled The Corpse Came Calling and that would have been a much better title for the movie, too, since it’s an almost literal description of the film’s opening sequence: fellow private investigator Jim Lacy (Brooks Benedict) stumbles into Shayne’s office. He’s not dead, of course, but he’s mortally wounded and the doctor who autopsies him later expresses amazement that he was able to travel as far as he was with a fatal gunshot wound. Once he’s inside Shayne’s office he dies in fact expire, and Shayne tells his long-suffering secretary and girlfriend Phyllis Hamilton (Cheryl Walker, making a welcome return to the series after being replaced in the immediately previous PRC Shayne, Blonde for a Day, by the considerably less feisty Kathryn Adams) to let him go out the back way before she calls the police. Shayne told Phyllis to make sure that the police think he wasn’t in the office yet when Lacy arrived. He adopts this subterfuge to avoid the cops, particularly Inspector Pete Rafferty (Ralph Dunn, making an unwelcome return to the series after the far better character actor Cy Kenbdall replaced him in Blonde for a Day), who has it in for Shayne and would love to pin a murder rap on him.
Then Shayne is visited in his office by Helen Brimstead (Louise Currie, whom I’d encountered before only as sympathetic characters in the Bela Lugosi Monograms The Ape Man and Voodoo Man, so it was surprising to see her give a quite impressive performance as a femme fatale), who gives Shayne a suspicious-sounding story about how she’s technically married to a gangster, Mace Morgan (Douglas Fowley, authoritative as usual even in a nothing role he could have played in his sleep). They separated some time before and Helen explains she’s fallen in love with a well-to-do man but she’s worried that he’ll dump her if he finds out about her sordid past. She tells Shayne she hired Lacy to track down Mace, who was convicted of armed robbery but escaped from prison, and since Lacy is now dead she wants to hire Shayne to find Mace and, if possible, kill him, Despite the title of the first PRC Shayne film, Shayne explains to Helen that murder is not his business, but he agrees to take her case and in gratitude she kisses him. Needless to say, Phyllis notices her lipstick on his lips and has the predictable jealous hissy-fit about it. Shayne goes to Helen’s apartment to discuss the case further, only he’s waylaid by a man who pulls a gun on him, but whom Shayne easily overpowers. Before that Shayne has been kidnapped by two thugs who were after something he recovered from Lacy’s buddy, a piece of a baggage claim check for a locker at Union Station. (Charles joked that the “Union Station” depicted in the film looks like a small-town train station; the real Union Station in L.A., which he’s been to, is much bigger.)
Then Shayne is summoned to the police station where Rafferty works and is told by Rafferty that the mystery man he tussled with in Helen’s apartment is actually a Federal agent named Pearson (Gavin Gordon) and Shayne should give him the piece of the baggage ticket he recovers from Lacy’s body. Rafferty and Pearson tell Shayne that the ticket is key to recovering a stat secret,the design of a new weapon, that spies for a “foreign government that means to do us harm” (given that World War II had been over for two years when this film was made, we assume it’s the Soviet Union) and that Pearson has been charged by the federal government with recovering. Only Shayne is wisely suspicious, and so are we if only because “Pearson” came off so much more like a thug than a lawman. At one point Shayne meets Helen at a local restaurant, only Mace finds them there and he pulls a gun on Shayne. Helen uses her own gun to shoot him dead, but in the end it turns out that Helen was actually part of the original crime. It seems that Mace, Lacy and a third man named Barton were all involved in the armed robbery of a Wall Street official in the first place, and they stuffed the loot in a suitcase and put it in the baggage lockers at Union Station. They divided the ticket into three pieces so none of them could double-cross then and recover the loot behind the others’ backs, only Helen hatched a plot to grab the loot for herself by killing the claimants and she shot Lacy as well as Mace (ballistic tests prove that both men were killed by the same gun). It was no surprise at all to learn that “Pearson” was actually an impostor – he was really Barton, the third man involved in the robbery – but it was a bit of a surprise to learn the big, scary government secret Pearson was supposedly charged with recovering didn’t exist at all, and neither did the rich boyfriend Helen was supposedly worried about losing in case he found out about her past.
Charles liked the film overall but, like me, thought the basic story deserved a much better movie than the one we got. He said the basic story reminded him of a Hitchcock movie – the MacGuffin that isn’t really a MacGuffin, the good people who turn out to be bad, the mysterious blonde of ambiguous morality. In fact a major studio, Warner Bros., had made a film called Three Strangers the year before that had points of similarity, particularly the common gimmick (also used in the 1942 Universal “B” Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon and another film in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Holmes series, 1946’s Dressed to Kill) of having the big secret divided into three parts, each useless without the others. (In Three Strangers, directed by Jean Negulesco from a story by John Huston and starring Sydney Greenstreet, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Peter Lorre, it was a winning lottery ticket.) Charles thought the standard characters of the Michael Shayne series – Shayne himself, Phyllis, Rafferty and the reporer/sidekick Tim Rourke (Pail Bryan, even more pointless than usual) – just detracted from a story that under a bigger budget from a major studio with “name” stars could have been a lot better than the film we have. The film also suffered from the usual problem facing the Shayne films, not just PRC’s five but the seven 20th Century-Fox hade between 1940 and 1942 with Lloyd Nolan as Shayne (a more credible actor in the part than Beaumont, of whom Charles joked based on his most famous role as the father on Leave It to Beaver, “June? Wally? Where’s the Beaver?,” and I joked back that June would say,, “Ward, you’re the private eye. You find him!”): uncertainty of tone. For films made at thew height of the film noir cycle the PRC Shaynes seem oddly to be mostly ignorant of it – though there are some nice moments, like the scene in which the thugs kidnap Shayne and drive him to the docks, and it looks like the film at least temporarily exited the comfortable world of the comedy-mysteries of the 1930-’s ane entered the noir underworld.
