Too Many Winners (PRC, Pathé, 1947)

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

Before The Lodger Charles and I dug out a DVD of the five Michael Shayne movies made by PRC in 1946 and 1947 and watched the final one in the sequence, Too Many Winners. I was surprised when the opening credits announced this as a production of “The New PRC” – I assume that got stuck on as a reference to the recently completed sale of PRC to British film mogul J. Arthur Rank, who bought the company as a guaranteed outlet for his British productions and changed its name to Eagle-Lion to reflect its coming together of U.S. and British enterprise. Too Many Winners was produced and directed by different people than the previous PRC Shaynes – John Sutherland instead of Sigmund Neufeld as producer and William Beaudine instead of Sam Newfield as director – and there were a few cast changes, too, notably in the recasting of Phyllis Hamilton, Shayne’s secretary and girlfriend. The new Phyllis, Trudy Marshall, is quite a bit spunkier and feistier than her predecessors, Cheryl Walker and Kathryn Adams, as she determines to keep herself and Shayne on track to take their long-planned vacation (they’re going to visit a couple who have a house on a lake where shayne and Phyllis intend to go duck hunting, and the film opens with a quite amusing scene in which Shayne and Phyllis are practicing on duck callers). First a mysterious heavy-set man walks into Shayne’s office to offer him a #2,000 bribe not to take a certain case – but when Shayne tells him they’re going on vacation anyway, the guy walks out, apparently thinking that if they’re not going to be in town anyway, he can save himself the money he was going to bribe them with.

The next contact Shayne and Phyllis have with the outside world is with Albert Payson (John Hamilton), president of the Santa Rosita racetrack. But Shayne is out when Payson calls, and Phyllis takes the message but doesn’t pass it on for fear it would derail their vacation plans. When Shayne retuirns he gets a phone call, not from Payson but from femme fatale Mayme (pronounced “Mame”) Martin (Cl;aire Carleton, who delivers a hard-edged performance but exits the movie way too early), who offers to sell him sone unspecified information, which he refuses. Later Mayme gets an unexpected visit from Albert Payson, with whom she had a brief affair; it ended some time before, but Payson wrote her some steamy love letters which she’s been using to blackmail him. Payson pays Mayme $1,500 to regain the letters and leaves with them. As Shayne is leaving Mayme’s apartment, he’s kidnapped by two thugs who beat him up to get whatever it was Mayme told him, which was nothing, and when they can’t get any information out of him they dump his body – literally – in the city dump. When we see Mayme again she’s been killed; Shayne sent his friend, reporter Tim Rourke (Charles Mitchell), to Mayme’s apartment to see if he could get the information out of her, but Rourke arrives to find her dead and the place crawling with cops, including Shayne’s nemesis, police detective Peter Rafferty (Ralph Dunn), investigating the crime.

Shayne finally gets contacted by a representative of the Santa Rosita track, John Hardeman (Grandon Rhodes), who hires him to get to the bottom of a scheme to counterfeit winning tickets and thereby threaten to bankrupt the track. Hardeman gives Shayne an elaborate explanation of the security procedures the track maintains to keep that from happening, but writers Fred Myton and W. Scott Darling (the latter a name I’ve seen on Monogram’s Charlie Chan and Mr. Wong movies) never bother to explain just how the crooks are evading the protections. Maybe the Production Code Administration told them they couldn’t include what they called “imitable details of crime” in their script (a prohibition some of the films based on Raymond Chandler’s novels had trouble with). Snayne eventually traces the counterfeit tickets to a couple of hoods, Ben Edwards (Byron Foulger) and Gil Madden (Ben Welden), who years before were convicted of counterfeiting tickets for the Irish Sweepstakes. Madden was given a light sentence but Edwards got 20 to 50 years, though he later escaped and tried to go straight. He married and fathered a child, and he also invented a new sort of camera with which he hoped to make a legitimate fortune, but John Hardeman – the man who hired Shayne in the first place, remember? – discovered his past and used it to blackmail Edwards and Madden (who was the crook who tried to bribe Shayne to stay out of the case in the opening scene) to print the counterfeit racing tickets. Edwards kills Hardeman, but one of Hardeman’s thugs, Joe (Frank Hagney), kills Edwards. As the police close in, another member of Hardeman’s gang kills Joe and the police agree not to tell Mrs. Edwards and their child of his criminal past.

Like most of the PRC Shaynes with Hugh Beaumont, Too Many Winners seems to have the makings of a great film in its basic story premise, but the plot is way too convoluted and has too many red herrings and unexplained detours. As soon as Claire Carleton enters we seem to be in the world of classic film noir, but, alas, she’s killed almost as soon as she enters, sort of like Jerome Cowan in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon. Once again it’s a pity that, as long as they were changing directors, they didn’t get Edgar G. Ulmer, by far PRC’s finest filmmaker and one who could have really made something special out of this story instead of the farrago of nonsense it is.