Please Murder Me! (Gross-Krasne Productions,Distributors' Corporation of America, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (February 27) at 10 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a 1956 film noir, Please Murder Pe!, which is a great title that deserved a better film. Please Murder Me! was directed by Peter Godfrey from a committee-written script – veteran German director E. A. Dupont and David Chandler are credited with the “original” story and A. C. Ward and Donald Hyde with the actual screenplay – and judging from his quite good 1951 film noir The Scarf, Please Murder Me! might have been a better movie if they’d let Dupont direct it as well. The Scarf indicates that Dupont’s directorial chops hadn’t deteriorated during his years of exile after his 1925 German film Variety, a proto-noir in which Emil Jannings played a circus trapeze artist whose wife falls in love with his hunky young partner. (He murders both of them and the film is told in flashback as he’s being released from prison following the completion of his sentence – a surprising gimmick since it wasn’t easy to do flashbacks in a silent film.) Please Murder Me! is basically your standard-issue tale of a femme fatale, Myra Leeds (Angela Lansbury), who for the past two years has been married to a successful real-estate developer in Los Angeles, Joe Leeds (Dick Foran). But not only is she tired of him, she never loved him in the first place – all she was interested in was the money he was making from the post-war L.A. real-estate boom. So she hatches a plot to seduce Joe’s old Marine buddy from World War II, defense attorney Craig Calhoun (Raymond Burr), in which she will kill her husband and make it look like she did so in self-defense because she’d just told him that she wanted to leave him and he got angry and attacked her.

Thanks largely to a brilliant closing argument in which Calhoun reveals that he was Myra’s lover, she’s acquitted – only then Craig discovers that Myra really did plan the killing and she did so not because she was in love with him but with yet another man, struggling artist Carl Holt (Lamont Johnson), who had actually proposed to her before she married Joe but she had turned him down because he had no money. Because he helped her win acquittal for the murder of her husband, she’s home free due to double jeopardy and so the only way Craig can see she gets punished for her crime is if he can goad her into murdering him. The film is narrated as a flashback by Craig into a tape recorder (obviously someone on the writing committee had seen Double Indemnity) and it begins with by far its best sequence: an openign pre-credits scene in which a shadowy figure whom we later realize is Craig is shown walking down the classically mean streets of L. A. at night. He goes into a pawnshop and buys a gun – without any of that fol-de-rol about waiting periods or background checks – then loads it and takes it back to his office. Then the main credits come up and the intrigue, such as it is, starts. Charles put his finger on what’s wrong with this film: Angela Lansbury has virtually no sex appeal. She’s certainly a physically attractive woman, but it’s hard to see why three men in the dramatis personae are so hopelessly drawn to her she’s able to use them as pawns in her plot to grab a fortune.

Lansbury projects neither the allure of Barbara Stanwyck (whom director Godfrey had worked with in Christmas in Connecticut and The Two Mrs. Carrolls, the last a dreadful movie hardly worthy of its stars; the one film that co-starred Humphrey Bogart and Stanwyck should have been better than this!) in Double Indemnity nor the sheer animal ferocity of Ann Savage in Detour. In the end, Craig arranges for Myra to come to his office at 12:30 a.m. and she shoots him with his own gunas he’s dictating the flashback, only Craig also invited the prosecutor in her murder trial, Ray Willis (John Dehner) , to his office 10 minutes later and the tape, which has been running all the time, proves that she killed him and he didn’t commit suicide, as she briefly tries to claim. This print, an item in the 50-film “Crime Wave” boxed set, cut off the closing credits,while the imdb.com page for the film shows what’s ostensibly a clip from this film but turns out to be from a totally different (and probably better) movie, in which a married woman is seducing a man by offering him capital for a real-estate development from her soon-to-be dead husband. Also one can’t watch Please Murder Me! without being haunted by the iconic TV roles its two stars would play later; one imagines Perry Mason trying to warn Craig Calhoun about all the mistakes he’s making, white Jessica Fletcher would fault the whole absurdity of the plot and declare, “I could write something better than that!”