Find the Blackmailer (Warner Bros., 1943)

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

The last item on TCM’s “B” film tribute July 20 was Find the Blackmailer, a really quirky movie that attempted to turn Jerome Cowan, a first-rate character actor, into a star by casting him as a private detective. The inspiration seems to have come from Cowan’s all-too-brief performance as Miles Archer in the 1941 film of The Maltese Falcon (in which he was killed in the first reel; I remember watching The Maltese Falcon with my brother and he was disappointed we didn’t get to see more of Cowan). It’s the usual fooforaw about a “reform” candidate for Mayor, John M. Rhodes (Gene Lockhart), who’s worried because a professional blackmailer, Mitch Farrell (Bradley Page), has supposedly trained a pet crow belonging to him to denounce Rhodes as a murderer. Rhodes hires detective D. L. Trees (Jerome Cowan) and his long-suffering secretary Pandora Pines (Marjorie Hoshelle) to recover the bird, but in the meantime one of Mitch’s many enemies gets to him and kills him. Now Rhodes really feels like he’s up against it: there’s a dead body and a crow which will accuse him of killing the guy. There’s also a “bad girl,” nightclub singer Mona Vance (Faye Emerson, who later left the movie business to marry one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s sons, Elliott, in 1944; they broke up in 1950 and she next married bandleader Skitch Henderson, but that too didn’t last), and naturally when Trees goes off to interview her about the case Pandora gets predictably jealous. There’s also a hanger-on named Ray Hickey (John Harmon) who turns out to be behind the whole blackmail plot; since crows (unlike pigeons or parakeets) can’t imitate human speech, he used his talents as a ventriloquist to make it seem like the crow could talk. I remember seeing Find the Blackmailer at my stepfather’s home in the 1970’s but not having encountered it since then, and about the only thing I recalled about it is the appearance the crow makes in the closing scene after we’ve heard it talked about – but haven’t actually seen it – all movie. Find the Blackmailer was written by the ubiquitous Robert E. Kent (who would sit at his typewriter and crank out stuff while describing to anyone within earshot the baseball game he’d attended the night before) based on a short story called “Blackmail with Feathers” by G. T. Fleming-Roberts. It was directed by D. Ross Lederman, who had one great movie on his résumé – End of the Trail, the 1932 pro-Native American Western its star, Tim McCoy, was inspired to make from his participation in an oral history of the battle of the Little Big Horn in the 1920’s that’s basically been described as Dances with Wolves 48 years early. But aside from that, he’s pretty much a worthless hack of whom I’ve joked, “Never trust a director whose name looks like it should have the letters ‘D.D.S.’ after it!”