Strange Bargain (RKO, 1949)

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

After that I watched the 1949 film Strange Bargain on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” telecast on Turner Classic Movies. I first heard of this movie in the 1970’s from William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film, which described it as having “a particularly cunning plot about a bankrupt businessman [Malcolm Jarvis, played by Richard Gaines] who plans to commit suicide, but asks his accountant, a man badly in need of money [Sam Wilson] (well played by Jeffrey Lynn), to change the evidence afterward to suggest murder so that his widow [Edna Jarvis, played by Katherine Emery from Val Lewton’s Isle of the Dead] will still be able to collect the insurance money which would be invalidated on a suicide death.” Malcolm Jarvis first disappoints Sam Wilson by not only turning down his request for a badly needed raise – Sam has a wife, Georgia (Martha Scott, top-billed), and two kids, Roddy (Michael Chapin) and Hilda (Arlene Gray), and both of them want bicycles and other items Sam can’t afford to get them on his meager salary – but telling Sam he’s about to be laid off because the firm is going broke. Then he offers him the particularly cunning proposition Everson referred to and says he’ll pay him $10,000 in cash for it – and when Sam asks why, if he has $10,000 to spare, he doesn’t put that in to the business to salvage it, Malcolm explains that since he owes $250,000, $10,000 would be a useless drop in the bucket. It also turns out that until three months previously Malcolm’s and Edna’s life insurance policies were just for $50,000, but he’s upgraded it to $250,000 – which would seem to give the cops ample reason to suspect insurance fraud of some kind. When Sam shows up to carry out his end of the strange bargain – he’s supposed to pick up the gun Malcolm used to shoot himself and fire two bullets through the window from outside so the police will suspect a random killer – Malcolm is already dead but not by his own hand.

The cops interrogate and surveil all the firm’s surviving principals, including Sam and also Malcolm’s business partner Timothy Hearne (Henry O’Neill), who had been after Malcolm to sell his share in the firm to him; and the company’s rather twitchy secretary, Miss Vantay (Betty Underwood), who in any other film noir would be a femme fatale who got her romantic hooks into Malcolm Jarvis and bled him dry financially, then killed him. Only the real killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Edna Jarvis, who figured Malcolm was going to wimp out on his plan to kill himself and leave her the insurance money. So she shot him herself, and though this means she can’t collect the insurance, her and Malcolm’s son Sydney (Raymond Roe) can and ultimately will, while Sam is exonerated and gets a promotion from assistant bookkeeper to head bookkeeper after Hearne buys out Jarvis’s share and takes over. Eddie Muller said he thought the film’s ending was a cop-out and cited a Murder, She Wrote episode from 1987 that was essentially a sequel to Strange Bargain, with Jeffrey Lynn and Martha Scott repeating their roles as they had naturally aged – only in the Murder, She Wrote version Sam had just been released following a 17-year sentence for insurance fraud. A number of other characters also returned from the first film, either with the same actors or replacements of similar vintage (Murder, She Wrote star Angela Lansbury often had the show’s writers create older characters for which she could use friends of hers from her early days in Hollywood). William Everson noted that the most interesting character in Strange Bargain is the lead police investigator on the Jarvis murder, Lt. Richard Webb (Henry Morgan, the only actor in the film whose work I know at all well, mainly from his iconic TV roles as Jack Webb’s partner in the 1960’s reboot of Dragnet and Col. Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H), who uses a cane throughout and is a good example of the dogged, determined law officer who achieves through persistence (and a Columbo-style knack for annoying the principal suspect into confessing – at one point he even says, “Just one more thing … ”) what other movie cops could only accomplish with fisticuffs or bullets.