Exposed (Republic, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, February 10) my husband Charles and I watched a pretty quirky 1947 “B”-movie from Republic, Exposed, dealing with female private detective Belinda “B.” Prentice (Adele Mara), daughter of Inspector Prentice of the Los Angeles Police Department (Robert Armstrong), who gets involved in a case when Col. William K. Bentry (Russell Hicks) hires her to investigate mysterious withdrawals being made from his family’s account by his stepson, William Foresman III (Mark Roberts). Needless to say, writers Charles Moran and Royal S. Cole couldn’t resist doing the old gag of having Col. Bentry show up at B. Prentice’s office (a quite nice art deco space far more lavish than just about any other movie private detective’s office, especially for an individual practitioner rather than the head of an agency) and having him startled and shocked to find that “B. Prentice” is (insert double-take here) a woman! Col. Bentry didn’t have a fortune of his own; he got it from a second marriage to Foresman’s mother, who died before the film begins, and apparently he’d also been married before since he has an adult daughter, Judith Bentry (Adrian Booth, later known as Lorna Grey). We first meet B. when a thug named “Chicago” (Bob Steele, who like Mara and Booth appeared primarily in Westerns; most of his Westerns were written and directed by his father, Robert N. Bradbury, and frequently had plots in which Steele’s character had to avenge his father’s murder) tries to kidnap her. She’s saved by her slow-witted but indispensable assistant and muscleman, Iggy Broty (William Haade), who sneaks up behind “Chicago” and knocks the gun out of his hand. She shows up to Bentry’s mansion to discuss the case further, only when she arrives she finds Bentry dead of an apparent heart attack. He’s been stabbed with a letter opener, but there’s no blood around the wound and B. deduces that he was stabbed after death. She also finds the needle from a hypodermic syringe (in 1947 the two came separately instead of being joined together as they are now) and takes it in her handbag, wrapping it in a tissue instead of putting it in a sealed evidence bag. Later she turns it over to her father – who gives her a lecture about concealing evidence – and it contains traces of a near-magical poison that induces a heart attack in its victim and then disappears in the body without leaving a trace. (I remember a report from the 1960’s that the CIA had either developed such a poison or was working on it, but I don’t think it’s ever actually existed.)

Suspicion falls on the various members of Bentry’s household: his stepson; his daughter; his butler, Severance (Harry Shannon) – a former star attorney who became an alcoholic, got disbarred and hit bottom until Bentry rescued him and got him a job as a butler – his doctor, Dr. Richard (Colin Campbell), who was in the habit of giving Bentry regular injections of vitamins, into one of which the fatal dose was sneaked; and his attorney, Jonathan Lowell (Charles Evans). There are several bizarre subplots, including one that William Foresman III was making large withdrawals from the family bank account, not to indulge a drug habit or a femme fatale as in most movies, but to bankroll a scientific experiment by Professor Ordson (Paul E. Burns), who’s been working on a medical treatment for alcoholism. Unfortunately, Jonathan Lowell had been embezzling money from the Foresman family business and using William’s withdrawals to conceal it. At one point Col. Bentry had talked about bringing in accountants to do a forensic audit of his business, and Lowell had worried he’d be caught from this, so he killed Bentry by spiking his vitamin injection with the poison – though before we learn that writers Moran and Cole and director George Blair seem to be heading us into a Murder on the Orient Express-style denouement in which B. reviews the crime and shows that all the principal suspects could have had a hand in it. Later attorney Lowell is himself found shot dead, though that one turns out to be an accident in which both he and “Chicago” (ya remember “Chicago”?) Reached for the Gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for his new villa in Cabo) and “Chicago” shot Lowell accidentally. The movie creaks to a close with B. and William about to go on a date – she stiffs her old man in the process – and “Chicago” back to his namesake city, where the cops have several outstanding charges against him. What’s most disappointing about Exposed (which, by the way, features no characters that have the sorts of deep, dark secrets that need to be exposed) is that Messrs. Blair, Moran and Cole created a fascinating lead character and then did way too little with her. I’d have liked to see Adele Mara repeat her performance as B. Prentice in a much more interesting movie that would have made a better case for this trailblazing character, an ancestress of Kinsey Millhone and V. I. Warshawski and a tough, no-nonsense heroine in her own right.