This Side of the Law (Warner Bros., filmed 1948, released 1950)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 5) my husband Charles and I ended up watching a film on Turner Classic Movies as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” series. It was a real oddity from 1950, a Warner Bros. production called This Side of the Law starring Vivica Lindfors, a Swedish actress they’d imported in hopes that after Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, lightning would strike three times and they’d be able to develop a Swedish actress into a major star. They made her Errol Flynn’s co-star in an elaborate 1948 swashbuckler called The Adventures of Don Juan and put her in a leaden melodrama called Night Unto Night, directed by Don Siegel (who married her; it was his first marriage but her third) and co-starring Ronald Reagan (totally out of his depth) in a drama about amnesia based on a story by Philip Wylie. That one was filmed in 1947 but not released until 1949. This Side of the Law had another long delay, filmed in 1948 but not released until 1950. It occurred to me when I read the imdb.com synopsis – “A drifter is bailed out of jail by a lawyer, who hires him to impersonate a millionaire until the man can be declared legally dead and the estate settled. However, the man soon finds out that things are not exactly how they seem” – that This Side of the Law is the movie Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour would have been if Ulmer and his writer, Martin Goldsmith, had taken up the hint they dropped briefly and then abandoned of having their down-and-out hero pass himself off as the long-missing heir to a major fortune.

Directed by Richard Bare from a story by veteran pulp writer Richard Sale and a script by Russell L. Hughes, it begins with David Cummins (Kent Smith of Cat People, The Curse of the Cat People, and The Fountainhead fame) lamenting that he’s been thrown down an old well at the Sans Souci (he makes sure to reflect on the irony of the place literally being named “Without Care”) and literally can’t climb out again because the inside walls are so slimy. He then delivers a flashback on how he got there: he was on the street, casually eyeing a gun in a store window, when a cop came by and arrested him for vagrancy. He’s taken to night court, where an unscrupulous attorney named Philip Cagle (Robert Douglas) pays his $50 fine and spares him the 30-day jail sentence that would otherwise have been his fate. Cagle has a job for him: to go to Sans Souci and impersonate the long-lost heir, Malcolm Taylor, who’s been missing for six years and 10 months. The time frame is important because if Malcolm doesn’t turn up after having been missing for seven years, his relatives – wife Evelyn (Vivica Lindfors), brother Calder (John Alvin) and sister-in-law Nadine (Janis Paige, mostly known for comedies and musicals but in a considerably darker role than her norm) – can have him declared legally dead and help themselves to his $3 million inheritance. Cummins is able to bid up the price from $500 to $5,000 but agrees to go through with the job. He already strikingly resembles Malcolm Taylor, and Cagle gives him two weeks’ worth of briefings on the history of the man as whom he’s going to pass himself off. Cagle finishes David’s indoctrination with the warning that his brother Calder can’t stand him, and Malcolm’s old dog Angel will only recognize him if he wears clothes Malcolm wore that still have his scent on them. (It’s hard to believe enough of the aroma would linger after seven years, but that’s at best a minor inconsistency in a hastily assembled plot that’s full of them.)

When he arrives at Sans Souci he finds not only that Calder doesn’t like him, his wife Evelyn can’t stand him either, mainly because he’d had a number of extra-relational activities and his latest affair with Calder’s wife Nadine was the final straw. Nadine is the first one to “out” him after noticing that David’s wrists are not scarred – the real Malcolm got permanent scars from a childhood fight with Calder – though she agrees to keep quiet about it for a share of the $3 million. Then David overhears Nadine call Cagle and realizes that the two are involved in a plot together. Cagle, angry at what he considers Nadine’s double-cross, lures her to a secluded spot on the estate overlooking a cliff, kills her, and pushes her body off the cliff. The police rule Nadine’s death an accident, and David is ready to walk out of the whole business and leave Sans Souci, but Cagle offers him a ride to town and then knocks him out and throws his unconscious body into the well. While he’s down there he sees a skeleton with the identification bracelet of Malcolm Taylor, so he realizes the real Malcolm was murdered. Unable to get a grip on the side walls of the well because they’re covered in slime, David works out a way to escape by climbing out horizontally and edging his way up. He gets out in time to save Evelyn from being murdered by Calder, who was going to throw her off the cliff. Cagle grabs a gun and tries to shoot David, but Evelyn sneaks up behind him while David is able to turn the lights out, so Cagle’s shots miss him. Cagle tries to flee, but Angel (the dog ex machina) attacks him and he falls to his presumed death down the well. With Calder arrested and Cagle dead, Evelyn is the legal heir, and she ends up not only with the fortune but also David, whom she’s decided she loves after all and refuses to press charges against.

Even Eddie Muller admitted that This Side of the Law – based on a Richard Sale story called The Doctor Deals in Death, though Hughes rewrote it so extensively that no doctor appears among the dramatis personae – isn’t a particularly good movie. What makes it interesting is that, though there’s nothing supernatural about it, Richard Bare and Russell S. Hughes give it the iconography of a horror film. There’s a portrait on the wall, presumably of a Taylor ancestor, that is strikingly reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, which had me thinking that for sheer family dysfunctionality, the Taylors rival Poe’s Ushers and J. B. Priestley’s and James Whale’s Femms. They live in an old dark house perched on the side of a cliff overlooking a seashore (as most of Roger Corman’s characters would in his succession of “B” horrors for American International in the 1960’s), and cinematographer Carl E. Guthrie gives it the dark, shadowy, Gothic lighting of a horror film. Even the incomprehensibility of the plot, the sheer level of uncertainty as to who’s doing what to whom and why, makes this film seem more like a horror movie and less like film noir.

It also occurred to me that in 1949, while This Side of the Law was still in the Warner Bros. vaults, Josephine Tey published a novel called Brat Farrar, another tale of an elaborate impersonation of a long-lost heir to secure a fortune, which is everything This Side of the Law should have been but wasn’t. Tey (true name: Elizabeth Mackintosh) created genuine suspense as the impostor fools everyone in the family except his twin brother, who knows very well he can’t be the real heir because he murdered the real heir. She created a brilliant climax on the side of a cliff that succeeds in creating a genuine sense of terror, whereas the equivalent scene in This Side of the Law is just perfunctory and dull. Tey even explained why the impostor and the dead brother looked so much alike – it turns out he was actually a distant cousin from a branch of the family that had moved to the U.S. – whereas Sale, Hughes, and Bare just couldn’t be bothered and we were supposed to chalk up the resemblance as just another coincidence. Indeed, though Brat Farrar has been filmed for TV at least twice (once in the 1980’s and once more recently), I wish Alfred Hitchcock had made it in 1950 with the perfect actor, Cary Grant, for the lead(s). That would have been a film to conjure with!