Missing Evidence (Universal, 1939)

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

When my husband Charles got home from work Sunday, September 7, I wanted to watch a movie I’d encountered on YouTube that proved to be a refreshing antidote to the darkness, dreariness, and nihilism of Sugar Mama: Missing Evidence, a 1939 Universal “B” directed by Phil Rosen from a story by Dorell and Stuart McGowan and a script by Arthur T. Horman. Though there’s something of a mystery in the title – the plot didn’t deal with missing evidence and it seems the “suits” at Universal just took an adjective and a noun that together would give the impression of “thrillericity” and made that their title – Missing Evidence turned out to be a well-made movie about an unusual racket: the counterfeiting of sweepstakes tickets. The film opens with an oddly psychedelic-looking shot of a wire basket being swung around. It turns out that’s the drawing for the Havana Sweepstakes, which like the real-life Irish Sweepstakes combines an opportunity drawing and a horse race. If you draw a lucky number you get a stake in a horse running in a race; if your horse either wins or finishes in the money you’re in line for a major payout. The movie opens with a mock newsreel featuring interviews with various people who’ve won sweepstakes jackpots. It then cuts to Senator Andrew Hodges (Guy Usher) giving a warning directly to the camera that it’s illegal for Americans to bet on sweepstakes and warning that a lot of the tickets being sold for these events are actually counterfeits. Two members of a gang specializing in counterfeiting sweepstakes tickets, Paul Duncan (Noel Madison) and Marty Peters (Joseph Downing) leave the theatre after this newsreel is shown, and Marty worries that their revenue from phony sweepstakes tickets will go down. Duncan assures him on the any-publicity-is-good-publicity principle that this will actually promote the enterprise.

The good guy is FBI agent Bill Collins (Preston Foster), who’s aware that the bad guys are hiding their phony sweepstakes tickets inside boxes of cigars and distributing them to hotel cigar stands, where the sales clerks offer them to selected customers. Among the sales clerks who do this is Our Heroine, Linda Parker (Irene Hervey), in whom Collins takes not only a professional but a personal interest. He’s trying to date her, she keeps putting him off, and when he takes her down to FBI headquarters along with one of her cigar distributors, Jerry Howard (Chick Chandler), the two lie and say they had no knowledge of the sweepstakes tickets hidden in the cigar boxes. Jerry is also dating Linda’s roommate Nellie Conrad (Inez Courtney), who works across the hall from Linda as the phone operator in the “Tilton Hotel.” (The real-life Hilton hotel chain was founded in Dallas in 1919.) Linda’s and Jerry’s willingness to shield the crooks gets reversed big-time when the Tilton’s elderly, long-suffering Irish elevator operator, John “Pop” Andrews (Oscar O’Shea), is heartbroken when he thinks he’s won $75,000 in the Irish Sweepstakes, then learns that he didn’t win anything because his ticket was counterfeit. Andrews responds by committing suicide; there’s the sound of a gunshot and then his body falls out of an open window. (I read the scene as him shooting himself at the window and then pushing himself out of it, to make sure that even if the bullet didn’t kill him, the fall would. It’s common for real-life suicides, including Robin Williams, to prepare more than one way of death and do all for which they have time.) The shock of the charming old man’s self-inflicted death shocks both Linda and Jerry into cooperating with Bill’s investigation, and Linda starts dating Bill as well.

Bill arranges for Linda to get “fired” from her job and instructs her to approach Paul Duncan for a job in his criminal enterprise. Duncan is reluctant at first, but Linda talks him into it by suggesting that he market his phony sweepstakes tickets to women by targeting beauty parlors and other places women frequent. Ultimately she works her way into the operation and gets access to the all-important lists of distributors. There’s also a lot of palaver about how Bill and the FBI don’t want to bust just low-level operators like Duncan; they want to track down “Mr. X,” the overall head of the phony sweepstakes tickets racket. There’s a great scene in which Bill and Linda, alone in Duncan’s office, have to write down all the distributors’ names before Duncan returns – a low-tech version of the climax of The Firm (1993), in which the big suspense issue was whether Tom Cruise’s character would finish copying the papers documenting the law firm’s Mafia connections before his bosses caught him at it. (When I saw Bill and Linda laboriously copying the information in notebooks, I briefly wondered why they weren’t using spy cameras to photograph them. I guessed they hadn’t been invented yet, but the first spy camera was developed by Robert T. Gray in 1885 and the best-known, the Minox, was designed in 1922 by Walter Zapp in Germany and first manufactured in 1936.) With that information, the FBI, with the help of local police forces, are able to organize simultaneous nationwide raids on the phony sweepstakes ticket distributors that essentially put the racket out of business overnight. Duncan tries to get Linda to run away with him, telling her that he is the mysterious “Mr. X” in charge of the whole operation. That surprised me – I’d assumed the writers were going for having “Mr. X” turn out to be an apparently respectable person, maybe even someone high up in law enforcement – but Charles said it hadn’t been a surprise to him. Ultimately the cops track down the fleeing Duncan and Bill shoots out the tires of Duncan’s car, hanging precariously out of his own vehicle to do so. Duncan is arrested and Jerry and Nellie move into a honeymoon cottage one of Jerry’s friends had designed – while Bill and Linda move into the one next door and, when they close the heart-shaped front-door window, the words “The End” are printed on it.

Missing Evidence was a major relief after the nihilism of Sugar Mama, heartwarming in its very predictability, its Production Code-driven insistence that the bad guys must be punished in some way. It was also a surprisingly well-done movie for a Universal “B,” looking a lot like a Warner Bros. movie except in the comparative restraint of its use of musical underscoring. What little music there was in the film was coordinated by Charles Previn, André’s uncle. It was driven effectively by Phil Rosen, who was on his way down from the two great movies he did in the early 1930’s (The Phantom Broadcast for Monogram 1.0 in 1933 and Dangerous Corner for RKO in 1934) to the total dreck he’d turn out by the yard for Monogram 2.0 in the 1940’s. It’s also capably acted; even Preston Foster comes off as a credible human being, though he’s never been one of my favorite actors. It still seems a shame that the lead role of “Killer” Mears in John Wexley’s play The Last Mile should have been played on Broadway by Spencer Tracy and in L.A. by Clark Gable, while the film version had to make do with Preston Foster, though as I wrote in my moviemagg blog post on The Last Mile (1932) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/05/last-mile-sono-art-world-wide-1932.html), “Foster, usually a terminally bland and dull actor, stepped into ‘Killer’ Mears’s skin and gave the performance of his lifetime.”