The Disappearance of Cari Farver (Howard Braunstein Films, Milojo Productions,, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 Lifetime showed a movie called The Disappearance of Cari Farver, based on a real-life murder case from Nebraska in 2012 – though in the real case it took until 2016 to catch the culprit and hold them accountable for their crimes, while in the film it seems to happen a lot faster than that. It’s an interesting movie, not only because of the crime’s macabre aspects but because the principals were mostly in their late 30’s and already had been divorced and had teenage kids, but they were acting like horny young adolescents just having come into sexual maturity. After a brief opening scene and a typical Lifetime chyron reading, “Four months earlier,” the first thing we see are a man and a woman,obviously with the hots for each other, escaping a crowded dance club and heading for the roof of the building, where they start fucking then and there. We see in the corner of the screen another, relatively older couple coming up to the roof, presumably for more sedate purposes, and for a moment we’re convinced our two lovebirds will be caught, but they aren’t. It turns out the two hot-to-trot people on that roof are Dave Kroupa (Zach Gilford), a local mechanic who works at a transmission shop, and Shanna “Liz” Golyar (Alicia Witt, top-billed). However, Liz isn’t the only woman in Dave’s life; he’s also seeing Cari Farver (Rebecca Amzallag), a divorcée with a teenage son named Sam (a hauntingly beautiful young man named Brandon McEwan who turns in some of the best acting in the film).

Dave met Cari when her car malfunctioned on her way to work and she brought it into Dave’s garage to be repaired; at first Dave was reluctant to ask for her phone number, but, egged on by Dave’s boss Nick (Derek Kun), he finally gets her contact information and they start dating. Dave makes it clear to both the new women in his life that he doesn’t want an exclusive relationship with either of them – just casual sex – and though they’re no longer a couple he’s still very much involved with his ex-wife and the mother of his kids, Sara Brower (Lisa Marie Giacinto). Cari wants to move in with Dave but Dave is still too commitment-shy for that, and their relationship (such as it is) goes off the rails when Dave gets a call from Liz asking him to come over and unstick her bedroom window – only she’s had other things in mind and those other things duly happen when Liz greets him wearing a bathrobe and opens it in front of him. The next time Dave sees Cari he tells her what happened, and Cari seemingly goes ballistic with jealousy by clearing all her stuff out of his place and disappearing. Dave then receives a text message ostensibly from Cari declaring that the relationship is over and she never wants to see him again. During the next week or so no one hears from Cari, other than via text messages and e-mails. Cari’s mother Nancy Rainey (Lea Thompson) – she’s listed as “Nancy Farver” on the movie’s imdb.com page but she’s called by a different last name in the actual film – gets suspicious because she and Cari have called every day, and she’s even more suspicious when she doesn’t show up to take her father Dennis (Chris Sigurdson) for a medical appointment for his cancer.

When Cari doesn’t show up either for her cousin’s wedding or her dad’s funeral once he croaks, mom is certainshe’s met with foul play and she reports it to the police. The police assign two detectives, a Black one named Miller (Milton Barnes) and a white one named Adams (Bradley Sawatzky), and as the barrage of texts and e-mails allegedly from Cari keep coming in, the two decided to split their investigation, with Adams acting under the assumption that Cari is still alive and Miller assuming that Cari is dead and someone else is sending the harassing texts and e-mails in her stead. Eventually the cops obtain the phone records for both Dave and Liz, along with their permission to download everything. In the meantime the harassment campaign waged against Liz by Cari – or whoever is impersonating her – has escalated, from spray-painting Liz’s garage door with the words “DAVE’S WHORE” to burning down Liz’s house with all fou9r of her beloved pets inside. Liz even reports being accosted by a stranger with a gun who shot her inthe thigh. The police at first suspect Sara Browne, Dave’s ex, but ultimately, by discovering presumably deleted images on Liz’s phone, they conclude Liz herself was the killer: she murdered Cari out of jealousy and then used her electronic devices to impersonate her and create the impression that Cari is still alive. In one of her pretend e-mails Liz actually reveals details of the crime – including that it took place in Cari’s own SUV and Liz stabbed Cari repeatedly, leaving blood all over the passenger seat in the front – and among the images they find on Liz’s phone is a shot of a decomposing foot with a tattoo on it of a Chinese character meaning “Mother.”

Nancy recognized the tattoo as one Cari had had done, and once they know where to look the police find blood over the front passenger seat of Cari’s car, match it to DNA provided by Nancy from an old hair brush used by Cari, and determine that it was Cari’s blood in the car. Eventually Liz is convincted of Cari’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and an ambiguous title tells us that Dave and Sara have continued to “co-parent” their children – the ambiguity comes from the fact that during the later stages of the film Dave moved back in with Sara after the unknown assailant threw a rock at Dave’s bedroom and thereby threatened the kids – and though there’s no hint that Dave and Sara have reconciled and become a sexually or maritally inivolved couple, the implication is they’re still living together and jointly raising the kids. What makes The Disappearance of Cari Farver so fascinating is the sheer elaborateness of the imposture Liz staged to make it seem like Cari were still alive – according to an article on the Cinemaholic Web site (https://thecinemaholic.com/cari-farver-murder/), she spent 40 to 50 hours a day online for four years pretending to be Cari (as I mentioned above, the real case took a lot longer to soive than the movie makes it seem) – and also the role of electronics both in committing the crime and in solving it. Also one has to wonder about the psyche of someone who would literally burn down her house and shoot herself in the thigh just to maintain the imposture that some dastardly criminal was out to get her.

Live at the Belly Up: Thievery Corporation (Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 11 my husband Charles and I watched a qu9ite interesting Live at the Belly Up TV show from 2018 featuring a band called the Thievery Corporation. There were quite a few interstitial interviews with the band’s leader, Rob Garza, in which he explained that his inspiration for starting the band came from a high-school elective he took in electronic music in the 1970’s, where among other things he got to work with the early analog syntheizers, ring modulators, drum machines and the reel-to-reel tape recorders on which electronic music was captured and preserved. The Thievery Corporation’s Wikipedia page explains, “Thievery Corporation was formed in the summer of 1995 at Washington D.C.'s Eighteenth Street Lounge.[1] Rob Garza and Lounge co-owner Eric Hilton were drawn together over their mutual love of club life, as well as dub, bossa nova and jazz records. They decided to see what would come of mixing all these in a recording studio, and from this, in 1996 the duo started their Eighteenth Street Lounge Music record label.” According to Garza, when Thievery Corporation was about to release their first self-produced CD they were uncertain whether to order 500 or 1,000 copies. They decided to go for broke and order the 1,000 – and within days they got an order from a record store in Cologne, Germany saying how well their CD was se3lling and asking for 2,000 more copies. Thievery Corporation, according to Wikipedia, has just two full members – Garza and Eric Hilton – plus four “studio and touring musicians,” at least two of whom, drummer Jeff Franca and guitarist and sitarist Ron Myers, are key contributors to their sound. The other “studio and touring musicians”: are Frank Orrall on percussion and Ashish "Hash" Vyas on bass (an instrument Garza and Hilton are also listed as playing, by the way, along with guitars and percussion,though Garza’s main instrumental contribution is as a synthesizer player),

There are also a number of singers who have been added to what Garxa calls their “family” over the last few years, including Loulou Ghelichkhani from Iran and Racquel Jones from New Orleans. Thievery Coirpooration do a lot of rap – though at least it’s the kind of positive socially conscious rap of Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy rather than the crime- and capitalist-glorifying garbage that passes foremost “hip-hop” (the euphemism used for rap by people who like it) today. On previous Live at the Belly Up programs I’ve complained that the songs sounded good individually but tended to blend together and sound pretty similar after a whole; that is certainly not a problem with Thievery Corporation! Thanks at least in part due to the sheer multiplicity of singers and the variouis national origins Garza has brought them from, Thievery Corporation's songs sound radically different from each other, though the ones both Charles and I liked best were those featuring Loulou Ghelichkhani. According to Garza, they just picked her up for a session one time and, after the results, he invited her to join the band – and her two features here, “Love Has No Heart” and “Lebanese Blonde,” were clearly the best songs on the program. I’m not sure just what “Love Has No Heart” means, but it’s a haunting sentiment and Ghelichkhani sings it beautifully and eloquently. She’s also featured on “Lebanese Blonde,” which according to Garza isThievery Corporation’s most popular song since it was used ikn the 2004 independent movie Garden State,

My husband charles and I watched Garden State in 2020 and neither of us remembered the song, but in general I had nice things to say about the movie when Charles and I watched it in 2020 via a close-out DVD (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/03/garden-state-camelot-pictures-jersey.html), and the song itself if great, powered by Ghelichkhani’s voice The momentsand Rob Myers’ power chords on sitar (the only song in which they used this traditional Indian instrument). Other particularly strong songs on the program included “Letter to the Editor,” sung by Racquel Jones of New Orleans, and two songs featuring a French singer, Natalia Clavier: “Le Monde” (“The World”), sung entirely in French with Clavier using a bullhorn throughout, and “Time + Space,” sung partly in French and partly in English. The luricisn of those songs featuring female singers largely made up for the rap selections, including “Fight to Survive,” “Culture of Fear,” “Ghetto Matrix” and “Warning Shots,” though at least, as I noted above, these are more or less positive rap exposing the continuing oppression of African-Americans but without glorifying the thug life the way the “gangstas” do. There are also some songs in the “dub” style, reflecting the Jamaican music that is to classic reggae what African-American rap is to classic soul. Overall, though, Thievery Corporation is a quite impressive group, truly (as fellow Washington, D.,C. native Duke Ellington liked to say) “beyond category,” and even if they did a song I didn’t particularly care for I could relax and rest assured that the next soug would be something really good and beautiful.

The Mallorca Files : "To Kill a Stag" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Before they showed Live at the Belly Up last night KPBS aired another episode of a rather charming of sometimes annoying British mystery series, The Mallorca Files, in which British female detective Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys) and German male detective Max Winter (Julian Looman) are partners in the detective force on the island of Maiiorca, off the coast of Spain. Just why the Mallorcan authorities need to import their cops from other countries is never explained by series creator Dan Sefton, but the two have an interesting and rather curious chemistry. They are quite clearly drawn as having no romantic or sexual interest in each other – Nick and Nora Charles they definitely are not – but was they also don’t have the kind of mutual professional respect for each other Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni did for each other on the first 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit either. At one point Max is dumped by his latest flame, bartender and waitress Carmen Lorenzo (Tábata Cerezo), because he stood her up one night and didn’t even call, so she spent the evening worried that he’d been killed in the line of duty and never forgave him once he tried to make up with her. This particular episode of The Mallorca Files was called “To Kill a Stag” adh was directed by Rob Evans from a script by sarah-Louise Hawkins. It was an O.K. mystery, abit too campy for my taste but with a believable resolution of the myseroy. The murder victim is a man named Karl (Leo Woodruff) who is found dead in a swimmikng pool the nght before he was supposed to get married to Chloe Sumner (Natalie Simpson).

He was drowned in the pool while he had been rendered unconscious with a stun gun during a trick with prostitute who uses the absurd professionial name “Carina De La Noche” (Lauren Carse). Apparently she makes a specialty of picking married men whose wives are out of town for a few days and using he stun gun to rob them, but not killing them. She’s confident that her victims won’t report her to the police because then they’d have to admit they were spending time engaging in extra-relational activities with women other than their wives. The cops work out a pose by which Max will pose as a rich man at the local casino, thereby attracting Carina’s attentims, and they will arrest her while she’s with him. Only Carina insists that while she’s inicapacitated and robbed her tricks, she’s never killed one. It turns out the real killer is Torsten, who had a one-night stand with Claire and immediately fell in love with hier, while she saw it as just sex with no emotional involvement or commitment on her part. It turns out Torsten set up Karl’s trick with Carina in the first place, hoping that Claire would have a jealous hissy-fit, break off their engagement and turn to Torsten. When Claire didn’t react the way he wanted her to, he killed the unconscious Karl in the pool and drowned him. Then he confronted Claire and threatened to kill her, too, only the police arrived just in time, arrested Torsten and saved Claire from being nyrdered herself. It was an O.K. crime show, not as interesting as the Mallorca Files episode we’d previously watched, “The Oligarch’s Icon” (a quite good tale about art forgery and theft involving one of the corrupt Russian oligarchs that took over the country’s economy after the Soviet Union fell). but it had its points.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Mirror Effect: (Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 6, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago I watched three episodes in Dock Wolf’s various Law and Order series franchises. I’ve already commented on the Law and Order episode, and the Law and Order” Special Victims Unit show that followed it also began with one of the lead detectives personally witnessing a crime in progress. This time the witness is Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelly Giddish), who has developed into one of the most interesting and stimulating characters on television; her relationship with her boss, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), has developed some of the same complexity Benson had with Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) in the first 12 seasons of this show before Meloni regrettably moved on. (It’s a pity Meloni didn’t get the role that would have been perfect for him: as Jack Reacher in the series of films based on Lee Child’s novels. Instead it went to the abysmally miscast Tom Cruise.) This SVU was directed by Michael Smith from a script by old Law and Order hand Julie Martin and newbie Margaret Rose Lester. It was called “Mirror Effect” and dealt with s a celebrity couple, Austin Collins (Grant Anstine) and Kelsey Jones (Julie Goldani Tollen). Both are involved in music, and though we’re specifically told that Kelsey is a country singer it’s a lot less clear just what Austin does musically, though given what he looks lile and his overall attitude and demeanor, we get the impression he’s an Eminem-style singer-rapper. When I first saw the promos I thought Dick Wolf and his staff of writers and show runners were doing Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, though the story that actually unfolded came off more like Chris Brown and Rihanna even though they were Black and the principals here were both white.

Rollins witnesses an altercation in the limo between the two celebrity hatebirds in which he grabs her and tears her dress; later she presses charges but then withdraws them when he proposes marriage to her and gives her a huge, ostentatious engagement ring which she proudly shows off on social media. Then, behind the close doors of their hotel suite, they have another altercation and this time he out-and-out rapes her. Both singers came from dysfunctional families; Austin was raised by a single dad who was an alcoholic and Kelsey by a single mom who has her iwn set of issues. The parts of the story paralleling the Johnny Depp-Amber heard trial are the dueling fan bases of the two performers and how Austin’s fans trash Kelsey on both social media and in the courtroom itself; at one point Austin’s fans start wearing red pants to the courtroom as an indication tkat Kelsey is lying about him, and the prosecutor is able to get the judge to ban people in red pants – the gag is the old saying, “Liar, liar, pants on fire” – from the courtroom. IN the end Austin is acquitted of the most serious charges against him, rape in the first degree and sexual assault, but he’s convicted of the lesser crime of rape in the third degree (what’s the difference?), and in the final scene Kelsey is crying on the shoulder of Captain Benson and saying her career is ruined because all her songs were love songs to Austin and now that she hates him, she can’t sing them anymore. “You’ll write new songs,” Benson tells her – and I couldn’t help but savor the irony of her getting and taking career advice from a tough-as-nails police official who in real life is the daughter of Jayne Mansfield!

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Catch Me if You Can" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 6, 2022)

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by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed also had its points of interest, even though this show already has two strikes against it: the lack of character complexity in most of the writing and the obeisance to the Great God SERIAL that Dick Wolf and company have embraced for this series even though they’ve avoided it in the other two Law and Orders. I could have done without the plot strand of the breakup between Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), the Black Lesbian who’s Elliot Stabler’s (Chrfistopher Meloni) commanding officer, and her wife over her long absences from homa, let alone the custody battle over their son (whom we’ve never seen), but I quite liked this episode because at least for once they drew one character villain with some real dramatic complexity. He’s Kenny Kyle (Michael Drayer), and as the episode starts he’s on the run both from the cops and from Teddy Silas (Gus Halper), son of a crooked real-estate developer (I suspect the writers were thinking of Donald Trump Sr. and Jr. here) who’s building a huge casino in downtown Manhattan called “The Majestic” and is out to crush anyone in his way. Kenny Kyle was a hit man hired by Teddy Silas to kill a Black man who was holding out and refusing to sell his property that was on The Majestic’s proposed site, which Teddy did by buying African black rats from a corrupt animal dealer and introducing them into the Black guy’s apartment. The rats poisoned him and he ended up taking a header from his balcony and killing himself “accidentally,” but in the process Kyle himself got bitten by the rats, which are making him feverish and paranoid.

He’s living with a woman and passing her off as his sister, while his real sister, a girl named Emily, was taken away from him when she was still a baby after their parents died. In his maddened flight he hijacks a car with a baby inside, and naturally he thinks that’s Emily (who in the meantime has grown un in a family from out of state) and Bell is fortunately able to take him in alive instead of dead. She’s worried that Teddy Silas would eliminate him, and there’s an engaging subplot in wich Teddy’s wife hires a woman private investigator to find out if he’s having extra-relational activities, only Teddy buys her off and tells his wife that he knows all the P.I’s in New York and whatever she can pay one, he can pay them double to get off the case and go on his side. It reminded me of the despairing line in Orson Welles’ film Confidentlai Report, a.k.ak Mr. Arkadin, in which the central character realizes that Arkadin (Orson Welles) has hired him to investigate his past not just to see if his record is clear but to kill off anyone who might expose Arkadin’s past as a human trafficker. “Where in the world can I go? He owns half of it!” says the investigator (Robert Arden) – and both there and here one gets a chilling statement of how utterly impossible it is to hold the truly rich and powerful accountable for anything, whether their names are Arkadin, Silas or Trump.

Laqw and Order: "Vicious Circle" a.k.a. "Camouflage" (Wolf Entertainment.,Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 6,2022)

r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched the three weekly episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order ffranchise, starting with an episode of the flagship Law and Order program, “Vicious Cycle” (though the updated imdb.com page for the episode lists the title as “Camouflage”) in which a mass shooter takes over a Ne wYork subway car and methodically targets people who look Asian even though the car is filled with the usual ethnic mix of people who ride the New York subways. Assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy, a British actor who does a marvelous job suppressing his normal accent and talking like an American) happens to be in the scene – he had just finished a lunch date with his girlfriend de jour and was heading towards the subway station when he sees a whole bunch of people running in the opposite direction. He saves the life of Kimmy Hsu (Emily N. Rudolph), a young Asian woman whom he spies bleeding out on the station platform, and uses his tie as a tourniquet to stop her bleeding until a uniformed officer arrives. After a few red herrings – including a homeless man who picked up the gym bag with one strap torn that the killer used to carry his guns and ammunition – the police finally arrest the killer, John Nelson (Ian Bell), on a tip from his girlfriend, Jessica Farrell (Tru Collins), who’s married to someone else but has not only been in an ongoing relationship with Nelson but had a deaf-mute daughter by him.

The problem is Jessica wants Price to assure her that she’ll never have to have her name revealed or testify in open court – only the judge in the case, Arnold Pappas (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson), orders her to appear in court on a motion from Nelson’s attorney, Andrea Rankin (Claire Coffee), challenging the legitimacy of the search that uncovered Nelson’s murder weapon. This poses a crisis of conscience for Price as he had to agree, in order to retain jurisdiction of the case against the U.S. Department of Justice, to seek the death penalty for Nelson despite his personal opposition to capital punishment and his work, before he became a prosecutor, with Andrea on the Innocence Project designed to get people wrongly sentenced to death either new trials, outright acquittals or at least communtations of their sentences to life imprisonment. Time and time again Andrea reminds Nolan of his true feelings about the death penalty, including quoting him a law review article he wrote declaring it barbaric. Midway through the case Andrea changes her defense and calls in an expert witness, Dr. Stanley Thibodeau (Brad Haberlee), to testify that John Nelson did indeed kill people based on their race or ethnicity – but he’s not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect because he was raised by his dad to hate Asians and his prejudice went into hyper-drive by the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread blaming of it on China. Fortunately the jury sees through this B.S. and convicts Nelson of mass murder – and gives him the death penalty in the second phase of the trial – but Nolan is left feeling ashamed of the way he worked hard to get even a heinous monster a death sentence when he’s morally opposed to the idea of execution. It was a good Law and Order, but they’ve done better crisis-of-conscience episodes than this and I would have liked to see more about John Nelson himself, particularly about how someone so nondescript and seemingly harmless could be a vicious killer.

Three on a Ticket (PRC, Pathé, 1947)

r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night shortly after 10 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the next-to-last of the five Michael Shayne mystery movies with High Beaumont as Shayne, Three on a Ticket. It was based on an actual novel by Davis Dresser, creator of the Michael Shayne character, under the name “Brett Halliday,” and like most of the films in the series was produced by Sigmund Neufeld, directed b y his brother Sam Newfield, and written by Fred Myton based on the "Halliday" novel. The book was entitled The Corpse Came Calling and that would have been a much better title for the movie, too, since it’s an almost literal description of the film’s opening sequence: fellow private investigator Jim Lacy (Brooks Benedict) stumbles into Shayne’s office. He’s not dead, of course, but he’s mortally wounded and the doctor who autopsies him later expresses amazement that he was able to travel as far as he was with a fatal gunshot wound. Once he’s inside Shayne’s office he dies in fact expire, and Shayne tells his long-suffering secretary and girlfriend Phyllis Hamilton (Cheryl Walker, making a welcome return to the series after being replaced in the immediately previous PRC Shayne, Blonde for a Day, by the considerably less feisty Kathryn Adams) to let him go out the back way before she calls the police. Shayne told Phyllis to make sure that the police think he wasn’t in the office yet when Lacy arrived. He adopts this subterfuge to avoid the cops, particularly Inspector Pete Rafferty (Ralph Dunn, making an unwelcome return to the series after the far better character actor Cy Kenbdall replaced him in Blonde for a Day), who has it in for Shayne and would love to pin a murder rap on him.

Then Shayne is visited in his office by Helen Brimstead (Louise Currie, whom I’d encountered before only as sympathetic characters in the Bela Lugosi Monograms The Ape Man and Voodoo Man, so it was surprising to see her give a quite impressive performance as a femme fatale), who gives Shayne a suspicious-sounding story about how she’s technically married to a gangster, Mace Morgan (Douglas Fowley, authoritative as usual even in a nothing role he could have played in his sleep). They separated some time before and Helen explains she’s fallen in love with a well-to-do man but she’s worried that he’ll dump her if he finds out about her sordid past. She tells Shayne she hired Lacy to track down Mace, who was convicted of armed robbery but escaped from prison, and since Lacy is now dead she wants to hire Shayne to find Mace and, if possible, kill him, Despite the title of the first PRC Shayne film, Shayne explains to Helen that murder is not his business, but he agrees to take her case and in gratitude she kisses him. Needless to say, Phyllis notices her lipstick on his lips and has the predictable jealous hissy-fit about it. Shayne goes to Helen’s apartment to discuss the case further, only he’s waylaid by a man who pulls a gun on him, but whom Shayne easily overpowers. Before that Shayne has been kidnapped by two thugs who were after something he recovered from Lacy’s buddy, a piece of a baggage claim check for a locker at Union Station. (Charles joked that the “Union Station” depicted in the film looks like a small-town train station; the real Union Station in L.A., which he’s been to, is much bigger.)

Then Shayne is summoned to the police station where Rafferty works and is told by Rafferty that the mystery man he tussled with in Helen’s apartment is actually a Federal agent named Pearson (Gavin Gordon) and Shayne should give him the piece of the baggage ticket he recovers from Lacy’s body. Rafferty and Pearson tell Shayne that the ticket is key to recovering a stat secret,the design of a new weapon, that spies for a “foreign government that means to do us harm” (given that World War II had been over for two years when this film was made, we assume it’s the Soviet Union) and that Pearson has been charged by the federal government with recovering. Only Shayne is wisely suspicious, and so are we if only because “Pearson” came off so much more like a thug than a lawman. At one point Shayne meets Helen at a local restaurant, only Mace finds them there and he pulls a gun on Shayne. Helen uses her own gun to shoot him dead, but in the end it turns out that Helen was actually part of the original crime. It seems that Mace, Lacy and a third man named Barton were all involved in the armed robbery of a Wall Street official in the first place, and they stuffed the loot in a suitcase and put it in the baggage lockers at Union Station. They divided the ticket into three pieces so none of them could double-cross then and recover the loot behind the others’ backs, only Helen hatched a plot to grab the loot for herself by killing the claimants and she shot Lacy as well as Mace (ballistic tests prove that both men were killed by the same gun). It was no surprise at all to learn that “Pearson” was actually an impostor – he was really Barton, the third man involved in the robbery – but it was a bit of a surprise to learn the big, scary government secret Pearson was supposedly charged with recovering didn’t exist at all, and neither did the rich boyfriend Helen was supposedly worried about losing in case he found out about her past.

Charles liked the film overall but, like me, thought the basic story deserved a much better movie than the one we got. He said the basic story reminded him of a Hitchcock movie – the MacGuffin that isn’t really a MacGuffin, the good people who turn out to be bad, the mysterious blonde of ambiguous morality. In fact a major studio, Warner Bros., had made a film called Three Strangers the year before that had points of similarity, particularly the common gimmick (also used in the 1942 Universal “B” Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon and another film in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Holmes series, 1946’s Dressed to Kill) of having the big secret divided into three parts, each useless without the others. (In Three Strangers, directed by Jean Negulesco from a story by John Huston and starring Sydney Greenstreet, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Peter Lorre, it was a winning lottery ticket.) Charles thought the standard characters of the Michael Shayne series – Shayne himself, Phyllis, Rafferty and the reporer/sidekick Tim Rourke (Pail Bryan, even more pointless than usual) – just detracted from a story that under a bigger budget from a major studio with “name” stars could have been a lot better than the film we have. The film also suffered from the usual problem facing the Shayne films, not just PRC’s five but the seven 20th Century-Fox hade between 1940 and 1942 with Lloyd Nolan as Shayne (a more credible actor in the part than Beaumont, of whom Charles joked based on his most famous role as the father on Leave It to Beaver, “June? Wally? Where’s the Beaver?,” and I joked back that June would say,, “Ward, you’re the private eye. You find him!”): uncertainty of tone. For films made at thew height of the film noir cycle the PRC Shaynes seem oddly to be mostly ignorant of it – though there are some nice moments, like the scene in which the thugs kidnap Shayne and drive him to the docks, and it looks like the film at least temporarily exited the comfortable world of the comedy-mysteries of the 1930-’s ane entered the noir underworld.