Please Murder Me!

Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day.

Please Murder Me! (Peter Godfrey, 1956) Sometimes, the world just syncs up: While scouting around for something to watch late at night, I was gravitating towards a late showing of a later episode of "Perry Mason" (Brian Donlevy was accused of the murder in that one) when I came across this low budget film-noir done just before Raymond Burr was cast as "Mason" (and before he appeared in the Americanized cut of Godzilla) starring Burr as a defense attorney trying a "cheap courtroom theatric" to get the accused (Angela Lansbury!) off a murder charge.

Now, Burr had done trial pictures before—he was the prosecutor in A Place in The Sun—and between that picture and this one he had done a lot of work in lots of genres, but most memorably noirs playing heavy-set villains ("It was me and Bill Conrad trading off roles" he'd crack) usually much older than his years. He had that sort of gravitas that would seem out of place in a light comedy.

Please Murder Me! (which is in the public domain) borrows lots of tropes from the "noir" hand-book—it was directed by Peter Godfrey, who'd made The Two Mrs. Carrolls with Bogart and Stanwyck—starting off with the "lead-narrates-the-picture," this time with the Double Indemnity angle of recording the story for a colleague to find in the eventuality of his demise. Burr's lawyer-character, Craig Carlson, has just bought a gun and taken it to his office after-hours to sit in the dark and tell his story into a tape recorder. He's desperate, probably a little delusional, and...if all goes well...he'll be dead in an hour.

That is some twisted basis for a movie...and for a protagonist. But, he's been pushed to it by his own actions. It's a story of selfishness, deceit, and "useful idiots," of how he betrayed his best friend Joe Leeds (Dick Foran) by having an affair with his wife, Myra (Lansbury), how Myra wanted a divorce, and how the discussion turned violent and Myra was forced to kill her husband. Who does she get to defend her? Why Carlson, of course, and the prosecution (led by John Dehner) has a pretty convincing case. It is only during final arguments that Carlson pulls the little detail of the affair into the mix to save her from the gas chamber. Nice trick, using that little known detail to get her off. But, he doesn't know everything, and, once he does, the mixture of shame and humiliation get all mixed up with professional pride...and a sacrificial sense of public duty.

Godfrey was a pretty good director, who was just straight-laced enough to make such a weird story seem plausible and keep from going off the rails, but had an eye towards the Grand Guignol, that would pop out at any moment—the weird askew angle here, the blanketing darkness there, the claustrophobic staging that seems just...off—and give you the creeps. He was good at invoking dread—Bogart's performance in Godfrey's The Two Mrs. Carrolls is as bizarre as any he's done (that wasn't a studio miscalculation, that is), and Burr's sober, weighted, mandarin performance—not that different from the way he carried "Perry Mason"—goes a long way to dispelling any audience rejection of the premise.

That goes for Lansbury, too. Lansbury had been straddling the good/bad fence from her first movie performance in Gaslight, and had the acting cunning to make each persona equally appealing while not succumbing to making her characters cyphers. She is the perfect actress to play the noir femme fatale and why she didn't do more is a mystery that even the crackest of gumshoes couldn't scrape to the bottom of. She's the perfect conspirator and any director would be lucky to have her as a co-conspirator.