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.

The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947)

The Two Mrs. Carrolls (Peter Godfrey, 1947) Fans of Humphrey Bogart don't often mention this dark guignol of a thriller that marks the only pairing of Bogart with the considerable presence of Barbara Stanwyck, an actor as unafraid of projecting a dark side as he is, even if this particular film doesn't exploit it, as it fits in the mold of Stanwyck's other "women in peril" films. Stanwyck always managed to straddle the line between naturalism and theatricality, while Bogart was always uniquely Bogart, self-aware enough to know both his strengths and weaknesses as an actor (and a man) and call them up, albeit with a veneer of artificiality that passed for theatricality and artifice.

At the start of the film, everything is rosy, full of natural light fresh air and pristine waters as painter Geoffrey Carroll (Bogart) and his new love, Sally Morton (Stanwyck) are vacationing in the mountains on a fishing vacation. It's all hearts and flowers and the two are very much in love, Gerry paying less attention to the fish than in sketching Sally. But, a sudden squall puts a damper on things when, while giving Sally a protecting coat, a letter falls out of his pocket, addressed to Gerry's wife. Sally is shocked and breaks off the affair.

Gerry explains the situation. The letter is to ask his wife for a divorce. She has been an invalid since the birth of their child, and her estate will supply all the care she needs. But, when the first Mrs. Carroll dies, Gerry continues to pursue Sally, they marry and she moves in with Gerry and his daughter from his late wife, Beatrice.

Gerry is distant, locking himself in his studio to paint for hours on end. They argue about sending Gerry's daughter to a boarding school, which the kid does not want to go to, preferring to stay at home with Gerry and Sally. Sally talks to Beatrice (Ann Carter), who reveals that the first Mrs. Caroll was hardly an invalid, but actually quite healthy and died suddenly after Gerry had returned from a fishing trip (DUN-dun-dunnn) and finished his portrait of her as an angel of death.

This naturally freaks Sally out, especially after finding the key to Gerry's studio and seeing that he's working on a portrait of her...as an angel of death. Plus, Gerry is acting very interested in a vampiric young socialite (Alexis Smith), who has commissioned Gerry to paint her portrait—maybe she should just wait a while.

The director, Peter Godfrey, was a director-friend of Stanwyck's, and he has a stagey directorial style that is sunny and bright at the beginning of the film and becomes gradually more stage-bound, darker and more closed-in as the film progresses and the second Mrs. Carroll's suspicions become more real. The film has a couple of bizarre touches on top of Bogart's increasingly paranoid and— eventually—deranged performance: one is Gerry's truly horrific artistic style and the other is his means of dispatching his wives—by providing a helpful glass of warm milk before bed...to help them sleep, of course. They obviously haven't seen Hitchcock's Suspicion. Or Hitchcock's Notorious.

The chief enjoyments of The Two Mrs. Carrolls is the pairing of Bogart and Stanwyck, a truly unhinged performance by Bogart—he has a wonderful final line—and the generally creepy air permeating the film, even when it becomes ludicrous. Beyond that, there's not much there.