Squad Car

FXM runs the movies they run in heavy rotation, but as I've said in the past they at least seem to change the rotation on a regular enough basis. One of the new-to-me movies that got added to the rotation recently is Squad Car. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 9:25, and then again early Saturday at 4:55 AM.

The movie starts off with a man working late at an airfield, when another man whom we only see from the knees down shows up, obviously stalking the first man for no good. The first man is a fairly stupid victim, since instead of trying to get away by driving off in his car or some such, he tries to make a panicked phone call instead, getting shot -- with a tommy gun, no less -- for his trouble.

The dead man was working for Jay Reinhart (Don Marlowe), who runs a crop-dusting service in the Phoenix area back when it only had about 15% of the population it does today. Obviously, the police, led by Lt. Beck (Paul Bryar), would like to get whatever information they can from Reinhart. He has an alibi, in that he was with his girlfriend Jeanne (Lynn Moore), although as we learn later, this is a lie and Jeanne is covering up for Jeanne in that regard.

One other person is an obvious person to ask for information, that being the dead man's girlfriend, nightclub singer Cameo Kincaid (Vici Raaf). The police detective asks himself why a stereotypical blonde bombshell-type singer would go for a mechanic in an airfield hangar, and figures something doesn't add up, but has no idea what.

On a different case in the Phoenix area is the Secret Service. As you'll recall, in the days before the Department of Homeland Security, they were part of the Treasury Department as their first mission was to investigate counterfeiting. It seems as though somebody's been passing bad banknotes in the Phoenix area.

Of course, the two cases are related. Manfred Stahl (Jack Harris) is a bespectacled man who's in on the counterfeiting ring, which flies in money from Mexico with Reinhart doing the flying. He's pissed that he's being shorted on the money, which is because the dead man was taking some of it out of the packages to buy things for Cameo. Cameo isn't stupid, and puts two and two together and wants a piece of the action now that her sugar daddy is dead, and is willing to use force to get her piece.

Squad Car is the sort of material that, by 1960, really should have been made as an episode of some TV series or other in the crime genre. Although everybody here was more or less unknown to me, they make something that's modestly entertaining but forgettable, the sort of stuff that TV needed in spades to fill all that programming. As a movie, it certainly couldn't have been conceived as anything more than a B movie. The end result is something that's more interesting as a time capsule than as art, although it's not terrible.