I Killed That Man

I recently got out my fifty-film Mill Creek noir/crime box set and popped in another DVD to watch another of the movies off the set, I Killed That Man.

Frankly, the title is misleading, but more on that later. The movie opens up with what looks like it could have been a scene of the reporters' gatheing in His Girl Friday, only on a much smaller budget, since the film was distributed by Monogram. But sure enough, it's a bunch of reporters having assembled for the execution of murderer Nick Ross (Rolf Haralde). Up to this point, Nick has remained silent about the details of the murder, leading people to believe that he's keeping a secret for some powerful person. But now that he's about to be executed and has no more consequences to face, he decides that he's going to spill the beans, and starts telling the assembled reporters what really happened.

However, as he's dishing out secrets, he suddenly stops and collapses, having died! And it's quite clearly murder, as the district attorney discovers some sort of poison dart in Nick's neck. So the DA orders the place sealed off and investigates everybody who was in the room. He quickly concludes that Lanning, who was a character witness in Nick's trial, is the killer, and has Lanning arrested. However, since all of this occurs in the first 15 minutes of the movie, it seems likely that Lanning will turn out not to be guilty and that the DA is letting everybody else out so that the real killer will suspect nothing.

Meanwhile, Geri Reynolds (Joan Woodbury) is a lady report at one of the newspapers who sent a male reporter to cover the execution. That male reporter hasn't returned, and the editor is wondering what is going on. So he sends Geri over to the state prison to get the scoop, in part because Geri had a previous relationship with the assistant DA, Rogert Phillips (Ricardo Cortez). As you can probably guess, the two of them are going to investigate the case more or less together and figure out who really killed Nick. Since this is a cast of mostly B-list people, with Iris Adrian as Nick's girlfriend being the closest to an A-lister outside of Cortez back in the 1930s, anybody could be the killer.

And to be honest, the actual mystery isn't so important in a movie like this. Instead, it's more about how we get to the main characters figuring out who did it and what dangers they face along the way, as well as their chemistry together. But other than Nick's monologue near the beginning, there's really no focus on the "I" who killed that man, especially if you assume that "that man" is supposed to refer to Nick.

I Killed That Man is B-movie all the way, and unfortunately, the print on the Mill Creek set isn't particularly good. I have a feeling, though, that it's not as if there are any particularly good prints out there for a movie like this. The movie moves at a reasonable pace and everybody is enjoyable enough, even if there's nothing particularly memorable. It's the sort of film that would be perfect for TCM's Saturday matinee programming block. One also gets the impression that it did what it set out to do, which is to entertain audiences of the day (just before the US entry into World War II) cheaply enough to turn a profit for the producers. A decade later, material like this would start showing up on episodic TV, but for now, it still had to be made as a B movie, and a modestly successful one it is.