Backlash

A movie that showed up in the FXM Retro rotation a few months back is the 1947 film Backlash. So I recorded one of the many airings and recently watched it, since it's coming up again tomorrow at 4:45 AM and again at 9:50 AM.

John Eldredge plays prominent defense attorney John Morland, who has been defending gangster Red Bailey (Douglas Fowley), and has a partner in O'Neil (Robert Shayne) and wife Catherine (Jean Rogers). They also have a vacation house up on one of those mountain roads overlooking the city (I'm guessing it's supposed to be Los Angeles, but not actually mentioned).

One day, Mr. Eldredge's car is found at the bottom of a ravine, having failed to traverse one of the curves in the mountain road leading to that vacation house. A charred body is found inside, obviously that of Eldredge. But investigation reveals that the car was traveling at a speed too slow to have gone off the road as a result of missing a curve. So it's not an accident, but murder!

Police detective McMullen (Larry Blake) goes to interview Mrs. Eldredge, and finds that she seems to be carrying on an affair with the District Attorney Conroy (Richard Travis)! This seems highly unethical, but then lawyers and cops never had much in the way of ethics. More investigation reveals that John thought he was being poisoned, and that he believed his wife might have been trying to kill him since he found out about the affair with the district attorney.

So everybody but the policeman is a suspect. But the evidence keeps mounting and pointing to Mrs. Eldredge. Still, Det. McMullen has the funny feeling that there's something not quite right going on here. It turns out he's right....

Backlash is one of those movies that has a pretty good premise. But unfortunately it's a B movie, produced by one of those outsourcing units that Fox seems to have used, so it's far more down-budget than even Fox's programmers. The credits are interesting in that regard, being in some much more recent font and looking more like TV scrolling credits, as though the print comes from a TV distribution package. But what it really means for the movie is that there's just not enough meat to hang on the interesting ideas, so we wind up with something that's rather a disappointment. Still, it's one that you should probably watch once if you can DVR it.

Apparently Backlash got a DVD release on Fox's MOD scheme (with the buyout from Disney, I have no idea if that's even still running). That means it's fairly pricey, much too much for what is at best a mediocre B movie.