The Brasher Doubloon

FXM has been putting a higher than normal number of movies I haven't blogged about before into its rotation. Thise time out, the movie in question is the 1947 B mystery The Brasher Doubloon. It's on the FXM schedule again, tomorrow at 4:45 AM, so as always, I made a point of sitting down to watch it so I could do a review here.

George Montgomery plays Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's private detective more memorably played by Humphrey Bogart and others. This time, Marlowe is out in Pasadena, at one of those rich people's houses of the sort where Mildred Pierce first met Monte Beragon. He's greeted at the door by Merle Davis (Nancy Guild), secretary to wealthy widow Elizabeth Murdock (Florence Bates). Murdock also has an adult son Leslie (Conrad Janis), who seems none too happy at the presence of Marlowe.

Eventually, Marlowe gets an audience with Mrs. Murdock, who informs him that she owns one of two known copies of a famous early American coin known as the Brasher Doubloon. (In fact, there is such a coin as the Brasher Doubloon, but there are more than two surviving copies.) Well, owned it. The coin has recently been stolen from her safe, and she'd like it back. But she doesn't want her name brought into the public eye in conjunction with such a crime, which is why she's employing the services of a private detective. It seems that only Mrs. Marlow, Leslie, and Merle know the combination to the safe, so logically it would seem one of them took it, and considering Leslie's attitude, he's an obvious suspect although that could just be a red herring.

Marlowe's first two leads are to a coin dealer and another man who seems to have an interest in the case, but the coin dealer gets killed after Marlowe's visit while the other man is found by Marlowe already having been killed. Understandably, the police are going to find that Marlowe is on the case and they're going to want information.

Meanwhile, Merle is beginning to act erratically, and Mrs. Murdock suggests that it's because Merle went crazy after having one of her bouts of amnesia where she couldn't remember what, if any, involvement she had in the incident in which Murdock's late husband fell out of a window to his death. There's some suggestion that perhaps somebody might be trying to blackmail Merle, or maybe Mrs. Murdock. More blackmail, death, and violence for Marlowe occur.

The Brasher Doubloon being a decided B movie, it doesn't get the polish that some of the other mystery movies of the 1940s got. That's a bit of a shame, since there's the kernel of a good story here, that really needed to be fleshed out to around the 90-minute mark. As it is, the movie is mildly entertaining, but with an ending hinging on the same flaw Call Northside 777 had, which is that it posits you can take film and blow it up as much as you want and not lose any detail. There's also the 40s trope of everybody being able to get right up with no aftereffects after having yet another concussion. You'd think all those film detectives wound up dying of CTE.

Fans of Raymond Chandler may be interested to see how this particular story of his (the book was titled The High Window) was handled. For people looking to get into 40s mysteries, I'd recommend other stuff first.