Flaxy Martin

Another of those movies that seems to show up fairly regularly on TCM since it was produced by Warner Bros. back in the 1940s is Flaxy Martin. The title was always enough to notice it, but for whatever reason I never actually got around to watching it. So when Eddie Muller picked it for Noir Alley a few months back, I finally made a point of recording it in order to be able to watch and do a review here.

Flaxy in the context of the movie is a woman's name, and that part is played by Virginia Mayo. But we don't see her for a bit. Instead we see Walter Colby (Zachary Scott), who's really the lead here. Colby is a lawyer for mobster Hap Richie (Douglas Kennedy). One night, Colby is called out of bed on an urgent matter. There's been a murder, and Hap needs Walter to get the guy off, since the man picked up for the murder is one of Hap's hired thugs, and guilty as sin.

Where Flaxy comes in is that she's Colby's girlfriend, although he doesn't realize that she's seeing Hap on the side. Colby goes to see Flaxy, telling her that this time is going to be it and that he'd like to become a respectable lawyer. Good look with that thanks to the Production Code. Flaxy is smart enough to know it'll never happen, and devious enough to keep it from happening. She's about to need that deviousness.

The paid witness who helped Colby get Hap's thug found not guity on the murder charge has decided she didn't get paid enough, and threatens to squawk. Flaxy goes to see her and is too obvious not to be noticed, which is one of the risks of going through life looking like Virginia Mayo. The thug also shows up, and kills the witness, but that leaves Flaxy as the one everyone's going to accuse.

And now here's where Colby gets stupid. He decides that he'll get Flaxy off by telling the authorities that he was the one to kill the witness, since he knows there's no evidence. Somehow a jury will clear him, as long as nobody double-crosses him, and you know somebody is going to double cross him. The only way Colby can clear his name is to escape from prison and solve the case himself, with the help of a Hitchcock blonde-type woman, Nora Carson (Dorothy Malone), who rescues Colby and hides him at her place just because. (Maybe she's sex-starved, although of course the Production Code wouldn't let the writers say that.)

Flaxy Martin is a hot mess in terms of the twists and terms of the story, although thanks to the cast and Warner Bros.' professional production, it's interesting enough for one watch. But it's really more the sort of movie you watch just to be a completist, and not something that would ever be considered the best movie of anyone in the cast.