Find the Blackmailer

Yet another of the B movies that I recorded off of TCM during their spotlight on B movies was an ultra-short film from Warner Bros. in 1943, Find the Blackmailer.

Jerome Cowan plays D.L. Trees, a struggling private eye who has a long-suffering secretary in the form of one Pandora Pines. She keeps dropping clues about the need for Trees to pay her, but Trees is either too dense to get it or is otherwise ignoring the clues. Since there's no work coming in, Trees turns on the radio in order to be able to listen to the paid political ad from reformist mayoral candidate John Rhodes (Gene Lockhart, by far the biggest name in this one). And then, wouldn't you know it, but Rhodes comes knocking on Trees' door!

Rhodes has a job for Trees, having picked him on the basis that Trees is apparently the least-known detective in town. If you've seen enough detective movies, you'd think somebody is setting Trees up. Anyhow, Rhodes says that he's being blackmailed by a Fred Molner, who is the brother of chorus girl and walking B movie femme fatale trope Mona Vance (Faye Emerson). Rhodes and Molner have some sort of past together beyond Mona, and Fred has been extorting money from Rhodes over it, a very bad look for a reformist mayoral candidate. Worse, Fred has been training his pet crow to talk, specifically to imitate Rhodes' voice to implicate Rhodes in Fred's death should anybody bump Fred off. Rhodes wants that crow.

So Trees goes over to Molner's apartment, only to find Fred very much dead. And as he's going through the apartment looking for clues, he finds another body. Except that this body isn't quite as stiff as Molner, just concussed. The body is Fred's bodyguard Ray Hickey. And while the two of them are talking, a third guy shows up, bookie Mitch Farrell. After the incident, Trees calls on the police to investigate, although Trees is going to be doing his own investigation in part to try to exonerate himself, and hopefully to get paid by Rhodes assuming Rhodes isn't the guilty one.

Find the Blackmailer runs a brief 56 minutes, but there's a lot going on, so much that it feels too complicated for its own good. But then, it was a B movie, so it was striving for entertainment rather than high art. In that regard, it does succeed. Nowadays, heck, anytime in the past 50 years, Find the Blackmailer is the sort of material that would be made for some sort of one-hour private detective TV series instead of as a movie. And there's a reason old detective shows like The Rockford Files are still running on those digital sub-channels.