Decoy

If you want a movie with a different plot twist, you could do a lot worse than to watch the B noir Decoy. Having seen it on the TCM schedule some time back, I decided to record it and recently finally got around to watching it.

After an intriguing opening credits in which somebody shoots at a locked box, the real action starts off in the present, or at least we're going to learn a couple of minutes into the movie that most of the action is told in flashback. A man in what looks like the sort of rural California we'd see in films like Out of the Past, looking very sickly, makes his way to the big city, where he finds the apartment of one particular woman, going to that apartment and shooting her! A policeman, Sgt. Portgual (Sheldon Leonard) shows up to try to get the woman's story before she dies.

That woman is Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie), and she's the girlfriend of a man named Frank Olins (Robert Armstrong). Frank and his gang robbed a bank out of a mid-six-figure amount, which was quite a lot in the middle of the 1940s. He buried the money in a safe place, but he was caught and sentenced to the gas chamber. The problem is that Frank is the only one who knows where the money is hidden, and he's more than willing to let that secret go with him to the grave.

Frank is also worried that Margot is seeing his lawyer, Jim Vincent (Edward Norris), behind his back, and as it turns out, he's right to be worried about it, not that it would matter if Frank is dead. In theory, there's always the possibility of Frank getting out on some sort of technicality. And wouldn't you know it, but Margot has a technicality in mind. The only thing is, it's not a legal technicality, in more than one sense of not being legal.

Margot has learned that the California gas chamber uses hydrogen cyanide gas to off the condemned, and has also learned that a historical treatment for cyanide poisoning is a chemical called "methylene blue". (In fact, there was such an experimental treatment; it just carried a substantial risk of making things worse, so other treatments were developed.) However, the methylene blue would need to be administered fairly quickly, and more importantly, Margo and Jim would need a doctor to administer the drug. In any case, once being revived, Frank would be able to divulge the location of the money.

It seems like an absolutely daft plan, and of course it is, but then this is a movie, so just go with it. Margot finds a doctor whose work includes a couple days a week working at the penitentiary where the executions are carried out, Dr. Lloyd Craig (Herbert Rudley), who also turns out to be the guy who shoots Margot in the scene before the flashback. She works on turning him so that he'll go along with the harebrained scheme. As you might guess from the beginning, as well as the fact that this is a movie, he does eventually go along. At the same time, there being a Production Code, you know that the scheme isn't going to work out in the end....

Thankfully, unlike some other movies, the fact that there's that Production Code doesn't mean that the story is harmed. Decoy is the sort of scheme that you expect to go wrong because there are so many points where it could. So instead, the fun is watching how the scheme doesn't work. And in that regard, the movie works very well, at least for the low standards of Poverty Row. It's not great by any serious measure, but it's entertaining nonsense. Definitely worth a watch.