I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes

I think I mentiones some weeks back how Eddie Muller mentioned in Noir Alley that Cornell Woolrich's stories don't always make sense; I think in conjunction with Black Angel. I mentioned that I had another movie based on a Woolrich story sitting on my DVR. That movie is I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes.

The movie starts off in a prison, where a man named Tom Quinn (Don Castle) is on death row. He's not very talkative and more or less resigned to dying. The other prisoners wonder how he got here and what made him as closed off as he is. As you might imagine, this is the cue for a flashback, although a lot of the story involves stuff that Tom couldn't possibly know even if he were narrating it.

Tom is married to Ann (Elyse Knox); the two of them are struggling dancers living in one room of a rooming house. Tom doesn't get much work, while Ann is supporting the both of them by working as a taxi dance and getting big tips from one particular client, working until the wee hours of the morning. That latter fact unsurprisingly makes Tom a bit jealous, and also keeps him up nights.

One night, Tom hears a cat mewling in the courtyard behind the building they live in. It's too much for him, so he throws one of his old shoes at the poor cat. Except that when Ann gets home, she informs him that she had actually gotten rid of those old shoes, so that all he had left was his good shoes with the built-in taps. He really should go out and fetch the shoe before somebody else takes it.

Tom doesn't, but surprisingly a good Samaritan leaves the shoes by the door to their room the next morning. At the same time, they learn about the death of a guy in the building on the other side of the courtyard. Otis, the dead man, was murdered, presumably because everybody in the area thought he was some sort of miser who paid for his purchases with old currency in denominations too high for someone of his putative lot in life. Obviously, he must have a lot more of those notes somewhere, which would naturally make somebody want to murder him.

The two story lines come together in a number of ways. One is that Tom finds a missing wallet which had belonged to Otis; Tom doesn't want to spend any of the money in the wallet which is actually a smart move because the police are tracking Otis' money. The other thing is that there's a shoe-print at the murder scene that matches Tom's spiffy new tap shoes. So when everything is put together it's only logical that Tom should be thought of as a natural suspect. He's arrested, put on trial, and found guilty, although one should be able to figure that out considering that at the start of the movie he's on death row.

At this point, we learn that Ann's rich benefactor from the dance hall is none other than Clint Judd (Regis Toomey), a police detective. Ann knows that her husband just has to be innocent, and that whoever it was who returned the shoes to Tom has to have been the person who murdered Otis. Perhaps Clint could help Ann investigate and figure out who really killed Otis?

Eddie Muller said, and I'd have to agree, that with some of these Cornell Woolrich stories you just have to sit back and enjoy the ride. I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes is definitely a good example of that. The story is full of plot holes, and yet it's surprisingly entertaining. I guess some of that is down to the fact that it's just a B movie, so it comes in with very low expectations. I don't think you can call it great by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly succeeds at keeping an audience entertained for the 70 or so minutes it's on the screen.