Thirty Minus Eight

The second of the movies that are on my DVR and coming up on TCM is one that they showed in August as part of Jeanne Crain's day in Summer Under the Stars: Twenty Plus Two. That airing comes up tomorrow, September 22, at 6:00 AM.

Crain isn't the star here although I think she's the highest-billed woman in the cast. The lead is David Janssen, playing Tom Alder. But we don't see him for a few minutes. The movie opens up with a scene at the apartment/office of one Julia Joliet. She runs a service which handles fan mail for movie stars; I assume fans would write to a postal drop and then a service like this would pick up the mail and do whatever the agent and star want done with it. But Joliet's real purpose in the movie is to get murdered.

That's where Alder comes in. He's not the murderer; instead, he's called by one of his police detective friends to look at the case (this rather seems like a plot hole to me). Surprisingly, the place looks like the police haven't gone over it yet. And Alder isn't a police detective. Indeed, he doesn't even like to think of himself as a private detective. Instead, he's the sort of person who goes out and finds missing heirs, which really is detective work but sounds classier. All of this is likely to keep the name of one of Joliet's clients, Leroy Dane (Brad Dexter), out of the papers. And when Alder goes through Joliet's files, he finds some things that he thinks would pertain to a famous missing persons case from a dozen years earler, that of wealthy Doris Delaney.

Indeed, it was reading about the Delaney case years back in a magazine article that gave Alder the idea to become this sort of investigator. And he's about to get another case, as one Jacques Pleschette (Jacques Aubuchon), son of a French-Canadian farmer who emigrated to North Dakota, wants Alder to look for his kid brother Auguste. Searches of military records reveal that there's some weird stuff going on, and one or multiple people is being highly dishonest.

Now if you're still wondering how Jeanne Crain comes into all of this, that's a good question. She doesn't really; instead she plays Linda Foster, a woman Alder had met as she was starting as an undergrad at UCLA and he was about to start law school. Alder didn't become a lawyer because the US got involved in Korea and Alder got his letter from Uncle Sam. That's part of where the closest to a female lead also gets involved. Dina Merrill plays Nicki Kovacs. We first see her as Alder is flying to New York and she's a passenger on the same plane as him. Alder thinks she looks familiar, and he's right. A decade earlier, after he got demobbed and was in Tokyo awaiting transport back to the States, he spent an evening at a taxi dance-type place where Nicki was working, having wanted to get away from the States because.... Well, they spent the evening together and Nicki was a perfect lady to Alder, who had no interest in anything sexual.

Everything eventually comes together for a finale, but before that I should probably mention a couple of cameos. Agnes Moorehead gets one scene as Doris Delaney's mother, who has remained out of the public eye all those years Doris has been missing, but for whatever reason lets this one private investigator talk to her. And William Demarest shows up as an alcoholic journalist. Both of them steal their scenes, unsurprisingly. Oh, there's a third cameo, but not from someone who succeeded as an actor. When Alder is at the taxi dance place, an obnoxious sailor with a bunch of tickets around his neck wants to dance all night with Nicki. IMDb suggests this is a young Robert Osborne, but the voice didn't sound right. Judge for yourself.

Twenty Plus Two isn't a terrible movie, but because of the convoluted plot it certainly isn't great either. To be honest, to me it felt more like the sort of thing that in the 1970s or 1980s would have been maybe a TV movie of the week. Or, possibly more likely, one of those two-hour movies designed to be a test pilot for a possible TV series. (I'm reminded of the one-season TV series Finder of Lost Loves that I used in the February 2020 TV edition of the old Thursday Movie Picks blogathon.) Such a TV show would have been sponsored by United Airlines, considering how many shots show their planes taking off and landing.

David Janssen does OK; Dina Merrill and especially Jeanne Crain are misused; and, as I mentioned, Moorehead and Demarest steal the show. But even with all that, Twenty Plus Two deserves one watch.