Scene of the Crime

TCM is running a bunch of movies tomorrow (May 23) that are police procedurals or fairly close to that. MGM did a whole series of shorts in the genre with the Crime Does Not Pay shorts of the second half of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, but feature-length procedurals weren't so common for the studio, being better known for the polished prestige material. One MGM movie that definitely fits the genre is Scene of the Crime, which TCM is running at noon.

The movie opens up with a murder in cold blood and in public, on the streets of Los Angeles. The murder is witnessed by a married couple who didn't exactly see much since they were in the shadows and wanted to avoid detection, but they heard the getaway driver refer to the killer as a "lobo". That's Spanish for "wolf", although in the context of late 1940s crime it apparently refers to a hired gun. The victim was a cop named Monaghan, and worse, Monaghan had a bunch of cash on him that wasn't taken and which he wouldn't normally have been able to account for.

Given the task of investigating is police detective Mike Conovan (Van Johnson). He's got a new partner in young C.C. Gordon (Tom Drake), since old partner Piper (John McIntire) is at the age where he really should be on desk duty. Conovan also has a long-suffering wife, Gloria (Arlene Dahl). The theory is that one of the national syndicates is trying to muscle its way into the local betting rackets, and that if Monaghan was on the take, as the money might suggest, he got caught up in it. Mike does good old-fashioned legwork, such as finding names and numbers that could be phone numbers or street addresses, as well as talking to police informants who don't want it known they're informants, such as Sleeper (Norman Lloyd).

One lead suggests guys named Turk Kingby and Lafe Douque may be lobos, while another lead suggests that Turk has an ex-girlfriend named Lili (Gloria DeHaven) who works in the burlesque show in one of the local clubs. However, neither Turk nor Douque fit the description of the murder given by the two witnesses. Mike tries to gain the trust of Lili, which makes Gloria really nervous, especially once the bodies start piling up. She sets him up with the possibility of getting a job handling security for a prominent industrialist, but Mike is just too damn honest to quit the force.

That, and there's also the rule that, thanks to the Production Code, the guilty parties will not be allowed to get away with it and the cops will get their man in the end. So you can expect the requisite happy ending in the final reel.

Scene of the Crime isn't exactly a bad movie, although it definitely has the MGM stamp all over it as a movie that's more than competently made but in a genre where they didn't really give the impression of knowing how to make a great film in that genre. The story and production feel by-the-numbers, and lacking the grit necessary to make a movie like this truly memorable. Ultimately, it comes off as the sort of material that would be fodder for well-done episodic TV a decade or two later, but at the MGM of 1949 is just ever so slightly off. It's still worth watching, but you can't help but think someone at another studio could have made a truly great movie.