This Side of the Law

In addition to foreign films and silents, I have a tendency to record a lot of the entries in Eddie Muller's Noir Alley series, especially the ones I haven't seen before. I like Eddie's introductions, and the movies are usually interesting even when they're not very good. The latest movie that I've seen from Noir Alley is This Side of the Law.

Kent Smith is the lead here, and as the movie opens he is in true noir style bemoaning the situation he's gotten himself into at a great old estate called Sans Souci somewhere on the California coast with the sort of clifftop paths that you know are going to lead to danger. In his case, however, his problems stem not from a femme fatale so much as a lawyer.... Flash back to a week earlier. David Cummins (Kent Smith) is an unemployed something or other who has just been picked up on a vagrancy charge. Imagine, to his surprise when, at the trial, somebody he's never seen before offers to pay the fine and everything! That somebody, lawyer Philip Cagle (Robert Douglas), has a proposition for David that could make him a tidy sum of money. And when Cagle takes David to his office, the secretary thinks David is some guy named Malcom Taylor!

Now, David isn't completely stupid, so he holds out for more money until he can learn more about the proposition and what he's being asked to do for the money. It turns out that the real Malcom Taylor disappeared just shy of seven years ago, without so much as a trace. As you may know, in the US it was historically the case that being disappeared for seven years was the point at which you could be legally declared dead, with all that comes with. (See also a movie like Too Many Husbands.) Since David looks amazingly like Malcolm, Cagle would like David to play the part of Malcolm for a few days before "disappearing" again so that he can't be declared legally dead just yet. Eventually, David holds out for a cool $5,000.

Unfortunately, he gets to the house and finds that nobody seems to have really liked Malcolm. Malcolm had a wife, Evelyn (Viveca Lindfors), but for what ever reason the two of them had a falling out. That probably has to do with the relationship that Malcolm had with his sister-in-law Nadine (Janis Paige), about which David obviously knows nothing but which Nadine seems eager to resume. That's because she's in a loveless marriage with Malcolm's brother Calder (John Alvin), who resents Malcolm because Malcolm was for some reason the favorite son back in the days when the parents were still alive. Things get worse when Nadine notices that David doesn't have a scar in a specific location where the real Malcolm would have had a scar, so she figures out that this isn't Malcolm, which sets the denouemnt in action as we see how David ended up where he did at the start of the movie.

This Side of the Law is fairly implausible, but it's also entertaining enough in the same sense that Columbo episodes are. It's not too difficult to figure out who the villain of the piece is, but the fun is in seeing how we ultimately get there. If you go into This Side of the Law not expecting much, I think you'll enjoy it.