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People like us should count their blessings every day
Strange Bargain (1949) is a good one. There isn't much to its suburban noir, but what there is is a nice little nightmare played for almost all its knee-deep stumble into crime is worth. To begin with, it only looks like the American dream.
In fact, it looks almost like a sitcom, as the paperboy pedaling around the sunny, leafy, white picket fences of Greater Los Angeles almost nails a paterfamilias with the morning edition as he steps out onto the front porch to retrieve the milk. It might be foreshadowing or just a neighborhood hazard: Sam Wilson (Jeffrey Lynn) straightens up with a grin and returns inside to his pertly bustling wife Georgia (Martha Scott) and their all-American offspring Roddy and Hilda (Michael Chapin and Arlene Gray) who yearn for new bicycles, bicker over breakfast, run off from pancakes to baseball practice. You can't get a much more nuclear family without glowing in the dark. With their Sunday church-going and their grace before meals, they could be the mascots of the prosperous oncoming '50's of conservative nostalgia. They are broke as a joke. For twelve years, Sam has kept the books for the securities firm of Jarvis & Herne, and after twelve years on an assistant bookkeeper's income: "We can't even take care of the bare necessities—make the payments on the house and the car—let alone save anything." The rising tide of the postwar economy only floats those boats whose salaries aren't tethered to a long-drowned cost of living. No sooner has he screwed up the courage to approach the question of a raise, however, than this conscientious, self-effacing man is left holding a pink slip, the wages not of hubris but of the firm's own precarity. It is merely the tremor of deeper shocks to come. The acceptance of a drink with Mr. Jarvis (Richard Gaines) leads to a proposal of insurance fraud with a particularly grisly twist: a suicide arranged to look like murder after the fact, whereupon the Jarvis wife and son will find themselves the beneficiaries of a quarter-million life policy to insulate them against otherwise certain financial ruin. As for the post-mortem accomplice, listening with spellbound horror: "Altogether you'll be almost a hundred percent safe—and you'll be paid ten thousand dollars." Of course Sam protests, though we can see the immemorial conflict of morals vs. meals frozen in his face. Of course he refuses, though he can't admit when he gets home that he was drinking anything but celebratory cocktails with the boss. Of course that night finds him tearing up into Beverly Hills, speeding to the Jarvis mansion in the professed hope of preventing the suicide, though when he finds the white-haired body on the floor of the library and the bloodstained revolver lying in a splinter of glass beside it, it takes him only a sickened, irresolute beat before he picks up the envelope addressed to "Mr. Samford Wilson." Of course it all goes wrong on levels an essentially decent sort of an office drone can't even conceive. There was a sly sting in that light-hearted opening after all. Some days a person just shouldn't leave the house.
Written for the screen by Lillie Hayward, directed by Will Price, and photographed with chiaroscuro as needed by Harry J. Wild, Strange Bargain clocks in at the frugal 68 minutes of an RKO B-picture in the aptly precarious days of Howard Hughes, but it is the rare film of its kind that I wish ran even another ten minutes. The action could use the room to breathe and the emotion would support it. Under the tin of red herrings that comprise the mass of the plot, the mainspring of this movie is its hero's titanic incompetence at crime. He's not just out of his depth, as ordinary people may be forgiven for being when their lives turn into thrillers, slashers, spy novels and so forth. Sam Wilson may be the worst accessory after the fact ever to panic intrepidly through an alibi. A summary of his behavior on the night of the crime risks reading like a panel from Highlights for Juvenile Offenders. Gallant wears gloves and covers his tracks and there's no movie, but Goofus fires two shots into the library wall to suggest an armed robbery without bothering to line them up with the trajectory of the death. Disposing of the weapon off the Santa Monica Pier, he moves anonymously enough through the crowd at the Port Hole Café and then throws the .38 so artlessly out onto the water that a late-night fisherman is startled by the splash. Even when he makes it home without witnesses, the soft shaded light of his own front hall, instead of comforting him with the middle-class sanctuary of ruffled curtains and vintage bric-a-brac, shows up the dark smudge on the brim of his hat, which means a telltale stain drying stickily on his hands, which means another man's blood fingerprinted throughout his car, which means a frantic scramble out to the garage to scour his hands and his hat and his steering wheel as clean as Lady Macbeth and then get caught letting himself back into the house by an obliviously ill-timed neighbor to whom he must give a sickly, unmistakable smile, detonating instantly any notion that he spent the evening reading quietly in his tortoiseshell glasses while his wife met with the charity committee and his kids watched pro wrestling on a friend's TV. He successfully burns the incriminating note from Mr. Jarvis, but so barely stuffs the $10,000 out of sight that the viewer waits for it to fall more or less literally off the wall. The real problem is that Sam himself is a Chekhov's gun. From the moment he wakes into the daylight horror of the morning after, every interaction he has, with his wife who notices at once her normally sensitive husband's reluctance to involve himself in a murder investigation whose victim he knew well, with his son whose innocently bloodthirsty love of true crime renders him a sort of daily dispatch from the Furies with each fresh detail of the Jarvis case, with ex-OSS Lieutenant Richard Webb of the LAPD (Harry Morgan) whose hard-boiled baby face and visible war injury suggest the weirder, tougher world usually assigned to criminals in domestic noirs rather than representatives of the law, flickers his guilt so inappropriately across his helplessly expressive face that even knowing he didn't shoot Malcolm Jarvis, we almost can't see how he won't be stitched up for the crime. I appreciate this decision both artistically and mimetically. Groomed for straight-arrow romance, Lynn really shone when allowed to play against his studio face, fecklessly foxed in Whiplash (1948) or such a schnook that the audience may catch themselves thinking of Sam as a little guy when he's objectively over six feet tall. He has his small and sympathetic virtues, but a forceful character isn't one of them. Poignantly and a little comically, he has to take the news of his firing sitting down, passing one hand over his face with a half-laugh for his grey flannel naïveté: "I've been with the firm twelve years. I guess I expected to spend the rest of my life here." He pulls a trigger with such a perceptible flinch that we know whatever else he did in the war, he can't—unlike his decorated actor—have seen combat or even boot camp. He fidgets with phone cords, his hat, his pockets when he has nowhere else to put his hands. A spring-loaded cat in his own garage leaves him sheepishly, actually shaken. The sergeant on the case derisively refers to him as a "scared bunny," which shortly yields the nickname "Peter Rabbit." Lieutenant Webb casts a meaningful eye in his anxiously loitering direction and explains the strategy: "I just want to pamper his beautiful case of nerves." The longer this tension stretches, the more inevitably we expect some kind of snap, whether it's the last fingernail of Sam's composure or circumstantial evidence. It isn't a victimless crime he's mixed up in, whatever Mr. Jarvis may have fantasized. A murder requires a perpetrator, a prominent citizen isn't going to be shrugged away into a cold case, and it would have been nice if the one-percent gap in the plan hadn't left such a self-fulfilling patsy in view.
Since the film does take the time to establish that its hero isn't a complete muppet when he's not thinking with his cortisol, it's a believable as well as a sweet touch that even though Sam characteristically almost gets himself killed confessing the truth to the last person he should have trusted with what he knew, when actually facing his own murder he forgets to be afraid and flashes straight over to making as much trouble for his murderer as possible. Edna Jarvis (Katherine Emery) left him flat-footed, castigating his eleventh-hour honesty with such contempt that it splashed over onto the viewer for buying into his fearful version of events in the first place: "Sam, you're a coward, a miserable coward. The police aren't after you. They've nothing on you. If you had kept quiet, you'd have been in no trouble and you would have had ten thousand dollars." It might then be an especial dare that he turns his back deliberately on the handgun she draws from her handbag, challenging her plan to stage his suicide and scapegoat him for her first murder, of her husband when she thought he wouldn't go through with the insurance scheme after all—for a mild-mannered pen-pusher, it's damn near action heroism to shove a half-shelf of books at a would-be killer as she fires. It does spoil her shot. After that he can be rescued by the deftly hooked cane of Lieutenant Webb, who assesses his disheveled, rueful, slightly bleeding state and allows him to be swept off by a fiercely defensive Georgia just as if he'd been the hero of the hour, which in his own back-handed fashion he kind of has. "You're not subject to any legal punishment, Mr. Wilson. And I think you've been punished enough already."
It's a nice ending. I'd like it even better if it didn't blow up so suddenly in the last few minutes of the film. There's a lot in Strange Bargain that feels shortchanged by the necessity of stuffing the plot into the runtime. I can't tell if more was made in a previous draft of the implication that Sam didn't serve in World War II, but it swirls around the same emotional terrain as his son's admiration for the war-wounded detective lieutenant and Sam's general sense of disappointing his children and the audience can tie in for themselves that Jarvis' $10,000 would cover a few bicycles and TV sets as well as mortgages and auto loans, but it's almost too nebulous to register as motivation unless we're supposed to be as unconscious of it as Sam in the moment of slipping a dead man's bargain inside his coat and I am not convinced we are. I can't tell if the film recognizes that none of its crimes are at all competently committed, giving it the logic of a comedy underneath its atmosphere of dread—the scope of Sam's blundering broadens impressively once we realize he was contaminating the scene of a real murder with the spoor of a fake one, but Edna shot her husband with her own gun instead of the one he had prepped for his accomplice, for God's sake. One can only imagine Lieutenant Webb as he finishes up his report, muttering the mid-century equivalent of what a bunch of noobs. I can't tell if the office politics should have been elaborated or trimmed, but as they stand, characters like the hot-tempered yet paternal Timothy Herne (Henry O'Neill) or the sweetly spiteful secretary Miss Vantay (Betty Underwood) feel like distractions rather than part of the machine. All the same, for all its fragments and loose ends, there is something real and material about the film that makes it recognizable, frightening, silly, like the world from which we watch it. I love all the quotidian observations that have since become period detail, like the mention of Gorgeous George on TV or Hilda with her movie star cards wondering if Cary Grant was a fair trade for Dick Powell and Jane Greer. I love the parting shot of a reminder that to err is human, full stop. It's as grounding as Georgia's cry of dismay at the first of the month; it lets the viewer even now locate themselves in the world where the chance of paying the bills might be worth the risk of involving oneself in a truly stupid crime. Surely we couldn't be as hopeless at it as Sam Wilson. Maybe we shouldn't leave the house, either.
The punch line of this story is that when I began to describe the plot of Strange Bargain to my mother, she began in turn to describe the plot of a recently viewed episode of Murder, She Wrote (1984–96), at which point we took to the internet and confirmed that "The Days Dwindle Down" (1987) was indeed written as a direct sequel, right down to Lynn, Scott, and Morgan reprising their original roles. It seems to reopen the ending and reweave elements of the plot, but I believe the film can stand it: I would even be curious to know if it fixed some of the glitches in the script. What I imagine it can't have fixed is the economics, which haven't dated one depressing whit. Did I mention the American dream? This percent brought to you by my safe backers at Patreon.
In fact, it looks almost like a sitcom, as the paperboy pedaling around the sunny, leafy, white picket fences of Greater Los Angeles almost nails a paterfamilias with the morning edition as he steps out onto the front porch to retrieve the milk. It might be foreshadowing or just a neighborhood hazard: Sam Wilson (Jeffrey Lynn) straightens up with a grin and returns inside to his pertly bustling wife Georgia (Martha Scott) and their all-American offspring Roddy and Hilda (Michael Chapin and Arlene Gray) who yearn for new bicycles, bicker over breakfast, run off from pancakes to baseball practice. You can't get a much more nuclear family without glowing in the dark. With their Sunday church-going and their grace before meals, they could be the mascots of the prosperous oncoming '50's of conservative nostalgia. They are broke as a joke. For twelve years, Sam has kept the books for the securities firm of Jarvis & Herne, and after twelve years on an assistant bookkeeper's income: "We can't even take care of the bare necessities—make the payments on the house and the car—let alone save anything." The rising tide of the postwar economy only floats those boats whose salaries aren't tethered to a long-drowned cost of living. No sooner has he screwed up the courage to approach the question of a raise, however, than this conscientious, self-effacing man is left holding a pink slip, the wages not of hubris but of the firm's own precarity. It is merely the tremor of deeper shocks to come. The acceptance of a drink with Mr. Jarvis (Richard Gaines) leads to a proposal of insurance fraud with a particularly grisly twist: a suicide arranged to look like murder after the fact, whereupon the Jarvis wife and son will find themselves the beneficiaries of a quarter-million life policy to insulate them against otherwise certain financial ruin. As for the post-mortem accomplice, listening with spellbound horror: "Altogether you'll be almost a hundred percent safe—and you'll be paid ten thousand dollars." Of course Sam protests, though we can see the immemorial conflict of morals vs. meals frozen in his face. Of course he refuses, though he can't admit when he gets home that he was drinking anything but celebratory cocktails with the boss. Of course that night finds him tearing up into Beverly Hills, speeding to the Jarvis mansion in the professed hope of preventing the suicide, though when he finds the white-haired body on the floor of the library and the bloodstained revolver lying in a splinter of glass beside it, it takes him only a sickened, irresolute beat before he picks up the envelope addressed to "Mr. Samford Wilson." Of course it all goes wrong on levels an essentially decent sort of an office drone can't even conceive. There was a sly sting in that light-hearted opening after all. Some days a person just shouldn't leave the house.
Written for the screen by Lillie Hayward, directed by Will Price, and photographed with chiaroscuro as needed by Harry J. Wild, Strange Bargain clocks in at the frugal 68 minutes of an RKO B-picture in the aptly precarious days of Howard Hughes, but it is the rare film of its kind that I wish ran even another ten minutes. The action could use the room to breathe and the emotion would support it. Under the tin of red herrings that comprise the mass of the plot, the mainspring of this movie is its hero's titanic incompetence at crime. He's not just out of his depth, as ordinary people may be forgiven for being when their lives turn into thrillers, slashers, spy novels and so forth. Sam Wilson may be the worst accessory after the fact ever to panic intrepidly through an alibi. A summary of his behavior on the night of the crime risks reading like a panel from Highlights for Juvenile Offenders. Gallant wears gloves and covers his tracks and there's no movie, but Goofus fires two shots into the library wall to suggest an armed robbery without bothering to line them up with the trajectory of the death. Disposing of the weapon off the Santa Monica Pier, he moves anonymously enough through the crowd at the Port Hole Café and then throws the .38 so artlessly out onto the water that a late-night fisherman is startled by the splash. Even when he makes it home without witnesses, the soft shaded light of his own front hall, instead of comforting him with the middle-class sanctuary of ruffled curtains and vintage bric-a-brac, shows up the dark smudge on the brim of his hat, which means a telltale stain drying stickily on his hands, which means another man's blood fingerprinted throughout his car, which means a frantic scramble out to the garage to scour his hands and his hat and his steering wheel as clean as Lady Macbeth and then get caught letting himself back into the house by an obliviously ill-timed neighbor to whom he must give a sickly, unmistakable smile, detonating instantly any notion that he spent the evening reading quietly in his tortoiseshell glasses while his wife met with the charity committee and his kids watched pro wrestling on a friend's TV. He successfully burns the incriminating note from Mr. Jarvis, but so barely stuffs the $10,000 out of sight that the viewer waits for it to fall more or less literally off the wall. The real problem is that Sam himself is a Chekhov's gun. From the moment he wakes into the daylight horror of the morning after, every interaction he has, with his wife who notices at once her normally sensitive husband's reluctance to involve himself in a murder investigation whose victim he knew well, with his son whose innocently bloodthirsty love of true crime renders him a sort of daily dispatch from the Furies with each fresh detail of the Jarvis case, with ex-OSS Lieutenant Richard Webb of the LAPD (Harry Morgan) whose hard-boiled baby face and visible war injury suggest the weirder, tougher world usually assigned to criminals in domestic noirs rather than representatives of the law, flickers his guilt so inappropriately across his helplessly expressive face that even knowing he didn't shoot Malcolm Jarvis, we almost can't see how he won't be stitched up for the crime. I appreciate this decision both artistically and mimetically. Groomed for straight-arrow romance, Lynn really shone when allowed to play against his studio face, fecklessly foxed in Whiplash (1948) or such a schnook that the audience may catch themselves thinking of Sam as a little guy when he's objectively over six feet tall. He has his small and sympathetic virtues, but a forceful character isn't one of them. Poignantly and a little comically, he has to take the news of his firing sitting down, passing one hand over his face with a half-laugh for his grey flannel naïveté: "I've been with the firm twelve years. I guess I expected to spend the rest of my life here." He pulls a trigger with such a perceptible flinch that we know whatever else he did in the war, he can't—unlike his decorated actor—have seen combat or even boot camp. He fidgets with phone cords, his hat, his pockets when he has nowhere else to put his hands. A spring-loaded cat in his own garage leaves him sheepishly, actually shaken. The sergeant on the case derisively refers to him as a "scared bunny," which shortly yields the nickname "Peter Rabbit." Lieutenant Webb casts a meaningful eye in his anxiously loitering direction and explains the strategy: "I just want to pamper his beautiful case of nerves." The longer this tension stretches, the more inevitably we expect some kind of snap, whether it's the last fingernail of Sam's composure or circumstantial evidence. It isn't a victimless crime he's mixed up in, whatever Mr. Jarvis may have fantasized. A murder requires a perpetrator, a prominent citizen isn't going to be shrugged away into a cold case, and it would have been nice if the one-percent gap in the plan hadn't left such a self-fulfilling patsy in view.
Since the film does take the time to establish that its hero isn't a complete muppet when he's not thinking with his cortisol, it's a believable as well as a sweet touch that even though Sam characteristically almost gets himself killed confessing the truth to the last person he should have trusted with what he knew, when actually facing his own murder he forgets to be afraid and flashes straight over to making as much trouble for his murderer as possible. Edna Jarvis (Katherine Emery) left him flat-footed, castigating his eleventh-hour honesty with such contempt that it splashed over onto the viewer for buying into his fearful version of events in the first place: "Sam, you're a coward, a miserable coward. The police aren't after you. They've nothing on you. If you had kept quiet, you'd have been in no trouble and you would have had ten thousand dollars." It might then be an especial dare that he turns his back deliberately on the handgun she draws from her handbag, challenging her plan to stage his suicide and scapegoat him for her first murder, of her husband when she thought he wouldn't go through with the insurance scheme after all—for a mild-mannered pen-pusher, it's damn near action heroism to shove a half-shelf of books at a would-be killer as she fires. It does spoil her shot. After that he can be rescued by the deftly hooked cane of Lieutenant Webb, who assesses his disheveled, rueful, slightly bleeding state and allows him to be swept off by a fiercely defensive Georgia just as if he'd been the hero of the hour, which in his own back-handed fashion he kind of has. "You're not subject to any legal punishment, Mr. Wilson. And I think you've been punished enough already."
It's a nice ending. I'd like it even better if it didn't blow up so suddenly in the last few minutes of the film. There's a lot in Strange Bargain that feels shortchanged by the necessity of stuffing the plot into the runtime. I can't tell if more was made in a previous draft of the implication that Sam didn't serve in World War II, but it swirls around the same emotional terrain as his son's admiration for the war-wounded detective lieutenant and Sam's general sense of disappointing his children and the audience can tie in for themselves that Jarvis' $10,000 would cover a few bicycles and TV sets as well as mortgages and auto loans, but it's almost too nebulous to register as motivation unless we're supposed to be as unconscious of it as Sam in the moment of slipping a dead man's bargain inside his coat and I am not convinced we are. I can't tell if the film recognizes that none of its crimes are at all competently committed, giving it the logic of a comedy underneath its atmosphere of dread—the scope of Sam's blundering broadens impressively once we realize he was contaminating the scene of a real murder with the spoor of a fake one, but Edna shot her husband with her own gun instead of the one he had prepped for his accomplice, for God's sake. One can only imagine Lieutenant Webb as he finishes up his report, muttering the mid-century equivalent of what a bunch of noobs. I can't tell if the office politics should have been elaborated or trimmed, but as they stand, characters like the hot-tempered yet paternal Timothy Herne (Henry O'Neill) or the sweetly spiteful secretary Miss Vantay (Betty Underwood) feel like distractions rather than part of the machine. All the same, for all its fragments and loose ends, there is something real and material about the film that makes it recognizable, frightening, silly, like the world from which we watch it. I love all the quotidian observations that have since become period detail, like the mention of Gorgeous George on TV or Hilda with her movie star cards wondering if Cary Grant was a fair trade for Dick Powell and Jane Greer. I love the parting shot of a reminder that to err is human, full stop. It's as grounding as Georgia's cry of dismay at the first of the month; it lets the viewer even now locate themselves in the world where the chance of paying the bills might be worth the risk of involving oneself in a truly stupid crime. Surely we couldn't be as hopeless at it as Sam Wilson. Maybe we shouldn't leave the house, either.
The punch line of this story is that when I began to describe the plot of Strange Bargain to my mother, she began in turn to describe the plot of a recently viewed episode of Murder, She Wrote (1984–96), at which point we took to the internet and confirmed that "The Days Dwindle Down" (1987) was indeed written as a direct sequel, right down to Lynn, Scott, and Morgan reprising their original roles. It seems to reopen the ending and reweave elements of the plot, but I believe the film can stand it: I would even be curious to know if it fixed some of the glitches in the script. What I imagine it can't have fixed is the economics, which haven't dated one depressing whit. Did I mention the American dream? This percent brought to you by my safe backers at Patreon.
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I appreciate timelessness as much as the next person who owns a nineteenth-century shirt, but not everything needs to remain in fashion!
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(Also, I love that there was a made-for-Dame-Lansbury sequel.)
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It really wouldn't. That too is depressing.
The poor fellow. Bookkeepers, and I do say this with love, haven’t a shred of imagination.
Aside from my affection for his actor, I find him a really credible example of the kind of character who runs just fine within the parameters of their accustomed routine and as soon as it goes off the rails, so do they. It is extremely sympathetic! But just about the worst state of mind in which to encounter a noir.
(Also, I love that there was a made-for-Dame-Lansbury sequel.)
I am interested in it! My mother seems to have enjoyed it a lot.
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https://123series.ru/series/murder-she-wrote-llk23/kwy4k1v
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I really liked it, I'd never heard of it before TCM ran it last week, and I still think the only thing really wrong with it is that it couldn't afford another thousand feet of film. It has the obvious budget of a phone call. I am beginning to feel very defensive on behalf of Jeffrey Lynn's postwar career, i.e., he should have had a lot more of one.
I love your line about Sam himself being a Chekhov's gun.
Thank you!
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These two:
"We can't even take care of the bare necessities—make the payments on the house and the car—let alone save anything." and
No sooner has he screwed up the courage to approach the question of a raise, however, than this conscientious, self-effacing man is left holding a pink slip, the wages not of hubris but of the firm's own precarity.
really do back up what
Sam Wilson may be the worst accessory after the fact ever to panic intrepidly through an alibi. --Awww. He gets the Kindergarten "I tried" award.
Gallant wears gloves and covers his tracks and there's no movie, but Goofus fires two shots into the library wall to suggest an armed robbery without bothering to line them up with the trajectory of the death. --Oh Sam. Sam, Sam, Sam.
Disposing of the weapon off the Santa Monica Pier, he moves anonymously enough through the crowd at the Port Hole Café and then throws the .38 so artlessly out onto the water that a late-night fisherman is startled by the splash. --Okay, at this point I laughed out loud.
it would have been nice if the one-percent gap in the plan hadn't left such a self-fulfilling patsy in view. --Yeaaahhhh, in another writer's hands, this would have been Jarvis's intention.
Surely we couldn't be as hopeless at it as Sam Wilson. Maybe we shouldn't leave the house, either. Hah! Indeed.
The film exists on Youtube! I'll have to watch it!
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Thank you!
really do back up what handful_ofdust says. Very nowadays.
Historically, I find it really interesting and valuable to have a film of this era state so explicitly that a person can do everything "right" and still end up drowning: I always like correctives to moralistic myths. Personally, aaaaaaaaagh.
--Oh Sam. Sam, Sam, Sam.
I really, not at all ironically love what a terrible crook he makes and how he doesn't get any better over the course of the film. When he finally takes a stand at the climax, he's just being honest, and it barely works out for him, either.
--Yeaaahhhh, in another writer's hands, this would have been Jarvis's intention.
I actually wondered for much of the film, but ultimately it seems to conclude that Jarvis was just as short-sighted about crime as his wife or his accomplice. I have a mixed record with the Coen Brothers—they are sometimes too mean-spirited for me—but I would love to know if they ever saw this movie; it feels like such a forerunner of their dark crime comedies where absolutely everybody is behind the eight-ball and may or may not know it, including the film.
The film exists on Youtube! I'll have to watch it!
Oh, excellent! I didn't even think to check! Enjoy!