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I've got money singing in my brain
I come not to bury Jack Bernhard's Decoy (1946) because it would just dig itself up again. This Z-budget artifact of block booking does not suffer from good taste. It is barely impaired by morals. A generation before the ascendance of sick humor, its plot is a pile-up of macabre and preposterous kicks in the head, culminating in a stinger so feel-bad, it actually is funny, the mic drop of nihilism attributed to so many noirs and accomplished by so few. It has a real feeling of doom, a phosphorescent unwholesomeness, and it opens in the scuzziest truck-stop restroom committed by Golden Age Hollywood. I am extraordinarily fond of it.
I can't even slate it for its femme fatale when Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie) is a figure of such irresistibly surreal avarice, it seems only respectful that the film should not escape her insatiable event horizon any more than the men she adds to her string and cuts lethally loose when she's through. Behind door number one, we have career robber Frankie Olins (Robert Armstrong), who turned himself into a three-time loser just to keep her in style and now awaits his turn in the gas chamber in the aging faith that she'll spring him in time to reap the luxuries of his secretly stashed $400,000. Behind door number two, right-hand double-dipper Jim Vincent (Edward Norris), signing on to her scheme to locate said lettuce in the chauvinistically misplaced confidence that he's calling the shots as opposed to so far behind the eight-ball, the audience can already hear it rolling up on him. Door number three opens onto the disadvantaged street where Dr. Lloyd Craig (Herbert Rudley) maintains a charity practice on his days off from prison doctoring, but his noble-minded naïveté peels off him like paint at a whiff of Margot's $75 perfume, the sum of his honest week's pay. Even Sergeant Joseph Portugal (Sheldon Leonard), the kind of sturdily streetwise flatfoot who rescues jailbait from mashers, pays for his bar snacks along with his beer, and drops his ubiquitous nickels in the tin for Yugoslav Relief, hovers on the edge of her harem in reluctant admiration of her total freeze-out of the law. Stripper-like as he watches over his half-eaten hard-boiled egg, she provocatively adjusts the cuff of diamonds on her wrist to glitter the gulf between his plainclothes scruples and her shameless glamour: "Do they have this kind of trash on your level, Jojo?" In a contractual sort of fashion, the film offers a motivation for her money-hunger, a childhood of industrial poverty which she sees distastefully reproduced in the doctor's street with its slum panorama of laundries and liquor stores, its gutter-playing urchins she strides brusquely past as if their ragged baseball shouldn't even bounce through the same air as her mink. "That street runs all over all the world. I know because that's the street I came from, six thousand miles from here in a little English mill town. But it's the same rotten street, the same factories, the same people, and the same dirty little grey-faced children." It's like trying to impose psychological realism on fire. What Margot wants is unremarkable, the ticket-taker and the cigarette girl and the audience who shelled out for the double feature all want it and so do we, eight decades on and it feels even less like a joke that a working stiff is just a corpse that can't afford to get off the clock. How she wants it cannot be explained by social factors. She wants like a Schwarzschild radius, like K-capture, like Kelvin zero. She wants like a contagious haunting, so that even men she's never met are scythed collaterally down by it, the driver of an armored car, the driver of a hearse—Liebestod is for chumps, it's cash on the death's-head that makes this world go round. What a vanitas, though. Between soft waves of red hair, her fine-boned face has a hard translucent pallor, as if faintly fever-sheened with its own cupidity, the crisp caress of her voice draws out a phrase like methylene blue until it sounds like an aphrodisiac and not the key to an audaciously lurid plan, not after all to rescue her lover from the death house before the whereabouts of his loot snuff it with him, but to reanimate him after execution and get it out of him then. "It'll cost plenty," she warns her co-conspirator, "and it's a long shot," as briskly as if she had just proposed a spot of bribery instead of jaw-dropping Grand Guignol. Margot, the original girl with the hungry eyes. That undiscovered country had better cough up and fast.
Seriously, for all the fabled fatalism of the genre, few noirs have as much skull beneath the skin as Decoy. Had it been produced for RKO by Val Lewton instead of Monogram Pictures by Bernhard and Bernard Brandt, it could have sported an epitaph by Webster or Kyd or Middleton, the bugged-out descendant of their splatter-black lyricism. Narrated from death's door by a gut-shot Margot, clutching her comfort object of a dirt-encrusted strongbox as she unfolds her gallows ballad of the wages of "simple arithmetic," the screenplay written by Nedrick Young from a story by Stanley Rubin never lets the action stray too far from the grave, its outrageously grislier flourishes as well as its general atmosphere of a pervasive bummer aided and abetted by the creepshow photography of L. W. O'Connell. Its calling card is a patsy on his last legs, uselessly smearing at his bloodied hands in a sink so blackened with grime, it's just as well his chestful of lead will kill him before infection has a chance to set in. Meeting his ashen reflection in the streaky shard of mirror makes it the audience's death mask, held in such zombie-glazed close-up that it is something of a relief when the camera backs off over his shoulder to a less tightly mortal third person, but then it plunges even deeper into the subjective world of the dead with the blackjack spectacle of a condemned's-eye view of the gas chamber, the somber little audience of prison officials beyond an unbreakable fourth wall reeling suddenly out of sight in the blackout of fumes. The PCA had shied at this exact point of view when originally planned by Billy Wilder for the ending of Double Indemnity (1944), but coming off the second string of Poverty Row, it must have gotten lost among all the sweet talk and burking. "Hey, wait a minute! Where's the body you was going to switch for Olins?" The reanimation itself is an underlit set piece straight out of shudder pulp, the real-life efficacy of methylene blue as an antidote to cyanide poisoning elaborated into a full-blown corpse reviver, intravenously jacked and monitored in the pings and whines of electrograms and mechanical ventilation until a weathered miracle of weird science can stare at the match he just blew out with his own restarted breath and collapse in exultant terror: "I'm alive!" Five minutes later, the poor schmuck redivivus, he isn't. Playing God is just one more dash in the line that leads to the treasure buried in the eucalyptus grove off the state highway and the only soul with a stake in the disposition of Frankie Olins rather than his dough is a slouchy-eyed Jojo, making the rounds so late that he apologetically bums an amphetamine off the frozen doctor with a deadpanned, meaningful, "My office hours are worse than yours." If the film actually had set itself as a treatise on the transience of the material, the expedient sets could only help, since even a plush suite in Decoy has the same underdressed interchangeability as a prison cell or a roadside hash house. Such humor as it contains beyond its cosmicist stings is assigned to an odd couple of morgue attendants (Louis Mason and Ferris Taylor) obviously once gravediggers or porters, whiling away execution night with solitaire and the dictionary out of which the lankier one keeps reading the ten-dollar words like one-liners, much to his stouter colleague's impatience: "There ain't enough story to it." The doctor smashes an apothecary weight like brass knuckles into his Hippocratic oath in torment of its betrayed ideals and falls to his knees in a swirling mist of headlights and leaf-litter to dig for Margot's $400,000 as she goads him on with gleefully blatant cries of "Deeper! Faster!" She wants like the grave itself, gaping for every man in the end. Nothing in her forthright recruitment to the ATS in Leslie Howard's The Gentle Sex (1943) prepared me for Gillie as Margot, the incandescently rotten role of a too-short lifetime, the femme so fatale, she can get the same man killed twice. By the time she's knocking them off herself with car and gun, the film has reached hold-my-beer levels of brutality for its decade and death has to work to meet her as fast, her breathless crest of triumph as unslakable as the desire that drove her there. The only man in the picture even close to her weight class is the patiently rumpled Jojo and he's too honest to hold more than the allure of corruption, which it takes the pity and proximity of death to conclude. Her last laugh is in his law-enforcing face. Cut off at the moral high ground, Portugal knee-deep in crooks is left to open the MacGuffin for which six people have died, which sat so enigmatically beneath the credits so that it could drive home the last memento mori nail of what all this striving and scheming and sinning is really worth: "To you who double-crossed me, I leave this dollar for your trouble. The rest of the dough, I leave to the worms."
I cannot make this film sound any better, weirder, or worse than it is. It's bleak and bonkers and looks like it was shot with a flashlight and a piece of cardboard where most B-movies at least tried to spring for two. At 76 minutes, it could be double-featured with a Senecan tragedy or a whoopee cushion. Eddie Muller paired it with the Corpse Reviver #2. It was the one collaboration produced by the brief marriage of Bernhard and Gillie and as the lankier morgue attendant whistles in admiration of his own mispronunciation of dichotomy, "Ain't that a lulu?" I saw it for the first time shortly after moving to our current apartment, when I was in no condition to try to convey its effect of an entire bookcase of pulp falling on the viewer, but it was most recently disinterred by TCM and is otherwise impressively difficult to find on the internet in legal fashion, which means that if you would like a ludicrously morbid pick-me-up, you should find it however you need to, only please leave the tire jack in the car. "Just this once, come down to my level." This trash brought to you by my singing backers at Patreon.
I can't even slate it for its femme fatale when Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie) is a figure of such irresistibly surreal avarice, it seems only respectful that the film should not escape her insatiable event horizon any more than the men she adds to her string and cuts lethally loose when she's through. Behind door number one, we have career robber Frankie Olins (Robert Armstrong), who turned himself into a three-time loser just to keep her in style and now awaits his turn in the gas chamber in the aging faith that she'll spring him in time to reap the luxuries of his secretly stashed $400,000. Behind door number two, right-hand double-dipper Jim Vincent (Edward Norris), signing on to her scheme to locate said lettuce in the chauvinistically misplaced confidence that he's calling the shots as opposed to so far behind the eight-ball, the audience can already hear it rolling up on him. Door number three opens onto the disadvantaged street where Dr. Lloyd Craig (Herbert Rudley) maintains a charity practice on his days off from prison doctoring, but his noble-minded naïveté peels off him like paint at a whiff of Margot's $75 perfume, the sum of his honest week's pay. Even Sergeant Joseph Portugal (Sheldon Leonard), the kind of sturdily streetwise flatfoot who rescues jailbait from mashers, pays for his bar snacks along with his beer, and drops his ubiquitous nickels in the tin for Yugoslav Relief, hovers on the edge of her harem in reluctant admiration of her total freeze-out of the law. Stripper-like as he watches over his half-eaten hard-boiled egg, she provocatively adjusts the cuff of diamonds on her wrist to glitter the gulf between his plainclothes scruples and her shameless glamour: "Do they have this kind of trash on your level, Jojo?" In a contractual sort of fashion, the film offers a motivation for her money-hunger, a childhood of industrial poverty which she sees distastefully reproduced in the doctor's street with its slum panorama of laundries and liquor stores, its gutter-playing urchins she strides brusquely past as if their ragged baseball shouldn't even bounce through the same air as her mink. "That street runs all over all the world. I know because that's the street I came from, six thousand miles from here in a little English mill town. But it's the same rotten street, the same factories, the same people, and the same dirty little grey-faced children." It's like trying to impose psychological realism on fire. What Margot wants is unremarkable, the ticket-taker and the cigarette girl and the audience who shelled out for the double feature all want it and so do we, eight decades on and it feels even less like a joke that a working stiff is just a corpse that can't afford to get off the clock. How she wants it cannot be explained by social factors. She wants like a Schwarzschild radius, like K-capture, like Kelvin zero. She wants like a contagious haunting, so that even men she's never met are scythed collaterally down by it, the driver of an armored car, the driver of a hearse—Liebestod is for chumps, it's cash on the death's-head that makes this world go round. What a vanitas, though. Between soft waves of red hair, her fine-boned face has a hard translucent pallor, as if faintly fever-sheened with its own cupidity, the crisp caress of her voice draws out a phrase like methylene blue until it sounds like an aphrodisiac and not the key to an audaciously lurid plan, not after all to rescue her lover from the death house before the whereabouts of his loot snuff it with him, but to reanimate him after execution and get it out of him then. "It'll cost plenty," she warns her co-conspirator, "and it's a long shot," as briskly as if she had just proposed a spot of bribery instead of jaw-dropping Grand Guignol. Margot, the original girl with the hungry eyes. That undiscovered country had better cough up and fast.
Seriously, for all the fabled fatalism of the genre, few noirs have as much skull beneath the skin as Decoy. Had it been produced for RKO by Val Lewton instead of Monogram Pictures by Bernhard and Bernard Brandt, it could have sported an epitaph by Webster or Kyd or Middleton, the bugged-out descendant of their splatter-black lyricism. Narrated from death's door by a gut-shot Margot, clutching her comfort object of a dirt-encrusted strongbox as she unfolds her gallows ballad of the wages of "simple arithmetic," the screenplay written by Nedrick Young from a story by Stanley Rubin never lets the action stray too far from the grave, its outrageously grislier flourishes as well as its general atmosphere of a pervasive bummer aided and abetted by the creepshow photography of L. W. O'Connell. Its calling card is a patsy on his last legs, uselessly smearing at his bloodied hands in a sink so blackened with grime, it's just as well his chestful of lead will kill him before infection has a chance to set in. Meeting his ashen reflection in the streaky shard of mirror makes it the audience's death mask, held in such zombie-glazed close-up that it is something of a relief when the camera backs off over his shoulder to a less tightly mortal third person, but then it plunges even deeper into the subjective world of the dead with the blackjack spectacle of a condemned's-eye view of the gas chamber, the somber little audience of prison officials beyond an unbreakable fourth wall reeling suddenly out of sight in the blackout of fumes. The PCA had shied at this exact point of view when originally planned by Billy Wilder for the ending of Double Indemnity (1944), but coming off the second string of Poverty Row, it must have gotten lost among all the sweet talk and burking. "Hey, wait a minute! Where's the body you was going to switch for Olins?" The reanimation itself is an underlit set piece straight out of shudder pulp, the real-life efficacy of methylene blue as an antidote to cyanide poisoning elaborated into a full-blown corpse reviver, intravenously jacked and monitored in the pings and whines of electrograms and mechanical ventilation until a weathered miracle of weird science can stare at the match he just blew out with his own restarted breath and collapse in exultant terror: "I'm alive!" Five minutes later, the poor schmuck redivivus, he isn't. Playing God is just one more dash in the line that leads to the treasure buried in the eucalyptus grove off the state highway and the only soul with a stake in the disposition of Frankie Olins rather than his dough is a slouchy-eyed Jojo, making the rounds so late that he apologetically bums an amphetamine off the frozen doctor with a deadpanned, meaningful, "My office hours are worse than yours." If the film actually had set itself as a treatise on the transience of the material, the expedient sets could only help, since even a plush suite in Decoy has the same underdressed interchangeability as a prison cell or a roadside hash house. Such humor as it contains beyond its cosmicist stings is assigned to an odd couple of morgue attendants (Louis Mason and Ferris Taylor) obviously once gravediggers or porters, whiling away execution night with solitaire and the dictionary out of which the lankier one keeps reading the ten-dollar words like one-liners, much to his stouter colleague's impatience: "There ain't enough story to it." The doctor smashes an apothecary weight like brass knuckles into his Hippocratic oath in torment of its betrayed ideals and falls to his knees in a swirling mist of headlights and leaf-litter to dig for Margot's $400,000 as she goads him on with gleefully blatant cries of "Deeper! Faster!" She wants like the grave itself, gaping for every man in the end. Nothing in her forthright recruitment to the ATS in Leslie Howard's The Gentle Sex (1943) prepared me for Gillie as Margot, the incandescently rotten role of a too-short lifetime, the femme so fatale, she can get the same man killed twice. By the time she's knocking them off herself with car and gun, the film has reached hold-my-beer levels of brutality for its decade and death has to work to meet her as fast, her breathless crest of triumph as unslakable as the desire that drove her there. The only man in the picture even close to her weight class is the patiently rumpled Jojo and he's too honest to hold more than the allure of corruption, which it takes the pity and proximity of death to conclude. Her last laugh is in his law-enforcing face. Cut off at the moral high ground, Portugal knee-deep in crooks is left to open the MacGuffin for which six people have died, which sat so enigmatically beneath the credits so that it could drive home the last memento mori nail of what all this striving and scheming and sinning is really worth: "To you who double-crossed me, I leave this dollar for your trouble. The rest of the dough, I leave to the worms."
I cannot make this film sound any better, weirder, or worse than it is. It's bleak and bonkers and looks like it was shot with a flashlight and a piece of cardboard where most B-movies at least tried to spring for two. At 76 minutes, it could be double-featured with a Senecan tragedy or a whoopee cushion. Eddie Muller paired it with the Corpse Reviver #2. It was the one collaboration produced by the brief marriage of Bernhard and Gillie and as the lankier morgue attendant whistles in admiration of his own mispronunciation of dichotomy, "Ain't that a lulu?" I saw it for the first time shortly after moving to our current apartment, when I was in no condition to try to convey its effect of an entire bookcase of pulp falling on the viewer, but it was most recently disinterred by TCM and is otherwise impressively difficult to find on the internet in legal fashion, which means that if you would like a ludicrously morbid pick-me-up, you should find it however you need to, only please leave the tire jack in the car. "Just this once, come down to my level." This trash brought to you by my singing backers at Patreon.
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