Murder Is My Beat (1955) doesn't live up to its title, but no film could that wasn't harder-boiled than an overcooked simile. It is a point in this one's favor that it's a softer touch. Formally and economically, it's B-noir and how, but though it plays by the book at its worst, at its best it plays instead with the expectations of its genre right down to the unreliability of its narrative. Just because it can't be trusted doesn't mean it's wrong.
The plot is ultimately a whodunnit, but it sets itself up like an aetiology: what brought a decorated homicide detective to the seediness of a suburban motor court, left flat by the convicted murderess he tarnished his shield to exonerate when he should have been escorting her to her just deserts upstate? For Captain Bert Rawley of the LAPD (Robert Shayne), disgustedly regarding the fugitive disgrace that used to be one of his best men (Paul Langton), there's no mystery worth an hour's flashback. "You let her play you for the biggest sucker who ever fell for the oldest pitch a dame could make. You, Ray Patrick, a cop! A level-headed, on-the-job, no-fancy-frills, straight-shooting cop! It's enough to make a man vomit." With this blunt catechism, we are primed to understand that however nobly our compromised narrator may justify himself, the most he can do is add his own sad variations to a theme as timeworn as Genesis 3:12, the blame-it-on-Mame rag of a good man gone bad for an even worse woman; thus as he recounts the initial trail of evidence that led him from the body of a man gruesomely scorched beyond recognition in his own fireplace to a snowbound cabin in the mountains five and a half hours north of Los Angeles, without even meeting the missing Eden Lane (Barbara Payton) we build up a predictably suspicious picture of a tight-sweatered blonde who sang sometimes at a bar too dinky to be rated a nightclub and caught the next Greyhound out of town even before her sugar daddy was pulled out of the fire, revealingly summarized down at headquarters as "short on dough and a face that'd stand out in heaven." Just in case we missed the intimation of her name, the disapproving sniff of a neighbor jogs it for us: "Reminds you of Original Sin." Confronted by a half-frozen, judgment-minded Ray, Eden rises from her armchair beside the fire as if she's been waiting for a visitor and then in answer to his flash of a badge asks without preamble, "You want me to come with you now?" It isn't delivered as an invitation. She sounds tense and startled, as carefully controlled as a woman alone in a road-blocking blizzard without even a phone on the premises to call for help if the armed stranger who casually threatened her for reaching to stir the fire really turns violent. Of course it could all be broken-winged decoy, but radically, what if it isn't? Having impressed us with the most stereotypically noir template of male-female relations, the film doesn't look to the woman to convince us otherwise, but filters the question intriguingly through the credibility of its men. One had her pegged as a gilt-edged tramp from the get-go; the other took the long chance of her innocence to jump from a moving train. It would not be inaccurate to say that the film's revelation depends on which one of them turns out to be the bigger dope.
Since none of this peculiar triangulation around the truth has a hope without the relationship of Eden and Ray, the strongest parts of Murder Is My Beat isolate these two characters in their ambiguous idyll that could be the folie à deux of lovers on the run or the rigged mechanism of a rescue complex and truly, trying to guess which one it is is much less interesting than just watching it unfold. Last seen in these parts playing the saddest of sacks for Robert Aldrich in The Big Knife (1955), Langton carries off the quixotically conscientious Ray half on physiognomy alone. Under a sterling slick of hair, he has what could be described as a sensitively modeled face, except it's too shadowed under the eyes and too worried about the brows and as soon as his mouth isn't skeptically braced, it's twisting itself into a second guess. Rewound by his own narration to the hard-nosed, straight-arrow detective lieutenant who prided himself on nine convictions out of eleven arrests and strode off like a SoCal Javert to notch up a tenth in a woman he hadn't even questioned yet, he's almost unrecognizable, he's as clean-cut as a block of wood and about as expressive, especially when stuck with square-jawed humblebrags like "The weather was fierce and getting worse by the minute, but eight years with homicide taught me that little things like blizzards must be taken in stride as occupational hazards." He's far more textured and credible as we meet him in the classically noir medias res of the cold open, washed up in the wreck of his good intentions in his shirtsleeves and the aftermath of a beating that stamped his face like a signet—in bruised profile, it makes him look a little ironically like a clown—and didn't brand him half so badly as the infatuation that leaves him still pleading for help from a man who doesn't want to hear another word from him, dogged, ashamed, and obsessed. As for Payton whom I had forgotten I had last seen in an even more dichotomous role in the Hammer sci-fi Four Sided Triangle (1953), I was disheartened to discover that she is better known for the devastation of her personal life than for the films she made despite it, because she's so natural as Eden that it seems a disservice to the character to evaluate her by the standards of either a good or bad girl. Certainly she presents the platinum chignon and lushly wrapped curves of many a mid-century siren, her full mouth painted so glisteningly that it doesn't quite seem to belong to the same face as her dark, wary brows, but she's neither vixen nor ingénue but a sad, adult woman saying in a kind of horror, "I can't help what you think." It's one of her few concessions to protest; more typical is her spellbound murmur, "The only way I can wake up from this nightmare is to go to sleep." Her fatalism, the resignation with which she submits to her arrest and trial and conviction is one of the first off-notes in the murder of Frank Deane which has otherwise tied itself up so neatly that Ray receives his commendation as much for the favorable publicity he's brought his department as for the actual finesse with which he handled the case; it troubled him as far back as their snow-drifted, candlelit overnight in the mountains where he snapped suddenly, "Skip it. I don't like the idea of helping people put themselves behind the eight-ball, even if it's to their own taste." The part could be listless, played for such enigma that it projects as merely blank. Instead her silence comes to feel like its own strange integrity, so charged with hopelessness or pride that when her reserve breaks at last, it's at once inevitable and electric that it cascades into Ray's own undoing: "Because for the first time, I began to doubt. And when a man begins to doubt what he represents is right—must be right—he's coming apart at the seams."
The attentive viewer may detect that the unraveling was already well underway. That our man's moral compass could be sent spinning from the thin blue letter of the law to its humane, unpredictable spirit is fairly foreshadowed by a line that seemed at the time generically placed to establish his tough credentials, especially in the parodically macho context of "the trail of a killer . . . I hate the wanton destruction of human life. I'd seen too much killing in the Pacific." Perhaps he's seen too much of it on the job in L.A. He reads the coverage of the Lane trial with less satisfaction than one might expect from the cop who made the collar; left alone with his quiet prisoner as night falls on the Southern Pacific's Starlight run, his first words to her since their inauspicious last meeting are the unexpected and touchingly inappropriate "Don't give up." Even if we imagine she was feigning the glimpse of her not after all murdered ex-lover on the platform at Lindaville, its very efficacy suggests that the spur for Ray's jump from grace was not the mirage of a sexual reward but the specter of a miscarriage of justice such as he has always partly feared: "To live with that thought for the rest of my life—" It is conceivable that in retelling his version of events to Bert Rawley, Ray is concealing his less creditable motives in an effort not to look like such a simon-pure sap, but since he sugarcoats none of the other failings of his week on the lam with Eden Lane, we might as well give him the benefit of the doubt. Specifically, in a grimly funny and troubling departure from the conventions of amateur detecting, Ray cut loose from the institutional resources of the police doesn't seem able to investigate his way out of his own misgivings. Lead after hunch after long shot peters out in the bricolage verging on apophenia of a mass-produced figurine, an unreported $5000, the photograph of an annual banquet for the Abbott Ceramics Company. The most concrete products of his ad-lib white-knighting are a fancy shiner and a sickening sense of futility. "Every day I put behind us drawing nothing but blanks was a day thrown into the ashcan and hauled to the city dump," he concludes brutally, his self-doubts riding shotgun with the passing haze of neon and flop sweat: "Better go home and tell that girl of yours who trusts you that you're up a tree." But if he's on a snipe hunt, where else should he be? What consolation can he take in the gratitude he insists she doesn't owe him when it's literally for nothing? Surely it must have occurred to him as he lies awake in a somber, recurring shot that even the smartest of sleuths can't find a person who's already ceased to exist. And yet it feels like the truest thing he could be doing, just because it's a human act of hope: as poignant as Eden's soft confession that every ashcanned day has been worth it just to be believed. Whatever underlies their phantom version of domesticity with their borrowed car and falsely signed names and his nine-to-five job of unsuccessful gumshoeing while she waits around the house so as not to be recognized from her official description, it is desperately something they both need.
( She's not what you think, Bert. Never was. )
An authentic product of Poverty Row, Murder Is My Beat was scripted and produced by Audrey Wisberg and directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, the past master of no-budget noir whose acclaimed Detour (1945) plays in some ways like the blueprint for the kind of movie this one isn't, although they share an embrace of rear projection that borders on black box theater. All location shooting is L.A. regardless of narrative geography, except for the improbably altitude-accurate blizzard. The cinematography by Harold E. Wellman suggests it is extracting maximum value from minimum light even in day scenes and I suspect most of its exteriors of being stock footage. It's hardly even expressionism; it's as flat as the disappointed world and then suddenly a journey north ranks among the great night trains of film noir, the damaged and potent faces of a pair of losers strained to a lucky throw intercut with the steel-driving clatter of wheels and the headlamp blaring like limelight down the track, as beautiful as everything that has nothing to lose. I got this experience off late-night TCM, but I see it's on Amazon and DVD and should ideally play around midnight on 35 mm in a print that looks like its hero's cheekbones. This doubt brought to you by my standout backers at Patreon.
The plot is ultimately a whodunnit, but it sets itself up like an aetiology: what brought a decorated homicide detective to the seediness of a suburban motor court, left flat by the convicted murderess he tarnished his shield to exonerate when he should have been escorting her to her just deserts upstate? For Captain Bert Rawley of the LAPD (Robert Shayne), disgustedly regarding the fugitive disgrace that used to be one of his best men (Paul Langton), there's no mystery worth an hour's flashback. "You let her play you for the biggest sucker who ever fell for the oldest pitch a dame could make. You, Ray Patrick, a cop! A level-headed, on-the-job, no-fancy-frills, straight-shooting cop! It's enough to make a man vomit." With this blunt catechism, we are primed to understand that however nobly our compromised narrator may justify himself, the most he can do is add his own sad variations to a theme as timeworn as Genesis 3:12, the blame-it-on-Mame rag of a good man gone bad for an even worse woman; thus as he recounts the initial trail of evidence that led him from the body of a man gruesomely scorched beyond recognition in his own fireplace to a snowbound cabin in the mountains five and a half hours north of Los Angeles, without even meeting the missing Eden Lane (Barbara Payton) we build up a predictably suspicious picture of a tight-sweatered blonde who sang sometimes at a bar too dinky to be rated a nightclub and caught the next Greyhound out of town even before her sugar daddy was pulled out of the fire, revealingly summarized down at headquarters as "short on dough and a face that'd stand out in heaven." Just in case we missed the intimation of her name, the disapproving sniff of a neighbor jogs it for us: "Reminds you of Original Sin." Confronted by a half-frozen, judgment-minded Ray, Eden rises from her armchair beside the fire as if she's been waiting for a visitor and then in answer to his flash of a badge asks without preamble, "You want me to come with you now?" It isn't delivered as an invitation. She sounds tense and startled, as carefully controlled as a woman alone in a road-blocking blizzard without even a phone on the premises to call for help if the armed stranger who casually threatened her for reaching to stir the fire really turns violent. Of course it could all be broken-winged decoy, but radically, what if it isn't? Having impressed us with the most stereotypically noir template of male-female relations, the film doesn't look to the woman to convince us otherwise, but filters the question intriguingly through the credibility of its men. One had her pegged as a gilt-edged tramp from the get-go; the other took the long chance of her innocence to jump from a moving train. It would not be inaccurate to say that the film's revelation depends on which one of them turns out to be the bigger dope.
Since none of this peculiar triangulation around the truth has a hope without the relationship of Eden and Ray, the strongest parts of Murder Is My Beat isolate these two characters in their ambiguous idyll that could be the folie à deux of lovers on the run or the rigged mechanism of a rescue complex and truly, trying to guess which one it is is much less interesting than just watching it unfold. Last seen in these parts playing the saddest of sacks for Robert Aldrich in The Big Knife (1955), Langton carries off the quixotically conscientious Ray half on physiognomy alone. Under a sterling slick of hair, he has what could be described as a sensitively modeled face, except it's too shadowed under the eyes and too worried about the brows and as soon as his mouth isn't skeptically braced, it's twisting itself into a second guess. Rewound by his own narration to the hard-nosed, straight-arrow detective lieutenant who prided himself on nine convictions out of eleven arrests and strode off like a SoCal Javert to notch up a tenth in a woman he hadn't even questioned yet, he's almost unrecognizable, he's as clean-cut as a block of wood and about as expressive, especially when stuck with square-jawed humblebrags like "The weather was fierce and getting worse by the minute, but eight years with homicide taught me that little things like blizzards must be taken in stride as occupational hazards." He's far more textured and credible as we meet him in the classically noir medias res of the cold open, washed up in the wreck of his good intentions in his shirtsleeves and the aftermath of a beating that stamped his face like a signet—in bruised profile, it makes him look a little ironically like a clown—and didn't brand him half so badly as the infatuation that leaves him still pleading for help from a man who doesn't want to hear another word from him, dogged, ashamed, and obsessed. As for Payton whom I had forgotten I had last seen in an even more dichotomous role in the Hammer sci-fi Four Sided Triangle (1953), I was disheartened to discover that she is better known for the devastation of her personal life than for the films she made despite it, because she's so natural as Eden that it seems a disservice to the character to evaluate her by the standards of either a good or bad girl. Certainly she presents the platinum chignon and lushly wrapped curves of many a mid-century siren, her full mouth painted so glisteningly that it doesn't quite seem to belong to the same face as her dark, wary brows, but she's neither vixen nor ingénue but a sad, adult woman saying in a kind of horror, "I can't help what you think." It's one of her few concessions to protest; more typical is her spellbound murmur, "The only way I can wake up from this nightmare is to go to sleep." Her fatalism, the resignation with which she submits to her arrest and trial and conviction is one of the first off-notes in the murder of Frank Deane which has otherwise tied itself up so neatly that Ray receives his commendation as much for the favorable publicity he's brought his department as for the actual finesse with which he handled the case; it troubled him as far back as their snow-drifted, candlelit overnight in the mountains where he snapped suddenly, "Skip it. I don't like the idea of helping people put themselves behind the eight-ball, even if it's to their own taste." The part could be listless, played for such enigma that it projects as merely blank. Instead her silence comes to feel like its own strange integrity, so charged with hopelessness or pride that when her reserve breaks at last, it's at once inevitable and electric that it cascades into Ray's own undoing: "Because for the first time, I began to doubt. And when a man begins to doubt what he represents is right—must be right—he's coming apart at the seams."
The attentive viewer may detect that the unraveling was already well underway. That our man's moral compass could be sent spinning from the thin blue letter of the law to its humane, unpredictable spirit is fairly foreshadowed by a line that seemed at the time generically placed to establish his tough credentials, especially in the parodically macho context of "the trail of a killer . . . I hate the wanton destruction of human life. I'd seen too much killing in the Pacific." Perhaps he's seen too much of it on the job in L.A. He reads the coverage of the Lane trial with less satisfaction than one might expect from the cop who made the collar; left alone with his quiet prisoner as night falls on the Southern Pacific's Starlight run, his first words to her since their inauspicious last meeting are the unexpected and touchingly inappropriate "Don't give up." Even if we imagine she was feigning the glimpse of her not after all murdered ex-lover on the platform at Lindaville, its very efficacy suggests that the spur for Ray's jump from grace was not the mirage of a sexual reward but the specter of a miscarriage of justice such as he has always partly feared: "To live with that thought for the rest of my life—" It is conceivable that in retelling his version of events to Bert Rawley, Ray is concealing his less creditable motives in an effort not to look like such a simon-pure sap, but since he sugarcoats none of the other failings of his week on the lam with Eden Lane, we might as well give him the benefit of the doubt. Specifically, in a grimly funny and troubling departure from the conventions of amateur detecting, Ray cut loose from the institutional resources of the police doesn't seem able to investigate his way out of his own misgivings. Lead after hunch after long shot peters out in the bricolage verging on apophenia of a mass-produced figurine, an unreported $5000, the photograph of an annual banquet for the Abbott Ceramics Company. The most concrete products of his ad-lib white-knighting are a fancy shiner and a sickening sense of futility. "Every day I put behind us drawing nothing but blanks was a day thrown into the ashcan and hauled to the city dump," he concludes brutally, his self-doubts riding shotgun with the passing haze of neon and flop sweat: "Better go home and tell that girl of yours who trusts you that you're up a tree." But if he's on a snipe hunt, where else should he be? What consolation can he take in the gratitude he insists she doesn't owe him when it's literally for nothing? Surely it must have occurred to him as he lies awake in a somber, recurring shot that even the smartest of sleuths can't find a person who's already ceased to exist. And yet it feels like the truest thing he could be doing, just because it's a human act of hope: as poignant as Eden's soft confession that every ashcanned day has been worth it just to be believed. Whatever underlies their phantom version of domesticity with their borrowed car and falsely signed names and his nine-to-five job of unsuccessful gumshoeing while she waits around the house so as not to be recognized from her official description, it is desperately something they both need.
( She's not what you think, Bert. Never was. )
An authentic product of Poverty Row, Murder Is My Beat was scripted and produced by Audrey Wisberg and directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, the past master of no-budget noir whose acclaimed Detour (1945) plays in some ways like the blueprint for the kind of movie this one isn't, although they share an embrace of rear projection that borders on black box theater. All location shooting is L.A. regardless of narrative geography, except for the improbably altitude-accurate blizzard. The cinematography by Harold E. Wellman suggests it is extracting maximum value from minimum light even in day scenes and I suspect most of its exteriors of being stock footage. It's hardly even expressionism; it's as flat as the disappointed world and then suddenly a journey north ranks among the great night trains of film noir, the damaged and potent faces of a pair of losers strained to a lucky throw intercut with the steel-driving clatter of wheels and the headlamp blaring like limelight down the track, as beautiful as everything that has nothing to lose. I got this experience off late-night TCM, but I see it's on Amazon and DVD and should ideally play around midnight on 35 mm in a print that looks like its hero's cheekbones. This doubt brought to you by my standout backers at Patreon.
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