Like moths to electric light, we did not even get the crime right

I tried to rewatch Backfire (1950), which I had not much liked about five years ago. I didn't much like it this time around, either, but it does serve as sterling evidence that the Golden Age of Hollywood was no less prone than the current age to twists that sounded their best inside the author's head. I enjoy a mad scene as much as the next pulp fan, but the one this film pulls out of its back pocket in the home stretch merely fulfills the promise of the title. Look away if you care about seventy-year spoilers, but I don't want the affable mortician played by Dane Clark to turn out to be the alter ego of the maniacally murderous gangster behind all the baroque mayhem of the plot, I want him to turn out to be an affable mortician—a returning veteran who went uncreepily into the funeral trade because he needed a sure thing for a business loan and the alternative was taxes—because I have seen that character far less often, in noir or any other genre, than I have seen flashy, fixated, criminal types. He's cute in the horn-rimmed cheaters he wears to look more professionally somber "for the customers—that is, for the customers' next of kin." Plenty of cute characters turn out to be decoys, of course, but it doesn't have to be so uninteresting when they do.