Destination Murder (1950)

Destination Murder (1950) is a blackmail and murder mystery queer-coded cinema-fantasy delivery boy fantasy psychopathic gang leader fantasy female seeker hero classic Edward L. Cahn film and also a classic film noir, by any sane and sober measure of the style, and doubtless listed as such because as far as Edward L. Cahn film noir output goes and is, this must be his noir masterpiece, the most classical and memorable of his out pout in that style and canon, Cahn's classic expression of the classic film noir style, and perfection ahoy.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the female seeker hero was a new twist in storytelling, and she was unique to film noir. 

Destination Murder (1950) is a good time. It is a film of stupidity greed and fo sho sho fire murder. It is not possible to relate any information regarding this cine-fayre without mention of the player piano which is a large part of its attraction.

Like the male seeker she is plucked out of her mundane existence by a crime and set on the path to its resolution . . .  but unlike the male, she wasn’t looking for adventure to begin with.

What a mundane existence. She barely seems to miss her father. Why was he shot? Who cared enough? The killer used his own car and was seen. The assassin hitman guy has a crazy outre leap. The leap is a huge part of the attraction of this film. This film is a good time.

Also unlike the male, the female or wifelet seeker hero has a defined role to begin with — wife — sister —or daughter (as in Destination Murder) — and she takes the evil urban streets and underbellies of noir as an ingénue, having her eyes opened as she bluffs her way towards resolution.

It was an idea that began with Jamaica Inn, a specifically 'woman's film' (Hollywood has to categorise everything in order to meet audience expectation and recoup its costs, with profit).

In film noir, there is a lot to upturn regarding women's roles however, and in Destination Murder, the family, the locus of woman's oppression is broken up by a murder.  I say that the family is where women have been oppressed, because it's in the family that they function not as people but as ideological entities, wife, mother, daughter, nurse and so on.

This is not a fancy film, but Edward L. Cahn is not known for his sophisticated ruminations on the form, but rather allows fantasy where realism will never tread, making the most of the silver screen to enlighten the undercurrents of the social and political languages of his day.

The entire conceit of the beginning aspect of the film, featuring the movie Corregidor (1943) (Wikipedia), and when we see movies within movies we must all be alert!

There are two actions to be alert to here, and the first is a not unusual trope, which is the film that begins with the title card saying THE END, usually as characters watch a film within the film.

Here a fine example, and a theatrical intermission follows. One of the more outre aspects of this quite crazed noir, only in fact crazed and outre if you think about it for long enough, is the perfect alibi. The killer is with his girlfriend and leaves the cinema for an intermission, and carries out a murder, which he travels to, in the break, so that no one is the wiser.

The concealed fantasy here is that the man is not good enough for the woman, the boy for the girl. If you are a regular cinema male attending the pictures in 1950, why might you not imagine you are something you are not, a hitman! And can you not carry out your hit that very second the lights come back on. You are no more cinema, but are cinema, in your own mental theater.

Cinema in theater in cinema in Destination Murder (1950)

This is the second action, the fantasy of the movie goer, that world, the world of your imagination, far more uncontrolled than the movies, and capable of far much worse, anything you can devise in fact.

Destination Murder (1950) emerges from the strange margins of postwar crime cinema. It is a film in which narrative logic is stretched to the breaking point, yet it maintains a peculiar integrity through its own odd sense of rhythm. 

Note: Stanley Clements buys two cartonnies of popcorn but returns to the cinematic-hall with JUST THE ONE in Destination Murder (1950)

One of these messenger boy joiks is a moiderah in Destination Murder (1950)

A cigarette measures out your death — Hurd Hatfield and Albert Dekker in Destination Murder (1950)

The film is brisk at sixty-five minutes, a running time that leaves no space for hesitation, yet it also seems to delight in narrative digressions that defy simple cohesion. It belongs to the B-noir tradition, a tradition in which speed, improvisation, and audacity are often more valued than polish or structural precision.

The story begins with a scene whose casual cruelty encapsulates the film’s sensibility. Jackie Wales, played with slick insolence by Stanley Clements, sits in a movie theatre. He rises at intermission, ostensibly to stretch his legs, and proceeds to carry out a contract killing. The victim, Arthur Mansfield, has barely answered his front door before he is shot. The assassin leaps over the picket fence and vanishes into a waiting car. 

The suspicious light — Destination Murder (1950)

Jackie then returns to his seat in the theatre, as if nothing had occurred, his box of popcorn intact. This sudden violence, framed by an almost comedic departure and return, establishes the tension between brutality and absurdity that threads through the entire film.

Laura Mansfield, portrayed by Joyce MacKenzie, is the victim’s daughter. Her performance has been criticized for stiffness, yet her character’s function is essential. Laura is a college student on break, though her poise and calculated speech suggest a far older and more worldly figure. When the police investigation fails to advance, she resolves to identify her father’s killer herself. 

Motor intrigue with psychopath (Stanley Clements) and female seeker hero (Joyce Mackenzie) in Destination Murder (1950)

It is a decision that, in its implausibility, reflects both the moral certainties and the reckless fantasies embedded in mid-century pulp storytelling. She recalls that her father had been engaged in a campaign against racketeering, which may have drawn the fatal attention of nightclub operators.

Her method is direct. She goes undercover at the Vogue, a nightclub run on the surface by Stretch Norton, played by Hurd Hatfield, but actually owned by the hulking and sadistic Armitage, a role inhabited by Albert Dekker. 

Armitage operates from an upstairs office, surrounded by signs of cultivated taste, including a player piano that delivers Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata while he discusses or commits acts of violence. Dekker’s physical stillness and soft voice make his eruptions of brutality more startling. The apparent hierarchy between Armitage and Stretch will later be inverted, one of the film’s many reversals.

Laura’s first step toward infiltration is to attach herself to Jackie, fully aware that he is the man who killed her father. She has seen him leap a fence in a manner identical to the killer’s escape on the night of the murder. Jackie, a small-time gambler, is not a calculating villain but a weak man whose impulses make him dangerous. Their relationship is laced with mutual exploitation. For Laura, he is a link to the criminal inner circle. For Jackie, she is another conquest, one that affirms his self-image.

Jackie’s own subplot thickens when he turns against his employer. Encouraged by Alice Wentworth, the nightclub’s actual femme fatale, he attempts to blackmail Armitage. Myrna Dell plays Alice with the relaxed authority of a woman who has lived in the margins of legality for years. Her manipulation of Jackie is one of the film’s sharper dynamics. 

In the summer of 1950, American cinema offered an abundance of taut little thrillers, quick to produce and quicker to fade from marquee memory. 

Living well and dating city montage in Destination Murder (1950)

Among them, Destination Murder appeared without fanfare, yet it has managed to linger in the fringes of the noir canon, sustained by its convoluted plotting, its mix of faded glamour and opportunistic casting, and by the peculiar magnetism of Hurd Hatfield in a role that reads, to modern sensibilities, as both villainous and queer-coded. It is a “B” picture in the strictest sense, with all the frugality and narrative overstuffing that implies, yet it remains an oddly compelling case study in how postwar crime melodrama could be at once predictable and strangely innovative.

The film’s premise is both blunt and outlandish. Laura Mansfield, a college student of apparent poise and beauty beyond her years, returns home just in time to see her father murdered on their doorstep by a deliveryman in uniform. 

The killer departs without haste, slips back into the shadows of an ordinary alibi, and the police, with their eyes on “bigger fish,” take no decisive action. This failure of official authority becomes the narrative pretext for Laura’s improbable transformation into amateur investigator, nightclub cigarette girl, and romantic decoy. 

The idea that she can infiltrate a tightly knit underworld by sheer force of charm and coincidence is one of the film’s many leaps of logic, but the conceit is not uncommon in mid-century thrillers, where female protagonists were often given a kind of reckless autonomy precisely because the plot required it.

HE COULD BEAT ANY RAP BUT LOVE! 

RUTHLESS DRAMA OF A RACKET KING!

(original posters-all caps!)

Her quarry, initially, is Jackie Wales (Stanley Clements), a wiry, gum-chewing, self-satisfied hitman whose opening alibi is a small masterstroke of pulp invention: he leaves a date at the movies “just to buy popcorn” during intermission, commits murder, and returns before the second feature begins. Jackie, however, is not the final link in the chain of culpability. 

He works for Armitage (Albert Dekker), the ostensible owner of the Vogue nightclub, who is in turn shadowed by his own manager, Stretch Norton (Hurd Hatfield). The early dynamic suggests that Armitage is the “Mr. Big,” but as the layers of deceit peel away, it becomes clear that Stretch, with his immaculate grooming, calculated detachment, and avowed disinterest in women, is the true spider at the center of the web.

Job interview in the den of sin —  conservative female seeker hero versus 'worldly' barfly woman —  plus vacuum cleaner in film noir — in Destination Murder (1950)

Hatfield’s portrayal of Stretch is one of the film’s most enduring curiosities. Five years earlier, he had been immortalized — and in some ways entombed — by the role of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Here, stripped of period finery but retaining that same mask-like beauty, he affects a subtle New York inflection and a languid precision of movement. 

His repeated “I don’t like dames” operates both as character shorthand and as an unintended signal to later viewers attuned to queer subtext in mid-century Hollywood. In the economy of the Production Code, the refusal of heterosexual interest often marked a villain as “different” in ways left deliberately undefined. 

Hatfield’s Stretch is fastidious, manipulative, physically restrained in violence (he often lets others do the dirty work), and given to an understated theatricality — all of which lend the role an air of coded queerness that sits uneasily alongside his courtship of Laura. That courtship, in turn, reads more as a move in a chess game than as an expression of desire, reinforcing the character’s opacity.

The plot’s progression is a spiral of shifting alliances and betrayals. Laura, convinced of Jackie’s guilt but still pursuing proximity to him, befriends him, dates him, and eventually follows him into the orbit of the Vogue. 

Armitage, meanwhile, reveals a taste for cruelty both physical and psychological. He referes to himself in the third person which is the surest fire sound of madness impending, it is an incredible touch. Check out the third person usage there my pals.

One of the film’s most bizarre touches is his ritual of beating victims to the strains of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, often rendered by a player piano whose location seems to migrate between sets without explanation. In one scene, the Red Caps, a real-life jump-and-jive vocal group, perform a jaunty number just before Armitage delivers a brutal punishment — the ironic counterpoint being as much a noir signature as the hard shadows and cigarette smoke.

Alice Wentworth (Myrna Dell), a platinum-haired moll, functions as the picture’s failed femme fatale. She schemes, she seduces, she conspires in blackmail, but she lacks the foresight or discipline to carry through. 

Gate vault alerts female seeker hero Joyce Mackenzie in Destination Murder (1950)

Her inability to “pull off” her plans, despite her evident hardness, gives the film a strange hollowness in its treatment of female criminality — as though true ruthlessness must remain the province of men like Armitage and Stretch. Yet Alice’s presence serves as a foil for Laura’s quasi-heroic performance: the former is entrenched in the underworld but fatally flawed, the latter an outsider who can glide in and out of its spaces without losing her moral standing (or so the film insists).

Free ciggies in Destination Murder (1950)

The middle act delivers one of the film’s most effective twists: the sudden removal of Jackie Wales from the board. Killed off-screen in a fit of gangland “cleaning house,” his absence allows Stretch to consolidate control. Here, Hatfield’s performance sharpens, his composure hardening into a kind of smug omnipotence. 

It is in this stretch of narrative — no pun intended — that his coded persona becomes most visible: he manipulates multiple subordinates, orchestrates a faux murder designed to frame Armitage, and controls Laura’s movements with the precision of a director blocking a scene. 

The staging of Armitage’s death is ludicrous in detail — drugging the man, planting a gun in his limp hand, staging a scenario in which Laura believes she is shooting in self-defense — yet the sequence has a dreamlike illogic that feels almost surrealist in its detachment from plausible human behavior.

The script, credited to Don Martin, piles these contrivances without apology. Indeed, part of the film’s charm, for those inclined to appreciate it, lies in its disregard for realism. The police operate with priorities that make no procedural sense, the nightclub functions as both den of vice and strangely public space, and Laura’s infiltration meets with virtually no resistance. 

Even the murder’s motive — tied, in some tellings, to her father’s involvement in racket-busting — is inconsistently handled, surfacing only to justify the whole affair before disappearing back into the shadows.

From a feminist analytical lens, Laura’s role is double-edged. On one hand, she is granted agency: she refuses to wait passively for male authorities to act, she adopts disguise and deception, she engages directly with dangerous men. 

On the other hand, her autonomy is bounded by the script’s refusal to let her be the decisive actor in the climax. The elaborate resolution is engineered by male characters — Stretch, Armitage, Frank Niles, and the police — while Laura’s principal function is to be maneuvered into position, literally armed, so that her shot can be the final act in someone else’s plan. 

Her flirtations with Jackie and Stretch serve the narrative more than they serve her own character development, reducing her sexuality to a plot instrument. Joyce MacKenzie’s performance, criticized by some for its woodenness, compounds this by rendering Laura’s inner life largely inaccessible. Her beauty is undeniable; her emotional range, less so. Thus, while the film toys with the image of a proactive woman, it ultimately reinscribes her within the safe bounds of manipulated pawn and romantic prize.

Seen in the context of 1950 America, Destination Murder participates in a broader cultural mood. The war was over, the Cold War had begun, and anxieties about hidden enemies — whether in organized crime or in ideological infiltration — permeated popular media. 

The police’s fixation on “Mr. Big” over the man who actually pulled the trigger mirrors the era’s fascination with conspiratorial hierarchies and the hunt for elusive masterminds. The film’s setting in a nightclub, with its blend of spectacle and secrecy, reflects a postwar fascination with leisure spaces as both glamorous and morally suspect. The cars, clothes, and social rituals on display are as much a document of their time as they are narrative decoration.

In the larger history of the United States, Destination Murder sits at the intersection of two significant currents: the persistence of the “B” crime picture as a training ground for actors, directors, and crew; and the gradual shift in postwar gender politics, wherein women’s wartime agency was both remembered and curtailed in peacetime narratives. 

The film offers a heroine who acts — but only within a tightly scripted male architecture. It offers villains who are charismatic and ambiguous — but only as long as they meet their narrative comeuppance. Its queer-coded antagonist is both compelling and doomed, reflecting a Hollywood habit of making difference synonymous with danger.

As for its noir credentials, they are solid if modest. The chiaroscuro lighting, the nightclub as moral crossroads, the hardboiled dialogue, and the fatalistic plotting all place it comfortably within the tradition. The constant double- and triple-crossing, the atmosphere of mistrust, the presence of a tarnished yet alluring female figure — these are noir staples. 

Yet it is in the small details that the film most clearly reveals its lineage: the ironic use of music before violence, the casual cruelty of criminal bosses, the sense that law enforcement is always one step behind, and the ultimate futility of individual schemes in the face of systemic corruption. Even the implausibilities contribute to its noir aura: in a world this crooked, why should events unfold with logic?

The supporting cast adds layers of texture, even when their performances are uneven. Albert Dekker, remembered from Dr. Cyclops, alternates between menace and almost comic bluster. Myrna Dell invests Alice with enough hardness to make her downfall sting, even if the script denies her the intelligence of a true femme fatale. 

Stanley Clements, better known for roughneck roles, plays Jackie as a man too foolish to grasp the implications of his own actions — a would-be ladies’ man fatally unaware that the woman he’s wooing knows exactly who he is. John Dehner, in a smaller but pivotal role, brings a touch of sly professionalism, familiar to fans of radio’s Have Gun, Will Travel.

The direction by Edward L. Cahn is brisk, functional, and occasionally inventive. He makes the most of his limited sets, reusing spaces with minimal redressing, and stages action with an eye for clarity over spectacle. The Vogue nightclub becomes a central arena, its powder room the site of minor but telling character moments. 

The Red Caps’ musical interludes serve both as period flavor and as ironic counterpoint, a technique more sophisticated than the film’s budget might suggest.

Destination Depression in a Low Cut Dress in Destination Murder (1950)

Hatfield’s Stretch remains the gravitational center. His refined menace, his cool refusal of conventional masculinity, and his final unmasking as the mastermind make him the most memorable figure. Even his death — preceded by a boast to the police’s planted informant — seems in character, as though he cannot resist the theatrical flourish of self-revelation. 

His queerness, coded rather than declared, enriches the role for contemporary viewers attuned to such signals, even as it functions within the 1950 moral schema as one more reason for his removal.

By the end, the tangled web has been cut through by bullets and arrests. Laura survives, her father’s murder avenged, her potential marriage to Stretch nullified by the revelation of his crimes. The police reclaim the narrative, and the underworld is once again cordoned off from the respectable surface. The resolution is neat in form if not in plausibility, a return to order that feels less like justice than like the final chord of a familiar tune.

Seventy-plus years later, Destination Murder is unlikely to be anyone’s gateway into noir. Its budgetary limitations, its narrative contrivances, and its uneven acting keep it on the periphery of the genre’s greats. 

Yet for the devoted, it offers rewards: the charm of its period detail, the occasional cleverness of its twists, the rare appearance of the Red Caps on film, and above all the study in elegant malice that is Hurd Hatfield’s Stretch Norton. In the landscape of postwar American cinema, it is a small but telling artifact — a reminder that even in the most workmanlike productions, traces of cultural tension, coded identity, and genre tradition can be found, waiting to be read between the shadows.

She persuades him to demand five thousand dollars from Armitage, armed with a written confession that would supposedly be sent to the police if he is killed. The first attempt fails, ending with Jackie beaten into submission. On the second try, the plan succeeds. But Alice then betrays Jackie, revealing the scheme to Stretch. Armitage responds by murdering Jackie.

Hurd Hatfield in Destination Murder (1950)

The murders in Destination Murder (1950) have a ritualized quality. Each major killing is accompanied by the playing of the Moonlight Sonata. This recurrence creates a tonal dissonance, an interplay between elegance and savagery. It is an affectation worthy of pulp’s more self-conscious villains, suggesting a world in which aesthetics and violence are inseparable.

Following Jackie’s death, Laura gains employment as a cigarette girl at the Vogue, placing herself under Stretch’s direct supervision. Their relationship is more ambiguous than her liaison with Jackie. Stretch is smoother, more composed, and his manner is seductive. 

The audience is left uncertain whether Laura’s attraction is sincere or merely strategic. Hatfield plays Stretch with an understated menace, his reserve masking calculated ambition.

Alice Wentworth: What's the matter, honey? Stretch giving you the business?

Laura Mansfield: Stretch? He doesnt' mean anything to me.

Alice Wentworth: Well, he certainly bothers me.

Laura Mansfield: Stretch does? He doesn't bother you.

Alice Wentworth: That's what bothers me.

Plus as a side surely one of the worst of cinematic lines in the long rolling sensational poor lineage of lines:

Lieutenant Brewster: You see, Miss Mansfield, we're dealing with killers, and a killer has only one destination: murder.

The structure of the criminal organization is revealed to be other than what Laura or the viewer initially believed. Stretch is not Armitage’s subordinate. In fact, he is the real leader. This reversal reorients the audience’s understanding of the preceding events, though the script offers little foundation for this change, making it feel like one more twist added for its own sake. 

The revelation arrives through a tape recording played by the police, in which Stretch admits his dominance over Armitage.

The climax comes swiftly. Stretch drugs Armitage and engineers a scene in which it will appear that Armitage is attempting to kill him. Laura intervenes, shooting Armitage dead. In the confrontation that follows, Stretch turns on Laura. 

The police arrive and kill him, ending the chain of treacheries. The narrative resolves not through Laura’s detective work but through the internecine violence of the criminals themselves, a conclusion that reflects the noir conviction that crime contains its own seeds of destruction.

Edward L. Cahn directs with a competence that rises above the film’s limited budget. Cahn was known for extracting the maximum from minimal resources, and here he shapes cramped sets into believable spaces. The nightclub interior is given texture through the inclusion of live music by Steve Gibson and the Red Caps, whose performance provides an authentic energy rare in productions of this scale. 

Their presence also hints at broader cultural currents, as African-American musical acts were beginning to cross into mainstream visibility in the early 1950s.

The performances vary sharply in quality. MacKenzie’s controlled stiffness undermines the plausibility of her role as a college student plunged into danger. Clements captures the petty vanity of a small-time hoodlum, though his threat level is limited by his boyish appearance. Dell delivers a more complete creation, her Alice a mixture of calculation and weary realism. Dekker, familiar to noir audiences from Kiss Me Deadly (1955), imbues Armitage with a perverse dignity. Hatfield’s Stretch is cold, deliberate, and unflappable, which makes his final moments more potent.

The year 1950 was one of transition for American cinema. The studio system was in decline, television was rising, and independent productions were increasingly common. Political paranoia was intensifying, with the Korean War beginning in June and the domestic climate shaped by McCarthy’s anti-Communist hearings. In this atmosphere, crime stories often reflected anxieties about infiltration, betrayal, and the fragility of established hierarchies. 

Destination Murder (1950), for all its pulp contrivances, participates in this mood. The hidden authority of Stretch over Armitage can be read as an allegory for unseen forces manipulating public figures, a theme resonant in a culture preoccupied with subversion.

Spirit level needed for camera operator in Destination Murder (1950)?

From the standpoint of gender, the film offers an instructive arrangement of archetypes. Laura is active in pursuing her father’s killer, but her effectiveness is questionable. Her major discoveries occur through proximity to men, not through independent deduction. She willingly enters sexual or romantic entanglements with dangerous figures in order to gain access, yet these relationships place her in reactive positions. 

By contrast, Alice operates from within the criminal sphere. She manipulates men directly, guiding their actions to serve her own ends. However, the narrative punishes both women. Laura survives, but only because the police intervene at the precise moment of danger. Alice is killed as a direct consequence of her manipulations. 

In this sense, the film affirms the noir tradition of portraying women’s power as both alluring and fatal, an element reflecting the postwar unease with shifting gender roles.

In the history of the United States, the figure of the nightclub, with its mixture of glamour and illegality, held a particular fascination in mid-century culture. It symbolized both aspiration and moral risk. The Vogue in Destination Murder (1950) is a concentrated version of this image. It is a site where money, violence, and performance intermingle. 

The presence of live music, the constant hum of activity, and the upstairs sanctum of the boss create a vertical metaphor for American social mobility, one in which the climb to the top involves corruption and betrayal.

As a noir artifact, the film contains the essential markers. There is the morally ambiguous protagonist whose journey leads through shadows and deceit. The lighting is functional but still arranges figures in ways that suggest entrapment, with narrow doorways and obstructed sightlines. The criminal hierarchy is unstable, with alliances shifting rapidly. 

Violence is intimate, carried out in living rooms and offices rather than in public arenas. The Moonlight Sonata motif is a stylized flourish that aligns with noir’s interest in personalized rituals of cruelty. The plot’s chain of betrayals, each double cross erasing the last, is a structural device central to the tradition.

The film’s flaws are numerous. The script’s twists sometimes feel like improvisations added without regard to prior events. Certain characters, such as John Dehner’s briefly appearing rival club owner, enter and exit without significant impact. Dialogue can lapse into cliché, and moments of blocking betray the constraints of the set. 

Yet these limitations also situate the film firmly within the B-noir mode, where resourcefulness and atmosphere often outweigh coherence.

In the end, Destination Murder (1950) is a minor entry in the noir catalogue, but it is not without distinct charms. Its blend of absurdity and earnestness, its collisions between calculated villainy and almost slapstick misdirection, give it a character separate from more polished productions. It offers a snapshot of a cinematic moment when even the most modest productions could carry the weight of broader cultural tensions. 

In its crooked way, it reflects a United States fascinated by crime, by the mechanics of power, and by the possibility that in the shadows above the nightclub floor, someone other than the visible boss may be calling the shots.

ell, Destination Murder may not be a high art, or even very good, but it does present this minor idea from the era, which is that with the family under threat, it is for the first time the job of the woman to trod the dark paths of crime, towards public resolution. 

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Stanley Clements

Albert Dekker

Joyce Mackenzie

Hurd Hadfield