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Packed with fun, action and menace, and oddly replete with cinematic meta-mechanics, Dillinger (1945) cannot be flawed for anything other than historical accuracy.
Historical accuracy might have gone against the grain, too. The minute makers of 1945, fresh off the tracks of the great crime film experiments of the 1930s, which incidentally probably amount to the greatest body of work of 1930s cinema, were imminently to collide with state forces and the Production Code was in fullest sway, and so accuracy might have been well sacrificed.
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This Monogram Pictures production of Crime and Punishment is an example of what cinema can do to a text and will do to a text, because it is barely Dostoyevsky, and yet leans into that tale not just for narrative and dramatic features, but to try and pull some of the existential magic over form the olden Russian experiences of the day to day realisations of pre-modern life in 1866. Everything stated was to come.
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Barry Sullivan plays Joe Morgan, an unkempt drifter type who arrives in Los Angeles and winds up working at an ice theatre, the star of which is Roberta Elva, played by former Olympic skater Belita. The heavy crime and mystery melodrama which ensues is solid film noir, insofar as it is redolent of nothing less than a nightmare.
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The source of the drama is easily stressed -- it's a box with $400,000 in it, the proceeds of a robbery.
And the leading actor in the villainous and double crossing pursuit of this box, is an energetic and deadly femme fatale performance from Jean Gillie, a British actor in her first American film role.
Actor Jean Gillie had a short, short life and Decoy, for all its ills and budgetary constraints was her penultimate film role.
For a film that doesn't boast much in the way of star performances, or glorious set pieces, Jean Gillie gives a helluva lotta goods in this short and at times brutal film noir.
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Two of the best tropes include the wifelet seeker hero, a staple of the early genre; and the falsely accused heel. He's hapless too, and actually quite hatless for noir.
Although the hero of this noir - Tom J Quinn, played by the relatively obscure Don Castle - works with his feet. So hapless and hatless he rides to his fate, a film noir heel nonetheless, with the solid backing of a good woman.
He's a dancer and this is a film noir of shoes, a graspable premise, summed up as: Vaudeville dancer Tom Quinn (Castle) is convicted for murder after his shoe prints are found at the scene of the crime. His wife Ann (Knox) follows the trail of clues to the real killer.