Destination Murder (1950)

The story is good because it is plotted well. It starts with a Ted-friendly fold: a guy is in a movie with his girl. He takes a break and kills someone and returns as if the murder was a movie. Well, it is.What follows is a collection of tough guys and dolls navigating through different interlocked schemes to cheap each other in some way. A few die. The good plotting comes from the intricate interlacing of the perfidy. The hero here is a mobster's "good" daughter who goes under cover to find the killer of her dad. The formula would have her won and lose both. She doesTed's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Weasley Stanley Clements plays Jackie Wales, a messenger with a gambling addiction. When the film opens he is at the movies witha girl. During intermission he goes out to buy popcorn - but in reality he has been hired as a killer and his target is Mansfield, Laura's father. Laura is played by Joyce Mackenzie, a poor man's Barbara Hale - they look as though they could be sister's with Joyce being the more sophisticated of the two.Laura is convinced that Jackie is the killer and befriends him so she will be able to catch him out. Hurd Hatfield (looking a bit older than his Dorian Gray days) plays Stretch ("I don't like dames"), the shadowy manager of the club that Laura gets a job with. He is also the mastermind of the whole operation. Stretch and the club owner (Albert Decker) are planning to bump Jackie off to stop himfrom "shooting off his mouth".Laura falls in love with Stretch and confides her real identity to him.... little does she know.I found this a very good noir. Starring small timers or actors that had seen better days, it had quite a few twists. To me Hurd Hatfield proved Dorian Gray was a role he was born to play - he was a one dimensional actor with an expressionless face.The film was very good.

"Destination Murder" makes for an enjoyable 70-plus minutes, assuming you're a noir fan and are not bothered by the sort of unlikely plot developments so characteristic of this genre. Notable are the solid performances of Hurd Hatfield (whose name will always be linked with "Dorian Gray") as a sleazy but debonair nightclub manager, the beefy Albert Dekker (whom I will always think of as "Dr. Cyclops"), and Joyce Mackenzie -- a really classy beauty in the sort of wholesome Jane Wyatt mode -- as the plucky heroine who, Nancy Drew-like, disguises herself as a nightclub cigarette girl to help solve the mystery of her father's murder. Also notable is the odd relationship -- odder than we initially assume -- between the Hatfield and Dekker characters. There are several clever plot twists and some interesting little bits of directorial business (e.g., a scene in the ladies' powder room of the nightclub, which offers an unexpected little study in social pecking order when two women ask for a glass of water; and a player piano that's activated when violence is going to take place). What stays with me longest is the memory of Mackenzie's gorgeous eyes and cheekbones.

If you find yourself up all some stormy Tuesday night with a bad cold, this movie may be just the thing to go with your hot toddy. It's a grade C or maybe D movie with a couple of good lines, plot twists and not-too-bad performances. A young(ish) lady home from college witnesses her father's murder by a delivery boy; when the police don't move fast enough for her, she turns sleuth herself. Most remarkable is Hurd Hatfield (the charmless star of The Picture of Dorian Gray five years earlier and virtually the only recognizable name in the cast), now come to this poverty-row sump of the movie industry. Destination Murder qualifies as film noir, but just barely; Noir can be cheap, but it's usually a little better than this.