The testimony of “special investigator” Jim Stover (Richard Travis) is going to send Paul Moody (Richard Emory) to the gas chamber…or so notes a newspaper reporter interviewing Stover during a lull in a murder trial that has garnered front page headlines (as witnessed by a montage after the movie’s opening credits). Moody’s accused of croaking Wendell Palmer (Ferris Taylor), who’s just been elected mayor on one of those “reform” tickets so popular in motion pictures back in the day. Paul’s supposed motivation is that he was holding a grudge against Hizzoner because Palmer eliminated him from being considered for a proposed mural to be erected at City Hall. Moody’s fingerprints were found on the telephone used to tenderize the Mayor’s skull…and as Stover is fond of saying in this film, “fingerprints don’t lie.”
Or do they? Well,
both the mayor’s daughter Carolyn (Sheila Ryan)—Paul’s fiancée—and a model (Margia
Dean) who works for Moody are convinced that Paul is innocent…after all, Moody
has been consistently protesting his innocence throughout the trial. It’s Carolyn who stumbles onto evidence that
just might free her future husband…evidence that points to police commissioner
Frank Kelso (Michael Whelan) as a “person of interest.”
If the plot of Fingerprints
Don’t Lie (1951) sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because it’s practically
a carbon copy of Kid Glove Killer
(1942)—an M-G-M “B” that served as the American feature film debut for Austrian
émigré Fred Zinnemann, the future Academy Award-winning director of From Here to Eternity (1953) and A Man for All Seasons (1966). (Fingerprints
was scripted by Orville H. Hampton—from Rupert Hughes’ story—who went on to
better things like Saturday morning cartoons and co-writing 1964’s One
Potato, Two Potato.) I’ve argued
here and elsewhere that there really was no such animal as a “B” movie at
M-G-M; nevertheless, Killer is a
very entertaining thriller—you can’t go wrong with Van Heflin and Marsha Hunt.
But in the case of Fingerprints
Don’t Lie, we’re talking Lippert Pictures here. We’re also talking about one of the cheapest
looking movies it has ever been my misfortune to watch (well, it is identified
as “A Spartan Production” in the opening credits—apparently budget noirs don’t lie,
either)—which is a crying shame, because I thought Fingerprints had a lot of potential. Its saving grace is that its running time
totals 57 minutes (at one time in the 1950s, this bad boy was edited down to a
half-hour for television) so it’s not as if you’re going to craft a major time
investment, later regretting the bad choice you made in life. The clue that Fingerprints has bought a one-way ticket to Cheap City is also revealed in
the opening titles, when the viewer learns that the director of this low-priced
little noir is Sam(uel) Newfield…and the producer Sigmund Neufeld—blood brothers
despite the difference in the spelling (and pronunciation) of their names.
Sam Newfield |
Sam and Sig had no pretensions about making art: they were
in the motion picture business to make money, and they did that very well. Of course, when you’re making movies that
cost less than a $1.75 somebody’s
bound to make a profit.
As I mentioned in TDOY’s
inaugural Forgotten Noir Fridays installment, VCI released Fingerprints Don’t Lie as a double
feature with I’ll
Get You (1952) to DVD in 2007 but apparently that disc is now out of
print. (Someone’s asking $100.96 for a
new copy at Amazon. Honestly, cartooners—it’s
not worth it.)
1 comment:
Mystery Science Theater 3000 joked about Sam Newfield and Sigmund Neufeld's nearly but not quite identical surnames (I believe it was in Lost Continent): "They were in separate lines at Ellis Island."
Hey, one of these little-seen Poverty Row programmers I've actually seen! I was home sick from elementary school, yet vividly remember watching Fingerprints Don't Lie on the Channel 11 Midday Matinee, primarily because it was one of the few films I'd seen up to that point in which I recognized nobody. Nary a star, not even a vaguely familiar character actor; the whole thing felt less like a movie and more like a failed TV pilot.
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