What did you watch? the 1945 noir, Apology for Murder.

I’ll just jump to the usual final question: was it noir? Oh yes.

Ooh, what was the plot: Okay this male reporter meets and falls for this woman who is married to a wealthy older man. She convinces the reporter to bump her husband off and they’ll be together. But when the reporter does, his boss at the newspaper is suspicious, and the reporter is unable to find time to spend with the woman.

Wait, this sounds familiar. Like I’m seeing Double. Oh no, it’s totally original. And at the end, there’s a big shootout, where the mortally wounded reporter heads back to his newspaper deck to type out his confession.

WAIT, THIS IS JUST DOUBLE INDEMNITY! What? OMG it is!

The very second that femme fatale Ann Savage asks reporter Hugh Beaumont to kill her wealthy husband, I couldn’t help but think “this seems like Double Indemnity,” one of the most important examples of film noir and its plots. Keep in mind this was the 1940s, they didn’t have Reddit or Mystery Science Theater, and that studios (especially smaller ones that operated on shoestring budgets) weren’t shy about recycling plots from other movies. What is 1945 you going to do, rent a VHS copy of Double Indemnity (which came out the previous year) to compare the movies? Was it even broadcast on television at the time? Who even had TVs? Like 10 people.

I’ll stick with the plot: Savage and Beaumont meet, make out, oh she forgot to mention she’s married so he storms out, Beaumont comes back to her, and while they’re at it why not kill her elderly husband? Well, rather than a complicated mishap on a passenger train, Savage sets up to trap her husband in the middle of a hilly roadway by staging a car accident, and Beaumont hits the old guy over the head with a wrench a few times, now she’s single again. They stuff the body in the old man’s car and push it down the hill. But get this: immediately the cops and Beaumont’s editor are suspicious because the wounds don’t match any kind of car accident and the car wasn’t even on, it was like a couple of idiots beat the old man over the head and pushed his car in Neutral down a hill.

An innocent man, one of the old man’s business rivals he was seen arguing with just earlier, is arrested by the police, tried, and put on death row. Pretty quickly, I might add. Meanwhile, Beaumont’s editor believes that the police got the wrong man, and sets to interview Savage and the original witnesses. This keeps Savage and Beamont further apart, which is great for her because she starts spending time with lawyer Allen, and once she’s cleared to inherit everything, she and Allen start dating.

With the heat on, and Savage planning to travel with Allen, Beaumont sneaks into Savage’s mansion and confronts the two. There’s a shootout – Savage shoots Beaumont, but he turns and shoots and kills Allen for some reason, and then shoots and kills Savage before stumbling back to the office to type his confession.

And Allen deserved that because? Yeah, that’s gotta be a low point for both Beaumont and the movie. In Double Indemnity, there’s another love interest for the femme fatale (the boyfriend of that movie’s old man’s daughter) but here it’s just another guy who happens to fall for Savage. Maybe he’s in love with her, maybe he’s overjoyed to meet a woman with some money, who knows. But our hero walks in (Savage correctly claims it’s her right to shoot and kill Beaumont for breaking & entering) and kills Allen because…he’s there? You’re supposed to have some sympathy with our noir protagonist, even if he’s guilty. Beaumont was already feeling bad about an innocent man taking the rap for the old man’s murder. Here he just shoots some guy who had every right to be at the apartment.

I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m watching a bad copy of the movie on youtube so a lot of scenes look degraded and some lighting barely shows, but I will say that despite that scene’s choice, even on the bad copy I watched, the lighting on our leads was perfect. I’d ask you watch Double Indemnity first, but this was a quick 70 minutes and a couple good scenes.

There’s also a few character actor performances (Arch Hall Sr., he of EEGAH! fame, has a part). Savage is known best for the stern vengeful stare and devious plotting in Detour. Hugh Beaumont? Aside from being the dad on Leave It To Beaver, lots of movies from this time. I know I saw him in Lost Continent (via MST3K), which was directed by this movie’s director, Sam Newfield. Newfield was definitely a prolific director especially for in-the-headlines and copycat films like this one.