I watched a bunch of old crime movies recently and haven’t written about them. Perhaps, PERHAPS, they are not worth viewing. One is a moderately well acted noir, one is a strange one about the afterlife and doppelgangers, and the third is a snoozefest. Are all worth watching? or skippable?

Cast A Dark Shadow (1955)

This is a British crime drama about golddigger Ed, who grows impatient when his wealthy elderly wife won’t die of a heart attack at the amusement park he drags her to in the movie’s boisterous opening. So he kills her by faking an accidental suffocation via a gas leak, but he was mistaken in thinking she left him her money. He gets the house, but a sister-in-law he never met gets the fortune. So he heads out on holiday and meets another widow, Freda, who may be wealthy but is very frugal. Though she falls for Ed, she promises to keep her money away from him and he might have to (gasp!) get a job. By happenstance, the car of a young woman, Charlotte, has broken down right in front of Ed’s mansion, and she’s also looking to buy a big place. Ed concocts a plan to woo Charlotte, make Freda jealous, and then KILL Charlotte, because in a twist he doesn’t let us in on but I guess is obvious because of the coincidence of her car breaking down in front of his place, Charlotte is his late wife’s sister. Ed cuts the brakes in Charlotte’s car but is caught and hops in the first car he can use to get away, which (c’mon, Ed) is Charlotte’s, and he crashes and dies.

Is it worth it? There’s some good acting in this one, particularly with the lead Dirk Bogarde (ed) and Margaret Lockwood (Freda). But everyone is kinda dumb. Like, Freda should have just had the marriage annulled when she got to Ed’s home and found out about Ed’s lack of finances and what a skeev he is.

Margaret Lockwood had a long career in films, and I know her from the Hitchcock classic The Lady Vanishes. But apparently this movie’s mediocre returns and reviews stopped her by then 20+ year career in film, and she spent the next 20 on stage and in TV before making a few films before retirement.

Angel On My Shoulder (1946)

This one is kind of batshit insane for a few reasons, mostly: who is this for? I think it was made for kids of that era, and it becomes more obvious as the movie goes on how any adult looking for a serious crime drama should take it. It takes you places that as a non-practicing catholic I would only have questions about the afterlife and what I can get away with if i made a deal with the devil, and lost. Eddie is a gangster who is picked up from his latest prison stint by his pal Smiley, WHO KILLS HIM. He wakes up IN HELL, full of brimstone and suffering and lots of people with New Jersey accents walking around wondering where they are after that bus hit them or whatever.

Satan aka Nick (don’t ask) notices that Eddie looks JUST LIKE a Judge back in the land of the living, and strikes a bargain with Eddie to possess the Judge as the Judge runs for political office to clean up the swamp or whatever. Eddie immediately does what your 1930s/1940s gangster does and demands hard liquor from the Judges’ elderly assistant, hits on the Judge’s chaste and do-gooder girlfriend, and sets out to kill Smiley. Nick has power over planes to divert them back to the airport to keep Eddie from deviating from Nick’s plan, which is to let Eddie be himself in front of the public looking to support the Judge in his election bid. WELL, because criminals are brazenly stupid in these films, they show up at the Judge’s rally before Eddie could ruin the Judge’s planned speech and assault Eddie in full view of a crowded hall. Eddie, as the Judge, dispatches the goons in hand to hand combat, looking heroic in front of all kids and the press and the Judge’s girlfriend etc.

In one point of intentional hilarity, Eddie as the Judge demands to meet with one side of a pending lawsuit over an inheritance, to demand a bribe. When he meets the Plaintiff, an old flame who is now a golddigger, he throws the bribe in their faces, bolstering the Judge’s pure idyllic image.

You see where every scene is going. The Judge’s girlfriend shows Eddie their future home and how great their life will be, and Eddie softens and falls for it. They’re about to elope when Eddie realizes that he’s NOT The Judge, and that marrying her would be dishonest. So he calls it off and heads back to the office, where Smiley is waiting for him. There’s not much of a confrontation, Smiley knows he killed Eddie but is confused over this Judge he never met who looks like Eddie and talks like Eddie. I mean what’s a killer criminal to do but back away slowly and FALL OUT THE WINDOW.

This doesn’t complicate ANYTHING. There’s no cops who stop by to ask the Judge what happened, which is what I thought would be the next dramatic beat, but instead it’s the girlfriend showing up and Eddie saying goodbye in a sappy scene that drags before Eddie leaves The Judge’s body and IS TAKEN BACK TO HELL, albeit leveraging Nick’s failure to ruin The Judge’s career to get a job with a little less suffering (…for eternity).

Is it worth it? This would be a lot zanier and conceptually “out there” if not for the slow pace of the love story and the bumbling mobsters who show up to cause trouble and there are no cops around and there’s no investigation as to why a known murderer with no connection to The Judge has fallen to his death from The Judge’s high rise apartment. That’s an act right there, a courtroom drama (comedy) where Eddie has to defend himself to save The Judge’s life while Nick looks one. Kind of a twisted Quantum Leap. Instead, it’s a sappy morality story that just DRAGS in places. If it wasn’t so long I’d recommend it just for these kind of 40’s mobster characters, especially the one who finds himself stuck in hell and wondering why he’s there.

The girlfriend is played by Academy Award winner Anne Baxter, who appeared in a lot of things for some of the best known directors in that Golden Age of Hollywood, but I know her from an episode of Columbo, because of course I do. Nick is played by Claude Rains, and, please, you should know him from Casablanca (“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”) among some other great movies of that era. The lighting of the version I saw wasn’t great so I didn’t recognize him. Eddie is played by “Scarface” (the original) actor Paul Muni. This cast has some heavy hitters for such a dopey movie.

No Escape (1953)

OMG this starts off with a beautiful shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, followed by a narration that you can’t escape from the cops in San Francisco. I don’t think the BART trains were built yet to break down frequently but I think the narrator meant that a dragnet & BOLO in the town would keep a criminal from escaping. And then the movie proceeds to barely proceed. A washed up songwriter is singing songs at a club for pennies and drinks. A girl is at dinner with two detectives and she asks the songwriter to sing about some other girl, and it upsets the detectives for some reason, and they leave. The club owner drivers the girl home while the songwriter stays and drinks himself into a stupor. He heads over to the club owner’s apartment where he finds the clubowner dead. He assumes the girl back at the bar did it, and goes to tell her to confess. Well, one of the cops doesn’t want her to confess, so he bullies the songwriter into hiding since the Songwriter was the last guy who saw the clubowner and could pin it on him. Ya follow? Does it matter? There’s virtually no danger felt as the songwriter hides out while he tries to think of a way to get the girl to confess. At some point he realizes that it was one of the cops who did it, and there’s a standoff of some sorts. For whatever reason, the movie doesn’t set up anything likable about this character, he just is. And he’s set on his path letting everyone know he’s going to turn that girl in. It’s BLAND. Even when something happens, nothing seems to happen. I was hoping for more SF scenery we just get more apartments and police station interiors. Not even a good crime thriller.

The director, Charles Bennett, wrote a lot of scripts for Alfred Hitchcock and other big directors before directing this snoozer. Afterward, he would write a lot of TV stuff for Irwin Allen in the 1960s.