What did you watch? The 1955 paranoia crime thriller A Life At Stake.

Are you going to write about murder? Um, I’m writing about a movie which has an attempted murder.

You could call it “Murder, HE Wrote” Oh, because of the star in today’s movie? Ha ha.

A Life At Stake is a somewhat overwrought crime drama where boozy and depressed Ed is approached in his dilapidated apartment to get out of his gutter and design some homes for a prominent couple in real estate to build on new land they’re interested in buying and selling. He’s asked to meet the wife of the couple, Doris, who is played by the then breezily seductive Angela Lansbury, whom a couple generations know from the long running TV show Murder She Wrote. (She appeared opposite of another TV crime solver, Perry Mason’s Raymond Burr, in Please Murder Me, which we covered before).

Doris basically throws herself at Ed promising great returns (wink wink) and her elderly rich husband Gus is away frequently so not only will he enjoy the profit sharing from the deal, but…c’mon, Angela Lansbury was pretty hot back then. So Ed attends a signing and part of the deal is that if something happens to Ed, like his untimely death, in the process of building the homes, Doris & Gus will get an insurance payout of…a lot of money, and it unnerves Ed. This is a real thing, by the way – “key man insurance.” I guess if you’re one a few people who can get a company up and running and the central activity or knowledge is dependent on you, and you die, the company gets that insurance money to compensate for your important contributions until they can find someone to adequately replace you.

Doris’ adorable “kid sister” (“I’m almost 22!”) Madge happens to walk in and Ed is too distracted by the suspicious nature of this insurance clause that no one mention until right before he signed the contract to make nice and have it be a proper meet-cute. “Sorry, can’t worry about this love triangle between myself, you, and your married sister, I have this feeling that this prominent upstanding business duo might kill me,” which becomes the mood for the rest of the film. Ed is in cars whose brakes fail, is fed drinks that cause him to nearly pass out at the wheel of another car, is nearly hit by more cars – are these mere coincidences and Ed is just a clumsy idiot fulfilling his genetic imperative, or is Doris and possibly Gus out to get him?

This is sort of an opposite Double Indemnity (“Triple Indemnity,” maybe?). There’s only so many characters that it’s not hard to figure out what the plan actually is, but the ante gets upped plenty when Gus finds out that Ed is still seeing Doris despite his complete distrust of her, and the insurance company won’t cancel the deal on Ed’s suspicions. And I was pretty distracted by some tense moments between Ed and Doris that I missed the set up for the denouement.

Was it noir? No, it was a pretty decent crime story despite the hokeyness, but at least it moved along quickly. Definitely worth a viewing.

Ed is played by Keith Andes, who had a pretty long career in theater, film, & television. Madge is played by Claudia Barrett, who also appeared in a lot of noir films…however, MST3K die hards might recognize her from the Robot Monster episode in season 1.