What did you watch? The 1946 crime noir film, Decoy.

You just watched a dumb 80’s action mystery about skateboarders bringing down a gun smuggling ring. So, now you have an old movie. Can you tell me in advance, is it noir? Hell yes.

Some movies of this era, filmed on the cheap and packing in a punch to make up for the low budget, they veer into a safe landing where the protagonists find themselves trapped by a criminal enterprise and they get out with a few scratches, maybe to make a statement at the courthouse down the street where they’re also going to marry the misunderstood damsel in distress. Some go the film noir path, where maybe the protagonist has time to confess their involvement to absolve someone else or recognize their just desserts. Decoy steers its getaway car right through the dark noir streets and into a few trees, before backing up and running over its victims a few times, just to be sure.

The movie starts off with a spoiler: an injured man, Dr. Craig, makes his way from the middle of nowhere to an apartment, where he enters and shoots Margot before dying from his wounds. Margot, in her dying breath, recounts the tale of how she came up with a plan to break her boyfriend Frankie out of DEATH ROW somehow. That’s right, her boyfriend was on death row. He won’t share where he hid the money from his last heist, so she and a guy (Jim) who was owed money from Frankie look to find an antidote for the chemicals used in Frankie’s upcoming lethal injection. Margot uses her feminine wiles to seduce Dr. Craig, who has a local clinic helping the needy, and is also the prison physician, who can administer the antidote after Frankie is executed.

(There’s no antidote like this, by the way – I guess it’s like how Juliet fakes her death in Romeo & Juliet, but this is better than Shakespeare, trust me.)

This is a conundrum for Dr. Craig, especially when Jim shows up and it’s clear that Jim and Margot are an item. Frankie draws out a map for where he hid the loot, and tears it up thinking that they won’t be able to read the map if they each have a piece. Jim shoots Frankie anyway, and then in a great tense scene, an officer who had been keeping tabs on various lowlifes, including Margot and Jim, walks in the doctor’s office to ask him questions about the executing, asking for the autopsy.

From there, Jim, Margot, and a shameful Dr. Craig drive to the location where the loot is buried, and Jim almost makes it, but Margot has other plans when she fakes a flat tire and has Jim change it for her. At this point, Dr. Craig goes all in on being her servant, knowing what this will get him soon after (and we saw it in the beginning of the movie).

Margot packs a lot of double crosses in the mere 70 something minutes of this movie. She has to be the least trustworthy noir femme fatale I’ve ever seen and yet every man falls in line. Heck, she even has the last laugh reeling in the hardboiled cop who predicted her downfall. I think that’s the one (minor) flaw for this movie – she doesn’t get to see how she may have failed even in her last moments, to see the error in her ways. Even if she were to realize it was maybe all for nothing, she wouldn’t care – she’s on her way to hell which may not be ready for her.

Was it good? As a noir, yes. It’s almost a joke at how it ends, but it’s still a “wow” moment – what a character. What a path of destruction! Who knows how many lives she’d ruin with a longer run time and bigger budget? Recommended!

Margot is played by Jean Gillie, who had and active career and appeared in one more movie after this one before dying in 1949 from pneumonia. Frankie is played by Robert Armstrong, who appeared in King Kong among a zillion other movies for decades.