Decoy

Decoy (1946) is a B noir picture from Monogram that lays fair claim to the description "death-haunted." The plot involves an execution and an actual raising from the dead. All the key players except the cop wind up dead. A femme who is indeed fatale drives a car over one of her co-conspirators three times to make sure that he is dead. The film's leading lady died of pneumonia at age 33, after making just one more film. The film's director (who at the time of filming was married to the leading lady) passes out of recorded history four years later, at age 37, and most likely also died prematurely. The film itself had to resuscitated after being unavailable for 30 years and becoming a legend.

Director Jack Bernhard met actress Jean Gillie, who had been acting in British features since 1935, during his time in Great Britain during World War II. He had gotten a start on a Hollywood career before the war, assistant directing or associate producing several pictures from 1938 to 1942 (he also wrote one B western film). On returning from Britain with Gillie, he launched on his career as a director with the very well-shot Decoy, and made nine more low-budget films, several of them noirs, before "disappearing" in 1950. He and Gillie divorced shortly after making Decoy together; never trust those wartime romances.

Gillie has developed a posthumous reputation on the strength of Decoy, but I'm not sure if that is due to any unique gifts so much as the nature of the part, which is as evil as they come. (Nedrick Young wrote the screenplay from a story by Stanley Rubin.) I can easily imagine other actresses playing this part and having just as much of a field day with it. The rest of Gillie's career looks unremarkable, although you can't tell until you see the films; she did mainly secondary roles in her British films, top-lining only one or two.

You can tell that Bernhard's gifts as a cub director are something out of the ordinary from the opening sequence of Decoy, which is a pip. A man who already looks half-dead is examining himself in the broken mirror of one of the crappiest bathrooms in cinema history (really, the gas station owner ought to be ashamed of himself). This sad specimen is Dr. Craig (Herbert Rudley, who bears a startling resemblance to Charles Grodin), who has been duped by Gillie's Margot Shelby into using "methylene blue" (an actual substance) to revive her gassed death-row boyfriend, Frank Olins (Robert Armstrong, looking to have aged about a hundred years since King Kong). Margot is no sentimentalist; she only wants Olins alive (briefly) because he knows where a whole lot of money is buried.

Having no clue as to any of this yet, we watch the zombified Dr. Craig stumble to the roadside and catch a lift to San Francisco -- he is one unsettling hitch-hiker -- where he will confront the heartless Margot. This ten-minute sequence is mesmerizing throughout, because we can tell that something really bad has happened and we become pretty desperate to find out what. It's a model of how to hook the viewer.

We always hear about how B pictures could function as a laboratory for young directors to try out different visual and dramatic approaches, but with the occasional praiseworthy exceptions who did just that -- Anthony Mann, Joseph H. Lewis -- most B directors just cranked the sausage out. Bernhard is clearly in the group of genuine artists; through camera placement especially (and good camera placement doesn't cost anything), he does everything he can to make his financially strapped picture "pop!" Putting in little, telling details doesn't cost much, either, and I was amused to come across this reference from a defunct blog in a Google cache, demonstrating just how subtle Bernhard could get: "In the bizarre world of Decoy, it's no wonder the careful viewer can spy this headline on a prop newspaper: Earth Forces Laid to Cosmic Impulse." I always try to read those fake newspaper headlines and sometimes pause my DVDs to do so, so I find this very funny -- and extremely apt.

After vanishing even from television screens for a very long time, Decoy re-surfaced in a collector print at the American Cinematheque in 2000, thrilling the audience and especially blowing them away with the triple run-over. "DVD Savant" Glenn Erickson describes the reaction:

The scene that had the Cinematheque audience climbing the walls is when Shelby commits a grisly murder with impeccable Martha Stewart manners. She runs over one of her confederates with her car, and then backs up and runs him over twice more for good measure. Then she gingerly retrieves the treasure map and the jack used by the victim to change her flat tire. It must be seen to be believed.

Unfortunately, the folks at Warner DVD did not have access to this print when they prepared the otherwise excellent DVD release (on which Decoy is paired with Andre De Toth's tough Crime Wave), so the DVD is missing "this extra six or seven seconds of mind-blowing sadism" (Erickson). Maybe that can be remedied on a re-release.