Yuku free message boards

DECOY (1946, d. Jack Bernhard)

For a long time, DECOY was one of those cult Holy Grail movies among film noir aficionados --- in the early ‘80s, I met a guy who claimed that he (acting on a tip from a friend who was an avid reader of regional newspaper TV listings) loaded his Betamax machine into his car and drove to a motel 150 miles away just so he could record a late-night movie broadcast of DECOY off of a UHF channel; CHFB’s own Butcher Benton says somewhere around here that the only copy of DECOY he was able to locate on the black market years ago had Croatian subtitles. Nowadays, though, DECOY is easily found in the 2007 Warner Brothers “Film Noir Classic Collection Volume 4” DVD box set. (You can’t beat that for convenience, but in some small way I actually miss the good ol’ days of fanboy treasure-hunting…)

A big part of DECOY’s appeal is that, even for a mid-1940s B-movie, is surprisingly strange, violent (there’s a sizable body count), and grim (there’s a one-two punch in the film’s last five minutes that really amps up the cynicism). Another draw is that grotty, artless Monogram aesthetic that makes everything look like a fluorescent light-lit cement cellar floor, which only adds to the existential despair of it all. But what makes this movie so one-of-a-kind is its main character Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie), an outrageously inhuman femme fatale that film scholar Bob Porfirio once identified as the most lethal and remorseless in the noir cycle aside from Annie Laurie Starr in GUN CRAZY.

These days, hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear or read about some terrible large-scale atrocity that has been committed by a narcissistic sociopath armed with a flag & a teleprompter or an accountant’s spreadsheet; in such a world, tales of a murderous black-widow blonde with a snub-nosed .38 Special revolver in her fist who is lovin' ‘em & leavin' ‘em dead seem almost quaint in comparison. But Margot’s cold viciousness still manages to shock even the most jaded viewer just a little bit (most notoriously, a scene involving two of her lovers and a flat tire which was sadly not wholly intact in the print used for this disc transfer). On the commentary track to the disc, Stanley Rubin, the writer of the original story on which DECOY is based, explained that he had wanted to create a character who was motivated only by selfish greed. Greed is absolutely the only thing that drives Margot’s engines; she’s insane with greed and is completely amoral in the way that she ruthlessly uses and throws away three (maybe four) boyfriends in this picture for a strongbox filled with $400,000 from an armored car heist. She’s so driven by greed, in fact, that she raises one of her boyfriends from the dead in order to get one step closer to it.          

Yeah, that’s right: “raises one of her boyfriends from the dead.” The boyfriend in question is Frankie Olins (Robert Armstrong), the hood who knocked over the armored car and killed a guard, but who stashed the 400 grand before going to prison for murder. Olins won’t reveal the location of the loot until he’s sprung from jail, so Margot seduces crook Jim Vincent (Edward Norris) and prison doctor Lloyd Craig (Herbert Rudley) and uses them to help her steal Olins’s corpse after his gas-chamber execution. The cockamamie medical science-fiction used to revive Olins falls closer to THE MAN WITH NINE LIVES than to LIFE RETURNS, but what’s important here is that, in the end, Olins is brought back from the dead just to be double-crossed by Margot! Olins’s resurrection and betrayal is a brutal and macabre scene --- apparently, not even a deadly dose of cyanide gas is enough to save you from the wicked machinations of this woman. Sergeant “Jo-Jo” Portugal (Sheldon Leonard, playing a bone-tired, hard-boiled, seen-it-all-before cop almost to point of parody) is the perpetually confused San Francisco cop trying to make sense of all the dead bodies he keeps stumbling upon.

I don’t think that I would recommend this to everyone, but for lovers of mid-century B-movie outré extremism, it don’t get much better than this.  

Another thread of DECOY love here:

http://monsterkidclassich...rum.yuku.com/topic/16408

"Earth Forces Laid To Cosmic Impulse"??