Sock It to Me

Blind Spot (1947) was unobjectionably winding up its 73 minutes of inessential Columbia B-noir and then it stuck its middle-aged character actors with the emotional landing and I was obliged to have feelings about it.

Thanks to a screenplay which regularly fires off such pulp epigrams as "Yes, but why should dog eat distinguished writer?" Blind Spot never actually bores, but it has little beyond the acridity of its literary angle to differentiate it from any other lost weekend noir when critically esteemed and commercially starving novelist Jeffrey Andrews (Chester Morris) comes off a double-decker bender to discover that his disagreeable publisher has been iced in exactly the locked-room fashion he crashed around town shooting his mouth off about the previous night and worse yet, he can't even remember the brilliant solution that made his pitch worth more than the pair of sawbucks he was condescendingly packed off with. "It's like falling off a log. Dangerous things, logs. More people get hurt that way." Smack in the frame of a crime he may even have committed in a time-honored vortex of creativity and amnesia, he renews his ambivalent acquaintance with Evelyn Green (Constance Dowling), his ex-publisher's level-gazed secretary who would have had work-related reasons of her own to entertain a three-sheets stranger's foolproof gimmick for murder, but with a second corpse soon in play and a policeman pacing the shadow-barred sidewalk above his basement efficiency like a guard down the cell block already, the two of them take their slap-kiss romance as much on the lam as the rain-sprayed studio streets will allow until the complicating discoveries of a check for $500 and a gold spiral earring pull their mutually suspicious aid society up short. Since everyone in this film reads detective fiction with the same frequency as offscreen, the levels of meta flying around the plot approach LD₅₀. "The only thing this proves is that I'm slightly moronic."

So far, so sub-Woolrich. The supporting cast may not be any less stock, but at least their detailing is more inventive than the hero's blear o'clock shadow or the heroine's demi-fatale peek-a-boo. Sarcastically spitballing a detective for his easy-peasy crime, Jeffrey proposed Jeremiah K. Plumtree, an eccentric old New Englander with the lovable habit of forgetting to unwrap his caramels before eating them. Instead he gets the decidedly uncozy Detective Lieutenant Fred Applegate of the NYPD (James Bell), one of those dourly hard-boiled representatives of the law whose wisecracks even sound like downers, the lean lines of his face chilled further by his crystal-rims. Even when he straightens up into an overhead light, he looks mostly annoyed at the shadows it sets slicing through his third degree, a thin, plain, dangerous plodder. "That's right. With an M." Naturally, his narrative opposite is the effusive Lloyd Harrison (Steven Geray), a cherubically flamboyant sophisticate with an honest-to-Wilde carnation in his buttonhole who deprecates his own best-selling mysteries with the modesty of the luxuries he can afford because of them, shaking himself a cocktail at a wet bar that could host the Met Gala. His Hungarian accent lends an eerily psychoanalytic air to the scene where he talks Jeffrey through recovering the blacked-out solution of his story, one of its few expressionist touches. "Small was the worst kind of a stinker. And a pair of shears in his back? Well, as the saying goes, on him it looks good." They make such an odd couple meeting over the trashed files and splintered locks of the crime scene that when the writer opens with the arch observation, "The cops must really love to wreck a place," we half expect to learn that the lieutenant ran him in once for some aesthetic misdemeanor or other and instead Applegate cracks the first smile we've seen out of his burned-in cynicism and then tops it by folding himself down at the murdered man's desk, conceding his mystification with the case, and even submitting to be teased self-reflexively by Harrison: "Only amateurs can solve a crime. You've read enough mysteries to know that." It's no caramel, but around a clearly old friend he has an odd, thoughtful tongue-in-cheek expression he closes his mouth on the second he catches himself being noticed. He chews on the ends of his glasses, too. It makes him look downright human.

( You forget the solutions must be completely logical as well as acceptable by the reader. )

Blind Spot was the scripting job of novelist and screenwriter Martin Goldsmith who had already penned the budget-free noir legend Detour (1945) and would pick up an Oscar nod for the equally second-feature The Narrow Margin (1952) and it shares their flair for creatively tough dialogue, even when its rhetorical saturation occasionally tips over from the enjoyable to the inexplicable, e.g. "Possibly it was the heat which the rain had done no more than intensify, which drained a person's vitality like ten thousand bloodthirsty dwarves." Its economical direction was the successful debut of former child actor Robert Gordon, but like so many B-pictures it draws as much or more of its tone from its photography, in this case by George Meehan who opens with a fabulous track down a working-class, washing-hung street of litter and pushcarts that could almost pass for a naked city, shoots his leading lady like abstract sculpture in the dark, and just for good measure throws in some subjective camera for an unfortunate run-in with a chair. I watched it off TCM at the last minute and am distressed to report the almost unwatchably blurred-out grunginess of every other print the internet seems to offer, not to mention their badly clipped runtimes; it hampers the ship manifesto. Pace the indeed memorably weird moment where Morris essentially faceplants into Dowling, muzzily nuzzling into her platinum waves like a soused, stubbly cat, I cannot care that much about obligatory het even when it comes with left-field chat-ups like "I was afraid you were going to turn out to be frivolous—order one of those exotic cocktails like crème de menthe with hot fudge." James Bell absentmindedly twiddling an important piece of evidence is more my line. This theory brought to you by my distinguished backers at Patreon.