Author: Tony D'Ambra

Jigsaw is a rollicking thriller so camp you forgive the preposterous plot and thank the heavens for bringing it your way. A weirder movie you could not imagine. Franchot Tone is a NY special prosecutor pursuing a murky underground hate group with tentacles in the highest echelons of the city’s elite government and business circles. Tone’s delicious turn has shades of his acerbically ironic portrayal of a PI in the excellent I Love Trouble from the year before.

But the dames steal the picture. Winifred Lenihan, an actress who only ever appeared in this movie and another obscure picture from 1931, is a delight as a middle-aged socialite with a hidden agenda, while another stringer Jean Wallace (Kiss Me Deadly) has you enthralled as a sexy – and intelligent – blonde cabaret singer with sinister connections.

Jigsaw in more ways than one. The only movie made by production company Tower Pictures Inc., this b-picture was made by a bunch of journeymen, who through the quirky finger of fate came together to pack into 77 minutes an entertainment set in a Manhattan so darkly baroque, it seems almost self-consciously noir. From the opening panoramic shots of an isolated city street to the seamless and exciting climax in a darkened art gallery at night, impenetrable shadows haunt the streetscape of a city almost subterranean in its ambience. Add out-of-left field tracking shots that harken to the craft of Max Ophuls, director Fletcher Markle, who co-wrote the screenplay, and his DP Don Malkames, fashion a mise-en-scene of real panache. The script is both corny and intelligent, with a disarming amorality. A crusading journalist killed by the bad-guys is still warm when Tone makes a move on the widow who is also more hot than cold.

To add to the puzzle, you have a bunch of A-listers in uncredited bit parts. Names like Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Marsha Hunt, Burgess Meredith, and Everett Sloane.

It takes a while to get moving, but once it kicks in, look out. A must-see.

In 1950 New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was “disturbed” and “depressed” by Highway 301, a dark gangster flick from Warner Bros.  He was emphatic in his dismissal: “the whole thing, concocted and directed by Andrew Stone, is a straight exercise in low sadism”.  Glen Erikson in his review of the DVD, described the relentlessly violent trajectory thus: “Imagine White Heat shorn of its rich characterizations and reduced to little more than its basic violent content: no complexity, just action and suspense scenes”.

Get it? A police procedural stripped back to its unardorned essence: violent hoods on the rampage. In deep focus and on the streets of  L.A.

In the way of the burgeoning police procedurals of the 1950’s, the movie is prefaced by homilies from not one but three State governors, each attesting to the veracity of the story and the lessons it holds for those contemplating similar escapades. The Tri-State Gang led by a remorseless “pretty boy” killer played menacingly by Steve Cochran, are heist specialists who find time to have settled relationships with women. One is even married to a totally amoral yet passive woman – unnervingly portrayed by Virginia Grey. A dame not offended by her better-half’s style of life, and who finds solace on those long  lonely nights with a portable radio that goes with her everywhere. Cochran early on dispatches his talkative erstwhile girlfriend by shooting her in the back.  He then latches on to the French Canadian girlfriend of another member of the gang, after he checks out when a heist goes wrong. Trouble is “Frenchy” finds out too late the trap she has fallen into. There is real terror here, and most strongly delivered in an extended sequence where Cochran pursues the girl on dark city streets after she tries to cut loose. The gang is eventually picked-off  by the law in increasingly bloody encounters.

Don’t look for ambivalence or redemption. This is a brutal modern take on the police procedural: uncanny in that the picture sets off rather than ends the late cycle segue on film noir.