BEHIND LOCKED DOORS. Eagle-Lion Films, 1948. Lucille Bremer, Richard Carlson (PI Ross Stewart), Douglas Fowley, Ralf Harolde, Tom Brown Henry, Herbert Heyes, Tor Johnson. Director: Oscar Boetticher. Available on DVD and currently now on YouTube.

   When the movie opens, newly minted PI Ross Stewart is admiring the work of the painter who has just put his name on the door of his office. It takes a while for the first client of most newly minted PI’s to walk in, but not in this movie. She – and of course she is a she – shows up even before the painter leaves. And he immediately falls in amorous lust for her. (I guess he has been reading too many pulp PI stories.)

   She does not reciprocate his advances, but neither does she seem all that put out by them. What she does have is a proposition for him, and strictly a business one. She thinks she know where a certain judge whom the district attorney and the police would love to get their hands on is hiding out.

   She has been following the judge’s girl friend, and ever night at a certain time she is admitted through a side entrance to a local mental institution. What she wants Stewart to do is to get himself admitted to said mental institution to see what he can learn on the inside. Stewart demurs until she mentions a $10,000 reward for the judge, which she is willing to split with him.

   Now you very well may be thinking to yourself that you have seen or read this story somewhere else before, and if you have watching or reading a lot of pulp fiction or B-movies from the 30s or 40s, I am sure you have. But with a director like Oscar Boetticher, sometimes known as Budd, at the helm, the 60 plus minutes (barely over) goes by very quickly.

   In any case, mental institutions in the 30s and 40s were no place to find yourself shut up in, and the one in Behind Closed Doors is no exception. But Lucille Bremer playing Richard Carlson’s partner in this particular plan does hold up her end of it, and all ends well, eventually.