Wed 5 Sep 2012
A Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: FINGERPRINTS DON’T LIE (1951).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[10] Comments
FINGERPRINTS DON’T LIE. Spartan Productions / Lippert Pictures, 1951. Richard Travis, Sheila Ryan, Sid Melton, Tom Neal, Margia Dean, Lyle Talbot, Michael Whalen, Karl Davis. Director: Sam Newfield.
Early this year an old childhood buddy of mine gifted me with a box of perfectly-chosen DVDs: no classics, just a lot of stuff I kinda wanted to see but didn’t want to spend much money on. So far, the gem of the set has been Fingerprints Don’t Lie (Spartan Productions, 1951) an enjoyably bad film that passes too quickly for its deficiencies to grow irksome.
Yeah, this is listed as “A Spartan Production,” and Spartan it is, but “Cheapo” might have caught the spirit better, as it was produced by Sigmund Neufeld and directed by Sam Newfield, the driving talents (for want of a better word) behind PRC, which has been widely celebrated as the most penurious studio in Hollywood. Fingerprints carries nobly on in the PRC tradition, with tacky sets, perfunctory acting, and a screenplay that seems more interested in killing time than actually getting anyplace.
What makes it fun to watch, though (for me anyway) is the amusingly slip-shod nature of the thing. Instead of background music we get an organ soloist, just like in the old-time soaps, bridging scenes and setting moods with a turgid melancholia that broke me up every time.
Then, late in the film, we get one of those cinematic conventions that normally go unnoticed: two characters talk about checking out a suspect’s apartment on the sixth floor of the Metropolitan Hotel, and we cut to an exterior shot of the Metropolitan, the camera sweeps up to the sixth floor, and we cut to the two characters walking into the apartment.
It’s the kind of movie-shorthand you’ve probably seen dozens of times and never noticed. Only in this case they couldn’t afford to send a cameraman out for an exterior shot, so they simply panned up a photograph of the hotel —- which might have worked except that no one noticed the photo was printed backwards and we see the words LETOH NATILOPORTEM in mirror-image!
Still later, the gaffes come fast and funny as the Police close in on the Crime Boss and his Moll in a rather economical–looking suite. When they tell the baddie he’s going Downtown, the obliging Moll opens her purse, ostensibly for lipstick, but holds it up what seems like an eternity as he sees the gun inside and they exchange significant glances. At some length.
Much later (it seems) he reaches inside the purse and fumbles around for several seconds before finally pulling the gun out — upside down! Whereupon he spends several more seconds getting it pointed at the cops, who promptly register surprise. Now that’s acting!
Following a bit of stand-off, the Crime Boss eventually shoots a cop, who bends sharply forward, as if hit in the stomach, then apparently remembers some long-ago instruction from the director, straightens up and grabs his supposedly-wounded shoulder. Bullets fly (or rather, bullet-type noises fill the soundtrack) till our bad guy (WARNING!) “falls” out a window.
Actually, we see him slide out the window-set, lie down on a not-quite-hidden platform and roll out of view. Which at least gets him mercifully out of this turkey.
I should perhaps add that the unfortunate actors in this thing at least carry on manfully, ignoring the paucity of their surroundings and the deficiencies in the script. In one scene, the prosecutor is played by Tom Neal, who would soon be facing a prosecutor himself. An actor named Sid Melton gamely struggles to apply comic relief as a newspaper photographer who can’t work a camera, and Karl “Killer” Davis makes a rather effective Hood. Altogether a game bunch, and it’s just a pity they had so little to work with.
Editorial Comments: This film, if you would like to obtain a copy, is easily available on DVD, as part of a two-for-one “Forgotten Noir” pair of offerings. See the image above. I’ll Get You, with George Raft and Sally Gray, is the main feature, with Fingerprints getting only second billing (in very small print).
Also worth noting, as Dan has already pointed out in a comment following Michael Shonk’s recent review of Philo Vance, Detective, this is one of the movies that was re-titled (as Fingerprints) and edited down to less than thirty minutes in a syndicated package of films sold to TV stations in the early 1950s.
September 5th, 2012 at 6:56 pm
Some of these people, Lyle Talbot, Sheila Ryan, Michael Whelan and Richard Travis had significant time at major studios. Whelan was given excellent opportunities by Fox prior to the war but seemingly couldn’t get it together afterwards. Sheila Ryan also at Fox but did quite a bit of work at Republic and Columbia with and for Gene Autry, her husband’s employer. Richard Travis was Bette Davis’ leading man in The Man Who Came To Dinner, and Lyle Talbot in many Warner films of the thirties. And The Bob Cummings Show in the fifties. These are, or were, really talented people who showed up for a weeks work. Always worth seeing.
September 5th, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Sid Melton was a popular choice for comedy relief during the 50s and 60s. Best known for his television work in CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT and GREEN ACRES (to name just two).
September 6th, 2012 at 11:50 am
Sid Melton became a billed in the opening credits regular on the DANNY THOMAS/MAKE ROOM FOR DADDY series as Danny’s boss. I’ll never forget him being killed by a dinosaur in THE LOST CONTINENT.
September 6th, 2012 at 4:39 pm
… and as long as someone mentioned Green Acres, may I be the one to mention that Sheila Ryan was the long-time wife of Pat Buttram?
September 6th, 2012 at 5:14 pm
Mike:
Someone alluded to it. Me.
September 6th, 2012 at 5:27 pm
Here’s a nice article about Miss Ryan: http://www.b-westerns.com/ladies13.htm
Turns out she was also married to Allan “Rocky” Lane for about a year in the mid-1940s.
September 6th, 2012 at 11:16 pm
Sid Melton was also Friendly Freddy on Gomer Pyle, who sold Sergent Carter that great fox fur for Miss Kitty!
September 7th, 2012 at 10:34 am
Last night, Itook alookat Fingerprints Don’t Lie.
I have the referenced DVD as part of a larger boxed set from VCI.
As it happens, one of the other DVDs in the set includes a picture called Mask Of The Dragon, which has the same writer (Orville Hampton), the same producer (Sigmund Neufeld), the same director (Sam Newfield), the same tech crew, the same organist (and some of the same music), many of the same sets, and most of the same cast (Travis, Ryan, Talbot, Melton, Whalen, Killer Karl Davis, a few others).
Looking at these epics back-to-back, I feel I can safely say that this is how these films were made, if not simultaneously.
The surprise that I got in the watching was that the two films have no direct connection each other: the actors play different characters and the storylines have no link between each other at all.
When I looked at the DVD boxes, I thought that perhaps I was looking at another possible Lippert series, this one starring Travis and Ryan as a boy-girl ‘tec team.
That’s what they are in Mask Of The Dragon, but in Fingerprints Don’t Lie they don’t seem to have a direct connection at all (at least at first).
Another difference is that in Dragon Sid Melton is one of the bad guys, a sub-thug to Killer Karl. As part of this, Sid gets to do the absolutely worst Chinese dialect jokes ever heard (no mean achievement in B-Hollywood).
One other thing: I noticed that several of the Lipperts in these VCI box sets begin with slides from the British Board of Film Censors, rating their content. Also, the credits begin “Spartan Productions Present“, which is British style (the American style would be “Soandso Productions Presents“). This indicates that Spartan Productions was (were?) Lippert’s British distributor.
The VCI collections are put together by Kit Parker, who must have the patience (not to mention the tolerance) of a saint to sit through these Gems for all of us.
September 7th, 2012 at 11:20 am
As I understand it, producers would often hire the cast for a certain amount of time. If a picture finished earlier, everyone would quickly do a second to fill out the time.
The PRC’s of PHILO VANCE reused some of the cast.
One of the reasons was the producers knew what they were getting from the actor, writer or director. When time and money meant more than story or art, they depended on professionalism over talent.
September 7th, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Catching up with the comments left so far, I can’t help but thinking that this must be one of the few blogs where Sid Melton has ever come up for discussion. He seems to have stirred up a lot of memories, including mine.
I remember him most as Ikky Mudd on CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT (that’s how IMDB spells it), but he had a huge long career on TV. His last TV appearance was on DAVE’S WORLD in 1997 when was 80 years old. (I never saw that series.) He died last November, at the fine old age of 94.
And what a wonderful coincidence it was that Dan and Michael Shonk sent me reviews of films with Sheila Ryan in them. They arrived within days of each other, but totally independently.
I’m kind of pleased about this.