The Blonde and The Blackmailer

 Sometimes Everything Comes Together

Behind Green Lights (1946) – The beautiful daughter of a political candidate is a suspect in the murder of a blackmailer just days before the election.  An honest police detective has to unravel the story to find the truth. 

Directed by Otto Brower

Starring Carole Landis, William Gargan, Don Beddoe

Why I Liked It – A wonderful surprise!  Fun combination of cast and story the works well.

There is nothing better than stumbling on a hidden jewel of a movie.  “Behind Green Lights” is a classic “B” movie.  For those of more modern movie fandom, a “B movie” was a low budget film used as the second part of a double feature.  Yes, in the old days, a ticket got you more than one movie, sometimes several more.  This was the second tier of Hollywood.  Young actors would start at this level and prove they could hold an audience.  It was possible to make a career out of B movies, and it gave some actors and actresses their own kind of fame.

With all that said, the quality of this level of movie making could vary widely.  “Behind Green Lights” stands in the top most percentage of the group.  There are no big stars, or even big stars-to-be here.  (Carole Landis has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  She was a beautiful actress with many friends in the movie industry.  She took her life just a few years after this movie.)  That doesn’t stop them from doing a fine job.  Landis plays the daughter of a reform politician running for mayor.  An unscrupulous private detective digs up some dirt that will hurt her father’s prospects. (We never find out what the material is or who it’s about!).  She may be the last person to see him before his murder.  There’s a bullet hole in him, and her fingerprints are on the gun.  Lt. Carson (Gargan) has to make his way through the press, politics, deceit and mismatched stories to find the truth.  There’s not a bad performance in the bunch.

The story takes a bit of noir, a little romance, some comedy and tosses into a nice police procedural/murder mystery.  What started as a movie to watch while I ate lunch turned into a real delight.  With nice touches like the body rolling up in the dead man’s car to the front steps of the police station, and the comic relief of Flossie the flower lady, it was one of the best 64 minutes of movie watching I’ve had in a long time.

I never did figure out the title, however.

You can find this movie on Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, and it’s available to rent/buy.

Rating – **** Recommended  

There’s no trailer available, but here’s a clip of the opening couple of minutes