Shield for Murder

As a big Edmond O"Brien fan, I am doubly disappointed in this movie in that he co-directed it besides starring in it. There are plenty of low-budget noirs that are good entertainment, but this was a real misfire. In the early going, the shadow of a boom mike shows up as big as a full moon, and that's typical of the technical mistakes or bad choices. Another bad choice - the beating of the two PI's sent by the gangster was shot with a low angle so that you only see O'Brien swinging his gun with no view of the victims, nor any idea how he managed to beat both of them to smithereens without having a glove laid on him. As a matter of fact, this movie is so filled with low angles, it nearly discredits the practice in general. The main character's desperation, white-hot temper, impulsiveness and stupidity are out-of-step with the idea of any kind of competent detective. There was no build-up or character arc. He's just as ridiculous at the beginning as he is at the end. His girlfriend is too far out of his league to be believed. The captain (Emile Meyer) is a corny cliché. The story wasn't well stitched together, so that situations arose without any set-up, such as the guys who were hiding him out for $500/day. I guess that part was left on the cutting room floor, which is preferable to the alternative - that it was left of the script.

source: Shield for Murder

In Shield For Murder Edmond O'Brien is tired of being a straight arrow cop. One night he murders a numbers runner and steals %25,000.00 from him. Of course his official version is that he was resisting arrest, but the bookmaker played by Hugh Sanders knows he's out all that money and he'll get it back one way or another. O'Brien is perfectly cast as the aging detective sick and tired of seeing crooks grow rich. His problem is that he's grown such contempt for the human race he thinks that he's the smartest guy out there. Never credits the crooks or the cops with an ounce of intelligence. That is his downfall. John Agar is his protégé and still a straight arrow. The undercurrent running through the film is that while Agar is trying to catch O'Brien will he fall victim to the same cynicism? Some other noteworthy performances in Shield For Murder are from Marla English as O'Brien's troubled girlfriend, Carolyn Jones as a bar girl he has a small fling with, Claude Akins as one of Sanders's hoods and Emile Meyer as the precinct captain. But Edmond O'Brien is something to see here. In a really crackerjack noir thriller.

***SPOILERS*** In a role that very possibly inspired the "Psycho Cop" series of movies of the 1990's Edmond O'Brian as the sweaty disheveled and bug eyed LA police detective Barney Noland is about as rotten and barbaric as any film or TV policemen ever seen up to that time. Murdering without conscience Barney not only guns down an innocent bookie, Kirk Martin,to grab his $25,000.00 bankroll he's given by his boss Packy Reed, Hugh Sanders, but murders by wringing his neck and throwing him down a flight of stairs deaf mute Ernest Sternmuller,David Hughes. That's in that Sternmuller is the one person who can identify Barney in Martin's murder. Working his way up in the LAPD as a Let. Detective the pay, about $100,00 a week, wasn't enough for Barney's future plans to marry 20 year old, some 20 years Barney junior, cigarette girl Patty Winters, Maria English and get a house out in the suburbs. So when Barney got a tip that Martin was loaded with cash he jumped at it not caring what the consequences were going to be. It was Barney's good friend at the LAPD Detective Sgt. Mark Brewster, John Agar, who by getting to the bottom, of the stairs, of deaf mute Sternmuller's death who figured out that his good friend and mentor Barney Noland murdered him! As well as him being the person who murdered bookie Kirk Martin! Barney also takes time to brutally pistol whip private detectives Fats Michaels & Laddie O'Neil, Claud Akins & Lawrence Ryle, who were hired by Mob Boss Packy Reed to checkup on him at a local spaghetti joint where he picked up boozy Carolyn Jones, wearing a blond wig, for a date. In the end it was Fats, with his head bandaged like Lon Cheney Jr in the "Mummy's Curse", who tried to murder Barney at a local YMCA where he was suppose to get the tickets and ready cash from mobster Mannings, Michael H. Cutting, for him & Patty to check out of the country to South America. ***SPOILERS*** Now on the run from both the law and the mob Barney is finally gunned down in a hail of bullets by the LA police lead by his good friend Det. Sgt. Breswter in front of the house that he hoped to buy with his ill gotten gains, the $25,000.00 in bookie money, for him and Patty to spend the rest of their lives living in. It's a shame that Edmond O'Brian wasn't given more psycho type roles like the one in "Shield for Murder" in him being so good in playing one. By then I would guess he was far too old and chubby to be convincing in playing psychos leaving them up to younger actors like Anthony Perkins to get to be cast in them.

Antihero star/director O'Brien does a good job. He plays a real beast -- a crooked cop who will do the lowest of the low. Marla English, as his girlfriend, is pretty and eefftive enough. She looks a lot like Elizabeth Taylor at that time. It's unusually brutal for its time but not espcially good.

Predictable cops and robbers stuff, made interesting because it is one of only two pictures directed by O'Brian. A good supporting cast-Agar, English, Akins, and Jones help prop up the old story of good cop gone bad. Full credits roll at the end, now the rule, but unusual in the 50s.

This film begins with perhaps the worst instance where a boom microphone is obviously in the shot. As Edmond O'Brien is walking from left to right across the screen, you can very, very clearly see the microphone's shadow. It's so clear and obvious you wonder how the film ever got released this way. It's funny but also rather sloppy. The same can be said for showing a revolver with a silencer--it quiets the shot SOME but isn't as silent as they usually show in films. These mistakes are probably there because this is a low-budget film and didn't have the care needed for a more prestigious project. It could also be that co-director and star Edmond O'Brien simply was out of his element as a director. Despite these limitations, the film IS worth seeing and I enjoyed it very much. That's because the script was taut and well-written. Additionally, the acting was fine---quite realistic and gritty. The film begins with a police detective (O'Brien) killing a bag man for the mob. In other words, this man was carrying a huge amount of illegal gambling money. However, this killing was NOT a mistake---O'Brien had decided to cash in on some seemingly easy money--killing the guy and claiming it was accidental. While this seems a bit suspicious, the story seemed plausible enough and it appeared as if he'll get away with murder and $25,000. However, there turned out to be a witness and soon O'Brien has killed again to hide his crime. And, like eating potato chips, O'Brien can't just stop there, as his plan is unraveling and the only way to keep it together is to kill again and possibly again. In addition to O'Brien, John Agar plays a younger cop who is O'Brien's friend. He is torn, as he strongly believes in O'Brien--but over time, it becomes more and more clear that O'Brien has gone bad. This is an interesting character and gave some depth to the film--and proves that despite conventional wisdom, Agar was a pretty good actor--he just chose to appear in a lot of rotten films in the 1950s and 60s (after his divorce from Shirley Temple). Overall, the film gets very high marks for its realism. In particular, it's very, very brutal for a Film Noir picture--one scene in particular made me cringe. It also gets high marks for the plot as well as O'Brien's excellent acting. It's actually surprising today that Edmond O'Brien is pretty much forgotten, as this Oscar-winning actor and supporting actor was great in tough-guy roles as he was far from the usual Hollywood "pretty boy"--an ugly and brick-like guy who could really act. So, despite a few technical problems, this is a better than average cop film that holds up very well today. For fans of Noir, like myself, it's a must-see--as is any O'Brien Noir film!

I cannot say that this is one of the better films noir, but it's a good example of the way this kind of film was drifting in the early fifties: away from the studios; toward independent production; more cars, fewer subways; a vaguely documentary air, ala Jack Webb, rather than the more elegant stylization we associate with the forties; more outdoor scenes, fewer cramped rooms; and overall a movement away from the Gothic and toward a more contemporary, which is to say paranoid mood. Having said this, it ain't a bad picture. Edmond O'Brien (who also had a hand behind the camera) plays a basically decent and fair cop who gives in to temptation and steals some money from a bad guy. He pays dearly for his transgression. O'Brien is edgier and tougher than usual; the rest of the cast is okay. This is an extremely watchable film. It involves you more than most police thrillers. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

In Shield for Murder (a movie he co-directed with Howard Koch), Edmond O'Brien plays a Los Angeles cop `gone sour.' Bloated and sweaty, he's a sneak preview of another bad apple – Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. In a pre-title sequence, he guns down a drug runner in cold blood, relieves the corpse of an envelope crammed with $25-thou, then yells `Stop or I'll shoot' for the benefit of eavesdroppers before firing twice into the air. When his partner (John Agar) arrives, there's only a few hundred dollars left on the body, and it looks like a justifiable police action – though O'Brien's shock tactics have already drawn the unwelcome attention of his new captain (Emile Meyer). O'Brien wants the money to buy into the American Dream – to put a down-payment on a tract house, furnished (oddly enough) right down to the table settings. It's a bungalow to share with his girl, Marla English, as well as a handy place to bury his cash in its yard. But a couple of things go wrong. First off, a local crime boss wants back the loot O'Brien ripped off and dispatches a couple of goons to retrieve it. Then, though there were no eye-witnesses to the murder, there was in fact an eavesdropper – an old blind man whose acute hearing picked up a sequence of shots that don't add up to the official story. When this good citizen decides to tell the police what he heard, O'Brien decides to pay him a nocturnal visit.... Based on a novel by William McGivern (who also wrote the books from which The Big Heat, Rogue Cop and Odds Against Tomorrow were drawn), Shield For Murder embodies some of the shifts in tone and emphasis the noir cycle was showing as it wound down. Its emphasis is less on individuals caught up in circumstance than on widespread public corruption; its tone is less suggestive than ostentatiously violent. The movie ratchets up to a couple of brutal set-pieces. In one, O'Brien, knocking back doubles at the bar in a spaghetti cellar, is picked up by a floozie (Carolyn Jones, in what looks like Barbara Stanwyck's wig from Double Indemnity). `You know what's the matter with mirrors in bars?' she asks him. `Men always make hard faces in them.' While she eats, he continues to drink. When the goons track him down there, O'Brien savagely pistol-whips one of them (Claude Akins) to the horror of the other patrons who had come to devour their pasta in peace. Later, there's an attempted pay-off (and a double-cross) in a public locker-room and swimming-pool that ends in carnage. It's easy to dismiss Shield For Murder – it has a seedy B-picture look and a literalness that typified most of the crime films of the Eisenhower administration. But it's grimly effective – almost explosive.

Less than one minute into the opening scene, a large shadow outline of the "boom mic" can clearly be seen in the background. The fact that director Howard W. Koch and editor John F. Schreyer decided to leave in this blatant gaffe, and the platinum beauty of a very hungry Carolyn Jones, ten years before Morticia Addams, were the two most interesting aspects of this film for me. Gritty crime drama's from the classic 'Noir' era (1941-1958) have been elevated to revered status. Rightly so in most cases. This would not be one. However, since exceptions prove the rule... Shield for Murder serves a useful purpose, I suppose.