Note: Gail Patrick moved beyond the ingenue parts when she played Cornelia the mean sister in My Man Godrey. After 60 or so parts as the haughty girl, retirement from acting drove her crazy. With her husband, Cornwell Jackson, she formed the production company behind the greatest courtroom TV series from 1957 to 1966. She was the soul of the series, said Raymond Burr. One wonders if it was due to Jackson that the writers so often returned to serious themes such as the struggle of women in a man’s world and the perils of emotional reasoning and all or nothing thinking.
Quiet
Please: Murder
1942 / 1:10 minutes
Tagline: “Their Love Thrived on DANGER”
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archive]
There’s an entire genre of wartime home-front movies - no surprise, given the size of that war -cherished by fans of scrappy B-pictures and early noir. What makes this one worth your time isn’t the gunplay or the blackout relics of it time - it’s the dialogue. Someone in the writing department clearly had a library card and wasn’t afraid to use it. George Sanders tosses off references to Freud, Lombroso, and Havelock Ellis like cocktail chatter, which is not what you expect in a movie made on a shoestring. It’s almost as if the script assumes the audience has a few neurons to rub together. Imagine that.
The tone is pure alley-cat ethics: everyone’s on the grift, and patriotism is mostly a prop - except for Richard Denning, who manages to sound sincere while mooning over a librarian whose boyfriend is off fighting the war. There’s even a moment where Denning reads the title of You Can’t Do Business with Hitler. I once saw that book in a Prudenville antique store forty years ago and didn’t buy it. Still kicking myself.
The best thing here is the attitude: brisk, literate, and just cynical enough to feel like gritty noir. Gail Patrick plays her schemer role with icy confidence, while Sanders - always the dry martini of actors - reminds me of a lout’s idea of sophistication. The whole thing runs barely over an hour, but it crams in forgery, shootouts, and a surprise ending that feels true to wartime home-front logic.
Bottom line: worth watching. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s smart enough to respect your intelligence while giving you a good time.
Other
Gail Patrick Movies: Click on the title to go to the review
·
If
I Had a Million
·
The
Phantom Broadcast
·
The
Murders in the Zoo
·
Death
Takes a Holiday
·
The
Crime of Helen Stanley
·
Murder
at the Vanities
·
The
Preview Murder Mystery
·
My
Man Godrey
·
Murder
by Pictures
·
Artists
and Models
·
King
of Alcatraz
·
Wives
Under Suspicion
·
Disbarred
·
Quiet Please Murder
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