User Reviews

DESTINATION MURDER is a moderately interesting noir film with a couple of credible performances--STANLEY CLEMENTS and HURD HATFIELD--and a nice turn by MYRNA DELL (the gal who gets bumped off in the first scene of THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE). She does an effective job here as a spurned and scheming woman despite some slick, yet naive dialogue.

JOYCE MACKENZIE has a model's good looks and is very pretty as the feminine lead but not exactly convincing as a woman who sets out to solve her father's murder. The story takes a few twists and turns along the way, but none of it seems credible even while you become absorbed in how it will all turn out.

ALBERT DEKKER is surprisingly weak in a key villainous role but HURD HATFIELD is strong enough here to make Dekker's role seem almost peripheral. He and Stanley Clements are the glue that keep the film within the realm of believability as moderate entertainment.

But all in all, it's the kind of passable and shadowy "B" film that can best be described as not likely to linger in your mind.

Weasley Stanley Clements plays Jackie Wales, a messenger with a gambling addiction. When the film opens he is at the movies with

a girl. During intermission he goes out to buy popcorn - but in reality he has been hired as a killer and his target is Mansfield, Laura's father. Laura is played by Joyce Mackenzie, a poor man's Barbara Hale - they look as though they could be sister's with Joyce being the more sophisticated of the two.

Laura is convinced that Jackie is the killer and befriends him so she will be able to catch him out. Hurd Hatfield (looking a bit older than his Dorian Gray days) plays Stretch ("I don't like dames"), the shadowy manager of the club that Laura gets a job with. He is also the mastermind of the whole operation. Stretch and the club owner (Albert Decker) are planning to bump Jackie off to stop him

from "shooting off his mouth".

Laura falls in love with Stretch and confides her real identity to him.... little does she know.

I found this a very good noir. Starring small timers or actors that had seen better days, it had quite a few twists. To me Hurd Hatfield proved Dorian Gray was a role he was born to play - he was a one dimensional actor with an expressionless face.

The film was very good.

This movie feels like the screenwriter and director were working from a check list of film noir elements and wanted to make sure they didn't miss any. There are lots of plot twists, like in many noirs, but so many of them make no sense, and seem to be thrown in just for effect. The story has very little internal logic, in addition to a player piano that seems to magically transport itself from one location to another. (as is pointed out in the goofs section). There's also the fact that the heroine, played by Joyce MacKenzie, suddenly wants to marry Hurd Hatfield's character, despite them having barely more than one scene together. And how did she not realize that he was likely in on the criminal enterprise with Armitage, since they were such close business partners?

The opening sequence of the movie is actually pretty nifty, with a murder being committed during a 5 minute movie intermission, but that's never than brought into the story to be used as the killers' alibi. There are other scenes in the movie that are good by themselves, but add nothing to the overall story.

Another liability is the acting. Joyce MacKenzie is pretty wooden, and you never really get emotionally involved in what she's going through in trying to track down her father's killer. Albert Dekker is usually excellent, but here he seems to veer between playing his character as a sinister tough guy and a comic buffoon. Stanley Clements is an actor I know from the later (and pretty dreadful) Bowery Boys movies, and I could never really believe him as a killer, or as a self-deluded would-be ladies' man. (It's the kind of part that Elisha Cook did much better).

I'm being generous in giving this 6 stars, in part because I know how hard it is to work with such a limited budget, but I really would only recommend this to hardcore fans of the genre. One small thing of note, to me, anyway. There's a scene in the nightclub ladies' lounge in which an actress named Norma Vance, credited as "Fran - Inebriated Lady," does a nice little comic turn as a cynical, wise cracking blonde. According to IMDB, that was her one and only film appearance ever. I always wonder about things like that. How does an actor come out of nowhere, score one part, and then completely disappear?

Couldn't get with it. My aesthetic apparatus fused. Stanley Clements is hired by thugs Albert Dekker and his sub rosa boss, Hurd Hatfield, who is posing as Dekker's night club manager, Stretch. Stretch might or might not be an invert. He keeps saying, "I don't like dames," and he slaps people lightly across the cheeks. Clement's mission: Wearing his messenger uniform, he must take a quick break during a movie intermission and shoot Dekker's business rival, which he does. Then he scoots back to the theater and resumes his date.

The police have their eye on him but can do nothing. But the victim's daughter, Joyce Mackenzie, has him under suspicion too and she is in a position to do something about it. She can and does put some moves on Clements, who must be listed among the most stupid murderers on record. He seems to have no idea that the past shapes the present and influences the future. His thought processes are rudimentary. She's a neat dame -- classy, y'know?, and, okay, so he murdered her old man in cold blood. So what? Let bygones be bygones. That's his philosophy.

He decides that the hit is worth a bit more than he was paid so he noodges Dekker up for more money -- five grand. This is a big mistake. Dekker smoothly removes and folds his belt in front of the terrified, diminutive Clements, while Hurd Hatfield turns on the player piano and we hear the gloomy melody and dark chords of the Moonlight Sonata.

Clements emerges later from the apartment, disheveled, blooded, dizzied. Then we get to know bar girl Myrna Dell, who tells Clements how to do blackmail right. (You write a complete confession and arrange to have it sent to the cops in case anything happens to you.) Myrna Dell is one tough cookie. She has no sense of humor at all. And she seems made of cast iron, with a figure resembling a Franklin stove. She doesn't always give good advice. Two thirds of the way through the movie, the pathetic Stanley Clements disappears, much to the viewer's relief.

The climax is unforgettable. As another viewer pointed out, so many improbables are involved that it's a miracle out of scripture. I guess I'll take a stab at describing it.

First, the treacherous Hurd Hatfield decides to have Dekker killed off. Here's how he arranges it. He invites Mackenzie, the vengeful daughter of the murdered man, to his apartment. Then, when Dekker arrives, as secretly arranged, he stashes Mackenzie in another room. He then drugs Dekker, sits his wobbly body upright in a chair, fires a pistol into the wall, clasps the pistol in Dekker's obligingly upright hand, cowers behind the desk, cries out for mercy -- and Mackenzie rushes in from the next room, having overheard Dekker's confession, picks up another pistol lying there, and shoots the oblivious Dekker, who is posed as if to plug Hatfield, perhaps in a state of cerea flexibilitas. Hatfield winds up plugged too, but I forget how. I think I was still abstracted by the knots in Dekker's murder or maybe it was a period of microsleep.

Well! There are two things that can DEFINITELY be said about this production. Hurd Hatfield certainly had a long career. From 1944 to 1991. And there's another thing. James Flavin plays a cop and he says "sqawd care" (New England, for "squad car". Twice.) Is there anything else to be said about this movie? Let me think.

Nope.

A woman's father is murdered. Not waiting for the police to solve the crime, she infiltrates the gangster's club by hiring on as a waitress. She manages to figure out who did what, and ends up in a relationships with the manager and staff, while the police belatedly close in. Seems that her father had been involved in a racket-busting campaign; the murder was revenge from the mob guys.

We've got Laura (Joyce Mackenzie), Jack (Stanley Clements), Stretch (Hurd Hatfield), Armitage (Albert Dekker), Alice (Myrna Dell), Lieutenant Brewster (James Flavin), and Frank (John Dehner), and Arthur Mansfield (Franklyn Farnum), Laura's murdered father.

Jackie ducks out of a movie theatre at intermission. He's not just going out for a smoke; he's off to deliver mayhem. To Arthur Mansfield. His package is a gunshot. His daughter Laura calls an ambulance, but its too late. At police HQ, Frank is quizzed by the Lieutenant. The problem for Frank is that he and his car were seen in Mansfield's neighborhood. Seems that Frank was Mansfield's business rival. Laura comes in to confirm that Frank's car was identical was the murderer's.

Laura gets a ride home from Jackie, one of the delivery guys in the police line-up. For some reason she doesn't identify him. More surprisingly, she starts dating him. Very quickly, Jackie gets in deep gambling. Next stop, a swanky club, the Vogue. He looks up Armitage there, but Stretch intervenes. Finally, Armitage let's him in.

Now we see that that it was Armitage that drove the getaway car for the hit on Mansfield. Instead of giving in to blackmail, he beats up Frank. With her new boyfriend broke, Laura hits up Stretch for a job. She's beguiling enough; even hanger-on Alice agrees. Laura's the new cigarette girl. Armitage says that he's marrying Alice.

More importantly, Stretch and Armitage cook up a cunning plan to finger Jackie as Frank's hit man. Now it's Alice's turn to try blackmail; that is, in cahoots with Jackie. I don't get why they think a confession will accomplish anything. Who cares if Armitage is nailed if it means Jackie's confession is really an accusation. We'll see about that. Alice confides in Laura. The plot works--Armitage pays off.

Weirdly, Laura knows nothing about this arrangement; even stranger, Alice is enlisted by Armitage to find the so-called confession. Only now does Jackie reveal who Laura is; we have to figure that Laura knows Jackie is her nemesis, otherwise she wouldn't play this elaborate game. Now, just to make it interesting, Stretch plots with Alice against Armitage. With the confession, he urges Stretch to take care of the boss man.

But, of course, Stretch is playing yet a different game; he's in cahoots with Armitage against Alice, Jackie, and Laura. Looks like Jackie is dead; bizarrely, the lieutenant tells Laura that they're really after Armitage. Oh, yeah, he's a bad guy. But what about her dad's killer? Meanwhile Alice has turned up dead too. Next thing we know, the two bad guys huddle up. We discover that Stretch is the mastermind.

Well, since Alice is dead, Stretch figures it's time to marry Laura. She gives up the ghost with Stretch; say, you know that guy one of you hoods had killed? Just so you know, he was my dad. The confession wasn't burned up after all; not only that, it really is the truth. Armitage set up the hit, Jackie carried it out. Stretch puts Laura in a back room while he welcomes Armitage in, allegedly for some business.

Aha! Artimage has been drugged; Stretch arranged a gun in his partner's unwilling hand and fires it into the wall. When Laura comes out of the room, Stretch raises his hands, as though he's being held at gun point. Laura sees Armitage holding a gun in their general direction. She fires her gun and kills him. Justifiable homicide? Yes. A wee problem, though, is that Stretch's gun was the one that killed Laura's father, and his prints are all over Jackie's confession. Who wrote it, then?

So, the police want to use Laura and Frank to incriminate Stretch. Stretch is indeed caught out by Frank. With the cops listening in, Stretch boasts that he was the crime boss. Dumb move. Frank pulls a gun on him; the cops burst in, and a general melee results. Finally, Stretch is shot. "He was a homicidal maniac" notes the Lieutenant. The end.

What a noir feast! It's not really a put-down to say that Destination Murder plays like a feature-length serial. The non-stop action, snappy dialogue, convoluted plot, and limited variety of sets and characters fit that compact genre perfectly. Most of these attributes are found in noir as well. Plus, the characters are fairly well-delineated.

That is, except for the main character, Laura. To the extent that the premise works --that the police are looking the other way for much of the time, so that Laura single-handedly has to play detective--only points out what's wrong with it. The police bypass a murder suspect to find someone who...might also be a murder suspect? That's just not plausible. If we can swallow that, then there's Laura, schmoozing these three hoods like she was working undercover for the FBI. I could see the ploy of getting close to one of them, maybe to get some intel on these guys. but all of them?

And to cap it all off, she is all set to marry Stretch--the mastermind of the murder plot. Ok, she doesn't know that he's top banana, but he's obviously from the same bunch. And, going back to the murder scene itself, how is it that she doesn't recognize Jackie? We might say that she didn't get a good look at him--but he makes her. Possibly she knew all along. She's just too chameleon-like to be believable: even a pro wouldn't act so love-lorn and nonchalant with the only three suspects in her father's murder.

The staged murder of Armitage is pretty clever; as is the letter. Who really wrote it? And it may or may not say what Jackie said it did; he changed his tune on what it said anyway. Good to keep some things mysterious.

This was highly entertaining, but it's impossible to suspend disbelief without superglue. Very hard to rate; with a different Laura or some more nuance to the script, this could've been great. It's still very good.

The story is good because it is plotted well. It starts with a Ted-friendly fold: a guy is in a movie with his girl. He takes a break and kills someone and returns as if the murder was a movie. Well, it is.

What follows is a collection of tough guys and dolls navigating through different interlocked schemes to cheap each other in some way. A few die.

The good plotting comes from the intricate interlacing of the perfidy.

The hero here is a mobster's "good" daughter who goes under cover to find the killer of her dad. The formula would have her won and lose both. She does

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Joyce MacKenzie (Laura Mansfield), Stanley Clements (Jackie Wales), Hurd Hatfield (Stretch Norton), Albert Dekker (Armitage), Myrna Dell (Alice Wentworth), James Flavin (Lieutenant Brewster), John Dehner (Niles), Richard Amory (Mulcahy), Norma Vance (patron in powder room), Suzette Harbin (powder room attendant), Buddy Swan (Arthur, a messenger boy), Ben Wenland (Dave, a messenger boy), Franklyn Farnum (Mansfield), Steve Gibson (himself, leader of Redcap Singing Group), Ralph Brooks, Jeffrey Sayre, Harold Miller, Suzanne Ridgeway (nightclub patrons), Steven Ritch (waiter), Fred Graham (fight double for Hurd Hatfield). Steve Gibson's Redcaps (themselves).

Director: EDWARD L. CAHN. Screenplay: Don Martin. Photography: Jackson Rose. Film editor: Philip Cahn. Art director: Boris Leven. Set decorator: Jacque Mapes. Wardrobe supervisors: Maria P. Donovan (women) and Jerry Bos (men). Make-up: Henry Vilardo. Hair styles: Lillian Shore. Music: Irving Gertz. Song (Gibson) by Steve Gibson and James Springs. Sound recording engineer: Garry A. Harris. Producers: Maurie M. Suess, Edward L. Cahn. Prominent Pictures (i.e. Edward L. Cahn Productions).

Copyright 15 June 1950 by RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. U.S. release through RKO: 8 June 1950. No recorded New York opening. U.K. release: 13 May 1951. Australian release: 9 February 1951. 6,721 feet. 74 minutes.

SYNOPSIS: After witnessing the murder of her father by a messenger boy, Laura Mansfield decides to track down the killer.

COMMENT: Don Martin has certainly come up with more than a few novel twists in the plot of this minor film noirish "B". Mind you, it stretches belief and some of the dialogue is pretty silly (especially that given to James Flavin who makes a most unconvincing detective), but it certainly has its moments, thanks chiefly to Hurd Hatfield and Albert Dekker.

One of the surprises is that the chief character is killed (off- camera, of course) when the movie still has twenty minutes to run. Fortunately, we didn't take to the player concerned anyway and his unexpected demise gives an opportunity for our favorite actor to take charge. This plot twist seems a little ridiculous but we're prepared to let it pass. After all, as said above, the film is worth seeing mostly for Hatfield and Dekker.

As for the actual star (as per the billing), it must be admitted that, although saddled with an unlikely self-assignment, Miss MacKenzie does her best to instill a smidgin of realism into her performance. She receives solid support from femme fatale Myrna Dell and (in a small role) glib gangster John Dehner.

The direction by Edward L. Cahn rates a notch or two above his usual super-humble standard. Production values score a generally adequate to low, but occasionally impress.

A woman's father is murdered. Not waiting for the police to solve the crime, she infiltrates the gangster's club by hiring on as a waitress. She manages to figure out who did what, and ends up in a relationships with the manager and staff, while the police close in. Seems that her father had been involved in a racket-busting campaign; the murder was revenge from the mob guys.

Jackie ducks out of a movie theatre at intermission. He's not just going out for a smoke; he's off to deliver mayhem. To Arthur Masfield. His daughter Laura calls an ambulance, but its too late. At police HQ, Frank is quizzed by the Lieutenant. The problem for Frank is that his car were seen in Mansfield's neighborhood. Seems that Frank was Mansfield's business rival. Laura comes in to confirm that Frank's car was identical was the murderers.

The best thing about this B-noir is its casting.

Who could do better as cocky, movie-intermission killer Jackie than square-jawed "I think I'm smarter than those other crooks" Stanley Clements?

Then there's too-handsome-to-be-believed nightclub honcho Stretch Norton, played to slimy perfection by Hurd Hatfield, and conniving, anything-for-a-buck blonde moll Alice (Myrna Dell).

Seamlessly infiltrating this sordid world is Joyce MacKenzie as Laura, whose father has been killed on their doorstep. The prim and worldly Laura doesn't stop to mourn -- with scarcely a pause she's insinuating herself into the world of the killer and his cronies. It's as unbelievable as it's diverting.

The production values here aren't high...in fact, the sets recall "The Twilight Zone." But the script manages to offer a few excellent lines.

"I only got one friend -- me!" sputters a humiliated, roughed-up Jackie.

"Are you interested in $5,000?" he's later asked. "Who isn't?" he replies, and I guess he's still got a point today.

The movie ends on a smarmy note, as we ponder the fuzzy line between pursuers and pursued. "This time, a squad car," drools an amorous detective to Laura. Er, OK.

A wonderful discovery here is the nightclub band Steve Gibson and the Red Caps. If you're ever feeling low, definitely check this group out on youtube!

A fun but messy and convoluted film noir that features some of the most ridiculous twists and turns I've ever seen, and the more ridiculous it gets, the more fun it gets as it tries to talk its way out of those absurdities. To find out who killed her father, sweet Joyce MacKenzie goes undercover to become a cigarette girl femme fatale, going out with the killer (Stanley Clements) fully knowing who he is infiltrate the criminal gang he's involved in led by Hurd Hatfield and Albert Dekker. There's a hard nosed femme fatale played by Myrna Dell who isn't undercover, the real deal of what a film noir bad girl should be like. John Dehner is thrown into the confusing mix as another bad guy who comes in out of nowhere to the already mixed up plot, and his entrance into the story serves nothing but creating another foil for Hatfield who has committed murder to rise to the top of his racket.

The most interesting element of the story is between Clements and Dell, with the she-wolf manipulating the dumb hired killer to blackmail his boss, using him to get her hands on some much needed cash. It's obvious what that will spell for both of them in the end because you don't blackmail a mobster and live to tell about it. A good dark intense atmosphere aides the ridiculousness of the storyline, and for a while, I was fooled into thinking that this was much better than it turned out to be.