TWO O'CLOCK COURAGE

US, 1945, 68 minutes, black and white.
Tom Conway, Ann Rutherford, Richard Lane, Lester Matthews, Roland Drew, Emory Parnell, Bettejane Greer, Jean Brooks.
Directed by Anthony Mann.

Two O’ Clock Courage is a very entertaining supporting feature, the touch of comedy with smart repartee and something of the emerging film noir. It was made at the time that Tom Conway was appearing in the The Falcon series – and he is much the same in this film as he plays a very suave gentlemen adrift on a street corner early in the morning with a gash on his forehead. He has amnesia.

He is almost knocked down by a taxi, driven by Ann Rutherford, quite engaging as the young woman who assists him in his search for his identity, pretending to be his wife, pretending that both of them are journalists from Dayton, doing a bit of investigation herself while, of course, falling for the mysterious man.

They are about to go to the police when they see the headlines that an entrepreneur has been murdered and the mysterious man fits the description of an intruder. They go to a shop to get a new suit to disguise him and they decide to go to the home of the chauffeur who might have been the murderer. While there, they encounter the rather humourless police inspector as well as a journalist, Richard Lane, who is forever developing theories, ringing his editor, changing the identity of the murderer from one moment to another.

The story has a theatrical background with the title of the film coming from a play whose title has been changed to Menace to hide the authorship, written by a man who is dead, with his mother writing a letter to the mysterious gentleman for people to acknowledge her son’s work.

There are all kinds of suspects. At one stage it is thought that the chauffeur is the killer. Then there is the English butler who heard mysterious words and who himself comes under suspicion. There is an actor who wants to marry the leading lady and is about to expose the authorship of the play. There is also a co-writer, claiming royalties, who is carrying on with the socialite, an early role for Jane Greer.

The action keeps moving around from the mansion, to the taxi driver’s apartment and the suspicions of her landlady, to The Blue Room full of socialites, to various apartments in hotels.

Since the action moves fairly quickly and there is a lot of smart dialogue, the audience, within the brief running time, will be trying to work out who the murderer is – and, after a seeming suicide, the real murderer is revealed as the actress.

This is a remake of the 1936, Two in the Dark.

The film was directed by Anthony Mann, an early film before he moved into a series of thrillers, a series of significant westerns during the 1950s from Winchester 73 and other films with Jane Stewart, as well as The Glenn Miller story, and then moving into big spectacles including the The Fall of the Roman Empire.