I KILLED THAT MAN


US, 1941, 71 minutes, Black-and-white.
Ricardo Cortez, Joan Woodbury, Pat Gleason, George Pembroke, Iris Adrian, Ralf Harolde, Gavin Gordon.
Directed by Phil Rosen.


This is a small-budget supporting feature but is more interesting than most.

It opens with a murderer going to the electric chair, accompanied by the chaplain and the warden, a group of newspaper reporters being ushered into witness the execution as well as other characters with different motives for being there. The condemned man decides to expose the man who commissioned him for the murder and would promise to give him some kind of lessening of the sentence but had failed. Just as he makes his announcement to the group, he falls a dead. There is a poison dart in his neck. Which means that all those present in the room are suspects.

Present in the group is an assistant DA, played by Ricardo Cortez. He locks the doors, gets all those involved to strip, he and the warden having to follow suit, then gives back anything found in the clothes, this enabling the screenplay to introduce us to the range of characters present. The assistant DA decides to focus on a rather portly man who had been a friend of the condemned when he was a boy and who has a cigarette holder in his pocket (which he says he took from his darling daughter to prevent her smoking – and it is revealed she is 26!). He is remanded in custody.



The assistant DA’s girlfriend is a reporter and when there is a mystery about the closed doors and the delay in the execution, she starts to pursue the case. She is a strong character played by Joan Woodbury. Also effective in the cast is George B. Breakston as Tommy who staffs the phones in the office, is very observant on detail, reads all kinds of speculative books for crime solving.


The assistant DA explains to the chief that he does not believe the first suspect is guilty. Attention shifts to the very respectable businessman who is to become significant in government and with prisons. The girlfriend has a meal with him and ingratiate herself. Meanwhile, there is the condemned man’s girlfriend and the reporter also pays her a visit. She supplies a phone number which the assistant DA follows up, at the house of the respectable businessman finding that the phone call concerned his butler and a bet. The other suspicious character is the head of an association against capital punishment – but it emerges that he is a suave conman, soliciting funds and that he is the only member of the association. He had offered to help fund and appeal for the condemned man, is in the car with the girlfriend when she dies. He then is taken into custody.

The villain, the respectable businessman, in his charm to the reporter, asked the manager of delete the restaurant to cash her check. He misinterprets it – that it is to be a regular payout to the businessman. When the reporter discovers the money, she goes to his house, is threatened, the butler ringing the gangster to bring some thugs to get rid of her. However, the assistant DA and one of the reporters who has been hounding him arrive in the nick of time.

The clue is a reference to a book borrowed from the library which has a description of poisons which the businessman has disguised in a packet of pills for his stomach troubles.

Written in a quite a lively style, touches of humour, a good mystery with suspects.