THE MAN WHO WOULDN’T DIE
US, 1941, 65 minutes, Black and white.
Lloyd Nolan, Marjorie Weaver, Helene Reynolds, Henry Wilcoxon, Richard Derr, Paul Harvey, Billy Bevan, Olin Howlin, Jeff Corey.
Directed by Herbert I. Leeds.
Lloyd Nolan portrayed the private eye, Michael Shayne, in six small-budget supporting features from 1938 to 1942. This is the fifth. While it has murders and disappearances, much of it is played more for laughs. While Michael Shayne is an effective private eye, he is full of wisecracks, rather pleased with himself and his detection work. But, still, a genial film presents.
There is a mysterious start as three respectable people watch a body being taken by car and then buried in the woods. It is a beginning of quite a complicated plot. The patriarch of the house, Paul Harvey, is a senator under investigation. His doctor friend, Henry Wilcoxon, has a complicated laboratory in the basement of the house. There is a sinister secretary, a groundskeeper. The politician lives with his younger wife (Marjorie Weaver), quite a sympathetic character.
The same night, the politician’s flighty daughter arrives to say that she has married. Given the situation, everybody acts with suspicion and, she leaves, but encounters her friend Michael Shayne and asks him to pose as her husband. Which he does with great flourishes.
There are complications when the daughter feels she has seen a ghost at the window, that a gun has been fired at her, bullets found, then the doctor murdered, Shayne going to see a circus friend of his who gives him information about a performer who is able to stay buried alive for a long time. The initially buried body also disappears and is the subject of search, especially from the comic chief of police, Olin Howlin, and some serious support from his coroner, Jeff Corey in an early role.
Ultimately, Shayne unmasks the main criminal mind – who turns out to be the nice loving wife, previously married to the circus performer, in league with the doctor, trying to kill off her stepdaughter.
A pleasant supporting feature with sufficient mystery – and plenty of that corny comedy.
