HOME, SWEET HOMICIDE
US, 1946, 89 minutes, Black-and-white.
Peggy Ann Garner, Randolph Scott, Lynn Bari, Dean Stockwell, Connie Marshall, James Gleason, Anabel Shaw, Barbara Whiting, Shepherd Strudwick.
Directed by Lloyd Bacon.
Home, Sweet Homicide is a light entertainment from 1946, post-war cheerfulness, a look at family, and much in the vein of the television family programs to come, and a murder mystery.
The film has an interesting cast, child actor Peggy Ann Garner in the lead, an early role for Dean Stockwell showing that he was very comfortable in front of the camera, Lynn Bari as the mother, James Gleason is an irascible cop, Shepherd Strudwick as a suspect, and, very surprising, Randolph Scott, not in the saddle or anything like his Western persona, but a quietly gentlemanly police officer.
Mother writes crime novels and the three children, the journalist father now dead, are very well-informed about detective investigations, clues, suspects… When the lady next door is shot dead, and they have accurate information as regards the time of the shots, they decide that their mother should investigate which will be a big boost to her for sales of her novels when she solves the crime. But, mother is busy about her own novel.
The three children love one another but there is continuing bickering, especially young Dean Stockwell resenting being called baby! The older daughter, Dinah, Peggy Ann Garner, has a local friend Joe-ell who is in on some of the action.
Mother’s detective character in her novels is Bill Smith. The chief police officer investigating, the quietly urbane Randolph Scott, happens to be Bill Smith. Signal for the happy ending!
So, there is comedy, tension, the children invading the house next door to find important documents, which they do, which reveal that the murdered woman was blackmailing a lot of her clients, concealing some information from the police, being interrogated, being shrewd in evading answers.
However, the main suspect from audience point of view turns out, of course, to be the killer with some dramatic turns and dangers for the children.
Very slight but a pleasant reminder of 20th Century Fox and its family-oriented entertainments of the mid 1940s.
