Bodyguard (film, 1948)

Mike Carter ( Lawrence Tierney ), a temperamental and unrestrained detective in the murder department of the Los Angeles Police Department , is suspended from office for abuse of authority. The outraged Mike tries to figure out the situation, turning to his immediate superior, Lieutenant Borden ( Frank Fenton ), with whom he developed an hostile relationship. After a short verbal skirmish, Mike hits Borden in the face, witnessed by the head of the department, Captain Wayne ( Charles Kane ), who dismisses Mike from the service. Some time later, Mike comes to a baseball game with his girlfriend Doris Brewster ( Priscilla Lane ), who works in the secretariat of the Los Angeles Police Department. During the match, Freddie Dysen ( Phillip Reed ), nephew of the elderly wealthy owner of the Continental meat processing plant, sits down to Mike. Freddy offers Mike a large fee of $ 2,000 to become his aunt’s bodyguard Gene Dysen ( Elizabeth Riesdon ), who, according to him, has recently been threatened. Mike rejects this offer, recommending contacting the police or private investigators, however, according to Freddie, the family does not want publicity. That evening, when Mike arrives with her, Doris, someone slips an envelope with 2 thousand dollars under the door of her apartment. Realizing that this is most likely the work of Freddie, Mike arrives in Pasadena , where Mrs. Dysen's mansion is located, to return this money. The outraged Mike returns the money to Freddy, especially since Mrs. Dysen does not believe that the threats are so serious that she needs a bodyguard. However, when he leaves the house, someone shoots through the window of the house, and one of the bullets hits Mrs. Dysen in the mirror. Realizing that the matter is taking a serious turn, Mike decides to accept Freddie’s offer and remains on night duty in the mansion. In the middle of the night, he catches Connie Fenton ( June Clayworth ), the secretary of Mrs. Dysen, who picks out bullets stuck in the wall and mirror. Mike accuses Connie of being associated with a shooting criminal, but she categorically rejects this charge. At four in the morning, Mike notices that Gene, accompanied by his butler, leaves the house and drives away. Mike follows after them, reaching the slaughterhouse. When he gets out of the car, someone attacks him from behind, and from a strong blow to the head, Mike faints. Mike wakes up while driving, seeing Lieutenant Borden killed in the next seat. At this moment, he realizes that the car was abandoned on the railway tracks, and the freight train was approaching it at great speed. Just before the collision, Mike manages to jump out of the car.

Realizing that he will be charged with the murder of Borden, Mike decides to independently investigate this crime. He asks Doris to dictate on the records a list of all the cases that Borden has conducted over the past two years, and leave the records for him in one of the stores. Meanwhile, Mike goes to the Daisenov meat processing plant, where he finds out from one of the workers that about a year ago, the state meat quality inspector Alex Stone died at the factory as a result of an accident when, due to poor eyesight, he stumbled and fell into a meat grinder. Appearing soon, Connie and shop manager Fenton ( Steve Brody ) firmly escorted Mike from the factory. He goes to the record store to listen to the recordings made by Doris, from which it follows that it was Borden's Stone case. When Mike leaves the store, he sees in the newspapers his photo as a suspect in Borden's murder. By taxi, Mike arrives at the Dysenov mansion to find out the reason for Jin’s night trip. She explains that she often goes to the plant at this time of day to personally verify the quality of the supplied meat, which guarantees high quality products of her enterprise. Mike goes to the San Pedro area to Adam Stone, the brother of the deceased inspector, who reports that Alex was keen on assembling miniature models of sea ships, and Mike realizes that the inspector could hardly have poor eyesight. Doris takes him to the ophthalmologist who examined Stone's vision. Under the guise of a patient, Mike undergoes an examination by an ophthalmologist, and when he asks a question about Stone, an unknown person attacks him. However, the detective manages to cope with both the attacker and the doctor, after which, with the help of Doris, he leaves the policeman who went into the ophthalmologist's office to check his eyesight. Mike enters the optics store, where Stone was prescribed a prescription, finding out that he had almost normal vision. He then calls Captain Wayne and invites him to the Dysen mansion to present his version of the killings.

In the meantime, Doris, contrary to Mike’s instructions, is heading alone to the meat processing plant to question the guard about who was on duty on the day of Stone’s death. Having made her way to the workshop, she sees how Freddy and Fenton inject water into meat carcasses in order to increase their mass, and from their conversation Doris understands that they did this more than once and made good money on this operation. Meanwhile, Mike arrives at the Dysen mansion, presenting Gene with evidence that Stone could not die due to poor vision. An elderly owner of the plant admits that Freddy recently told her that he suspects Fenton of injecting liquid into the meat in order to increase its mass. In this case, it turns out that Fenton is a former prisoner and Connie's brother, at the request of which Gene and hired him. After that, Mike realizes that it was Freddy and Fenton who killed the inspector, who uncovered a scam with meat, and then Borden, who began to blackmail them, demanding more and more money to stop the investigation. At the same time, in the murder, Freddy decided to set up Mike, who had a conflict with Borden. When Captain Wayne and his subordinates appear in the mansion, Mike, having received an alarming call from Doris, immediately goes to the meat processing plant, hijacking the arrived police car for this. Meanwhile, Doris sees how Freddy kills Fenton, announcing to him that in this way he will be introduced as the sole organizer and performer of meat fraud. Allegedly, Fenton killed the inspector, and then Borden, and now that Freddie revealed his criminal scam, he tried to kill him too, but Freddie got ahead of him and shot him out of self-defense. Doris accidentally finds himself, and Freddy begins to pursue her in the shop, driving into a corner. At that moment, Mike breaks the glass on the first floor and bursts into the building. After a hard fight, he finishes off Freddy, and at that moment the police appear at the meat-packing plant.

Some time later, Mike is reinstated at work, and Captain Wayne escorts him on a honeymoon with Doris.

This was the third picture of Richard Fleischer as a director and his first film noir , after which he directed such films of the genre as “ Trapped ” (1949), “ Follow me quietly ” (1949), “ Easy target ” ( 1949), The Robbery of the Collector's Car (1950) and The Narrow Edge (1952) ^[1] . According to movie historian Hal Erickson, “after these films, it became apparent that Fleischer had outgrown the level of Category B paintings and was ready for more prestigious work” ^[2] .

In addition to this picture, Lawrence Tierney was known for his leading roles in the film noir “ Dillinger ” (1945), “ Born to Kill ” (1947), “ The Devil Hitchhikes ” (1947) and “ Blackmail ” (1950), and at the end of his career he played in such popular paintings as “The Naked Gun ” (1988) and “ Reservoir Dogs ” (1992) ^[3] . Priscilla Lane played in the two early films noir “ Dust Will Be My Destiny ” (1939) and “The Blues in the Night ” (1941), as well as in such successful films as the crime drama “ Roaring Twenties, or the Fate of a Soldier in America ” (1939) , the military thriller " Saboteur " (1942) and the comedy " Arsenic and old lace " (1944) ^[4] .

As the film historian Dennis Schwartz wrote, “the co-author of the story underlying this film was 23-year-old Robert Altman , and the director was Richard Fleisher, each of whom subsequently had an impressive directorial career” ^[5] . According to another movie historian Hans Wallstein, “you don’t necessarily guess that future directors of Boston Strangler and Green Soilent (Fleischer), Nashville and Short Stories (Altman) honed fangs on this kind of material” ^{[6 ]} .

Overall rating of the film

Criticism generally restrained this picture, in which, according to film expert Spencer Selby, “the former detective becomes a bodyguard, extracting evidence of his innocence after he is framed for murder” ^[7] . Hal Erickson called the film “the second-tier noir thriller” ^[2] , and Michael Keeney called it the “fastest movie it could have been in 62 minutes” of screen time ^[8] . Film critic Dennis Schwartz praised the film as "a tough but routine Category B crime action movie that looks like an episode from the Mike Hammer television series." He also noted that “this is in general an unimportant, standard thriller,” in which “it was not difficult to figure out the perpetrators,” while he positively noted the scene of the “good old fight at the factory” ^[5] . Hans Wallstein rated the film as a whole “mediocre criminal story,” in which “a couple of future representatives of auteur cinema - Richard Fleischer as a director and a very young Robert Altman as a co-author of the script” - “experimented with some interesting perspectives and exchanges of cool replicas " ^[6] .

Actor rating

Wallstein noted that the studio “ RKO invited a couple of tough guys who knew how to give a person a nose, which gave the picture a go” ^[6] . First of all, critics noted the work of Lawrence Tierney . In particular, Hal Erickson drew attention to "Tierney with a granite jaw as a temperamental Mike Carter" ^[2] , and Mike Keeney wrote that "Tierney is good, playing the role of a good guy for the sake of change." He managed to create the image of a “hot-tempered and powerful cop”, but Lane, according to the critic, is “too coy” ^[8] .

• Spencer Selby. Dark City: The Film Noir . - Jeffeson, NC: McFarland & Co Inc, 1997 .-- ISBN 978-0-7864-0478-0 .
• Michael F. Keaney. Film Noir Guide: 745 Films of the Classic Era, 1940–1959 . - Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2003. - ISBN 978-0-7864-1547-2 .

• Bodyguard at IMDb  
• Bodyguard at Allmovie  
• Bodyguard at the American Film Institute website
• Bodyguard at Turner Classic Movies