IMDb meta-data 44 minutes, rated 5.3 by 74 cinematizens.
Genre: mystery, comedy
Verdict: Padded even at 44 minutes.
It opens with the characters introducing themselves to the fourth wall. Never seen that before or since.
PI Tom leaves his Squeeze in charge of the office while he does mens business. A client appears and Squeeze accepts an assignment to take a picture of a woman in a divorce case. What can go wrong?
Well, to avoid being seen with a camera it is hidden in the titular hat box. Got it?
Well get this, Squeeze does not look into the hat box but takes the client’s word for it. This client is wearing a stick-on goatee, a greasy wig, and looks like he missed the clown car. Dutifully Squeeze stakes out the target and when she appears, Squeeze deploys the hat box and discovers that within is a gun not a camera, and she really did shoot the woman. Bang! Dumb!
Tom returns to sort this out. No one noticed until the last five minutes that the gun in the hat box was Tom’s very own gat which Goatee had snitched from Squeeze’s desk while she was licking the tip of a pencil to write a receipt. Nor did anyone realise until the last five minutes that the murder bullet did — Spoiler alert! — not come from the gun in the hat box.
It gets sillier as it goes on. Yet it went on … to a sequel, ‘The Case of the Baby Sitter’ (1947).
There is an in-joke. The ubiquitous Allen Jenkins is Tom’s gofer and he is nicknamed ‘Harvard’ because he did not go to Yale. Get it? No, me neither. See below for the explanation.
Tom Neal stars as Tom. He was a privileged scion with a Harvard law degree who was better known in Hollywood for fistfights, adultery, allegations of rape, drunk-driving, and finally a murder trial. It seems someone shot his wife in the head. He served six years for manslaughter. Justice is certainly blind. However he was finally blacklisted and he disappeared from the silver screen.
When the credits start with Robert Lippert’s name, we all know it is a Filene’s Basement production.