Quiet Please, Murder (1942)
IMDb meta-data 1 hour and 10 minutes runtime, rated 6.5/10.0 by 238 cinematizens.
Genre: noir, krimi
Verdict: The tome is mightier than the gat.
The kindly library attendant says to the oily George Sanders that the priceless Shakespeare folio on display would only leave the building over his dead body. Oily George obliges by shooting him in the back, stealing the folio, whistling while he works. Thereafter he engages in masochistic banter with his henchwoman. For 1942 it is surprisingly explicit about pain being pleasure. To lighten the tone he refers to her as Lady Dracula.
George is a merciless but studious murderer who reads what he steals. He cites Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Bugs Bunny with equal facility. This man knows the literature.
George then makes copies of the stolen folio which Lady Dracula sells far and wide for him. She is the cut-out, and knows it. One buyer is Sidney Blackmer who is an intermediary for …. Hermann Göring in Berlin. In the middle of the war, Fat Hermann is buying books from the USA! What a scumbag! Sidney quickly realises the purchase is an excellent fake and wants the money back and a cut of future frauds.
Sidney is chilling as on behalf of Fat Hermann he whispers threats to Lady Dracula who is caught in the middle and does not like it. Sidney has her pegged, and George is only too willing to cut her loose, after all that is what a cut-out is for, though he personally is undaunted since he is has home court advantage and is just as ruthless as Fatty’s minions. See scene one above for proof. Regrettably Sidney and George do not have a scene together to see who could could do evil in a lower, icier key. Sid went on to lead a coven in Rosemary’s Baby (1986). A promotion of sorts, I guess.
The affable Richard Denning stumbles into the triangle. All three players – Nazis, George and his gang, and Denning – meet in the public library to square the deal, each pursuing a separate agenda on which murder figures right after Apologies and Minutes from the Previous shoot-out. While a member of George’s gang, Lady Dracula has her own agenda trying to arrange some mutually assured destruction among the other players, leaving her unscathed. It is more than a triple cross and that left the fraternity brothers baffled. (Situation Normal for them.) All of these villains and Denning wander around the vast public library from balcony (convenient for pushing someone off), the basement (handy for muffling gunfire), stacks (great for spying), and the front desk (for hiding behind) near closing time, when…..
A wartime blackout drill plunges the whole crew into darkness in the library as the bodies fall this way and that. Stabbing, shooting, garrotting, torturing all catalogued by the Dewey decimal system. George’s fiendish plan includes a fake police investigation. However, the fake investigation is so competent that Denning becomes suspicious for in B movies the cops are from the Keystone precinct so he soon figures out that it is ploy by the Oily One.
In the ensuing mêlée the Nazis and George’s gang whittle each other down. Again there is a mild surprise at the end when Denning forsakes Lady Dracula to her unambiguous fate which is not left to the imagination.
The ubiquitous Byron Foulger is the twitchy Mr Walpole, librarian cum air raid warden, a marvellous veteran character actor with nearly 500 items on the IMDb who is instantly recognised by cinematizens, though he was often uncredited in the films. It has to be said that Lady Dracula is no Spider Woman. Gale Sondergaard would have dominated the film from this role with timing, poise, her own brand of menace, and enunciation. Our loss.
Dated 1942 it was released in 3 February 1944 at the height of the Pacific Island campaign. Denning gives a nice speech about the home front. He should know since he was a US Navy submarine officer in the Pacific between 1942 and 1945 while the One-A John Wayne stayed home without any bone spurs.