Scene of the Crime and Eddie Mueller's Noir Alley

Scene of the Crime is a routine police procedural directed by MGM's Roy Rowland, a competent if largely unimaginative film maker.  According to Eddie Mueller who introduced the film on TCM's Noir Alley, a program dedicated to film noir, the movie represented MGM's first foray into this genre.  The film did well at its release in 1949 and, the next year, MGM released a half-dozen pictures that we would now characterize as noir -- including one of the signature works of that kind, Anthony Mann's Border Incident.  The Scene of the Crime is ingeniously plotted:  three cops set out to solve a murder, the death by gunfire of another off-duty cop killed while carrying one-thousand dollars (and, therefore, suspected of bribery.) The three cops form a team led by Van Johnson, the actor playing the film's hero.  One of the cops is a novice and the third an experienced "flatfoot."  This triumvirate is designed for maximum information-transfer to the audience:  the seasoned cops have to explain to the novice what is going on and the wise old police officer (played by the excellent John McIntyre --  a fixture on TV westerns when I was a boy) makes wise cracks and provides experienced commentary.  The plot is violent but the film is exceedingly verbose -- everyone talks in ultra-hardboiled argot:  "you could be your blood when you're sirened away" someone says, "sirened away" meaning hauled from the crime scene in an ambulance.  Gunmen are called "lobos" and there's an impenetrable line about "knowing that you know what I know you know."  A glamor girl does a reverse strip tease and Van Johnson's wife clings to him in a suitably wifely manner.  The cops threaten suspects with being scalded by hot coffee and, generally, a good time is had by all.  The only reason to recommend the film is a spectacular, almost Shakespearean, turn by Norman Lloyd playing a sinister snitch nicknamed "Sleepy."  Lloyd is astonishing, menacing in a understated way, and punctuating  his threats with a mirthless "yuck-yuck".  Unfortunately, there's not enough of him in the film (he gets murdered) and the rest of the picture, despite its lurid plot, is a snooze.

Eddie Mueller introduces the films on Noir Alley.  Mueller has written a book on noir pictures and has provided excellent commentary tracts on DVD editions of some of the movies that he shows.  Mueller is saturnine with wit like a dry martini and he's compulsively watchable -- he looks like one of the shadowy figures in the films that he showcases, dressed in a pinstripe suit with a satin bouquet in his breast pocket.  Most film noir are fairly short, usually about ninety minutes and, so, Mueller is given substantial latitude to provide both preface and postlude to the films presented on the show.  Often, his commentary is significantly better than the rather routine movies that he screens and he never fails to provide interesting and useful facts about the films.  I first heard Mueller on a DVD commentary track exchanging wise-cracks with the crime writer James Ellroy with respect to a little neo-realist crime picture, Andre de Toth's Crime Wave -- he and Ellroy got into a squabble about exactly what section of the California criminal code was being violated in a robbery in the opening scene in the film and, from that point forth, the commentary was a cinephile's dream.  Noir Alley airs on Saturday nights at 11:00 pm (CST) and, then, again on Sunday morning at 9:00 am on TCM -- it's well worth watching.