Crime Wave / Decoy (Film Noir Double Feature) [DVD]

I first heard about "Decoy" in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Silver's "Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style," and later in "Death on the Cheap:The Lost B Movies of Film Noir!" by Arthur Lyons. The film was considered "lost" for many years since it was a "Poverty Row" movie and had not been seen for many years. I read that it contained the sexiest and most deadly "femme fatale" of film noir, the lovely Margo Shelby played by British actress Jean Gillie, who died young of pneumonia. The plot is intriguing if somewhat absurd. Margo, a poor girl who became the moll of a gangster, hopes to find the $400,000 he robbed from an armored car. Sentenced to death for shooting the driver, Frankie Olins (Robert Armstrong) won't tell anyone where he hid the loot. He wants his second-in-command Edward Norris to hire him a better lawyer for his appeal, unaware that he and Margo are planning to double-cross him. They convince a doctor to use methelene blue to revive Frankie Olins after his execution in the gas chamber so they can get him to tell them where the money is hidden. The doctor also falls for Margo's considerable charms and the plan works! After Frankie draws a map, Norris shoots him. He and Margo now each have half of a map to the buried loot. Together with Dr. Rudley, the devious duo head out to the woods above San Francisco to seek out the buried treasure. Along the way, Margo fakes a flat tire and after Norris fixes it, she ruthless runs him over, then calmly puts away the jack. Rudley wants to kill her, but when she hands him Norris' revolver, he cannot bring himself to shoot her. He digs up the treasure and then lets Margo shoot him. Tough Cop Joseph "Jojo" Portugal, played by Sheldon Leonard is also under Margo's spell. He arrives at her apartment just after she's been shot by the dying Rudley and hears her confession. She mocks and humiliates him by laughing in his face before dying. He opens the "treasure" to find that Olins only left a one dollar bill to his betrayers and a note saying he left the rest of the money to the worms. One of the best film noirs I've seen, Jean Gillie's Margo is wonderfully evil and seductive. I loved a small bit of dialogue between her and Jojo. He says: "Don't let that pretty face go to your head." She responds by smiling at him and saying coldly: "Or yours?" Great mood lighting, convincing sets and props and an eerie music score all add to the tension, but Jean Gillie's acting steals the show. A fantastic noir. "Crime Wave" was also a "Poverty Row" production, but it is somewhat more predictable. A bank robbery planned from the inside goes wrong because the police are one step ahead of the robbers all the way. The acting was drab but the tension was good. A B- in my book compared to a very high A+++ for "Decoy." Well worth the price for two above average Film Noir movies.

I really liked the movies "crimewave" and "Decoy". In the movie crimewave with sterling hayden and gene nelson.sterling hayden plays a cop who uses ex-con nelson to capture nelsons old buddies that killed a policeman at a gas station and are running away from the law. a young charles bronson plays one of the fugitives. And always good badguy ted de corsia (from "the "enforcer with humphrey bogart and " The lady from shanghai" with orson welles and rita hayworth)plays the other fugitive. I thought the movie "crimewave" was good but pretty predictable. The other movie "Decoy" I liked too. It was about a very pretty but evil lady (jean gillie)who has a boyfriend robert armstrong(from king kong;1933 version)who kills a brinks truck driver and is set to die in the gas chamber. armstrong buries the treasure but before he is executed jean gillie thinks of a plan with gangster boyfriend and lover doctor to bring him back alive and collect the buried treasure. Decoy did have far fetched happenings in it but I really Enjoyed it. both movies I would reccommend. Tragically jean gillie in real life died of pneumonia a few years later but she made a great femme fatale. I loved her.too bad her short life span gyped us out of more possible great roles like this. the movies "crimewave" and "decoy" are worth the money ,especially if you like film noir detective and gangster movies!

"Crime Wave" is a good, solid, moody cop and crime flick from the 1950s. It is loaded with dark, shadowy night shots from the Los Angeles of the era. Has any city been better for films of this nature? The story has it that director de Toth sought out LAPD for advice on shooting locales. And there is even a shot of a red street car!The main characters are Gene Nelson as an ex-con trying to go straight. His no-nonsense wife, Phyllis Kirk is right by his side. His old gang, led by a smarmy Ted de Corsia, tries to drag Nelson back into a life of crime. They have the "perfect set up"- a bank job in Glendale. The leading LAPD detective is a perfectly cast Sterling Hayden, a cop with a tough exterior indeed but with a slightly softer heart."Crime Wave" incorporates fine police backgrounds, gloomy interrogation rooms, cynical detectives leaning on informers, Hayden leaning on dicks he out ranks, leather-jacketed cops on night patrol and the constant staccato of radio chatter. Those calm female LAPD dispatchers deserve high praise. The supporting cast shines-including James Bell as Nelson's parole officer and Jay Novello as a "veterinarian"- not to mention the dogs in his kennel. There is also a great cameo by Nelson's work supervisor- the veteran Hank Worden (Mose Harper in John Ford's classic "The Searchers").This review is avoiding any mention at the resolution. It comes soon enough. deToth has packed so much into a tight 73 minute run time. No one will be bored. Somehow 43 characters pass before us in that brief span. "Crime Wave" is a wonderful return to gloomy, no nonsense 50s crime/noir with an old pro at the helm and a veteran cast going through its paces."Decoy" is eerie-even by film noir standards! The film is based on hidden loot and a grifting woman's efforts to get her hands on it. The role of the femme fatale is played to perfection by Jean Gillie. Her Google site informs us that she got her movie start by playing comedy roles! The action unwinds by flashback after JG is shot by someone with a small grudge against her.A good review won't even try to divulge the resolution but this viewer thought the ending was telegraphed early in the movie. That is "Decoy's" major weakness. Its strong point is the fast developing plot in a 76 minute run time. No one will be bored here either. Another strong point is that "Decoy" is included on the same disc with the far superior "Crime Wave. Stay along for the ride and enjoy both.An interesting thought: How would Detective Sterling Hayden have handled Gillie?

This review is about "Decoy"Jean Gillie (Margot) devises a plan to spring her lover Robert Armstrong (Frank) from prison. She gets help for her plan from Edward Norris (Jim) and an unwilling Herbert Rudley (Dr Craig)). The idea is to get Armstrong to locate some hidden money for them to share. However, there are ulterior motives at play......Methylene blue is at the centre of this story. It is used in the plot to revive Robert Armstrong after he has been killed as it is an antidote to cyanide poisoning. However, be careful if you want to experiment on someone you don't like very much as it serves as an antidote to the poison while you are living and not after you have died. It takes nothing away from the good idea for the plot though. However, poor Robert Armstrong doesn't live for very long after he is revived and so we don't get to see the side-effects of this drug, which turns your urine green and makes the whites of your eyes blue - we would then have been in a completely different film genre, possibly a comedy horror.The cast do well despite 3 of them not being very good at acting - Jean Gillies, Herbert Rudley and, in a minor part, Marjorie Woodworth. Jean Gillies, while she is the driving force behind the film is either very good as demonstrated by her ruthlessness while at the steering wheel on the way to dig up the money and her determined self-confidence as she knows what she needs to do, or dreadfully unconvincing as in her scene when she talks about coming from the dirty street to which she never wants to return (her posh Kensington accent fools nobody - she's NEVER been a girl from the streets) and her insane encouragement to Herbert Rudley to dig for the money. Her OTT hysterics are not convincing in both these examples. It is funny to watch, though. Herbert Rudley plays a broken man for most of the film and comes across as a wet fish which is frustrating, although he comes good right at the beginning when he finally becomes a man and pulls a trigger. Still, he is annoying to watch for most of the time as this story unfolds in flashback. As for Marjorie Woodworth who plays Rudley's nurse and girlfriend.....ha ha ha....she's just terrible.The film is well-paced and atmospheric, eg, the scene when Herbert Rudley is reviving Robert Armstrong and the scene where Jean Gillies engineers a flat tyre situation as she, Rudley and Norris make it to the location where the loot is buried. It is a shame that the film has been cut as it would have been far more powerful and disturbing to see Gillies do what she does to Norris twice as originally filmed as opposed to the one time she does it (which is shocking enough). And her laughter as she fools Sheldon Leonard who plays Sergeant Joe Portugal provides a memorable ending. She was one mean bitch.The acting is sometimes wooden, the dialogue is sometimes woeful (a very annoying comedy duo at the morgue provide an example of this along with the claptrap speech about coming from that dirty street that Gillies delivers), a posh English accent seems a wrong choice for the lead role and the music is sometimes way too over dramatic but somehow, it doesn't seem to matter. What would normally be a recipe for disaster strangely has a very different effect and produces an entertaining film.It is sad to discover that in real life, Jean Gillies died of pneumonia 3 years later in 1949 in London.