Watched: 01/15/2026
Format: DVD
Viewing: First
Director: Jack Bernhard
What an odd film.
Devoid of narrative economy, the movie starts with a guy staggering his way to the highway, and then hitches a ride from the countryside to San Francisco. He then takes the lift up to someone's apartment, and shoots them. It's a dame!
A cop - an instantly recognizable Sheldon Leonard - who played Nick the bartender in It's a Wonderful Life, here playing a cop named Joe Portugal* - shows up too late. And the woman shot tells her tale. But only after she gets to hold the unopened MacGuffin box.
The woman is our femme fatale, Margot, played by Jean Gillie in her penultimate performance before succumbing to pneumonia in 1949 in her early 30's. Margot's been working a grift on a mobster who knocked over an armored truck, but for his trouble is on death row - and no one knows where the money is. She's cheating on him with another gangster, Jim, with whom she concocts a plan to get the dough.
They'll let the guy get executed by cyanide gas, but then steal the body and revive him with Methylene Blue,** a very real medication that can, in real life, combat cyanide, but, alas, in real life, does not restore life function to a corpse. But in this movie, it sure does.
To do this, Margot seduces the doctor who does the autopsies on executed crooks. I guess she's really good at *something*, because in a short time she convinces the doctor (Herbert Rudley) to join in on the operation. If they can get that money, then she'll be happy!, she says.
Anyway, things take... a while... to get to the point.
The one thing this movie has... well, it also has a knock-out nurse (Marjorie Woodworth) working for the doctor who seems like she's in a completely parallel story that isn't being filmed... So the OTHER thing this movie has is British-born lead actress Jean Gillie, who is really pretty terrific, gorgeous, and as solid a femme fatale as you're likely to find. The character as written is why this movie exists - not that all the characters aren't a *little* bit bonkers, but Margot is a stunning psycho, using her charms to manipulate three men at a time, sometimes two in the same room.
The weirdest thing is that the movie is called "Decoy", and at the beginning of the movie they start at the end, seeing Margot shot, the doctor clearly dying and you see an unopened money box. And , because the movie is called "Decoy", one might spend 80+ minutes sitting there going "well, clearly that money box is a decoy".
Like, I have zero idea why this starts at the end and tells itself in flashback. It does nothing to help the story as we can see what will become of everyone before the story starts. And it's not a good enough movie to make you say "gee, what was that? Maybe there's twists and turns!" It just plods toward that ending we saw at the beginning.
Anyway, it's certainly not awful, and from a "this is bonkers" perspective - bringing people back from the dead, Margot's scheming, etc.. - it's interesting. But the pacing can feel deadly in the first thirty minutes or so, and it telegraphs the ending in the title. So.
*truly, it can be said he is Portugal, The Man
**Methylene Blue is the name of my new shoegaze band
No comments:
Post a Comment