Bury Me Dead (1947)

Barbara Carlin (June Lockhart) is a bit like Tom Sawyer (or various superheroes), seeing as we first meet her when she’s attending her own funeral, incognito under a nice black veil that’ll fool everybody she knows and loves (or hates), of course. Apparently, a stable with her inside burned down under somewhat suspicious circumstances. It’s just that she wasn’t actually at the family mansion at the time, so the burned-up female body must belong to somebody else.

Instead of visiting the police once she learns what has occurred, Barbara decides to take the matter of cracking this case on her own, trying to surprise a confession out of her friends and relatives by just turning up at everyone’s place after her funeral. Given what we later get to see of the way the local police operates, her plan’s probably the safer bet to come to the truth of the matter. So we get to meet the family when Barbara first makes herself known to the always dependable family lawyer Mike (Hugh Beaumont), then her sort of (it’s complicated, so we get our first flashback) sister Rusty (Cathy O’Donnell), her shiftless and shifty estranged husband Rod (Mark Daniels), her basically brain-dead (but hot if you’re into idiots, apparently) boxer lover George (Greg McClure) who once was Rusty’s boxer lover before Barbara got between them – for Rusty’s own good, of course. Flashbacks and a lot of wisecracking ensue, until the murderer tries to do Barbara in again.

Going by the title and the classically noir beginning (as shot by the great John Alton, no less), you’d expect the film (a PRC productions, purveyors of the finest noir on Poverty Row) to continue as some Woolrich-style weird mystery, but once Barbara unmasks herself to Mike and starts to go through all the suspects she knows (basically everyone she ever met), the whole thing plays out more as a comedy, with our heroine wisecracking and tough-talking through the mystery, and the generally sarcastic tone of the dialogue making mincemeat of all of the film’s melodramatic pretensions. And this isn’t a case of the film being unintentionally funny – the dialogue as well as the characterisation border on open satire of the non-genre of the noir, populated as the film is by people like “neurotic” sister Rusty who does all of the Freudian psychobabble you’ll find in noir but hilarious, or George who isn’t just a tool but an actual comedic idiot. All of this does of course weaken the dramatic impact of the film’s various melodramatic conniptions; but then, I don’t believe for one moment the film as directed by the sometimes great Bernard Vorhaus wants its audience to find them anything but sardonically funny.

It’s a pretty great comedy too, with Lockhart (who has all the best lines) cracking wise and taking names for most of the film, making Rod’s lack of open infatuation with her the most improbable part of the film. Of course, the film has a final scene where Barbara is supposed to be willing to put the household into Rod’s hands and he babbles something about from now on “taking good care of her”, but everything we’ve seen before does make this sound like the film going “yes, yes, yes, propriety must be restored, the censors and such” at the audience instead of meaning anything of what it just said. The viewers have, after all, met Barbara and her husband.

Before this supposed happy end, the film’s final act does step away from the comedy a bit (but not so far as not to have fun having its way way the police and especially their star criminologist), and does get up to some actually thrilling noir business, with some tightly directed suspense (that’s still based on the police being so comically stupid, even Rod turns out to be a better detective than any of them are) whose impact is greatly enhanced by Alton’s standard tricks working well with Vorhaus’s sense of timing.


It’s a great little film, really, even though it’s not the one its title suggests.