In short: The Crimson Key (1947)

Mrs Swann (Barnadene Hayes) hires half-boiled private eye Larry Morgan (Kent Taylor) to shadow her husband, who has apparently been acting strangely. Alas, while Larry is sleeping, somebody murders Dr Swann; his wife, rather optimistic concerning Larry’s capabilities after that one if you ask me, decides to keep the detective on the payroll to find out who did in the hubby and why.

So, Larry starts on his investigation and talks to peculiar people, tells his dreams (that is, the plot of the movie) to a Freudian analyst of dubious ethics, chats with an alcoholic society lady (Doris Dowling) more or less locked up by her husband (Dennis Hoey), gets roughed up, and stumbles upon more than just one additional corpse.

This little Fox programmer directed by Eugene Forde is a bit of a favourite of Quentin Tarantino (who also adds the helpful hint that it’s on YouTube), and it’s really not too difficult to see why. Sure, Forde’s direction is more of the straightforward, shoot fast, don’t shoot dumb, try to keep things in focus manner than anything that’ll ever get big stylistic praises, but it’s also very effective in not standing in the way of a very fun script by Irving Elman and a cast that seems to find a lot of enjoyment embodying their slightly stranger versions of standard hardboiled detective character types.

Because talk is cheapest when you’re on a budget – and boy, this surely is on a budget – there’s quite a lot of dialogue and very little action, but the filmmakers clearly put a lot of effort into making every scene with the various characters Larry encounters in his investigation memorable. So most of the dialogue here is fun on some level or another, and every character has some foibles or mannerisms for their actor to milk. Which everyone does absolutely joyfully, leading to a film that mostly uses the set-up of a shoe-leather destroying investigation to realize a series of wonderful little encounters full of witty repartee and more than a little weirdness. Plus, how many other movies are there containing a scene in which a detective presents the plot of the movie he’s in as a dream to a psychoanalyst? It’s delightful.