Director Edgar G. Ulmer is beloved by many fans of classic cinema for his ability to inject great style into the lowest-budgeted of films, never more so than in his film noir masterpiece Detour (1945). But the Austrian-born filmmaker made other noirs, too, notably Ruthless (1948), Strange Illusion (1945) and his final noir effort, Murder Is My Beat (1955). In this low-budget, B effort for Allied Artists, police detective Ray Patrick (Paul Langton) investigates the murder of a man whose body was found sticking into a fireplace, his face and hands burned beyond recognition. Patrick tracks the man's girlfriend, nightclub singer Eden Lane (Barbara Payton), to the snowbound cabin where she has been hiding, and arrests her for the crime. She asserts, however, that she fought with the man but did not kill him. Later, after Lane has been found guilty, Patrick is assigned to accompany her on a train to prison; during the ride, she claims to glimpse on a passing train platform the man she's accused of having murdered. Patrick believes her, and, putting his career in jeopardy, jumps off the train with her in order to dig deeper into the situation. But is Eden Lane telling the truth, or is she simply another manipulative film-noir dame toying with the emotions of her latest chump?
Murder Is My Beat is no Detour, but it does create interest, mainly through its voiceover-driven flashback via the perspective of Ray Patrick, as he relates his story to a fellow cop who has been hunting him down. Patrick's descent from a by-the-book cop to a man who takes the law into his own hands bears similarities to character motifs in other Ulmer pictures, such as Detour, though in this case the script doesn't allow for the same level of nightmarish intensity. The story itself contains more than a few plot holes and convenient coincidences, strung together by an often-elliptical editing style. Whether this is all by design or just a side effect of the low budget, it does manage to create an eerily atmospheric tone, one with just enough doom and fatalism to bring the movie into noir territory. (Ulmer biographer Noah Isenberg has written that the cryptic editing makes the film feel "almost unfinished.")
This was Ulmer's first film back in Hollywood after several pictures in Europe. Isenberg later wrote that "Ulmer especially embraced the opportunity to work again in America, which by then, despite some of the recent political turmoil, he regarded as his true home." The screenplay, by Englishman Aubrey Wisberg (who also produced), was originally entitled The Long Chance, and was changed to Murder Is My Business before a final change to Murder Is My Beat. Wisberg was a prolific maker of B films in Hollywood in the 1940s and '50s, and had co-written a previous Ulmer picture, The Man from Planet X (1951).
Barbara Payton's biographer, John O'Dowd, has written that the character of Eden Lane is one whom the actress "may have seen as a kindred spirit to her own jaded soul." Payton's life, career, and looks had declined rapidly since she'd starred opposite James Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950). Heavy drinking, drug use, partying, and salacious scandals were to blame. Most famously, she was engaged to actor Franchot Tone in 1951 while simultaneously carrying on an affair with actor Tom Neal (the star of Detour), and even occasionally announcing that Neal was actually her fiancé. Finally, in September 1951, the two men got into a fistfight over her; inevitably, Neal won, knocking Tone senseless and sending him to the hospital. Payton eventually married Tone, but less than two months later she left him to take up again with Neal. She later said of Neal: "He had a chemical buzz for me that sent red peppers down my thighs." Through all this, she made a few more films, including one with Neal -- The Great Jesse James Raid (1953).
But after that, nothing came along until Murder Is My Beat. Payton was grateful for the opportunity. In her ghost-written memoir, I Am Not Ashamed, she declared, "It was wonderful to be working again, even though it was a small-budget picture. I felt it was the beginning of a new and brighter career. Then the roof fell in." During production, she claimed, the money fell through, and $75,000 was needed to finish the film. According to the memoir, she found a friend at a brokerage company (identified only as "Mr. Shellout") who agreed to raise the money if she would spend a week with him at Lake Arrowhead. She agreed to the deal.
Payton clearly looks tired on screen, as if her spirit has been broken, and she looks far older than her 27 years. But the effect actually helps her performance and is appropriate to the character. The audience is purposefully left in the dark until the end as to her guilt or innocence, and her sad, understated, hesitant style comes off as suitably ambiguous. Perhaps it was a conscious acting choice, but her actual appearance and demeanor certainly seem to have played a part.
In any case, Ulmer was certainly talented enough to have been aware of this and used Payton's condition. Film historians Robert Porfirio and Alain Silver later wrote, "Ulmer extracts the maximum narrative tension from the viewer's uncertainty over Eden Lane's guilt, an uncertainty reinforced by Payton's portrayal of Eden in a 'neutral' manner... Payton's performance permits the suggestion of instability beneath the surface calm of Eden's visage."
Murder Is My Beat opened in many cities at the bottom of a double bill with the Randolph Scott western Rage at Dawn (1955). Those critics who reviewed the film (many outlets, including The New York Times, did not) were quite mixed in their assessment. Trade paper Variety called it "a shoddily made melodrama, scarcely meriting fill-in playdates or the Allied Artists releasing label... The writing has no logic and motivations remain cloaked in obscurity." But the Los Angeles Times found it a "suspenseful, ingenious whodunit," and The Hollywood Reporter deemed it a "good production...that will bolster any twin bill," specifically praising Payton's performance and Ulmer's pacing.
But the film did nothing for Payton's career. Few took notice of it, and she never made another. Instead, her life continued to spiral down into further scandals and especially drinking problems until she died of liver failure in 1967, at the age of 39.
By Jeremy Arnold
SOURCES:
Noah Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins
John O'Dowd, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story
Barbara Payton, I Am Not Ashamed
Robert Polito, essay in O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors
Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style
