This essay is adapted from the book Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, due out from University of California Press early next year.

“Somehow even mediocrity can become majestic when it is coupled with death.” —Andrew Sarris

After directing a few generally unnoticed pictures abroad, including the Italian production I Pirati di Capri (Pirates of Capri, 1949) and the Spanish-English co-production Muchachas de Bagdad (Babes in Bagdad, 1952), and continuing to work as a freelancer, Edgar G. Ulmer returned to the terrain of American hard-boiled noir one last time. His agent and friend Ilse Lahn, a fellow transplant from Vienna who worked for the Paul Kohner Agency—which represented among other émigré filmmakers Billy Wilder, Erich von Stroheim, and Fred Zinnemann—came to him with a project called The Long Chance (what would ultimately acquire the release title Murder Is My Beat). In a letter of 14 February 1954, soon after the script had been vetted and approved by Joseph I. Breen’s office, Ulmer informed his daughter Arianné that he was busy scouting locations for the production, which was scheduled to begin shooting that April. At the time, he and his wife Shirley were living in a rental apartment on Fountain Avenue in Hollywood, not terribly far from Universal and other lower-rung studios, where he’d once worked. It had been a welcome return for both of them, having bounced around Europe for several years battling recurrent loneliness and feelings of marginalization. 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.

Scripted by the British writer Aubrey Wisberg, who had co-written Ulmer’s Man From Planet X with Jack Pollexfen a few years before, and co-produced by Lahn and Wisberg for Masthead Productions as an Allied Artists release, Murder Is My Beat—finally issued on DVD this past January from the Warner Archive Collection—is another case in Ulmer’s career of work done on the fly. Owing in part to the vertiginous nature of the story confected by Wisberg and Martin Field and to the elliptical editing undertaken by Ulmer and Fred Feitshans, Jr. (who, like Wisberg, had worked with him on Man from Planet X), the film often feels unmoored, almost unfinished, given over more to atmosphere and emotion than to narrative coherence. “Ulmer introduces us to situations and characters without warning,” observes John Belton. “The frequency and consistency of his narrative lapses give them thematic significance: whether it is intentional or not, Ulmer’s narrative discontinuity becomes symbolic of the forces of disorder and destruction that dominate his artistic universe.” Like Detour, the film exudes an air of rawness, its players and settings notably gruff and downtrodden, a relatively accurate reflection of the bargain-basement production.

Murder Is My Beat

As in the case of his other two better-known noirs, Detour and Ruthless, Murder Is My Beat takes shape more or less via flashback narration. The film opens with a sedan careening down a California highway bathed in sunlight, the man at the wheel exhibiting a look of dogged determination—the strains of Al Glasser’s modest score helping to highlight the initial suspense—as he turns into a roadside motel. He exits the car and snakes his way around several motel cabins before sidling up to the one he’s looking for, ducking under the window to make sure he’s not noticed. Inside, viewed furtively through the cabin window shot from outside, Detective Ray Patrick (Paul Langton) lies on his back, eyes glazed over in a state of apparent resignation, staring up at the ceiling. The pose he strikes vaguely recalls one struck by Burt Lancaster’s Ole “Swede” Andersen near the start of Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), moments before his door is kicked in, which is precisely what occurs here. Instead of being gunned down, though, Patrick leaps up and tackles his assailant, who after a few awkward, clumsy blows is recognizable as his boss in the Los Angeles Homicide Division, Captain Bert Rawley (Robert Shayne). As it turns out, Rawley has been chasing down Patrick ever since he and Eden Lane (Barbara Payton) jumped from the train that was to bring Lane to a prison upstate. There she was to serve a sentence for the murder of a man known as Frank Dean, a man with whom she allegedly had been having an adulterous affair and who was found lying headfirst in his own fireplace, face and hands charred beyond recognition.
Despite Rawley’s insistence on taking Patrick back with him to Los Angeles in cuffs, and despite his firm belief that one of his “best men” was played for a sucker, Patrick manages to persuade his boss to listen to his story which, unsurprisingly, is when Ulmer rolls out his flashback told in voiceover narration. Detective Patrick explains things from the very beginning, from the first moment that he showed up at the scene of the crime (i.e., when he was still the “level-headed, on-the-job, no-fancy-frills, straight-shooting cop” that Rawley took him to be when he assigned him to the case) to the burgeoning sense of doubt with respect to Lane’s supposed guilt (i.e., when Patrick begins to feel as if he were “coming apart at the seams”) and his ultimate decision to take “the long chance” of the film’s working title—which is to say, to take the law into his own hands.

Murder Is My Beat

Along the way, we are given a tour of the inscrutable world of Eden Lane: we meet Patsy Flint (Tracy Roberts), Lane’s shifty, tight-lipped roommate at “The Spotlight” nightclub, where Lane sings and where Flint works as a “picture snatcher” (her chief occupation, we later learn, is blackmail); we get a quick look at Flint and Lane’s cluttered apartment and a few clues suggesting Lane’s hurried departure on a Greyhound bus bound for Northern California; we then follow Detective Patrick who, after trudging up a snow-covered mountain, finds his catch holed up in a chalet in the Sierras, on the lam but looking deceptively innocent (“all sweetness,” as he puts it, “but the most dangerous type at that”); and finally, we witness Patrick becoming more and more smitten with the very woman he’s sent to arrest for murder, from their first cigarette to their dramatic leap from the moving train, after Lane claims to have seen Frank Dean on the platform of a station they passed. Viewed in the wider context of film noir, Patrick shares some of the same susceptibilities that undercut the otherwise steely, rugged exterior of Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) in Otto Preminger’s far more polished and generously bankrolled Laura (1944). They both exhibit a near-pathological faith in the innocence of a woman who is taken, at least fleetingly, to be a murderess. Moreover, they both show a willingness to ignore the rule of law in favor of their own vigilante pursuit of love.

At the very moment that Patrick has his story loop back to the original point at which Rawley entered the scene, Ulmer returns things to the present. With some additional coaxing, Patrick convinces his boss to give him another 24 hours and to lend a hand in finding the true murderer. Working as a team, they discover that Frank Dean was merely an alias for a married man named Abbott (Roy Gordon), the owner of a ceramics factory in the small Northern Californian town in which Patrick and Lane fatefully find themselves after jumping from the prison-bound train. Rawley and Patrick hunt down Abbott, squeezing a confession out of him. In the film’s penultimate scene, caught on a train leaving town with his wife, Abbot admits that while having an affair with Lane, he was blackmailed by a private investigator, the man he killed and left for dead in his fireplace (the investigator, we learn, was romantically involved with Patsy Flint, who continues the extortion efforts). By the close, all loose ends are essentially tied up, and Patrick, in the ill-conceived, incommensurately sentimental final scene of the film, is free to marry Eden Lane, now proven innocent, with Rawley as his best man.

In terms of its generic trappings, Murder Is My Beat oscillates between noir, the police procedural and, as one critic has recently put it, a “rather ordinary whodunit.” Given its limited means, it isn’t long on style, has minimal camerawork, and essentially gets by on its canny use of mirrors, stock footage, and rear projection. But the basic mood of the film conveys the same social disillusionment encountered elsewhere in other bleak pictures of the period. The specter of war, though slowly beginning to recede on the horizon by the mid-1950s, is still eminently palpable in Murder Is My Beat. Detective Patrick’s moral compass, which we know from the world of noir is always in danger of being compromised, is guided by his wartime experience. “I’d seen too much killing in the Pacific,” he announces while wading through the deep snowbanks in pursuit of Lane. Much like Al Roberts—and of course countless other noir antiheroes—he is adrift in the world, taking each blow as it’s dealt. And like Roberts, he ultimately accepts his fate, inauspicious as it may be. The final line of his flashback narration evokes a similar sense of ensnarement: “now I knew I was licked.” Similarly, Ulmer takes up the vexed issue of class—those who have it and those who don’t—once more with this film. Indeed, Mr. Abbott’s extramarital affair with the much younger nightclub singer Eden Lane is a form of social slumming for the factory owner, a way for him to indulge anonymously in the vices of big-city life. And as we observe further in the plot’s unfolding, Mrs. Abbott (Selena Royle) comes from an unusually affluent, well-established family—the ceramics factory belongs to her—which makes the final charges of blackmail, those leveled against her and her husband by the conniving, déclassé Patsy Flint, all the more menacing. Mrs. Abbott would rather commit suicide, as she does in the end, than have her family name dragged through the mud. 
If there is one thing that elevates the film, however, it’s Barbara Payton’s performance as Eden Lane. Having reached the pinnacle of her career playing opposite James Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950), only to then suffer from a pileup of scandals onscreen and off, Payton brought a degree of human vulnerability to the lead part, her last. Even if she’s missing the high-octane verve of Ann Savage’s Vera, Payton’s Eden Lane, dressed in her form-fitting sweaters, with her platinum blonde hair and thick, glistening lipstick of a 1950s pinup girl, helps get the film up on its feet. “It may lack the classic dimensions of . . . Detour,” suggest film noir historians Bob Porfirio and Alain Silver, “but benefits from the presence of Barbara Payton as an ambiguous femme fatale. 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.” From the moment we first meet her, sequestered in the mountain chalet looking pouty and forlorn but not entirely culpable, there is a magnetism that draws in the viewer and that propels the film. It doesn’t take long for Ray Patrick, and the audience with him, to fall for Eden, to believe her sighting of Frank Dean—what initially seems sure to be a mere MacGuffin—and to maintain an abiding faith in the distraught nightclub singer. Playing against type, she’d rather turn herself in for a crime she didn’t commit than to have Detective Patrick jeopardize his career for his indiscretions.

Film poster for Murder Is My Beat

Although review attention at the time of the film’s release, in the final days of February 1955, was scant—and what did appear was uneven at best, with Ulmer’s direction called “well-paced” in one trade paper, but considered run of mill elsewhere, i.e., “[direction of a] standard thriller in standard style”—Milton Luban’s evaluation in the Hollywood Reporter declared, “Miss Payton is excellent as the wrongfully convicted girl.” As a side note, Luban found it fully within his rights as critic to offer his view of Payton’s putatively expanding figure: “she is getting a bit too buxom.” Of course, the film—from the script to casting to wardrobe, lighting, cinematography and direction—no doubt played up this aspect, following the logic of exploitation, in the hope of box-office appeal. Early on in Patrick’s flashback, after arriving at the crime scene, Frank Dean’s neighbor Miss Sparrow (Kate MacKenna) recounts that Miss Lane “wore tight clothes [that] in an indecent way showed her shape” and that even her name “reminded you of original sin.” When co-producer Ilse Lahn first supplied Joseph Breen with a copy of the script in January 1954, he flagged any and all suggestive bits (repeating the same canned language on the need to cover all body parts, specifically in the case of “the negligee worn by Eden”). It had to be clear, moreover, that Eden was not a prostitute. This was true of Patsy Flint as well. In the film, she is referred to as a “picture snatcher,” not to be confused with “middle-aged hustler,” as the scenario in the script initially had it—a red flag for Mr. Breen’s office—but whose wardrobe, body movements and gestures, after the shooting was complete, might suggest otherwise. As in Detour, Ulmer ultimately appears to have had a fair degree of wiggle room when it came to sexually charged banter (e.g., the flirtatious exchange between Patsy and Detective Patrick in her apartment) and racy innuendo.

Part of the attraction of a film like Murder Is My Beat—not altogether unlike that of Detour—is the visual pleasure taken in its imperfections and its flagrant violations of Hollywood studio conventions. It requires a certain appreciation of the so-called “spirit of poverty,” or what Antoine Rakovsky calls “l’esthetique du ‘cheap’,” of under-budgeted, minimalist filmmaking in extremis. By the time the initial enthusiasm for film noir, expressed by French cineastes and the auteur-focused critics of Cahiers du cinéma, had made its way across the Atlantic, such films as Detour, Ruthless, and Murder Is My Beat had found a new audience. Replicating the efforts of the French Cahiers crowd, American art-house moviegoers and critics of the late 1960s and 70s took great pains to find virtues, even poetry, in the neglected, depraved, misunderstood independent pictures made on the fringes of Hollywood. Following such an approach, it was now possible, to paraphrase Andrew Sarris, to perceive the “mediocrity” of a second-bill crime picture as something truly “majestic.” Or, as James Naremore notes in his magisterial study of film noir, More Than Night, the American counter-cultural scene at the time was particularly receptive to such impoverished productions: “Critical commentary circulated through alternative newspapers and campus journals, and from the beginning, aficionados lavished special praise on B movies or slightly pulpish genre films. It was hip, for instance, to prefer Murder Is My Beat over The Maltese Falcon, or to argue that Touch of Evil was a better movie than Citizen Cane.” In this climate, driven at the beginning perhaps merely by a compensatory or contrarian impulse toward hipness, a director like Ulmer would achieve a new wave of recognition, one that was built in no small measure around the appreciation of his work in film noir.