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This is one of Noir's most bizarre stories and I absolutely love it. OK, it's crazy but that's the best thing about it.
The film was directed by Jack Bernhard, then-husband of the female star Jean Gillie, who made two other low-budget Noirs, The Hunted and Blond Ice. Decoy was produced for Monogram and is only 76 minutes long, but it is a doozy and textbook Noir all the way. It ticks all the right boxes.
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| Jean Gillie as Margot |
Poverty Row pictures never tried to hide what they were, they did not have, and did not need, any pretensions at intellectual filmmaking. And thank God for that. Because of this lack of pretense we get one of Noir's greatest B's, with craziness, pulp and a bit of horror and sci-fi thrown in. One may be afraid of this turning into an Ed Wood picture, but not to worry. It's classes better than that.
The film obviously had a low budget, but the cinematography is beautiful, pure Noir, especially in the prison scenes. So much can be done with so little.
The plot is utterly implausible and hard to swallow. Never mind, it doesn't matter at all.
Old gangster Frankie Olin is supposed to die in the gas chamber. His girlfriend Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie) is quite cut up about it, not because of him but because of the $400,000 he had stashed away and doesn't want to divulge the location. So she seduces another gangster, Jim Vincent, to help her spring Olin and furthermore seduces the prison doctor Craig, so he can administer the antidote for the cyanide poisoning from the gas chamber! After Olin has died! Olin indeed comes back from the dead (with a little nod to Frankenstein's monster: "I'm alive" and things get more and more complicated as greedy Margot really doesn't want to share the loot with anyone, and anyone who stands in her way must die.
The story is told in flashbacks with a voice-over by mortally wounded femme fatale Jean Gillie who gives an outstanding performance. The movie is what it is because of Gillie. Like her contemporary Poverty Row femmes fatales Peggie Cummins, Ann Savage and Janis Carter, she never had much of a career. It's hard to find a reason for this. She looks absolutely fabulous in her wardrobe and plays the spider woman with utter relish. It's hard to believe she would even need Methylene Blue to revive a corpse, her perfume alone should do it.
It seems only Poverty Row was capable of bringing out the absolute worst in its deadly dames. Never again have they been so utterly depraved, evil and unredeemable. There's not even a touch of sympathy or remorse about them.
If the movie hadn't been produced by Poverty Row, this role should have guaranteed Gillie a great career. As it was, she died at the age of 33 of pneumonia.
The voice-over here, as in other Noirs, stresses the sense of fatalism and powerlessness of the narrator as the audience sees and hears an already determined series of events play out. One can only philosophically accept one's fate.
As a femme fatale Gillie is as ice-cold, ruthless and lethal as they come. She's bad through and through. She doesn't bat an eyelid when her gangster lover No. 2 shoots gangster lover No. 1 and a short time later runs over lover No. 2 with a car. After lover No. 3, the prison doctor, has dug up the loot he also gets a bullet while she laughs hysterically. Life is cheap and death is brutal, nasty and pointless.
But like the smart girl that she is she lets the boys do all the work for her to reap the rewards all by herself.
This movie is one of the few times where the motivation of the main protagonist for her greed is explained. Gillie spits out her contempt for poverty in a passionate speech about the 'dingy, dirty street' in England where she came from. She has vowed never to go back, and her greed is her unstoppable driving force. It's the same kind of street that her doctor lover lives on now and it is nothing she could ever accept.
What's more, she knows exactly that the supposedly devoted-to-his-work-amongst-the-poor doctor is just waiting for his chance to break out and be corrupted. She knows he has been waiting for that moment his entire life. She knows that he likes her apartment, loves the clothes and the perfume she wears, loves everything she has to offer.
In the beginning the doctor is portrayed as one who serves the poor and unfortunate almost sacrificially in a run-down little office, but one look at Gillie and his world changes forever. His existence so far, that is clear to him, has been stultifying and banal.
The doctor is just one of a long line of Noir characters who, until opportunity and temptation knocked, had been a righteous and stable paragon of duty and responsibility. In a short time these characters are seamlessly but very believably transformed into reckless, dangerous and sometimes even murderous types, all suggesting that anyone, in the right or wrong circumstances, was capable of almost anything. And only self-deception would make them deny it.
In true Noir tradition, having an upright character just means that a person has never encountered temptation, the temptation that would reveal how unreliable their noble principles were all along.
At the start of the movie we see the doctor's face in a shattered mirror with a jagged edge, hinting at another darker side of him. His alter ego is not quite as straight-laced as he thinks. A harsh reality so often looks back at us from the mirror.
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| Herbert Rudley as Dr. Lloyd L. Craig |
If Gillie's driving force is money, for the men it is simply lust. Dark sexual motivations are essential here. The entire male cast loses their heads, and their lives, bar one. Suckers always die.
The actors of the three main male characters are not too memorable, however the same cannot be said about Sheldon Leonard as Sgt. Joe Portugal, the only man who does not succumb to Gillie's charm. He doesn't let her cloud his judgment, though he is tempted, and that's why he is the last man standing at the end of the movie.
Leonard was a strong actor with a great screen presence and a good antagonist for Gillie.
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| Sheldon Leonard as Sgt. Joe Portugal |
Thankfully the ending of the film is not a cop-out but stays true to the nature and spirit of Noir. Gillie's death scene plays exactly the way it should. She is unrepentant to the end, still thinking only about the money that is all hers now, daring the cop to kiss her and then laughing in his face. Here we can see the essence of her character. Her only goal in life has always been to control and tear down as many others as possible before she herself has to go the same way.
The ending features a nice ironic twist and emphasizes another important Noir theme: you can try to play the game, but you can't win against the house. There are no winners, ever, only losers. It's what counts as a healthy moral in Noir.
But, as always the case with good Noir, the audience roots for the morally corrupt and one almost hopes Gillie to get away with her schemes.
Cynicism runs through the movie from beginning to end. Nobody can escape his and her fate. Redemption is not possible.
A Noir review (originally published on a Western Board where we also delved into Film Noir) from a fellow SLWB (Sergio Leone Web Board) member - Jessica Rabbit - posted February 24, 2017 exactly 9.56 decimal years ago.
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