Edward L. Cahn's Destination Murder (1950).

 I've written a great deal about Edward L. Cahn on this blog  (Nov 21 2014, Mar. 26 2016, Oct. 31 2016, Feb. 5 2017, Jan 13 2019, Apr. 22 2019, Sept. 27 2019); not only do I enjoy his films but he made so many of them, 127, from Law and Order in 1932 to Beauty and the Beast in 1962, most of them low-budget and obscure, that I still continue to seek them out.  Destination Murder recently showed up on the film noir series on Turner Classic Movies, hosted by the knowledgeable Eddie Muller.

Destination Murder is a dark and disturbing film, with cinematography by B veteran Jackson Rose and an original screenplay by Don Martin, who wrote Gerd Oswald's excellent B Western The Brass Legend (1956). It is an impressive variation on the film noir genre with a good girl (Joyce Mackenzie), a bad girl (Myrna Dell) and two bad guys (Albert Dekker and Hurd Hatfield).  It starts out with Jackie Wales (Stanley Clements) leaving a film during intermission to get his date some popcorn and having Armitage (Dekker) drive him to a house where he shoots a man and then gets back in five minutes to bring his girl popcorn!  The murdered man's daughter, Laura Mansfield (Mackenzie) recognizes Wales in a line-up but he has an alibi, so Laura dates him to try to get evidence.  When Wales goes to get more money from Dekker he is beaten up to the loud music of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a tinkly player piano.  And then the plot gets even more complicated, as Stretch Norton convinces Armitage to kill Wales and Alice Winterworth (Dell), who are trying to blackmail him.  After Wales's death Laura falls for Stretch, not realizing that he is actually Armitage's boss and was the mastermind behind the death of Laura's father.

Each character is double-crossing somebody else, as Armitage lives in luxury while always referring to himself in the third person, Stretch Norton talks about his hatred of women (suggesting that something is going on between Armitage and him), while Laura gets a job as a cigarette girl at the Vogue, Armitage and Norton's nightclub, which has a young African-American woman in charge of employees and an excellent Black jazz band, Steve Gibson and the Redcaps, which performs "I'm All Alone," something that describes each of the film's protagonists. This film is a good example of what Manny Farber called "termite art," as opposed to the more pretentious "white elephant art," a film not trying to win any Oscars.  Although the film is a low-budget B film Cahn and cinematographer Rose bring to it a precise eye for lighting and composition and Cahn's direction moves swiftly in this seventy-two minute film.