Felix E. Feist's The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950)

The film noir was mostly a post-WWII phenomenon, echoing the disillusionment of veterans as they returned home.  This was combined with the many German emigres bringing greater expressionism to film and the advancing technology in film that made filming cheaper on location.  Eddie Mueller, of the Film Noir Foundation, is unearthing and restoring many films of this genre and making them available in theatres and on Turner Classic Movies, which recently showed The Man Who Cheated Himself.

Two elements of the film noir are effectively used in Felix Feist's film:  the cop who investigates a crime in which he was personally involved and the double-crossing wife whom the cop fancies and by whom he is manipulated.  The cop in this film is played by Lee J. Cobb and the wife by Jane Wyatt, later the mother in the TV series "Father Knows Best" (her role is rather small but she plays it with impressive sleaziness).  Cobb's brother and partner is played by John Dall, who did not have much of a career but was excellent in Gun Crazy (also 1950) and Hitchcock's Rope (1948), in which he played seemingly nice guys seething with passion.  In the Feist film Dall is the good-cop brother who brings down Lee J. Cobb, Dall playing  a relatively "normal" guy who tames his passion by getting married and settling down.

One lesson to be drawn from this film is that if one throws a gun used in a murder off a bridge, as Cobb does, one should make sure there is not a boat passing underneath, as happens in the film.  We only learn this later when the gun is used in another crime.  As Cobb pretends to solve the murder of Wyatt's husband Dall undercuts his efforts with his own intellectual analyses of the evidence, suggesting a new role for ratiocination in modern crime-solving.  I particularly like that in this black-and-white film a key point of evidence is the color of a car, as Dall figures out that Cobb's blue car that was used to dump the body of Wyatt's husband was misidentified as green because the witness turned out to be colorblind. The cinematographer was Russell Harlan, who also did Gun Crazy the same year (one of six films he did in 1950); he and Feist made impressive use of San Francisco locations.