Please Murder Me! (1956)

Director: Peter Godfrey
Writers: Al C. Ward and Donald Hyde, based on an original story by E. A. Dupont and David Chantler
Stars: Angela Lansbury, Raymond Burr, Dick Foran, John Dehmer and Lamont Johnson

Index: 2025 Centennials.

This didn’t turn out to be the greatest movie that Angela Lansbury ever made, but I’ll leave it to others to look at Gaslight, The Manchurian Candidate and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, to cite just three. It didn’t turn out to contain a great role for her either, though I always like her as a villain, even if she didn’t. What it did turn out to be was an interesting failure and a pristine opportunity for Raymond Burr, billed second.

He’s Craig Carlson, attorney at law, and this starts out with him walking through dark film noir streets, checking pawnshop windows and buying a gun. He comes back to his office and dictates a fantastic message to Ray Willis: “In exactly 55 minutes, I will be dead. Murdered.”

If you want to how to hook an audience, this is how. Nowadays, it’s tailor made for a trailer, but it works as the prologue too. Of course, it’s a film noir so we leap into flashback and learn how the story progressed to that point.

While it goes back to Iwo Jima and Joe Leeds saving Carlson’s life, thus becoming the best of friends, but it’s really about Myra, Joe’s wife, a decade later. That’s why it’s Craig who breaks the news to him. She’s going to leave him, he says. “Who’s the guy?” Joe asks. Me, he replies.

I have to be careful how I proceed from that point because the script is very clever indeed. Sure, the first half of the film could have been quicker and the second half longer and, were I to take a drink every time Raymond Burr faces right the camera under strong light and talks in a low tone, I’d be dead before Joe is, but the script is clever and the more I think back after knowing where it goes, the cleverer it seems.

And yes, Joe dies and pretty quickly too. He goes home during a storm to find Myra in bed, throws their black cat out of the bedroom and closes the door. Next thing we know, there’s a gunshot and Myra’s explaining to a laughably young Denver Pyle that it was self defence.

Enter Ray Willis, the DA Carlson will record a message for when the story ends. He thinks she killed him in cold blood and the case is so clear that he’ll seek the death penalty. When it reaches court and we start hearing evidence, we can see why. Angela Lansbury hasn’t done a lot by this point, but it seems like she’s killed her husband. Surely that’s enough.

Of course, if you’re going to stand trial in an open and shut murder case, it kind of helps to have Perry Mason represent you in court and, sure enough, she’s found not guilty. Now she’s free, clear and single with three quarters of a million bucks to her name and a new life with Craig awaits. She’s got away with murder.

Except this is film noir so it’s never going to be quite that simple. With the court case over, we can think about it for a moment and that’s exactly what Carlson does. It’s telling that we never think that he was in on it. He seems and has seemed all along to be an honest lawyer, if we can imagine such a creature. Again, it helps that Carlson is played by Raymond Burr.

The thing is that, while we’ve watched him play Perry Mason, the quintessentially honest lawyer forever, he hadn’t found the character at this point. The Perry Mason show didn’t start until 1957, running until 1966. 1956 audiences didn’t have that connection, remembering the lawyer either as Warren William in the thirties movies or maybe John Larkin on radio. It’s not hard to imagine that the folk at CBS struggling to cast Mason for television watched this and had their man, but apparently it was his role in A Place in the Sun in 1951 that sold them on him. He’d been in to audition but for the part of the DA, Hamilton Burger, not Mason.

I’m talking a lot about Burr here rather than Lansbury, who would have reached a hundred years old today. I’m watching this for her.

However, this is emphatically Burr’s film up until this point, when he starts to question not only her innocence but her motives for loving him. That’s when her character deepens and is given a lot more screen time. Even though she was top billed, it stays his film to the very end, which Craig foreshadowed in the prologue. At least from our point of view.

From the point of view of the characters, all the characters, it’s Myra’s film so emphatically that it literally wouldn’t exist without her. The rest of the credits list could have packed with a different set of characters, right down to Joe and Craig. There needed to be a husband and a love interest who’s a talented lawyer, but they could have been anybody, whoever Myra had in mind. She, however, is irreplacable.

Sadly, the indie company behind the movie, Grosse-Krasne, saw her as a B-movie villain, an unfortunate side effect of her being English in Hollywood and her most acclaimed roles being in villainous films, like Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray, even if she wasn’t the villains. It took a long time for that stereotype to change.

She was seventeen in Gaslight, having moved to the States with her mother, in 1940 to avoid the Blitz in London. It was good casting, as the Cockney maid, and it landed her an Oscar nod as Best Supporting Actress.

That led to National Velvet then The Picture of Dorian Gray, which won her a Golden Globe. It’s a shame that MGM didn’t push her as a leading lady, but she played support in all the best and most prominent films of her career there: The Hoodlum Saint, State of the Union and The Three Musketeers, to name three. They started to loan her out to other studios, so she terminated her contract and shifted to family and the stage.

She struggled to avoid being typecast older than she was, but those were the parts she got and sometimes they were good or prominent ones. She was only four years older than Joan Plowright in A Taste of Honey on Broadway, ten years older than Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii, a mere three older than Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate but she was mother to all of them and the latter led to a third Oscar nod and her second Golden Globe win.

Real fame, though, didn’t come until Mame on Broadway in 1966, winning her first of four Tony Awards, and Murder, She Wrote on TV in 1984, winning her four Golden Globes but zero Emmys from twelve nominations. The former made her a star, the latter took that global.

Her final competitive award was in 2015 for a touring stage production of Blithe Spirit and she almost reached a hundred, passing in 2022 six days before her ninety-seventh birthday. Her final screen role came earlier that year, in Glass Onion, playing herself in a cameo. She was so iconic that the entire world knew her.