This movie is sort of like Weekend at Bernie’s, if the object in that film had been to keep Bernie’s body hidden and constantly on the move so no one could find it.
J. Edward Bromberg, a hard-working character actor, gets a rare chance to star in a film. He plays an upstanding newspaper publisher named Henry Kruger who threatens rival publisher Andy McDonald (played by Paul Guilfoyle) after McDonald splashes a tawdry story about Kruger’s daughter all over the front page of his daily paper. McDonald turns out to also be a blackmail magnate, and when one of his victims rubs him out, his body winds up in the trunk of Kruger’s car. Most of the film involves the increasingly perplexed Kruger’s attempts to deep-six the body so he won’t be accused of a crime he didn’t commit. The only problem is, the body won’t stay in one place for very long. Who’s moving it? And why?
The Missing Corpse is a fun mix of comedy and suspense. Like most of the output from P.R.C., it’s a quick, low-budget diversion, and little more, but it’s still a light-hearted and fun hour and one minute. As far as MacGuffins go, a dead body is a pretty good one, and P.R.C. certainly released worse films into theaters in the ’40s.
Media tie-ins are nothing new. Radio’s Boston Blackie, a long-running syndicated show about a (mostly) reformed jewel thief and amateur sleuth, got its start as a series of short stories, then silent films, then talkies, before being adapted for radio. And big-screen adaptations of radio series were commonplace. The Whistler, The Great Gildersleeve, Fibber McGee & Molly, The Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger, and I Love a Mystery all led to multiple film adaptations, not to mention the many radio series that were adapted from other media, like dime novels or the daily comic strips, that went on to be films.
Mary Beth Hughes appeared in dozens of films from 1939 onward as a second- or third-billed actress (including films in the Charlie Chan, Cisco Kid, and Michael Shayne series), but in director Sam Newfield’s P.R.C. production The Lady Confesses she gets to strut her limited but charming stuff in a lead role. A natural redhead, Hughes usually appeared onscreen as a platinum blonde. Her round cheeks, big eyes, and moxie made up for what she lacked as a thespian.
Edgar G. Ulmer was born in 1904 in Olmütz, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (now part of the Czech Republic). Like a number of talented German and Austrian directors, he moved to the United States in the ’20s and began working in Hollywood. Unlike better-known directors like Billy Wilder or Fritz Lang, however, Ulmer toiled in obscurity for most of his career, cranking out no-budget films. At least part of this was due to the fact that he was blackballed after he had an affair with Shirley Castle, who was the wife of B-picture producer Max Alexander, a nephew of powerful Universal president Carl Laemmle. Castle divorced Alexander and married Ulmer (becoming Shirley Ulmer), but the damage to Ulmer’s career was done. He spent most of the rest of his career churning out product for P.R.C. (Producers Releasing Corporation) Studios, one of the financially strapped Hollywood studios collectively referred to as “Poverty Row.”
Dick Powell was known as a song-and-dance man when he was cast as hard-boiled dick Philip Marlowe in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely.
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