How they made cocktails before World War II. The guy on the right screwed up once and lost his eyebrows.
The Shadow Returns (1946) is part of a long-neglected set of stories[1], published in magazines and told in radio shows, about private detective Lamont Cranston. He has an alter-ego, The Shadow, who wears a mask and is almost never seen but as a shadow against the wall, with which he uses extra-legal means to extract information from criminals and their associates while solving crimes. In this particular episode, he’s the nephew of the Commissioner of Police[2], which lets him hang around the investigation of a man who mysteriously commits suicide from the balcony of his mansion after a set of diamonds disappears from his mansion. In the company of his fiancee, Margot, and his minion, Shrevvy, they pursue lead after lead, twice more seeing men mysteriously leap to their deaths.
Soon, they discover the secret of the stones, a formula of immense value, and how a man’s fetish for a particular ranch tool is used to effect the many murders. As the bodies pile up, Lamont and Margot maintain their rather carefree approach to the case, until one of the several suspects, each less memorable than the next, is finally fingered, and the case is closed.
Now the only question is how to bundle The Shadow out of the mansion before the Inspector finally fingers him.
It’s ok. The humorous bits with Shrevvy are mostly off the mark, but Lamont and Margot have an easy chemistry that helps move this story along. This is definitely a pre-Bogart crime movie, as Bogart seems to mark the point where we get deep looks into the characters, whether they are protagonists or antagonists, and that’s why The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca stand head and shoulders above most of their predecessors.
Unfortunately, the print we saw had some damaged audio, but it was nothing we couldn’t tolerate. We mostly stuck around just to see why these guys kept leaping from balconies.
And here is the YT version (we saw the version on Amazon Prime). The YT preview looks terrible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLuGtk_f0Kg
1 Or perhaps not. I just know I’ve never seen any new stories in this series since I became a conscious human being. And I don’t care enough to do the necessary research.
2 Perhaps this is always true. I am unfamiliar with this series of stories.
