This suit doesn’t fit right. I suppose that’s de rigeur for a chief of police in a goofy little town.
“Studio One in Hollywood” is the name of an old, old TV series (ca 1947 – 1958), featuring hour long episodes of unconnected shows, which I will treat as short movies. We just saw Two Sharp Knives, a pleasingly complex murder mystery which, despite the relatively awful video, intrigued us. The mystery opens with the how and why a man traveling with his daughter to meet his estranged wife for the first time in ten years is found dead, hanging by his neck in a prison cell, where he’d been placed when the local police were notified that the Philly cops wanted him for murder. It’s puzzling that the cop on duty hadn’t noticed a thing, and even his little nap should have been disturbed by the stool being kicked away by the suicide.
But then the chief of police, who is already under political attack by the D.A., discovers the Wanted for Murder poster is a fake, and the coroner, deceiving the D.A., calls it murder. The chief is in a squeeze play now, between a bewildered daughter who believes he did it, and the knowledge that the real players may be leaving soon.
And why?
It’s a well-acted and -crafted tale, and the worst part of it may be the mysterious title. It’s adapted from a short story of the same name by the legendary Dashiell Hammett, and I have to wonder if the part of the story justifying the title was edited out during the adaptation to the screen; I’d be delighted to read the story, as I’ve read (but mostly forgotten) all of his novels.
I won’t recommend it, but it’s not a bad way to spend an hour.
BONUS: You also get the original Westinghouse commercials that went with it!
