I’ve never seen so much unintended height differential between characters!
Manhandled (1949) is a mediocre whodunit that does a credible job on the front end and then wastes it on the back end. Author and cash-strapped husband Alton has been bothered for weeks with a dream that he’s beating his wife, a rich socialite, to death with a bottle of perfume. He takes his problem to a psychiatrist, who urgently contacts the wife for an interview. She shows up in the company of an architect, who is designing a beach house for her; she has little time for the absurd dream.
But the psychiatrist’s assistant has a rather loose, flappy mouth, telling her wannabe boyfriend, a former police officer who was removed from the force and is now a private detective, about this unusual case, and mentioning the expensive diamonds the woman wore to the appointment. This smarmy ex-cop takes advantage of her to snatch her keys to the office and make a copy of them.
The next morning, the wife is dead, bludgeoned to death in her apartment with, yes, a bottle of expensive perfume. And the ex-cop is fencing her jewels.
Who did it? Unfortunately, people are exonerated far too easily. The husband, a dislikable character, took sleeping pills and couldn’t have done it; the maid and butler confirm that and have their own alibis; the architect, who is honestly a nobody, is also quickly proven to be elsewhere.
Which leaves the assistant and the ex-cop.
There’s a lot missing here. Some characters seem to exist without histories or futures. The husband might be an author, but will he ever publish another book? And why the dream? The architect, who seems unaffected by the murder? The insurance agent, who pops up out of nowhere and gets in the police’s way? The police? The ex-cop?
The psychiatrist?
The mysteries are somewhat fun to figure out, but there’s a lack of connection to the characters that keep this movie on the B-list. It’s not awful, and when one of the characters is purposefully crushed by a car against a wall in a back alley, it’s almost surreal. Some of it is clever, but in the end, it just doesn’t click.
