Murder He Says -Full Movie- (1945)

Murder He Says (1945) -Full Movie- starring Fred MacMurray and Helen Walker, directed by George Marshall.

Synopsis: Pete Marshall is a pollster sent into the countryside to find Smedley, a colleague who has vanished without a trace. Marshall inadvertently stumbles upon Smedley's killers, the outlaw Fleagle family, who are holed up in their relatives' house in the hope of convincing Grandma Fleagle to divulge the location of $70,000, which the notorious criminal Bonnie Fleagle hid before landing in jail. Pete Marshall evades the family's constant attempts to bump him off, but further complications ensue when a young woman posing as Bonnie Fleagle arrives at the door.

Murder, He Says (1945) is an infrequently seen but very funny dark comedy set in a remote mountain community, clearly intended to represent the Ozarks. (The director and producer George Marshall went so far as to make the cast study recordings of native Arkansas speakers to guide their accents.) The film is partly a send-up of films about the South such as John Ford's Tobacco Road (1941), and partly a hillbilly-inflected parody of the Gothic horror genre, complete with a ramshackle secret passageway and a sinister figure peering at the characters through peepholes. At the same time, Murder, He Says works as an outright slapstick farce, especially during the cleverly staged climax in which various characters chase each other in the house's large basement.

Murder, He Says is a true ensemble piece: in addition to Fred MacMurray's excellent comic lead, one would be remiss in failing to acknowledge the considerable contributions of Porter Hall as Mamie's third husband, the conniving Mr. Johnson, Jean Heather as the Ophelia-like mad cousin Elany, and Peter Whitney as the bumbling twins Mert and Bert.

Fred MacMurray and Helen Walker in "Murder, He Says" (1945) directed by George Marshall

During the film's initial release, the reviewer for the New York Times didn't quite know what to make of its black comedy, calling it a "farce melodrama" and titling the review rather ungenerously as "The Lowest Depths." The reviewer for Variety gave it even more of a mixed evaluation, writing: "Laughs clock heavily and pace moves so quickly audiences won't have a chance to discover it is a lot to-do about nothing and thinly premised until it's well over." Today, many critics regard it as one of George Marshall's strongest comedies and in general one of the better comedies of the era. Released only a year after Frank Capra’s similar black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, Murder He Says stands on its own. In fact, critic Pauline Kael believed that Murder, He Says was superior to Arsenic and Old Lace. Certainly Fred’s performance is subtler and more modulated than Cary Grant’s constant mugging and actually funnier because of it. Cary Grant was never happy with his performance in Arsenic and Old Lace. Source: www.tcm.com