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 satire 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 Helen Walker as Claire, the Bonnie Fleagle imposter, Porter Hall as Mamie's third husband, the conniving Mr. Johnson, Jean Heather as the Ophelia-like Elany, and Peter Whitney as the bumbling twins Mert and Bert.

George Marshall’s darkly funny—yet slapsticky—Murder, He Says (1945) is a perfect example of Fred MacMurray’s comedic skills. The film frankly looks and plays like it was intended for Bob Hope (it even throws in an outright dialogue reference to George Marshall’s 1940 comedy The Ghost Breakers). Hope was off the screen in 1945 (presumably doing USO tours), so it would make sense that something intended for him might find its way to MacMurray. 

MacMurray plays Pete Marshall, a pollster representing the Trotter Poll, who’s been sent to the backwoods and he runs afoul of the Fleagle clan—as pretty a gang of homicidal hillbillies as you’ll find this side of Tobe Hooper. Very likely they were the inspiration for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. For a man fending off death almost from the moment the movie begins, MacMurray's Pete is amazingly sanguine about the whole experience; he wants out, but he plays the role for laughs rather than terror. This hillbilly terror movie is so bizarre it's almost hard to figure out why Paramount Pictures released it. The script was by Lou Breslow, from a story by Jack Moffitt; Breslow later cowrote and directed another strange but much more successful film, You Never Can Tell (1951), in which Dick Powell played a dog reincarnated as a detective solving his own murder!

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. 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 at times an unfocused plot 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 said he was never happy with his performance in Arsenic and Old Lace. Source: www.tcm.com