Franchot Tone: Smooth P.I. in "Love Trouble"

'I Love Trouble' (1948) is a film noir written by Roy Huggins from his first novel 'The Double Take,' directed by S. Sylvan Simon, and starring Franchot Tone as Stuart Bailey. Plot: A wealthy man hires a detective to investigate his wife's past. The detective (Franchot Tone) discovers that the wife had been a dancer and left her home town with an actor. The latter is killed before he can talk, but, with the help of a showgirl, the detective learns that the wife had used stolen papers from a girl friend to enter college after she had stolen $40,000 from the night club where she worked.

Franchot Tone was a terrific actor. He could play a psycho as in "Phantom Lady" and "Man on the Eiffel Tower" or he could switch to a smooth, fast-thinking and highly intelligent private eye as in "I Love Trouble". The title is misleading. It suggests a comedy-mystery, which this is not. Tone is not sardonic, like a Dick Powell. He's not weary, like a Robert Mitchum, and he's not tough, like a Humphrey Bogart. He's smart and quick-witted and self-controlled.

Janet Blair pops up, as the sister of whom this wife had taken an identity before her marriage. And Janet's real sister, the possessor of that identity, has happily left it behind when she married. That's Janis Carter, affecting a terrible South American accent. Tone doesn't know if he can trust Blair, but he knows he's attracted to her. Meanwhile his detecting takes him all over LA and nearby places where he meets up with a bevy of well-known supporting players and complications.

This is noir, done Chandler-style in complexity, in which even the writer may not know who did what to whom, when, and why. I haven't grasped it all myself, but the ride is sure enjoyable, and I'll take it again. It's done in a lighter Dick Powell "Murder My Sweet" vein, but without any narration. Solid film noir.

A great turn by Franchot Tone as LA private eye Stuart ‘George’ Bailey, who out-Bogart’s and out-Powell’s Philip Marlowe in a deliciously convoluted story of deception, greed, frame-ups, murder, and sexy high jinks. Bit player Glenda Farrell is a comic delight as Bailey’s cute, loyal, eccentric, and sharp-as-nails secretary Hazel. Tom Powers delivers a solid performance as the aging suspicious husband who hires Bailey to tail his young wife, who is being blackmailed. Steven Geray delivers a nuanced low-key performance as mysterious crime-boss Keller, and John Ireland, Raymond Burr, and Eddie Marr are great as Keller’s heavies. Sid Tomack is in his element as a small-time chiseller who is out of his league. The dames are all delightfully buxom good-bad girls, with enough charm and innuendo for a dozen Marlowes: Janet Blair, Janis Carter, Adele Jergens, Lynn Merrick, and Claire Carleton. A weird waitress-from-hell played by uncredited bit-player Roseanne Murray, is a scream. Source: filmsnoir.net

One afternoon in the Formosa Café near Goldwyn Studios, the actor Franchot Tone approached Beth Short (The Black Dahlia). She was at the bar as the actor stepped from the inside telephone booth. He pretended to know her, dropping a few names, but Beth only smiled and shook her head. “She said she was waiting for someone,” Tone says, “and I said to her, ‘Of course you are, you’re waiting for me! And I have just arrived.”’ He says it was “a ridiculous line” he had used before. The actor insisted he remembered her “very well... and I think many girls were flattered by it, but this one seemed more concerned that I’d had too much to drink.”

He told her he had finished a film with director Robert Siodmak, 'Phantom Lady,' and convinced Beth that an associate interviewing young women with “your kind of looks” would be most interested in meeting her. He took her to the unoccupied office of the “associate” but she was not interested in cozying up on the sofa, which opened into a bed. Tone says, “I thought it was a pickup from the start but to her it wasn’t anything of the kind!” It was an extraordinary experience, Tone later recalled. Beth believed they had “hit it off” as people. She was disappointed that Tone had only “that” in mind. He tried to kiss her a couple of times and told her she had the most gorgeous eyes in the world, which he thought she did—dreamy eyes that he was almost seeing through grey smoke. He could imagine her as a siren luring sailors to their death. And then she turned ice cold. Always the gentleman, Tone turned the situation around and made it seem that he had made a mistake thinking that she was after romance. He did find her most refreshing to “talk” to, he said, but secretly the actor was flustered —a pathetic scene, and the girl seemed so sad that Tone had to hold back tears. “She told me she’d been ill,” he says, “something about an operation to her chest.” He gave her a phone number to reach him about “the part and the associate. I gave her whatever bills were in my wallet. It was a strange and unsettling experience. Even after I called a cab for her and she was gone, the feeling stayed with me. It was almost as though I had experienced being afraid of her.” -Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder (2006) by by John Gilmore