Cover Up (1949)

 ☆ ☆ ½

Cover Up (1949) – A. E. Green

The vault of films noir runs very deep and you never know what gems are left to be found (after all the prime viewing has been done).  I thought a film starring Dennis O’Keefe (T-Men, 1947; Raw Deal, 1948) and William Bendix (Lifeboat, 1944; The Blue Dahlia, 1946) had got to be good but alas t’was not so.  What looked like noir on the surface, judging by the time, the stars, and the plot (insurance investigator discovers that apparent suicide is actually a murder being covered up by seemingly a whole town), turns out to be quite jaunty and even light-hearted rather than the dark existential fare I sought.  In retrospect, director Albert E. Green might have been better known for musicals.  Perhaps O’Keefe was looking for something to change his image into more of a romantic leading man type. He seems to have demanded that the Christmas setting be kept (another ingredient tipping this toward sentimentality) when a producer threatened to jettison it.  Only Bendix maintains his edge, as the sheriff who may or may not be in on the conspiracy (and could even be the killer) – he’s got the sly sense of humor that he flashes in his best films while also not afraid to be rough-edged or a bit of a lunk. Barbara Britton is fine as the love interest/daughter of the town banker. But viewers looking for “menace meets small town norms” in their noir had best start with Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943).