Cover
Up
(1949) is a quite enjoyable example of Christmas Noir—if we can play with calling
it a subgenre. It has some lighthearted
aspects like Lady on a Train (1944), which we’ll discuss in weeks to
come, and a grim mystery that toys with symbols of Christmas as its backdrop
not unlike Lady in the Lake (1947), which we covered here in this
previous post.
Though
I’m usually content to experience each season in its turn and prefer not to
rush the holidays—Thanksgiving does not deserve to be given the bum’s rush—this
year I’m hoping to tackle a roster of yuletide-related movies as early
as—now—to lead up to a new book for the new year: Christmas in Classic Films,
which will be a collection of essays from this blog. More on that in weeks to come.
Cover
Up
can also be likened to Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) with
its mysterious murderer casting a sinister shadow over a homey small town. However, in Cover Up, the murderer is
not an outsider like Uncle Charlie come to town; murder is already afoot when
the dogged insurance investigator arrives on the train. He is played by Dennis O’Keefe, and he meets
a nice girl here, too, who like Teresa Wright, will grow chillingly aware of
danger to her family. She is Barbara
Britton, lovely and understated, with a little more polish than “Young
Charlie.”
Though
the film has elements similar to all these movies, it is still its own unique
creation. It manages to be both an
intriguing and unsettling mystery and a charming, even wistful, tribute to
Christmas.
It
begins lightheartedly enough, with Dennis O’Keefe and Barbara Britton in a
“meet-cute” aboard a train as they arrive at the same small town. It is her town, and she arrives home to spend
Christmas with her family. She carries the requisite armload of wrapped
presents, which she repeatedly drops, and Mr. O’Keefe, who has already eyed her
approvingly on the train, rushes to lend a hand. They next board a bus from the train station
to go downtown and the bus driver, a townie whom Britton knows, sets up the
story for us by sharing with her the big news: one of the town’s most prominent
citizens has committed suicide. The camera lingers only slightly on O’Keefe’s
expression at the news, and we assume he knows something about it.
We
don’t know if Miss Britton has been away at college, or has just taken an
extended trip. Her family meets her at
the bus stop with enthusiasm: Mother, Dad, and kid sister Ann E. Todd, a
fresh-faced child actress in one of her last film roles. We saw her in Roughly Speaking (1945)
and My Reputation (1946) discussed in these previous posts.
Miss
Britton introduces O’Keefe to them, and when he says he is staying at the hotel
on business and will be in town only a short while, Dad invites him to come to
their house in the evening to visit. An
extraordinarily friendly invitation to a stranger, but we are meant to see them
as an all-American family with small-town virtues.
There
is, however, a degree of small-town vice here as well. The bus driver has intimated that the man who
committed suicide was not well liked. As
the movie progresses, we learn that everybody hated his guts. When Mr. O’Keefe checks in at the sheriff’s
office – we learn then that he is an insurance investigator, not unlike my
hero, Johnny Dollar—he has no suspicion that the death was anything more than a
suicide, but his company has sent him here to fill out the proper paperwork on
the insurance with the coroner’s report.
His first inkling, and ours, that there might be more to this death is
the deliberately and glibly stonewalling attitude of the sheriff, played by
William Bendix. Bendix is great in the
role, with a knife-edge of sinister smugness and wry humor. We discussed
Bendix’s work here in The Blue Dahlia (1946).
Sheriff
Bendix is coyly uncooperative about the details of the death and it takes
O’Keefe’s stubborn cleverness to ferret out that the victim was shot with a
Luger, which is obviously a pistol that not too many people in a small town
would have. It is also missing. Though, as it happens, the sheriff pulls one
out of his desk drawer. When O’Keefe
asks the smart aleck but not just hypothetical question to Bendix, “I don’t
suppose you killed Phillips, did you?” he gets no direct answer and we
wonder if perhaps the aloof sheriff is a murderer.
The
hints and clues begin to unwind, accompanied by the trappings of
Christmas. Bendix is wrapping presents
at his desk when O’Keefe’s routine filling out of forms turns into suspicious
interrogation. Bendix rarely meets
O’Keefe’s eye, he just puffs on his pipe and his sausage fingers delicately and
patiently seal wrapping paper around a small box. Over by the window is a spindly table-top
tree. O’Keefe moves toward it, fingers a
small present on the table under the tree absently, as if he is thinking of something
else. Bendix remarks, “Why don’t you
forget about it? Go on home, visit your
folks for Christmas.”
O’Keefe
replies, slipping from his confident tough guy mode, “Sounds great, Sheriff,
only I don’t have any folks and my home is wherever I happen to hang my
hat.” There is a brief, rather pained
look on his face. He puts the present
back under the tree, as if he is refusing a place at the table at Christmas, as
if he doesn’t belong. Then through the
film noir blinds at the window he spies Barbara Britton come out of a shop
across the street, and tells the sheriff he has a reason to stay. The sheriff thinks he means the murder case,
but we see that is only half of it.
He
buys a compact at the jewelry store, has it wrapped, but is there also to question
the jeweler, who found the body. The
jeweler and his wife are uncomfortable with the interrogation, and we see that
everyone O’Keefe talks to is on edge but thoroughly pushing the party line that
the death was a suicide. There appears to be a great conspiracy afoot.
O’Keefe’s
next stop is the town undertaker—a dour fellow in typical comedy relief, who
tells him that there were no powder burns on the body. The suicide is looking more and more like
murder.
O’Keefe
takes up the invitation to stop at the house where Barbara Britton’s family
lives, and surprisingly, the compact is a gift not for Britton, but for the
younger sister, Ann E. Todd. It’s a
cheery home with a fireplace, Mother and Dad, played by Helen Spring and Art
Baker, in easy chairs, and a comically more-dour-than-the-undertaker maid
played by Doro Merande. O’Keefe gives
sleuthing the night off, he thinks, and takes the already smitten Miss Britton
to the movies.
We
learn gradually, as happens in small towns, that most people not only know each
other, but are in some way connected.
Barbara’s good friend, played by Virginia Christine, is the niece of the
dead man. She was to inherit his wealth
as his only relative. She was away the
night of the killing as that was the evening she eloped against his
wishes. Russell Arms plays her new
husband, of whom the uncle disapproved.
Arms had minor roles in several films until he eventually found work in
television and became familiar in living rooms across the country as one of the
stars of Your Hit Parade.
It
looks like Russell, who has a bit of a temper and a chip on his shoulder, could
have killed Uncle, and Virginia certainly looks uncomfortable, as if she is
covering for him.
Barbara
Britton drives O’Keefe around on his errands—like scouting out the murder scene
at Uncle’s house, and when O’Keefe mentions his quest for a Luger, she
innocently and happily blurts out that her father would lend him his Luger.
Daddy’s
got a Luger pistol?
O’Keefe,
who has come to like the family, and love Barbara, is anguished that it might
be her father whom he is tracking, and slowly, her eyes on the road as she is
driving, we see cold realization on her face that she just implicated her
father in a murder.
They
are being tailed everywhere by the sheriff, who seems to emerge from the
shadows and remains, if only by his teasing attempts to thwart O’Keefe and send
him down the wrong paths, to be the main suspect.
Christmas
enters again in a climactic scene as the town prepares to light an enormous
tree in the town square, an annual event.
The town’s beloved doctor does the honors every year, and the family
bustles off, amongst gently falling snowflakes to take part. O’Keefe tags along, part of him succumbing to
the nostalgic joy of celebrating Christmas with others in a town he confesses
he has grown to like, a frank nod to the fact that Christmas is as lonely for
some people as it is happy for others.
But something else plays on his mind: all around him are suspects and he
grows uncomfortable that the idyllic community has dirty secrets and nefarious
doings.
They
wait for Doc to arrive, and the bustle and hum of the crowd grows louder in
anticipation, but at the last moment, word arrives that the old Doc, who has
retired and moved to another town, has passed away this evening.
Dad
gives the announcement at the tinny microphone, and there is shock and
sadness. But Doc would have wanted them
to continue with the tradition, so the tree is lighted and Christmas goes on,
whether or not anyone feels like it. We
all know that even the Grinch could not stop Christmas from coming.
At
home, Barbara finds Dad’s Luger pistol and hides it in her purse. When ferrying O’Keefe on another errand, he
asks for a match (he chain smokes throughout the movie), and is comfortable
enough in their relationship to reach for her purse, which she grabs
defensively, saying she has no matches in there. He knows she is hiding something—oh, great,
another suspect. She will eventually
plead with him to drop the case, but Dad, who refuses to be protected, is stoic
and prefers to let things play out. He
is a lucky man to have not only his daughter try to cover for him, but is maid
as well. Doro Merande burns his easily
identifiable old beaver coat, an eerie holocaust in the snow, when it seems to
be implicated in the murder, at least according to a phony trap O’Keefe planted
in the local paper to smoke out the murderer.
Small
clues are dropped for us here and there so that, unlike in many other mystery
films and books we are not meant to know what the investigator is thinking or
doing behind the scenes, it is enjoyable to be able to view the case playing
out while we look over Dennis O’Keefe’s shoulder, knowing as much as he does.
There
taut moments, and warmhearted ones. Christmas
not only appears as a backdrop like the street corner Santa Claus in some
scenes, or as a prop, like William Bendix’s “business” with wrapping presents,
but is ultimately the reason for the “cover up,” which actually is larger than
O’Keefe has anticipated. The
conspirators knew the murderer would be revealed, they just wanted to delay it
until after the holiday, as O’Keefe incredulously discovers, “so that a town
could have a Merry Christmas.”
The
biggest mystery in the story is actually why the family’s living room Christmas
tree is fully decorated when O’Keefe first visits the home, and then on a later
visit is in the process of being decorated.
Perhaps the person in charge of continuity had a little too much eggnog.
For
more on Cover Up, have a look here at these posts by your friends and
mine, Paddy Nolan Hall aka the Caftan Woman, and Laura at Laura’s MiscellaneousMusings, and Vienna at Vienna’s Classic Hollywood.
********************
Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally. Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.
