Cover Up - 1949

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.”

 

It sounds corny, but when O’Keefe and Barbara Britton walk off, with the sheriff and Dad looking after them, and “O, Come All Ye Faithful” swelling up before the end credits, it seems like an actually satisfying ending.  It’s delightful to note that Dennis O’Keefe, with a childhood training in vaudeville and writing skits, co-wrote the screenplay.  Less happily, we might also recall that, like his character in this movie, he really was a chain smoker and died too young at 60 years old of lung cancer.

 

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.

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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.