Movie Review: Larceny in Her Heart (1946) directed by Sam Newfield
Noted private detective Michael Shayne (Hugh Beaumont) and his adoring if sarcastic secretary Phyllis “Phil” Hamilton (Cheryl Walker) are five minutes away from starting a two-week vacation visiting her aunt in Niagra. Naturally, that’s when a wealthy would-be client walks through the door. Burton Stallings (Gordon Richards) wants Mike to find his missing stepdaughter Helen (Marie Hannon). He gives Mike a photo of the missing girl and a $500 retainer check, then goes out for some urgent business. Phil reminds Mike they’ve been planning this vacation for a long time, but Mike could really use the 5 Cs. Phil goes home to pack.
While his secretary is out, Mike suddenly receives a new visitor, a young woman who’s stinking drunk and only manages to slur that she needs to see Michael Shayne before passing out. He puts her on the couch in his apartment (the front room of which is his office) and notices that she looks remarkably like the photograph he was given. Wow, that was easy.
When Phil returns, Mike tells her he’s got a hot lead, so he should be done within 48 hours, and drives her to the train station. When he gets back to his apartment, though, his guest is dead–strangled! Worse, the cops, led by Detective Sergeant Pete Rafferty (Ralph Dunn), have received notice of a disturbance here, and Rafferty is hopeful that this time, finally, he’ll prove Shayne is a crook. Mike manages to trick them into leaving, but recruits his reporter friend Tim Rourke (Paul Bryar) to help him move the body so he won’t be in jail while he investigates the murder.
This results in the corpse disappearing and reappearing at inconvenient moments, another corpse popping up, and eventually Michael Shayne having to be committed to a sanitarium for alcoholics.
This was the second of five Michael Shayne movies produced by PRC, a low budget studio known for producing short B-movies (this one’s just over an hour long.) Hugh Beaumont (who older readers like me may best remember as Ward Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver) plays Shayne as a light-hearted wisecracker who’s in love with Phil, but still willing to flirt with other pretty women when the opportunity comes up. Mike’s kind of callous about murder, treating the two deaths as more of a personal inconvenience than tragedies.
Mike does several blatantly illegal things over the course of the movie, but suffers no legal consequences. Rafferty only manages to get one cuff on him before being told he can’t arrest Shayne. On the other hand, his investigation does get Mike beat up a few times, so he’s not getting off entirely unscathed.
Content note: Murder, fisticuffs. Alcoholism, period treatment of alcoholic patients that may disturb some viewers. Mike is shirtless a couple of times. Teens on up should be okay except for the medical scenes.
This is light mystery good for an hour’s entertainment, but not much deeper than that. It would make a good double feature with a more serious crime drama. See if you can get the Classic Flix restoration for the best viewing experience.
