Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

The greatest movie ever!

One of the worst movies I've ever seen

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Producers: George M. Merrick, Max Alexander. A Merrick-Alexander Production. Not copyrighted. U.S. release through Select Attractions: 12 September 1941. No New York opening. 73 minutes. Alternative title: SOME CALL IT MURDER.SYNOPSIS: A young woman sacrifices her own life to save her brother.COMMENT: Starts off quite promisingly. By the admittedly humble standards of the independent "B", the direction is not bad at all, and the mystery itself is quite intriguing. But alas the pieces of the puzzle fall all too quickly into place and one is then forced to spend the rest of the film drearily watching the on-screen characters while they ploddingly and ratheer laboriously unravel the truth that is staring them in the face. As if this setback were not bad enough, audiences were also obliged to put up with some exceedingly tiresome comic relief. Direction and photography also fall off, while both the tired plot and the same dreary sets are used again and again until we are thoroughly sick of them. Stanley Fields gives a lumberingly obvious portrayal, Rose Hobart looks too old for the heroine, Michael Whalen too young for the hero, while Robert Bond is one of the least personable villains we have ever come across. Joan Woodbury has some moments of effectiveness, although she is inclined to over-act.

I'LL SELL MY LIFE is a standard detective story filmed in 1941. There's an opening murder and then a bunch of characters investigating said murder. The one twist in this, and it's not really much of one, is that the murderer is actually a murderess, so it's a gender spin on the normal story.One interesting thing about this film is that it self references the detective story genre quite a bit. The main character is a journalist and one of the main supporting characters is himself a writer of detective fiction. There's a lot of plot packed into the 73 minute running time, but none of it is very interesting and it requires close attention on the part of the viewer to keep track of all the participants, which gets quite testing after a while. Needless to say there are no big names present in the cast.

"I'll Sell My Life" is a low-budget B-movie with a cast of mostly unknown actors. This isn't a complaint--such films are often quite good. Unfortunately, while the film had a really great plot idea, the execution of the plot left me quite cold due to indifferent writing, acting and direction.The film begins with a woman murdering another woman--though you only see part of it and aren't sure who the killer is. Soon, a famous mystery writer places a very unusual ad--that he will pay handsomely for a woman's life. What exactly does this mean? Well, whoever agrees to this arrangement will confess to the murder, get convicted and executed--and then this person's family will receive a huge check. One woman answers this ad, as she feels intensely guilty for an accident she caused in which her brother was left blinded. With this money, he could afford to get much needed surgery to restore his sight. However, a newspaper man sees the ad and decides to investigate for himself.As I said, the plot was pretty good--and very creative. The problem is that the film did nothing with this decent script idea. The overall results are a bit listless and dull and SHOULD have been better.

The IMDb synopsis for this work, contributed by the redoubtable Les Adams, will allow a prospective viewer to have a firm idea of the storyline for this low-budget affair that might well serve as a template for how a flagrantly outrageous melodrama was to be constructed during its cinematic time frame, the years from the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s. The picture is taken from a long story entitled "I'll Buy Your Life" by Walter F. Ripperger (incorrectly listed upon the credits screen as Rippenger), first published in Street & Smith's DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE, March, 1941. Ripperger's tales appeared with frequency from 1934 to 1941 in pulp fiction periodicals, these magazines paying authors by the word, accepting nearly any submission that adhered to established popular standards, even if too whimsical to succeed as even a remotely rational narrative, as is the case with this film. Director Elmer Clifton, with aid from dialogue director George Rosener, is accountable for this treatment of the Ripperger original, and the result for the most part butts up against basic canons of common sense, essentially becoming merely artificial tosh that must go without the courage of its lack of conviction. An undernourished plot benefits from several musical numbers. A significant amount of the action occurs in a cabaret, Club Sirocco, where entertainment is provided for the most part by a highly popular Cuban band of the film's era, Eddie Durant And His Rhumba Orchestra, with Durant himself singing a version of Mysterio, by Leo Rojo. Talented second female lead, the striking Joan Woodbury, dances with skill and also sings a novelty number, "Incidentally", composed by her real-life husband, actor Henry Wilcoxon. Robert Regent, cast as lead Rose Hobart's blind brother, offers an abridged version of Stephen Foster's Beautiful Dreamer in his fine baritone. Clifton's established propensity for artistically composed closeups, maintained since his palmy days at the helm of top-tier silent motion pictures, has increased the merit of some episodes, but a strong barrier remains to viewer pleasure: a hackneyed scenario that as a consequence lowers the film to its station as merely a tiresome exercise in anti-climax. Despite flat direction that thereby pardons hamminess displayed by some veteran players, these are depreciated when always effectual Hobart is on screen, persuasively creating her role of a woman ready to sacrifice her life for a noble purpose. Reissued by Alpha Home Entertainment, the first name among those companies supplying little loved older films to a DVD buying public, has not, in accord with its policy, remastered this film; however, the print is visually satisfactory throughout, and its sound quality is fine, skips and elisions being infrequent. There are, as must be expected from Alpha, no extras provided upon the disk.