Touches You

So much average

Excellent but underrated film

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

This film only heightens Edgar Ulmer's fame as a great director even if it isn't as great as Detour was.The opening has one detective tracking down another, and the fistfight that follows leads to an intriguing story told in flashback that begins with a scene of a murdered man face-down on a carpet of an apartment with his face in a fireplace, which turns out to be an important part of the plot. Why was one detective beating up the other? Well, the other had fallen in love with the supposed murderer of the dead man in the apartment. After she's convicted of the murder, while he's escorting her on a long train ride to prison, she sees the supposed dead man while looking out the window of the moving train. He's standing on the platform of a station the train had passed by. This has elements of Detour in it, if I remember correctly. In any event, said detective becomes convinced of the possibility of the woman's (Barbara Payton) innocence and they actually jump off the moving train together to get to the bottom of the case. What a brilliant use of the limited funds available to make this movie. But it gets much better as they move closer to the truth, with the owners of a ceramics company (it wasn't Bauer Pottery but it could have been). I couldn't stop watching Murder Is My Beat.

The other reviewer did not have anything good to say about this movie. Well, it is cheaply made and obviously, Edward Ulmer didn't have much of a budget. He mostly directed B-movies anyway. However, this was one of his later films and his star was Barbara Payton. Her sad sad life was on the down-swing at the time she did this, her final film. She was only 28 years old and this marked the end of her career which had started only five years earlier. If you watch this film, you will see a very good performance by Barbara Payton. This may not be a true film-noir, but it is a dark, downbeat drama with a great musical score. I believe this is worth 77 minutes of viewing time. Enjoy!

A man's body is found face down in a fireplace, face and fingerprints charred beyond identification. Clues lead to his mistress, bar singer Barbara Payton (alas, we get to hear nary a note). Homicide cop Ray Patrick tracks her to a mountain cabin, but a blizzard forces them to spend a (chaste) night together, and she starts to get under his skin. On the train back to Los Angeles, she spots the man who was presumed murdered standing on a platform; against his better judgement, Patrick joins her on the lam to uncover the truth -- a confusing pastiche involving her roommate, a double blackmail scheme, the wrong body and, somehow, ceramic figurines....Of all the directors who started out in European cinema but fled to America, Edgar G. Ulmer worked with the most crippling resources. In Murder Is My Beat, he returns to Detour's depressing terrain of thrown-together fugitives holing up in crummy motels. But instead of the full-tilt, well, savagery of Ann Savage, there's the catatonic passivity of Barbara Payton, a beaten-down, ill-used blonde. (How much of this depends on acting ability is anybody's guess. At this final outpost of her movie career -- five years earlier, she'd been James Cagney's moll in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye -- Payton had already begun her sad drift toward the demimonde.) Though the story relies too much on explication rather than exposition, its fatalistic inertia keeps the viewer interested but off balance. It's another cheapie noir saved from utter mediocrity by the genuine, if compromised, talents of its director.

Mid way through this movie there is a scene at a figurine factory complete with workers on the assembly line. It has nothing really to do with the movie and looks like it was taken straight taken from one of those 50s instructional films. It may have been the peak of Murder is my Beat.