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A Masterpiece!

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Franchot Tone stars with then-wife Jean Wallace in "Jigsaw" from 1949. It's a B movie with lots of cameos from stars, I guess who were friends of the director, Fletcher Markle, or friends with someone: John Garfield, Henry Fonda, Marlene Dietrich, Marsha Hunt, Burgess Meredith, Everett Sloan, and Brenda Frazier, in roles like a bartender, a waiter, a nightclub singer, etc.This is a real mess of a movie despite the cast. The DA (Walter Vaughn) thinks the death of a print shop owner was suicide, but the ADA (Tone) believes it was murder, connected to an extremist group, "The Crusaders." I think they were supposed to be Communists.Then a journalist who has attacked the group is killed, and Malloy becomes certain The Crusaders are behind it. Investigating, he meets a strange political boss and an attractive singer (Wallace). Either they can help him or are part of a cover up.I really couldn't figure out if this group was really subversive or just a money-making scam; the script kind of waffled between the two. The only reason to see this is for the cameos and the cast, although in my opinion, Jean Wallace couldn't act her way out of a phone booth.At the time of this film she was recently divorced from Tone and would later marry Cornell Wilde. Tone would go on to become involved with starlet Barbara Payton, whose boyfriend Tom Neal would put him in the hospital. In a way, these people's real-life stories are more interesting than this movie.

I got this film from one of those public domain mega-packs on DVD. While this is not a bad film, I can see why the film makers didn't bother renewing the copyright--it just wasn't all that interesting. Most of the problem seems to be with the writing. The plot seems to bounce all over the place and where the film began seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with where it ended. Had all the dull moments and irrelevant plots been eliminated or polished, I really would have enjoyed the film a lot more than I did.Franchot Tone plays a prosecutor with the DA's office who is initially looks into the case of a White supremacist who might have been murdered. Whether or not this is the case is uncertain, but when Tone's newspaper friend is killed when he tries investigating (again, it was made to look like a suicide), he knows that there is some sort of conspiracy afoot. However, instead of trying to bash heads and get to the bottom of it, he infiltrates an organization that might be behind all this--as well as buying and selling public officials.As I said, the writing was pretty poor. However, for film nuts like myself, it's still worth seeing for all the strange and unexpected cameos, such as Henry Fonda and John Garfield (among others). Not a good movie but it has enough to it that it isn't a total waste of time seeing it--not exactly a glowing review, huh?!

This is an effective minor film noir with some good acting and sharp dialog. Although the quality of the print (Classic Film Noir, Volume 2) and sound track is inferior, the cinematography is good with plenty of well-composed shots. The movie is flawed by clumsy direction and uneven editing but there are many scenes where everything comes together nicely and flows smoothly. Franchot Tone's suave performance as a special prosecutor is convincing and is supported by a good cast. The rambling convoluted plot about his investigation of a commercial Neo-Nazi "hate-group" business is important social commentary that elevates the movie above the typical crime dramas of that era.Not a great movie but one with redeeming features.

Many purists will find this film not a noir. A great deal of the cinematography,lighting and camera angles, however, is textbook noir and this alone makes the film worth watching. Jean Wallace plays herself but it's a great play. The main character is sufficiently morally ambiguous--he knows his promotion comes from dubious sources and when he defeats these sources we don't see him disavowing the new job. The political angle doesn't work today in the way it might have at the time; watching this 1949 film today it's worth recalling that this was a period, just before McCarthy and Korea, when everything seemed up for grabs in the U.S. Prosperity was still, for a lot of folks, 'just around the corner' and the film in some ways portrays the fear that Nazis, communists, whoever, had infiltrated social and political elites. The director and others involved were part of the Mercury Theater grouping, associated in various ways with Orson Welles. There's a remarkable sequence in the party scene in the middle of the film where the camera assumes first person position...a bit like the earlier Lady in the Lake by Robert Montgomery, for a few minutes. I found the use of voice-over and first person camera an interesting wrinkle on noir's interrogation if the 'inner subject.' Markle would go on to head the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and had earlier worked as an uncredited screenwriter for Orson Welles.