Twenty Plus Two
Director: Joseph Newman
Year: 1961
Rating: 6.0
This is a low budget black and white independent
production that managed to get a fine cast on board. It is a detective story
that is as complicated and convoluted as a Lew Archer story - filled with
coincidences and assumed identities. That is a good thing in my book. For
much of its 102-minute running time I was in the dark where I was meant to
be. How are the murder of a secretary, a movie star, a missing girl for twelve
years and a man looking for his brother all connected? It begins to come
together for the viewer in a lengthy flashback when you go, oh I think I
sort of get it. But not all of it.
Tom Alder (David Janssen) is a detective
but his cases involve looking for missing heirs. It is happy work he says
when he tells people that money is coming their way. And not dangerous. Nose
to the grindstone sort of thing. Make connections. But he has always been
fascinated by the case when a girl from a very wealthy family in NYC went
to the malt shop and never came back. 12 years ago. When a secretary is murdered
in her office and papers clearly searched - he notices that she has a stack
of news clippings from that old case. It puzzles him. And he tries to put
some pieces together. He visits the girl's mother (Agnes Moorehead), questions
an old time reporter (William Demarest) and wonders why a fat man has come
to him to look for his brother at this moment. The same man he spotted outside
of the office of the dead secretary.
He runs into an old girlfriend (Jeanne Crain)
who dumped him when he was in Korea fighting and she seems to want him back.
He is tempted. He still loves her but he knows poison once he has tasted
it. Her friend enters the picture on a flight when they are seated together.
She (Dina Merrill) is vaguely familiar but he can't place her. Janssen
has all his acting tics in place that we saw so often during the TV show
the Fugitive. The furtive smile, the grimace, the dog-eyed look. It worked.
Could have been 20 minutes shorter but an intriguing detective film where
it is all brain and no brawn. Only a really intrusive soundtrack with blaring
trumpets in scenes that made no sense bothered me.
