ACCOMPLICE

US, 1946, 68 minutes, Black-and-white.
Richard Arlen, Vida Ann Borg, Tom Dugan, Archie Twitchell, Marjorie Manners, Earle Hodgins, Francis Ford.
Directed by Walter Colmes.

This is very much a B-budget film. It has the touch of the film noir. It is also a story of a private eye.

Richard Arlen, veteran of such classics in the 1920s as Wings and The Virginian, is a private eye, with a strong reputation, working with an assistant, Tom Dugan, humorous and tough, engaged in doing all the footwork, is approached by a former girlfriend, Vida Ann Borg. Her husband is missing, claims of amnesia. He works at a bank, the detective approaches the head of the bank, discovers more suspicious information about the missing husband, his dealings in a mink farm, his setting up a girlfriend in a hotel apartment.

The wife of the missing man becomes more and more suspicious character, a blonde femme fatale. She identifies a dead body as her husband – but it turns out to be the head of the bank, the girlfriend also murdered.

The detective is under suspicion from the local sheriff. But he then goes on a trip to New Mexico, to an old ruined mansion, a scheme set up by two conmen, and a revelation that the husband is still alive, is working on a plot with his wife – and there is a final shootout.

A time-passer from the mid 1940s.