APOLOGY FOR MURDER

 

I recently finished reading a book titled FROM THE MOMENT THEY MET IT WAS MURDER: DOUBLE INDEMNITY AND THE RISE OF FILM NOIR by Alain Silver and James Ursini. The book carries the Turner Classic Movies label, and it takes a deep dive into the making of DOUBLE INDEMNITY, the talent involved in it, and the history and use of the term "film noir". 

One subject the book covers is a 1945 film made by the Poverty Row company PRC called APOLOGY FOR MURDER. Authors Silver and Ursini state that the PRC production is an unofficial remake of DOUBLE INDEMNITY. I had no idea that APOLOGY FOR MURDER even existed, so I decided to track it down and see for myself (APOLOGY FOR MURDER can be found on YouTube and the Internet Archive). 

Without doubt APOLOGY FOR MURDER is a cheap knockoff of DOUBLE INDEMNITY. It uses nearly every element of Billy Wilder's classic film, but it makes slight variations on the material. It's almost fascinating from a film geeks standpoint to watch DOUBLE INDEMNITY and APOLOGY FOR MURDER one after the other to see how PRC pulled this off, and avoided getting sued in the bargain. (Apparently PRC was planning to call their film SINGLE INDEMNITY--I find it hard to believe that even they would have gone that far. Maybe they should have called the film APOLOGY TO PARAMOUNT.) 

In APOLOGY FOR MURDER, the two scheming lovers are played by Hugh Beaumont and Ann Savage. Beaumont's Kenny Blake is a newspaper reporter, and he meets Savage's Toni Kirkland when he goes to interview her husband Harvey Kirkland (Russell Hicks), a rich businessman who is much older than his wife. In literally just a few minutes, Kenny and Toni start up an affair, and it isn't much longer than that when Toni brings up the idea to murder her husband before he divorces her and leaves her with nothing. Kenny is first shocked by the idea, but he's so obsessed with Toni he goes ahead with it, sealing the couple's ultimate doom. 

Needless to say, APOLOGY FOR MURDER can't in any way compete with DOUBLE INDEMNITY. APOLOGY doesn't have anywhere near the budget, talent, or the running time (it lasts just a little over an hour). There's no subtlety or nuance in APOLOGY. In DOUBLE INDEMNITY Fred MacMurray is a cynical guy with a chip on shoulder, while Hugh Beaumont comes off as a dope way over his head. Ann Savage's Toni doesn't have the layers of villainous complexity that Barbara Stanwyck had in the Wilder classic. Toni is just plain greedy. 

In DOUBLE INDEMNITY the killing of the lead female's husband is carried out at night, and a stretch of lonely railroad track is used to dump the body. In APOLOGY FOR MURDER the killing happens in broad daylight, at the side of a dirt road out in the country. The seedy atmosphere of ordinary Los Angeles locations prevalent in DOUBLE INDEMNITY is nowhere to be found in APOLOGY FOR MURDER. 

APOLOGY FOR MURDER's equivalent of the Edward G. Robinson character in DOUBLE INDEMNITY is Ward McKee (Charles D. Brown), the editor at Kenny's newspaper. Like Robinson in the earlier film, McKee has a sixth sense that Harvey Kirkland was murdered, and he has a running gag with Kenny concerning them lighting the other's smokes. Brown isn't as ingratiating as Robinson is, but to be fair, the script doesn't allow him to be. 

Low budget maven Sam Newfield directed APOLOGY FOR MURDER. Newfield certainly wasn't in Billy Wilder's class (although he did wind up making hundreds of films and TV shows). APOLOGY does come off a bit better than the usual PRC product (which isn't saying much), but if it didn't have the DOUBLE INDEMNITY rip-off tag, it wouldn't generate any interest whatsoever. Many Poverty Row features from the 1940s have fallen off the face of the earth, and I now wonder what other "remakes" PRC and similar companies whipped up that I have no knowledge of.