Anti-hate circa 1949

Jigsaw delivers a fair 1940s crime drama involving a hate group, with cameo appearances by stars who give it the effect of a public service announcement at the beginning of the Hollywood political blacklist period.

Actor Fletcher Markle’s 72-minute début as writer-director does not flesh out the shadowy right-wing “Crusade” at the heart of the story, more than to highlight a fraternity of double-breasted miscreants who assert their “inalienable right” to hate aliens in their “Fight for America”. Nor does Markle identify the aliens. But the rascals and the brain behind them will be no surprise to viewers in the Trump era. Reporter Charles Riggs (Myron McCormick) tells Manhattan prosecutor Howard Malloy (Franchot Tone): “Now we got people around who want to make people hate each other, be afraid of each other, just so they can make money out of it. I don’t like that.”

Our synopsis contains no plot-spoilers. The story opens with the murder of a small printing press owner on an ominously empty block of West 31st Street. Malloy is the man-about-Manhattan assistant district attorney assigned to the case. He is engaged to Caroline Riggs (Doe Avedon), sister of the intrepid independent reporter hot on the Crusade’s trail.

Malloy meets Charlie Riggs in a midtown bar for his lowdown on the organization. Riggs declines to share specifics; he assures Malloy he is close to breaking a story. He leaves ordering a last round and tells Malloy to pick up the tab. Malloy tells Jack the bartender that he never drinks alone. “That can be fixed,” says Jack (Burgess Meredith in cameo), raising and downing Riggs’s abandoned drink.

The plot leads Malloy to a singer in a fancy midtown supper club, The Blue Angel. This was an actual club on West 55th Street. Soon after Malloy and Caroline Riggs arrive, the singer takes a break and an actual blue angel leaves the club—Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich sang in a German dive of the same name in her 1930 breakout film, Der blaue Engel, from which the supper club took its name. A waiter comes to take their order—Henry Fonda, like Steve Buscemi at Jackrabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction, though Fonda was a much bigger star. When Malloy asks the waiter when the show starts, we hear Fonda’s distinct voice condescend to reply: “That was the supper act”.

The singer Barbara Whitfield is Jean Wallace, Tone’s wife at the time, with whom his character has better chemistry than with his fiancée in the story. Modern viewers probably will not recognize celebrities of that period such as the actors John Garfield, Everett Sloane, and Marsha Hunt in their brief walk-ons. Markle himself, New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons, and socialite Brenda Frazier also appear in cameo roles.

The aliens do not include Angelo Agostini (Marc Lawrence), a hardscrabble ethnic Italian fixer with mob connections. We learn that the Crusade issues uniforms and insignia, see it try to intimidate the weak and use a gunsel named “Knuckles” Miller (George Breen in his sole movie appearance) to do its wet work.

It is no coincidence that the film came out at the beginning of the blacklist era which gained momentum in October 1947 when the US House Un-American Activities Committee began to subpoena people working in the Hollywood film industry to testify at hearings about alleged communist sympathies. Many actors in Jigsaw were left-leaning; Meredith, under suspicion at the time, subsequently was among those blacklisted. Dietrich voted with her feet twenty years earlier against this kind of behavior in other circumstances. 

Otto Preminger bookended the Hollywood blacklist era in his 1962 classic Advise & Consent when he brought Tone and Fonda together as a left-leaning president and his Secretary of State appointee opposed by zealous right-wingers, and cast the blacklisted Meredith as an evidence-giving Red.

Jigsaw (1949) US (72 minutes). Directed by Fletcher Markle; screenplay by Markle and Vincent O’Connor, based on a story by Joe Roeburt; cinematography by Don Malkames; edited by Robert Matthews; music by Robert W. Stringer; produced by Edward J. and Harry Lee Danziger.