Synopsis: Pete Marshall is a pollster sent into the countryside to find Smedley, a colleague who has vanished without a trace. Marshall inadvertently stumbles upon Smedley's killers, the outlaw Fleagle family, who are holed up in their relatives' house in the hope of convincing Grandma Fleagle to divulge the location of $70,000, which the notorious criminal Bonnie Fleagle hid before landing in jail. Pete Marshall evades the family's constant attempts to bump him off, but further complications ensue when a young woman posing as Bonnie Fleagle arrives at the door.

Murder, He Says (1945) is an infrequently seen but very funny dark comedy set in a remote mountain community, clearly intended to represent the Ozarks. (The director and producer George Marshall went so far as to make the cast study recordings of native Arkansas speakers to guide their accents.) The film is partly a send-up of films about the South such as John Ford's Tobacco Road (1941), and partly a hillbilly-inflected parody of the Gothic horror genre, complete with a ramshackle secret passageway and a sinister figure peering at the characters through peepholes. At the same time, Murder, He Says works as an outright slapstick farce, especially during the cleverly staged climax in which various characters chase each other in the house's large basement. Another effective element is the convincing optical effects for the scenes where Peter Whitney plays the twins Mert and Bert; indeed, the effects still look better here than in many more recent Hollywood films with the same "identical twins" gimmick.

Chicago-born George Marshall (1891-1975) had one of the longest careers of any major Hollywood director; his films spanned more than fifty years from his first short Westerns in 1915-1916 to his last feature, the Jerry Lewis comedy Hook, Line and Sinker (1969). Marshall arrived in Hollywood in 1912 and quickly worked in a range of capacities from bit players to prop man, editor, script writer and cameraman before going on to direct feature films. After serving in World War I, he returned to Hollywood and directed a large number of shorts, including the Bobby Jones golfing comedies. He returned to feature film production only in 1932. Already a well-established comic director, Marshall began to introduce comedy -- and even elements of parody -- into his genre films starting with Destry Rides Again (1939). The Bob Hope vehicle The Ghost Breakers (1940) similarly sent up the Gothic genre and remains one of the more successful horror comedies alongside Murder, He Says. Marshall's taste in black humor extended to a "Blue Dahlia"-themed party that he threw for a group of mystery writers in 1946 at the restaurant Lucey's, shortly after the opening of his classic noir film by the same title. When the lights went out, the chef was found "dead" on the table, and the writers all had to come up with an explanation of how he was murdered.

Marjorie Main gives one of her more memorable performances as Mamie, the horsewhip-snapping, murderous matriarch who is on her third husband. In many ways, her performance here sets the stage for her Oscar®-nominated role in The Egg and I (1947). The same year that Murder, He Says was released, the 96th Infantry Division awarded Marjorie Main the title "Occupation Girl," dubbing her "a rough girl for a rough division." According to Michelle Vogel, author of a recent biography of Marjorie Main, one sergeant in the division wrote her a letter declaring, "With a shotgun in one hand and a horsewhip in the other, you are truly the epitome of all that the 96th Division has accomplished." The following year, Main traveled up to San Francisco to greet the Division when it docked. In the spirit of her award, she wore a cowgirl outfit and carried a gun and whip. However, Murder, He Says is a true ensemble piece: in addition to Fred MacMurray's excellent comic lead, one would be remiss in failing to acknowledge the considerable contributions of Porter Hall as Mamie's third husband, the conniving Mr. Johnson, Jean Heather as the Ophelia-like mad cousin Elany, and Peter Whitney as the bumbling twins Mert and Bert.

During the film's initial release, the reviewer for the New York Times didn't quite know what to make of its black comedy, calling it a "farce melodrama" and titling the review rather ungenerously as "The Lowest Depths." The reviewer for Variety gave it even more of a mixed evaluation, writing: "Laughs clock heavily and pace moves so quickly audiences won't have a chance to discover it is a lot to-do about nothing and thinly premised until it's well over." Today, many critics regard it as one of George Marshall's strongest comedies and in general one of the better comedies of the era.

Producer and Director: George Marshall
Associate Producer: E. D. Leshin
Screenplay: Lou Breslow, based on a story by Jack Moffitt
Director of Photography: Theodor Sparkuhl
Art Direction: Hans Dreier and William Flannery
Film Editor: LeRoy Stone
Music: Robert Emmett Dolan
Costumes: Mary Kay Dodson
Cast: Fred MacMurray (Pete Marshall); Helen Walker (Claire Matthews); Marjorie Main (Mamie Fleagle Smithers Johnson); Jean Heather (Elany Fleagle); Porter Hall (Mr. Johnson); Peter Whitney (Mert Fleagle/Bert Fleagle); Mabel Paige (Grandma Fleagle); Barbara Pepper (Bonnie Fleagle); Tom Fadden (Ben Murdock); Walter Baldwin (Vic Hardy); George McKay (Phil Grady); Joel Friedkin (Tunk Thorsen).
BW-87m. Letterboxed. Closed Captioning. Descriptive Video.

by James Steffen

Sources:
Review of Murder He Says. Variety, April 11, 1945.
"The Lowest Depths." (Review of Murder He Says.) New York Times, June 25, 1945, p.20.
Hopper, Hedda. "Looking at Hollywood." Los Angeles Times, July 12, 1946, p. A2.
Vogel, Michelle. Marjorie Main: the life and films of Hollywood's "Ma Kettle." Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006.