Bodyguard

Richard Fleischer’s Bodyguard is a minor noir, but interesting for a few reasons: the story was the first screen credit of soon-to-be-auteur Robert Altman, it’s set in the New York meatpacking milieu, and Lawrence Tierney plays a good guy. After his suspension for insubordination, police detective Mike Carter (Tierney) is hired as bodyguard for Gene Tysen, the owner of Consolidated Meat Packing, who’s been receiving anonymous death threats, including a bullet flying through her mansion window the moment Carter’s hired. We learn that a meat inspector had been murdered in the plant, soon followed by the murder of the police inspector assigned to investigate. While not the evil villain this time, Tierney still brings his entertaining, hard-boiled style (“It’s about as cozy in here as Grand Central Station”) and calls the butler Dracula. Cinematographer Robert De Grasse toys with extreme close-ups — Carter’s firing, Carter’s eye exam — and finds plenty of opportunities for expressionistic lighting, like when Carter’s fiancée Doris Brewster (Priscilla Lane) breaks into the packing plant, which commences an extended final sequence in which we learn butchers have no talent with guns.