Nocturne

After opening credits, the camera swoops down onto a tree house-like mansion overlooking Los Angeles lights from its mountainside perch, zooming through a sliding glass door to reveal cocky pianist Keith Vincent (Edward Ashley) tapping away at his keyboard, composing a new song he’s calling “Nocturne” for the woman he’s currently dumping who sits unidentifiable in the shadows, then recounting his previous affairs with all the women whose songs he’s written and whose portraits line his walls, until his long, self-aggrandizing monologue is cut off by a bullet to his head. A tense, winding mystery that makes the most of its second-tier cast, Edwin Marin’s Nocturne stars George Raft as Police Lieutenant Joe Warne, who’s called in to investigate Vincent’s death, which is initially ruled a suicide. His first clue, one woman’s portrait missing from the pianist’s wall, leads him to savvy, mysterious, brilliantly named Frances Ransom (the always underrated Lynn Bari), her sister Carol Paige (Virginia Huston), and a variety of shady characters hanging around the Keyboard Club, like pianist Ned “Fingers” Ford (Joseph Pevney) and violent thug Eric Torp (Bernard Hoffman). Myrna Dell is entertaining in the role of Susan Flanders, the victim’s bitter, blond housekeeper (“What am I supposed to do, bust out weeping?”), and Mabel Paige is a natural as Warne’s mother. Marin combines the nightclub milieu with shadows and streetlamps to create a quintessentially noir setting while keeping the whodunit up in the air for the duration. Note the successfully extended tension when Warne enters the photographer’s home studio on a windy night, curtains flapping and doors slamming, the crunch of a flash bulb beneath his foot sounding like gunfire, only silence escorting him to a grim discovery.