The Missing Juror

Close your eyes whenever Jim Bannon is on screen in Budd Boetticher’s The Missing Juror and you’ll immediately understand why he began his career as a radio announcer, including playing Detective Jack Packard in the “I Love a Mystery” serial. While radio may be Bannon’s more natural medium, his co-stars here are two of film noir’s most enjoyable yet underutilized performers: George Macready and Janis Carter. Bannon plays newspaper reporter Joe Keats, on the case of a madman who’s killing each juror, one by one, who had convicted Harry Wharton (Macready) of murdering his wife only for exonerating evidence to emerge shortly thereafter. Keats befriends one particularly beautiful juror, Alice Hill (Carter), recently hired as an interior decorator by a mysterious man named Bentley, who may be dangerously connected to the Wharton case. (Whenever a body is “burned beyond recognition” in noir, you can be sure a case of stolen identity is imminent.) Boetticher and crew paint admirably with a noir brush, using shadows and silhouettes to add a layer of alienation and an occasional Gothic sheen, particularly in the final sequence in Bentley’s home. An uncredited Mike Mazurki plays a masseuse who saves Keats’s life, but the main thespian thrill is Macready, who can play mania and mental disintegration like few others.