Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Her Adventurous Night (1946)

Dennis O'Keefe is about to leave on a fishing trip. He and his wife (Helen Walker) and their imaginative son (Scotty Beckett) talk about the Midvale Bank killing, which happened about the time that his parents left. He is in constant trouble at school because of making up stories about the faculty. O'Keefe's unloaded gun falls out of the car as he drops Beckett off at school, so he tucks it into this belt. He visualizes the front door as a trap, so he and buddy crawl in through the basement. He drops the gun and it goes off. The police are called in, and in order to keep them from calling back his father, he makes up a story to connect the gun to the Midvale case. He launches into an imaginative tale, which the police take as genuine testimony.

The bank robber flees. Walker was driving down a country road and swerves to avoid O'Keefe's telephone repair truck, and gets stuck in the mud. She bums a ride from him, but he has to stop to make more repairs enroute. Just then the bank robber roars by, pursued by the police, bullets flying. O'Keefe is now smitten, but they have a Donnybrook first. In the middle of the fight, the robber pops up from the back of the truck with a gun. Because the vehicle breaks down, they have to hike it, and he ends up carrying her until they find a car the robber can steal. But the car owner stops them with a gun. The robber says they are newlyweds, and the car owner puts them up for the night. Finally the killer flees. It turns out that the killer, in Beckett's imagination, is the principal.

They call in O'Keefe from his fishing trip and he is furious with Beckett. They arrest O'Keefe and Walker. Since they cannot stop him now, Beckett launches into a full scale investigation of the crime - and solves it, but it was not the principal, but a supposed salesman.




Walker


Beckett

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