Tell No Tales (1939)

Melvyn Douglas' newspaper is being shut down by corporate mogul Douglas Dumbrille. However, his bartender notes that the bill that Douglas gave him is money used to pay the ransom in a kidnapping case. He goes to Dumbrille to beg for one more day for the paper so he can track the bill to the kidnappers, but no dice, and he has to flee. He has to get the only witness (Louise Platt) to the kidnapping out of a girls' school to help him. She is under close police protection. By posing as an attorney, Douglas persuades her to leave, and they slip out. While he is talking to the man who might have passed the bill, Platt slips away.

Next Douglas goes to Halliwell Hobbes' house. He had treated the shoulder of a black fighter who paid him with a $100 bill. He is able to name the man. Platt comes back because she has no money to pay the taxi fee. He sends her to stay with a friend, but she is kidnapped right after Douglas leaves. Next he goes to see the fighter called "The Cat," but he has been run over by a car, and the family is mourning for him. (Mantan Moreland is among the mourners.) His wife said that she gave him the bill. Next he goes to a concert where Florence George is performing. The Cat's wife was her maid. He calls his friend to check on Platt and learns that she never arrived. Pretending to be at a loss, he goes back to Dumbrille, who was the one who gave the bill to the maid. He says he got the bill at the gambling joint of Gene Lockhart, whom he knows.

Lockhart says that a couple of mobsters came in on the night the bills were there. But after Douglas leaves, Lockhart goes to his brother (Tom Collins) and tells him that he was in on the job and kicks him out. Collins' buddies pick up Douglas and tie them in the back of a truck. (They already have Platt.) Collins helps them escape, but his leg is injured in the jump from the truck. The thugs notice they are gone and find them with a spotlight, but they make it an abandoned house. Douglas overpowers one of them and has him summon his partner. They take them to the newspaper office, and there discover that Collins is dead. Douglas and his pressman put out another copy of the paper by themselves.

Platt asks him for a job, but he remembers that he does not have a job, either. But Dumbrille, after taking a chewing out by an elderly female employee, announces that the paper will stay open.





Platt