Backfire (1950)

Edmond O'Brien has to tell his ex-GI buddy Gordon MacRae after his operation that he is not going to be able to begin ranching immediately because of his surgery. Nurse Virginia Mayo cares for MacRae in the hospital. They have fallen in love. That night Viveca Lindfors slips into his room and tells him that O'Brien has been hurt and is calling for him. She says he is suffering terribly and wants to be put out of his pain. MacRae tells her to tell him to hang on until he can get to him. She supposedly wrote her address on a pad and left it for him, but the doctor tells him it was a hallucination. Then he gets a telegram from O'Brien from Chicago, saying that everything is fine. After MacRae is released from the hospital, the police pick him up. Captain Ed Begley tells him that O'Brien is wanted for the murder of Richard Rober. There is a flashback as Begley tells MacRae the details of when they attempted to arrest O'Brien. They have no proof of his guilt, but he is the #1 suspect, especially since he ran. MacRae says he may not have come back because he was injured, and Begley agrees to play along with him.

MacRae starts looking for O'Brien. He pays his overdue phone bill at the hotel. Ida Moore, the housemaid, tells MacRae about O'Brien while he was there. She mentions $40,000 that O'Brien and Rober were fighting about. Rober was blackmailing O'Brien about overdue taxes. MacRae locates Dane Clark, who was a service buddy and now runs a mortuary. He had seen O'Brien in a boxing match, but not since. MacRae and Mayo go to see Frances Robinson, Rober's widow, but she tells them little. MacRae calls the numbers that O'Brien called when he was staying at the hotel. One of them was to Sheila Stephens. He goes to her house, finds the extra key, and enters. In the house he finds a picture of the woman who visited him in the hospital. Her roommate comes in, and he pretends to be Lindfors' boyfriend. She mentions a man named Lou Walsh, for whom O'Brien had worked. After MacRae leaves, the girl is shot. The gun that killed her killed Rober.

Then word comes that Leonard Strong has been shot on skid row, and keeps mumbling about O'Brien. Lou Walsh had released the brake on a car, causing it to crush O'Brien's legs because he was trying to run away with Lindfors. Mayo slips into the office of the doctor who worked on Walsh. She observes the doctor burning the record of O'Brien's accident. He catches her, and locks her in a side room. He calls MacRae and tells him where O'Brien is, but is shot by Walsh immediately after he does. Mayo hears all this. She calls the police. When MacRae gets to the address, it turns out that Walsh is really Clark. He is insanely jealous because Lindfors would not tell him that she loved him, and had strangled her. While they are talking, O'Brien manages to get out of bed and diverts Clark's attention enough to stall him until the police arrive.




Mayo and MacRae