Quiet Please, Murder (1942)

          George Sanders and Richard Denning in the same movie is a nice formula for success. This time Sanders is the bad guy, who shoots a librarian and steals a rare book. Gail Patrick is his girlfriend who in the beginning is in on the scheme. She sells a copy of Hamlet to Sidney Blackmer, a German spy, who spots it as a phoney and murders the dealer who set up the deal. Denning is a detective investigating the theft from the library. Now Patrick is on the spot and when Denning offers to keep her from blame if she helps him nab Sanders, she agrees.
          Most of the movie takes place in the public library, a strange place for a mystery. Blackmer mistakes Denning for Sanders and tries to make him give up the money from the forgery. Later Blackmer is murdered, and Sanders poses as a detective from homicide. He has all his cohorts lined up for a full scale murder investigation, but what he is looking for are the priceless books from the libary's collection, which have mysteriously disappeared. Everyone who had been in the library are confined, supposedly under police custody.
          What follows is a film "noir" if darkness is a requisite for the genre, because most of the scenes are in the shadows. There are chase scenes through the book stacks in the library. Denning keeps trying to figure out who is who and who is on who's side.
          This a distinctly and deliberately understated movie, but do not let that fool you. It is a thriller in the fullest sense of the word, and very well done. Definitely a "keeper."




Patrick