ROSES ARE RED (1947)

Peggy Ford is found dead in her apartment, a red rose clutched in her hand. In her purse is found a picture of the new district attorney, Robert Thorne, who has come into the office on a platform of cleaning up corruption. Mob boss Jim Locke isn't happy about this declaration and neither is police officer Rocky Wall who is on Locke's payroll. The picture turns out to be of a crook named Don Carney; Carney and Thorne look exactly alike, even to both having pencil-thin mustaches (it seemed to me that one mustache was a bit scruffier than the other, but it was hard to tell). As Thorne takes the oath of office in the presence of his girlfriend Martha, Carney gets out of prison on parole and stops in to see his wife Jill. As the cops put the finger on one of Locke’s men for the murder of Peggy, Locke gets a bright idea: kidnap Thorne and have Carney study him and replace him so Locke can save his criminal enterprise, which will eventually entail having Thorne killed. This B-crime film is interesting but lacks the talent and imagination to make it special. What the movie does best is the dual role business. Don Castle plays both Thorne and Carney; there's not much differentiation between the two in Castle's performances, but we manage to tell them apart. The scenes in which they meet up are effective, done not with split screen but with one character seated or standing in front of rear screen projection of the other character as they interact (as pictured). Castle is a bit lightweight but I usually like him so I cut him some slack here. Also good is Joe Sawyer as the crooked cop Rocky. Everyone else is no more than serviceable. The two female leads, Peggy Knudson as Martha and Patricia Knight as Jill, don't actually look alike but they feel interchangeable. Familiar faces in supporting parts include Paul Guilfoyle and Douglas Fowley as thugs, James Arness as a (very tall) cop, and Charles Lane as a lawyer. Jeff Chandler has one of his earliest credited roles as a killer, but all the bad guys blend together. Edward Keane, as Locke, confined to a wheelchair, is disappointingly low energy. There's not a lot of tension, though a scene in which Thorne, pretending to be Carney pretending to be Thorne, meets up with Carney's wife, is good. The ending feels a bit rushed but the final shootout is handled well. The opening murder is never really explained, and the rose (in Peggy's hand and in the title) means nothing. [YouTube]