I gave it the old college try. It gave me the old army game. It seems I just don't like Cover Up (1949).

I don't mind that it isn't a Christmas noir. Whatever the advertisements of its hard-boiled title and the gun-drawn silhouette of its credits, its runaround is compactly established as soon as Sam Donovan of Federated Insurance (Dennis O'Keefe) steps off the bus in idyllically Midwestern Cleberg to spend his Christmas investigating the apparent suicide of the least popular man in town. Per double indemnity, that $20,000 policy doesn't pay out if he really shot himself—ditto if one of his beneficiaries did it instead, although Sam's read on the Phillips case is professionally routine. "With any luck, I think I might be out of here by tonight." What should have been a done-and-dusting interview with the folksily leather-jacketed Sheriff Larry Best (William Bendix), however, makes it clear that the visitor with his gallant armful of packages and the citified flair of his paisley scarf is in for the Summerisle treatment, his most upfront questions deflected and deferred with a plausible-deniable civility that leaves him in possession of a minimum of evidence and a maximum of suspicion. The coroner is out of town for the holiday, the jeweler who discovered the body hedges the details, the undertaker lets slip a discrepancy in the forensics and the sheriff offers his own Luger as cheerful exhibit of all the ex-servicemen's souvenirs that could match the minimal ballistics, opining meanwhile on the slow-burning merits of a pipe over a pack of impatient cigarettes. The dead man's niece wants none of the money, double or not. Not half an hour in town, an incredulous Sam's clocked his B-picture's premise: "Looks to me like this guy Phillips was murdered. In fact the whole town knows it and nobody seems to care!"

The merits of this set-up are not nil. In particular, the Christmas of it all lends an extra sheen of unease to Sam's almost complete inability to make any headway on the Phillips case, the more agreeably because it's done almost without irony. As pastorally as the town is sketched with its bell-ringing Santa and wreathed storefronts and season's greetings exchanged by neighborly name, the insurance investigator is efficiently a loner who lives for his job, characteristically dismissing a comment on his chain-smoking with the ergonomically glib, "I know, it saves a lot of time." Encouraged to relax for the holiday, he tucks a package back under the office's carefully baubled mini-tree with the awkwardness of a touched nerve: "Sounds great . . . Only I haven't got any folks and my home's wherever I happen to hang my hat." Even before we learn that he isn't natively an urban sharpie but a displaced small-towner himself, the appeal of Cleberg to Sam is Hallmark-transparent, especially with the meet-cute guide of Anita Weatherby (Barbara Britton) attuning him to its homespun rhythms one movie date and tree-lighting at a time. Her father is one of its leading citizens, her younger sister boy-crazily enchanted with the newcomer, the maid as tartly unimpressed with him as if he'd been calling for months. Anita nudges him that he flirts like he's selling a policy and a freckle-faced kid twists around in his seat during the newsreel to ask if they're going to kiss, which even better than gee-whiz matchmaking turns out to be a hustle for bowling money. "You know, I haven't done anything like this in years," Sam marvels at the end of the night, sounding as surprised by his own unstressed sweetness as by the archetypally wholesome environment that fostered it. "Movie, soda in the corner drugstore, walk your girl home, kiss her goodnight—" It's a readymade family Christmas, straight off the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. It's the most wonderful time of the year and every lead he pursues on his dogged rounds dead-ends in someone lying to an obviously ludicrous degree. A gun vanishes, a fur coat burns. The film really isn't folk horror, but the stonewall of his welcome produces something of the same parallax of coziness and creep, above all the ease with which an outsider could just fall into the place prepared for him and can't let himself so long as no one's giving him a straight answer—the only one of the townspeople even willing to acknowledge the kayfabe is a conflicted Anita and she's so direct and distressed in her plea to drop the investigation, she plainly regards it as more of a threat than an unsolved murder in the placid, prosperous haven of her post-war home town. Sam reiterates his commitment to the truth regardless of consequences; without the city slicker's romanticized respect for the white picket life, he's not afraid of turning over rocks or spinning up the rumor mill. Genre-savvily, he teases the convenience of one suspect to his face, plants a false item in the evening edition of the trusted Gazette in order to flush out another with the specter of a chemist coming from Chicago to extract a definitive clue from the damp-dried carpet where the killer of Roger Phillips stood. He's not a fool, even if he's had enough wool pulled over his eyes to make an ugly sweater. But he's up against the implacable niceness of the American dream and it's stymied more powerful men than Sam Donovan, who after all was just supposed to fill out some paperwork and depart as procedurally as he came. Being played by the noir-tempered O'Keefe does not transitively endow him with a badge or a blackjack or any real leverage beyond stubbornness and sarcasm. "What is this, Sheriff? No report, no gun, no bullet? Maybe he isn't even dead."

All of these elements would fit naturally into a noir, in which small towns harbor just as much weirdness and corruption as the more profiled suspects of big cities, but after feinting around this territory for nearly all of its 83 minutes, Cover Up recoils so hard at the denouement that it ricochets right past heartwarming and lands in the schmaltz. When Sam unexpectedly fired the sheriff's Luger for its ballistic fingerprint, its owner admonished the deputy who came tearing through the door with his sidearm out, "Put away that gun. You don't want to go killing anybody—not at Christmastime, anyhow." It sounded like his usual line in dry humor. It's the moral position of the film. Past the last-minute shoal of red herrings, which at least explain some of the irregularities of the investigation by having had two separate people working to obstruct justice without checking with one another, the resolution of both the mystery and the romance depends on the audience agreeing that Christmas really is such a sacrosanct time of year that it authorizes the cover-up of the title, originally a postponement and now a permanent evasion of justice: "You both covered for a man so that a town could have a merry Christmas." Nobody but nobody liked the mean-spirited, gnawingly destructive Roger Phillips and least of all the concerned Dr. Gerrow, a tireless country physician so beloved by his community that the news of his fatal heart attack on the night of the tree-lighting sent as much dismay through the crowd "as if something happened to Santa Claus," who finally snapped with compassion and took one of the trophies from the rack of the Cleberg Pistol Club and went out to serve some solstitial vigilantism. "I guess he stopped thinking of the problem as a man and took the medical point of view. Seeing this malignant growth strangling his town, he decided he'd have to operate to save it." Sheriff Best and Stuart Weatherby (Art Baker) only intended to stall the doctor's arrest until after the holidays, but are now confronted with the custody of his saintly legacy, which they entreat the ambivalent insurance man to join them in preserving. Of course he can't withhold the truth from his company, but he needn't broadcast it beyond their records. The $40,000 of double indemnity can go to a charity of the niece's choosing and Cleberg can rest secure in its doublethink of the well-defended memory of Dr. Gerrow. Wavering toward honesty, Sam is ultimately swayed by the distraught interruption of Anita to fall on the sword of the Christmas conspiracy and profess with creditably convincing chagrin, "I—I've been wrong all along. Like the sheriff's so fond of saying, I'm not much of a detective." Out into the soft-falling sugar-sparkle of Christmas Eve he goes with the season in his heart and his girl on his arm, implicitly redeemed from expedient cynicism, explicitly absorbed into the heart of Cleberg, and as the come-all-ye-faithful church bells rang out on the soundtrack I did not feel a suffusion of goodwill toward men, I felt I'd been popped in the jaw with a fistful of tinsel. I can believe in the legal and ethical quandaries of crimes where both the victim and the perpetrator are dead, but not spoiling Christmas does not constitute one for me. No one caring about the murder works as a dark joke about the innocent surfaces of pretty how towns and otherwise is not in a class with Christie. Its lies all turn out sentimentally benevolent, its deaths as fortuitous as acts of God: its holiday spirit is exactly the kind that burned me out on too much post-Victorian Christmas music. I bet it could gain an ironic fandom on the Hallmark Channel in no time.

I first encountered this film in 2018, since which time it has received a restoration courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive and it does look mint, especially when the cinematography by Ernest Laszlo allows itself to layer a few shadows into the shine of silver paper chains and holly. Nearing the end of his five-decade career, director Alfred E. Green encourages the playfully ambiguous tone to bloom in the banter between Bendix and O'Keefe and Britton, but I have to conclude that I am just much more at home to feel-bad holiday movies than O'Keefe, who pseudonymously co-wrote the screenplay with Jerome Odlum as the first effort of his own production company, Strand Productions. TCM ran it as part of their Christmas marathon, but it seems to exist regardless of seasonality on Tubi and YouTube. The emphasis on double indemnity is cute, as if the 1944 film slightly traumatized the entire life insurance industry. I am fond of the hero's ruefully self-bestowed epithet: "That's me, Sam the unexpected." It could have applied a little less to the wrap-up of his film. This murder brought to you by my merry backers at Patreon.