Film noir is an individual taste, and while the genre is certainly one of the most famous of classic movies today, there are so few that can be called "all-time classics". Certainly, when you say "Film Noir", you may think instantly of "Laura", "Double Indemnity", "Gilda", "The Big Sleep", among a few others. But then, there are the "sleepers", low-budget delights like "Detour" and "Decoy", cult classics like "Somewhere in the Night" and "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes", and later day film noir entries like "Cape Fear" and "The Manchurian Candidate". Some might rank the more obscure entries in this genre as just average, but there are hidden delights out there just yearning to be re-discovered."A Blueprint For Murder" took me totally by surprise, and I was not expecting the twists and turns of this exciting melodrama. It all starts with an unseen little girl screaming in ailment, supposedly due to viral encephalitis, but suspicions lead to more being revealed than meets the eye. The poor little girl's uncle (Joseph Cotten) arrives and exchanges pleasantries with Jean Peters, the girl's stepmother and widow of his late brother. They are seemingly very close, but certain factors begin to make him suspicious of her. His close friend (Gary Merrill) and Merrill's mystery obsessed wife (Catherine McLeod) give him the hints that something else could be up. Could the seemingly sweet Peters be a strictnine poisoning murderess? After the poor girl dies, Cotten keeps putting off leaving town on business, afraid that his nephew (Freddy Ridgeway) might become Peters' next victim. But there's no evidence to prove that Peters isn't anything more than a loving woman, and it is up to Cotten to go out of his way (here very desperately) to prove himself either right or wrong.All the twists and turns are there for a desperate measure to reveal the truth, and it all culminates on a European bound steamship where Cotten himself might be revealed to be a killer. This is another chase between cat and mouse where the stakes are obvious. As Peters points out after her possible motives are exposed, Cotten has possible motive too. So the viewer begins to question what seems obvious as possibly being not so, and who seems to be good as being not so. The fact that romance slowly erupts between Cotten and Peters makes them a couple straight out of memories of MacMurray and Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity" and Mitchum and Greer in "Out of the Past". This one has a twist towards the end that left me with a dropped jaw and clutching my hands, both in tension and delight, as to the twists and turns of this film noir roller-coaster.

Joseph Cotten and Jean Peters star in A Blueprint For Murder a nice tight noir thriller for 20th Century Fox. This film starts with the death of Cotten's niece and Peters stepdaughter. Despite some major flaws the film does proceed to a tension building climax.For one thing the fact that a healthy 17 year old girl dying suddenly and mysteriously would have set off alarm bells. My 34 year old sister who died suddenly and of natural causes had an immediate autopsy ordered by the New York City Medical Examiner. It's no different in Los Angeles and that would have shown the strychnine poisoning. Cotten would have had to do nothing to get the investigative ball rolling. But the premise here is that murder by poison is hard to detect and more difficult to prove. People have accidentally taken poison all the time. Even with a lack of evidence Cotten persuades the District Attorney to bring an indictment and it's thrown out of court due to lack of evidence. That's the second flaw in this film, double jeopardy should have attached to Peters.Still Cotten persists and the film comes to a climax with he and Peters in a duel of nerves. What Cotten does is take one long chance with his own freedom to prove Peters guilty of murder. What he does is something you see A Blueprint For Murder.I can't forgive the bad writing and faulty legal premises on which this film rests. Still it is enjoyable on its own level.

A Blueprint for Murder (1953)A clean, old-fashioned murder mystery, brightly lit, and even including a voyage on a cruise ship to Europe like some Betty Davis movie, or Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. It's a crime standard at the end of the film noir era, with a terrific star who never quite fit into any genre very well, Joseph Cotten. It's smart and fast and strong and almost believable, at least until the drawing room high stakes of the end, which is just great movie-making. Cotten plays Whitney Cameron, and he's visiting his niece in the hospital. Quick facts pour on (and are slightly hard to follow at first): she has some strange affliction, her father (Cameron's brother) died of a strange affliction a few years earlier, and the stepmother is sweet as cherry pie, though she plays a demonically fierce romantic piano. Then the niece suddenly dies, and before Cameron leaves the scene, suspicions arise about the stepmother.By the way, stepmothers can do terrible things that mothers would never do to their own children, like murder them. And so we are led down that obvious path. Soon, however, we know that the movie can't be quite that simple, and another suspect clarifies. The view is left deciding who is playing the better game of "not me." It's good stuff, very good, though constrained and reasonable, too. We don't always want "reasonable" in a film.The stepmother is excellent, played by Jean Peters, and a helping couple is also first rate, especially Gary Merrill as a lawyer friend. Merrill was in "Where the Sidewalk Ends" and "All About Eve," and is partly why those are great films. Peters plays the cheerful innocent here just as she did in a another pair of masterpieces, "Niagara" (with Cotten) and "Pickup on South Street" (a true noir from the same year as this one). It's Cotten who drives the movie, however, and he has a tone rather similar to his similar "visiting uncle" role in "Shadow of a Doubt." He is, in fact, a kind of soft-spoken, dependable icon in many movies (and later lots of t.v.) and it's because he's so normal that I think he's less adored. But he's exactly what the movie needs, guiding us first through the police investigation and then the informal one of his own. It had the makings of a tightly woven classic.Why are there so many films that are quite good but not amazing? I think a little of everything, often, but here it's the story itself that is limiting. A great idea, surely, but a little too familiar in its basic plot, and quite simple. A second plot, or another suspect, or another murder along the way would have been just fine. I think the directing (by Andrew Stone) is competent but lacks vision, and an unwillingness to push the edges a little. It proceeds, and we don't want movies to simply move along. There are, however, some excellent scenes, like one in the police office early on where the two leading men are led from one desk to another, from one group of cops to another, in a flowing, backward moving long take. It's a lesson in first rate cinematography, actually. And in fact the movie is totally enjoyable, never slow, expertly done, with a good cast.

Interesting film soon falls flat. Joseph Cotten, a reserved heavy smoking businessman, shows up just in time when his young niece dies suddenly in the hospital. Joe's brother and sister-in-law are already gone, and before his death, the brother had remarried the lovely Jean Peters. A young nephew survives.What seems to be a routine tragedy soon develops into murder by poisoning. When it becomes obvious that Peters has killed her step-daughter, Cotten and others must prove it and at the same time protect the young nephew from the conniving killer.The film falls flat once Cotten follows Peters and the young nephew on to a boat where she is taking the young lad to see Europe and probably come to his death.Cotten's scheme is to kill his sister-in-law before she kills the little boy. Far-fetched but not out of the realm of a world gone crazy is the plot to this film. The entire problem here is that it's almost impossible for anyone to pin the murder on Peters.It appears that after supposedly poisoning Miss Peters at the end, Cotten seems to have gone awry. The poison doesn't seem to be working proving that those aspirins with the w on them weren't poison after all. ...But were they?