In The Time Of B-Film Forgotten Noir-Fingerprints Don’t Lie-Do They? 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Fingerprints Don’t Lie, starring Richard Travis, Sheila Ryan, 1951

 

Well of course since we are in the age of science, the age when various rational ways of investigating phenomena is much preferred over vacant daydreaming, ideology or acts of God. This same process applies to the investigation of criminal activity since despite the advances of humankind we are still stuck with crime and the criminal mind. Plus we have come a long way, at least I used to think we have come a long way from using racks, thumbscrews and such as the way to separate the guilty from the innocent although lately that proposition has been turned on his head more times than I like to remember. All of this by way of looking at the scientific method of fingerprinting which in its time represented that advance over thumbscrews and dark jail cell beating to get a confession from the innocent or the guilty that I just mentioned in the film under review whose title tells the tale here, Fingerprints Don’t Lie.   

Everybody knows, or should know, that each person’s fingerprints are essentially unique and for law enforcement purposes if you can match a set of a suspect’s prints with some object involved in a crime well then it is only a question then of how long a jail sentence, or how quick the big step off in the big house when the lights go dark, will be if you capture that miscreant. This film despite its title turns that proposition on its head, for a while. See Matt, who is in love with the Mayor of Gotham City’s daughter, had a beef with the good mayor over his martial intensions with that mayor’s daughter. Here is  where Matt gets into trouble though, gets himself set up for the big step off, because he was the last person seen leaving the mayor’s office the night of the beef. Problem: the mayor turned up dead, very dead the next morning and guess who the prime suspect is. And the basis for that suspicion and subsequent trial where Matt falls down for the count, is going to the big house to await his terminal fate was a set of fingerprints found on the telephone that turned out to be the murder weapon.       

Here is where Matt is both hung out to dry and eventually cleared. The fingerprint expect, Robert Jordan, testified in open court that the set on the telephone matched Matt’s. Done. Done, despite the fact that Matt endlessly proclaimed his innocence. But don’t they all. I guess though that the mayor’s daughter Theresa bought Matt’s story and begged Jordan to see if he had made an error. Now most guys, most fingerprint guys, men of science guys, women of science too, would have blown her off but Theresa’s begging finally payed off. Once Jordan saw the possibility of error, went beyond the hard fingerprints on the telephone angle he went might and main to figure it out. To not leave you guessing since where love is involved no way a good-looking kid like Matt is going to take the fall, not in Hollywood in the 1950s, it turned out that the old regime police commissioner the Mayor had been elected to root out, Jack Callahan, figured as the villain. See as the old story goes Jack had some frail he was playing around with and needed plenty of dough, and to keep his job (which as anybody but a goof knows includes plenty of graft) to keep her in style. So Jack fudged the evidence, did some scientific mumbo-jumbo of his own. Naturally rather than take the fall, take the big step himself he tried to escape when he was cornered with the evidence. But Jordan not only was handy with an inkpad but with a rod and wasted the guy. So if anybody asks you if fingerprints don’t lie you can say that they do not-except sometimes.