The best film noir involves a sap of a man who is willing to give up his career and risk everything including his life just because of the femme fatale who may or may not be a killer, a crook or a tramp. Film historians explain that the vixens of "Double Indemnity", "Out of the Past" and "Detour" were able to destroy their men much like the vamps of the silent era through the promise of the best sex of their life. That is the case of "Murder is My Beat" where a detective gets all the evidence to arrest a blonde vixen for murder, follows her through the snowy wilderness, gets her on the train to take her back, and bam!, is all of a sudden under her spell and willing to risk everything because she claims that she has seen the supposed murder victim standing outside of the train on a station platform. A lie or her conscience playing tricks on her? That remains to be seen.

A typical film noir narration moves the plot along and while this is definitely a cliché of these types of films, in this case, it works wonders. Paul Langton is both hero and narrator, telling his story as he tries to reason as to why he believed that the blonde and buxom cabaret singer Barbara Payton was innocent of the murder he has been collecting evidence on against her. Payton leaves little to the imagination in her tight sweater as Langton basically bursts in on her in the snow-covered cabin. He barely missed walking over the roof of it until he noticed a chimney sticking up out of nowhere. She looks pretty cozy there in spite of the fact that there's probably 10 feet of snow outside threatening to block her in for the winter.

As directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, this is one of his lesser known classics (which includes film noir sleepers like "Detour" and "Ruthless"),and there is wonder as to why newer filmmakers have discovered his work to be artistically genius. What seems at first like a generic film noir as that era was winding down is actually a great find in itself, with tight editing, crisp dialog and characters you never know what side of moralistic laws they are on. That keeps you guessing all the way through and that is what great film noir is all about.

When a man is found with his face destroyed by fire in a fireplace, the prominent Police Detective Ray Patrick (Paul Langton) is assigned to the case. Soon he captures the singer Eden Lane (Barbara Payton),who was the man´s mistress, and solves the case. Eden is sentenced to prison and while Ray is transporting her by train, she claims that she has just seen her lover alive in a train station. Ray believes the woman and helps her to escape to hunt the man. Meanwhile Police Captain Bert Rawley (Robert Shayne) hunts the couple down.

"Murder Is My Beat" is a flawed but entertaining film-noir directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. The plot has many coincidences and most of the twists are not believable but it is worthwhile watching at least once. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Morto Desaparecido" (The Vanished Dead")

A man's body is found face down in a fireplace, face and fingerprints charred beyond identification. Clues lead to his mistress, bar singer Barbara Payton (alas, we get to hear nary a note). Homicide cop Ray Patrick tracks her to a mountain cabin, but a blizzard forces them to spend a (chaste) night together, and she starts to get under his skin. On the train back to Los Angeles, she spots the man who was presumed murdered standing on a platform; against his better judgement, Patrick joins her on the lam to uncover the truth -- a confusing pastiche involving her roommate, a double blackmail scheme, the wrong body and, somehow, ceramic figurines....

Of all the directors who started out in European cinema but fled to America, Edgar G. Ulmer worked with the most crippling resources. In Murder Is My Beat, he returns to Detour's depressing terrain of thrown-together fugitives holing up in crummy motels. But instead of the full-tilt, well, savagery of Ann Savage, there's the catatonic passivity of Barbara Payton, a beaten-down, ill-used blonde. (How much of this depends on acting ability is anybody's guess. At this final outpost of her movie career -- five years earlier, she'd been James Cagney's moll in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye -- Payton had already begun her sad drift toward the demimonde.) Though the story relies too much on explication rather than exposition, its fatalistic inertia keeps the viewer interested but off balance. It's another cheapie noir saved from utter mediocrity by the genuine, if compromised, talents of its director.