14 | November | 2018 | Through the Shattered Lens

The 1947 film, Shoot to Kill (also known as Police Reporter), opens with both a bang and a crash.

The police are chasing a car down one dark and lonely road. When that car crashes, the police are shocked to discover who was inside of it. Two men and one woman, all well-dressed. The men are both dead but the woman is merely unconscious. The police identify one of the men as being the notorious gangster, Dixie Logan (Robert Kent). It makes sense that Logan would be fleeing the police but what about his two passengers, newly elected District Attorney Lawrence Dale (Edmund MacDonald) and Dale’s wife, Marian (Luana Walters)?

The police may not be able to get any answers but fortunately, there’s a reporter around! Mitch Mitchell (Russell Wade) is a crime reporter and, seeing as how he knew both Lawrence and Marian, he seems like the perfect person to get some answers. (In fact, it was Mitch who first suggested that Lawrence should hire Marian as his administrative assistant, therefore setting in motion the whirlwind romance that would end with them married.) Mitch goes to see Marian in her hospital room and he asks her what happened.

It’s flashback time! Yes, this is one of those films where almost the entire film is a flashback. That, in itself, is not surprising. Some of the best film noirs of all time were just extended flashbacks. (D.O.A, Double Indemnity, and Sunset Boulevard, to name just a few examples.) What sets Shoot to Kill apart is the fact that, occasionally, we even get characters having a second flashback while already in someone else’s flashback. We’re through the the film noir looking glass here, people.

Lawrence Dale, we’re told, was elected district attorney because he managed to secure the conviction of notorious gangster Dixie Logan, despite Logan’s insistence that he was no longer involved in the rackets. However, what we soon discover is that not only was Logan actually innocent but Dale specifically prosecuted him as a favor to some of Dale’s rival gangsters. That’s right, Lawrence Dale was on the take! It also turns out that Marian has some secrets of her own. When she first showed up at Dale’s office, she was doing more than just looking for a job. As for her marriage to Dale …. well, I really can’t tell you what the twist is here because it would spoil the entire film.

Shoot To Kill may clock in at just 64 minutes but it manages to pack a lot of twists and turns into just an hour. In fact, I’d argue that it probably tries to do a little bit too much. At times, the film is a bit difficult to follow and a few inconsistent performances don’t help matters. For instance, Russell Wade is likable as the crime reporter but he still doesn’t exactly have a dynamic screen presence. Much better cast are Luana Walters and Edmund MacDonald, who both do a good job as, respectively, a femme fatale and a sap. At the very least, history nerds like me will be amused by the fact that Edmund MacDonald was obviously made up to resemble Thomas E. Dewey, the former Manhattan District Attorney who twice lost the U.S. presidency.

The best thing about Shoot To Kill is the look of the movie. Filmed in grainy black-and-white and full of dark shadows, crooked camera angles, and men in fedoras lighting cigarettes in alleys, Shoot to Kill looks the way that a film noir is supposed to look.

Regardless of whether it was the filmmaker’s original intention, Shoot To Kill plays out like a low-budget, black-and-white fever dream. It’s definitely a flawed film but, for lovers of film noir, still worth a look.

In an interview with the now-defunct Kicking It Old School Blog, T’Pau’s Carol Decker explained the genesis of the song that would become Heart and Soul. It all began when her bandmate and then-boyfriend Ron Rogers purchased a new keyboard with a built-in synthesizer:

“He was just trying to get used to the gizmos in it and while messing around with the sequencer he started the ‘bum bum buh buh bum bum bum’ of the bass riff. T’PauI started to sing a melody over it, the wafty vocal and came up with ‘more than an ocean keeps us apart.’ … The lyrics were about when I went on holiday with my parents and Ronnie couldn’t come. I missed him so much, but then I morphed the story into a fictitious one of not being loved back (which I was) … The rap was the idea of Andy Piercy, our then producer. He said the gaps needed filling, so I started these syncopated sort of nonsense noises. I then turned those noises into words which took about a week to get right.”

The song reached #4 in both the U.S. and the UK Charts. In the UK, it became a hit after it was used in a clothing advertisement while, in America, its success was largely credited to the above music video, which was put into heavy rotation on MTV.

The song is best known for its vocal layering, with Decker’s melody lines coming in over the rap. Stylistically, the video’s is similarly layered, resulting in a perfect synthesis of audio and visual.

Heart and Soul is song that epitomizes an era. Personally, I have fond memories of fleeing from the Liberty City police while listening to it.

Everything’s better with a little heart and soul.

And yes, T’Pau was named after a Vulcan who appeared on an episode of Star Trek. Before Decker saw that episode of Star Trek, the band was called Talking America.