Accomplice

Richard Arlen is an eccentric P.I.

Richard Arlen proved he hadn't lost his looks or his ability to put over his style of easy going acting but he was given no help in this movie which started off in an urban setting, moved on to a mink farm!! then ended up in the West where Arlen, by this stage of his career, was more at home.

There are a couple of B-noir movies--Shack Out on 101 comes to mind--that sometimes entertain with their low-budgetness. Sometimes, like in Detour, they absoltely shine.

'Accomplice' is a low-budget noir caper film, starring Richard Arlen after his career was long past its peak. I always liked Arlen; during the peak years of his career (late silent era to mid-30s) he was almost the exact equivalent of the modern Harrison Ford: an action hero, in the classic adventurer mould, who still had credibility as a serious actor in thoughtful dramas.

Richard Arlen steps into Humphrey Bogart's shoes as a hardboiled private detective who gets hired by his former flame Veda Ann Borg to find her missing husband Edward Earle. Some years earlier Borg left Arlen flat at the altar as she traded upward to marry a man with money.

Plot-heavy detective programmer.

You could say the same thing for convoluted scripts, rushed out by the dozens after the popularity of film noir sprang up in the 1940's. This poverty row thriller offers some second string leads and sidekick character actors in the leads-former A star Richard Arlen and hard-boiled Veda Ann Borg headlining a puzzling story involving a private eye, a dame, a supposed missing husband and a fraud scheme.