Cover Up

Insurance investigator Sam Donovan comes to a small Midwestern town to look into a death that has been filed as a suicide. Every detail he examines points him towards murder instead. The trouble is that nobody in town wants to talk; everyone including the sheriff seems content to leave the file closed, and no door opens for the investigator. Alfred E. Green's film carries the urban darkness of noir into a small-town Christmas: snowy streets, decorated windows, family tables, and a lie moving quietly among them. Violence is almost never shown, and the tension comes entirely from who knows what. The distance between William Bendix and Dennis O'Keefe is the real engine of the picture. At a little over eighty minutes, it is a plain, small production.