Decoy

A woman walks into a doctor's house with a bullet in her and collapses. Before she dies she tells everything to the policeman who has followed her. Margot Shelby's lover has been executed, and only he knew where the money he buried is. Margot lays out a plan: bring the man back after the gas chamber, get the map, and then be rid of him too. Whoever stands in her way she spends, one after another. It is a cheap seventy-six minute production but it stands apart among films noir: here the femme fatale is not a side character who wrecks a man's plan, she is the plan. Margot sets everything up, uses everyone, and is not sorry about it to the last moment. Jean Gillie plays the part without softening it at all, and it became the work the English actor is most remembered for in Hollywood. Jack Bernhard directed. The film was forgotten for a long time and rediscovered later.