The Brasher Doubloon

A wealthy and disagreeable widow hires the private detective Philip Marlowe to recover a rare gold coin missing from her late husband's collection. Marlowe has barely started before he sees that everyone in the house is holding something back: the frightened secretary, the useless son, the threats arriving at the door. As he follows the coin, unexplained killings pile up behind him and the case turns out to be less a theft than an old family incident nobody will name. The source is Raymond Chandler's novel The High Window, and this is the last of the Marlowe pictures made in the forties. George Montgomery's Marlowe is usually rated the weakest of the run; the tired irony Bogart or Powell carried is not here. What holds it up instead is John Brahm's direction and the shadowed interiors. It is over in seventy-two minutes. The cast includes Fritz Kortner, one of the German émigré actors of the period.