Tuesday's Overlooked Films: Decoy (late posting)

This low-budget, nasty film noir from 1946 is a treat. The young British actress Jean Gillie who died three years later from pneumonia is the cold-blooded femme fatale and narrator of the story. The neat twist is she knows of an antidote called methylene blue for cyanide gas poisoning. She works an inside deal that gets her convict boyfriend Frankie revived after his prison execution so he can tell her where he buried a strongbox holding the stolen $400,000. She also has to bring in the death chamber doc who then has second thoughts about what he's getting into. The only actor I recognized was Sheldon Leonard (later TV producer of I Spy, Andy Griffith Show, Dick Van Dyke Show) who plays a hardboiled cop with lots of campy fun. The pace moves fast and there's a mean twist at the end. I watched the film contained in the Warner's Noir Vol. 3 box set. IMDb.com gives Decoy 6.8/10.0 but I see that as too low. More like a 7.5, I think.