Editor Robert Lowery and his girlfriend/photographer Jane Withers are frustrated by Paul Harvey. They want to produce a great photomagazine with shots and stories with pizazz, while Harvey is interested in his dignity as a publisher of health culture magazine. Harvey wants to sell the magazine, so Lowery and his staff buy it... but part of the money comes from Harvey's own personal account at the magazine, and the auditors are coming Monday. Desperate to replace the money, they sell pictures of heiress Elaine Riley kissing her fiance, Bill Evans. It's only after they've sold the shot to a competing magazine that they realize it's not Miss Riley that Evans is kissing, and that people are murdered, starting with the editor they sold the picture to.
It's a well written and well played comedy-mystery directed by the unexceptional Lew Landers. Lowery does a nice double-take and Miss Withers is fine with her bull-in-the-china-shop attitude and quizzical delivery. As is typical with Pine-Thomas movies for Paramount, they fill the cast with slightly down-at-the-heels talent, skilled performers who were not quite the stars they had once been, like Lyle Talbot, and young , hungry talent in bit roles, like Herschel Bernardi. The Dollar Bills boasted proudly that they never had A budgets, and that all their movies made money. That's because, unlike great talent, if they never turned out a great movie, the ones they turned out were solidly entertaining.
It's a well written and well played comedy-mystery directed by the unexceptional Lew Landers. Lowery does a nice double-take and Miss Withers is fine with her bull-in-the-china-shop attitude and quizzical delivery. As is typical with Pine-Thomas movies for Paramount, they fill the cast with slightly down-at-the-heels talent, skilled performers who were not quite the stars they had once been, like Lyle Talbot, and young , hungry talent in bit roles, like Herschel Bernardi. The Dollar Bills boasted proudly that they never had A budgets, and that all their movies made money. That's because, unlike great talent, if they never turned out a great movie, the ones they turned out were solidly entertaining.