Crime Street presents
Jigsaw (1949)

Director - Fletcher Markle
 

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Plot
Film Notes
Cast and Production Credits

The Plot

The owner of a print is shop found dead. It looks like a suicide to the police. Suicide. But that's not the way Assistant D.A. Howard Malloy (Franchot Tone) sees it. And when a journalist friend who has been investigating an extreme right wing group called the Crusaders is also found dead, he goes on the hunt himself. He gets a bit sidetracked by a hot night club singer, but whose side is she really on? High society's dark house of cards is about to come down.

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Film Notes

A Mirror Image of the Red Menace Films

Jigsaw was a low budget, independent film financed mainly by its star Franchot Tone. As an attempted exposé of racism among the upper classes, it stands as something of an answer to the paranoid anti-Communist films of the Red Menace of the same period. It was perhaps something of a labor of love for the star and his supporters, left leaning New York actors.

Style-wise, however, though not much above TV crime dramas of the time, it has an exciting climax in a museum and the on-location street scenes lend some realism to the effort.

A Special Tone

The year 2005 marks the centennial of the birth of Franchot Tone, an actor who had the talent and looks, but not whatever else it took, to become a major Hollywood star.

It didn't seem that way early in his career: he was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor in 1935 for Mutiny of the Bounty. His fellow shipmates Clark Cable and Charles Laughton also received Best Actor nominations.

But movie stardom was not what interested Tone: the stage was his true vocation. He began his career there and returned there in 1939, leaving Hollywood for the most part behind other than taking a project here and there to finance his theater work.

Among his significant dramatic accomplishments was his role as a founding member of the legendary Group Theatre, which later evolved into the influential Actors Studio. In 1957 he originated the role of James Tyrone Jr. in the first production of Eugene O'Neill's Moon for the Misbegotten.

His New York stage work also provided Tone with the opportunity to work in live dramatic television in series such as Studio One. Late in his career he had a regular role on TV's Ben Casey.

And the Rest is Trivia

• Franchot Tone was married early in his career to Joan Crawford (1935 to 1939). Speaking of marriages, Tone was also married to Jean Wallace, his co-star in Jigsaw.
• Watch closely and you'll see uncredited cameo appearances by Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, Burgess Meredith and John Garfield.
• The trio of nominees from Mutiny of the Bounty lost the 1935 Best Actor Award to Victor McLaglen (The Informer.)

-- Ed Schneider - Alameda TV

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Cast

Production Credits

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Franchot Tone

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