Three on a Ticket (1947)
A private detective, who has been shot, stumbles into the office of Michael Shayne (Hugh Beaumont), and dies before Shayne can question him. Shayne finds a baggage ticket in his hand. He claims it and finds the checked-bag contains the loot from a robbery. Now, he has about fifty minutes left of the running time to find the crooks, bring them to justice and return the money to the rightful owners. And needs all of it.
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Good start, but then it gets ruined
everything you have heard about this movie is true.
It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
When the Michael Shayne series was revived in the mid-1940s after a four-year break, Hugh Beaumont replaced Lloyd Nolan in the title role, and there was also a significant drop in production values. "Three On A Ticket" is an extremely low-budget movie (of course, the fact that it's only available in "unofficial" and unremastered prints doesn't do it any favors, either). But if you can get used to that, it's not really a bad film. The story is half-obvious, half-clever: a private detective from New York walks into Michael Shayne's office and, before saying a single word, drops dead - he had been shot. Not long after the police take away the body, a glamorous blonde enters Shayne's office and basically asks him to help her get rid of her criminal husband. What's the connection? And what's the significance of the baggage claim ticket that Shayne found in the dead man's pocket? Beaumont, although inferior to Nolan, is OK in the role, and Louise Currie, who if IMDb is correct will turn 100 (!) in a couple of months, makes a coolly dangerous femme fatale. ** out of 4.