Jigsaw (1949)

Very well executed

good back-story, and good acting

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

The quality of the picture and the sound of the copy I bought is so bad that most of the time I could not understand the dialogue. I bought this DVD just to see the cameo by Marlene Dietrich, and after her appearance I was somewhat intrigued and decided to watch the entire film. Like other reviews stated the plot is so confusing that it is difficult to follow, and it was not easy for me to watch until the end. Can someone explain to me the final scene? Hope this is not a spoiler!!! What was that woman looking for that was hidden behind a painting in that museum? She kept destroying the backs of the paintings until she finds some papers. And I did not have a clue of what was going on....

Well I have to say, this was the most interesting mystery flick that made no sense whatsoever that I've ever seen. I actually got more out of viewer posts on this board than the movie itself. That happens every now and then, perhaps one in every three hundred or so films. I'd be willing to give this another go, but it came in a mystery film boxed set of two hundred fifty pictures, and I'm going to get to all the rest of those first.It's uncanny - the picture holds your attention the whole time, and I had to figure something was going to come out of this to tie the whole thing together. Very mysterious, very sleek, thirty five dollars to bail out the cat - that's it! I'm not going to get pretentious and say I spotted all the future stars in their cameos, just Burgess Meredith as the bartender, and he could have been Leonid Kinskey just as easily.Clever stuff here - The Crusaders, the Blue Angel, the Mohawk Political Club, and Molloy (Franchot Tone) named the special something or other. What were the papers hidden in the museum art? I don't know. Neither will you. Maybe next time.

... There has to be a limit. This movie is pretty much a mess. It doesn't feel like New York City, of which I am a native and almost-lifetime resident. It has too many plots going at once. They add up but only with force on the part of the writers.It starts out as a sort of Northern "Storm Warning." (Now, there we have a superb, underrated movie!) I guess the racist posters that set off the plot are symbolic of the beginning of the McCarthy witch-hunts. If they aren't, they don't make any sense: OK, granted: According to my parents Manhattan at that time was not always friendly to people other than Caucasians. But were there actually plots and mobs? I can't believe it.The casting gives it some noir cred. I'm not talking about the brief cameos by big stars. Nor,really, about Franchot Tone. He is OK but he isn't exactly a noir staple and he's maybe a bit old for the role.But we have Jean Wallace. We have Marc Lawrence.For me, the single best feature of the film is the presence in a fairly small but significant role of an actress I had never before tonight heard of: Winifred Lenihan.I see that she was the first person to play the title role in Shaw's "St. Joan" on Broadway. She is in very different territory here. But whoever cast her did so with genius: She is absolutely perfect.Also, I wonder about the character played by Hedley Rainnie. He's ambiguous in many ways. He wears a beard and maybe that's meant to signify his foreign origins. I wonder, though: Is he intended to be gay? The way the character is portrayed reminds me of the intentionally creepy go-between for the Senator and his ex lover in the better known and overrated "Advise and Consent" almost a decade later.It isn't a good movie, in sum. And the print I saw was really bad. But watch it for Ms. Lenihan. In a very quiet way, she's brilliant!

JIGSAW (1949) ** 1/2 (out of four) After his reporter friend is murdered, a D.A. goes off looking for the killers. Once again, the 1940's delivered all sorts of gems within the noir genre. This film here has quite a good reputation but I personally found it to be quite slow and boring in spots. The performances are all good but the director isn't able to get much out of the story and in the end nothing makes too much sense. Seeing stars like John Garfield and Henry Fonda is always great but their cameos add very little to the film.Available on DVD through various PD companies.