Wonderful character development!

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Expected more

Disappointment for a huge fan!

Willing to give up everything for a sexy babe who isn't bad but yet drives him crazy, a tired and disillusioned cop (Edmund O'Brien) turns to murder in order to get out of a business he has grown to hate. When first seen, O'Brien has his arm tightly around a man he is guiding into an alley. A bullet goes off, an obvious blind man witnesses the killing, and a crowd forms, where O'Brien insists that he was trying to frighten the victim to stop with a bullet that went wild and hit its victim. O'Brien has conveniently removed a bag of money from the dead man's vest pocket which he does not turn over, and returns to his duty as normal. But there's another side to this crooked cop, and we see that when he visits scantily clad Marla English who is about to go from full dressed clerk to teddy wearing cigarette girl. O'Brien goes ballistic on seeing his girl dressed like this, manhandles her and orders her to leave immediately. Fellow cop John Agar suspects that something's amiss, and when the deaf man from the apartment above the murder alley suddenly turns up dead, there's an alleyway waiting for O'Brien one that will lead him to his doom.This crafty film noir is seen through the eyes of a bad guy, one who's supposed to be on the right side of the law, but disillusionment with law enforcement has pretty much destroyed. O'Brien is excellent as this multi faceted character who finds himself dealing not only with organized crime figures but old colleagues who obviously trusted him at one point. He has a horrifying sequence that is nearly as chilling as the pushing of the little old lady in the wheelchair down the stairs in "Kiss of Death". The whole film is set up like a time bomb ticking, just waiting for him to either explode himself or even accidentally step on one. The final reel is a chase sequence between O'Brien and both seedy criminals and his former co-workers, going from a busy community swimming pool to a housing community under construction. Everything about this film noir is top notch, tensely paced and quite the nail biter. Look for a bleached blonde Carolyn Jones as a party girl whom O'Brien meets in a dive bar.

In Shield For Murder Edmond O'Brien is tired of being a straight arrow cop. One night he murders a numbers runner and steals %25,000.00 from him. Of course his official version is that he was resisting arrest, but the bookmaker played by Hugh Sanders knows he's out all that money and he'll get it back one way or another.O'Brien is perfectly cast as the aging detective sick and tired of seeing crooks grow rich. His problem is that he's grown such contempt for the human race he thinks that he's the smartest guy out there. Never credits the crooks or the cops with an ounce of intelligence. That is his downfall.John Agar is his protégé and still a straight arrow. The undercurrent running through the film is that while Agar is trying to catch O'Brien will he fall victim to the same cynicism?Some other noteworthy performances in Shield For Murder are from Marla English as O'Brien's troubled girlfriend, Carolyn Jones as a bar girl he has a small fling with, Claude Akins as one of Sanders's hoods and Emile Meyer as the precinct captain.But Edmond O'Brien is something to see here. In a really crackerjack noir thriller.

Middle-aged "Detective Barney Nolan" (Edmond O'Brien) is a bad cop out to make a score for his retirement fund. He finds it by murdering a "bagman" bookie of a local mobster who was carrying $25,000 in mob-money. Nolan stages the scene to make it look like an arrest that deteriorated into an attempted escape, leaves some chump-change on the corpse, and pockets the $25k. Initially, it looks like Nolan will get away with his callous scheme and eventually retire to suburban track-house comfort with his much younger girlfriend, "Patty" (Marla English).However, he has three things going against him. First, he already has too many shootings "in the line of duty" for this one to be completely shrugged-off by his captain (Emile Meyer), the local crime beat reporter (Herbert Butterfield),and his fellow detectives. Secondly, the mob boss, "Packy Reed" (Hugh Sanders), wants his $25k and sends two goons (one of them a young Claude Akins)after Nolan to get it back. And, finally, there was a witness to the murder. Still, Nolan has his partner, "Sgt. Mark Brewster" (John Agar), who is willing to give his friend every benefit of the doubt, but as the evidence of Nolan's guilt mounts even Sgt. Brewster starts to wonder.The best thing about "Shield for Murder" is the character of Barney Nolan. He's a violent brute. The beast underneath the badge is never far from the surface. He murders for money. He roughs-up his girlfriend's boss for no reason other than his outrage at her skimpy cigarette girl costume. He brutally pistol-whips two men in front of a bar full of shocked and horrified patrons. Yet, we see glimpses of a man who was not always a monster- his sweetness towards his girlfriend and a scene where he lets a young shoplifter off the hook which was apparently a repeat of something he done in the past to good effect.Edmond O'Brien probably aged more quickly and badly than any leading man actor of his era. In 1939's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" he was thin, had a mop of wavy hair, a pencil mustache, and the chiseled features of a handsome Hollywood matinée idol. Yet, within fifteen years, he was badly overweight, puffy-looking, and sweaty. It looks like he didn't give a hoot about his physical appearance which is unusual for an actor. In "Shield for Murder," though, O'Brien's disheveled appearance actually fits his character very well.However, his scenes with 19 yr old budding starlet Marla English are a bit of a stretch. While one can definitely see what an overweight, middle-aged man would like about Ms. English's "Patty"- she looks like a combination of young Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Collins- we have no idea what she sees in him. Ms. English is OK in the role, but her character could have been played by almost any young actress. It appears Ms. English was chosen by the producers just so they could briefly show-off her physical assets in that cigarette girl costume.

Detective Barney Nolan (Edmond O'Brien) drags a two-bit bookie into an alley, shoots him in the back, robs him, and later claims it was done in the line of duty. His young partner, Mark Brewster (John Agar), believes him unquestioningly but their superior is a little more realistic, seeing as Nolan shot and killed a couple of Mexicans two years earlier. Believing that "a cop is given a gun and the authority to use it and one's no good without the other", the Captain closes the case but things heat up when gangster "Packy" Reed lets it be known that the bookie was carrying $25,000 of the mob's money and they want it back. A deaf-mute witness to the crime comes forward but when he, too, winds up dead, Brewster begins to have doubts about his partner/mentor and starts to fall for Nolan's girl, Patty Winters (Marla English)...In the late 1940's, Los Angeles was one of the most corrupt cities in America. In 1949, Governor Earl Warren appointed a California Crime Commission to investigate and one of the witnesses was Sgt. Charles Stoker, an honest cop. Some of the problems were depicted in Fritz Lang's roman-a-clef of the "Black Dahlia" case, THE BIG HEAT(1953) and was given a happy ending that didn't occur in real life. Hounded off the force, Stoker would go on to write "Thicker 'N Thieves" and "L.A. Rogue Cop" in the early 1950's. The public's interest in police corruption reached its peak around this time and three movies were made from the books of William P. McGivern (who also seems to have used Stoker as inspiration): Fritz Lang's THE BIG HEAT, SHIELD FOR MURDER and Robert Taylor's ROGUE COP. SHIELD FOR MURDER is an unpretentious programmer that leaves messages to Western Union, putting the focus on action and violence instead. What social commentary there is comes from an old newspaperman who's seen it all and offers the opinion that it isn't bad cops that frustrate society but the "tin wall of silence" that goes up whenever there's an investigation. Detective Nolan is a vicious bad egg but, strangely enough, also has a softer side; he lets a young shoplifter go free the way he did his protégé, Brewster, years before. Nolan says of working so long in the kind of environment he does, "some of it is bound to rub off" and things eventually spiral out of control and a dragnet ("Operation Tin God") is formed to bring the rogue cop down. The everyday brutality and strong-arm tactics that went into police work back in the day are also shown in a relatively matter-of-fact manner. Many faces from the Golden Age of Television pop up including Claude Akins as an underworld enforcer and Carolyn Jones as a bar fly who witnesses Nolan's sadism. Jones was also a B-girl in THE BIG HEAT. This was the "official" film debut of 50s cult movie star Marla English, "the poor man's Elizabeth Taylor", and she acquits herself well as Nolan's frightened girlfriend. Co-directed by star Edmond O'Brien (with producer Howard W. Koch), SHIELD FOR MURDER is a fast-paced crime drama that builds to an exciting climax and would play great with THE BIG HEAT in a "good cop/bad cop" double feature that doubles as a Carolyn Jones two-fer. Well worth checking out.Trivia: The shadow of a boom mike is clearly visible in the alley during the opening sequence. 7/10