Flickering Shadows - The Missing Lady!

Monogram made three Shadow movies in 1946 starring Kane Richmond as the pulp hero. Of the three The Missing Lady is the best, but in a weird way. The series was designed to be light-hearted crime detection with large doses of comedy sprinkled in. I get a real Thin Man vibe off the first movie The Shadow Strikes as Lamont Cranston (Richmond) and Margot Lane (Barbara Reed) verbally spar while attempting to unravel a mystery. In the second movie Behind the Mask, we get a better effort to deliver some film noir, an ideal atmosphere for the Shadow, but that falls aways much to quickly and we have some truly absurd comedy completely derailing the movie to the point where the solution to the mystery doesn't even seem to matter all that much. This movie keeps the comedy much more at bay. 

The missing lady of the title is a jade statue stolen when its owner was murdered. Despite headlines about the unsolved case, the police don't seem to know the statue was taken despite the insurance company being interested. That's how Cranston gets involved. There's some really edgy violence in this one, surprising after seeing the benign way the previous films handled such things. Reed's Margot Lane is kept out of the story much more and the times she's used seem less intrusive. That said, the jealousy which motivates her actions gets really tiresome after more than a few movies of it. She's a screwball dame in a noir mystery and as such has not that much to offer. Other dames do and its from them we get some heat, if only the kind approved by 1940's censors. 

Needless to say Cranston wins the day. I say Cranston instead of the Shadow because after some excellent scenes early in the movie featuring the personal, the Shadow disappears from the doings. This movie is the most convincing with the Shadow but does too little of it. I cannot say this is a great flick, but it's better than its predecessors and that's not nothing. 

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