Crime Against Joe
Directed by Lee SholemJoe Manning, a drifting, hard-drinking artist, regains consciousness in a small California town to find a young woman murdered nearby and no memory of the preceding hours. The local police, led by the methodical Detective Sergeant Hollander, move quickly to build a circumstantial case against him. Joe's only immediate ally is Frances 'Slacks' Bennett, a nightclub singer with reasons of her own for keeping Joe out of custody – and out of her past.
As Joe pushes back against Hollander's investigation, his search draws him into the orbit of Philip Rowen, a man of local standing whose wife Christy harbors a visible unease, and of Red Waller, a bartender's associate whose loyalty cannot be assumed. The murdered woman, Irene Crescent, proves to have intersected with nearly everyone in Joe's blurred evening, and the web of prior acquaintance begins to suggest that the killing was neither random nor impulsive.
Crime Against Joe works the familiar noir template of the falsely accused ordinary man – cornered by circumstance, betrayed by gaps in his own recollection – and presses it through the conventions of the small-town procedural. The film is compact in its construction, economical in its character work, and honest about the degree to which innocence, without proof, offers no reliable protection.
