Given the events of the past week, this week’s movie title sounds as if it were ripped from the headlines. It is not. Shield For Murder dates from 1954. It’s a bad cop movie with a stellar performance by Edmund O’Brien as bent copper Barney Nolan.

The movie opens with O’Brien’s fatal mistake: He robs and kills a bookie who works for the Los Angeles syndicate. He’s a greedy bastard who couldn’t resist $25K, which is worth over $300K in 2026 money.

Repeat after me: Greed kills.

O’Brien has operated under a cloud of suspicion for years. His fellow detectives know he’s dirty, but they’re not talking. Neither is his captain played by Emile Myer.

If you’ve seen the movie and were wondering why an LAPD captain has an old school Brooklyn accent, you were wrong. Meyer was from New Orleans. He was discovered by Elia Kazan while filming Panic In The Streets here. Enough trivia.

O’Brien has only one friend in the unit, Mark Brewster who is played by mole person John Agar. He’s the crooked cop’s protege but O’Brien turns against Agar anyway. It’s what dirty detectives do.

I call John Agar the poor man’s Jeffrey Hunter because like Hunter he got his start working for John Ford. It was all downhill after that. FYI, Jeffrey Hunter was born in New Orleans. Oops, I broke my no trivia pledge. Never mind.

O’Brien is a one man crime wave. Over the course of the movie, he beats a sleazy shamus half way to death, pushes a deaf-mute witness out a window, and slaps his girlfriend played by ingenue Marla English. If there’s a shitty thing to do, O’Brien’s character does it including burying money at a suburban tract house:

Dirty cop gets dirty. Details at 10.

O’Brien tries to escape justice at the end of the movie but the production code decreed that he must die. It was a satisfying ending for this creepy copper.

That’s all the story I’m willing to reveal. This feature is called pulp fiction, not pulp spoilers, after all.

Repeat after me: Greed kills.

The acting in the movie is terrific. It’s full of vivid performances, especially by future Morticia Addams, Carolyn Jones.

She plays a cute drunk who flirts with the dirty cop in an Italian restaurant until he goes psycho. She’s only in one scene but steals it. O’Brien, who co-directed, lets her get away with this barroom robbery.

Shield For Murder is based on a novel by William P. McGivern who also gave the world The Big Heat and Odds Against Tomorrow. 

The screenplay was written by veteran crime fiction writers Richard Alan Simmons and John C. Higgins. It is not a flashback heavy noir, which is to its credit.

Shield For Murder is one of only two films directed by star Edmond O’Brien. Howard W. Koch was his co-director. He’s best known as the producer of multiple Oscar casts.

Grading Time: I give Shield For Murder 3 1/2 stars and an Adrastos Grade of B+.

It’s time  to ponder posters. We begin with the American and Mexican one sheets.

That’s a great tagline BUT one could easily substitute money-hungry for dame-hungry.

Here’s a quad poster for the road.

All this talk of hunger makes me wanna head to the lobby for a snack:

They were out of popcorn, so I mugged the dancing popcorn box. It’s what Barney Nolan would have done.

While in the lobby, I saw these:

Ouch.

Let’s leave the lobby and hop aboard the trailer:

The last word goes to Eddie Muller with his Noir Alley intro and outro: