Three On a Ticket (1947)

Three On a Ticket was the fourth of the five Mike Shayne PI thriller B-movies made by PRC in 1946-47, with Hugh Beaumont as Mike. Prior to this Twentieth Century Fox had made seven Mike Shayne movies with Lloyd Nolan. Despite the much lower budgets I actually prefer the PRC films. They’re closer in feel to the novels, they’re a bit grittier, they have less annoying comic relief and while I like Lloyd Nolan as an actor I think Beaumont was a better fit for the role.

The Mike Shayne private eye novels were published under the name Brett Halliday, a pseudonym used by Davis Dresser. Dresser wrote the early novels in the series while the later novels were written by an assortment of ghost writers. Mike Shayne is a pretty standard fictional PI and the books have a fairly hardboiled vibe.

Three On a Ticket begins when a guy walks into Mike Shayne’s office and promptly drops dead. A bullet in the guts can do that to you. Mike and his faithful secretary Phyllis (Cheryl Walker) are rather disconcerted. Mike doesn’t want the cops to know he was in the office at the time, mostly because the first thing he did was to conceal two vital pieces of evidence. One of them is a baggage claim ticket.

The dead guy was another PI, Jim Lacy. Mike used to be vaguely acquainted with him but preferred to keep his distance because of Lacy’s unsavoury reputation.

Dead guys can mean trouble but Mike’s next visitor is a very Iive blonde and they always mean trouble. The blonde is Helen Brimstead (Louise Currie) and she wants to hire Mike to do a very simple job. All he has to do is kill her husband.

Murder is not one of the services Mike provides for his clients but he strings her along because she tells him that Jim Lacy recommended him. Obviously the blonde is mixed up in whatever led to Lacy’s murder and Mike wants the answers to that. The blonde spins a yarn about having married a hoodlum named Mace Morgan. Now she wants to marry a rich respectable guy and Mace is blackmailing her.

All sorts of people seem to know about that baggage claim ticket, they all suspect Mike has it stashed somewhere and they all want it. The Feds want it as well. The blonde has been involved with some tough characters and they definitely want it.

The plot isn’t dazzling but it has a few reasonably decent twists.

Hugh Beaumont plays Shayne as a likeable rogue. Cheryl Walker as Phyllis is feisty. Louise Currie as Helen is a reasonably effective femme fatale type (although of course we don’t know for sure if Helen is a bad girl or if she just looks like one). The supporting players are adequate.

This is a PRC movie so it looks cheap (because it was) and it’s a bit rough around the edges) but it moves along briskly.

Sam Newfield may not have been a great director but he was very competent when it came to making B-movies on tight budgets.

Three On a Ticket is a solid enjoyable B-picture. Recommended.

All five PRC Shayne movies are included in DFVD set from Classic Flix. The transfers are nothing to get excited about but they’re perfectly watchable.

I’ve reviewed a couple of the earlier PRC Mike Shayne movies - the excellent Murder Is My Business (1946) and Larceny in Her Heart (1946). I’ve also reviewed the 1945 Mike Shayne novel by Brett Halliday Murder Is My Business.