Plot-heavy detective programmer. Among the many characters, you may need a scorecard to keep up with who's impersonating whom. Nonetheless, Arlen's got the needed edge as PI Simon Lash-- (with a name like that, the creators may have hoped a movie series would emerge). Too bad that great vixen Veda Ann Borg can't seem to get motivated in what amounts to a crucial spider woman role. It's one of the few times I've seen her walk through a part. Though the many traveling shots along California's post-war highways and byways are well staged, filming lacks appropriate mood and atmosphere. Still, whose inspiration was it to film around that castle in the desert, a real one, not a studio creation. Those are memorable scenes and perhaps the movie's high point. At the same time, casting comes up with a number of colorful characters to spice things up-- Twitchell's cagey sheriff, Hodgins' assertive caretaker and Ford's craggy old man, for instance. A few period years later and a pretty good noir might have emerged to flavor up the turgid storyline. Anyway, for folks interested in vintage street scenes and isolated castles, this is a good flick to check out. Otherwise, the 60-minutes remains a flawed programmer that still manages a few compensations.

This film noir thriller was made by the notoriously cheap PRC studio although they do manage a handful of decently-shot car chases to break up the otherwise low budget narrative. It's a private eye film with Richard Arlen doing his best impression of Humphrey Bogart as a sleuth whose encounter with an old flame sets him off on a journey involving murder, deception, and all kinds of crooked activities.The plots of these films almost write themselves and ACCOMPLICE is a rather undistinguished film for what it is. Veda Ann Borg's femme fatale is a bit wishy washy and the actress lacks the kind of magnetism and charisma to make her character truly work. Arlen is a bit of a damp squib too, although some of the supporting cast make for delightfully weaselly characters.Once two thirds of the running time is up the action shifts to the desert and becomes more action-oriented, in fact it resembles a western for the most part which is a far cry from the metropolitan setting of the early part of the movie. ACCOMPLICE is a cheap and rather forgettable slice of film noir action although aficionados of the genre might well get a kick out of it.

Richard Arlen steps into Humphrey Bogart's shoes as a hardboiled private detective who gets hired by his former flame Veda Ann Borg to find her missing husband Edward Earle. Some years earlier Borg left Arlen flat at the altar as she traded upward to marry a man with money. Earle's got it all right and may have a love nest going with Marjorie Manners.He also has a mink farm and a body with his head blown off with a shotgun is identified by Borg. The local sheriff Archie Twitchell thinks that Arlen might well be an Accomplice to Earle's murder.Several homicides later we learn the solution. Richard Arlen's Simon Lash has a lot in common with Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade.This PRC film has the usual cheapness associated with Poverty Row. But they have an intriguing film. And you'll love as much as I did two desert rats in Francis Ford and Earle Hodgins and the racket they've got going.

'Accomplice' is a low-budget noir caper film, starring Richard Arlen after his career was long past its peak. I always liked Arlen; during the peak years of his career (late silent era to mid-30s) he was almost the exact equivalent of the modern Harrison Ford: an action hero, in the classic adventurer mould, who still had credibility as a serious actor in thoughtful dramas. 'Accomplice', regrettably, was made (on a VERY low budget) after Arlen's energies had run out, and it's a poor example of his craft.Private detective Simon Lash (Arlen) is contacted by Joyce, an ex-girlfriend who jilted him at the altar. Joyce is played by Veda Ann Borg, who always looked trashy, and who gives a mechanical performance in this movie that makes me wonder if she's related to the Borg Collective (in Star Trek). Joyce's husband Jim has been suffering from bouts of amnesia, and now he's gone missing altogether. Jim was a bank executive, and Private Eyelash (I mean, private-eye Lash) is a cynical sleuth, so he naturally assumes that Jim's 'amnesia' was a pretext for embezzling bank funds. But then Lash investigates, and no funds are missing. Then, of course, he investigates a little more, and...'Accomplice' sets up an interesting premise, but the script gets murkier — and the characters' motivations more contrived — as it proceeds. Noir films usually take place in a world where everyone is corruptible, everyone is motivated solely by self-interest, and the very few people who don't conform to those rules are subsidiary characters who get exploited or bumped off very early in the proceedings. 'Accomplice', however, belongs to that dismal subgenre which I call 'goodie noir', in which everybody in the world is a crook or a scoundrel EXCEPT the hero, who is always motivated by purely virtuous instincts and decency. I find this sort of story utterly implausible. Down these mean streets a man must walk, yadda yadda.'Accomplice' is made even more painful because it's made on a wretchedly small budget. The film's director Walter Colmes (who?) shows an Ed Wood-like penchant for setting up his camera at the most ludicrous angle, over and over. We get too many car chases in this movie, and in each car chase we get lots and lots and lots of close-ups of spinning tyres. Ed Wood was an angora fetishist; is it possible that Walter Colmes was a rubber fetishist? The ending of 'Accomplice' is extremely contrived. Former silent-film star Francis Ford (John Ford's older brother) gives a welcome performance in a supporting role. I'll rate 'Accomplice' 3 points out of 10.