Willing to give up everything for a sexy babe who isn't bad but yet drives him crazy, a tired and disillusioned cop (Edmund O'Brien) turns to murder in order to get out of a business he has grown to hate. When first seen, O'Brien has his arm tightly around a man he is guiding into an alley. A bullet goes off, an obvious blind man witnesses the killing, and a crowd forms, where O'Brien insists that he was trying to frighten the victim to stop with a bullet that went wild and hit its victim. O'Brien has conveniently removed a bag of money from the dead man's vest pocket which he does not turn over, and returns to his duty as normal. But there's another side to this crooked cop, and we see that when he visits scantily clad Marla English who is about to go from full dressed clerk to teddy wearing cigarette girl. O'Brien goes ballistic on seeing his girl dressed like this, manhandles her and orders her to leave immediately. Fellow cop John Agar suspects that something's amiss, and when the deaf man from the apartment above the murder alley suddenly turns up dead, there's an alleyway waiting for O'Brien one that will lead him to his doom.This crafty film noir is seen through the eyes of a bad guy, one who's supposed to be on the right side of the law, but disillusionment with law enforcement has pretty much destroyed. O'Brien is excellent as this multi faceted character who finds himself dealing not only with organized crime figures but old colleagues who obviously trusted him at one point. He has a horrifying sequence that is nearly as chilling as the pushing of the little old lady in the wheelchair down the stairs in "Kiss of Death". The whole film is set up like a time bomb ticking, just waiting for him to either explode himself or even accidentally step on one. The final reel is a chase sequence between O'Brien and both seedy criminals and his former co-workers, going from a busy community swimming pool to a housing community under construction. Everything about this film noir is top notch, tensely paced and quite the nail biter. Look for a bleached blonde Carolyn Jones as a party girl whom O'Brien meets in a dive bar.

In Shield For Murder Edmond O'Brien is tired of being a straight arrow cop. One night he murders a numbers runner and steals %25,000.00 from him. Of course his official version is that he was resisting arrest, but the bookmaker played by Hugh Sanders knows he's out all that money and he'll get it back one way or another.O'Brien is perfectly cast as the aging detective sick and tired of seeing crooks grow rich. His problem is that he's grown such contempt for the human race he thinks that he's the smartest guy out there. Never credits the crooks or the cops with an ounce of intelligence. That is his downfall.John Agar is his protégé and still a straight arrow. The undercurrent running through the film is that while Agar is trying to catch O'Brien will he fall victim to the same cynicism?Some other noteworthy performances in Shield For Murder are from Marla English as O'Brien's troubled girlfriend, Carolyn Jones as a bar girl he has a small fling with, Claude Akins as one of Sanders's hoods and Emile Meyer as the precinct captain.But Edmond O'Brien is something to see here. In a really crackerjack noir thriller.

Every character in "Shield for Murder," even minor ones, seems worn down by life. The whole film has a bleak, hopeless tone, personified by the principal character, played by Edmond O'Brien, a crooked cop who murders someone for money and then spends the rest of the film dodging both the crime boss who the money was meant for and the police who want to see justice done. The hugely ironic finale finds O'Brien being gunned down on the front lawn of his suburban dream home, which he was going to use the money to buy. The 1950s suburban American dream is not to be had for this prototypical noir protagonist (or should we say antagonist).O'Brien appeared frequently in films like this, but rarely did he play such an unapologetic bad guy. Usually his characters, if not necessarily nice guys, at least had one foot on the side of what's right and decent. This character is bad through and through, which is a bit of a misstep for the movie, since we're not at all conflicted about seeing him brought down. In so many noirs, the suspense comes from seeing essentially good men wrongfully accused, or watching them land in bad situations because of tricks of fate or wrong place wrong time dumb luck. But in this one, we just want to see O'Brien get caught, and since we're pretty sure he will be given the conventions of the time and genre, there's not much suspense in seeing it all play out.The film's biggest asset is probably the brief appearance of Carolyn Jones decked out as a bleach blonde. For the time she's on camera, her exotic face was the only thing I could look at.Grade: B+

Less than one minute into the opening scene, a large shadow outline of the "boom mic" can clearly be seen in the background. The fact that director Howard W. Koch and editor John F. Schreyer decided to leave in this blatant gaffe, and the platinum beauty of a very hungry Carolyn Jones, ten years before Morticia Addams, were the two most interesting aspects of this film for me.Gritty crime drama's from the classic 'Noir' era (1941-1958) have been elevated to revered status. Rightly so in most cases. This would not be one. However, since exceptions prove the rule... Shield for Murder serves a useful purpose, I suppose.