Decoy is a tightly wound, plot-driven noir from producer/director Jack Bernhard, who made it in an attempt to turn his British wife, “Miss Jean Gillie” as she’s billed, into a Hollywood star. It didn’t work, though Gillie is actually very good as Bernhard’s female lead.
Anticipating the femme fatale character of Gloria Grahame to some extent, complete with overpainted top lipline, Gillie plays Margot Shelby, the girlfriend of condemned murderer Frankie Olins (Robert Armstrong), who comes up with a plan to spring him from death row – by injecting an antidote to the lethal toxin administered in the gas chamber, thus bringing Frankie back to life after his execution.
Do not try this at home – methylene blue actually is an antidote to the hydrocyanide gas used in gas chambers but it won’t conjure anyone back to life if things have gone that far.
Back to the plot. To bring about this resurrection she’ll first need to get hold of some methylene blue. Then she’ll need to nobble the doctor in attendance at the execution so she can take possession of the dead man’s body and work her magic. This, usefully, happens to be one and the same person – Dr Lloyd Craig (Herbert Rudley), the noirish male sap who falls under Shelby’s spell.
Shelby has no particular concern for Frankie. He’s on Death Row because of a murder committed during a heist. Only he knows where the ill-gotten heist money is and that’s all Shelby is interested in. Shelby’s relationship to men is one of power – Frankie dotes on her, though she’s secretly seeing one of his gang, Jim Vincent (Edward Norris). The good doctor, blind to the adoring glances of his wholesome receptionist/nurse (Marjorie Woodworth), is also smitten. In case that’s not enough, Shelby also appears to be warming up Joe Portugal (Sheldon Leonard), the cop on the heist case, as another potential lover – “Joe Joe,” she calls him.
It’s unusual for a female to be the mastermind of anything in the movies, but that’s what Shelby is here. She also delivers the noirish voiceover – also unusual.
She’s the only character who really matters and that becomes obvious once Frankie has been revived – Bernhard lays on some Frankenstein-adjacent atmospherics here – and lets slip where the money is. The unusually pro-active Shelby sets about either killing all the men involved or attempting to engineer their deaths. At one point she deliberately runs over one of her victims. Then reverses over him to make sure – footage now now cut after squeamish objection.
Perhaps it was just too much, all this death and female agency. The film failed, the marriage between Gillie and Bernhard also, and Gillie packed in Hollywood and went back to the UK, where she died of pneumonia aged 33 – “apparently of pneumonia” the short bio on the IMDb says, whatever “apparently” means.
She is fabulously nasty as Margot Shelby, with a performance that suits the plot histrionics and the frequently loud and surging score by Edward J Kay. Her British accent singles her out more than a bit and also draws attention to the artificiality of her role (and all the hard-boiled females found in film noir) – the accent unbalances the “pleasures of genre” dynamic a touch.
The whole thing is done in flashback, as noir so often is, with a couple of lovely moments at the end. One is the reveal about the money. The other is Margot Shelby’s parting moments. I’m not going to give either away but they are worth hanging on for. Worth 76 minutes of anyone’s time.
Decoy (in a set with Crime Wave) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
