Organised race hate is a grift, the unusually prescient 1949 film Jigsaw points out, and is just another way of separating the poor and gullible from what little money they have. Donations, uniforms, other paraphernalia, it all adds up.
Franchot Tone plays an assistant district attorney investigating the death of a printer. Who, it turns out, used to do off-the-books work for a far-right hate gang. The dead man’s wife insists that a journalist is involved in her husband’s death. Though she also insists that her husband killed himself, so who knows. DA Howard Malloy believes that the woman is scared out of her wits and is only telling him what she’s been told to say. When the journalist himself winds up dead, Malloy starts digging further, and uncovers the existence of a gang called the Crusaders, a white-supremacist outfit with spidery connections all over the place.
Malloy’s investigation takes him into places high and low, rubbing up against villains, vamps and high society dames. He meets press barons, PR people, a radio executive, the rule of thumb being that the higher up they are, the more likely they are to be involved in the Crusaders.
The existence of this gang sticks in Malloy’s craw because it goes against his idea of the USA – liberty and equality of opportunity for all. This is what motivates him – racism is un-American. At one point one of those well connected Crusaders will attempt to sell Malloy a different vision of America, one where “the right to hate” is part of the grander notion of free speech. Sounds very 21st century to me, this selective prioritisation of foundational principles.
This is a strange film. It chunks through plot development as if it didn’t matter and it not entirely successfully tries to incorporate a race-hate angle into a standard crime-noir format. There’s a femme fatale, a pock-marked villain, a lot of bad guys in high places, with Malloy the obvious white knight. Seen from a slightly different and no less unsuccessful angle, it’s a Nazi-fifth-column movie left high and dry by the end of the war being roughly forced into doing boon work for a new master.
Interesting, for those reasons if nothing else. And also because there are a bunch of cameos by famous people. If you can see them. The copyright on Jigsaw lapsed and so the world, and Amazon, is chock full of terrible copies that are oodles of generations old. Caveat emptor. But if you are bold enough, Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, Burgess Meredith, Marsha Hunt, John Garfield and Everett Sloane can all be briefly glimpsed. I definitely saw Dietrich (leaving a club called The Blue Angel) and Garfield (he even speaks a line), the others are listed but maybe I couldn’t see them through the murk of the terrible copy I watched.
Ignore the famous. There are plenty of good actors to feast the eyes upon. Tone – righteous and a bit stiff as ever, well suited to the righteousness of Malloy. Marc Lawrence is particularly good as Angelo “The Angel” Agostino, a strange mix of the fixer, humanitarian and crime boss. And Jean Wallace, vamping it up as night club singer Barbara. Barbara is a pretty nice girl beneath the hard-bitten facade, it turns out, which is how Wallace herself comes across.
There’s a romantic angle, which never really suits Tone and comes across as a bit chintzy. It feels like it’s there because that’s what the back office says the film must have. It undermines the dark and shadowy goings-on and is is yet one more element in what often feels like a stew of bits left over from other films. Maybe that’s why they called it Jigsaw? A fascinating oddity.
Jigsaw – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
