The Man Who Cheated Himself is a prime example of a good movie ruined by bad casting. Lee J Cobb’s in this case, who’s meant to be playing a cop blinded by love and winding up on the wrong side of everything. If Cobb’s Lieutenant Ed Cullen is a poor sap being driven by his dick, it doesn’t come across.
Jane Wyatt also isn’t quite right as Lois, the object of Ed’s affection. It’s hard to locate her as a woman who could drive a man to mess his life up totally. No heat, no spark, no nothing.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The plot revolves around a little lie that turns into something much bigger after Ed steps up to protect Lois (Wyatt), the woman he’s been having an affair with. Her husband comes home unexpectedly and finds Lois and Ed together. After some shouting and waving around of a gun, the husband winds up dead. It was accidental but Lois did it. From here fate takes over as the main driver of the plot. Ed gets rid of the body by dumping it at the airport before throwing the murder weapon into the bay. Only for the gun to wash up and get used in another murder. It’s this that starts to pull Ed down.
Fate intervenes several times, in fact, effectively enforcing Hollywood’s strict moral code by punishing Ed and Lois for adultery with developments no one could see coming. It is their only real crime. Lois has killed her husband by accident. Ed has killed no one.
If it sounds like I’m giving away the plot, it’s because it’s not entirely important. The drama comes from watching Ed lose his composure as fate’s agent – his own kid brother – undoes him. Young Andy (John Dall) is in awe of his older brother and has just started working with him as a rookie cop. Learning everything on the job, he traipses around after Ed as the lieutenant “investigates” the crime he himself is implicated in.
Weirdly, the two brothers live together and share a bedroom. Cobb is about 40 at this point and Dall about 30. Doubly weird. But it does at least reinforce what’s going on here – fate is always with you, perhaps right next to you in the adjacent bed reading a book before lights out.
The whole thing, for all its weird plot twists – maybe Lois’s husband was plotting to kill his wife, we’re never really sure, for instance – is a lot of nothing about nothing. Would it have been a better film if Andy had been the focus? He’s the real detective here after all and it’s his eager-beaver desire to prove himself to his brother that provides the film’s dramatic fuel. It feels often as if it would be better with more Dall and less Cobb but that would rob Ed of his tragic-hero status and turn the film into a routine policier. Either way, director Felix E Feist keeps it bouncing along and cinematographer Russell Harlan makes it look good.
Harlan did To Kill a Mockingbird, Rio Bravo and Run Silent Run Deep so knows his stuff and gets to bring out the fancy noirish looks in the film’s big set-piece finale, which takes place at the Fort Point building – seen in Dark Passage and Point Blank. Suddenly the crime thriller styling is abandoned and things get much more shadowy as fate finally exacts her murky tribute. If you’re watching the 2018 UCLA Archive/Film Noir Foundation restoration, this is where its improved visuals really come into their own.
The film was produced by Jack Warner Jr, son of big Jack Warner, and was originally known as The Gun, which is a better title than The Man Who Cheated Himself. He is clearly finding his way.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
