Men! All liars! Cheats, louses, and liars! All they want is to ravish nubile dames! One track minds, all of them! What's a dame to do? Right! Date the entire yale football team and string the louses along just in case the A Team hunks don't work out. Wait! We're getting off track. Let's take a look at 1947's "The Pretender," a W. Lee Wilder film.
Our film opens on the New York Stock Exchange where Kenneth (Albert Dekker) is losing millions and trying to hide this fact from his nervous clients. He co-mingles funds and purloins from the funds of wealthy heiress, Claire (Catherine Craig) to pay the more savvy clients. Claire trusts Kenneth impeccably as he was her dad's best friend. Now Kenneth has to find a way get lots of money. Right! He proposes to the nubile Claire...who ends up being a bit of a playgirl. Yep, she's dating just about every player on the Yale football team. Not wanting to marry the much older Kenneth, she accepts a proposal from a doctor friend, Leonard (Charles Drake)...but Kenneth doesn't know who the guy is. Now Kenneth has a brilliant idea, hire a hit man to kill Claire's fiancé. That way anyone who Claire decides to marry, who isn't him, Kenneth will have rubbed out. Genius! Uh oh...he goes to mobster Victor (Alan Carney) to hire the assassin.
Not having a name of the fiancé, the assassin is told to watch the society pages and the guy who will soon appear in a photo with Claire will be the mark. What could go wrong? Claire gets mad at Leonard, breaks the engagement, drives over to see Kenneth, and insists he marry her that night. Yep...the newlyweds appear in the society page the next day and the hired killer sees the photo and now has his mark. Realizing his predicament, Kenneth tries to get Victor to cancel the hit, and will even let him keep the money. There's a problem, an angry dame (Linda Stirling), who is quite sultry, murders Victor...now Victor won't be cancelling any hits. Kenneth now lives in fear that the he will be rubbed out. He will fire the servants and not eat. Claire notices the strange behavior and calls on old flame, Leonard for help. See where all this is going?
Will Clair be better off with Leonard if Kenneth gets rubbed out? Are any of the Yale boys the hired assassin? Who is this angry babe that murdered Victor and might she be the hired gun? This is a good one and we pull for Claire only because she is quite the dish. For a tale of twists, ironies, and paradoxes set in New York City, see "The Pretender."
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