The film starts with the murder scene of a woman who manages the fan mail for film star LeRoy Dane. Private detective Tom Alder (David Janssen) is told about the details of the case by a cop friend of his who drops by for a drink. Actually, Alder is a particular kind of private detective - He tracks down the long-lost beneficiaries of estates for a cut of the proceeds.
But the murdered woman's entire estate was less than three thousand dollars, so why the interest? Alder looks around the murder scene late at night - apparently crime scene tape was not in the budget - and finds some old clippings in the murdered woman's apartment concerning a rich couple's 16-year-old daughter who went missing 13 years before. This is what apparently piques his interest, although there is no estate involved, and nobody has hired him, and thus nobody is paying him to do any investigation. And yet he spends more on airlines and hotels than the Beatles on tour as he goes about looking for answers. Along the way he meets a host of colorful characters, none of whom seem related to any of the others, but all with an interest in his investigation. Complications ensue.
The "Big Sleep" this is not, but it has some of the same problems and features, but for its time versus the time of The Big Sleep. It's a great example of an industry in transition - one that is exiting the production code era and entering the swinging sixties. It's just not quite there yet, and it has a great jazz score. But the plot just wanders all over the place.
It scores some in the casting department - William Demarest as a washed-up homicide detective who has turned alcoholic and waxes poetic. And it busts some there too - Brad Dexter looks more like the muscle for the mob than he does some matinee idol that teens go crazy at the sight of. And I always liked Jeanne Craine in her 20th Century Fox vehicles, but she is cringeworthy here as someone from Alder's past who sees him one night in a bar after ten years apart, and then pesters the guy, apparently proud that her breaking his heart years ago caused him to become hard and cynical - at least so she believes.
