Please Murder Me

A 1956 film noir directed by Peter Godfrey, starring Raymond Burr and Angela Lansbury. Attorney Craig Carlson (Burr) falls in love with Myra Leeds (Lansbury), the wife of his best friend Joe (Dick Foran). When Myra asks Craig to defend her after she shoots Joe dead, claiming self-defense, he wins her acquittal — only to learn she manipulated him and planned the murder all along. Trapped by attorney-client privilege and his own guilt, Carlson devises a desperate plan to force Myra to murder again: him. Told largely in flashback with Burr's characteristic gravitas and a memorably cold Lansbury performance, it is a compact, twisty courtroom noir. The film is in the public domain.