Raymond Burr

The Los Angeles police know that Pete Ritchie is smuggling narcotics across the Mexican border, but they cannot make a single charge stick. They send an undercover officer, Madeleine Haley, to get close to his operation. Before she can get anywhere, she is grabbed by Johnny McEvoy, a government agent posing as a hoodlum who is also after Ritchie. Neither knows the other is on the same side of the law, and the two of them end up running the border together while Ritchie closes in. Fred MacMurray and Claire Trevor play the two agents who keep each other in the dark, and Raymond Burr is the heavy. The film was the first production of Borderline Pictures, formed by MacMurray, director William Seiter, and producer Milton Bren, who deferred their own salaries to make it. It entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Crime · Noir · Thriller

A 1951 jungle horror film written and directed by Curt Siodmak, the screenwriter of The Wolf Man. On a rubber plantation deep in the Amazon, foreman Barney Chavez (Raymond Burr) kills his employer and takes his beautiful wife Dina (Barbara Payton) — but a witch's curse condemns him to transform into a gorilla, stalking the jungle while the police commissioner (Lon Chaney Jr.) closes in. Essentially a loupe-garou tale transplanted to the tropics, it is a minor-key cult item with a remarkable cast for its budget. The film is in the public domain.

Horror

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.

Crime · Thriller