Crime Against Joe

Joe Manning is a struggling artist who wakes up in a jail cell after a night of heavy drinking, accused of killing a nightclub singer. With his memory fogged and his reputation hanging by a thread, he scrambles to reconstruct what happened the previous evening. As he talks to nightclub regulars, a hard-bitten cop, and a few people who might help or hurt him, layers of suspicion and small-town gossip make it hard to tell who's telling the truth. The story follows his attempts to separate rumor from fact and to hold on to whatever evidence might clear him, without revealing key turns in the plot.

This 1956 crime drama was directed by Lee Sholem, from a story credited to Decla Dunning and Robert C. Dennis, and stars John Bromfield and Julie London among its leads.

Commercially, Crime Against Joe didn't break out as a major box office success and is usually described as a modest entry among midcentury crime films, with no widely cited grosses.

Critical reaction has been mixed, reflected in a middling average from a small number of votes. Reviewers and later viewers tend to note the film's noir-tinged atmosphere, its emphasis on memory and suspicion, and the moral fog surrounding nightlife and alcohol. Performances by Bromfield and London are often singled out as anchors, while the script and pacing get uneven marks.

In terms of cultural footprint, Crime Against Joe hasn't become a household title, but it can be of interest to fans of 1950s crime pictures and collectors of Julie London's screen work. It captures period details of the nightclub scene and the era's approach to crime melodrama, so it turns up occasionally in retrospectives about lesser-known noirish films. For viewers curious about midcentury mood pieces and character-driven mysteries, it offers a compact, era-specific example rather than a mainstream classic.