Behind Green Lights (1946)

aka: Precinct 33

An unscrupulous private investigator with a penchant for blackmail is found dead in a car, and the leading suspect is Janet Bradley (Carol Landis), the daughter of of a mayoral candidate. With the election just weeks away, the press, here depicted as shallow and ruthless, will do anything to get a juicy story. They muscle the medical officer into switching the corpse with another body when it becomes clear that Janet couldn’t have been the murderer. Detective Sam Carson (William Gargan) must find a way to clean up the mess and save the girl he’s beginning to fall for. Also with Richard Crane, Mary Anderson and John Ireland.

By 1948, Carol Landis’s career was in decline and her marriage with W. Horace Schmidlapp was collapsing. She entered into a romance with actor Rex Harrison, who was married to actress Lilli Palmer at the time. Landis was reportedly crushed when Harrison refused to divorce his wife for her. Unable to cope any longer, she committed suicide at her Pacific Palisades home on July 5, 1948 by taking an overdose of Seconal. She had spent her final night alive with Harrison. The next afternoon, he and the maid discovered her on the bathroom floor. Harrison waited several hours before he called a doctor and the police. According to some sources, Landis left two suicide notes, one for her mother and the second for Harrison who instructed his lawyers to destroy it.