Suspicions confirmed

As I watched this movie, it occurred to me that although it was a good comedy, it might have worked as serious crime drama. Admittedly, the premise of the movie is a little implausible, but a lot of the films noir made in the 1940s had implausible premises too. And this movie, set as it was in the 1940s, involving detection by an insurance investigator, is obviously meant to suggest such films.

By coincidence, within a couple of months of watching this movie, I saw Whirlpool (1949). It involves a woman who is a kleptomaniac, a secret she keeps from her husband, who is a psychoanalyst. She meets an astrologer/hypnotist/con artist, who promises to cure her of her kleptomania. But he is actually being threatened by a woman whose money he swindled, who just happens to be one of the patients of the psychoanalyst. So, he hypnotizes the kleptomaniac into opening her husband's safe and stealing the records in which the patient incriminates him. Then he goes in for surgery, and while in a room recovering, he hypnotizes himself so he won't feel pain, sneaks out of the hospital and murders the woman whose money he stole, and then sneaks back in the hospital so he will have an alibi. Then, thanks to a posthypnotic suggestion, the kleptomaniac goes over to the murdered woman's house, where the security guards find her and have her arrested for murder.

In other words, a lot of the elements of the Jade Scorpion are in this movie as well, and it is every bit as implausible as a serious version of Jade Scorpion would have been. Of course, it still works better as a comedy.