Has anyone else seen "The High Wall" (1947)?

[Lanrezac]

This is a pretty routine murder mystery from 1947.  In a subplot in it, a sleazy janitor in a high-rise apartment building is trying to blackmail a man who lives there for the crime of murder.  We, the audience, suspect that man really is a murderer because A) the man arrested for the murder is a decorated veteran with an adorable 6 year old son, and B) the character being blackmailed has no other reason to be in the movie except to be the killer.

The blackmail victim now approaches the blackmailing janitor about his demand, while the janitor is working in the high rise.

Specifically, the janitor is on the top floor.  Standing on a tall stool.  IN FRONT OF AN OPEN ELEVATOR SHAFT.  Tapping at something inside the shaft with a hammer.

When his blackmail victim approaches him, the janitor does not even get off the stool.  Instead he goes back to work and TURNS HIS BACK ON HIM.  On a man he suspects of murder, and to whom he has never said anything like "I have written a letter to be opened in the event of my death."  But to whom he does say, right there, that he is soliciting offers from the arrested man.

Well, at that point, Nature just has to take its course.

This is really one of the most jarring things I can remember happening in a major studio (MGM), big budget (Robert Taylor, Herbert Marshall) production that was not meant to be an insult to anyone's intelligence.  And yet no review I can find remarks on it.  It is like one of those moments in "The Guy From Harlem" when Mike suggests that The Guy take yet another woman is his girlfriend's apartment...only to be stunned when he really does it.

I am probably making too much of it, and I apologize if you have read this far for what you now feel is a shaggy dog story.  But I found it jaw-dropping, and wondered if others did.

Incidentally, this movie was part of a postwar fad for films that involved psychology as a plot device.  The gimmick in this one was truth serum (genteelly referred to as "narco-synthesis").  Among other things, the hero gives it to the villain at gunpoint, to make him confess in front of the police.  I suppose that is even more remarkable, but did not seem as out of place for 1947 as the janitor's flashing neon "MURDER ME" sign.