The title of They Only Kill Their Masters sounds like a punchline, and in a way it is — but the film that follows is stranger, sadder and more interesting than its premise suggests. Directed by James Goldstone from a screenplay by Lane Slate, it stars James Garner as Abel Marsh, police chief of the sleepy California coastal town of Eden Landing. Abel returns from holiday to find that a local woman, Jenny Campbell, has been found dead on the beach, apparently mauled by her own Doberman, Murphy. The town has already decided what happened: the dog did it. Abel’s job is to arrange for Murphy to be put down. Instead, he starts asking questions, and the questions lead him into a web of secrets that touches almost everyone in Eden Landing.
Garner is ideal casting for Abel Marsh. He plays him as a transplant from the East Coast, a man who took a small-town job expecting a quiet life and discovered that small towns are only quiet on the surface. Abel is wry, observant and a little lonely. He does not much like dogs, which makes his growing sympathy for Murphy — a well-trained, gentle animal who plainly does not fit the profile of a killer — all the more affecting. Garner has a gift for playing men who do the right thing reluctantly, and Abel is a perfect example: he does not set out to be a hero, he simply cannot bring himself to sign a death warrant, canine or otherwise, without being sure. That stubborn decency drives the whole film.
The mystery itself is elegantly constructed. Jenny Campbell, played in flashback and photograph, was pregnant when she died, and the evidence does not quite add up: she drowned, in fresh water made to look like salt water, which suggests murder rather than a mauling. As Abel investigates, he encounters a remarkable cast of Eden Landing residents, played by a roll call of Hollywood veterans: Katharine Ross as Kate Bingham, the veterinary nurse who becomes Abel’s ally and romantic interest; Hal Holbrook as Dr. Warren Watkins, the local vet; June Allyson, Tom Ewell, Peter Lawford, Edmond O’Brien, Ann Rutherford and Arthur O’Connell as townspeople with their own reasons to want the case closed quickly. The film was, poignantly, the last major feature shot on MGM’s old backlot before it was sold, and the presence of so many golden-age stars gives it the feeling of a farewell to an era.
Goldstone, a television veteran, directs with a calm, unhurried style that suits the coastal setting. Eden Landing is photographed as a place out of time: quiet streets, a small police station with barely enough cars to go around, a beach that looks beautiful and faintly menacing. The film’s pace is deliberate, sometimes to a fault, but it allows Garner room to build Abel through small details — the way he talks to suspects, the way he listens more than he accuses, the way his loneliness becomes visible in scenes with Kate. Ross and Garner make a lovely, low-key couple: two people who have both learned to be careful, discovering that they might not need to be careful with each other. Their romance never overwhelms the mystery, but it gives Abel a personal stake in staying in Eden Landing rather than drifting on.
What gives the film its lasting interest is its theme of prejudice — not only toward a dog, but toward people. Eden Landing is quick to blame Murphy because Dobermans, the town believes, kill their masters. It is a convenient story, and convenience is the enemy of justice. Abel’s investigation is, at heart, an argument against convenient stories: against assuming the outsider is guilty, against accepting the first explanation because it saves trouble, against letting a community’s gossip do the work of evidence. Garner plays that argument without preaching. Abel simply keeps asking, politely and persistently, until the convenient story falls apart. It is the same moral intelligence that animated his best television work, transferred to a feature mystery.
The film was not a great success on release, and Garner himself was famously dismissive of it in his memoirs, reportedly preferring not to discuss it. That dismissal is a little unfair. They Only Kill Their Masters is not a classic, but it is a handsome, well-acted, old-fashioned whodunit with a humane centre, and Garner’s performance is one of its chief pleasures. He is relaxed, funny and quietly moving as a man who finds purpose in a case everyone else wants to forget. The scenes between Abel and Murphy the dog are genuinely charming, not because they are sentimental, but because Garner plays them straight: a man who claimed not to like dogs, learning to trust one, is a small story told well.
There is also a melancholy undertone that suits Garner at this stage of his career. Made just before The Rockford Files would make him a television icon again, the film catches him between phases: too established to be a newcomer, too restless to settle into easy stardom. Abel Marsh, a man who has moved to a new town and is still deciding whether he belongs there, feels like a character Garner understood from the inside. His performance has the quality of a man thinking on screen, and that thoughtfulness is what keeps the mystery engaging even when the plot grows complicated.
For Past Tunes audiences, They Only Kill Their Masters is a rewarding rediscovery: a coastal mystery, a gallery of Hollywood legends, a dog who steals every scene he is in, and a James Garner performance that proves his greatest strength was never toughness or charm alone, but a quiet refusal to accept the easy answer. Abel Marsh may have wanted a quiet life in Eden Landing. What he found was a murder, a romance and a Doberman who needed a friend. That, for Garner, was always enough to build a film around.