WOMEN FROM HEADQUARTERS (1950)

“Around the clock you will rescue children from unfit homes, neglectful parents, and crime provoking surroundings. On patrol of public parks, playgrounds, and schoolyards, you will keep a vigilant watch over safety of children. Our files tell a meaningful story of lost and despairing wrecks of girls led out of the shadows of crime and from the brink of destruction and suicide by the friendly hands of policewomen.”

“And nothing will stand between you and the unforeseen danger of your every assignment except what you’ve learned here at the academy. There’s a snub-nosed police revolver in your shoulder bags or under arm holsters that’s for your protection in emergency. Keep that in mind: for emergency only. Congratulations and good luck to each one of you.”

Given that Women from Headquarters is a bottom of the bill crime programmer from Republic Pictures, shot in only twelve days, one’s expectations would surely be low. Not so fast though — with a director like George Blair and with John MacBurnie behind the camera, it’s safe to raise the bar a little. By 1950 these cats, along with other members of Republic’s crime quickie crew (producer Stephen Auer, editor Harold Minter, etc.) had established a track record of modest but surprisingly good stuff (Streets of San Francisco, Post Office Investigator, Alias the Champ, Federal Agent at Large, Unmasked, and Destination Big House). All that being said, it’s a shame that Women from Headquarters falls short of expectations in just about every way imaginable.

Joyce Harper (Virginia Huston) and Ruby Kane (Barbra Fuller) have been struggling by on their own for years — Joyce practically raised the younger girl. But when the war came Joyce joined the Army nurses’ corps, leaving teenage Ruby without the crutch of an older role model. Now back together in Los Angeles, the two women (Ruby’s just turned 21) are trying to make a go of it as roommates in the brave new post-war world. At first glance, Ruby appears to be making out better. She’s got a nice gig hopping cars at a drive-in off Sunset and a steady boyfriend — though Joyce hardly approves. For her part, Joyce is struggling. She’s been bouncing from secretarial job to secretarial job, unattached and unable to find fulfilling work that doesn’t involved getting pawed by her bosses. She says early on, “when I got out of uniform I came back to a world I didn’t fit into. I felt sort of lost and unhappy in the work I’d done before.”

Joyce finally discovers her purpose on the night Ruby gets busted. Her motherly suspicions of the younger girl’s beau Max were well founded. While out on a date at a local watering hole (Ruby likes to get loaded) Max slips into the back room to negotiate a drug deal with the proprietor, leaving Ruby alone with her drink. When a drunken barfly tries to get fresh, Ruby tosses her highball in his face at precisely the moment a girl-boy cop team braces the bar on a routine check. Surprisingly, it’s Ruby who gets popped — the lady cop, Sergeant Rogers (Frances Charles), is prowling for suspected jailbait. Rogers puts Ruby in the backseat and drives her home to Joyce, who verifies the girl’s age and gets her off the hook. In the course of their conversation, Rogers gives Joyce the low-down on the LAPD and tells her she thinks she’d be a great fit.

Rogers wasn’t kidding either. Joyce churns her way through the LAPD academy and upon graduation is assigned to a plainclothes unit working directly out of headquarters. In her first few months on the job she amasses a record that would make Edmund Exley piss his pants: busting up high class gambling dens, saving kidnapped children, and chasing down bank robbers. Joyce even brings in a cop killer. Unfortunately all we get to see of her exploits are a montage of newspaper headlines and B roll of crooks on the run.

While all of this is happening Ruby is suspiciously absent from the movie. Following her near miss with the cops, she and Max bolt the Southland for Chicago. We don’t see her again until much later, after Joyce gets promoted to the narcotics squad. The headline-grabbing lady cop learns that her old friend has returned to California when she discovers her in the infirmary at the city jail, pregnant and battered by Max, now a hardcore felon. Sharing her tale of woe with her old pal, the naïve Ruby delivers the movie’s campiest line: “I was married to a criminal dope peddler.” Joyce agrees to get Ruby out of the clink if she rolls over on Max, who is then expected to stooge on his supplier, and on and on up the chain until Joyce can hopefully expose “Mr. Big.” Max’s paternal instincts kick in when he learns that Ruby is knocked up, and he happily spills on his bosses, leaving Joyce and her blue crew to move in and clean out the garbage.

I don’t know about you, but the two quotes set off at the top of the essay are worth getting excited about. They suggest a movie about female police officers more concerned with rolling their sleeves up and doing good work than with keeping their makeup on straight. Too bad for us, secretary turned cop Virginia Huston never wears a uniform or pounds a beat in this movie, and her face — delightful as it is — is always perfectly, and frustratingly, composed. In fact, she somehow manages to get through the picture almost entirely without showing off any real police work, and the early promise of those “despairing wrecks of girls” are left to the speeches, while that snub-nosed police revolver stays forever hidden in her shoulder bag.

Women from Headquarters’s promise as a film noir is wrapped up in Joyce’s feelings of angst at her return from the war, and her unusual career response to those feelings. This inability of the returning veteran to reintegrate into domestic society is one of the cornerstones of noir; it’s only too bad that the film doesn’t do more with it, though surely we have to award Republic some points for the gender switch. While Joyce’s response to her newfound malaise is to defy societal expectations by pursuing a potentially deadly job in the police force, she outwardly displays none of the angst or inner turmoil that we hope for. Certainly we can’t blame the actress. For what its worth, this is the same Virginia Huston who played Robert Mitchum’s girlfriend Ann in that noiriest of noirs, Out of the Past. Huston’s filmography lists only 13 roles, but the majority were top shelf projects. We have to believe she could act a little.

Possibly the failure is the normally excellent Blair’s. He allows his cast to stumble through, and fails to manipulate his camera and the lighting with same verve that I’d come to expect from him. In the end, this is an instance when we have to accept the shortcomings of B material and make allowances. The story is too plot driven and the reels are simply too few to allow for an A picture exploration into Joyce’s psyche. Regardless, while Women from Headquarters’s failure to rate as a film noir is forgivable, its failure to entertain isn’t. The promise of the subject matter gives me shivers, the noir-style character tropes are evident, and the thing moves along quickly enough, but it’s a sloppily rendered paint by numbers picture that isn’t particularly worth looking at. If you want to see somewhat similar material handled the right way, check out 1953’s Code Two.

Women from Headquarters (1950)

Directed by George Blair

Written by Gene Lewis

Starring Virginia Huston, Robert Rockwell, and Barbra Fuller

Cinematography by John MacBurnie

Released by Republic Pictures

Running time 60 minutes

END OF THE ROAD (1944)

I’m beginning to appreciate the inventive ways that George Blair uses his camera so much that I find myself paying more attention to his technique than I am to the story he’s trying to tell. That’s not to say that Blair’s films are bad, because they certainly aren’t. His crime programmers for Republic Pictures are undeniably cheap, inarguably brief, and patently unbelievable, but my journey through his filmography has introduced me to several enjoyable films that, while broadly forgotten by (or unknown to) most film noir enthusiasts, undoubtedly deserve a place in the noir conversation. 1944’s End of the Road is an excellent example of his work.

Edward Norris plays Bob Kirby, a reporter for Living Crime magazine. Serious noirists will best remember Norris from the spectacular and outrageous 1946 B movie Decoy. In this film, Kirby’s grumpy, cynical editor dispatches him north to the Q to get an interview with one Walter Gribbon, recently convicted and sentenced to the death house for the murder of his girlfriend Nora. After their meeting Kirby becomes convinced of Gribbon’s innocence and launches his own investigation, even though his refusal to smear the condemned man costs him his job. He quickly comes to suspect Chris Martin (John Abbott), one of the Nora’s coworkers, and orchestrates a complicated plan to get him to confess. Kirby’s scheme eventually pays off, and in pure throwback fashion he gets his job back with a big raise. Oh, he gets the girl too. After all, there’s always a girl. 

We are in film noir territory here, even though the movie ends well and Kirby is a completely cardboard good guy. The visuals are solid: black, moody, and stylish. Shadows from venetian blinds striate practically every wall. In an important scene that takes place in Martin’s room, the neon light of the hotel’s sign throbs incessantly through the window, disturbing the murderer’s sleep. This visual device was still years away from being a cliché, and Martin actually takes a moment to lament the light’s debilitating effect on his state of mind. This sort of neurotic fixation is heady stuff for a 51-minute Poverty Row program picture from 1944—film noir was everywhere.

More on Abbott, he really makes this thing work. Where Edward Norris falls short as a noir protagonist, Abbott totally delivers, and actually manages to wring a great deal of pathos out of his limited screen time. His mounting sense of desperation and alienation is compelling, particularly when he is unable to find a job after quitting the florist shop in the wake of his crime. His motivation for strangling Nora had been entirely financial—she refused to loan him money. The notion of a man being unable to find work in the peak wartime economy of 1944 would not have gone unnoticed by End of the Road’s theatrical audience. Even a little picture such as this one portends the labor uncertainties to come when the boys returned home.

One key sequence is also critical in establishing the film’s noir credibility. In it, Kirby attempts to unsettle Martin with the help of the German shepherd that was in the flower shop at the time of the killing. Night after night, Kirby stands vigil with the keening, forlorn dog outside Martin’s window. Martin becomes so unraveled at its wailing that he abandons his apartment and flees to Los Angeles. The dog functions as a reminder of Martin’s crime, returning from “out of the past” to terrify him. This acknowledgment of the psychological underpinnings of a murder is impressive for an early-cycle film noir, and plays clearly towards 1940s audiences’ armchair fascination with Freudian psychology. Abbott’s performance is strong enough that we empathize with him and begin to believe that Kirby’s persecution is cruel. The British-born actor’s work here ample proof that in spite of whatever else might be wrong with a film, when the actors give honest, committed performances, it’s awfully difficult not to like the final product. Unfortunately for me, the print of the movie that I watched was so dark through this section of the movie that I was essentially only able to listen to Martin’s flight from the grieving animal to the train station. I’m certain that had the quality of the print been a little better, Blair would have made it well worth paying attention to.

I’m usually not that interested in the more technical aspects of filmmaking, but much of what Blair does is difficult to ignore. In my essay on Federal Agent at Large I suggested that Blair reminded me of Otto Preminger, though I’m beginning to reconsider whether or not the resemblance isn’t to the Jaws-era Steven Spielberg. Blair and cinematographer William Bradford (an Oscar nominee for the very rare film Women in War) keep the camera moving—though not usually on a crane like Preminger or tracks like Ophüls. Instead we get a steady combination of pans and zooms, along with several brief tracking shots. It’s a fine exercise in low-budget filmmaking—Blair gets through several scenes with just a single camera, using a prizefighter’s mix of combination shots to keep our eyes in motion. And his scene transitions are marvelous: wipes, extreme close-ups, and a rapid 180° pan that might make your head spin.

Unbelievable story. Darn good B moviemaking. Give End of the Road a chance, if you get the chance.

End of the Road (1944)

Directed and produced by George Blair

Screenplay by Denison Clift and Gertrude Walker

Cinematography by William Bradford

Starring Edward Norris, John Abbott, and June Storey

Released by Republic Pictures

Running time: 51 minutes

FEDERAL AGENT AT LARGE (1950)

“To beat somebody with your fists doesn’t make you anybody. On the other hand, a shiv gives you real authority.”

What a great line that is—hardboiled and hopelessly nostalgic. The character that says it in Republic’s Federal Agent at Large is a nervous twitch called Jumpy. Nostalgic? Of course. What kind of hood totes a knife? One circa 2014 stop-and-frisk and you’re off to Rikers. Then again, maybe by 1950 the nostalgia was wearing thin. Late in the picture Jumpy learns the hard way not to bring a switchblade to a gunfight.

Silence of the Lambs! Note the one-sheet
hanging above the TV at Quantico.

Lots of people, even devoted crime and noir fans, consider Poverty Row stuff like this practically unwatchable, especially considering the atrocious prints that collectors have access to. Not me. This is my favorite end of the pool. The water here may be a little cloudy, but the temperature suits me just fine. Beside, who can’t fall in love with this kind of dialogue? Here’s another one. “Guys like you, they all come to the same end— in the pen or in a ditch.” That’s courtesy of the film’s big-shot heavy, “Mr. Upstairs.” He’s giving the title character, an undercover T-man trying to hustle some diamonds in exchange for a gambling stake, some free advice. 

You ready to watch this yet? I thought so.

Jumpy. Mr. Upstairs. The dame? Call her Solitaire. With character names as delicious as these, the plot practically becomes secondary. Here it is anyway. The Feds send Mark Reed (Kent Taylor) down Mexico way to get to the bottom of an elaborate gold smuggling ring. Seems like a gang of hoods, run by Mr. Upstairs, have blackmailed a university archaeology professor (Robert Rockwell) into sneaking the gold through customs hidden inside artifacts from his dig. Reed infiltrates the gang and things unfold about as you’d expect them to—until a whopper of a surprise at the end almost pushes the movie into film noir territory. (Not quite though.) There’s almost no chance you’ll track this down and see it, so I don’t mind spoiling: There’s no sunset to ride off into for agent Reed. Just when you think he’s about the turn the tables on Mr. Upstairs, the old man uncorks a revolver and ventilates him. Borrowed from T-Men? Maybe, but eyebrow-raising nonetheless. 

Star Kent Taylor acted in Hollywood for five decades, but he’s a forgettable hero. Likeable but bland, he reprised Chester Morris’s Boston Blackie character on television for three years in the early 1950s. Dorothy Patrick actually gets top billing as Solitaire, the is-she-or-ain’t-she-a-bad-girl nightclub owner. Patrick accounts for most of the film’s verve. She was coming off a strong showing in the 1949 Oscar heavyweight Come to the Stable, but her career never took off as it should have. Film noir fans will undoubtedly recognize her as the girl Friday in 1949’s Follow Me Quietly. Bag of potatoes Robert Rockwell is billed third. He and Eve Arden spun Our Miss Brooks’s into some small measure of immortality, but then the cast falls into obscurity. All the fourth billed star, Estelita Rodriguez, has to offer is a pair of songs.

This is a little movie, 59 minutes long and relegated to sound stages and the back lot. Just like Anthony Mann’s T-Men, it ends with a gun battle on a big ship tied up in Long Beach. Federal Agent at Large isn’t a knock-off though, the budget wouldn’t have allowed for it. Make no mistake, we are in bad movie territory here. But look past budget and production values and you’ll find something to like. Director George Blair (Lonely Heart Bandits, Destination Big House) didn’t have much to work with beyond a routine script peppered with a few great lines, but he managed several competent moving-camera shots and starkly lit nighttime interiors and exteriors. The brawls and gunfights are far from boring, and the way the film establishes its flashback structure and voiceover narration (minimal) is quite original. If you manage to watch this and can’t find anything to like, then at least get a load of the poster. If you don’t like that, something’s wrong with you.

Federal Agent at Large (1950)

Produced by Stephen Auer

Directed by George Blair

Written by Albert DeMond

Starring Dorothy Patrick, Kent Taylor, and Robert Rockwell

Cinematography by John MacBurnie

Released by Republic Pictures

Running time: 60 minutes