NO QUESTIONS ASKED (1951)

A black widow without a mate is just another spider.

A man is on the run through the wet, deserted streets of lower Manhattan. He scuttles into the shadows cast by a stairwell just as a prowl car tears by, its siren whining against concrete and brick. As the man hunkers down we hear his voice, “My name is Steve Keiver. That’s what all the sirens are about. They’re screaming for me. I was very popular that night—everybody wanted me, dead or alive. You think there’d be a thousand hiding places in a large city, but there aren’t.” More police cars make the scene, closing off any possible egress, their searchlights obliterating the deep dark. As Steve presses his back against the grimy recess of a doorway, the narration turns inevitably to the source of his dilemma, “You wonder how it happened and where it all really began…”

Steve (Barry Sullivan) is an insurance company lawyer who gets the brushoff from his girlfriend Ellen (Arlene Dahl), owing to the fact that his present salary won’t set her up in diamonds and pearls. A telling exchange early in the picture provides the straight dope on their shaky relationship. The scene finds their pair bickering during a taxicab ride home from the airport. Steve believes—what a chump—Ellen’s been on a solo ski trip to Sun Valley:

Her: “I’m not a one-room flat kind of girl. I don’t want to raise my children in the kind of poverty I was raised in. I couldn’t stand it. I want security.”

Him: “If you’re just patient honey—“

Her: “—I’ve waited a year. You can’t deposit patience in a bank.”

Him: “We’re never gonna be rich, that’s not security. But we love each other, you can deposit that in my bank.”

Steve asks for a raise the following day, but his boss parries: “Ladders are built for patient men,” the guy says. However, the boss also makes an offhand remark about a recent stolen fur case: he’d pay ten grand to the thieves, no questions asked, in order to avoid settling the claim. Steve gets a big zinger: he’ll find out who heisted the furs and broker a deal between them and the insurance company. He’ll receive a finder’s fee and everyone will be happy: the thieves will get more for the goods than a backroom fence would pay, his boss dodges a six-figure payout, and Steve’ll have enough in the bank to give Ellen a swimming pool full of sparklies. Unbeknownst to him—what a maroon—it’s already too late. Ellen just eloped to Europe with Gordon Jessman (Dick Simmons), a smooth operator she met on the slopes in Idaho. Steve is crushed when he discovers Ellen’s deserted apartment.

Steve contacts the crime syndicate and eventually manages to buy back the furs for the insurance company. It isn’t long before he’s finessing a deal over another caché of stolen goods, and then another, and another. Before long he’s flush. With Ellen out of the picture, Steve finally notices Joan (Jean Hagen), a coworker. Joan’s a nice girl. Steve—what an idiot—should be so lucky. She knows that Steve is walking a tightrope in his new venture, but she’s been carrying a torch for so long that she can’t help going along.

Cut to the gala premiere of a Broadway show. Two henchmen from the stable of gangster Franko (Howard Petrie), pull off a lurid robbery. In full-on drag-mode, they crash the powder room during intermission and relieve all the old broads of their Harry Winstons. During the fracas Joan gets pistol-whipped, leading the cops to think Steve might be in on the caper. What’s more is that the boys in blue have already named Steve Public Enemy Numero Uno—New York’s bad boys are stealing more than ever now that they know Steve can broker a high-dollar insurance company buy-back. Our guy Stevie may be a slick solicitor who knows how to walk the line between legal and illegal, but he’s forgotten all about the difference between legality and morality. It’s gonna cost him.

You didn’t think we were through with Ellen, did you? When she gets wind of Steve’s success, she gives Gordon the heave-ho and heads for Steve’s place, where she learns that he’s about to handle the buy-back of the loot from the Broadway premiere heist. Gordon—a cuckold but no fool—decides to rob Steve and take the jewels for himself. In doing so he kills a police detective and frames Steve as the trigger man. Already leery of cops, Steve runs. Real time and flashback coalesce as the film returns to its opening scene, with Steve clawing at the shadows in the cheap side of town.

Meanwhile, Ellen and Gordon are frantically packing their bags when Franko’s men arrive, expecting to find Steve and the jewels. Ellen thinks they can sell the jewelry bundle back to Franko, and she and Gordon go along willingly to negotiate a deal. This is where No Questions Asked becomes something special. Folks, take my advice: don’t mess about with gangsters. Pretty simple, huh? Not to stuck-ups like Ellen and Gordon, who think their nice clothes make them smarter than the lower-class types. Instead they’re amateurs who are about to learn one of film noir’s most brutal lessons. Dig them trying to handle Franko:

Her: “How much are they worth to you?”

Him: “How much are they worth to you? I don’t think I’m going to have to pay anything for them Mrs. Jessman. You’ve got the jewels—I’ve got you.”

Her: “If anything happens to me you’ll never find those jewels.”

Him: “You’re smart, but you made a big mistake: I never went to Vassar. I’m afraid you’re dealing with dirty people. When we get finished with you you’re going to be begging to tell us where those jewels are.”

Franko makes with some torture; Gordon pisses his pants and squeals. Ellen prostests. Ellen blubbers. Ellen screams. Franko puts a bullet in her. Ellen dead. Gordon looks on in stupified horror. Franko puts a bullet in him. Gordon dead. It’s one of the most matter-of-fact and chilling death sequences in the entire history of film noir.

Steve—what a cluck—stumbles in and decides he wants to fight. He and Franko somehow go head over heels into a swimming pool. Too bad for Steve, but we learned earlier in the picture—for real!—that Franko’s special thing is holding his breath for a really long time. Boffo! Franko triumphs. Steve floats, all glassy-eyed. Enter the cops. They cuff everyone, resuscitate Steve, and then cuff him too. They figured out he didn’t pull the trigger on the dead cop, but he’s an accessory whether you like it or not. Joan hates it. The cops tells her that Steve looking at a two year jolt in Rykers. 

Let’s get something straight about the noir femme fatale: she can’t exist without her special guy. And not just any old schlub—he’s got to be screwy enough to throw away everything he’s got and everything he believes in just to have her. In No Questions Asked, Ellen Jessman is that rare girl, a bona fide femme fatale. She’s greedy, manipulative, superficial, immoral, and exists to make Steve sacrifice his place in the world in order to satisfy her material whims. Irredeemable, and yet she’s merely one side of the coin—she’s got to have her man. Steve is every bit the archetypal a film noir protagonist. Like so many others before him, he suffers from the simple, fatal inability to resist a girl who’s no good. He sees it all clearly and still can’t help himself. Wasn’t Walter Neff the blueprint? When given a clear choice between a nice girl and vampire, Steve does the noir schmuck thing and chooses sex (and redheads). 

But because Ellen is beyond redemption she’s killed, along with her cowardly and murderous husband. Steve is murdered too, but just for a little while. He traded an honest career for a fast buck and gambled the good girl for adultery with the bad. Fate holds Steve—what a dumbass—accountable for his choices. His career is kaput, but maybe with luck and early parole for good behavior Joan’ll be waiting for him outside the gates. In the movies at least, the good ones wait.

In spite of the title’s admonition, there’s still one question left as the end titles roll: When all is said and done, does Steve really get wise or is he the same sucker as before? With Ellen dead we’ll never know.

No Questions Asked (1951)

Directed by Harold Kress

(Also one of Hollywood’s legendary film editors, recipient of two Academy Awards*: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), Mrs. Miniver, Random Harvest, The Yearling, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, Silk Stockings, How the West was Won*, The Poseiden Adventure, The Towering Inferno*.)

Cinematographer: Harold Lipstein

(Significant films as DP: The River’s Edge, Pal Joey, Ride a Crooked Trail, Hell is for Heroes.)
Story: Berne Giler

Screenplay: Sidney Sheldon

Starring: Barry Sullivan, Arlene Dahl, George Murphy, Jean Hagen.

Released by: MGM

Running time: 80 minutes

HIGHWAY 301 (1950)

“You cannot be kind to congenital criminals like these. They would show you no mercy. Let them feel the full impact of the law.”

Back in the days before the no-holds-barred speedway/parking lot that is Interstate 95, sun-seekers in their Nash Ramblers and Studebaker Champions trekked from Baltimore to Florida on U.S. 301. In the 1950 Warner Bros. noir, Highway 301, a ruthless band of killers known as the “Tri-State Gang” exploit the thoroughfare’s easy on-easy off access to engage in that most American of crimes: kicking over banks.

The leader of the outfit is played by Steve Cochran, a good-looking and underestimated actor who could do more than the critics of his day were willing to acknowledge. Cochran could be boyish and naïve in one picture and a greasy scumbag in another; in Highway 301 he creates a legitimately terrifying screen persona, most certainly influenced by Jimmy Cagney’s neurotic turn in the previous year’s White Heat, in which Cochran co-starred. Here, Cochran borrows from the older actor and still manages to keep him at arm’s length. Unlike Cody Jarrett, Cochran’s George Legenza murders so casually that the film’s heartbeat barely flutters whenever he squeezes the trigger. Yet despite the actor’s idyllic good looks and his wardrobe of switchblade-sharp suits, there’s zero glamour to be found in this evocation of the criminal life. The Tri-State mob live out their doomed lives in a series of cheap roadside flops, greasy spoons, and chop suey palaces. Hustling from place to place, all cigarette smoke and nervous sweat, crammed five or six to a car, going nowhere.

If you can get your hands on a copy (Warner Archive DVD), stick with it beyond the first five minutes—viewers must first endure a trio of warnings from the governors of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina about the perils of the criminal life. Juvenile delinquency was an ongoing national concern in the postwar period, as distressing as polio, the bomb, and Biro and Wood’s Crime Does Not Pay. Parents, teachers, and church groups wrung their hands over how all this glorification of crime might lead to a generation of profligates, so the brothers Warner must have been eager to let three pontificating politicians blow for a minute or two at the start of the picture. This is by no means a juvenile delinquency movie—that filmic fad was still a few years away—but given the gunfire about to light up the screen, it’s hard to blame them for welcoming any stripe of official endorsement.

Wait. Biro and Wood,* you say? Who? They were the boys behind the most brutal comic book ever made. You thought those 1950s EC strips were bad? Get wise. Crime Does Not Pay plumbed the depths of human depravity and put it all on display on the glossy covers and pulpy pages of a sensation that was devoured by millions of kiddies and adults each month from the 1940s to the early 1950s. The comic dodged censors (at least for a while) because its crooked culprits always got it in the end, but in the pages leading up to those last few panels, Biro, Wood, and company exalted in an orgy of tommy guns, nooses, shotgun blasts, short skirts, and shallow graves. They spilled buckets of blood; they jammed hypodermic needles in their characters’ eyes; they set women on fire. As a matter of fact, in their June 1948 issue they even told the story of notorious Depression-era gangsters Walter Legenza* and Bobby Mais, the same fellows whose capers loosely inspired Highway 301. The movie creeps right up on that same thin razor of a line between documentary and exploitation that Crime Does Not Pay gleefully spat upon. With the exception of, perhaps, The Phenix City Story, it comes closer than any other midcentury crime film to capturing the wanton lewdness of those comics.

Highway 301 opens in tobacco country, with the Tri-State crew taking down a Winston-Salem bank in broad daylight. One by one, as the hoods exit the idling getaway car and take up positions in the lobby, a narrator gives up the skinny on their respective yellow sheets. One henchmen boasts 21 arrests and zero convictions—accused of everything from arson to murder. Another has just as many collars, with nothing to show for it beyond a hundred-dollar fine. George Legenza himself is on the lam, having busted his way out of the state penitentiary some months ago—though if he’s worried about being nabbed it doesn’t show. Highway 301’s moralizing tone is front and center from open to close: the system treats crooks with kid gloves, and the boys and girls in the audience need to be scared straight before the George Legenzas of the world get their hands on them.

The robbery comes off fine—turns out the gang has been tearing up and down Highway 301 for a while, leaving the bluecoats in the lurch. Even the feds are in on it now, but, as it happens in so many mid-century noirs, the law is obliged to impotently wait on the crooks to goof up. Fate and Destiny are the twin puppet masters of the noir universe, and they don’t give a damn about making the police look smart. When noir screenwriters wanted to lay crooks low, they zeroed their scripts in on tiny mistakes that turned out to have big consequences—a cosmic, ironic brand of justice. Take, for example, a canonical picture like Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing: karma comes not via the law, but rather from a discarded horseshoe in a parking lot, a cuckolded husband, and a gust of wind on an airport tarmac. In the noir universe, cops mostly chase their tails until the time comes for them to swoop in and pick up the pieces.

In Highway 301, fate comes with penciled eyebrows and a French accent. Lee Fontaine, (B-movie actress Gaby André), a recent conquest of Legenza’s protégé, is new to the gang. After she’s logged enough time to see what Legenza does to cops (shoots them in the back), armored car guards (shoots them in the back), and his girlfriends (shoots them in the back), she decides to beat it back to her native Canada. The film’s second and third acts take a detour from all that bank robbing and nestle into the shadowy confines of the Warner’s back lot, as the narrative shifts focus away from the gang’s crime spree to Legenza’s efforts to snatch Fontaine before she can blab. Don’t think too hard about why the Tri-State boys carpool to and fro with their girlfriends stashed at nearby motor courts instead of leaving them safe at home—the story falls apart if they don’t. But let’s at least acknowledge that in most other like-minded films (including Cochran and Cagney’s White Heat) the paramours don’t travel. I’ll back off that point as far as Hollywood lifer Virginia Grey is concerned. Her seen-it-all floozy steals every scene, and Highway 301 would be a lonely stretch of blacktop without her.

Yet the film’s tone is such that it barely resembles the iconic noirs from just a few years before. Double Indemnity, Laura, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, and many others class-up their violence under a veneer of lust and sex. That’s not the case here—Highway 301 is as brutal as it is detached. Its killings are more coldly matter-of-fact than any seen in the classics mentioned earlier, and more closely resemble those from another bank job picture, 1995’s Heat, release nearly a half-century later.

In the end, this is a low budget affair, but a stylish one. Yes, Richmond, Virginia has far too many palm trees and conspicuously resembles the Bunker Hill neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, but the serpentine streets of the WB back lot never looked better, doused in shadow and drenched with rain. The film’s final moments, including a fantastic car stunt and a hair-raising sequence set atop a train trestle, are not only worth the price of admission, but also render bearable all of the dreary semi-documentary bits that showcase law enforcement. •

Legenza in Crime Does Not Pay

 * Writer-artist Bob Wood beat a woman to death in New York’s Irving Hotel—she was “giving me a bad time” he bragged to the cabbie who drove him home—and did three years for first-degree manslaughter. Seem like a short sentence? Apparently in those days being drunk was a mitigating factor. Rest easy though: Wood signed some IOUs with the made guys at Sing Sing in order to make his prison stretch go easy. When he got out and the time came to pay the piper, Wood couldn’t find his wallet. He was murdered within a year of his release.

* The real-life Legenza would die in Virginia’s electric chair on February 2, 1935. A wealth of documents are available here.

Highway 301

Written and Directed by Andrew Stone

Produced by Brian Foy

Starring Steve Cochran, Virginia Grey, Gaby André, and Robert Webber

Cinematography is by Carl Guthrie

Released by Warner Bros. Pictures

Running time: 83 minutes

TWO OF A KIND (1951)

Talk about a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Two of a Kind, released by Columbia in 1951, is a perfect example of how a Hollywood ending can derail a promising noir. The premise is enticing: three grifters try to work an inheritance scam on an elderly California couple. They plan to pass off a fellow con-artist as the couple’s long-lost son and claim a huge inheritance when the aged millionaires finally kick over. The cast is rock-solid, and includes noir icons Edmond O’Brien and Lizabeth Scott, as well as President Woodrow Wilson himself, Alexander Knox. 

Two of a Kind moves with verve and is characterized by tough talk and slick Burnett Guffey photography. It establishes itself as a noir early on, with a wonderfully memorable scene involving the two leads, a car door, and some great banter. Two of a Kind also foreshadows doom in half a dozen different ways, including a slew of references to the game of craps, yet in the end it fails to deliver on its dark promises — instead wrapping up like an MGM musical, where boy and girl hop into a ragtop and ride off into the setting Pacific sun, leaving the audience jilted and angry.

The opening finds Brandy (Lizabeth Scott), searching for a man she’s never met, a very specific kind of a man who fits the requirements that she and her accomplice Vincent (Alexander Knox) require to orchestrate a swindle of gigantic proportions. It seems that many years ago, a wealthy California couple, the McIntyres, lost their son during a trip to Chicago. Mrs. McIntyre had a dizzy spell and cracked her head on the sidewalk outside Marshall Fields. When she woke up her toddler son was gone. She wasn’t without hope though — the tip of little fellow’s left little finger is missing, making him easy to recognize. Yet despite this unusual telltale, after more than three decades the McIntyres have never been able to locate their son.

The McIntyre family attorney, who turns out to be none other than Brandy’s partner Vincent, has long been in charge of the search for the boy. And it’s Vincent who first sees the opportunity to make a grab at the McIntyre family millions; he and Brandy just need to find the right man to play the part of the prodigal son: white male, early thirties, from the Chicagoland area, raised in an orphanage, and finally: willing to pare his pinky for a big payoff. Enter Mike ‘Lefty’ Farrell (Edmond O’Brien).


Throughout film history there have been countless scenes when a character loses some limb or another, and most such films exploit the suspense-filled moments before the axe falls, the knife slashes, or the chainsaw rattles to life. In this case the exchange between Brandy and Mike leading up to the “ouch” is just as compelling. The scene occurs early on, just after Brandy discovers Mike drearily checking cards at an L.A. bingo joint. In a brief sequence of impressive narrative economy, Brandy manages to catch Mike’s eye, test his mettle against a hired thug, get him arrested and bailed out, clue him in on the potential scam, and convince him to put his little finger in the path of a car door. Considering the pair just met, Mike seems too eager to go along with her plan. It’s a weak point in the story that relies on the seductive power of the femme fatale to make believable — after all, how many men will maim themselves for a woman they’ve just met? It’s a hard pill to swallow, and Liz Scott isn’t the girl to help it go down any easier. Scott was certainly a wonderful actress — she could outperform most fifties crime pic ingénues with her eyes alone, but she lacked that Rita-esque brand of raw sexuality necessary to close this deal. 

Nevertheless the sequence is Two of a Kind’s best — though it’s the doom and gloom dialogue which brings the whole thing off. The outcome is never in doubt; we know the finger has to come off for the story to move forward, but the film carves out mucho character development before the big moment. Brandi pulls up to a shadowy curb, the emergency hospital quietly looming a block ahead. She cuts to the chase: “It has to look like an accident — you walk in with a smashed finger and tell them you caught it in a car door.” “And how does it really get smashed?” Mike asks, to which she deadpans, “In a car door.” Brandi leans across Mike’s chest and pushes open his door, while he eyes her warily for the first time. She removes the lipstick from her handbag and paints an aiming line on his little finger before announcing, “You’d better have a cigarette.” Still gregarious, Mike asks, “Who gets to make with the door?” To which Brandy’s curt “I do” not only establishes her clear control of the situation but also that Mike (like other noir protagonists) is in way over his head. Her final admonition, “Look the other way” comes just a second before she crushes his finger. The scene is certainly the most noirish in the film, particularly in how it parallels Mike’s predicament with that of a man about to be executed. The cigarette, the turning of the head, the willing submission, and finally, the moment’s sexually-charged, emasculating violence are quintessentially noirish, and ensure that Two of a Kind would be much better-remembered if only it didn’t shoot itself in the foot so soon after chopping off Mike’s finger.

But the stakes are so low! One of the reasons the car door scene resonates is because it’s the only exciting moment in the movie — and all it involves is a busted up little finger! The film is otherwise light on crime, and the inheritance scheme fails miserably. No one gets killed, and when the plan is unraveled Mr. McIntyre doesn’t even press charges, even knowing that Vincent secretly hoped to kill him in order to get rich even quicker. McIntyre simply demands that the larcenous lawyer close up shop and leave town, while he actually invites the repentant Mike to perpetuate the ruse for the sake of the forlorn Mrs. McIntyre’s newfound happiness. As a matter of fact, the stakes are so low that everyone would likely have been better off if the hustle had succeeded: The McIntyres would have lived out their final years in the happy knowledge that their son had returned, while the already-rich Vincent and Brandi would have just gotten richer and Mike would have endured a guilty inheritance. Considering that the McIntyres had no other potential heirs, perhaps the only real losers would have been the charitable organizations that would have otherwise inherited the funds.

Yet if a deeper reading is made, an important question comes to mind, though it’s one that potentially destroys the film, or at least makes it awfully difficult to like: What about the McIntyre’s real son? It’s not that viewers would expect this lost child to joyously reappear after thirty years to throw a monkey wrench into Brandy and Mike’s plans (though that may have made for an interesting twist). Postwar audiences were as aware as any of the potential for horror in the world, and the details of the Lindbergh case still lingered in the public mind, as would the circumstances of the Wineville Chicken Murders (known to contemporary audiences thanks to Clint Eastwood’s Changeling) and many other newswire scandals of the period. In giving Two of a Kind such a happy denouement, fate can’t mete out the justice required by the noir universe. Sometimes the happy ending is an important part of the noir journey, as in the redemption-oriented Tomorrow is Another Day. Yet here Vincent, Brandy, and Mike contrive a terrible crime: they casually and unremorsefully attempt to cash in on the grief and hope of a decent family that has lost its only child, in all likelihood to a horrible death. The film trades justice for romance, and no two stars, even O’Brien and Scott, possess screen chemistry sufficient for us to forgive a crime that involves preying on the heart of a bereaved mother. We are left to wonder how the title, Two of a Kind, is intended to represent Brandy and Mike, though in some dark, accidental way conjures thoughts of Mike and that vanished little boy, a plot device of so little consequence to the film that he’s denied even the human dignity of a name.

Two of a Kind (1951)

Director: Henry Levin

Producer: William Dozier

Cinematography: Burnett Guffey

Screenplay: James Edward Grant, James Gunn and Lawrence Kimble

Starring: Edmond O’Brien and Lizabeth Scott

Released by: Columbia Pictures Corporation

Running Time: 75 minutes

OUTSIDE THE WALL (1950)

Larry Nelson gets thirty years in a big boy cell after he accidentally snuffs a reform school guard. But fifteen years later, he’s a rehab poster boy: educated, good-looking, trained in the prison infirmary, the pride of inmates and staff alike. Best of all, his parole just came through. It ain’t all rosy though: Nelson is institutionalized and nervous to leave “home,” never having lived on his own. He’s also never driven a car, had a bank account, or taken a drink. He’s practically a doctor, but knows nothing of the birds and the bees. With the promise of a job at the city hospital and $600 in the breast pocket of his prison-issue suit, he hits the busy streets of Philadelphia, braced for a new life somewhere Outside the Wall.

And he ends up washing dishes at a greasy spoon. The hospital’s applications and background checks — not to mention candy stripers — scare the hell out of him. At first pots and pans suit Nelson just fine, but when a pair of stick-up men crash the diner he decides that big city life is just too much to handle. He hoofs it out of town and into rural Jewel Lake, where he answers a help wanted ad at the local TB sanitarium. The lab job pays little more than room and board, but the boss doesn’t ask too many questions. Nelson settles in with ease, and soon earns the respect of his superiors and the attention of two pretty nurses. Elegant brunette Ann (Dorothy Hart), is the girl next-door type, while Charlotte (Marilyn Maxwell) is an ambitious blonde who likes men with “nice cars and money to spend.” Hard-to-get Charlotte is everything Nelson ever dreamed of in a skirt, but he needs a ragtop and wad of cash before she’ll give him the time of day.

Back in Philly, ex-cons take an armored car for a cool million. Their tuberculosis-stricken leader, Jack Bernard (John Hoyt), needed a big score to bankroll his remaining years. Back in Jewel Lake Nelson couldn’t care less about the headlines — until Bernard checks into the sanitarium. The convalescing crook needs a courier to run weekly payoffs to his scheming ex-wife Celia (Signe Hasso), who he fears might flip on him for the reward. Nelson agrees — tired of getting the cold shoulder from Charlotte. Celia wants the entire million though, and hires thugs Red (Lloyd Gough) and Garth (Henry Morgan) to help her get it. Bernard is the only one who knows where the money is, but Celia and her boys wrongly assume that Nelson was in on the heist and try to torture the information out of him. He escapes and hurries back to the sanitarium, where he finally sees Charlotte’s true colors and turns his attention to Ann, confessing his knowledge of the heist as well as his past. She’s elated, but insists that before they can be together he has to come clean with the cops. Meanwhile, Celia and her goons are barreling to the sanitarium for a final reckoning with destiny…

This is a solid crime picture, even if it isn’t a full-bodied film noir. Larry Nelson comes to grips with freedom altogether too quickly and too well. He isn’t plagued by the crushing insecurity, self-loathing, or self-doubt that makes Steve Cochran’s character in Tomorrow is Another Day (1951) infinitely more interesting. (That special movie also manages to capture the bad blonde and the angelic brunette in the same character!)  Nor is Nelson the product of the typical noir prison, as in Brute Force, but rather the very real Eastern State Penitentiary — Cherry Hill — where the golden rule was rehabilitation. Instead of cruel treatment and an uncaring bureaucracy, he is carefully educated and highly trained. The system dotes on him. And the everyday folks he bumps into aren’t suspicious or frightened noir regulars. Instead of being shunned, exploited, or ripped off, the people of Outside the Wall try to lend a helping hand: the warden lines up a job, a uniformed cop helps him navigate traffic, and instead of looking for a kickback, his boss at the diner is ecstatic to have found such a hard worker. Sure, a barfly tries to lift his wallet, but he swats her away with ease.

Speaking of Nelson, his feathers never get ruffled, even though he’s got zero life experience. He isn’t paranoid or desperate — he’s not even mildly neurotic — and like a jailhouse Sam Spade he uses his prison smarts to stay a step ahead everyone else. But even if we don’t have both feet fully in noir territory here, Outside the Wall is plenty worthwhile. Marilyn Maxwell has a lot of fun making like a bad girl, and Harry Morgan is a grotesque (if underutilized) villain even by his lofty standards — like a pint-sized inquisitor gets people to spill by jamming scalpels underneath their nails. Noir or not, this is unabashedly a crime film, and occasionally a brutal one.

I’m ambivalent about the bland Richard Basehart, even though his early movie career is steeped in noir, and Outside the Wall was one of his better roles. I’ve read much about what a great actor he was, and how he could have been big star if only Hollywood had given him the chance. Rubbish. Basehart was good-looking in a vanilla sort of way and he had some depth, but he lacked above-the-title, big star screen charisma — and said so himself. Rather than compare him to Burt Lancaster, the bland Basehart was rather a stone’s throw away from Kent Smith, which, in the end, isn’t a terrible thing. Both enjoyed lengthy careers and appeared in more memorable films than most actors could have dreamed of. Maybe Basehart simmered a bit more than Smith, but he was certainly no Lancaster.

One of the best things about Outside the Wall is writer-director Crane Wilbur’s dialog: “You’re being born all over again kid, except this time you’re a man.” “Where you been all your life?” “I just found out what money can buy.” “I always was a sucker for a dame.” Smart, pulpy stuff that sometimes hints at epigram and always makes me smile. Wilbur had a thing for prison pictures. He penned a bunch of noir screenplays, most dealing with jailbirds and ex-cons. A Hollywood lifer with who began as an actor, he wrote for the ear and punctuated his scenes with good lines, no matter what he was working on — it’s hard to imagine that screenplays as contradictory as The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima and House of Wax both sprang from his typewriter in the same year (1953). But if Wilbur was a fine writer he was a pedestrian director. Canon City (1948) and Outside the Wall are plenty good enough, but they pale next to He Walked by Night and CrimeWave (1954), Wilbur scripts brought to the screen by more gifted directors.

Outside the Wall is cheap, enjoyable, unspectacular, and entertaining. It has too much brotherly love for a bona fide film noir, but it offers a rare glimpse at the mid-century streets of one of America’s great cities, and it serves up plenty of what crime and noir fans get jazzed on: prisons and parolees, bad girls, torturous thugs, and killers who pull heists with hand grenades. Everything about it may have been done better in some other picture, but what’s not to like?

Outside the Wall (1950)

Written and Directed by Crane Wilbur

Starring Richard Basehart, Marilyn Maxwell, Signe Hasso, John Hoyt, and Harry Morgan
Cinematography by Irving Glassberg
Released by Universal International

Running time: 80 minutes

THE STEEL TRAP (1952)

In the 1952 film The Steel Trap, a dissatisfied and bored Jim Osborne (Joseph Cotten) passes the hours dreaming up ways to embezzle from the bank where he has, for the past eleven years, toiled himself into a life of restless humdrum. Soon daydreams morph into actual preparation, and Jim waits for the right weekend to put his plan into action. If he can clean out the vault one Friday after everyone else has gone home, he’ll have until Monday morning before the cash is missed. A million bucks jammed into a suitcase later and it’s planes, trains, and automobiles in a mad dash for Brazil — with his unknowing wife Laurie (Teresa Wright, lovely as a blonde) in tow. But just like a cat with a ball of yarn though, fate steps in and toys with the escape plan — Mr. and Mrs. Osborne can’t seem to get out of the country. When at last it looks as if they can get clear, Laurie gets wise to the theft and heads straight back to sunny California. Facing the prospect of cooking, cleaning, and sleeping all by himself, Jim also reverses course in a desperate attempt to replace the loot before the bank reopens Monday morning…

The themes at play in The Steel Trap aren’t unusual; the movie stands on the shoulders of films such as Double Indemnity (1944), Pitfall (1948), and Roadblock (1951), where other bored men use desperate, reckless means to escape the monotony of their middle-class existence. Don Siegel’s Private Hell 36 (1954) and Mark Stevens’s feverish Time Table (1956) would continue the trend through the middle fifties. Judging by the popularity and preponderance of these tropes throughout the entire arc of the classic film noir period, we come to understand how these crime films were able to effectively offer counter the trumped-up veneer of optimism smeared over the postwar culture — including most of Hollywood’s film output.

Sans film noir movies, where could we explore in an effort to come to terms with an inescapable truth of those years: Not one that suggested that for most Americans the prosperity and material gain wasn’t possible, but that it simply wasn’t enough. Jim Osborne has all the ingredients those glossy magazine ads led him to believe were the recipe for happiness, as he says to a coworker:

“I was just thinking I’ve got a wonderful wife, a wonderful daughter, good health, a steady job, a reasonably secure future. I should be a pretty contented man.”

And yet he isn’t. In spite of all those things (not to mention a cute little bungalow and shiny new car) Jim’s life is vacant and without purpose, and he is unable to come to terms with his malaise. In reflecting upon his unhappiness he doesn’t seek renewal through increased commitment to his family, or to his community, or by considering a different, possibly more fulfilling career — like an addict, he just wants more. A gossamer, tenuous more. Somewhere else, somewhere exotic.

Writer-director Andrew Stone, who made a long career of musicals but switched to noir melodramas in the fifties, essentially treats The Steel Trap as a suspenser. It moves quickly and doesn’t waste many frames putting the money into Jim’s suitcase. Most of the running time is used up watching the Osbornes scramble to overcome a Kafka-esque series of roadblocks, while Jim grows ever more paranoid and tense. For the most part it works, but Jim’s interactions with a bevy of airline clerks (as well as an absurd scene with a U.S. customs agent) grows tedious, and finally brings to mind a much-loved Steve Martin and John Candy satire from an utterly different genre. Dimitri Tiomkin’s music is as good as expected but Oscar winner Ernest Laszlo’s cinematography is not. The Steel Trap only occasionally looks as good as Laszlo’s other film noirs, and a few of his set ups can only be described as, well, lazy. In the end this is a well-made and watchable film that nevertheless resonates more as a reflection of its time and issues than it does as pure entertainment or on the merits of its production.

Beyond the overarching themes, two additional moments in particular stood out to me: one keys off Jim’s opening narration, which informs the audience that his tenure at the bank has lasted for eleven years. Fifty-two minus eleven equals Pearl Harbor: Jim, embezzling bank manager, missed the big one. It seems that many of us have forgotten that 1952 was a time of war in the United States, but certainly it was front and center in the minds of ticket-buyers at the time, and the filmmakers inserted the detail as to not alienate all of those who would have naturally assumed that Jim had served. It’s also fair to suggest, as a friend just reminded me, that by being cast as a criminal Jim serves not only as a stand-in for all of those “home front connivers” that made life more difficult for everyone during both wars, but also as a representative of the pervasive corruption depicted in such films as The Captive City. 

If 1952 was a time of war, it was also the era of burgeoning television and of rampant McCarthyism. (In just two short years, the reckless senator himself would fall prey to the devilish little device.) A later moment is emblematic of Hollywood’s take on both: Laurie, rehashing her day, tells Osborne about service calls from three repairmen. The first wanted $18 to fix their floor model, the second $32. The third restored the set to perfect working order by tightening a loose wire and didn’t charge a dime. It’s a shrewdly timed jab at the costliness and potential risk of television ownership, coming just as the device was beginning to proliferate in the rural and suburban areas of the country. The conversation between husband and wife hints at an issue more deeply troubling than the honesty of TV repairmen however. At the point when Laurie says, “integrity seems to be a thing of the past, I’d even suspect my own brother,” we have no choice but to cast our eyes at the person seated next to us in the theater. She is the innocent in The Steel Trap, the moral center of the film. And if she has fallen victim to suspicion and paranoia of a nation under the spell of Joe McCarthy, what hope can there be for the rest of us?

In real life, dissatisfied men of a certain age blow their savings on sports cars or hair implants; maybe they even fool around. In the world of film noir they commit crimes. The vast majority of them, whether real or celluloid, eventually come to their senses. It takes abandonment for Jim Osborne to come to his. He wanders the streets of New Orleans deep into the twilight, deciding whether to board the plane headed back to L.A. or the one for Rio, contemplating the life that accompanies each ticket:

“I walked and I walked. And with each step I realized more and more what it meant to be a thief. A man without honor, without self respect, a man without a wife, without a daughter, without a home.”

As he approaches a flower seller, the film slips into an eerie montage showing the Osbornes as every bit the family from the magazine ads. Strangely though, the series of images plays against the outline of an orchid, and are saddened by an ethereal Ella Fitzgerald tune. The effect of the montage is to suggest that these memories can’t be easily recaptured, if at all. Nevertheless Jim tosses his cigarette into the gutter and makes for the airport. Yet in choosing to return to his old life (provided he can undo his crime) I wonder if he has come to understand what exactly made it feel so hollow in the first place, or if he has discovered some better way to move forward — because his potential new life looks exactly like his old one and his change in outlook seems somewhat less than earth shattering. In this The Steel Trap leaves us to ponder some troubling questions. Hopefully Jim knows the answers.  

The Steel Trap (1952)

Written and Directed by Andrew Stone

Produced by Bert Friedlob

Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo

Music by Dimitri Tiomkin

Starring Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright

Released by 20th Century Fox

Running time: 85 minutes