I WOULDN'T BE IN YOUR SHOES (1948)

It opens, this thing, on death row. A nameless penitentiary squats next to a river that turns over and over, churning like the guts of the suckers wasting away inside its walls. Three hours to go until the lights flicker and the warden once again flips the switch on the vacancy sign. It’s Number Five’s turn tonight, and he’s got no taste for the meal that arrives hot under a silver platter. Number Three puts on a record, hoping to take Number Five’s mind off the ticking of the clock, which echoes so loudly that not even the crashing of the river can drown it out. The other doomed men whisper to him from up and down the block, “Talk boy, tell us how you got here. Talking takes your mind off things when you’re up close to it.” So Number Five hunkers down onto the rack, probably for the last time, and gives. It has to do with a dead man, a wallet full of big bills, and a pair of dancing shoes.

“Where you been?” he remembers asking her.

“Around the world in a rowboat.” She said, her lips barely moving, tired after yet another night on her feet, eyeballing the bed and longing for the numbness of sleep. Give her a few hours and she’ll come back to life, having momentarily forgotten the too-tight heels, the threadbare dress, those same old tired records, and the wretched breath of lonely, clutching men.

It stings to look at her, to think about what she does for the rent. He isn’t pulling his own weight — they live off her sweat and tears. They both used to be real dancers, but that was a lifetime ago. The city was magnificent when the war was on, bright and abundant with six-week contracts, every grinning theatrical man’s door wide open. Not now though. In the months since it ended and the naval yard in Brooklyn began to teem with men again — older now, their eyes different — the nightclub gigs dried up and the city boiled down to this one room apartment and the dark alleys that surround it on all four sides.

He remembers his anger that night, the tangy flavor of it, remembers throwing one new dancing shoe, then the other after the alley cats bleating on the fence outside their window. The shoes were a gift from her, a sign that she still hoped, but to him they were just another reminder of his failure. He shut his eyes thinking he’d either get the shoes back in the morning or he wouldn’t, but when he dragged himself out of bed they were already there, leaning neatly up against the flat’s scarred door. He should’ve figured the shoes’ reappearance was fishy. If he wasn’t such a dumb cluck he would have thrown them in the incinerator.

Maybe he should have gotten wise later that afternoon, when he found the wallet and the money on the street. Third-rate hoofers like him didn’t catch breaks, there was something else at work here. It was if the thing had been put there just for him, where only he would find it. He had pounded this stretch of sidewalk, from one dour theatrical man’s locked door to the next, so often that he could do it through the haze that his life had become. He could have, should have turned it in — he wanted to, really — but she lit up when she saw the bills. She thought of the money as their ticket out, to the coast and maybe a chance in the movies, and what good was a man if he couldn’t give his girl the things she wanted?

But the cops had his number. They had taken a plaster of the footprint at the murder scene — in the alley right outside the apartment window. They knew it was a tap shoe. They knew the damn thing belonged to a man of his size and build. They started watching him and waiting for him to spend the money. It was a Bakelite radio that fouled them up, and not even a good one. Can’t a man buy his wife a radio without being hauled in for murder? Not in this nightmare. Now in a few hours, at midnight, this first Tuesday after Christmas, the lights will flicker and a day or two later some other sap will take his place, and the others will call him Number Five. He’ll have a story of his own to tell, and a river that listens.   

I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948)

Directed by William Nigh

Screenplay by Steve Fisher

Story by Cornell Woolrich

Starring Don Castle, Elyse Knox, Regis Toomey

Cinematography by Mack Stengler

Released by Monogram Pictures (Walter Mirisch Productions)

Running Time: 70 minutes

VIOLENCE (1947)

Film noir’s definition may be as elusive as ever, but we can say with confidence that noir confronted the harsh realities of the postwar world more immediately than other kinds of Hollywood films. With their smaller budgets, noir movies developed a penchant for low cost, “ripped from the headlines” subject matter. They also often realistically depicted the internal and external struggle of veterans attempting to readjust to a culture irrevocably changed — more anonymous, more sophisticated, more neurotic — than the one they left behind at the outbreak of war.

Released originally by Monogram Pictures and recently made available through the Warner Archive, 1947’s Violence is concerned with the efforts of intrepid magazine reporter Ann Dwire (Nancy Coleman) and federal investigator Steve Fuller (Michael O’Shea) to uncover the truth behind veterans’ aid group the United Defenders. Headed by fire-breathing jingo “True” Dawson (Emory Parnell), and his cold-blooded right hand man Fred Stalk (Sheldon Leonard), the U.D. isn’t the legitimate organization it’s cracked up to be, but rather a picket-busting goon squad available to the highest bidder. Dawson uses his gift for polarizing oratory to enthrall returning servicemen, bellowing that the Defenders are the “…fearless spine that will stand behind you for all the things you’ve been promised: better housing conditions, your jobs back with privilege of seniority, and relief from the shortages that affect the happiness and well-being of you and your families!” Meanwhile, he and Stalk are secretly cultivating a six-figure deal with a mysterious “Mr. Big” figure to hire the Defenders out as club-wielding thugs: “We get ‘em young and tough, the kind that’s already wearing a chip on its shoulder — and then we’ll prime then for the payoff. We’ll prime them with hate! Hate for labor, hate for management, hate for the party that’s in, hate for the party that’s out!” During one such rant, a vet dares to challenge Dawson’s violent rhetoric, prompting the big man (in an obvious reference to HUAC — whether it’s an embrace or an indictment is unclear) to whine that the Defenders’ enemies can “get on the inside too.” He then calls for “a couple of red-blooded boys” to take care of the problem with their fists.

In order to properly come to grips with just how ‘of the moment’ Violence was, we need to take for a closer look at the domestic situation at the time of its release. It isn’t exactly correct, that conception most folks have about the period of time just after the war being a moment of unbridled prosperity and optimism in the United States. There was a short period of adjustment, before the renewed militarism of the Cold War and Korea (not to mention the rising middle class’s demand for new leisure and consumer goods) that would find returning soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines faced with a crisis of uncertain jobs, declining wages, sorry working conditions, and piss-poor housing.

Everyone who wanted a job had worked when the war was on, and while the home front labor shortages guaranteed high wages and almost unlimited overtime, rationing of staples and the general lack of luxury items led to out-of-control inflation, even after the surrender. After four long years folks were tired of going without; they had saved fastidiously during the war and now wanted to spend their money on their wants rather than their needs. By 1946 most families were eyeballing one of those new suburban bungalows, complete with a TV set in the living room and a Ford Super De Luxe in the carport. Yet as the economy was returning to a peacetime model and millions of G.I.s were rejoining domestic life, big business believed the transition period presented the right opportunity to slash wages and overtime, pare women from the labor pool, and return to a more profitable depression-era pay scale. An emboldened American people wouldn’t stand for it.

In the wake of the layoffs, the cuts in pay and overtime, and four years’ worth of stockpiled grievances (the AFL and CIO promised not to strike during the war), things got ugly. In what would become known as the Great Strike Wave of 1946, as many as five million Americans walked off the job. Steel, coal, oil, transportation, utilities, retail; it seemed to involve everyone. Entire cities went on solidarity strikes. Confrontations were commonplace, and there were those, like Violence’s Dawson, who were ready to cash in on the trouble. Big business had a long history of using the police and the National Guard to quash strikes, and when that wasn’t legally possible they turned to private contractors. By the time Congress opened the 1947 session, the labor situation was a national calamity, and more than 250 related bills were under consideration by lawmakers. It was during this maelstrom, in May 1947, that Violence hit theaters. Just a few weeks later, and over President Truman’s veto, congress passed the controversial Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, made it far more difficult for workers to strike.

That brings us back to Violence, a movie that attempts to cash in on the fears and the tumult of a country trying to get back to work, and hoping to recover from too many years of war and depression. It opens in the cellar of the United Defenders’ Los Angeles headquarters with the thuggish Stalk and simple minded crony Joker (Peter Whitney) murdering an employee who got too close to the truth, while Dawson blusters away to the Ladies’ Auxiliary in the meeting hall just over their heads. It’s a delightfully noirish beginning — dark and hardboiled — but the rest of the film fails to live up to these opening moments. As the action moves upstairs, we meet UD secretary Ann Mason, who appears dutiful until we realize that she’s using her secret bracelet camera to photograph everyone in the room! Mason is actually Ann Dwire, girl reporter for VIEW magazine. With microfilm negatives hidden in her bag, she departs for Chicago to pen her exposé. She hops a taxi outside the Union Station, but is tailed by agent Steve Fuller. The chase results in a fiery crash that sends Ann to the hospital with a bad case of — wait for it — amnesia. Deciding to play the situation to his advantage, Fuller sneaks into the hospital and convinces her that they’re engaged, and then tricks her into getting him a job with the UD. Unfortunately for Steve, Ann no longer remembers who she really is, and when she learns that he’s actually a G-Man, she rats him out to Dawson and Stalk!

Violence was Monogram’s follow up to its 1946 hit Decoy, and features many of the same principals: director Jack Bernhard, producer Bernard Brandt, writer Stanley Rubin, and actor Sheldon Leonard. But don’t go looking for a repeat performance. WhereDecoy was creative and stylish, Violence is drab and predictable. The cast often seems disinterested, the production design is tepid, and Bernhard’s direction is uninspired. Even the talented Leonard suffers in comparison. His droll delivery in Decoy acts as a foil to Jean Gillie’s outrageously over the top femme fatale, and his deadpan style doesn’t wash playing against two leads (Coleman and O’Shea) unable to parry his style. In short, Violence fails to deliver on either the tastiness of its title or the promise of its topicality — and it fails to capture even a little of the same verve that made Decoy so much fun. Rather than drawing attention to an issue of national importance — the problem of returning veterans in labor strife — Violence simply morphs its fascinating premise into grist for the Poverty Row mill. What it needed was a shot of Methylene Blue.

Violence (1947)Directed by Jack Bernhard
Produced Bernard Brandt
Written by Stanley Rubin and Lewis Lantz
Cinematography by Henry Sharp
Starring Nancy Coleman, Michael O’Shea, Emory Parnell, and Sheldon Leonard
Released by Monogram Pictures
Running Time: 72 minutes

JENNIFER (1953)

“Oh, I don’t mind being alone, I’m used to it.”

I love Ida Lupino as much as the next guy, but I much prefer her rough and raspy screen persona to the meek and skittish Ida we meet in Jennifer. She plays Agnes Langley, a burgeoning spinster-type who accepts a caretaker’s position at a sprawling Spanish-style mansion on the outskirts of Santa Barbara. The mansion’s previous resident, Jennifer Brown, disappeared mysteriously, leaving the bored locals to toss around theories regarding her whereabouts. Agnes inexplicably falls under Jennifer’s spell and becomes unnaturally obsessed with uncovering the missing woman’s fate. Along the way a few men enter Agnes’s life — Jim (Howard Duff), who owns the local grocery store and manages to show up at the mansion at least a dozen times each day; Orrin, an overgrown teenager who bags groceries and runs errands for Jim; and an unnamed gardener we see constantly lurking around the grounds. The men are each posited as potential suspects in Jennifer’s disappearance, even though it’s unclear if a crime has been committed at all — Jennifer may have just skedaddled. By the time we learn the truth, we witness Agnes unravel from the strain of not knowing, and of being alone in a such a large house. The film is only superficially concerned about what happens to Jennifer; it’s more interesting (and film noir-ish) to see what happens to Agnes.

We are in B-picture territory here, and while Richard Edwards argues that it’s an oversimplification to suggest that B-films all went the way of television, as much can be said of Jennifer. This is surely subject matter that would become fodder for television — though admittedly the low quality of the Poverty Row production makes such an assumption easy. And the production values here are in fact pretty low. Even sporting cinematography by, perhaps the greatest of them all, James Wong Howe, there’s little to distinguish this film from other Monogram efforts than an occasional nicely atmospheric shot. Considering the talent involved, the results are pedestrian.

Most of the picture’s action takes place around the house, which is described as “old” by some of the film’s characters — as if all vacant movies houses have to be old, though it is revealed in the first scene that the house was built just before the market crash, a mere twenty-five years before. Where typical movie mansions are richly appointed, particularly in spooky films, this one is bare. The lack of appointments meshes with the story, but it’s equally obvious that the filmmakers were working with what was available to them: a for-sale property leased as a ready-made film set for the duration of a two or three week shoot.

I spend a lot of time looking for little pieces of clever narrative corner-cutting that are a hallmark of low-budget films, and Jennifer is full of them. One of the key devices in the film is a diary, which is conveniently labeled “DIARY” in big gold embossed letters smack dab on the cover, which Agnes finds early on. As the entries are revealed, we learn a little about Jennifer and get a few clues as to her mindset in the period of time leading up to her disappearance. It’s clear that the filmmakers constructed the entries solely for the benefit of the audience; the pages bear little resemblance to real diary entries. Pages with brief lines such as “Oiled the sewing Machine” or “Walked in the Garden,” with absolutely nothing else simply don’t ring true. Yet it’s a clever use of the book, with the pages functioning as brief inter-titles to keep the story churning along.

The leading man in the film is Howard Duff, Lupino’s then-husband. They are much better together, though not paired romantically, in Private Hell 36, but they have the easy-going chemistry of husband and wife that makes their moments together passable. Look closely and you’ll see that Duff shifts his real-life wedding ring to his little finger for their scenes together. His character, grocer Jim Hollis, has some connection to the missing girl and the family that owns the house. He’s supposed to look in on Agnes, but he goes overboard and at times seems to be stalking her. We are supposed to assume he’s the chief suspect, but the movie lays it on so thick he becomes an obvious red herring.

In the end, the film’s men are irrelevant. It’s all about Ida’s performance, and how she bears up. This isn’t one of her best outings, and it’s hard to make it through without imaging a more physically demonstrative actress in the part — namely Joan Fontaine. Of course Fontaine made such roles famous (and cliché), but it’s plausible to imagine her getting this part. Joan’s big studio career was over by the time Jennifer was made, and soon afterwards she would be cast to play opposite Ida and Edmond O’Brien in Lupino’s The Bigamist.


Jennifer (1953)

Directed by Joel Newton
Produced by Berman Schwarttz
Story by Virginia Myers
Cinematography by James Wong Howe
Starring Ida Lupino and Howard Duff
Released by Monogram / Allied ArtistsRunning time: 73 minutes

WHEN STRANGERS MARRY (1944) (aka BETRAYED)

By 1944, with the war in Europe raging away, the mania for quickie marriages at home reached alarming levels. Such whirlwind couplings were explored in many Hollywood films at the time. In Vincente Minelli’s 1945 romance, The Clock, Robert Walker and Judy Garland meet, fall in love, and wed over a two-day pass; while in Cromwell and Selznick’s 1944 Since You Went Away the effects of such a marriage resonate throughout the lives of a Midwestern family; and most famously in William Wyler’s masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives Dana Andrews and goodtime-girl Virginia Mayo discover what life is like for such a couple after the war has ended. With prestige studio productions such as these dominating the screen, it seems inevitable then that a B-crime picture would come along and explore what can happen when two people who barely know each other tie the knot. The result is When Strangers Marry, an exciting little thriller that delivers as much suspense as one could ask for in an hour. Although the film is one big riff on a quickie marriage, understandably missing is the war. The story hinges upon the suspicions of a young wife, and had any of the suspects been servicemen the movie never could have been made.

Released by Monogram in 1944, re-released three years later as Betrayed (owing to Robert Mitchum’s rise to stardom), and directed by a young William Castle, the film benefits from the grouping of an incredibly talented cast and crew, all at the outset of what would be long and significant careers. In spite of all this talent the film’s biggest drawback (as was typical of Poverty Row productions) was the script — which is frustratingly cooked-up and calls for a great deal of suspension of disbelief. You’ll see the denouement coming a mile away, but fortunately When Strangers Marry has a lot more going for it than Philip Yordan and Dennis Cooper’s screenplay. Yordan, who was notorious in Hollywood for grabbing writing credit whether it was rightfully his or not, and who would go on to write such films as Dillinger, The Black Book, and The Big Combo seems difficult to blame, though it’s perplexing to consider that the author of the brilliant House of Strangers, and an Oscar winner for the Western remake Broken Arrow, also penned the “ice-skating noir” Suspense. (For more, read Alan K. Rode's fascinating article on the enigmatic Philip Yordan here.)

In addition to Castle, Mitchum, and the reliable Dean Jagger, the film stars twenty-one year old Kim Hunter in just her third picture. The future Oscar winner had already been featured by directors Mark Robson and Edward Dmytryk in her first two films, and she does quite well when asked to carry this one. The movie’s runtime is admittedly brief, only 67 minutes, but Hunter dominates — featured in practically every scene beyond the first. She plays Millie Baxter, a young wife who gets a great deal more than she bargained for after hitching to Paul (Jagger), a traveling salesman she’s only just met. The story shadows her to New York in search of her man and a longed-for new life in the Big Apple. There’s been a vicious murder though, and all signs eventually point to Millie’s mysterious and inexplicably absent hubby. Millie is joined in her search by old boyfriend Fred Graham (Mitchum), who despite a veneer of cool seems a bit too interested in the affairs of her marriage. The story takes us down a circuitous and contrived (to put it mildly) pathway that ends with dramatic flair and a MacGuffin that Hitch would have been proud of.

Whatever When Strangers Marry lacks in narrative power or dialogue it more than makes up for in style, direction, and charisma — though admittedly by invoking the word style I don’t mean to imply MGM gloss. After all this is still a Monogram product. (However, one aspect that is beyond reproach on any level is the Dimitri Tiomkin’s brilliant music.) The movie has touches that are often expressionistic and occasionally surreal; yet compelling as they are they only accentuate the uneven, disjointed feeling of the whole. I’ve never considered myself a particularly ardent fan of William Castle, but I do get really excited about any film in which a young director works through his material with inventiveness and verve. Castle’s tight pacing and ability to create tension are present, and he and his salty cameraman Ira Morgan give the film a few truly memorable moments. The most visually and psychologically noirish of the bunch happens somewhat early in the film, as Millie finds herself alone and unable to sleep in her Manhattan hotel room shortly after arriving in the city. As she stands by the window of her room her face is alternately swathed in darkness and then harshly lit by the neon dancehall marquee that dominates the space outside her window. The effect has been used many times, but Castle knowingly employs it to exaggerate the phobic tension of Millie’s dilemma. The same can be said of a later moment when the heroine wanders the midnight streets of SoHo, and finds herself in a nightmare of her own making as the gigantic grotesque faces of other characters leer down at her from her mind’s eye. The sequence is jarring and effective. Much of Castle’s early film work involved projects such as this, where he utilized film noir visual style to elaborate upon his character’s psychological disposition rather than to simply embellish a scene or obscure cheap production values.

Like other such films of the early forties, When Strangers Marry is more prototypical than typical in its use of noir traits. Some viewers will dismiss it as not-quite-a-noir due to the lack of key signifiers such as a male protagonist or a femme fatale, while recognizing that the visual look and feel of the film varies wildly from scene to scene. Yet as mentioned above, Castle and crew score big points for the careful way in which they employ visual style, which is done in some moments as subtly as it is obvious in those detailed above. For example, pay close attention to the camera set-ups used to film the two male leads — both are photographed with specific ‘rules of engagement’ — that evolve as our senses of the characters change. The film is also boasts psychological themes that are highly identifiable with noir: the isolation and loneliness of Millie, the neurotic and paranoid deterioration of Paul, and Fred’s cool cynicism. And while none of these traits are as pervasive, and the film owes something to the mystery tradition of the previous decade and a something else to Alfred Hitchcock, it still offers an exciting viewing experience and an offbeat expression of early film noir.

When Strangers Marry, aka Betrayed (1944)

Director: William Castle

Producers: Maurice King and Frank King

Screenplay: Philip Yordan and Dennis Cooper, based on a story by George Moscov

Cinematographer: Ira Morgan

Starring: Kim Hunter, Robert Mitchum, and Dean Jagger

Released by Monogram Pictures

Running Time: 67 minutes

FEAR (1946)

Released by Monogram in 1946, Fear is film noir’s take on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It’s a little-remembered movie that has all the flaws typical of a Poverty Row production, including a low budget, a less-than-stellar ensemble, and a swiss-cheese storyline. However in spite of those limitations it’s also an inventive, exciting, and thought-provoking little movie. It takes that famous narrative: man desperately needs money, man commits murder to get it, man’s life falls apart — and embroiders it with a series of story developments that are either surprising, inexplicable, or just plain weird. What makes the film truly fascinating is the final plot twist, which leaves viewers wondering if the whole thing was intended to be a tongue-in-cheek gag. Whatever else it might be, Fear is put together with unexpected panache, and the results are as pleasing as they are mystifying.

Peter Cookson stars as medical student Larry Crain. (Fear is his only legitimate leading role, though he was notably married to Poltergeist actress Beatrice Straight for forty years) The opening scene finds a morose Crain in his shabby one-room flat, sodden over a bizarre telegram from the medical school: “Circumstances beyond our control compel us to discontinue all scholarships.” Of all the set-ups in film noir this is one of the most absurd. As an academic of many years, I can assure you that the chances of a school being compelled to ‘discontinue all scholarships’ is pretty far out there. However in Fear, baffling developments are par for the course. Wait and see.

Compounding his troubles at school, Crain’s landlady Mrs. Williams (the ubiquitous Almira Sessions) seems to live outside his door, incessantly badgering him for the rent. Desperate to scrape together even a few smackers, Larry shambles over to see professor Stanley, who teaches at the medical college but makes extra money moonlighting as a pawnbroker. Larry’s lone valuable is his dead pop’s engraved watch, for which the old man offers just a sawbuck. Stanley adds insult to injury by withholding two dollars to cover the vigorish on previous loans. Though it seems a bit too convenient that Stanley must open his wall safe in order to retrieve a measly eight clams, it gives Larry the chance to scope out the wads and wads of cash camping in the professor’s strongbox, as well as a heavy set of brass fireplace tools by the mantle. Larry gets the impulse to kill the professor then and there, but resists. However he’s so enamored by the idea that he walks home in a daze.

Cue the girl. With his eight bucks in hand Larry grabs a stool and a hot meal at the local hangout. He spends more than expected when he has to buy coffee for a girl who appears to have everything in her purse except loose change. The money is happily spent however, when Eileen (Anne Gwynne) agrees to a date. Romance blooms, but as far as the movie is concerned Eileen doesn’t much matter. She gives Larry someone to talk to so the audience can know what he’s thinking: Larry believes that any crime is excusable providing the ends justify the means. What other films accomplish through voiceover narration, Fear provides by giving the protagonist a conversation partner.

Following his encounter with Eileen, Larry returns home to more bad news: a huge tuition bill and an ultimatum from Mrs. Williams: pay up or hit the bricks. He immediately recalls the professor’s strongbox, and decides to do the deed. The strongest segment of the film is the murder sequence, which takes place in Stanley’s tenement house. Director Alfred Zeisler amps up the tension, beginning with Larry’s ascent up the apartment building’s stairs, wary of a black cat lurking along the way. At one landing he pauses outside a flat that is being painted. The painter shimmies his ladder from one spot to another without climbing down, like some grotesque insect on stilts. This interlude turns out to be important rather than just absurd; the painter and the freshly painted room shortly become critical story elements.

When Larry finally rings Stanley’s bell, the academic is reluctant to admit him, considering that the younger man was just there the previous evening. Larry offers a wrapped and tied package that he claims contains a silver cigarette case, though in actuality it’s just a cheap glass ashtray from his own drab room. As the professor struggles to open the bundle, he chastises Larry for wrapping the damn thing so tightly. In a moment where the script really comes to life Larry apologizes, dolefully saying “I’m sorry” as he bends over, unseen by the professor, to pick up that heavy fireplace poker. We don’t get to see Larry land the killing blow — once the camera leaves his strained face, it shifts to capture the prof’s trembling hands as he struggles with the bundle. It’s in this expressionistic moment, and a few others like it, that Fear really scores as a film noir. Just as the wrapping paper finally falls away and Larry’s ruse is revealed, the blow is struck and the ashtray drops, shattering the old man’s glass of port, which spreads against the white table cloth like so much lifeblood.

Larry escapes the murder scene, barely, and makes it back to his room where he passes out, to be roused later by a detective who takes him in for questioning — his engraved watch makes him a suspect. The man in charge of the investigation is the jovial Captain Burke (Warren William, so rakish and debonair that he must think this is a Lone Wolf picture). The two play cat and mouse with each other for a while, until Larry’s mind begins to unravel under the strain. A brief but excitingly expressionistic montage finds him once again wandering the streets in a daze, assaulted by visions of nooses and other portents of death. Fate leads him to a train yard, where he barely avoids being struck by an onrushing locomotive. This brush with death convinces Larry to confess to Eileen — who inexplicably decides to stand by him. He returns home to find Captain Burke waiting to show him the morning’s headlines: the painter from the second floor apartment has confessed to bludgeoning Professor Stanley! Burke clearly stills believes that Larry is the murderer, but in light of the painter’s confession Larry overcomes his conscience and keeps his mouth shut. Nevertheless, in film noir neither fate nor justice can be thwarted — Fear climaxes as an ebullient Larry is struck by a car and killed as he rushes to reunite with Eileen.

Hang on a second. Cue the harp music and the swirling vortex — Larry isn’t dead after all, he was just dreaming! Instead of lying dead in the street we find him lying in bed, yanked from a deep sleep by someone knocking at his door. It’s Professor Stanley, except this time the dear fellow wants to give Larry a loan to tide him over until his scholarship check, thankfully restored, arrives in the mail. As a bewildered but carefree Larry leaves his room to a brighter day he bumps into Eileen in the hallway — except her name isn’t Eileen, it turns out to be Kathy. She’s tracked him down to pay back his sixty cents, and has decided to take a room at Mrs. Williams boarding house as well! Once again, for the first time, Larry makes a date with the girl, and in a moment of Vertigo creepiness asks if he can call her Eileen. Unfazed, she remarks that he “sure must have been in love with that girl!” To which Larry replies, as the screen fades to black and the end titles, that someday he’ll “tell her all about it.”

The ending of Fear is frustrating and silly, though it still begs an interesting question: Why take a film that already closes well and tack on a coda sure to leaves audiences wagging their heads? Maybe to extend the running time: there are several passages in Fear that suggest Zeisler was stretching for length rather than tension. Or perhaps to give viewers a surprise to talk about as they waited for the A-feature to begin. Poverty Row films were usually as derivative as they were low-budget, and Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window had been a hit with a big twist. It’s also clear that Zeisler was enamored of Lang — he was working in the German film industry just as Lang was making his best films. The dreamy denouement, along with a clever smear of white paint on Larry’s jacket strongly argue that Zeisler was paying homage to an admired fellow filmmaker.

It’s also fair to suggest that Larry Crain’s imaginary death, steeped as it is in the relentless fatalism that defines film noir, is only obvious to contemporary audiences as the best spot to close the movie. In 1946, audiences were enamored with the psyche, and the psycho-neurotic dream conclusion would have pressed some topical buttons. For my part, I can only explain Fear’s eyebrow-raising oddities, its plot holes, and its bizarre twists, its general balderdash, by asking: Who says dreams have to make sense?

Fear (1946)

Director: Alfred Zeisler

Cinematographer: Jackson Rose

Screenplay: Dennis Cooper and Alfred Zeisler

Starring: Peter Cookson, Warren William, and Anne Gwynne

Released by: Monogram Pictures

Running time: 68 minutes

9/17

SUSPENSE (1946)

On the one hand, if you are going to call your movie Suspense, try to make sure you’ve got some. On the other, unless you can imagine someone walking up to the box office and asking for a pair of tickets to “Turgid Potboiler,” Suspense ain’t so bad.


There are about a dozen standard plots that account for at least half of the movies ever made. It might be fun to figure them all out at some point, but it’s enough to say that Suspense implements one of the doozies: Down-on-his-luck guy breezes into town and finds a chump job. Through some stroke of genius (or luck) he quickly becomes the boss’s right hand man. Guess what? The boss has a honey of a wife, and she and the new boy light a fire together. The boss feels the heat and all of a sudden he isn’t so chummy with his right hand anymore — and the dame is stuck in the middle. Something’s gotta give and someone’s gotta go — the hard way. Sound familiar? This story has been played out in films such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Gilda, The Strip, and a million more stretching all the way back to Josef von Sternberg’s iconic Underworld. The trick to using such an old saw effectively is to sharpen it up somehow — in the case of Suspense screenwriter Phillip Yordan put the production on ice — literally.


Maria Belita Jepson-Turner, known in film just by the exotic moniker Belita, was only twelve when she skated for Britain in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, finishing well back of Norwegian gold medalist Sonja Henie. With a face and figure to die for, Belita skated after Henie to California to make it in the picture business. While Henie landed at Fox and began appearing in frothy romantic comedies with Tyrone Power, Belita ended up at Monogram. The studio, one of the better B factories, was home of the Charlie Chan, Mr. Wong, The Shadow, Joe Palooka, and Cisco Kid franchises. Monogram had scored a huge hit in 1945 with Lawrence Tierney in Dillinger. (On a side note, the bosses at Monogram knew you just can’t beat a well-made gangster picture — following Suspense, they would reteam Belita, sans skates, with Barry Sullivan in The Gangster.) In an attempt to achieve big boy status for the studio, the Dillinger profits were pumped into Suspense, the only truly big-budget picture to bear the Monogram trademark. Both Suspense and The Gangster did fair box office, though not enough to elevate either Monogram’s status as a studio or Belita’s as a star. She made a picture a year in the forties, and appeared in a few more in the fifties, then retreated to life on the road as a professional figure skater.


Look, Suspense isn’t a very good picture, but nevertheless it is interesting. What makes it so is its absurdity. Postman’s banal roadhouse becomes a neon nightspot with an ice show in Suspense. Incandescent sweater girls like Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth had that magical something that allowed them command audiences while standing still. Not so with Belita —  she’s forced to skate about in sequined outfits and soar through hoops ringed with razor-sharp swords. In an effort to cash in on her talents, the movie is punctuated every fifteen minutes or so with an ice number, leaving contemporary viewers is perplexed — as in ‘Were there really night clubs with ice shows in the forties?’


In a sense the viability of the plot is beside the point, as the film was trumped up in order to cash in on the public’s new interest in skating, and grab some of Henie’s audience for Monogram. The movie is remembered today primarily as a film noir, but at the time of its theatrical run it was first and foremost an ice skating picture, and the skating sequences play with much more verve than the story.


Phillip Yordan’s screenplays in the mid-forties were derivative — he still had a way to go before penning The Big Combo. Yet with Yordan’s pulpy story and Frank Tuttle’s direction a film noir was inevitable. Tuttle doesn’t rise to the level of This Gun for Hire, but the fault lies in the screenplay rather than budget or talent. Yordan’s dialog doesn’t approach that of Graham Greene, and the screenplay borders on obnoxious — filled with contrivances that add at least 20 minutes of unnecessary prattle to the film. Worst of all, the darn thing doesn’t generate a lick of the promised suspense.


Still, the movie has its saving graces. Bonita Granville is one of them. The star of the late-thirties Nancy Drew franchise did a fair impersonation of Dick Powell and reinvented herself as a tough broad in the 1940s. In Suspense she plays the Barry Sullivan’s jilted lover from Chicago. She makes a delectable woman scorned and pumps a ton of life into Suspense — if only she could skate. Also of note is Eugene Pallette, appearing in his final film. Pallette was a fixture in classic movies, and one of those guys with an unfamiliar name but instantly recognizable face — and voice. Many will recognize him as Henry Fonda’s father in The Lady Eve. Here he plays the sort of character who serves as a bridge between the two male leads. He’s older, and consequently non-threatening to either man — a confidant to Albert Dekker’s man in charge and a mentor to Sullivan’s boy on the make. Pallette’s presence has the same affect of someone like William Bendix — the film feels a lot more comfortable with him in it.


Also of note is the cinematography. If I’m putting a beating on this film, noir purists will still want to see it for it for Karl Struss’s camera work. Suspense is really Struss’s only film noir, which is a shame. This is the guy who won the first Academy Award for shooting Sunrise, and went on to DP The Great Dictator and Limelight for Charlie Chaplin. Suspense has overwhelmingly dark look, more shadow than light, yet still seems bright and sharp because Struss’s use of high contrast. 


In the end Suspense is a film that leaves you wanting: wanting a more original story and better dialog, wanting more Bonita Granville, and wanting more Karl Struss. But it doesn’t leave you wondering what’s gonna happen — you’ll figure that out in the first ten minutes.

Suspense (1946)

Director: Frank Tuttle
Cinematographer: Karl Struss
Screenplay: Phillip Yordan
Starring: Barry Sullivan, Belita, Albert Dekker, Bonita Granville, and Eugene Pallette.
Released by: Monogram Pictures
Running time: 101 minutes