BODYGUARD (1948)

Lawrence Tierney’s hallowed reputation as the real-life embodiment of a film noir tough guy endears him to most movie fans and generally insulates him from criticism. Hard core enthusiasts often establish their noir bona fides by slinging stories of his off-screen exploits. He’s the cinematic equivalent of a made guy. If you can’t get with Tierney, it seems at times, you might as well leave film noir well enough alone — it probably ain’t for you. In spite of all that, beyond Tierney’s unique one-two punch — leading man good looks and his spectacular ability to project menace — he wasn’t much of an actor. When a role came along that he couldn’t charge into with his head down and his fists up, as was the case with director Richard Fleischer’s Bodyguard, his performance comes up a few shells short of a stacked clip.

There’s little to care about here by way of story: Tierney plays a detective who gets pink-slipped on account of his strong-arm tactics, then framed for the murder of his lieutenant. That’s the extent of Bodyguard’s noir statement: wrongly accused ex-copper has to get out from under on his own steam. The rest is just running time. Along the way Tierney gets mixed up in some intrigue surrounding a murder cover-up at a meat-packing plant, and the wealthy owners who may or may not have had something to do with it.

Nevertheless, the critical mass surrounding Bodyguard is generally favorable, owing to some slick dialog and several deft directorial touches by Fleischer, just beginning his career. As far as Tierney is concerned, most other reviewers rehash the same tough mug platitudes that one bumps into when reading about Dillinger, The Devil Thumbs a Ride, or Born to Kill. In this case the praise isn’t merited. Tierney is miscast; and Bodyguard would have been a better movie with a more capable leading man. Woe is us that Paramount had Alan Ladd locked up at the time, because this is the kind of part that he was made for. Tierney is one-dimensional and flat; Ladd had something else. I’ll stop — I know the comparison is unfair.

Tierney had more in common with film noir’s iteration of Raymond Burr, and maybe even a leg up on him. Admittedly, this comparison is also unfair because Burr, in spite of his wide range and other special gifts as an actor, didn’t look like Ben Affleck. But can you imagine Tierney instead of Burr in Pickup? It’s at the very least intriguing. His air of corruption, the rough edges, the cheapness, and that hair trigger? Bodyguard asks him to holster all of these things, to sit on his hands, and one wonders if Priscilla Lane — she’s too perky not to like — wasn’t cast as the girl Friday in order to soften Tierney. After all, if we like her, and she likes him, we ought to as well, right? The hard sell goes even further: Tierney plays big brother to some neighborhood kids, tosses a ball back and forth with another, and drinks his milk like a good boy. But we’re unmoved; as an actor Tierney just wasn’t meant to be liked. Perhaps it took this movie to make sure of it.

* A note or two about the poster: In spite of the artwork, Tierney doesn’t rough up any women in the film. (For that matter, he never actually works as a bodyguard either.) Certainly the RKO brass were hoping the artwork would pull in the audience from his successful turn the previous year’s Born to Kill. And the image of Lane — it couldn't be less flattering. 

Bodyguard (1948)

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Screenplay by Fred Niblo Jr. and Harry Essex, based on a story by George W. George and Robert Altman.

Starring Lawrence Tierney and Priscilla Lane

Produced by Sid Rogell

Cinematography by Robert De Grasse

Released by RKO Pictures

Running time: 62 minutes

THE CLAY PIGEON (1949)

I tend to celebrate B movies here, and I’m seldom as critical as I could be. But even I have to take my shots at The Clay Pigeon. 

Jim Fletcher (Bill Williams) wakes up in a military hospital with a blind man clawing at his throat his throat. A nurse intervenes, but rather than offering comfort she calls Jim traitor. He soon learns that he’s accused of ratting his fellow POWs out to the Japanese, who then tortured and executed them. After Jim’s convalescence, he’ll face a treason charges. The only problem is that he can’t remember whether he did it or not — he has amnesia! Hoping to somehow recover his lost memories and clear his name, Jim (inexplicably unguarded) escapes the hospital and flees for San Diego — remembering that his best friend from the Navy, Mark Gregory, lives there with his wife Martha (Barbara Hale). Martha is charming as she ushers Jim inside, but when she excuses herself to make coffee Jim notices the headline on her newspaper: “James Fletcher, Seaman First Class, Wanted for Treason! Blamed for Torture Killing of Mark Gregory” Holy Smokes! Jim rushes into the kitchen to explain, and finds Martha frantically attempting to dial 1119. (See what I did there?) They fight! Martha scrapes and claws like a wildcat, but Jim subdues her. He then uses her phone to contact another buddy from the POW camp, Ted Niles, who agrees to help. Dragging a trussed-up Martha along for the ride, Jim takes her Plymouth and makes for the City of Angels. (Now folks, if the baby-faced Jim was actually guilty, this wouldn’t be called The Clay Pigeon, so once Ted gets involved it becomes pretty clear who the real culprit is. If nothing else, this is a movie that just can’t keep a secret.) At any rate, Jim drives; Martha stews. Then, in one of B filmdom’s most mind-boggling leaps in logic, somewhere along the road, and in spite of her being a kidnap victim, Martha accepts Jim’s protestations of innocence and decides, in light of any evidence in his favor, that he can’t be responsible for her husband’s death. For the rest of the hour (this is a short one), she makes like his girl Friday (Hale neatly anticipating her career-defining role as Perry Mason’s Della Street). And in no time at all, everything works out in their favor.

Really?

Richard Fleischer directed The Clay Pigeon for newly minted RKO chief Howard Hughes. Fleischer knew his business (three words: The Narrow Margin), so the direction is up to scratch. This moves quickly and with purpose, the pacing and staging are fine, the acting is competent, it has several stylish scenes (including a nice on location cat and mouse sequence through L.A.’s Chinatown) and more than enough tension in the final reel (especially impressive when the denouement is a no-brainer). The problems here have to do with the script, with the limitations of the running time, and most importantly, with the film’s failure to live up to the responsibility of its premise.

But in terms of competent storytelling The Clay Pigeon is a misfire. Worse than that, it must have been terribly insulting to a large segment of its 1949 audience. Look no further than Martha’s change of heart. Here’s a woman who lost her husband to the war — and not even in combat. Mark was executed in a POW camp after being accused of stealing rations by a fellow American, his best friend. Now that bastard, a traitor on the front page of every paper, is at her front door — making a fool out of her and her husband’s memory. Martha’s fight with Jim is an eyebrow raiser: savage, believable, and utterly appropriate, but her inexplicable and abrupt change of heart mere moments later is the film’s great crime. It does a profound injustice to the postwar audience members who lost loved ones overseas and couldn’t move on quite so easily as Martha does. I don’t mean to suggest that there wasn’t a plausible way to get her on Jim’s side, but rather that the movie’s attempt is pathetic. Surely new testimony from a fellow prisoner who saw the newspaper, or even the early return of Jim’s lost memories might have convinced Martha of his innocence. Instead, she comes to believe in him even before he himself — don’t forget his amnesia — can recall exactly what happened. The next thing the audience knows, they’re shacked up in a beachfront cottage, swimming and cavorting a week away while Jim gets his head straight. It just doesn’t wash, and this is a movie — B or not — that owed an audience with fresh memories of cataclysm a little more respect.

There’s a oft-noted moment however, when it tries to make good, but I say it still comes up short. Earlier I mentioned the foot chase sequence through the (strangely deserted) streets of Chinatown (One of them, at least. Back then L.A. had three: Old Chinatown, New Chinatown, and China City). In the scene, Jim ducks into a building and shelters in the home of a Japanese American woman, who also happens to be a war widow. She covers for Jim when the hoods barge in, and we soon discover that her dead husband earned the DSC as a member of the legendary Japanese-American 442^nd Infantry Regiment. The script expects us to take for granted that she’s too simple to read the newspaper, because although she easily intuits that Jim’s pursuers aren’t the policemen that they claim to be, she’s inexplicably unaware that the man in her back room is the most wanted fugitive in the southland.

Certainly the scene pays homage to the Japanese Americans who fought for their country, an important balancing act given that one of the movie’s villains is the POW camp guard, Tokoyama (Richard Loo), who murdered Martha’s husband and is now hanging around chop suey joints in Chinatown. This all raises an important question: What in the world would a fugitive Japanese war criminal, or even a Japanese American widow, be doing in Chinatown? Weren’t the Japanese responsible for the murder of nearly 6,000,000 Chinese citizens throughout the course of the war?¹ Believe me folks, I dug into this as deeply as I could and all indications are that those of Japanese descent steered clear of Chinese neighborhoods in the months and years after the war. It’s unfathomable to me how The Clay Pigeon postulates that anyone and everyone of Asian descent would make themselves at home in Chinatown.

War is terrible, and some people do horrible things to get through it. In the end, the most troubling aspect of The Clay Pigeon is its failure to grapple with this — treason here is just another plot device, an excuse for Jim Fletcher to run. His amnesia only serves to keep us in the dark for a brief time while the movie builds some steam — until, just like Martha, we get to know him well enough to understand that such a nice, clean-cut boy couldn’t possibly have betrayed his pals. (Go ahead Martha, why not just forget about your dead husband and marry the guy?) Well, in Act of Violence, Van Heflin’s clean-cut Frank Enley doesn’t have the luxury of amnesia. Enley actually committed the crimes that Jim Fletcher is accused of, and he has to live with himself. Act of Violence dwells long and hard on Enley’s guilt — and builds forcefully towards his desperate final act of contrition. There’s a reason why it’s a minor classic and The Clay Pigeon is merely a cardboard exercise “in what happens next?” moviemaking.

What does happen next? They get married, of course.

The Clay Pigeon (1949)

RKO Radio Pictures

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Produced by Herman Schlom

Written by Carl Foreman

Cinematography by Robert De Grasse

Starring Bill Williams and Barbara Hale

Running Time: 63 minutes

¹ http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM

EDGE OF DOOM (1950)

This post is part of the film preservation blogathon happening all over the web this week. Organized by Ferdy on Films and the Self-Styled Siren, this year’s event benefits the Film Noir Foundation, an organization dedicated to restoring classic noir films. Please click the For the Love of Film (Noir) link on the right to make a donation, and help preserve the films to which this blog is dedicated. Notice also a link for the Foundation itself. For my part, I’ve decided to offer one of my favorite essays, for a great film called Edge of Doom. This piece first ran at Noir of the Week a few months ago, and I chose it for the blogathon because I think it’s in many ways emblematic of what makes noir so special to me. (That and I love the last paragraph of the essay!) Enjoy, donate, and visit as many participating blogs as you can.

Mr. Craig, my mother’s dying.
I got my own troubles Martin.


Grim. Bleak. Miserable. These are all words that aptly describe the 1950 social noir Edge of Doom. It’s a strange film, saturated with religion, crime, and urban nightmare, with an unrelenting dreariness that makes the experience as hopeless as any to be found in the pantheon of film noir. Whether or not its religious themes shine any redemptive light into its dark corners is, frankly, secondary in importance to the more potent presence the city holds over this film.


The image of postwar Los Angeles in the collective memory is one of the enduring promise of westward expansion: wide-open spaces, sun dappled lawns, orange groves, and home ownership — the American Dream. Opportunities abound along the broad avenues, all of which lead down to a picturesque blue sea. Just as the dream city described in the opening moments of the film adaptation of L.A. Confidential was proven false, such a fantasy is also absent from Edge of Doom. And by not actually naming the city in which it is set (though it is clearly L.A.), Edge of Doom suggests that it isn’t any single metropolis, but that all cities are responsible for the problems besetting those obliged to inhabit them. Yet this city appears to have more in common with New York, or the Philadelphia of the source novel — than it does Los Angeles. Edge of Doom gives us not a diffuse space, but a densely populated warren of enclosed streets, where little sun reaches and the sea is just a far-off dream. It confines its inhabitants and limits their movement; its neighborhoods functioning less like communities than they do cell blocks. And unlike the downtowns of so many other film noirs, this one is indifferent: it punishes the innocent to a much larger degree than it does the guilty, with its rampant poverty compounded by overpopulation and lack of upward mobility. In the end, it subversively asks us to consider whether or not religion is the solution, or if it is truly the opiate of the masses.


Dana Andrews, who brooded on screen as well as anyone, is oddly cast here as Father Roth, a jovial priest, wise beyond his years. Andrews is here for the wattage of his star power, and gets top billing, but his part should have gone to an older man. Despite Andrews’ presence, Farley Granger is Edge of Doom’s real star. He appears as Martin Lynn, a frustrated young man tethered to the slums by a dead-end job and a dying mother. He draws a pathetic thirty bucks a week driving a truck for the local florist — a man who recognizes Martin’s hard work but is either unable or disinclined to give him a raise. The boy’s salary matters little: the film endeavors to show us that there are essentially no means by which a young man of Martin’s status and circumstances can lift himself out of the urban blight, even if he didn’t have the responsibilities of a girlfriend and a dying mother. Martin wants to relocate to the drier climate in Arizona in order to stave off his mother’s tuberculosis, but his earnings are prohibitive, and there’s no father to help out: Martin’s pop tried to escape his own poverty by sticking up the corner store, and when the police came calling he opted for suicide over prison.


You probably hate plot summaries as much as I do, but the events of the film can’t be discussed without explaining its first thirty minutes — bear with me and I won’t spoil the final hour. The self-murder of the father is the pivotal event in Edge of Doom — even though it predates the action of the film. It’s the father’s demise that plunges Martin and his mother irrevocably into the hell of Skid Row tenement life; while more importantly, it’s the source of Martin’s grudge against the church for refusing the suicide a Christian burial — the same church to which his mother nevertheless devoted her life. As the frail old woman lies dying, she asks her son repeatedly to summon the priest — Martin denies her this, instead escaping to the corridor to beg his neighbors for help. When the haggard woman next door, Mrs. Lally, tells him that nothing else can be done short of the priest, Martin wrenches the phone away from her and storms back to his apartment. She calls anyway, but Father Roth is out attending to another matter. The elderly Father Kirkman (Harold Vermilyea) offers to come, but the neighbor rightly fears Martin’s wrath — Kirkman is the same priest who refused to bury Martin’s dad. Mrs. Lally decides to wait for Father Roth, but it’s too late anyway — she goes to Martin’s room and discovers that his mother died while she and the boy argued over the phone call.


In a state of shock, Martin asks Mrs. Lally to sit with his mother while he makes funeral arrangements. But as he trudges down the stairwell he passes the room of Mr. Craig (Paul Stewart) — a lowlife gambler who invites the young man in for coffee, though it’s unclear whether he’s actually concerned for the boy’s loss or just sees him as an easy mark — it doesn’t take Craig more than a minute or two to find out that the dead woman had no life insurance. Craig’s intentions aside, the exchange has a profound affect on the shocked and impressionable Martin, and paves the way for the film’s primary drama to unfold.


No matter how low their station in life, older men are always inclined to offer younger men advice, and Mr. Craig takes this as an opportunity to do so. It’s here, in Edge of Doom’s most powerful scene, that Stewart earns his paycheck. His squinty eyes appear skull-like and hollow under the mean light of a bare bulb — he stalks around the fair-skinned young man and delivers one of the most delicious speeches in all of film noir. The scene is quiet and powerful, with no music to speak of, just the embittered voice of a man made tough and desperate by too many years on the hard-knock streets:

“Nobody lends you money, a kid like you: driving a truck, delivering flowers, making thirty bucks a week. You’re a bad risk. Money, money! That’s all that counts in this rat race. If you got it they’ll bury you like a queen. If you ain’t they’ll pack her in a box and shove her in a hole in the ground. I feel for you Martin, and for what your mother went through in this world. She oughtta go out in style, like a somebody; the world owes it to her. It’s a rich world, but it hates to give — you gotta take! Somewhere out there someone owes you something. All you gotta do is have the nerve to collect.”

Finished with his monologue, Mr. Craig steps into the kitchen to get Martin his coffee. He returns to find the boy has quietly slipped out. Craig turns from the door, the hint of a smile curling at the edge of his mouth, lights a cigarette and goes to the window, where he looks out over the darkened rooftops to the pulsing sign of the Galaxy Theater, beckoning to him from just a few blocks away.


In the meantime Martin walks to the rectory and rings the bell, where he glimpses Father Kirkman pacing his study. Like all such young men Martin is filled with rage, the sort of unfocused ire that pines for a target, deserving or not. Martin finds his in the gruff old priest, after testing the front door and finding it unlocked. He pushes in and confronts the old man, who berates him for denying his mother the last rites. Fueled by Mr. Craig’s words, Martin lets loose, demanding the church furnish his mother with the lavish funeral he believes to be her due. The contrived exchange between the two goes poorly, and escalates to the point that Kirkman orders the boy away. When the priest turns, Martin grabs a heavy brass crucifix from the desk and bludgeons him, shouting in a way that would bring unintentional laughs were the film not so dark, “I want a big funeral!” Aghast at himself, Martin wipes down the crucifix and flees. He attempts to get lost in streets, but the city, in spite of all its anonymity, denies him this. The cops grab the fidgety, guilty-looking young man after he ducks into a diner — though they believe him to have committed a different crime — it turns out somebody just robbed the Galaxy Theater…


The final hour of the film unfolds along two lines: it deals with Martin’s continued, eventually tedious, attempts to waylay everyone meets into giving his mother a funeral; and the boy’s weakening attempts to elude justice. Wildly successful director Mark Robson, who started his career with Val Lewton horror pics and ended up doing Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls (my favorite is the great boxing picture with Kirk Douglas, Champion), keeps Edge of Doom tense and entertaining throughout. In the most oft-told story about the film, it fared so poorly upon its initial release that it was pulled from theaters so Sam Goldwyn could have additional scenes added to the beginning and end of the picture, as well as some Dana Andrews narration inserted in between. Despite the clamor over the scenes, their message of redemption is fairly banal and does little to compromise the thematic darkness of the film. And haven’t we, as noir fans, trained ourselves to ignore the endings of many otherwise wonderful films? Some have complained that in the story’s final moments Father Roth shares that Martin has returned to the church, though I would argue that this outcome is realistic. Many people in Martin’s circumstances show contrition — the real question is whether or not the feelings are authentic. In this case we’ll never know.


When your mother dies, you want desperately for everyone to know how extraordinary she was — such is motherhood — and the desire stays with you, unabated, forever. Much of the criticism of Edge of Doom is hung up on Martin’s single-minded impulse to get his mother a “fancy” funeral, and how his obsession fails to ring true. It’s easy for some to dismiss the movie on those grounds, but I’m not so sure: deep down, Martin probably doesn’t care much whether or not his mother gets an extravagant sendoff. I’m sure he’d be satisfied with something appropriately modest. What Martin really wants is recognition for her life — though his failure is in not understanding human nature: the world in 1950 was changing, people were struggling to recover from the tumult of war, confused over a changing social and domestic order, frightened of annihilation, and cynical about the failed promises of life after victory. Urban life was fast becoming too indifferent for jaded people to get worked up over the loss of what Father Kirkman calls “a simple woman.” People reserve such feelings for their own mothers, not Martin’s. Life in the big city goes on, and the insensitivity of everyday people doesn’t give Martin the right to act out. He, like everyone else, must adjust to things as they are. Martin simply refuses to do so.


Film noir tropes have been applied to an incredibly diverse range of narratives, though few have approached the uncompromising visual and thematic darkness of Edge of Doom, a movie that offers no winners, no bright side, and most importantly: no answers. It confronts us with a troubling vision of postwar urban life and plies a tepid message of redemption amidst squalor that feels unmistakably phony. Consequently it’s distasteful — it lacks that buffering veneer of artifice that allows us to safely give ourselves away to a film. We are drawn to the rain-soaked streets and back alleys of film noir in part because they shimmer — awash in an intoxicating play of light and shadow. Yet, those reflections are of a bygone world that, if we are being honest, could only exist on celluloid. We like film noir because it’s at once stylish and stylized, sexy and seductively violent: an armored car stick-up; a clever fugitive on the run; Laura over the fireplace; Joan Bennett in a raincoat, under a lonely streetlight, the shadows around her like velvet. Edge of Doom, on the other hand, is awfully damn real.

Edge of Doom (1950)

Directed by Mark Robson

Produced by Sam Goldwyn

Cinematography by Harry Stradling

Screenplay by Philip Yordan, based on the novel by Leo Brady.

Uncredited writers: Charles Brackett and Ben Hecht

Starring Farley Granger and Dana Andrews

Released by RKO Pictures

Running time: 99 minutes

BUNCO SQUAD (1950)

Bunco, n.: The use of dishonest methods to acquire something of value; a swindle.

They oughtta teach Bunco Squad in film school, it’s that good. A 1950 product of the famed RKO B unit, it’s a first-rate example of narrative economy and efficient picture-making. Now I’m no knucklehead, Bunco Squad isn’t The Narrow Margin. I’m not out to compare those two pictures, because beyond their B status and shared studio they have little in common. The Narrow Margin is an exemplary noir thriller with an iconic tough-guy actor in his greatest part. Bunco Squad doesn’t rate as a film noir and has a far less prestigious or able cast than Margin — the actors in Bunco Squad even mispronounce words, tough ones like occult and Los Angeles. Still, this is a little movie that crackles. It’s contrived, heavy on coincidence, and might even be a bit campy, but in spite of all this it still begs to be watched and doesn’t disappoint those who do. It’s a gem of a mid-century crime picture, and although it’s not a film noir, it’s one that certainly rates a few days in the spotlight on this blog.

I included the definition above because “bunco” is hardly a household word. It never registered with me until I read James Ellroy—even though Jack Webb devoted a section of his cop manifesto The Badge to the LAPD bunco squad way back in 1958. That same unit is the subject of our movie, which beyond a rare television airing was nigh on impossible to see until it recently became available through the Warner Archive. The picture opens fast, at only 67 minutes it has to, with star Robert Sterling lecturing a citizens’ group about all the ways that flimflam crews get over on the squares. He’s even got a home-movie screen with 8mm visual aids. Movies such as Southside 1-1000, Code Two, Appointment with Danger and The Street with No Name (to name a very few) sport openings with a narrator speaking over some montage of stock footage, telling us about how the treasury boys, the motorbike unit, the postal cops, or even the g-men are putting their asses on the line for the sake of law, order, and Wonder Bread.

Bunco Squad does the same thing: we get the footage, we get the narrator, we get the same results. But in this case the speaker happens to be our star, and by introducing him in this way it trims some fat from the running time. And by making the montage sequence a movie-within-the-movie, it allows us to watch how the on-screen audience reacts. When Sterling’s Detective Steve Johnson mentions how the palm readers and tarot card shams contribute to the $200 million per year bunco haul, a old man in the crowd looks down his nose at his wife, who turns away, red in the face. Yet when Johnson adds the wheel of fortune and roulette to the list, it’s the wife who gets to glower. As Johnson wraps up his speech his partner rushes in—the captain needs them downtown—a hot tip on a new racket. The scene runs just over two minutes, but it’s one of the many frugal but effective moments that sets Bunco Squad apart. It packs a wallop of important information: we meet our star and his partner; get a fix on the bad guys, what they do, how they do it, and who they do it to.

The cops here are one-dimensional, pure cardboard; their moral certainty is absolute. At 67 minutes, time can’t be wasted agonizing over ethical ambiguities or on character development — in fact there’s no character development at all, which is the most damning evidence against Bunco Squad as a film noir; it has none of the alienation, obsession, and desperate choices that make a noir a noir. We have to take for granted why the police are compelled to uphold order and why the crooks would choose to do ill. Fate never takes a hand and irony must have been busy elsewhere. These points aren’t offered to disparage Bunco Squad, but to differentiate it from the film noir and show that such a picture can nevertheless succeed by other means. What Bunco Squad does well is show us, exposé style, how the con artists organize and carry out their scams. The notion makes sense: audiences generally have a sense of how cops do business, but in a movie that deals with crooks who use brains instead of bullets, there’s big upside in showing how they pull the rabbit out of the hat — particularly when it’s a spooky séance scam.

Here are the details: con man Tony Weldon (Ricardo Cortez, Bunco’s lone name star) rolls into L.A. on the heels of Mrs. Royce’s secretary, knowing that if he can get close enough to the old bird he might pry loose her 2.5 million dollar nest egg. When Weldon learns that Mrs. Royce’s boy was killed at Normandy he knows exactly how to work her. He builds a crew of professional swindlers, including ex-con crystal ball gazer Princess Liane (Bernadene Hayes, not bad in a role tailor-made for Marie Windsor), professional shill Mrs. Cobb (Vivien Oakland), restaurant swami Drake (Bob Bice), and the smooth-talking Fred Reed (John Kellogg). They develop an elaborate shell game in order to convince Mrs. Royce to bequeath her money to the “Rama Society.” There’s a fine sequence that depicts each of them uncovering seemingly banal pieces of information about the dead son’s schoolboy days, that when sewn together and dressed up in an otherworldly séance, take on the look and feel true mysticism. The plan works, and Mrs. Royce amends her will. When the secretary gets suspicious of Weldon her car plummets into a canyon—no brakes! (Weldon cuts so many brake lines in the movie that if were a mob picture they’d call him “Snips.”)

Meanwhile, the cops are pounding the pavement trying to make a case—they know who’s involved, but can’t prove a crime has been committed. In a spectacular B-movie coincidence, Steve shows up at Rama society headquarters just in time to see Mrs. Royce. When the cops brace her she scoffs and tells them to buzz off—which Detective Johnson does, and how: straight over a cliff with cut brake lines! He lives, barely, and enjoys one moviedom’s briefest convalescent periods. Finally, the cops contrive to beat Weldon at his own game, with the assistance of famous magician Dante (playing himself) and Johnson’s actress girlfriend, posing as a rival medium. When their scheme gains traction with Mrs. Royce, Weldon resorts to violence, setting the stage for Bunco’s finale—and another brakeless car careening through the hills above Malibu.

The fixation on murder by cutting brake lines jeopardizes the movie’s credibility, but it’s also another one of those expeditious touches that allow a whole lot of story to be crammed into a few reels. The first time it happens we get plenty of detailed information: the killer approaches and climbs under the car; we hear him cut the lines; we see him resurface and stow the cutters. This takes a modest thirty seconds; the final time it takes just six. The cinematic value of this method of attempted murder is significant. Bullets are difficult to dodge, but the brake line technique generates suspense—and a special sort of suspense at that, considering that the amount of time between the cutting of the lines and the car ride itself can be shortened or lengthened to suit the plot. 

Most B pictures rely on contrivances stacked on top of one another and outrageous coincidences too. Bunco Squad is no different, yet it’s all done so smoothly you’ll hardly notice and surely won’t care. It borrows one of the quintessential devices of the caper picture to great effect: that of the criminal who builds a crew and executes a clever plan; except in this case it’s not a heist but a swindle the crooks have in mind. There’s nothing spectacular about the story or the cast, and its noir credentials are tepid. But Bunco Squad is a crackerjack crime movie anyway. It’s polished, well constructed, features a ton of on-location L.A. exteriors and surprising special effects. It goes a long way towards reminding us that not all mid-century crimes movies were filmed in the noir style, and that such films shouldn’t be dismissed—or forgotten.

Bunco Squad (1950)
Directed by Herbert Leeds
Produced by Louis Rachmil
Cinematography by Henry Freulich
Screenplay by George Callahan, based on a novel by Reginald Taviner
Starring Robert Sterling, Joan Dixon, and Ricardo Cortez
Released by RKO Studios
Running time: 67 minutes