CHAMPION (1949)

Champion is usually described as a cautionary tale about the bitter price of ruthless ambition. Rubbish. The character of Midge Kelly is heroic, admirable, and downright glorious. A rotten son of a bitch? Certainly. But I envy him, and you should too.

Champion airs from time to time on TCM and has been available on DVD for ages, so this essay assumes that you know the film. Besides, you just can’t dig into this thing without considering the ending — proceed knowing that spoilers await. For those who need a refresher, the story goes like this: Michael “Midge” Kelly (Kirk Douglas) and his brother Connie (Arthur Kennedy) are heading west in search of their fortune when they get rolled and are forced to thumb it. They cadge a ride from a palooka (John Day) on his way to fight a main event in Kansas City. Hoping to earn a quick buck, Midge takes a fill-in spot on the undercard. He’s beaten badly but catches the eye of manager Tommy Haley (that noir-iest of actors, Paul Stewart), who offers to Mickey him into a real fighter. When Midge and Connie reach Cali and discover their prospects vanished they are compelled to find scut work in a roadhouse. Both are attracted to a waitress, Emma (Ruth Roman), who Midge is forced to marry in the wake of a tryst. Feeling trapped, Midge eighty-sixes Emma and scrams for L.A., where he takes Haley up on his offer. Midge’s toughness and ambition make him a natural in the ring, and soon he rates a bout with number one contender Johnny Dunne, the same cat who taxied him into Kansas City. Midge is ordered to take a dive in trade for a legit title shot down the line, but he stuns everyone when he batters an unsuspecting Dunne. Although irate gamblers get their revenge, Midge’s refusal to cheat makes him appear heroic and he gets a title shot anyway, which he wins. Now standing on top of the heap, Midge alienates everyone around him. When he gives Dunne a rematch, he takes a terrific beating — until the jeering crowd and the ringside announcers spur him to final victory. Staggered, leering, and triumphant, Midge returns to his dressing room where he collapses and dies.


Everyone involved scores points for making a great picture about an asshole, but Kirk Douglas deserves the lion’s share of the credit. His Midge Kelly is one the most interesting and complicated boxers in screen history, which is a significant accomplishment considering how droll the character likely would have been in the hands (gloves?) of a lesser talent. Champion was a landmark early Douglas landmark film and justly earned him an Academy Award nomination. Most of what has been written about the movie praises his virtuoso performance or affirms the film’s status as a morality tale. While Douglas is indeed the stuff of legend, the “What Price Fame?” angle just doesn’t wash. Champion is a coldly cynical movie about a hard-as-nails tough guy; made during an era when all the little kids didn’t get a trophy. If it were merely a cautionary tale it would have ended differently: with Midge dead and defeated in the center of the ring. Redemption? No, thanks. An apology tour? Piss off. Midge Kelly isn’t redeemed at the end of Champion — he’s validated. Let’s come back to this later, first Douglas deserves his due.

Kirk Douglas was a great performer who, if nothing else, understood what made him a movie star. He was blessed and cursed with a hyper-magnetic screen presence. Everything about him was just...exaggerated. No actress could wrest the spotlight from him, which is why he isn’t remembered as one of the great romantic leads. Don’t buy it? Next time you watch him in a love scene and things start to heat up, take note of who grabs your attention. It’ll be Douglas. That was his great gift: he was bigger than the story, bigger than his cast, bigger than his directors. His innate arrogance was his greatest asset. He’s cast perfectly here. 

Let’s get back to Midge. Here’s a Depression-era kid who came up tough. His father took a powder in the first round of Midge’s life. And his mother, unable to keep both her sons, sent Midge to the orphanage and kept Connie at home. Midge grew up abandoned and institutionalized, on the losing end of a low-rent Sophie’s choice. Then with adulthood came the war and the bloody hell of combat. This is a guy who’d been rolled, robbed, cheated, chastised, red-taped, taken for granted, swindled, and sent to war. How would you handle it? After Midge mustered out he took on the thankless role of provider for his mother and little brother, and bore no grudge. Sure, he stepped on people along the way, but didn’t he get stepped on first? In spite of it all, he’s probably the most upbeat character in the film. He raised himself out of a hellish upbringing through his own grit to become the champion of the world. All he wanted out of life was the respect of other men offered by success in the ring. Boxing exacts a steep price in exchange for that success, and Midge saw clearer more plainly those around him that he’d ultimately have to pay it. If success left Midge feeling entitled yet emotionally crippled, who can blame him? 

Who does he hurt? The story places Midge in the arms of three different women. First with Emma, the wife/waitress whom he deserts. Of the film’s women, she’s the most deserving of happiness, which she ultimately finds with Connie. Although she married Midge, she understood going in that he didn’t love her. Their mistake causes her much short-term distress, but it was through him that she met Connie and eventually found what she was looking for.* Midge’s second tryst was with the aptly named Grace Diamond (Marilyn Maxwell), a good-timer who treats fighters like Kleenex. She’s an opportunistic user who meets her match. The idea that Midge could hurt someone so despicable is silly. His final girlfriend is Palmer Harris (Lola Maxwell), the spoiled and slumming wife of the crooked fight promoter. Their affair is brief, and ends when Midge agrees to cut ties in exchange for a bigger percentage of the gate. Undoubtedly a cold-blooded choice, but it bears repeating Midge has no idea how to make himself or anyone else happy, especially not a married woman. Midge is a pig, but he never tries to hide it. All the women in the story are well rid of him, but none suffer lasting harm.


That leaves the brother and the trainer. Connie is supposedly the sympathetic conscience of the film, constantly exasperated with his brother, yet he seems to have forgotten who pays the bills—and, for that matter, who grew up in the orphanage. Hell, Connie even gets the girl; what does he have to grouse about? As for the trainer, Haley is the only guy in the picture who knows the score all along. In quintessential noir fashion, he knows that he’ll be dropped him when the bigger purses come, yet he returns to train Midge for his climactic title fight anyway. As he repeats time and again, “I can’t keep away from it, I like to watch a good boy in action.” The idea of a fighter leaving one trainer for another happens as often on screen as it does in real life, a cliché in both worlds. It’s important to realize that Champion is a noir film in which none of the characters come away clean. Dig this most of all: when Midge finally lands that first big fight with Johnny Dunne, both Connie and Tommy want him to take the dive—they want him to cheat. 

If the movie has a flaw it’s that it doesn’t fully depict the grueling physical realities of the prizefighter’s life. The ring scenes (directed by Stanley Kramer rather than Mark Robson, who Kramer said didn’t know enough about boxing) are exquisite, but the narrative’s preoccupation with fight-fixing doesn’t afford any screen time to the everyday sacrifices made by fighters. Midge stacks knockouts way too fast and scores a title shot in no time at all, while in reality the achievement of a world’s championship, or even a spot on the undercard of a championship bout, was a pipe dream for most pugs. The film does include a Rocky-style training sequence, though nowadays it plays for laffs. 

Douglas is miraculous in his final scene. Bloody and victorious, having returned to his dressing room after ferociously pummeling Dunne, he leers and gesticulates at the camera, his battered face a desperate reflection of his maimed but resilient soul. Midge’s life comes full circle with his defeat of the man who opened the door to a life in the ring—a dichotomous life that offered not only the illusory pleasures of fame, fortune, and women; but more importantly, the respect and legacy he craved. Cinematic convention keeps us expecting that he’ll see the light and turn an improbable Ebenezer Scrooge-like corner at the end, yet he never does. Midge’s refusal to compromise or live on anything but his own terms is a worthy valediction. It imbues his life with a strange and moving integrity. It also makes him an iconic hero of film noir. It’s fitting that he should die after he wins the final fight; he has nothing in the world left to prove. Some men are not meant to suffer old age.

Champion (1949)

Director: Mark Robson.

Cinematographer: Franz Planer
Screenplay: Carl Foreman, based on a story by Ring Lardner.
Starring: Kirk Douglas, Arthur Kennedy, Marilyn Maxwell, Ruth Roman, and Paul Stewart.
Released by: United Artists
Running time: 99 minutes

* (Some viewers/reviewers of Champion suggest that Midge rapes Emma late in the film. For the record, after numerous viewings I still don’t read the code in that way, but I’d certainly change my tune (and, of course, my review) if someone were to convince me. This essay is something of a justification Midge’s bad behavior, but certainly not for rape. 

The Bad-Good Good-Bad Guy: Dan Duryea in The Underworld Story

Nobody could deliver a line quite like Dan Duryea. My favorite comes in 1949’s Manhandled, when his slimy, gum-chewing private detective brags, “You’re not talking to a cluck Charlie. You’re talking to a guy who knows all the angles.” It wasn’t his wittiest line, nor was it the most hard-boiled or sarcastic, but it said a mouthful about Duryea’s screen persona. After all, the lanky blonde actor made a name for himself in the forties and fifties playing a series of pinstriped hustlers, leering hoods, and—believe it or not—two-fisted misogynists. His sardonic losers always thought they knew the score, but by film’s end were seldom on the right side of the law, if they were even breathing.

Yet in the period following the war, as the hopeful forties gave way to the uncertain and confused fifties, and as the fears of a disillusioned public began to creep into the movies, Duryea’s ability to contrast antisocial behavior with boyish charm, to “know all the angles,” or at least pretend to, made him more valuable than ever in Hollywood. He was uniquely able to actualize the audience’s itch to play those same angles, to grab a handful of that easy money, to flout those shiny post-war promises that most of them had missed out on anyway. And if the right property came along, Duryea might even get to play the good guy.

That property turned out to be 1950’s The Underworld Story, a nearly forgotten and oddly titled film (it has next to nothing to do with gangsters) that, thanks to the Warner Archive, is now widely available. No mere programmer, the United Artists production is one of those rare low-budget pictures that offer a frightening snapshot of its time—of everyday Americans, their optimism sapped, struggling to get by in a new world amidst the tumult of progress. The film is complex without being complicated, though a detailed synopsis would require much more space than I’m allotted here.

In a nutshell, it tells the story of Mike Reese, a venal big city reporter with a chip on his shoulder. Reese’s editors set him up as the fall guy after one of his stories gets a mob stoolie executed on the steps of city hall. Given a pink slip and blacklisted, Reese leaves town and buys into a sleepy suburban paper, but soon finds himself back in the thick of current events. A wealthy socialite has been murdered, and her maid—a black woman—is wrongfully accused of the crime. It just so happens that the murdered woman is the daughter-in-law of Reese’s former publisher, and the killer is the mogul’s spoiled son. Regardless, Reese believes the maid to be guilty, and burns through the majority of the running time playing both ends against the middle in an effort to line his own pockets. But as the story uncoils and the truth finally becomes clear to him, Reese is forced to make a decision between his own rank selfishness and the girl’s life.

Director Cyril Endfield turns in an intelligent and beautifully constructed film. It’s smart, well-paced, and looks gorgeous—Stanley Cortez’s lighting and camera work holds up against that of any iconic film noir. Endfield coaxed great stuff from his entire cast, but Duryea in particular shines—The Underworld Story is one of the best roles of his career. Endfield wrote the screenplay himself, adapting a story by Craig Rice (pseudonym of mystery writer Georgianna Craig) with assistance from Henry Blankfort. The resulting script is foreboding, laconic, and brimming with razor-sharp dialogue. It undertakes a range of issues, including the power of the fourth estate to manipulate public opinion, the capacity of the wealthy to influence the judicial process, the country’s never-ending struggle with racism, and the capriciousness of small town morality.

However, if the project represented a zenith for many of its principals, for a few the nadirs to come were life-changing. The film’s multi-layered criticisms of the Communist witch-hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee are so apparent that even the committee members themselves couldn’t have missed them. The Underworld Story goes so far as to give its lone black character, Molly (played by Mary Anderson, a white actress), the wrongly accused and persecuted murder suspect, the same surname as HUAC member John E. Rankin, the racist and bombastic congressman from Mississippi. Thus, it’s no surprise that Endfield’s film (along with his other incendiary 1950 piece, The Sound of Fury) drew the government’s ire: screenwriter Blankfort, actor Howard Da Silva, and Endfield himself would soon join the ranks of those defamed by the blacklist.

Dan Duryea’s task in The Underworld Story was formidable. He had to create one of noir’s more subtle protagonists, a cynical, manipulative, and morbidly opportunistic reporter, his idealism forgotten somewhere among all the column inches and carriage returns (Yes, Mike Reese will undoubtedly bring to mind the character of Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder’s famous Ace in the Hole [1951], but The Underworld Story reached screens almost a full year earlier). Yet unlike Duryea’s heavies of the forties, this character had to take a sharp turn back towards the light, and bring a skeptical audience along for the ride. The Reese of the first two-thirds of the film is a scoundrel of the first order: a man who will exploit any situation for the sake of a payoff. Duryea’s tremendous range and feel for the part are most evident in two scenes involving Becker, a seedy defense attorney (Roland Winters).

The first—which shows Reese at his worst—happens over a T-bone lunch in the city, as he tries to convince the disinterested mouthpiece to take Molly’s case. Becker deflects him with a stack of fresh headlines that already have her head in a noose. “If she was white she wouldn’t stand a chance against these,” he says. Reese parries with money, offering to split the forty thousand dollars raised by the defense committee fifty-fifty. “She’ll hang,” sighs Becker. Reese’s response, “So she’ll hang,” is so callous that it stops the lawyer cold, a forkful of steak frozen in mid-air. Duryea knows that Reese must eventually turn the corner, but he also realizes that the payoff will be better if the audience harbors some doubt. The lunch scene is the linchpin in his character development—Duryea wants us to hate him.

Yet Reese’s primary function in the film is redemptive, and his moment of transformation— new territory for Duryea—comes during his next encounter with Becker. This scene takes place at the penitentiary, where the two men meet in order to persuade Molly to cop to a reduced charge of manslaughter. She flatly refuses, knowing that a guilty verdict at trial will mean the death penalty. In her anger she compares Reese’s schemes to those of a slave trader, and rises to leave. “Even if you die?!” he shouts in bewilderment, to which she fires back, “All I have left is that I’m innocent. I won’t give it up!” This is the film’s big moment, when the fact of Molly’s innocence finally obliterates Reese’s cynicism.

After she departs with the matron, the camera’s attention returns to him. Duryea underplays it—perfectly. His profile lit starkly against the shadows, he hems and haws, toying with his hat as he asks Becker to accept all of the committee’s money—including his cut—in order to give Molly a proper defense. Becker says the whole wad may not be enough. “How fat can you get?” scoffs Reese, the book on his cynicism slammed shut. Duryea makes the transformation so believable that by film’s end it’s impossible to imagine any other actor in the role.

What still matters about The Underworld Story and Dan Duryea’s vivid performance is the extent to which the character of Reese had to resonate, at least in a few ways, with post-war movie goers—people who could drum up the cost of a double feature easily enough, but had somehow missed out on the gravy train that everyone was so damn sure of back in 1945. Duryea understood their frustrations, and he becomes a proxy for the audience, fulfilling their desire to act out—to mouth off, to do the wrong thing, to get rich quickly. A self-centered knucklehead who still manages to save the day must have been a welcome, even liberating presence on the screen.
And although Duryea’s career playing the heel was typically thankless, he is now rightly regarded as one of noir’s essential performers. If his jaded screen persona is uninhibited by rules and morality, it’s only so the audience can bask in all that delicious freedom—at least until the end titles and house lights nudged them once again into conformity. ■

The Underworld Story (1950)

Written and Directed by Cy Endfield

Based on a story by Georgianna Craig

Cinematography by Stanley Cortez

Starring Dan Duryea, Gale Storm, Herbert Marshall, and Howard Da Silva

Released Through United Artists

Running time: 91 minutes

I originally wrote this piece for Noir City, the quarterly magazine of the Film Noir Foundation, and it is included in the recently released Noir City Annual 2013. Do yourself a favor and order a copy from Amazon here. The book is crammed full of the best in noir writing, and the proceeds go to the preservation of the original prints of these great films! 

TIME TABLE (1956)

For the men of film noir, the ones who fought the war and returned to a changing country, the idea of a dutiful and submissive wife, a white collar, and a white picket fence just couldn’t cut it — and heaven knows our noir heroes tried to fit back in. They squirm in their suits, tugging at those tight collars, chewing their nails, always on the make for that thing that might break the monotony and remind them of what it feels like to be alive. Pour another drink, Don Draper. 

Despite a five-decade career in film and television, Mark Stevens was most visible in the years immediately after the war. He made his first big splash with Lucille Ball and Bill Bendix in 1946’s The Dark Corner, followed by a pair of notable 1948 films: the FBI-noir The Street with No Name and the Academy heavyweight The Snake Pit. Stevens is of less interest for those projects (to me, at least) than he is for his 1950s work, after he struck out on his own. He was the force behind his own film production and music publishing companies (he could sing), as well as the star and occasional director of Big Town, a popular weekly television series in which he played a crime-busting newsman. Although Stevens failed to carve out a lasting place as filmmaker, his earliest efforts, Cry Vengeance (1954) and Time Table (1956) — both surprisingly good noirs — beg for increased attention in contemporary film circles and make one wish the fledgling director had framed more crime movies. 

Unfortunately for anyone who hasn’t seen Time Table, it’s impossible to discuss without spoiling its big twist — so let’s get it out of the way right now (and don’t worry, the reveal occurs in the first half of the film):  Stevens plays an insurance investigator who — here it comes — turns out to be the brains behind the very robbery he’s asked to solve. Although it’s an old saw that may bring to mind Double Indemnity, Time Table more closely resembles titles like Roadblock, Private Hell 36, and The Man Who Cheated Himself.  It draws from a myriad of noir films rather than any one in particular. This much is certain: in spite of being a cinematic mutt, Time Table is an intriguing movie that deserves to be seen. However, if your taste prohibits enjoyment of a “derivative” film, then it probably isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you are able to connect with a noir picture that utilizes familiar genre tropes and still manages to captivate, keep reading. Or better yet, go track this down. It will surprise you. 

The movie opens with a ten-minute-long heist sequence, cleverly staged on a train speeding west through the Arizona night. A polished crook posing as a doctor manages to crack the train’s safe and snatch all the money inside. The job is perfectly planned and calmly executed, using high-tech explosives, a precisely detailed timetable, and a cagey scheme involving a “sick” passenger and his “wife” — both in on the caper. The trio of bandits exit the train in a scrubby desert town, and abscond in an ambulance with half a million dollars. The railroad’s insurers will have to make good on the policy unless the money is recovered, so they assign the case to Charlie Norman (Stevens), their best man, forcing him and his wife Ruth (Marianne Stewart) to delay their long-planned Mexican vacation. Charlie is partnered with railroad detective and best friend (yeah, yeah) Joe Armstrong (King Calder). 

The second act contains a healthy dose of cop procedure. Charlie and Joe chase leads, pal around with the yokel cops, and generally marvel at the skill of their quarry — all while Charlie becomes more preoccupied and nervous. We’re convinced his frustration owes to the lost vacation, until the twist occurs and we discover otherwise: Charlie masterminded the entire robbery in the first place, and he’s torn up because his perfect crime is unraveling all around him. He dreamt up the caper, recruited the players, and worked out the all-important timetable. Why? For some unknown reason Charlie is fed up — with his job, with his home, and with his marriage. He intended to pull off the heist, then use his Mexican holiday as a means to skip out on his old life and rendezvous with his accomplices south of the border. There he intends to cut up the money and start fresh in Argentina with new squeeze Linda (Felicia Farr). Yet fate, as it so often does in film noir, has a different agenda: one of the crew is shot and killed, throwing off the timetable and forcing everyone to hole up. In the meantime, Joe’s investigation starts to pay off, while Charlie grows more desperate. He is finally forced to commit a murder in order to protect himself, scaring his remaining co-conspirators into making a run for it. Just as Joe finally gets wise to the whole scheme, Charlie heads for Tijuana in a last-ditch effort to find Linda. With the Federales riding shotgun, Joe corners the lovers in TJ and guns are drawn… 

Whether explored deeply or viewed as pure escapism, Time Table scores. Aben Kandel’s (City for Conquest) accomplished script surpasses typical B movie fare, with an airtight plot and plenty of tough, pithy dialog. Kandel also has a gift for subtle double-entendres that reinforce the story’s central theme and reward attentive viewers. For example, early on when Ruth replaces the blanket on a dozing Charlie, he mumbles, “What’re you trying to do, smother me?” All of Kandel’s characters, in one way or another and regardless of their gender, are struggling to overcome the emptiness of a world in which they’ve discovered, all too late, that the fairy tale assurances of their younger years are simply not meant to be. Charlie finds no comfort in his bleak, middle class existence. Fulfilling the role of the perfect wife brings Ruth little but disappointment. Linda trades her alcoholic, disgraced husband for the promise of a better life with Charlie, but instead leaps from the frying pan into an altogether deadlier fire. Even Joe runs himself into the ground living up to the image of a dead cop father who taught him there’s no such thing as a perfect crime. In Time Table, perfection is as ethereal as the haze of cigarette smoke that obscures each frame. 

Stevens’ direction might be described as workmanlike, but he understands where to linger, when to move quickly, and how to get a lot out of his actors — Time Table has a great cast. Wesley Addy (Kiss Me Deadly, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) is fantastic as the drunken ex-M.D. who holds it together just long enough to rob the train, while King Calder, who worked previously with Stevens during his run as television’s private detective Martin Kane, excels as the relentless railroad cop. Calder’s face and body language are so hang-dog it’s hard to imagine him in roles outside of the crime genre. Two of the most memorable performances come from actors in small parts. Jack Klugman, appearing in his first film role after having met Stevens on an episode of Big Town, plays a chain-smoking wheelman who squirms under the lights like nobody’s business. Klugman has just one scene, but he steals it cleanly away from Stevens and Calder. The second standout is Alan Reed, whose name and face may not be incredibly familiar, though his unforgettable and iconic voice certainly is — even thirty-five years after his death. Reed’s stocky build, unique look, and instant pathos made him a natural for this stuff — it’s surprising he didn’t make more crime pictures. Reed vividly brings to life the helicopter pilot most responsible for Charlie’s plans going down the tube. He burns the candle from both ends and pays a steep price for turning stool pigeon — in one of the film’s best moments. 

At a quick 79 minutes, Time Table is a second feature — it plows ahead, sacrificing much at the altar of brevity. Yet while similar films are repudiated as rote exercises in “what happened next?” moviemaking, they frequently provide an instructive lens through which we can examine the cultural values of their era. Time Table is such a film. At its core is the question of Charlie’s motivation to self-destruct, and he offers no clues beyond a vaguely expressed desire for a change. At a critical point in the final reel, Ruth confronts him: 

     “Charlie, why’d you do it? Why?” 

     “Why? What does it matter?”

And later in the same scene:

     “We had so much Charlie. Why, why?” 

     “The house becomes a prison, the job a trap.” 

     “What did you want?”

     “A new kind of life.”

Yet the film doesn’t explain why Charlie so desperately wants this new life. Personally and professionally he has everything a man could reasonably ask for — his situation is even admirable. Ruth is a kind and attractive woman for whom he has genuine affection, and his tough-guy job as an insurance cop makes him a bona fide man’s man. The most telling aspect of Time Table is how it takes for granted that viewers will embrace Charlie’s compulsion to escape his circumstances without being given a reason. 

Look closely at the absurdity of Charlie’s actions: he trades his job and his honor for a satchel of money; a fine suburban home for assuredly more squalid digs in Argentina; and a caring spouse another woman, albeit younger and a little prettier, who nevertheless seems to be cut from the same beige piece of cloth as his wife. It’s also worth pointing out that Linda is a Mexican — another way in which the film drives home the point that Charlie’s all-American situation somehow isn’t adequate. And he knows his trades are for keeps — permanently sanctified through blood and betrayal. After all, Charlie’s a law enforcement man who, like Walter Neff, understands the risks but believes his knowledge of the game provides an edge. At the same time, he is aware of the looming possibility of the little green room at Quentin, where one’s final black moments are strained listening for the plop-plop-fizz-fizz of everlasting relief.

Unlike in other noir pictures, the protagonist’s downfall can’t be attributed to a femme fatale. Time Table doesn’t have one. Sure, there’s a girl, but Charlie’s inamorata is hardly an upgrade on his wife. Here’s a guy who is winning the rat race and still wants out — he hates everything about his situation. The answer to his motivation lies in the movie’s unrelenting cynicism. Time Table consciously subverts the post-war American dream of happiness through national prosperity and material achievement. It thumbs its nose at the white bread promises of the Eisenhower era: the steady jobs, home-sweet-homes, and June Allyson wives that saturated mainstream media offerings. It gives us a protagonist who has achieved these material things and more, yet remains unfulfilled. In many ways, Charlie’s case is even more compelling than that of the pill-popping Ed Avery in another 1956 film, Nicholas Ray’s brilliant Bigger Than Life — if only because Time Table is neither a character study nor a message picture. For the men of film noir, the ones who fought the war and returned to a changing country, the idea of a dutiful and submissive wife, a white collar, and a white picket fence just couldn’t cut it — and heaven knows our noir heroes tried to fit back in. They squirm in their suits, tugging at those tight collars, chewing their nails, always on the make for that thing that might break the monotony and remind them of what it feels like to be alive. Pour another drink, Don Draper. 

What makes Time Table so enthralling (as well as numerous other film noirs), is that while modern audiences might find Charlie Norman’s gambit unfathomable or absurd, some of the 1956 crowd undoubtedly recognized themselves in him — feeling every bit as suffocated while having to acquiesce to the vanilla model of happiness offered up on countless roadside billboards, magazine advertisements, and sponsor-centric TV programs. Consequently, Charlie becomes a poster child for those who felt trapped in that uncanny era of prosperous conformity — and an authentic film noir anti-hero. In recognizing and understanding the daring of filmmakers who so openly questioned the fleeting promises of the American Dream, we further appreciate the enduring allure of film noir.

Time Table (1956)

Produced and Directed by Mark Stevens

Written by Aben Kandel

Cinematography by Charles Van Enger 

Art Direction by William Tuntke

Starring Mark Stevens, King Calder, Alan Reed, Jack Klugman, and Wesley Addy

Released by United Artists

Running time: 79 minutes

CAGE OF EVIL (1960)

“You know it’s real funny. Since I’ve been on the force I’ve been around hoods and thieves and killers, the real stinking part of the human race. I always wondered if it would rub off on me. Now I know.”

Most people who stumble upon 1960’s Cage of Evil won’t linger much before they start trolling for something else to watch. Yet it’s the sort of thing that I luxuriate in; 70 minutes of pulpy goodness, with sharp stylish dialogue and a second-rate cast giving it everything they’ve got. It’s made on the cheap, with every B movie trick in the book: unfamiliar performers, cheap sets, rear projection, long takes, and so forth — half the plot is related through voiceover narration. Even with its 1960 release date, it still exists in that magical, purely cinematic world that lent itself to such delightful crime films — the one in which a police officer who skews towards brutality wasn’t looked at with scorn by his fellow officers and the LAPD brass. Such cops and cultures don’t function well in the world away from the screen (as the long and storied history of the real LAPD easily demonstrates), but they sure make great fodder for films and pulp novels. In the case of this film, a culture inclusive of the brutal police officer is quite necessary: Cage of Evil would never get off the ground if its protagonist’s violent behavior made him a suspect in the eyes of his colleagues. Instead, he enjoys the support of his fellow officers and the encouragement of his captain. He’s clearly the sort of officer that Dudley Smith would want in his LAPD. (Edgy detectives would become the heroes of seventies films, then cartoonish superheroes during the eighties. By the early nineties they would demonized in a spate of “internal affairs” thrillers.)

The film stars Ron Foster, the kind of squinty, oily actor who does every scene with a cigarette in his hand. Plenty good looking enough with carved features and a dour expression, Foster was cut from the right cloth to play Detective Scott Harper, a cop who gets passed over one time too many and decides to take his chances on the opposite side of the law. His slicked-back jet hair and habit of looking at his costars crossways only add to his unctuous credibility. Harper’s hardboiled bona fides are established early on, when he beats up a hapless diamond cutter on the slight suspicion the man may have abetted in the diamond heist central to the story. It costs him dearly: even after having placed third on the lieutenants’ exam, Harper gets passed over for the promotion when the jeweler signs a complaint.

Foster has had a surprisingly long career in Hollywood considering how spotty his resume is. After starring in a number of B films in the late fifties and early sixties with director Eddie Cahn (including this one), he spent most of the last fifty years appearing sporadically in character roles on television. He had a recurring role in the cop series Highway Patrol, but his longest run was during the mid-nineties on the CBS soap Guiding Light. More recently Foster has lent his voice to popular video games such as Max Payne and Grant Theft Auto.

Pat Blair plays Holly Taylor, the ‘hostess’ who acts as a go between for the diamond thieves and their San Francisco fence. Harper goes undercover to get next to her, and naturally they fall for each other — in pure Phyllis Dietrichson style, she sweet talks Harper into crashing the exchange and murdering everyone involved, but on the other hand she sticks with him even after she finds out he’s a cop! Like many other cheap crime movies, Cage of Fear is heavy on plot and light on character motivation; anyone who forgets that going in is bound to exit disappointed.

Blair is a doll, though she must have grimaced at her image on the film’s lobby card. (By the way, Her eyes don't really look like that, and the set up depicted appears nowhere in the film.) Pushing six feet in heels she runs the risk of towering over the guy opposite her, but she and Foster have surprisingly good chemistry. It took me a little while to make up my mind about her — her facial features and statuesque figure make her come over more like a contestant in the Miss America pageant, but after a change in hairstyle and wardrobe I was on the same page as the casting director. I knew Blair previously as the second female lead in the better-known 1956 film noir Crime Against Joe, but she surpasses that work here. There are still a few green moments during the Cage’s final action sequence, but for the most part Blair shines — especially in those sultry moments opposite Foster. Blair is somewhat more conspicuous than Foster — she had a seven year run opposite Fess Parker on the popular Daniel Boone series.

The arc of the story should be familiar by now: cop gets the shaft, meets a bad girl, and does the crooked thing. Cage of Evil ends along those same lines, though it manages to spin a few of the more tired clichés along refreshing lines. The climax cleverly borrows from Kubrick’s The Killing in a way that almost feels more like homage than outright theft. It’s also slickly ironic: in a sea of films that find their protagonists desperately attempting to make it across the border into Mexico, ours manage to do it in style — yet they bungle their getaway nevertheless.

Cage of Evil is not shot in the noir style, but I was still struck by the economical filmmaking. Cahn almost always uses middle-length shots with a single camera set-up and TV style lighting. This technique has ruined plenty of good material, but he manages to pull it off through pans and zooms, particularly when his characters relocate from one spot to another on a given set in between zooms. He gets a lot of bang for his production dollar by moving his actor about, and the movie feels more prestigious than it really is. Rear is used whenever characters are driving around Los Angeles, but those shots are bookended quite effectively with on-location exteriors at assorted LA locales. One of the rear-projection moments is striking: as Harper and Taylor are making their getaway, he uses the pause at a red light to explain to her why they have to run, “you can never surrender on a double-murder charge.” As he speaks, a large sedan barrels toward them from behind. The car’s arrival on their back bumper coincides with the best part of Foster’s monologue. Though it’s possible the moment may have been inadvertent, the notion of pursuing fate as embodied by heavy Detroit metal makes the moment powerful. The sense of clever B moviemaking evaporates just afterwards, as the rear projection shows Harper’s car turning into the airport parking lot, while his hands remain stalwartly at ten-and-two.

None of this stuff should amount to anything, but Cage of Evil is a much stronger film than I imagined it would be, and it lends a great deal of credibility to the notion that a movie rendered in earnest doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. This title is available instantly on Netflix, and is worth a shot.

Cage of Evil (1960)

Directed by Edward Cahn

Produced by Robert Kent

Written by Orville Hampton and Alexander Richards

Starring Ron Foster, Patricia Blair, and Harp McGuire

Cinematography by Maury Gertsman

Art Direction by Serge Krizman

Released by United Artists

Running time: 71 minutes

THE KILLER IS LOOSE (1956)

Someday Wagner, I’m gonna settle with you for it.




The Killer is Loose has holes — blast it with a Tommy gun it has such holes. It’s a little movie with a story that churns single-mindedly forward until its title character sprawls dead on a well-kept suburban lawn and all is once again right with the world — you can get back to your TV dinner now. It asks us to swallow a lot: happenstance, strange motivations, coincidences and contrivances, maybe even a miracle or two. The story unfolds so rapidly you’ve gotta wait until the end to pick your nits; stop to raise an eyebrow and it just moves on without you, scoffers be damned. Who cares what happened to the other bank robbers? So what if the bank has a house safe instead of a vault!


Anyone conversant in B crime movies will tell you to look elsewhere if you want perfect films with plot holes a mouse couldn’t shimmy through. Instead there’s something about cheap little programmers that pulls at the gut, something so compelling it keeps prying questions at bay. We accept them for what they are, warts and all, and we grant concessions; more often than not it’s the endings: how many times have you seen a delightfully grim film noir wrecked by a “studio” wrap-up? Movies are diversionary, they aim to please, to sell tickets and popcorn; Hollywood practically invented the focus group in order to ensure audience satisfaction. With that in mind it’s surprising that an such exciting group of original and subversive films were ever produced in the first place; who cares if a few of the endings are trumped up — it’s a price worth paying.


In spite of occasionally artificial endings, low budgets, plot holes, and sometimes less-than-stellar acting, the allure of classic noir is potent. Its world is at once far-off and concocted — a not-quite-true reflection of how things were, yet one that serves as a comforting surrogate for those of us too young to have lived through the war and the decade that followed. It’s a world that tantalizes, a powerfully nostalgic world that romanticizes crime and crooks, imbuing their acts with an intoxicating veneer, a cinematic new-car smell. Although the fifties film noir is thankfully free of dead little boys in Penney’s boxes and killers with living room abattoirs, its milieu is one that ever so gradually began to resemble the world at large. Its subject matter became more in tune with social problems: the influence of organized crime, juvenile delinquency, and criminal psychosis — while its expressionistic vision began to give way to something more pedestrian, and the heart of noir crept inexorably out of the claustrophobic urban spaces, like the denizens of the city itself, into the daylight and eventually … the suburbs.


At this awkward conflux of reality and movie-fantasy that happened at the end of the classic noir cycle we find The Killer is Loose: Leon “Foggy” Poole (Wendell Corey), the inside man on a bank job, is cornered by police in the walk up apartment he shares with his wife. During the standoff she is inadvertently shot and killed. Instead of accepting responsibility, Poole blames the police for her death and swears to pay back Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotten), the dick who pulled the trigger, by killing his wife Lila (Rhonda Fleming). Poole gets transferred to the honor farm for good behavior, but escapes and sets out for revenge. The cops try to snare him, but he evades capture and eventually makes it to the Wagner home for a showdown with the waiting police.


The title itself, almost sounding more like that of a slasher film or a straight thriller, played on the fears and suspicions of a wary public. Earlier noir titles looked inward, referencing their own characters, fetishes, and narrative predicaments: Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, The Guilty, The Killers, Gun Crazy, and so forth. The locations and populace of The Killer is Loose, however, are meant to feel ordinary and familiar, and subsequently all the more terrifying. The message is that anyone could be a raving lunatic — the football coach, milkman, or the teller at the bank — and we’d never get wise. The movie spectacularly undermines the American Dream; it argues that you can’t feel safe anywhere, that the killing grounds are no longer the back alleys in the wee hours, but the suburban kitchen just after the five o'clock whistle blows. The boogeyman isn’t a slick gunsel in a fedora and trench coat, but a myopic banker with Coke-bottle glasses. Furthermore, The Killer is Loose doesn’t prop up the police as infallible pillar-of-the-community types — it needles them, makes fools of them, even emasculates them. The cops know a madman is on the prowl. They know his name, his face, and his intentions, yet with all their manpower and methodology they might as well go grab a bear claw or some scrambled eggs. In the end, it’s dumb luck more than anything else that brings the killer to his knees in an fevered hail of pent-up gunfire. Audiences must have left the theaters with a gnawing suspicion: that in this brave new world the police couldn’t protect them, and that the man selling tickets or the usher with his flashlight might harbor the darkest kind of fantasies. In an era of rampant suspicion and mistrust, The Killer is Loose was like gasoline on an already burning fire.


With revenge as a central theme, Budd Boetticher made a lot of sense as director, and owing to the great deal of critical attention he’s received in recent years it would be awfully easy (and terribly film blog-ish) to make this essay about him. Like almost every other film noir, The Killer is Loose is much more intriguing as a commentary on the cultural and social upheaval of its day than it is as simply a product of its director, in spite of the presence of thematic elements (revenge, alienation, murdered wives) that characterized Boetticher’s later westerns with Randolph Scott. Though to the director’s credit he saves The Killer is Loose from becoming a cookie cutter affair by making the revenge-seeker the most sympathetic character. Wendell Corey is hardly the performer one would expect as a psychopath; his performance must have been shocking to audiences. Corey was a professional wingman, most famously to James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. His career included a mix of prestige pictures, second features, and TV work. He was a first-rate character actor and a hardcore alcoholic who died of cirrhosis at 54. Although not a film for which he is remembered, The Killer is Loose was his best role. He and Boetticher understood that Poole was a new-fangled psycho and they played the schmuck angle to the hilt. Those who would dismiss this as a routine programmer with a shaky story fail to recognize how important it is to the closing door of the noir cycle: Foggy Poole has a lot more in common with traditional noir heroes than most viewers give him credit for. In one of the most popular movies ever made, Paul Freeman says to Harrison Ford, “It would take just a nudge, to make you like me, to push you out of the light.” Foggy Poole is what you get if you nudge one of those famous noir protagonists — Lancaster, Ladd, Widmark — into Freeman’s abyss.


Corey’s performance is heavy on pathos and light on motivation. He’s unglamorous, frightening, and pathetic — such killers have become all too familiar to contemporary audiences, and an American TV news cliché: cut to a million next-door neighbors staring into some camera plaintively reassuring a reporter how the maniac was “such a nice, quiet guy.” But it’s important to recognize that Poole, unlike Eddie Miller in 1952’s The Sniper, is an outwardly well-adjusted member of society, appearing quite normal to those around him. In fact, we never learn why he decides to knock over his place of employment — he’s happily married, gainfully employed, and judging by the passage of time and his interaction with his coworkers and customers, perfectly reasonable. There are a few clues early on, but they fail to provide anything more than circumstantial evidence: When Poole bumps into his old sergeant at the bank, the man gets a few cheap laughs from the other bank customers at his expense: Poole wasn’t a good soldier, and the nickname Foggy was meant to ridicule. Later, in what is undeniably the film’s most gut-wrenching (and best) scene, the two men meet again under different circumstances. The point is that Poole is a psychopath — his animus can’t be justified; his desire to get even is out of proportion and entirely unwarranted, and despite a calm exterior his behavior is consistently irrational. This is best exemplified by the fact that after being assured of an early parole, Poole decides to bolt the honor farm — committing multiple murders in the act — when if he had just waited he would have earned a legal release and could have sought revenge with better odds of success.


Corey’s pathos and Poole’s relentlessness, his alienation from society and his denial of its rules is what makes him, not Joseph Cotten’s Sam Wagner, the central noir persona here — even though the movie allows the less observant viewer to dismiss him as merely the “bad guy.” And while Cotten’s police detective isn’t in any way offensive, viewers will almost be rooting for Poole to get Lila Wagner in the sights of his .357 magnum. She’s a ball and chain of the first order, and one wonders if Poole wouldn’t be doing Wagner a favor by punching her ticket. In a movie that strives to shine a light on the impotence of authority, Wagner’s relationship with his wife demonstrates that unlike the police of 1940s film noir, postwar cops no longer wear the pants in the family. This ‘crisis of masculinity’ is a significant, yet seldom discussed ingredient in the noirs of the 1950s. The suggestion is extraordinarily provocative: that if Wagner were somehow free of Lila and the burdens of consumerism, conformity, and domesticity, he might then recapture the edge that once made him a good cop. Film noir often subverts the family, giving us married cops who exchanged their brutality for a new Frigidaire and some lace doilies, becoming soft and powerless in an increasing complex and criminal world. Bud White, that most violent of policemen, would have made mincemeat out of Poole — and look at what love nearly cost him.


In the end, the extermination of Leon Poole does little to assuage our fears. Instead, audiences would have left the theater troubled, because although this killer had been stopped, others were most assuredly still out there, every bit as invisible. Four years later, an even more vividly painted and equally unexpected psychopath would follow neatly in the footsteps of Foggy Poole, like a cinematic little brother, and his impact was so staggering that it snuffed out the dying embers of film noir, and knocked the crime thriller squarely on its ass for an entire decade — until a new group of seventies filmmakers, hell-bent on a realism, would reinvent the genre, and gloriously return it to the gritty streets of the American metropolis.


And they had enough sense to give us divorced cops.

The Killer is Loose (1956)

Directed by Budd Boetticher
Produced by Robert Jacks
Cinematography by Lucien Ballard
Written by John and ward Hawkins, and Harold Medford
Art Direction by Leslie Thomas
Starring Joseph Cotten, Wendell Corey, and Rhonda Fleming
Released by United Artists
Running time: 73 minutes