NO QUESTIONS ASKED (1951)

A black widow without a mate is just another spider.

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

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

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

Him: “If you’re just patient honey—“

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Questions Asked (1951)

Directed by Harold Kress

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

Cinematographer: Harold Lipstein

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

Screenplay: Sidney Sheldon

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

Released by: MGM

Running time: 80 minutes

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

OUT OF THE STORM (1948)

In order to understand how important typecasting was in classic Hollywood, how it could make or break a movie — even a cheap B picture with a twelve-day shooting schedule — look no further than Republic’s 1944 crime programmer Out of the Storm, starring Jimmy Lydon. Lydon gained fame playing comic strip teenager Henry Aldrich nine times for Paramount Pictures throughout the war years. After the fighting ended he signed a contract with Republic Pictures (which he jokingly referred to as Repulsive Pictures!) and made several low rent crime films, the most notable of which was Edgar Ulmer’s Strange Illusion (1945). From time to time Lydon appeared in supporting roles in major studio productions, including a pleasantly funny turn alongside Elizabeth Taylor in the 1947 William Powell hit Life with Father, and, believe it or not, as Ingrid Bergman’s little brother in Victor Fleming’s 1948 colossus, Joan of Arc. Lydon enjoyed a lengthy acting career in Hollywood films and on television before transitioning into a significant role as a producer. He even did a stretch as vice-president of the Screen Actors Guild. As of this writing he’s approaching 92 and living happily in California with his wife of 62 years.

In Out of the Storm, set during the war, he is perfectly cast as Donald Lewis, a clerk at west coast naval yard. Amidst the tumult of the never-ending stream of tankers, freighters, and liberty ships sliding into the Pacific, Donald spends his days in the relative calm of the payroll office, endorsing checks for the yard’s ten thousand workers. It’s Christmastime as the movie opens, and Donald has just taken possession of $125,000 in folding money, when a crew led by Stubbins (familiar hood Marc Lawrence) hurries up the stairs and into the payroll loft. Stubbins shoots the guard, beats another man unconscious, and then forces Donald to grab stacks of bills from the safe. After the gang flees Donald telephones security, but before they arrive he gapingly realizes that the crooks overlooked the $100,000 intended for the workers’ Christmas bonuses and made off with significantly less: the $25,000 in fives and tens meant for check cashing. Donald hesitates for just a moment, and then hides the money. He returns later, in the dead of night, and smuggles it home. The remainder of the movie vacillates between the predictable and the surprising as Donald tries hard to hang onto the loot before eventually coming around — though Out of the Storm pleases even when it treads this familiar ground.

Let’s momentarily imagine the challenge faced by Out of the Storm’s producers, needing to fill the lead. Here we have a fairly straightforward morality tale about a war worker who steals, albeit passively (everything about Donald is passive), and most importantly, whose crime becomes the catalyst for his coming of age. We need an actor who can sell two key characteristics: the audience must be able to understand his motivation to steal, and in time they must be able to forgive him. The movie never explicitly tells us why Donald isn’t in the service, though there are two possibilities: he could have received a 2-B deferment from service as an employee of the war industry, or his designation could have been the dreaded 4-F: “registrant is not acceptable for military service.” The casting of Jimmy Lydon, neither a tough guy nor a dreamboat, makes it clear exactly which weak-kneed designation the filmmakers wanted us to assume, and it shows us why the casting process is vital.

What kind of a guy would take this money? What kind of guy would end up in the payroll office in the first place? Donald lacks the physical strength required to man either a rivet gun or a machine gun. And he’s bitter about it. Here’s a kid with guilt. The movie’s opening narration, in which he resignedly laments his situation over stock footage of the smoking wreckage of Pearl Harbor, and then over images of countless ships under construction during the big buildup of 1942, is a self-pitying diatribe about how some young men “went to the fighting lines [and] some went to the assembly lines.” Donald feels left out of both groups, resenting not just the servicemen overseas, but also the blue-collar workers who make more money than he does:

“Seemed like everybody in the yard was making money. Everybody else was really building something, really doing something. But me? I got stuck in the payroll department with a lot of adding machines and file records and a salary of $40 a week. How far can you make that go?”

And yet Donald is still a good boy — he mails a chunk of his meager earnings home to his mother and struggles by on the rest. We get the impression that all would be well if only he could strap on a uniform and get in the fight like everybody else. All of his simmering guilt is cleverly ratcheted up by the presence of his girlfriend and coworker Ginny (Lois Collier, sort of a poor man’s Gail Russell). Ginny’s a real doll, and entirely out of Donald’s league. They’ve been together for nearly a year, after bumping into each other during lunch. Here's how it needles: it’s a mismatched relationship only made possible by the war, and Donald knows it. He constantly uses his small salary as an excuse not to get married, but we suspect that he really believes he doesn’t deserve such a great girl in the first place. Ginny, for her part, is strangely desperate to get hitched, Donald’s finances be damned. (It’s terribly easy to imagine a dead Marine on Guadalcanal with her picture in his breast pocket.)

At any rate, the film excellently establishes Donald’s angst at being left out of the fighting and his disappointment at not landing an appropriately butch spot in the war effort, and then being saddled with a devoted girlfriend whom he doesn’t feel he deserves. Such a character could easily come across as a weasel. We’d hate Donald if we didn’t think his heart was in the right place, if he didn’t so obviously love his mother, if he hadn’t fretted and called the guards after the theft, and if he wasn’t just a dumb, jealous, understandably immature kid. But we do like him, and we also feel sorry for him. We understand, just as he does, that Captain America is just a comic strip character and that there wasn’t a place on the front lines for every weak-kneed kid who wanted to get in. Perhaps the movie’s best, most transformative moment comes near then end, when Ginny looks Donald in the eye and calls him a coward, and the sting of the remark compels him to finally understand something that all of us ultimately have to come to grips with: that life ain’t fair, and that not getting all the things we want isn’t an excuse to act out.

Out of the Storm presented a complex casting problem that, in this instance, the filmmakers solved perfectly. Jimmy Lydon is nearly flawless as one of the countless fellows left to grapple with self-worth while fighting the war from home. He successfully spins the confused, frustrated angst of youth into the moral ambiguity and misguided choices that lie deep within the tangled heart of film noir.

Out of the Storm (1948)

Directed by R.G. Springsteen

Screenplay by John K. Butler

Story by Gordon Rigby

Starring Jimmy Lydon, Lois Collier, and Marc Lawrence

Cinematography by John MacBurnie

Released by Republic Pictures

Running Time: 61 minutes

WOMEN FROM HEADQUARTERS (1950)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women from Headquarters (1950)

Directed by George Blair

Written by Gene Lewis

Starring Virginia Huston, Robert Rockwell, and Barbra Fuller

Cinematography by John MacBurnie

Released by Republic Pictures

Running time 60 minutes