TWO OF A KIND (1951)

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Two of a Kind (1951)

Director: Henry Levin

Producer: William Dozier

Cinematography: Burnett Guffey

Screenplay: James Edward Grant, James Gunn and Lawrence Kimble

Starring: Edmond O’Brien and Lizabeth Scott

Released by: Columbia Pictures Corporation

Running Time: 75 minutes

OVER-EXPOSED (1956)

I haven’t written much about Cleo Moore or Hugo Haas aside from an earlier essay on The Other Woman, in spite of seeing the lion’s share of their respective pictures. I’ve always intended to do some sort of magazine length piece about the director and his peroxide muse, but the moment never seems right. However I had a chance to take a look at Moore’s 1956 film Over-Exposed on the Bad Girls of Film Noir, Volume 2 disc, released by Columbia Classics in 2010. My initial viewing was via a rough bootleg, so the high quality transfer here was a welcome surprise.

This is the rare Cleo Moore outing minus Hugo Haas, and it’s refreshing to see the actress with her name above the title and out from under the big Czech’s pervasive lack of self esteem and his bittered pleas for Hollywood recognition. On the other hand, worn-out Lewis Seiler, who directed Moore the previous year in Women’s Prison (on the same disc as Over-Exposed), is asleep at the wheel. Nobody out there is shouting that this would-be Monroe was a great actress, but surely she wasn’t hopeless — see her sexy splash scene opposite Robert Ryan in Nick Ray’s On Dangerous Ground. Throughout Over-Exposed Moore appears to have only just learned her lines, just a take or two away from getting it right, but Seiler is either too easily satisfied or simply too anxious to get the movie in the can. It makes for a frustrating viewing experience. 

The story here takes a backseat to cheesecake, with many of the scenes contrived to get Moore into a series of cantilevered gowns and swimsuits by legendary Columbia costumer Jean Louis (picture Rita/Gilda singing Put the Blame on Mame). And although the 5' 3" canary blonde was at best a poor man’s bombshell, Moore never looked better than she does in Over-Exposed, and if Marilyn or Lana saw the move there must have been a few moments when even their eyebrows perked up. Spectacular cleavage aside, Moore plays Lily Krenshka, a small town girl who arrives in the Big Apple only to get busted after she landing a job as a hostess in a clip-joint. Lily’s perp walk is flashpopped by Max West, an aging, drunken photographer who somehow manages to convince her to pose for swimsuit photos in his apartment studio. Intrigued by the possibilities of a life on the other side of the camera, Lily stays on with West, tending to his alcoholism and reviving his flagging business, all while learning the ins and outs of the photographer’s life (via a nice montage). Eventually she leaves the nest with a camera of her own and a sexier name — Lila Crane, but finds career opportunities few and far between. Spurned by the legitimate news agencies, she finally lands a position as a barely-clad picture grabber at a Manhattan nightspot. Before long Lila shrewdly develops herself into one of the top portrait and advertising photogs in the city, but will her reckless ambition and her casual willingness to photograph anyone, at any time, doing anything, bring it all crashing down?

Although Over-Exposed is ostensibly a crime film, it’s a stretch to call it a film noir. There’s no doom, dread, or angst, and with the exception of a scene near the end involving pock-marked love interest Richard Crenna, there’s little in the way of visual style. Most of the scenes are flooded with light, giving viewers a never-ending eyeful of a decked-out Moore, in spite of otherwise cheap production values. In trading Haas for Seiler we get to finally see what Moore could do in an unabashed star vehicle, but at the expense of Haas’s weird, and inherently noirish psychological peccadilloes. 

Over-Exposed exploits its star under the façade of a morally upright tale about runaway ambition, but such irony was obvious even in 1956. In the end contemporary viewers will find a film that merely reinforces those same old gendered mid-century stereotypes about “threatening” women who want to work in a man’s world. Faced with desperate circumstances after being arrested as a hostess (prostitute), Moore’s Lily/Lila admirably manages to lift herself out of a deplorable situation through a legitimate professional career. And although the script paints her as a careerist who eschews morality and a place in the kitchen for money and glamour, contemporary audiences will find little fault with her actions. After all, is it fair that Lila lives in a world where the quality of her photographs seems not to matter?

Over-Exposed (1956)

Directed by Lewis Seiler

Produced by Lewis J. Rachmil

Screenplay by James Gunn and Gil Orlovitz

Story by Richard Sale and Mary Loos

Cinematography by Henry Freulich

Starring Cleo Moore and Richard Crenna

Released by Columbia Pictures

Running time: 80 minutes

CHINATOWN AT MIDNIGHT (1949)

“You’re a very paradoxical young man.”

Shops closing early! There’s a killer thief on the loose in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, and the cops are hot on his trail. That’s a bare bones plot description if ever there was one, yet it jibes well with Chinatown at Midnight — a rabbit punch of a movie that cashes in on the success of He Walked by Night, the granddaddy of film noir cop procedurals, released to theaters just a year before. It’s a fast paced little movie with just a few cheap sets and scenes glued together by plenty of voice-of-god narration. But it also boasts some solid basic filmmaking; looking good in spite of its meager budget, with some striking photography and a few flashy sequences that belie its doghouse budget. The film is ruined by its sloppy, often nonsensical script, though to its credit it manages to dodge the expected racial stereotypes.

The man on the lam is Clifford Ward, played by Hurd Hatfield, who had a modest acting career after making a big splash as the title character in 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Hatfield seems a little too urbane to be credible as the unbalanced heist man-cum-killer in this film, but the movie does its best to justify his casting by spinning the murderer as a multi-lingual dandy whose bachelor pad landlady raves about his “excellent taste for a young man.” Hatfield’s Clifford is in cahoots with an upscale interior decorator Lisa Marcel (Jacqueline DeWit). She locates expensive pieces in expensive shops; then he shows up at closing time and knocks the places over. Maybe he loves the older woman, maybe he doesn’t — who knows the angles? She doesn’t make eyes at him and she doesn’t pay him off either. We never get the dope on their relationship. Maybe Clifford just likes to takes risks — he certainly has no qualms about killing. Just after we meet him, he visits a curio shop in Chinatown and guns down the young clerk; when the girl in the back room tries to call the cops he blasts her too. In a veer from the expected, Clifford actually picks up the receiver and completes her phone call: “come quick, there’s been a robbery and shooting!” The zinger is that his frantic exchange with the switchboard operator is in fluent Chinese.

So that’s why we get Hurd Hatfield instead of a tough monkey like Charles McGraw or Mark Stevens. Our boy is able to call in his crime with a Cantonese dialect, convincing the cops that their quarry must be Chinese. From that moment onward Chinatown at Midnight is a cat-and-mouse game between Clifford and San Francisco’s finest, led by the pugnacious Captain Brown, played by iconic film noir actor Tom Powers. (His name might not be that familiar, but Powers probably appeared in a million crime films — often as a cop — though he got his bust in the noir hall of fame for playing the ill-fated Mr. Dietrichson in the big one, Double Indemnity.) The procedural aspects of Chinatown at Midnight are handled with care, showing viewers a few of the clever ruses used by the police to ferret out a suspect — the best is when a clever matron poses as a census taker in order to search the flophouses and tenements. The film is divided roughly in half between Clifford’s occasionally witty escapes and the semi-doc cop stuff, but the thing never really gets off the ground until the final reel, when Clifford starts to knuckle under from a nagging case of malaria and the ever-tightening dragnet. He finally takes to the rooftops, automatic in hand, for an exciting showdown with the buys in blue — pity our boy Clifford: they've got Tommy guns.

This is a fairly competent and successful effort for all involved, except the hack screenwriters. The worst moment in the story has to be the most eyeball-rolling example of shoddy police work in the entire canon of B movies — one that altogether sums up the visual strengths and the narrative weaknesses of the film: there’s a sequence in the middle that places Clifford within arm’s reach of justice. Having just killed again to keep the law at bay, he is forced to hide in a darkened room after his shots draw the police. What follows is exciting stuff, well-edited, strikingly filmed, and very tense — culminating in a pitch black exchange of gunfire that brings to mind Henry Morgan’s big moment in Red Light. It’s an exhilarating scene, the sort of thing that draws us all to film noir. Yet after Clifford makes a break for it, shedding his jacket, tie, and .38 revolver in a back alley garbage bin, he attempts to hide by shuffling into a queue of four or five down-and-outers waiting in a bread line. When the dicks come huffing and puffing around the corner a breath or two later, they just give up — tossing their hands into the air without so much as a look around, completely giving up, but not before adding for our sake, “Funny, he didn’t look Chinese to me!” Too bad for them that their rabbit is five feet away, and all they have to do is brace the hobos in order to put Clifford in the little green room at Quentin. They can’t even manage a pathetic “which way did he go?”

Photographed by prolific journeyman Henry Freulich, clearly influenced by John Alton, Chinatown at Midnight is heavily steeped in the noir visual style. The cardboard sets and low rent cast are more emblematic of a poverty row effort than a second-feature from a little major like Columbia, but the studio’s B-roll exteriors of various San Francisco locales almost pull off the illusion of an on-location shoot, and further separate it from Poverty Row. The acting here is merely passable and the script is a bloody shame, but Freulich and director Seymour Friedman give the finished film has a strong visual identity, even if everything else is from hunger.

Chinatown at Midnight (1949)

Directed by Seymour Friedman

Produced by Sam Katzman

Written by Robert Libbott and Frank Burt

Cinematography by Henry Freulich

Art Direction by Paul Palmentola

Starring Hurd Hatfield, Jacqueline DeWit, and Tom Powers

Distributed by Columbia Pictures

Running time 67 minutes.

THE CASE AGAINST BROOKLYN (1958)

“Don’t you know what this is? This is a million bucks every week! They’ve got hundreds of runners, a whole city sewed up! Cops right up to the top, they can squash you like a bug…”

As America entered the Eisenhower era, Hollywood screenwriters began to challenge many of the taboos of the earlier postwar period. Beginning with the groundbreaking success of 1948’s The Naked City, the movie industry shifted production away from the back lots and sound stages, and more authentic-looking kind of crime film came into vogue. Yet as the 1940s became the 1950s, film producers began to understand that audiences were not only more sophisticated than they had been before the war, but far more jaded as well. The rote escapist fare that had been a godsend in the bleak years of the Depression and the war was less palatable than it had ever been. Atomic-age audiences instead wanted movies that reflected the cynicism and uncertainty of the world in which they lived — and while the resulting films eschewed a rose-colored artifice for something more realistic, the crowds could at least take reassurance in knowing they were all in it together.

There are numerous social, political, and cultural tremors that occurred after the end of the Second World War that nudged America closer and closer to the upheaval of the 1960s. In terms of popular culture alone, film noir is merely one of many such tremors. Let’s not forget about the rebelliousness of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and the Beats; the explosion of Elvis Presley and Rock and Roll; the Kinsey report, Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, and Playboy magazine. Regardless, in the autumn of 1945, Americans were more united than they had ever been, sharing a common desire for a peaceful and prosperous future, bound up in high employment rates, low inflation, home ownership, and previously unheard of personal affluence. It practically goes without saying that by the 1960s this dream proved to be more or less unattainable (for many), unsustainable (for others), or simply unwanted—yet the twenty years in between proved to be a critical period of uneasy and confusing transition. One has only to watch a few episodes on television’s Mad Men to see the myriad ways in which prevailing attitudes were imploding in the face of clashing value systems: old-fashioned and conservative versus progressive and liberal—all set in the pressure-boiler of heretofore unseen gender and generational differences, compounded by an explosion in technology, information, and consumerism run wild. Truly the twenty years between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of Vietnam are some of the most fascinating in our history.

So what part did film noir play? While earlier films, even crime films, typically propped up the police force and civic leaders as pillars of the community, by the time the paranoid 1950s were in full swing such institutions became open to scrutiny — and the noir style was perfectly suited to confronting them on film. (With caution though: note the careful stance taken on the title lobby card shown at the end of the post.) The list of films that deal with corrupt officials is practically endless, though Hollywood’s Capra-esque populism always made it easier to pick on politicians rather than cops. Capra’s own 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington deals, as a plot point, with political corruption, while 1949’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture, All the King’s Men (1949) examines similar problems from a more exhaustive (and realistic) point of view. It took film noir, of which there are very few films that don’t involve the police, to expose crooked cops. The Big Heat (1953) is the most well-known such film, though The Turning Point (1952), Rogue Cop (1954) and Shield for Murder (1954) to some degree all tread similar ground. And while those films are concerned with bent police officials or individual officers, few ever dealt with the systematic corruption of a community’s entire police force. That brings us to 1958’s The Case Against Brooklyn.

Loosely based on a the story “I Broke the Brooklyn Graft Scandal” first chronicled in True magazine, the movie stars one of filmdom’s most beloved fathers, Darren McGavin, in a key developmental role. McGavin had splashed as a pusher in Otto Preminger’s 1955 picture The Man with the Golden Arm, and by 1958 he was a three-way veteran of stage, film, and television. The Case Against Brooklyn would prove to be McGavin’s springboard into a two-season TV run as the title character in Mike Hammer, where he cemented his reputation as an actor who could excel in tough-guy roles on both sides of the law. In The Case Against Brooklyn, McGavin plays Pete Harris, an idealistic young cop plucked straight out of the academy by the district attorney, a man intent on bringing down the numerous bookie joints wreaking havoc in the borough. Ironically (particularly considering Hollywood’s ongoing war against television), it’s a small-screen news exposé that sets the wheels of justice in motion. When the news piece points the finger at corrupt cops, the DA figures that the only way to get untouched officers is to pull them right out of the academy (a la DePalma’s The Untouchables). McGavin’s Pete Harris is no fresh-faced pup either (the actor was 36 when this was made), in spite of his inexperience as a police officer. His non-traditional age is explained away as the result of a ten-year stint in the Marine Corps.

A garage owner got in too deep and was beaten to death by the bookies — the DA’s only lead is the dead man’s wife (Maggie Hayes). Harris is told to get close to the widow, which he’s plenty eager to do. Other recruits pound the pavement, and some even enroll in college: “a hotbed of bookie activity.” Harris makes it clear early on that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to get next to the woman, even if it means shoving his own wife (Peggy McCay) onto the back burner. This notion of infidelity for the sake of professional advancement is one of the most curious in the film, and also one that only seems possible in the wake of the 1956 weakening of the Motion Picture Production Code. It strikes at the heart of placing materialism and personal prestige ahead of traditional values, while reinforcing the film noir trope of the police officer as a thoroughly alienated character unable to maintain a healthy personal relationship.

Most cinematic cops were still married in the fifties, though their unions were increasingly on the rocks. Howard Duff’s character in The Naked City is an idealistic young cop just like Pete Harris, but a decade later Harris’s wife is just so much extra baggage. Even when she is brutally murdered (in a sequence lifted directly from The Big Heat) his grief barely registers; by the final reel it’s clear that in spite of the idealized characterization of his wife, Harris will be just as content to end up with the widow. By the early 1970s screenwriters wouldn’t even bother with marriage — cops wore their divorces as prominently as their badges. This failure at personal life has become an enduring factor in establishing the modern movie policemen, one of cinema’s most well worn clichés. The idea would further evolve in the 1980s, when the cop’s absent wife was just as likely to have been killed as a sympathy ploy (Lethal Weapon) or in order to motivate revenge (Hard to Kill). Al Pacino’s character in Heat (1995) has multiple exes, yet the film exhaustively details the collapse of his current marriage. In Die Hard (1988), which harkens back to the heroic bravado of John Wayne films, Bruce Willis is estranged from his wife, and he’s only able to win her back when his reckless determinism actually saves her life — to turn her back on him then would demonstrate more ingratitude than audiences could tolerate.

 

As illogical as it might sound, Pete Harris’s relationship with the widow actually does lead him to the heart of the Brooklyn bookie rackets. We are deep into B-movie concessions here: Harris goes undercover, and the DA brass don’t even give him a new name — it would have ruined a plot point. It turns out that Rudi (Warren Stevens), one of the racket toughs who laid the beat down on the widow’s dead husband, is also trying to hone in on Harris’s play with the woman. Contrivance and coincidence work their magic and by the end of the movie we get the expected showdown between the forces of good and evil, complete with a hospital bed finale and newfound romance.  Along the way, McGavin’s athleticism and imposing physical presence are on display as Harris relentlessly plugs away at his job, breaking anything that gets in his way. (After seeing this, his casting as Hammer is a no-brainer.) When he’s finally brought to bear by the bureaucracy of the police force, Harris turns over his badge and his gun (The Big Heat, again) and squares the job on his own terms — again establishing precedents for the cop dramas of the 1970s and 1980s.

Despite its rather late-cycle release, The Case Against Brooklyn is solidly a film noir. It makes a half-ass stab at voice-over narration, and the music is melodramatic and intrusive at times, but the cinematography is impressive. Many of the interiors are shot in the blandly-lit middle-distance takes popularized by television, but the exteriors are often fantastic: one scene in particular finds Harris in a low-light, low-angle face off with the dirty cop who has just murdered his partner. The framing, high-contrast, and blocking are as good an anything you’ll ever find in a quintessential film noir. However, it’s by other means that The Case Against Brooklyn’s truly establishes itself as a film noir. Even the title is significant in its ambiguity: it indicts not only the civic bureaucracy of the borough, but seemingly its people as well — after all, the bookie joints couldn’t fly without their clientele —suggesting that in the noir milieu, everyone has a little dirt on their hands. It would have been easy enough to call this Cops for Sale, or something along those lines, so the vagueness of the title seems purposeful. Yet it’s the characters that really drive the point home: Pete Harris is in the classic mold of the noir protagonist: alienated, obsessive, driven to the point of recklessness. The movie gives us the two classic female types: the fatale and the perfect wife. And although the script requires its fatale, Maggie Hayes, to transform from one type to the other along the way, her initial impression is entirely contrived to sexualize her character and motivate audiences to imagine her as something dangerous. It’s her presence in the picture that creates tension between Harris and his wife, causing us to question his motivations: is he relentlessly pursuing the bad guys, or is it just the girl? In the gray half-light of the noir world, the answer is both.

The Case Against Brooklyn (1958)

Directed by Paul Wendkos (The Burglar)

Screenplay by Bernard Gordon (Blacklisted, credited as Raymond T. Marcus) and Julien Zimet

Screen Story by Danial B. Ullman. Based on an account by Ed Reid

Produced by Charles H. Schneer

Cinematography by Fred Jackman, Jr. (The Night Holds Terror, Cell 2455 Death Row)

Art Direction by Ross Bellah (The Lineup, Nightfall)

Starring Darren McGavin, Warren Stevens, Maggie Hayes, and Peggy McCay

Released by Columbia Pictures

Running time: 82 minutes

8.0.3

NIGHTFALL (1957)

Why anyone would actually want a career in the movies is beyond me. It’s murder. Aspiring actors queue up hoping to be one of the lucky ones, the kind with a forty-year, wrinkle-free fairy tale of a career, financial security, and maybe even an award some magical late-February night. But it ain’t in the cards for most — and I don’t mean those lucky saps who never even get their foot in the door. Hollywood is cruelest to those who actually make it; the ones who achieve a certain level of fame — the kind where you get decent billing in a few pictures and everyone from your hometown, maybe even your whole state, thinks of you as a favorite son. But when the picture business sours on you, gets suddenly fickle, and eventually passes you by, everyone still knows who you are. Only now you can’t go back. You can’t become un-famous. Anonymity is suddenly as elusive as a part in an A-list picture, and a squarejohn’s nine to five is out of the question. What are the options? Most try to hang on, taking lesser and lesser roles until somewhere along the way some vital part of them is lost and they begin to become … cheap. The list of such actors and actresses is endless, and the tremendously gifted Aldo Ray’s name — oh, whatta name — is somewhere on it. Dig his awards page on IMDb for proof: nominated for a 1952 Golden Globe as “Most Promising Male Newcomer” for the Tracy / Hepburn vehicle Pat and Mike, his second nomination twenty-five years later from the Adult Film Association of America: a “Best Actor” nod for the 1978 film Sweet Savage — Ray won that one. (And it must be noted he earned it by keeping his clothes on.)

Ray was something else: Big. Blonde. Good looking. Affable. All-American. Naval combat vet. If he punched you he’d knock your block clean off — only he’d never punch you. He was that guy. He had that hulking innocence that made a star out of Merlin Olsen decades later. He could have played Mongo in Blazing Saddles. Quentin Tarantino liked him enough to subtly name Brad Pitt’s character after him in Inglorious Basterds. Ray fell into acting sideways and Hollywood never knew exactly what to do with him. He had an offbeat, scratchy voice that didn’t quite match his looks, and though he could never quite pull it off romantically (he comes awfully close with Rita Hayworth in Miss Sadie Thompson), Ray could certainly act. His resume is a mix of character parts and leads, war films, westerns, and plenty of TV. He made one legit film noir; the subject of this essay, a role that really asked for what Ray had to offer as a performer.

Directed by Jacques Tourneur, Nightfall is thematically reminiscent of the director’s earlier canonical film Out of the Past. Made in that period of the later mid-fifties when film noir had become too damn aware of itself and was beginning to sputter out. It’s to Tourneur and cinematographer Burnett Guffey’s credit that Nightfall doesn’t get bogged down in self-awareness in the same way that, for example, another 1957 film based on Goodis, The Burglar, does. This is a spare, no frills, kiss-my-ass kind of picture that gets straight to the point and makes every one of its 78 minutes pay off. It’s not cheap though; it doesn’t shout B — everything about it is well constructed by an experienced and confident team of professionals. Guffey in particular stands out. The film’s first 20 minutes boast numerous intricate camera setups and a marvelous dolly shot, all handled so deftly you barely notice the craft. Guffey isn’t trying too hard; he lets the narrative guide his camera and the results owe less to his desire to show off than to the need for economy. It’s first-rate, virtuoso stuff.

I’m loath to compare two strikingly similar films such as Out of the Past and Nightfall; doing so is usually boring, the sort of thing best left for term papers. But there’s a parallel between the characters of Jeff Bailey and Nightfall’s Jim Vanning that is far too extra-referential not to pick at: the way both meet the audience, and how setting is used to manipulate our first impression. This notion of the first impression (and how it plays out in the big picture) is one of the more fascinating aspects of noir character development; it never gets the discussion it deserves. In these movies entrances matter; pay attention to them. Here are two movies that play the old noir saw of the unshakeable past. Both feature a male protagonist on the lam from his former self — which gives Tourneau the chance to fiddle with the notion of personal responsibility. It’s in the great outdoors that we first encounter Out of the Past’s Jeff Bailey: trying to lure fish from a cool mountain lake, a stunning girl-next-door waiting for him on the bank. We get to know Bailey even before we first see him, his name is plastered all over the service station he owns, and the town might as well be on a postcard. Bailey smells like  one of the lucky ones in post-war America — he has the looks, the car, the place, the girl.

As for Nightfall, Jim Vanning’s first appearance is handled quite differently: we first see him on the neon splashed streets of Los Angeles, tip-toeing from corner to corner, paranoid, nervous. He lights a cigarette and glances over his shoulder. This is a man who has done something, we think. He must have a reason to be this afraid. Yet Tourneau has fooled us, Vanning’s just an innocent victim of dumb luck. While back at the lake, Bailey has it all and doesn’t really deserve any of it. That's where Tourneau sets us up and knocks us over. First impressions. Expectations. Conditioning. Our response to each hero and each predicament would be different if we knew from the get-go how much each guy had it coming. Here's a director who's at his best when he lets his story tell little white lies — and he recognizes that in masking the truth about his characters he turns the contrasting flashback into a real punch in the gut. In this stuff Tourneau stood by himself.

Nightfall again. In most good crime pictures the quality of the dialog is on par with the story. Not so here. The dialog — witty, sharp, if admittedly not-quite hard-boiled — is just better. There’s a great deal to enjoy in Nightfall, though it takes some suspension of disbelief to get there. The dramatic thrust of the film, not to mention its underpinnings as a noir, revolves around the characters being in the wrong place at the wrong time — and not just Aldo Ray’s Jim Vanning, but all of them: Anne Bancroft’s Marie and even Nightfall’s superb villains, played by Brian Keith and the terrifying Rudy Bond. The story is a mish-mash of circumstance, twist, and chronology that defies summary — so I won’t bother with one. The plot is surely contrived, never has there been a movie that relied so heavily on one of its characters being a physician. It may seem trivial, but it’s a critical plot point and the movie tanks without it — it’s just an awfully hard pill to swallow. But in the end, if you’re a film noir fan you realize that it’s not what happens that makes these movies so great, it’s how our heroes respond, and how the filmmakers choose to share it with us that makes the noir film so endlessly fascinating. In the case of Nightfall, the actors and the filmmakers come through. 


Nightfall (1957)

Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Produced by Ted Richmond
Story by David Goodis
Screenplay by Sterling Silliphant
Cinematography by Burnett Guffey
Art Direction by Ross Bellah
Starring Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft, Brian Keith, and Rudy Bond
Released by Columbia Pictures
Running time: 78 minutes.

THE MOB (1951)

$685.00
How much off for the police force?
Why should I knock off anything just because you’re a policeman?
Thought you might want to try and bribe me, I’m always readin’ about cops being bribed.
I’ve got more influential friends than you in the boy scouts.





It’s Broderick Crawford versus the waterfront and the world in 1951’s The Mob, a just-okay noirish cop picture from Columbia. The effective opening sequence is the most visually striking of the entire film, and does much to establish the cynical attitudes portrayed throughout. It’s late night on the rain-soaked streets of New York City, where we find detective John Damico (Crawford) in a pawnshop haggling (the exchange highlighted above) over the price of a piece of jewelry — a potential gift for his girl. Walking home he hears gunfire, and spots a shadowy figure with a gun hunched over a crumpled body in the middle of the deserted street. Crawford shouts his policeman’s warning but is placated when the shooter produces a badge and claims to be on the job — which he most certainly isn’t. Crawford is taken in by a shiny Lieutenant’s shield and police-issue .38 super chief. He only gets wise after the killer heads for a lunch counter to supposedly call in the report and instead vanishes through the back door. By the time a prowl car makes the scene Crawford is beset by visions of his career and his pension running into the gutter, awash with the dead man’s blood and the foulness of the street.


In 1951 New York, the blame-game is the only game in town, and the news-hungry public likes to play. A convenient schmuck if ever there was one, Crawford is rewarded with a sixty-day vacation — at least as far as the papers are concerned. Privately the police commission charges the cop with getting to the bottom of the waterfront rackets, the ultimate source of the predicament our Damico finds himself in. In order to infiltrate the mob, Crawford is given a new name, Tim Flynn, and a made-up rap sheet courtesy of the New Orleans P.D.


The opening ten minutes of The Mob are emblematic of one of the best qualities of the movie business: a film can throw subtle jabs about public attitudes directly at the masses without overtly preaching — camouflaging its message within the entertaining slickness of the medium itself. By situating Crawford in a pawn shop late at night tells us many things about his role as a police officer: he works terribly long hours (it’s night), in terrible conditions (it’s pouring), he’s underpaid (he frequents pawnshops), and even in his off hours he remains a vigilant public servant (he responds to the gunfire) — yet for all of his risks and sacrifices his grasp on his job and his pension are tenuous at best (he falls for a ruse that would have fooled any of us.) Furthermore, his masters are quick to make him the scapegoat, a fact he understands so well that he makes no protest. Finally, they place him in greater danger by wooing him undercover with a carrot of redemption — that he dutifully chases due to an ingrained desire to uphold public order and protect his own place in the world.



Any effort to suggest The Mob as a precursor to later films such as On the Waterfront or even Edge of the City is misspent. The film only pays lip service to the notion of exposing corruption, and instead the exposition is concerned primarily with uncovering the identity of some mysterious criminal mastermind behind the corruption. As for the corruption itself, there’s little evidence of it. In one scene (where we get a great early look at Charles Bronson) longshoremen are obliged to pony up four bucks before they can work for the day, but one of them smiles it off as mere “cigarette money.” As the sequence unfolds Crawford namedrops his way into a cushy job running a forklift, while the previous driver, a much more experienced man, is forced to sling crates. Along the way a few men get killed, all resulting from a desire to inform on the mob to the police, but there’s nothing about the killings that’s particularly germane to the waterfront rackets — after all, this is what the movies had been teaching audiences about gangsters since the twenties — they kill informants. The notion is as stale in 1951 as it ever was, and handled with somewhat less panache in The Mob.


Crawford is the whole show, and it’s almost impossible to imagine another actor fronting The Mob. Crawford was similar to Edward G. Robinson in that he possessed two distinctly different screen personas. Unlike Robinson however, who projected either a meek bookishness or a swaggering violence, Crawford’s two screen faces were less far apart, more subtlety differentiated because both were characterized by something simmering just beneath the surface — something quite dangerous. In his most famous roles he’s at his most outrageous: playing politician Willie Stark in 1949’s All the King’s Men and as Harry Brock in Born Yesterday. As a racketeer in New York Confidential, or just pretending to be one in The Mob, Crawford shows his range — creating characters that can make a pretense at class but still scare the pants off you. In The Mob gives him the chance to be both: the moral and upright policeman and the New Orleans thug.


Crawford’s John Damico has much in common with the filmic cops and detectives of a generation before — he navigates the squarejohn world and the underworld with the same ease. He’s a creature of the city who knows how to use the urban landscape to his advantage. Women can’t seem to help themselves around him. Yet it’s hard to imagine Sam Spade falling for the ruse that burns Damico — the forties private detective seemed more superman than man. Maybe that's because Damico’s post-war world is far more complex: corrupt, amoral, pessimistic, neurotic…political. Throughout the film Damico is hounded — even tortured — by Bennion (Walter Klavun), a sleazy cop-on-the-take from another precinct. Despite the this corrosive presence, Damico’s changing world still demands that his faith in the righteousness and authority of the system be absolute, so the idea of working undercover doesn’t faze him. The dramatic tension to be found in unglued cop films such as Serpico and Prince of the City were still a lifetime away. The Mob is forced to rely on shoot-em-up theatrics and a damsel in distress to get the job done.

The Mob (1951)


Director: Robert Parrish
Produced: Jerry Bresler
Cinematographer: Joseph Walker
Screenplay: William Bowers, based on a story by Ferguson Findley
Starring: Broderick Crawford, Richard Kiley, Ernest Borgnine, Neville Brand.
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Running time: 87 minutes

BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAWN (1950)

“A brutal policeman is a terrible thing. He has too much power, too many chances of taking his viciousness out on helpless people.”

Optimism and pessimism fight it out Between Midnight and Dawn, an entertaining and well-crafted crime melodrama from 1950. These competing worldviews are embodied in the characters of prowl-car officers Rocky Barnes (Mark Stevens) and Dan “Pappy” Purvis (Edmond O’Brien). After bonding as Marines on Guadalcanal, the pair returned to Los Angeles and continued their partnership as cops. The laid-back and gregarious Rocky came through his war in better shape than Dan, who in typical Edmond O’Brien fashion is bitter, cynical, and brooding. Dan has trouble seeing the world in anything other than black and white — people are either all good or all bad, as he says to Rocky in a telling early exchange, “Wait until you’ve had your fill of the scum. Slugging, knifing, shooting holes in decent people. You’ll toughen up, junior.”

The film opens with an especially noirish sequence where the partners respond to a report of suspicious activity at a warehouse. They discover two young women parked on the lonely street outside the run down building, doing a piss-poor job looking out for their no-good beaus. Rocky and Dan put the bracelets on the girls and head into the warehouse. They corner the suspects inside and short gunfight ensues —  Rocky grazes one of the youths with a shot from his service piece. Back at the station, the delinquents put on a tough act, but one of the girls falls apart, pleading and “blubbering” (per Dan) to be let go. Though Rocky wonders about justice for a wayward teenager, it’s plain that age and gender don’t carry any water with Dan — stone-faced as the hysterical girl is taken into custody, screaming over and over “I don’t want to go to jail!” as she’s dragged away.

The scene does much to establish the competing personalities of the two partners, as well as the noir milieu of Between Midnight and Dawn. Although the dark visual framework of the picture is thoroughly realized by noir stalwart George Diskant (The Narrow Margin, On Dangerous Ground), the narrative is also distinctive. Rocky and Dan live in an uncertain world of deteriorating values in which people are not what they appear to be. Two innocent-looking girls in a parked car are engaged in larceny; shop owners live in fear of all-powerful criminals; children in the street are as prone to violence as hardened felons. Even the most innocent character in the film, love interest Kate Mallory (Gale Storm), initially deceives the pair — though her fib is understandable: as the daughter of an old-guard Irish cop who was gunned down in the line of duty, Kate, who works as a dispatcher, is reluctant to begin a relationship with the infatuated Rocky, who has quietly fallen in love with her sultry voice, which he hears each night through the prowl car’s radio.

Speaking of Gale Storm, she’s a revelation. Every boy’s idea of a high school cheerleader does well in this role, and although she doesn’t sing, she demonstrates more range here than in most of her other pictures. All of the characters in Between Midnight and Dawn are developed to a greater degree than expected, and Storm plays the part of the dead cop’s kid with aplomb. She projects outward confidence and wit carefully blended with the street smarts of one reared in a cop’s house. The movie takes seriously her efforts to steer clear of involvement with Rocky and Dan, and includes a few nice scenes between Gale and her live-in mother (Madge Blake). There’s a fine moment when Mrs. Mallory, having lost her own husband to violence, is able to convince her daughter that beginning a relationship with Rocky is the right thing to do. It might be a bit unusual for a film noir to have such a pronounced romantic angle — as Between Midnight and Dawn does — but it actually works because the romantic tension between Rocky and Kate is so firmly situated in her neurotic, if understandable, fear of death.

And Rocky does indeed die, gunned down by foaming-at-the-mouth gangster Richie Garris (Donald Buka). Every element of the story foreshadows Rocky’s killing, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. In fact, even in 1950 it was a sturdy movie-land cliché that in a buddy-cop film one of the partners — inevitably the nicer of the two — was doomed. What makes this scenario interesting is rather how Kate and Dan respond to Rocky’s murder. 

Both suffer from a markedly cynical strain of pessimism. Kate’s is rooted in the fear of losing yet another loved one; Dan’s is more complex. He clung to his idealism throughout the war, but lost it when he came home to a world changed from what he believed he had fought for. The wonderfully depressing — and inarguably noirish — notion of this aspect of the story is that unlike the narratives of more mainstream Hollywood productions, Kate and Dan’s dour worldview is ultimately confirmed! She loses her new love just as she lost her father, while Dan loses his partner and best friend to the senseless violence of a world gone mad. After surviving the unimaginable horrors of the Pacific, Rocky is shot in cold blood by a chickenshit gangster looking for revenge.

While Kate’s response to Rocky’s death is ultimately bittersweet, Dan sinks into despair and self-pity. He begins to haunt the nightclub where Garris’ girlfriend Terry Romaine (Gale Robbins) warbles, hoping she’ll lead him to the killer. When nothing pans out Dan braces her directly. He’s so frustrated and enraged that he beats and humiliates the girl even when she denies knowledge of Garris’ whereabouts and claims to have broken off their relationship.

The characterization of the gangster villain in a 1950 noir picture is worth talking about for a moment. In the legendary Warner Bros. pictures of the depression the romanticized gangster-hero was ultimately brought down by the society he exploited — he was an aberration against a fundamentally incorruptible and morally superior social system. When the sleeping giant of that system became aroused against him, he didn’t stand a chance. One of the crucial differences between the postwar film noir and the 30s gangster film is in its portrayal of the system itself, which noir presents as  Kafka-esque in its bureaucracy — uncaring, immoral, and burdened by corruption.

By the 1950s, Hollywood’s treatment of the gangster was also tired, and certainly less romantic. Donald Buka plays Garris as a caricature — a sputtering hood who manhandles his girlfriend and tries to clumsily bribe or bulldoze his way out of every tight spot. His actions are childish and irrational. He represents everything in the world than Dan Purvis hates. Yet within the mid-century film noir construct the power of the system and social justice is diminished. That 30s gangster is reincarnated as a pure sociopath who exists in a system unable to stamp him out. After Garris is convicted of murder, his cronies easily bust him out of prison. He’s then able to exact revenge on Rocky and successfully elude the dragnet, until tripped up by his urge to creep on the girlfriend who no longer wants him. The police finally nab Garris by staking out Terry’s apartment.

It’s in this final set piece that Dan has the chance to avenge his friend and restore some sort of balance to his world, though even in this he’s nearly undone. Although he’s clearly better than Garris with his bare hands or his firearm, fate conspires to muddy the waters of his revenge — and in so doing forever alter the way he sees the world. As Garris attempts to escape the encircled building, he dangles a child from a high window in order to scare the police. Dan sneaks into the building hoping to take the gangster from behind. When he sees that Garris has abandoned the child to hide elsewhere, he tosses a gas bomb into the apartment and climbs through the window. Inside the smoke-filled apartment Garris gets the drop on Dan, but Terry steps into the line of fire and takes the bullets, saving Dan’s life and freeing him to blast away. Garris tumbles down the stairs, leaving a bloody, smeared handprint on the wall, while Dan leaves the building and discovers Kate waiting for him amidst the throng of onlookers.

Dan has a great deal to ponder as he and Kate exit the frame arm in arm: he has to live knowing that he wasn’t her first choice — that his best friend had to die for him to end up with the girl. Far more importantly, he bears the newfound responsibility to redeem himself and to become a better man, granted by a woman he had denigrated and beaten, who stepped in front of him when the bullets went flying.

Between Midnight and Dawn (1950)

Director: Gordon Douglas
Cinematographer: George Diskant
Story: Leo Katcher and Gerald Drayson Adams
Screenplay: Eugene Ling
Starring: Mark Stevens, Edmond O’Brien, and Gale Storm
Released by: Columbia Pictures
Running time: 89 minutes