THE CLAY PIGEON (1949)

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

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

Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Clay Pigeon (1949)

RKO Radio Pictures

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Produced by Herman Schlom

Written by Carl Foreman

Cinematography by Robert De Grasse

Starring Bill Williams and Barbara Hale

Running Time: 63 minutes

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

VIOLENCE (1947)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOOPHOLE (1954)

Take it easy. If you’re innocent you’ve got no worries.

Yeah? Well, I am innocent. I got plenty of worries.

Allied Artists’ Loophole is one of the numerous exercises in “it could happen to you” storytelling that surfaced in the noir films of the McCarthy era. With obvious parallels to the red baiting of the day, it served to remind 1954 audiences that not all was well in the world, and that innocence didn’t immunize any citizen from persecution. Even in its final moments, after order has presumably been restored to the world, it irresistibly subverts the “happily ever after” endings of mainstream Hollywood films. Yet Loophole’s noir ethos doesn’t begin and end merely with the theme of fate dealing its hero a rotten hand — in this case a bank teller wrongly suspected of grand theft. As a film that brokers in the attainability of the American Dream, much of its conceptual darkness comes not from the unfair circumstances thrust upon the hero, but instead from its depiction of the man responsible for the hero’s misfortune. He is neither a bank robber nor a police officer, but a sociopathic insurance investigator long since bereft of his judgment. One can argue that this man, played vividly by the iconic Charles McGraw, is the real noir protagonist in Loophole.

On the surface it’s a pleasant-enough B movie, with a good cast, fair production values, and strong story concept. Barry Sullivan is Mike Donovan, teller at the Hollywood branch of the Capital National Bank. Mike’s a regular guy if ever there was one: he fought the war, married the girl next door, and then settled down in one of those post-war bungalows in the city where the sun always shines. As Loophole opens, Mike is happily ensconced in the American Dream. One Friday, a team of federal auditors gives the bank its annual checkup. However, a thief named Herman Tate (Don Beddoe, looking as dowdy as a character named Herman ought to) is posing as one of the examiners; with the help of his sexy girlfriend Vera (Mary Beth Hughes), he manages to swipe almost fifty grand while Mike’s back is turned. When his end-of-the-day numbers refuse to add up, the terrified teller leaves for the weekend without informing his supervisor. He comes clean Monday morning, but it’s too late — he already looks guilty. If the missing cash isn’t found, the insurance company will have to make good. They dispatch ex-cop Gus Slavin (McGraw) to investigate, and he’s dead certain Mike is at the center of an inside job. The FBI and LAPD are brought in, and although they eventually come to believe his story, Slavin remains unmoved, convinced that if he can keep Mike unemployed he will eventually have to use the stolen money to pay his bills. Since he really is innocent, Mike is forced to sell his house and take a menial job as a cab driver. As the insurance company’s payoff deadline approaches, Slavin increases the pressure, until Mike realizes that in order to get out from under, he has to nail the crooks on his own.

We often forget that the characters of classic film noir survived not only the Second World War, but the Great Depression as well. Although the postwar years were characterized by growing prosperity and wealth, those enjoying it were intimately familiar with dire circumstances. If nothing else, Loophole shows us how two men with diametrically opposed outlooks cope with life in these supposedly better times. Films such as this one quietly whispered to audiences that the American Dream isn’t guaranteed — that our happiness can be taken away in the blink of an eye. Mike Donovan isn’t the Swede or Jeff Bailey— he doesn’t have it coming. Yet unlike those characters he staves off morbidity and cynicism, maintaining his sense of optimism throughout the film. Mike is part of the system: married to a faithful wife, working steady, and making payments; he’s not on the run from some inescapable past. And when the going gets tough Mike and his wife Ruth (Oscar winner Dorothy Malone) stick together — and eventually triumph. Years later they will most likely remember their ordeal as a bump in the road, something to chuckle about over roast beef with Ed Sullivan. Looking at Loophole from this perspective, it hardly rates as a film noir. It even seems opposed to some of the notions that we consider definitive. Yet it is a noir, achieving that status through the more subtle characterization of Gus Slavin, who, unlike Mike, has not been able to successfully conform to the fifties status quo.

All we know about Slavin’s past is that he “resigned” from the LAPD, but we never learn why (though early on when he coldly remarks that “What [Mike] needs is a taste of rubber hose,” we get an idea). Although Slavin resembles the noir protagonist (neurotic, obsessive, anti-social, alienated) more closely than Mike does, he isn’t the hero of the film. He pursues his suspect as implacably as any single-minded protagonist from T-Men or Appointment with Danger, but unlike them he fails to “get his man” in the end. Why not? The answer lies in Slavin’s great flaw: his inability to differentiate between the guilty and the innocent, brought about by his failure to conform to societal mores. We know that Mike is innocent — after all we witnessed Herman’s crime — and yet, while the FBI and LAPD officers working the case can plainly see his innocence, Slavin can’t. It’s this pathological presumption of guilt that undoubtedly cost him his police job, and Slavin is incapable of learning from his past mistakes. He is a stubborn man who has fallen from the razor’s edge, and has lost that part of his self that allowed him to function in a rational world. The film’s most fascinating moment is it’s final one, when an exonerated Mike, restored to his job at the bank, looks up from his orderly column of figures to see Slavin inexplicably lurking outside his window — as the narrator confides that once again “Mike Donovan’s sitting on top of the world …… or is he?” It’s in this moment, when we recognize that there will always be Gus Slavins in the world, that we begin to wonder if it’s possible to ever truly be safe.

Loophole (1954)

Directed by Bud Schuster

Produced by Warren Douglas 

Story by Dwight V. Babcock and George Bricker

Screenplay by Warren Douglas

Cinematography by William A. Sickner

Starring Barry Sullivan, Dorothy Malone, and Charles McGraw

Released by Allied Artists Pictures

Running time: 80 minutes

One last note: The image on the film’s poster is a sham. At no point in the film does Barry Sullivan ever hold a satchel full of money. 

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

THE MEDIUM (1951)

“If there is nothing to be afraid of, then why am I afraid of this nothingness?”

Here’s a truly astonishing film. The experience was all the more powerful because at the outset I knew nothing whatsoever about it — not even the premise. I was immediately drawn in by the striking imagery of the opening — image my surprise a few minutes in when everyone started singing.

A film noir opera? You got it.

Considering this site is dedicated to crime films, I probably have some explaining to do. The Medium, released in 1951, is an independently produced filmic opera with a decidedly noir-ish slant. Written, directed, and composed by Gian Carlo Menotti, it stars American actress-singer Marie Powers as Baba, a bunco artist who runs a low-rent fortune telling parlor as ‘Madame Flora.’ She’s assisted by her daughter Monica and adopted son Toby, a mute gypsy boy Baba condescends to as her “poor little half-wit.” The trio scratch out a meager living in one of the worst ways imaginable: by preying on parents who have lost a child. Their routine is incredibly polished, and despite the film’s expressionism and sung dialog, the early scenes are surprisingly documentary, sharing with audiences the behind-the-curtain methods employed to take advantage of the gullible.

Things go wrong when Madam Flora has an unexpectedly visceral experience during one of her séances: at the penultimate moment, she feels a man’s hands clutching at her throat. Following the departure of her guests, she blames Toby for what she believes a cruel joke. The youth gesticulates his innocence, but the unnerved Baba refuses to be placated. The narrative unfolds from this point along two tangents: We watch Baba come unglued — at first merely uncertain, then paranoid, and ultimately, insane, while the silent Toby struggles to maintain his innocence and survive in the household. Monica looks on helplessly, pitying her mother and secretly loving the boy.

The plot may be simple, but the movie is populated with one resplendent scene after another: In one expressionistic episode Baba crouches over Toby. Incensed that he won’t rouse from feigned sleep in order to look at her, she lights a candle and then drips the hot wax all over his chest and face. When his eyes burst open, she pours the wax on them, until they are sealed shut and a terrified Monica drags her from the room. Another finds Toby and Monica searching the town square for Baba. They stumble arm in arm through a crowded festival in the town square, at first forgetting about the missing woman — merely content to be young and away from their squalid flat. All is well until the two become separated. The smiles of the crowd become leers, and the gypsy Toby becomes persona non grata to the townspeople — without Monica, he cannot survive. This notion is maintained throughout the film, and is critical to The Medium’s tragic, if also predictable (it is opera, after all) denouement.

This is, at its heart, a typical film noir story: A low-life con artist scams one person too many, and fate finally intervenes to set things straight. Which brings me to a point of clarification: I’m not out to convince anyone that this is a film noir — what I’m doing instead is demonstrating the prevalence and versatility of the thematic elements and the visual language of noir, both of which The Medium employs authoritatively. This was filmed during the years in which the noir style was most often on the screen, and it’s quite apparent that Menotti wanted to couch his film in a style that was popular with and familiar to audiences — and perfectly suited to his subject matter. The extreme angles and shadows of film noir are everywhere, as are the obfuscated framing and handheld camera work we’ve come to identify with the style. In spite of an obviously meager budget, the art direction and set decoration are magnificent, taking full advantage of the dilapidated condition of post-war Rome.

This is a little movie at only 80 minutes or so; music people call it a one-act opera. Fewer than ten characters have lines, only five have more than one. The cast is excellent. Baba is played by contralto Marie Powers; this was her only feature film role. She sang the part on Broadway, and then a few years later during a live television performance. (Powers grew up a few towns over from me in Mt. Carmel, Pennsylvania, a hard-knock place — think the first act of The Deer Hunter — where people scrape anthracite coal from the ground, live for high school football championships, and cheap beer at the fire company. The place seems to have forgotten her.) She enjoyed an on-and-off theatrical career, with her brightest moment coming when she was cast third behind Olivier and Quinn in the original production of Becket. She died in New York City in 1973. Anna Maria Alberghetti appears as Monica, while the lithe Leopoldo Savona (who looks a lot like Prince) is Toby. Savona has an uncredited bit in La Dolce Vita, but made his biggest impact directing spaghetti westerns in the sixties. Alberghetti, a dead ringer for Pier Angeli, made the most of her debut here, going on to co star in numerous A-level Hollywood features and then shining on Broadway for the better part of two decades. She won a Tony award as Best Actress in 1962 for Carousel. The rest of the cast of The Medium complete the visual look of the film: the characters are unglamorous, vividly real, and occasionally frightening.

Considering that all the dialog is sung, the actors rely on rather Dreyer-esque pantomime in the intervening passages. Yet this never feels overly theatrical or the performers inauthentic. Of course the look and feel of film noir fails to resonate in every scene, and at times The Medium becomes reminiscent of a silent picture. The frame is vignetted — darkened in the corners — while continuous orchestration completes the feeling. It’s an odd, imperfect, intoxicating thing, this movie; yet despite a foreign setting it successfully communicates familiar elements of the best American film noir: it allows us to step down into and wallow in a world that isn’t all sunshine and roses. And while some have tried to paint this as a sort of specialized neo-realism rather than a film noir, it clearly owes more to the dark American crime film than it does The Bicycle Thief. The lighting and camerawork are too exaggerated, too unnatural for anyone to ever confuse this with neo-realism, and the doom that awaits Baba is entirely of her own design. In the end, The Medium reminds that there is always someone who has a tougher row to hoe, and that fate, like justice, is blind.

The Medium (1951)

Written, Directed, and composed by Gian Carlo Menotti
Cinematography by Enzo Serafin
Starring Marie Powers, Anna Maria Alberghetti, and Leopoldo Savona
Released by Lopert Pictures Corp.
Running time: 84 minutes.

JENNIFER (1953)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Jennifer (1953)

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