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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Underworld Story (1950)

Written and Directed by Cy Endfield

Based on a story by Georgianna Craig

Cinematography by Stanley Cortez

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

Released Through United Artists

Running time: 91 minutes

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

THE OTHER WOMAN (1954)

One of the joys of cultivating an interest in film history lies in the discovery of a marvelous yet forgotten film or filmmaker, such as Hugo Haas and his 1954 film noir The Other Woman. The Jewish-born Haas was an established comedic actor in his native Czechoslovakia who also successfully wrote, produced, and directed his own films. In 1938 he fled the Nazis for France, then finally settled in America and spent the war years doing stateside radio broadcasts in his native language. (Haas’ brother Pavel, a well-known composer, would die in Auschwitz.) Haas worked to improve his English and resumed acting in the mid-forties, and although he worked regularly in Hollywood, and even gave acting lessons, he couldn’t achieve the fame he had enjoyed in Europe. He was an ardent admirer of Chaplin, and envisioned himself succeeding in the same writer-director-star mold as the famous comedian. Wanting desperately to regain his status as a filmmaker, he used his life savings to launch his own company, Hugo Haas Productions, through which he brought to the screen a fascinating string of ultra low budget crime pictures. From 1951 – 62 he wrote, produced, directed and starred in a dozen features, many based on Czech source material, which he considered cinematic calling cards. The “written, produced, and directed by” title board of most are emblazoned with his signature. Yet in the case of The Other Woman, ostensibly a crime thriller but really a movie about the movie business, Haas’ deep-rooted frustration with his status (or lack thereof) in Hollywood bubbles to the surface in moments where he castigates the industry establishment and its collective failure to embrace his talents.

Haas’ American films are remembered today primarily for his R. Crumb-like obsession with casting buxom blonde bombshells. He directed and starred alongside Cleo Moore in seven pictures, including The Other Woman. Moore was a Louisiana girl of epic proportions who worked as a cover model for men’s magazines and, in the wake of Marilyn Monroe’s success, made her mark as a B-Movie vixen. She and Haas are inexorably linked in collective memory, and while Moore wasn’t a terrible actress she also wasn’t a strong lead, and it’s worth considering how differently Haas’ films might be received today if he hadn’t so slavishly cast her in them. In Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s brief analysis of The Other Woman they actually claim, quite erroneously, the pair were married. Yet surely it’s unfair to dismiss Haas as a from-hunger purveyor of drive-in cheesecake. The Other Woman demands otherwise. Despite its obviously low budget production values and cast, it’s a polished, highly personal film with a nuanced, clever script that doesn’t compromise its own dark underpinnings — even if the story of blackmail and murder is hackneyed. What elevates The Other Woman over similar potboilers is how Haas uses the story and visual tropes of film noir to comment about his personal life in Hollywood.

The story is routine: Sherry Steward (Moore) is working on a film set when she gets a shot at a fill-in part. Although the role only calls for three lines, she blows it. Humiliated and seething, she blames her failure on director Walter Darman (Haas), and decides to gets revenge. Sherry eventually drugs Walter and convinces him they enjoyed a night of raucous sex, which resulted in a pregnancy. He never believes her, but is terrified that a scandal will ruin him. Sherry demands $50,000 to stay mum, but doesn’t realize Walter hasn’t got the money — his career is in a shambles. His pictures are deemed too hopelessly “artistic” to make a profit and his studio chief father-in-law wants to cut him loose. Walter reckons it makes more sense to simply murder Sherry, and does. The police see right through his alibi, and Walter soon confesses.

While there’s nothing outwardly special about the premise, it allows Haas essentially to play himself on screen — a struggling émigré film director trying to create art in a shallow town where the bottom line is all that matters. The cleverest aspect of the setup is Walter’s marriage to the boss’ daughter. The relationship allows Haas to not-so-subtly allude to the nepotism inherent in Hollywood (don’t forget David O. Selznick’s marriage to Irene Mayer), while at the same time creating a filmic relationship that allows for on-screen arguments about the nature of the movie business. The entire arc of the film, in which Haas’ character moves from one sort of prison to another, is also telling. Along the way he falls prey to Sherry, who symbolizes everything bad about Hollywood. In spite of Walter’s efforts to appease her, he never fully understands why she is trying to destroy him — and because of this he eventually finds himself in a prison that he desperately wants us to believe is not of his own making.

Hugo Haas intended The Other Woman to serve as a parable of his own life. The first scene sets the stage as Sherry and a coworker watch Darman coaching an actor on how to properly play a crucial prison scene. Sherry remarks about the harried director, “He’s quite a ham.” The savvy coworker expresses surprise that she isn’t hip to Darman’s background: “Are you kidding? He was a big star in Europe. Here he played bits — just nothing — guess you have to know the right people.”

Yet Darman does know the right people. He’s the producer and director of the film only because of his marriage to the daughter of studio production chief, Charles Lester (Jack Macy). He remains in perpetual disagreement with his father-in-law about what constitutes good filmmaking however — the older man is emblematic of the cookie cutter efficiency of the studio system, while Darman is portrayed as the intellectualized ‘continental,’ more interested in art than profits. The pair tangles over the status of Darman’s current directorial project: “Look Walter, I ran the whole picture twice … I even talked it over with the projectionist — everybody’s opinion is valuable. I admit, there are some artistic shots, but in general it’s a dull picture. I’m sorry, but there’s no beating about the bush when big money is involved. Every time we have these arguments Walter, you put on the expression of a martyr; you’ve been in America long enough to catch onto the public’s tastes.” Offended, Walter lashes out at Lester, at the same time suggesting how Haas really feels about the movie industry’s pandering status quo: “The public’s taste is much higher than you might expect … but it seems to be easier to make pictures for kids and imbeciles — making little delinquents of a whole generation, and the poor adults have to sit through it and suffer. Always the same story, the same characters, the same happy endings, it’s just ridiculous.”

Later, after Walter’s film fails dismally with a sneak preview audience, the two men’s relationship implodes and Lester berates Darman: “In all my thirty years of picture-making I never saw anything like it … I never felt so terrible in my life — I should’ve taken the scissors myself, instead of arguing with a stubborn, art-stricken genius — and cut all the dragging meditations and psychological nonsense … and deep ideas.” When Walter accuses the older man of sabotaging the preview, Lester storms out, telling his son-in-law, “I’m through with you.”

In The Other Woman’s final moments, as Darman finds himself behind a real set of bars, he laments his situation, putting a new spin on Lester’s formula for profitable moviemaking: “How did it happen? How did it happen? Movies. Take a handful of sex, mix it with violence, give it some comedy relief … and a happy ending.” Then, as the end music begins to swell, he lifts his eyes, stares directly into the camera and says, “I’m sorry, no happy ending for this one.” It’s a wonderful moment in the film, and a slickly layered piece of cinema that bookends the opening, when Darman naïvely advised the young actor how to play the very scene he is now relegated to. One is left with the overwhelming conviction that the pretense between fiction and reality has been dropped, and we are no longer certain whether the spoken lines and the prison setting are more relevant to the character, the actor playing him, or the director of the film — all of whom represent different parts of Hugo Haas.

It’s clear that Haas indeed envisions himself as a tragically exiled and underappreciated artist — which he was. It also seems that he suffered, as most artists do, from self-loathing and guilt — it’s essential to remember that he was also a survivor horribly affected by the War. In spite of his personal demons, or maybe because of them, what he accomplished in The Other Woman is meaningful: he gives us an enthralling low-budget film that is part crime thriller, part Hollywood exposé, and part anguished parable of his perplexing Tinseltown odyssey.

The Other Woman is Hollywood.



The Other Woman (1954)
Director: Hugo Haas
Cinematographer: Eddie Fitzgerald
Screenplay: Hugo Haas
Starring: Hugo Haas, Cleo Moore
Released by: Twentieth Century Fox
Running time: 81 minutes

STRANGE BARGAIN (1949)

In the opening moments of RKO’s 1949 second feature Strange Bargain, everyman husband and father Sam Wilson ducks a well-aimed daily newspaper as he reaches to grab the milk from his suburban front porch. It’s a slick bit of foreshadowing: take but a step outside your front door, and you never know what might happen to you. (Yes, I know Bilbo Baggins said just about the same thing.) Hobbits aside, the indifference of fate is a common film noir theme, even though this is a picture that doesn’t merit much consideration in that regard. The setup is there but the execution isn’t, and neither is the payoff. Instead one gets the impression of a teleplay or a TV movie of the week, almost as if the producers of the Donna Reed program decided to see how it would go over if they did a murder mystery special. There’s some irony in this — considering the three leads (Scott, Lynn, Morgan) would recreate their roles some forty years later on an episode of Murder, She Wrote.


Back to the setup. Wilson is a schmuck of the first order. Get a read on his mug in the poster: confused. He’s the guy who never manages to get ahead, because unlike everyone else it never occurs to him to even try. He just falls out of the sack each morning, vacant smile on his face, and pours himself into one of his three Woolworth suits. He eats the same breakfast every day, pats his two kids on the head, and heads off to his job as the “assistant bookkeeper” at a small town financial firm. Make a picture of him in your head — I bet he nods a lot. He's happy enough at his job, but doesn't realize it’s the pits. (Just maybe though, he does know and is punishing himself for not fighting in the war.) The two owners are at each others throats, the secretaries treat him like a coat rack, and since Sam tallies the numbers he knows the joint is down $50,000 a year for the past four and a half years — yet in spite of all this he doesn’t have the good sense to go look for a position elsewhere. Instead, what’s he do? On the urging of his wife he asks for a raise. And what happens? You got it: pink slip.


And then things get weird.


In the real world Sam might throw a tantrum, make like Johnny Paycheck, and then head home to mope and collect a few unemployment checks before finding another gig — maybe even a better one. That’s not what happens though. Instead Mr. Jarvis, amped from the firing, decides to make Sam a proposition. After all Jarvis is the one who’s really losing his shirt. He tells Sam he needs a favor: He’s decided to cash in all his chips and score a big life insurance check for his wife and his kid by smoking the barrel of his .38 revolver, but the insurance company won’t pay off on a suicide. He needs somebody to come over and make it look like a murder, and he’s willing to pay Sam $10,000 if he’ll do the dirty work. You have to give this Jarvis some credit: he may have run his own company into the ground, but he recognizes a patsy just as quick as the next guy. Of course Sam comes across with the “you have so much to live for” shtick, but his eyes go a little buggy at the mention of the ten grand.


Later that night Sam gets a call from Jarvis, hand on the trigger. Sam rushes over, ostensibly to save him, but instead finds him dead on the floor. He discovers the promised bankroll along with the strangest thank-you note any guy ever got, and decides that since Jarvis is already dead, there’s no harm in taking the wad and following through on the titular deal. Sam takes the revolver and fires a shot through one of the windows — shielding his face from the gun with the crook of his elbow. Read: he’s scared of the gun — no way was he in the war. He beats it home, hides the money, and feigns shock the following day when Jarvis’s death hits the papers: Murder!


The cop on the case is Harry Morgan, believe it or not playing a Lieutenant Webb, who was a big hero in the war and now walks with a cane. He has a reputation for always getting his man. Webb’s arrival makes Sam into even more of a putz: it turns out his son worships the celebrity cop — more proof dad sat out the fighting. (They really pour it on in Strange Bargain — Jeffrey Lynn either really needed to work or he’s as much a dunderhead as his character. His on-screen wife, Martha Scott, even gets higher billing.) The second half of the film deteriorates into a run of the mill whodunit, with a few possible suspects, and a not-so-surprising twist ending. At only 68 minutes it’s a fun ride, and admittedly provides the chance to see Morgan in the kind of part he didn’t get to play very often.


By far the most interesting aspect of Strange Bargain is the development of the main character. The film is greatly concerned with where Sam Wilson stands in his own community and domestic arrangement, his lack of power in both arenas, and how he copes when his livelihood and freedom are threatened. Yet while the majority of mid century Hollywood pictures feature characters relying on family, community, or perseverance to overcome adversity, Strange Bargain doesn’t. It can boast a happy ending, but not one that comes about through the actions of Sam, who is as passive getting into his mess as he is getting out of it. He’s a ping pong ball dropped into a pinball machine. The character’s very name, Sam Wilson (Uncle Sam), suggests that he is the definitive American man — so why make such milquetoast out of him?


It’s would be easy to write off Strange Bargain as a “it could happen to you” type of cautionary tale, if it didn’t take such drastic steps to drag Wilson through the dirt. In a sense he is the wrong man type, having done nothing to warrant his situation, which makes the development of his character all the more baffling — why not make him a winner? In the end we’ll be happier with triumph than we will with mere relief. Nobody in the theater is at risk of imagining themselves in similar circumstances, because nobody really believes they’re as pathetic as Sam. Even though he eventually gets off the hook, the movie wants us to ponder how he got on it, and it tries desperately to give us a reason to blame him. We are prodded to wonder if it because he was so pathetic, quintessentially American, or so banal?


The real question is whether or not the film wants us to believe those conditions are synonymous.


Strange Bargain (1949)

Directed by Will Price
Produced by Sid Rogell
Cinematography by Harry Wild
Written by Lillie Hayward and J.H. Wallis
Art Direction by Carroll Clark and Albert D’Agostino
Starring Jeffrey Lynn, Marthat Scott, and Harry Morgan
Released by RKO
Running time: 68 minutes.

HOLLYWOOD STORY (1951)

Like many of you I’m often surprised by the inclusive definition some have of film noir. I once cared about whether or not a particular movie “qualified” as a noir — as if there were a checklist of traits used to keep score. It seems that many enthusiasts still think this way. I stopped doing so because it gets in the way of a more meaningful and rewarding look at the films, robbing them of much of their value and individual identity. A film can’t “add up” to noir status — just like a list of ingredients haphazardly thrown in a bowl don’t “add up” to a well-prepared meal. Something has to bind the ingredients together — something thematic, purposeful, and altogether more difficult to put a finger on. The best way to identify a noir for sure is to watch enough, read enough, and learn enough to recognize the ties that bind when you see them. Like so many other things in life, the right answers come with education and experience. Thinking about film noir this way still allows for debate about what exactly it is and what films are representative, inching all of us closer to a shared truth,while keeping the films alive and breathing.

That being said, there is a central set of about 200, maybe 250 films that most agree on, and the great thing about film noir is that it’s possible to pull any two at random from such a list and find that they have little in common. Nonetheless, we seem to exist in a world where any movie with a bad girl or a private eye is called a film noir, which has led to a multitude of movies being codified as such that just … aren’t. A few lists available in cyberspace attach the noir label to as many as 1,000 movies. Hollywood Story appears on most of these lists — but it isn’t an especially strong film noir.

Cashing in on the renewed interest in the silent film era generated by Sunset Blvd., Hollywood Story, released by Universal in 1951 and helmed by William Castle, stars Richard Conte as a filmmaker lured west after a successful career in New York City. Conte’s Larry O’Brien is such a hot commodity that his deal gives him the juice to greenlight any picture on any subject he wants. Larry’s introduction to the sights and sounds of L.A. comes from agent / war buddy Mitch Davis (Jim Backus), who takes him to scout a decrepit silent film studio. Larry’s engine starts purring when he learns of a sordid killing, still unsolved, that took place on the lot way back in 1929. He decides the story of a murdered silent film director would be big box office and wants it to be his first picture. Over the next few weeks he researches the details around the crime and begins to develop the project. But as he learns more and more about the killing, various people in his life try to dissuade him from making the film — it seems everyone he knows in Hollywood is somehow connected. Eventually Larry’s prying reveals the killer’s identity and the case is finally put to rest.


Hollywood Story is pure whodunit hokum, with a story better suited for any one of the endless Perry Mason-style television dramas of the period. There’s little action, and the dialog simply pushes the complicated plot towards an obvious and inexorable conclusion. Missing is tension, character development, and pace. Nothing builds. What we have is a routine mystery that solves itself, and by the time the killer is revealed most viewers will have stopped caring.

There are a few redemptive qualities worth mentioning. First, it’s a movie about movies and consequently promises a peek into the secret inner workings of the industry. Second is man-around-town location shooting which provides plenty of shots mid-century L.A. and various Hollywood landmarks. The only problem is that most of these glimpses are second-unit shots that accompany the opening titles. And finally there’s Richard Conte, absolutely one of the greatest film actors of the fifties not accorded the respect he deserves by contemporary audiences — so consistently enjoyable he could do the actor’s equivalent of “singing the phone book.”

Yet Richard Conte is miscast in Hollywood Story. Besides being wrong for the part, he’s just too good for it — and consequently sticks out like a sore thumb. That’s not to suggest that the other cast members were second rate, but Conte is the only above the title performer in the cast. Some of the actors, Jim Backus and Fred Clark in particular, are simply using Hollywood Story as an excuse to chew scenery. The female lead is Julia Adams, and although the camera winces at her — especially in tight — she does well alongside Conte, and her performance improves a little with time. Adams has had a long film and television career, and at the time of this writing is still banging away at it, having appeared recently in episodes of Lost and CSI. The rest of the cast is unremarkable, though it does include a few moments with stars of the silent period and one with the relatively contemporaneous Joel McCrea. After all Sunset Blvd. features the famous “waxworks” scene with Buster Keaton and H.B. Warner, so Hollywood Story just had to respond with Francis Bushman and William Farnum.

As for film noir, I didn’t find much. There are one or two dark visuals, including a dramatically lit confrontation in a flop house and a well-conceived (given the rest of the film) cat-and-mouse at the close, but that’s it — and a few nods to a popular style does not a film noir make. Conte’s character doesn’t internalize any of the film’s drama, and neither do any of the others. There’s no cynicism, no obsession, no neurosis. As a matter of fact, Conte is so controlled, self-assured, and infallible that he epitomizes everything the noir protagonist is not. Frankly, he’s less a Hollywood player in this film than he is a pre-war private detective. He does all of his investigative work under the auspices of research for his movie — but he never actually loads a camera, and the movie doesn’t otherwise feature any scenes showing the nitty-gritty of movie making. Nothing is done to establish Larry’s Hollywood credibility, but he is made out to be one hell of a private eye. As for the girl — no dice. Adams’ Sally Rousseau enters the film bitterly, but she warms into the proper fifties sweetheart so fast your head’ll spin. The rest of the cast members are cardboard cutouts.

The film frustratingly introduces a few cynical notions that might have inched it closer to film noir, but it fails to capitalize on them. Coming back to the exteriors that frame the opening titles, it’s interesting to note that many of the shots depict television studios like CBS and NBC — odd because the film was made during the early days of Hollywood’s war with television, and espouses those values. In an early scene where a few characters are reminiscing about the early days of the movie business an ancient studio guard says,” You don’t see pictures like that anymore.” to which Fred Clark responds “Sure you do Pop, every night on television.” Yet the movie decides to drop it and never returns to the subject. Given the prominent placement of TV production facilities in the first few images of the film I expected TV or those working in it to play some part in the drama, yet it isn’t so. It’s bewildering, unless we consider that the opening footage may have been poorly-chosen stock. Another notion in play is that of the incompetent police force. Familiar-faced Richard Egan plays the cop, and despite the fact that Richard Conte is an East Coast movie maker he’s able to unravel a generation-old unsolved murder despite no personal connections and only a neophyte’s sense of L.A. culture. As Conte digs deeper into the case the police glom on to his efforts, but he stays a step ahead of them, eventually leading Egan’s Lt. Lennox around by the nose. Yet again the film fails to follow through: there’s no hardboiled rivalry between Conte and Egan, rather an almost a healthy respect; and by the end of the film Conte has to count on Egan to save his life.

Hollywood Story is a mediocre mystery made watchable because of Richard Conte. It doesn’t rate as a film noir, and in spite of its self-referential themes, nostalgia for the good ole days and lofty title — it would have made better fodder for hated television.



Hollywood Story (1951)
Directed by William Castle
Cinematography by Carl Guthrie
Story and Screenplay by Frederick Kohner and Fred Brady
Produced by Leonard Goldstein
Starring: Richard Conte, Julia Adams, Jim Backus, Fred Clark, and Richard Egan
Released by Universal International
Running time: 76 minutes

THE PRETENDER (1947)

We make allowances in our enjoyment of films that we withhold when considering other art forms — movies seem to operate by a different set of standards: so many disparate elements come together from so many different minds and sets of hands, not to mention competing agendas, that audiences can be incredibly forgiving if a film isn’t up to par — provided some aspect of it captivates them. It’s one of the reasons that movies are timeless — viewers can find something worthwhile in a film they would otherwise consider a failure. The Pretender, a second feature from Republic Pictures, is a good example of such a film. It offers the sort of half-baked film story that gets dreamt up in some writer’s bed during those hazy moments somewhere between awake and asleep. Its overly contrived and forces itself upon us, but it nevertheless piques our curiosity in some way that, despite the flaws, we still want to see how its particular gimmick plays out on-screen.


The Pretender stars Albert Dekker, a man whose name is familiar to film buffs but more or less forgotten by the general public. Dekker had a sturdy career in the movie business, finding his way west after making his bones on Broadway. Today he’s remembered mostly for the title role in the 1940 science fiction classic Dr. Cyclops, though he did make a few crime pictures, including the essential 1946 film noir The Killers. He can also be found chewing scenery in the 1945 noir-on-ice, Suspense, and playing it mysterious in the fascinating 1941 proto-noir Among the Living. In spite of Dekker’s work in front of the camera he remains one of the unlucky souls for whom the Kenneth Anger-hyped speculation surrounding his grisly, sexualized death will forever overshadow anything he accomplished in life. It seems that whenever his name comes up writers feel obligated to rehash the details of his demise. Dekker’s corpse was discovered in the bathroom of his Hollywood apartment in 1968, hands shackled behind his back and body hanging limply from the shower curtain. For three decades conjecture involving robbery-murder, suicide, autoeroticism gone wrong, and things even more bizarre have made the rounds. The gossip is unfortunate, because it obscures the fact that Dekker was a pretty good actor — he had an intelligent and refined screen persona that was enhanced by sheer physical size. He was able to use that persona to affect either feelings of pathos or enmity from his audience. The guy had real range and he should have been a bigger star. His performance is the saving grace of The Pretender.


The movie finds Dekker in the role of Kenneth Holden, a Wall Street loser who likes to play the market but can’t pick a winner. He’s in the hole big-time, so he starts drafting five-figure “loan” checks from the accounts of one Claire Worthington (Catharine Craig), a pretty young woman — years his junior — whose sizable fortune he holds in trust. Dekker writes check after check in hopes that his luck will turn, but when it doesn’t he gets the idea to marry the girl and co-opt her funds the easy way. The problem is that Claire is already engaged to Dr. Leonard Koster (Chares Drake) — a good-looking psychiatrist she’s fallen head-over-heels for.


Holden refuses to let a little thing like love get in his way, so he arranges with local racketeer Victor Korrin (pudgy Alan Carney, scene-stealer par excellence) to have the boyfriend knocked off — which is exactly when The Pretender begins to sink under the weight of its own contrivances. It starts when Holden can’t pass along the name of Claire’s fiancé — she has conveniently kept his identity a secret. Korrin’s only option is to scan the metro society columns for her engagement announcement, and then kill the man she’s pictured with. And of course he doesn’t do the dirty work himself— he subcontracts the messy stuff, and refuses to reveal the hired killer’s identity to Holden. It’s in the scene where the killing is arranged that the filmmakers frustratingly fail to cash in on one of those moments of wicked irony that so often makes film noir a treat. Korrin wants twenty grand for the job, which obviously Holden can’t get his hands on unless he raids Claire’s accounts yet again — but the filmmakers fail to cash in on the irony of one man purchasing his rival’s death with the money of the woman they both desire. The addition of such a scene would have done much to elevate The Pretender as a film noir, yet Wilder let the moment pass. Nevertheless the scene is still the best in the film by a mile — the camera gets in tight on both actors, each cloaked in shadow. Carney, performing his ass off, does a bit with his cigar that makes the scene unforgettable.


No sooner than the Holden and Korrin seal their deal the film jumps across town to an equally critical scene, when Claire, ready to paint the town, meets Dr. Lenny at his hospital. Just as the young lovers head for the elevator he gets called to the operating room for a psychiatric consult that quickly turns into surgery, a ruined evening, and hurt feelings. In a startlingly forced 180, even for a B-movie, Claire decides she isn’t willing to share her man with the medical profession and stuffs her diamond into an envelope along with a hastily scribbled note that reads simply, “It won’t work.” She fumbles the envelope into a nurse’s hands, then slinks to a phone booth and dimes Holden: “Let’s get married…tonight!” In spite of the silliness of her character, I found Craig to be an actress with pluses. She looks like a cross between Norma Shearer and Kay Francis — classy without being aloof, sophisticated yet attainable. The camera seemed to like her, so it’s surprising she didn’t have a longer career in the movies — it lasted just ten years from start to finish, then a forty-year marriage to the Music Man himself, Robert Preston.


The story briskly shoves its way along, damn the credibility, until it gets what it wants: Claire ducks out of her engagement to the shrink and instead elopes with Holden. But before he can get in touch with Korrin to cancel the contract on her husband, the fat man’s past catches up to him and he gets bumped off, leaving a bewildered Holden with a big target on his back and looking over his shoulder for a man with a gun. The latter sequences of the film focus on Holden’s unraveling psyche as he scrambles to identify and try to stop the would-be killer. His fear of this unknown reaper causes him to come completely unglued — leaving him sequestered in his room, fittingly unable to exalt in the wealth he conspired to obtain. Holden’s paranoia overtakes him at a lightning pace, and it’s not particularly credible from a story standpoint, but Dekker is good enough to keep you intrigued. He changes his appearance, mistrusts and dismisses his servants, refuses to eat anything but canned goods, and fails utterly as a husband — next thing we know Dr. Leonard is back on the scene. The inevitable conclusion offers a fitting consequence of the noirish fatalism that permeates the movie, with an ironic, smirking postscript reminiscent of such films as Shockproof and Tomorrow is Another Day tacked on for good measure.


At 69 minutes The Pretender is so brief that it’s fair to suggest it doesn’t get made, even on Poverty Row, a few years further into the era of television. The gimmicky story, which feels more like an episode of The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents than it does a feature film (or even a second feature for that matter), seems more suited to the smaller screen. It’s notable on the production side for two reasons. This is the moment in which famed cinematographer John Alton gets his first real crack at noir subject matter, and while his work is as uneven as the film itself, there are a few great moments — like the deal-making scene between Holden and Korrin. Also noteworthy is the use of theremin music in the soundtrack. The instrument that would give the science fiction films of the following decade their distinctive electronic sound is used with gusto in The Pretender, and while it seems somewhat foreign in a crime picture, the movie wouldn’t be the same without it.

The Pretender (1947)

Director: W. Lee Wilder (Billy’s older brother)

Cinematographer: John Alton

Screenplay: Don Martin

Starring: Albert Dekker, Catharine Craig, Alan Carney.

Released by: Republic Pictures

Running time: 69 minutes

BEWITCHED (1945)

Considering many viewers don’t seem to care for Bewitched, there’s a lot of ink floating around out there about this slick little second feature from MGM. I find myself in the minority, because I think it’s a gem. Make no mistake, in one important way (depending on your point of view) it hasn’t aged well: it’s a rather crude look at schizophrenia in its most sensational form — multiple personality disorders. And because of the era’s (or rather, Hollywood’s) limited understanding of psychology and the movie studio’s propensity to take dramatic license with existing scientific knowledge, the film does a disservice to those whose lives have been touched to one degree or another by mental illness. Be that as it may, the problems are easily forgiven, and what remains is a well-made and inventive thriller with a few great moments. 


Why here at WDL? Bewitched is also distinctive as a prototypical film noir.


The story goes down smooth: Joan Ellis is a pleasant young woman with everything life has to offer, particularly a fine family and loving fiancé — but hang on — she hears a nasty voice in her head that wants to be in charge, to be “let out.” 


Fearful of a scandal, Joan skips her small mid-western town and makes for New York City, where she finds work as a cigar counter girl. Soon, she’s wooed by Eric, one of the building’s many attorneys (Stephen McNally). At first she’s skittish but after he comes on strong they are quickly engaged. Just when Joan feels that everything is once again coming up roses, she discovers her old fiancé waiting for her in her room — he’s tracked her down and wants to take her back home. As he packs her bag for the return trip, the voice in Joan’s head finally speaks up: it doesn’t want to leave the big city for Dullsville, so it commands Joan to pick up a pair of scissors and kill — which she does!


Jump to a quick trial where Joan’s sweet nature guarantees that she’ll beat the rap. Just as the not guilty verdict is being read, the voice speaks up, telling Joan how kill again and again in the future. Not wanting this to happen, Joan blurts out a last second confession and Bewitched begins to take some strange turns….


The voice in Joan’s head belongs to Audrey Totter, of Tension fame. Though Totter is uncredited, she really sinks her teeth into her part and although there’s a campy quality to the way she taunts and jeers at Joan, it works. The presence of Totter also lends Bewitched some extra credibility as a film noir, though it isn’t needed. The fascinating aspect of Joan’s dichotomy is that each half of her mind represents an archetypical film noir woman — Karen is a femme fatale and Joan is the good girl.


The femme fatale part is a no-brainer: Karen is a black widow — she uses Joan’s good looks to attract men, in order to act out her violent impulses. She kills Joan’s first fiancé, and warns her that she’s ready to kill the next, and then the next after that. Joan herself is both the pure innocent and the noir anti-hero: she’s cruelly victimized by fate and by chance, through what her psychiatrist calls “one birth in a million.” Like other noir protagonists, most often males, Joan is forced to ride out her predicament, with only the merest illusion of the outcome fate has in store for her. Despite this trauma, Joan’s actions are heroic: she attempts to save her family from the stigma of scandal by fleeing her hometown; and when presented with the unvarnished truth of Karen’s intentions at her trial, she sacrifices herself in order to kill Karen. Phyllis Thaxter’s performance deserves praise: she is able to make Joan and Karen appear dramatically different, without stooping to Jekyll and Hyde style preening. Her timing is good, and she is able to make her violent scenes creepy, if not actually frightening.


In addition to the role of fate and the thorough characterization of Joan, there are some exciting visual moments in Bewitched, including an expressionistic street sequence featuring an elaborate tracking shot: Joan is caught late at night on a deserted street, where she encounters a few real-life manifestations of her inner turmoil. The noirish quality of the atmosphere is excellent, though it doesn’t quite mesh with the rest of the film. Bewitched also uses montage to great effect, although the primarily to keep the running time brief. Joan’s entire arrest, booking, and courtroom experience is summarized in a fast cut, claustrophobic, and for lack of a better term — sweaty — montage that shows attorneys, witnesses, and jurors all grotesquely leering at the accused. Oboler’s direction is competent, but he doesn’t maintain a noir vision for the duration — after all this was only 1945.


Mental illness was popular fodder in film noir, especially in the years just after the war. The idea of a film protagonist being stricken by something so arbitrary and invisible (and at the time: fantastical) was a trendy way to demonstrate how an everyday Joe or “Joan” can get worked over by cruel fate. What separates noirish takes on the subject from more “serious” productions is that the illness in noir invariably becomes an excuse for violent crime. So in this regard film noir is quite exploitative of mental illness, which is why viewers shouldn’t knock the manipulative and melodramatic treatment of multiple personalities in Bewitched. If the subject was treated clinically instead of tongue-in-cheek, the film just couldn’t have been made. The one place where we can gripe is the whitewashing of Joan’s “cure.” It’s disappointing to think that even in 1945 audiences would believe a ten-minute hypnosis session with a psychiatrist would cure Joan of her demons. It smacks of witch-doctoring, and actually makes the finale somewhat droll. It would be more in keeping with the tone of films to come, and with the fact that the character had actually killed, if audiences thought Joan was obligated to bear her burden uncertainly into the future. In the end though, the trick to enjoying this picture is to take it with some salt. Bewitched isn’t The Three Faces of Eve or The Snake Pit — it’s a sensationalist second feature with roots in radio drama and isn’t meant to be viewed as anything more than diversionary entertainment. After all this is MGM, not Warner Brothers.

Bewitched (1945)

Director: Arch Oboler
Cinematographer: Charles Salerno Jr.
Screenplay: Arch Oboler
Starring: Phyllis Thaxter, Edmund Gwenn, Audrey Totter (voice only).
Released by: MGM
Running time: 65 minutes

OUTRAGE (1950)

It’s one thing to say that a film is a “product of its time.” I do this fairly often since I’m normally focused on “the time” as much as I am the film. One of the great things about classic movies is that contemporary viewers are able to immerse themselves in the period of the film in question — the clothing, the dialog, the scenery — even the morality of the day, as suspicious as it often was. There’s something comfortable about “sinking into” a picture and becoming, if only briefly, a part of its world. However, in the case of Ida Lupino’s Outrage, what’s depicted on film is far from comfortably sentimental. It’s no coincidence that Outrage is often considered a film noir, as the central act of the film is a rape (though the term is never used), and it subsequently examines the alienation of the victim from her family and her community. Lupino sets this all up during the title sequence: as the credits flicker across the screen we get a bird’s eye glimpse of Mala Powers as she staggers through a forbidding maze of urban streets, constantly stealing glances over her shoulder for an attacker who is long gone. In the wake of her ordeal Powers is set adrift, isolated, a theme that Lupino expands upon throughout the film. Finally, through the ramifications of the rape the film illuminates the underside of the seemingly idyllic 1950s American small town. 

Powers, in her first adult role, turned out to be a solid choice for the lead. Part Jean Hagan and part Judy Garland (minus the charisma and some of the talent), Powers’s “every girl” persona is well suited to the part of Ann Walton, girl-next-door who is viciously assaulted by the scarred counterman at the factory lunch stand. Despite the fact that the crux of Outrage lies in what happens afterwards, the most stylish and viscerally memorable sequence in the film is the attack itself, as Ann, caught late at night in the wrong place at the wrong time, is pursued through a vacant industrial landscape. Lupino alternates high- and low-angle shots as Ann darts through a maze of deserted alleys, piled high with crates and barricaded by semi-trailers. At one point she crouches along a wall plastered with circus posters, beneath grotesque clowns who sneer down and ogle her every step. After pleading for anonymous help and blaring the horn of a parked truck, she finally succumbs to terror and to fate. As the busted horn caterwauls, Ann curls into a fetal position and awaits the inevitable. As the man closes in, her attention is transfixed not on his face, but on the long scar that adorns his neck — redolent of the red slash of the clowns’ mouths. The attack itself is not depicted. Instead the tableau closes as an old man in an apartment just around the corner, aroused from sleep by the moan of the horn, glances unconcerned and oblivious before slamming his bedroom window.

The middle of the film concentrates on the days immediately following the crime. Ann staggers home to a mother so stunned that she gapes wordlessly at her daughter. The police are summoned and Ann is given the once over by the family doctor — whose treatment essentially starts and stops with sedation. The cops are amiable but helpless in lieu of Ann’s shocked inability to identify her attacker beyond his gender and his scar. It has been noted by others that the term “rape” is never heard, with the more subjective term “criminal assault” used in its place. Although the police have little to go on they manage to mount an impromptu lineup for Ann’s benefit, and Lupino effectively uses the scene to focus on the absurdity of the practice. No soundproof room, no one-way glass — Ann sits in the front row of a makeshift theater as a troop of scarred and scary hoodlums is paraded by. As each man looks down at her, shows his profile, and exposes his scar, Ann is asked over and again if he is her attacker. Lupino makes it understandably clear that even had Ann recognized her assailant, she’d be hardly likely to admit it in this setting, being too aghast and terrified to think coherently. Through close ups, fast cuts, and shifting camera angles, Lupino establishes the sort of stifling, consumptive fear that anyone would feel in similar circumstances.

After reading her name in the paper and hearing herself whispered about by friends and neighbors, Ann returns to work. Constantly reminded of the attack by the judgmental stares of her coworkers, her resolve to endure finally breaks, and she decides instead to flee. Totally divorced from her community, Ann boards a bus for Los Angeles. After hearing a radio announcement that she is being sought as a missing person, Ann wanders away on foot, and eventually collapses by the roadside. Her body is plucked from the apron by a dark character in a jalopy who drives away with her in the back seat. Lupino uses this moment to again show the irony of the girl’s precarious situation: The traumatic effect of the assault on Ann’s mind is such that she leaves behind the frying pan to risk the fire — half-dead and helpless on a deserted road. It’s no mistake that Lupino depicts her rescue ambiguously, a medium-long shot of an unknown man picking her up and placing her limp form in his car — and also no mistake that she makes us wait a time before we are certain of his good intentions.

Ann comes-to in strange surroundings and has a few frightened moments before she learns that soft-spoken preacher Bruce Ferguson (Tod Andrews), rescued and gave her into the care of a family of fruit farmers. The story then contrives to establish Ann in a new life at the grove. It turns out that she has much to offer, and they take her in without asking many questions. As the weeks and months pass, she carves out a place for herself and tries to forget her previous life. She can’t escape her past that easily though, which comes rushing back after she violently clubs a man at the annual harvest festival. Ann’s moment of self-defense is the most important in the film. It happens when some yokel comes on too strong at the picnic, and she whacks him on the head with a wrench because won’t keep his hands off. She again flees, only to be delivered to the authorities by a concerned Bruce. It’s at this point that Outrage takes a shocking turn and lives up to its title in an unintended way: Ann is arrested for assault. Although Lupino gives us a textbook lead-up to rape — including the dominant male figure pushing the girl to the ground in spite of her repeated protests, kissing at her and making his intentions very clear — it is the woman who is accused of a crime for defending herself. The farm hand’s part in the event is dismissed, as he’s widely known to be a “decent fellow.” In a film full of ironies, the most significant of all is that Ann, who previously submitted to her attacker and accepted her rape as inevitable, is treated as a criminal in the very moment she gains the resolve to defend herself. In the aftermath the only thing that keeps her out of Tehachapi is Bruce, who takes up her cause, guaranteeing psychiatric treatment for at least a year. Ann remarks at her hearing “Maybe I am crazy — sometimes I feel as if the whole world is upside down.”

Unfortunately, Outrage no longer functions as entertainment. The retrograde attitudes are so prevalent that the world of the film is not one we wish to enter, nor thankfully should we. Ida Lupino, always ahead of her time, deserves all the credit in the world for being the first to address the consequences of a rape in a major motion picture, but her pandering to the misogyny of the day is painfully dated and casts a horrible pall over the whole film. Nevertheless, it can often be enough to open the door, and Lupino opened many.

Outrage (1950)
Director: Ida Lupino
Cinematographer: L.C. Stoumen and Archie Stout
Screenplay: Collier Young, Malvin Wald, and Ida Lupino
Starring: Mala Powers and Tod Andrews
Released by: RKO, via Filmmakers (Lupino's independent production company)
Running time: 75 minutes