Some more noir for Noirvenber.

The Breaking Point (1950), directed by Michael Curtiz. This is something of a remake of Hawks’s To Have and to Have Not (1944), and both are versions of a story by Ernest Hemingway. The Breaking Point was undervalued and rarely seen for years because its star, John Garfield, was implicated in the Red Scare of the late 40s and early to mid 50s, and the film was not promoted by Warner Brothers. In any case, this is an impressive film from a somewhat under rated director. Here Curtiz gives a masterclass in camera movement, blocking, and mise en scene. The early scenes in the Morgan house set the tone efficiently (Curtiz is always efficient – see Casablanca, maybe the most efficient film ever made) and slyly. We get the layout of the house, members of the family, and the dynamic of a family on the economic edge. What Curtiz brings to all his efficiency with camera movement and blocking of scenes is an interest in character, and the people here are complex; they have interior lives communicated through both camera and bodily and facial gestures. As for the story, this is a daylight noir. It involves a sailor returned from the war to find life difficult, if not downright impossible. Harry Morgan (Garfield) finds himself scrambling to make a living with his fishing boat off San Diego. He gets himself into trouble, first with human trafficking and then with gangsters who have robbed a racetrack. Along the way, he meets this film’s femme fatale, Leona Charles (Patricia Neal), loses his friend and partner, Wesley Park (Juano Hernandez), and nearly loses his wife, Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter) and two kids. Harry survives the mayhem, but barely and not without the loss of a limb. The final shot of the film is devastating, an empty pier with just a young black boy standing hopelessly and bewildered, shown in a long crane shot. This boy is Wesley’s son who has come to meet his father. No one bothers to notice him and inform him that his father is not coming home. Hawks’s version of the story is jaunty when set beside this grim examination of post-war angst.

 

The Enforcer (1951), directed by Bretaigne Windust and (uncredited) Raoul Walsh. This film is distinguished by its fractured narrative. The story is told in flashback, and flashback within flashback. The story concerns organized crime, and contracts and hitmen, and a voice over the phone. Joseph Rico (Ted de Corsia) is in jail, a witness in the trial of crime boss Albert Mendoza (Everett Sloane). Rico does not make it to trial. He falls to his death trying to escape from custody. Crusading District Attorney Martin Ferguson (Humphrey Bogart) now has a problem. Can he find another witness by combing through all the evidence the police have amassed? His investigation takes us back in time. We meet a gang of hitmen who answer to their boss, Rico. Rico, in turn, gets his orders over the phone. The is a taut procedural, having something of the feel of a documentary. Much of this is thanks to the uncredited Walsh who reshot some of the film, especially the intense ending. We also have a bit of a mystery thrown in, a mystery that turns on a dead woman’s brown eyes. This is an impressive film.

 

Without Warning! (1952), directed by Arnold Laven. Carl Martin (Adam Williams) is an unassuming gardener who also happens to be a serial killer who prefers blond young women. His weapon of choice is a pair of garden shears! This is a well-done thriller that is surprisingly prescient. It plays out as an early version of CSI, following the painstaking work of the police and forensic people as they seek to find out who is committing a series of murders. The murderer, Carl, is consistent in the women he targets and in the timing of the murders. He is also something of an amateur. Although not, strictly speaking, a noir, this film does reflect the postwar angst and paranoia. It moves along quickly and efficiently, and has enough tension to hold the viewer’s attention.

 

My Name is Julia Ross (1945), directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Lewis made two well-known noir films, Gun Crazy and, one of my favourites, The Big Combo. He also made a bunch of other low-budget winners. My Name is Julia Ross is an early film by Lewis that merges the likes of Rebecca with Gaslight to deliver a noir-gothic mix that will satisfy your taste for the unusual, but somehow familiar. Julia Ross (Nina Foch) is looking for work as a secretary. She finds a job with the pleasant elderly woman, Mrs. Hughes (Dame May Whitty). She goes to work in a London house where she is to board as well, and wakes two days later is an isolated house in Cornwall, wearing clothes that sport a monograph with the letters MH. It turns out that MH is Marion Hughes, wife of Ralph Hughes (George Macready). Julia/Marion finds herself held prisoner, and saddled with a husband who seems to have a screw loose. He especially likes knives. Lewis gives us walls, windows, bars, gates, doors and a creepy stairway to let us know Julia’s plight. I must say the plot holds well, and poor Julia appears to be heading for her death. Will she escape? Will she drink poison? Will she jump from the window onto the rocks below?  I suspect we might piece things together early in the film, but Lewis keeps things tense and firmly under control so that we suspend disbelief and enjoy the machinations of kindly Mrs. Hughes and her wacko son. This is a satisfying small film.

 

Obsession (1949 – AKA The Hidden Room), directed by Edward Dmytryk. Made in England while Dmytryk was in exile from HUAC, Obsession ia about an urbane doctor whose wife has a series of affairs. Reaching the “last straw,” the doctor plans the perfect murder of his wife’s latest lover. His plan is to dissolve the man in a bath of acid, but the little dog Monte manages to thwart the clever doctor’s scheme. The doctor, Clive Riordan (Robert Newton), is suave to the point of creepiness. His wife Storm (Sally Gray) is slinky. The American love, Bill Kronin (Phil Brown) is suitably hapless. Into this mix comes Inspector Finsbury (Naunton Wayne), a cerebral adversary for the cool Dr. Riordan. The film has tension, perhaps best exemplified in the Doctor’s intention to try out his acid bath on cute little Monte. Especially clever are the borders the Doctor provides for his prisoners, Bill and Monte, borders beyond which their chains will not allow them to pass. Prior to this film, Dmytryk had made impressive noir films in Hollywood – Murder, My Sweet (1944), Cornered (1945), and Crossfire (1947), for example – and he brings his flair for this sort of thing to Obsession.

 

Undertow (1949), directed by William Castle. This little thriller with a noirish sensibility arrives from William Castle before he became the king of schlock in the 1950s. It is an efficiently paced man-on-the-run film with impressive location shooting in Chicago. The story is familiar: GI returns to the U.S. after seven years military service, meets an old friend in a Reno casino, plans to marry his old flame, befriends a woman he happens to meet on his way to Chicago, and finds himself the suspect in the murder of his intended bride’s uncle. People are not who they appear to be, although being familiar with this sort of thing, we know who is not who they pretend to be. The cast is serviceable with Scott Brady taking the lead as Tony Regan, former soldier and former criminal now hoping to go straight and run a resort in the High Sierras. Others include Tony’s friend Danny Morgan (John Russell), his other friend Detective Charles Reckling (Bruce Bennett), his girlfriend Sally Lee (Dorothy Hart), his new friend Ann McNight (Petty Dow), and briefly an unnamed detective played by Rock Hudson (billed as Roc Hudson). Tony is in deep hot water, but he manages, with Ann and Charles’s help, to swim to shore.

 

Scandal Sheet (1952), directed by Phil Karlson. The film derives from Sam Fuller’s novel, The Dark Page (1944), and it has Fuller’s gritty, cynical take on the newspaper business, already turning into more of a scandal sheet than an outlet for legitimate news. Broderick Crawford is Mark Chapman/George Grant, editor of the New York Express, a newspaper whose readership is climbing because of the lurid stories it publishes. The opening scene has reporter Steve McCleary (John Derek) and photographer Biddle (Harry Morgan) joking about not being able to get a picture for the front page because the woman whose murder they are investigating has too much blood on her face. The plot has Chapman finding himself in trouble when his wife, a woman he has abandoned years ago, turns up at a Lonely Hearts Club gathering and recognizes her long-absent husband who has not changed his name. As things turn out, the poor woman meets her end when she and Chapman scuffle in her seedy hotel room. Chapman tries to cover up this mess, but his attempts to do so lead to him murdering a hapless old reporter who happens upon the truth of Chapman’s identity. The story gives us a sense of the newspaper business as morally suspect, interested only in sales. Surprise! The scandal here is what lies behind the news, not the news itself. As noir films go, this one is more than serviceable. Crawford gives a sweaty, paranoid, loud-talking performance. In other words, he gives the kind of performance we expect from this actor. John Derek and Donna Reed as the two young reporters offer a bit of hope in this examination of an America losing its way.

 

The Thief (1952), directed by Russell Rouse. Here is a noir with a difference – it has no dialogue. None. No one speaks from beginning to end. The effect is a film that both works and does not work. It works because the sounds, especially the ringing of a phone and the protagonist’s laughter/crying near the end, serve to heighten tension, accentuate the main character’s loneliness, and inform us of the haunted situation the main character finds himself in. It does not work because some interactions between characters, especially the one between Allen Fields (Ray Milland) and the girl down the hall (Rita Gam, in her first film), strike us as impossible without some spoken words between the two. The film also calls for patience on the part of the viewer. The plot has Dr. Fields, an award-winning nuclear physicist, passing secrets to the enemy, most likely the Russians, and becoming more and more conscience-stricken as the unanswered phone calls keep coming. Fields is a noir anti-hero who finds himself caught in a web of intrigue. We surmise from his reactions to the ringing phone and to his gathering of secret intelligence and to his paranoid (for a good reason) reaction to people, that he desperately wants to extricate himself from the situation in which he finds himself. All in all, this is an interesting experiment, but one hardly to find acceptance by a general audience.