The Crooked Way (1949)

“I could forget a lot if things- you, for instance.”

This picture is directed by Robert Florey, lensed by John Alton, scored by Louis Forbes, and scripted by Richard Landau (whose name you will find attached to several notable early Hammer Films noir titles), from “No Blade Too Sharp,” a radio play by Robert Monroe.

It stars John Payne as a war hero with a silver star and a bit of shrapnel lodged in his brain from the war.   I love how the opening cleverly fakes out the audience with documentary-style narration that transitions to a doctor (Crane Whitley) explaining to Payne the extent of his injury and giving advice on ways to possibly tease some of his memories back by returning to his home town in hopes he may be recognized by someone who knew him before.  If only he had realized he was a character in a noir film, he’d have known that was a bad idea.

As the doctor talks and show x-rays of the injury, Payne’s face is hidden in darkness, just as his own identity and past are hidden from himself and the audience. Lights come up and we see the man he is now- a man known only as Eddie Rice, a blank slate with a an unknown past and uncertain future.
The script does a good job of keeping the audience only slightly ahead of Eddie in his quest for answers, making it more interesting to see how he uses wits to track them down. Amnesia gives him an odd, cool edge that serves occasionally to his advantage but more often gets him deeper into trouble than if he knew the score.

As the scene moves to the city where he lived before the war, the voice-over narrative duties are transferred then to Eddie, who occasionally reveals his thoughts to the audience by this means. Before he has a chance to even leave the train station in town, the first person he meets upon arriving is Lieutenant Joe Williams (Rhys Williams), who scoops him up and takes him to headquarters to talk things out, calling him Eddie Riccardo and hinting that he was not wanted in town when he left 5 years ago. Captain Anderson ( is also introduced at this point, but primary cop-duty on this film is left to Williams for now.

As they have nothing to hold him on, Williams and Anderson let him go, but strongly hint that they’d rather he left town.  Naturally, with his desire to recollect his old self, Eddie has no such intentions.  As he is leaving the station, he is spotted and recognized by a woman (Ellen Drew) across the street who is busy posting bail for a man names “Petey.”

She comes up close to be sure, and speaks to him, but he doesn’t recognize her, taking a blind stab in the dark at her name, based on the initials on her purse.  Seeing his uncertainty, she offers to drive him to a hotel, and probes deeper to see why he’s come back.  At the same time, he is subtly picking up clues about her, since she obviously recognized him but didn’t offer her name at their meeting. He slyly gets her name from her driver’s license.  Nina Martin.  The name still means nothing to us.

While he goes to his room, she makes a call to tell a certain interested party about this development.
The party she calls is gangster Vince Alexander (Sonny Tufts), who is in the middle of roughly interrogating a man named Kelly (John Harmon), who formerly was in his employ, bur turned stool pigeon.   This scene serves triple duty 1) in introducing the character as a big shot who doesn’t like stoolies, 2) showing his obsessive focus as he ignores the ringing phone, and 3) setting up Kelly as a corpus electi that will come in handy later on.  Vince has his thugs beat and kill Kelly, then takes them along to visit their long-departed friend Eddie.  His parting words to Kelly cement the image of Vince as a vindictive killer.  “Kelly, You’re dead! Oh, and Kelly- when you get to where you’re going, have ‘em give you a nice even burn.  Don’t let let ‘em just fry you on one side.”

When they show up in Eddie’s apartment to confront him, they are thrown a bit off balance by his claims not to recognize them, but not enough to prevent a thorough and ugly beat-down from occurring.  Vince goes off on how they grew up together, went into the rackets together, and how Eddie betrayed him and let him take the rap for him and go to jail for 2 years.  He stops short of killing Eddie, instead urging him to leave town in 24 hours.

When Eddie recovers, he deduces that Nina was the one who set him up for that beating, and traces her down to find out why.  She learns his amnesia is real, and lets him know just how rotten he used to be, and give him several nasty clues to the full brutality of their past together.  They were once married, and he was an abusive, no-good louse to her.  In spite of seeing how bitter toward him she is, in his desperation, he ends up turning to her for help anyways when he becomes a wanted man, suspected by Williams of working for Vince to execute Kelly. The gradual thawing of their relationship forms the romantic “divorce-reset” fantasy element of the story. If only real life relationship problems were as simple as a case of amnesia.  This aspect of the film almost seems like an early model for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

But when Williams get too close to figuring out Vince is in back of the killing, an alternate plan springs into Vince’s mind to get rid of two birds with one stone.  Kill Williams, frame Eddie. He has his thugs pick up both men, one dead and the other unconscious, and they are left in a car together outside town. Fortunately Eddie awakens in time to get away from this falsified scene of the crime.

He hitchhikes a ride back to town, catching a lift with a passing mortician’s van, “Green Acres Mortuary” which simultaneously symbolizes his potentially riding toward his own funeral, and offers a brief moment of dark humor, as the man driving (Garry Owen) goes on about hoping he’s not missing out on any business, and bragging about his business policies “pick ‘em up while they’re alive, and they won’t forget you when you’re dead!”

With both the police chasing him and the crooks intent on his death, Eddie hides out with Nina and her roommate Hazel, until suddenly the gangsters’ hit man bursts in firing live ones. Nina takes a bullet meant for Eddie.  She hazily looks up to him while watches over her, waiting for a doctor to arrive.

“Light me a cigarette,” she whispers.  As he does so, his face is again shown in total shadow, an echo of opening sequence. His identity has become a mystery to her now, too. This isn’t the Eddie Riccardo she knew, loved, and learned to hate.  He’s a shadow, a phantom, some stranger.  Riccardo is drifting away into the past.  “You’re far away...how far?” she says, perplexed.

“Five years.  A lifetime. Beyond that, a blank.” As he says this, the light slowly reveals his face to her.  Is it Riccardo or Rice that she sees? Can she trust him enough to love again?  He confesses he feels he’s being cornered, forced back into the Riccardo role by fate.  Can her love keep him on the path back into light?

The one person who holds the key to the resolution is Petey, the man she had helped bail out in the beginning.  As memorably played by the familiar character actor Percy Helton (you may recall him as the drunken parade Santa in Miracle on 34th Street), he is a nervous, craven little man with an attachment to his pet cat, Samson. As a potential witness in the cases against Vince Alexander’s organization, he’s been kept in hiding in an old warehouse.

Eddie finds him after a desperate search that leads him through all the darkest, cheapest filthy corners of town.  Knowing that Vince’s gang will be hot on his trail, he tips off his cab-driver to  who he is so that Captain Anderson and his police will end up coming to the same location and force a show-down between the competing hunters out to get Eddie.

Vince is first on the scene, and after his attempts to lure Eddie back to the dark side and death fail, he manages to put a bullet in Petey. Eddie manages to narrow the odds by killing the thugs with Vince, and there is a deadly struggle between these two, brought to a halt only by the arrival of the police, who offer each a deal if they bring the other out with them.

Vince has the upper hand, dragging Eddie out at gunpoint, but Petey manages to crawl to a gun and fire a couple at Vince, whose reaction make it clear to the cops who the real villain is.  All is wrapped up neatly with a bit of exposition from Captain Anderson, and Eddie and Nina  have a chance for their happily ever after.

The film is an exciting exploration of ideas of identity, redemption, and transformation. It dares to ask big questions, like “what makes a man evil,” but dares to keep from ending up too black-and-white in its conclusions.  Despite his forgotten past, Eddie finds himself doing similar things- and with same intense drive- as if he were the old Eddie, Riccardo. Only his intent seems different. The idea of Rice vs. Riccardo is played with in multiple levels throughout the movie, though never losing sight of entertainment as the main objective. The result is an engaging film for noir or any genre.

**** out of 5

Flaxy Martin (1949)

“She’s a great kid- you can always trust her to double cross you.”

This film is something of a surprise in the filmography of director Richard Bare, who somehow managed to slip this one in between his work in short films- specifically the George O’Hanlon starring “Joe McDoakes” series. You know, the ones with the man behind the 8-ball.  He had also worked with star Virginia Mayo a year earlier on a little flick called Smart Girls Don’t Talk, but shorts were where he earned his bread.  This film is similarly anomalous in the filmographies of both screenwriter David Lang, who wrote a handful of low-budget genre films before, and mostly westerns and tv work after, and cinematographer by Carl Guthrie, who spent most of his career on B pictures, westerns, tv, and shorts, including a couple of McDoakes pictures. The score is the work of Bill Lava, who at the time was also working on b pictures and shorts like the McDoakes series. Later, of course, he’d be vilified by cartoon fans for his odd late-series looney tunes mood music.  Somehow, this bunch of artists perennially “behind the 8-ball” (literally) seem to have managed to pull off a minor masterpiece right under the studio’s nose.  

The story opens with breaking glass and a dark figure jumping out of a window, then scrambling across a dimly lit city street. Frantic phone calls to the police and the rapid response are shown in quick montage.

“I’ll never forget that face!” the witness repeatedly says to the police as she shudders in terror while describing her recollection of the murder that has just been committed.  The brute attached to the face she describes is Caesar (Jack Overman), a familiar figure in the underground world of this city. Unlike the more well-known cinematic criminal, “Little Caesar,” He is an imposing giant-a thoughtless animal- with plenty of rage and muscle to do the dirty work for local crime boss Hap Ritchie (Douglas Kennedy), but not enough sense to keep from getting caught.

And caught he is, so Hap calls in his lawyer to get Caesar out on bail. The lawyer he calls is Walter Colby (Zachary Scott), who is none-to-happy to be awakened in the middle of the night for something like this.  Colby protests that this was not what he signed up for.

Walter Colby is an honest-enough, hardworking lawyer who resents having to constantly do this kind of shady legal work for unsavory employers.  But he has a fatal weakness, and if you guessed it’s a girl, you’re right.

Flaxy Martin (Virginia Mayo) may be a cheap nightclub singer, but for Colby, she is his whole world.  As he says himself to her at one point, “When it comes right down to it, I guess I’d do almost anything for you.”  Little does he suspect that her loyalties are stronger to his boss than to him.  She’s the one Hap calls when Colby gets ornery or difficult, and she then works her charms on Colby to manipulate him into following orders he otherwise would find ethically questionably.

This time though, Colby goes to far in protesting his objections, and Hap is convinced that his lawyer is no longer someone he can count on.  It’s time to get rid of him, and he uses Flaxy to make that happen.

Early, Flaxy had hired a girl, Peggy Ferrara (Helen Westcott), to act as a witness to provide Caesar an alibi during the night of the murder.  When Peggy tries to make a little extra on the side by blackmailing Hap, she earns the next spot on Caesar’s hit list.  Hap has Flaxy make Colby think that she herself is chief suspect for Ferrara’s murder, and naturally, Colby tries ever means he can to get her freed from suspicion.

Colby falls right into Hap’s traps by doing this, but he really has himself to blame for what follows.  His love for Flaxy is so loyal and blind, he willingly claims the murder as his own doing, knowing that without any other evidence to support his claim, he will never be convicted.  But in court, a surprise witness supplied  by Hap to the prosecution confirms Colby’s guilty plea, and he is sent up to prison.

This is a unique case of a “Wrong Man” noir in which the man is actually arrested on his own admission of guilt.  It is only after he is convicted that he catches on to what has been done to him, with a little help in the way of a friendly tip given to him by a cab driver he once helped as a lawyer. With his eyes suddenly opened to the double-cross that has been played on him by Flaxy and Hap, Walt grabs his first chance to escape, while on a train en route to the prison.

He is picked up along the road by Nora Carson (Dorothy Malone), an innocent “good girl” type, who kindly brings him to the safety of her own country home, with nary a question as to who he is, or where he’s come from.  The next morning he wakes in this home to find he is suddenly freed from the dark shadows of the city and transported to a place of idyllic bliss among birds and blooms.

Though she learns who he is, Nora continues to welcome him in her home and offers him whatever help he needs.  This taste of real goodness is just what Colby needs to spark that sense of decency in himself, too.  It doesn’t immediately eliminate his desire for revenge, but he at least begins to work his way toward the light, beginning with the resolution he makes to return to the city and face the troubles he has brought on himself, beginning with finding the ones who helped him over that cliff, and bring them to justice.

The resolution is nearly too late. The rosy, Flaxy-free interlude is brought to an abrupt end when a nosy busybody from next door calls the local sheriff to investigate this mysterious stranger in town, and he quickly arrives with cuffs in hand.  This would be bad enough for Colby, but there is a wild-card in the deck to make things even more interesting for him.

That wild card comes in the form of noir favorite Elisha Cook, here playing Roper, a zoot-suited gunsel with inferiority complex, who has to this point only been briefly seen a few times at the apartments of his employer Hap Ritchie.  He is a classically squirrelly and injured Cook creation, who is constantly being goaded and provoked, especially by Colby who frequently gets digs in about his size and intelligence.

When word got out of Colby’s escape, Cook has the smarts to realize there is something more at work than mere survival instinct.  He suspects Colby knows, and hunts him down personally to find out. Roper shows up just in time, pokes his snub nose in through the back door just as the sheriff is questioning Colby at Nora’s front door.  With a manic intensity, he shoves the aging officer into a closet, and cuffing Nora and Walt together with sheriff’s cuffs, drives them away into the woods to kill and bury them.

Walt must do some fast thinking, faster talking, and well-times scrapping to stay alive and escape with Roper’s car.  He knows he is driving right back into trouble but is now doubly determined to save his neck and get the ones responsible for stretching it out for him.

The first name on his list is Caesar, but when he catches up to him, the thug is already dead, shot by Roper, who rings the phone in Caesar’s apartment to taunt Colby from just outside where he is waiting to shoot Colby when he comes out.  A dramatic chase ensues, climaxing in a tense roof-top face-off to the death.

But Colby’s trouble are STILL not over.  He finds Flaxy, who tries to convince him she only double crossed him for his own good.  He isn’t buying it, but he puts on a good show to let her believe otherwise.  They plot together to lure Hap to her apartment and get the getaway money they need from him.  When Hap arrives, Flaxy takes the money and holds both men off at gunpoint, determined to take it all for herself.

Her greed is her undoing, and Colby takes delight in telling her so.  “You double crossed yourself this time, didn’t you, sweetheart? Just like I thought you would.”  The two men team up to back her into a corner, until she must shoot one or the other.  She nails Hap, but Colby wrestles the gun from her and slips out, leaving her for the police to take away.

The only conflict remaining to be resolved at this point is Colby’s battle with his own conscience. Will he take the money and run?  Or will he turn himself in and end up poor but free?  Nora’s loving pleas provide the answer to that conflict, and they live more-or-less happily ever after.

The plot has a few weak spots and some overly-tangled threads that occasionally get snarled up, but there is no shortage of excitement, interesting characters, and murky noir atmosphere to make Flaxy Martin a film well worth viewing.

*** out of 5

Too late For Tears (1949)

“You’re quite a gal, Mrs. Palmer.”

Indeed she is.  This knock-out performance by noir favorite Lizabeth Scott is an artfully executed subversion of American ideals of “the perfect housewife.” When we first meet Jane Palmer (Scott), she projects the image of the most blissfully happy and supportive, loving wife a 1950’s fella could ask for. Arthur Kennedy is a natural fit for the part of Alan, her still-smitten and adoring husband.

We are introduced to them in the opening scene, driving home from a party with friends, cruising down a darkened, isolated stretch of road overlooking the city.  Their happiness is quickly interrupted by a fateful mix-up, when a passing car tosses a satchel full of money into their back seat.  After inspecting it and discovering its contents, a glimmer of something dark and dangerous shines in Jane’s eyes.

When the car that money was intended to be transferred to show up behind them. she takes the wheel, recklessly careening down the curving roadways and into town where she can shake the tail and get to home and safety. The excitement obviously gives her a thrill. This is clearly what she’s always wanted, not a happy, sedentary life as a retiring housewife.

In their apartment they argue over what to do with the ill-gotten windfall.  She wheedles and begs and reasons until her husband is almost convinced to agree to keep the money.  But a sudden scare involving an unexpected visit from his sister Kathy (Kristine Miller), who lives in a neighboring apartment, shakes their resolve and he manages to win an agreement from her to let him hide it someplace safe until they have had time to think their decision through.

While Alan is busy taking the satchel to a train station baggage check for safekeeping, a visitor arrives at their apartment in the person of Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea is one of his most interesting roles).  He claims to be a detective following a tip on their license number for speeding, and asks to take a look around their apartment. Through some clumsy lies on both their parts, each uncovers the other’s subterfuge- Fuller is no detective, and Jane is no innocent housewife.   He is the man the money was meant for, and she is the one who got it and knows where it is.

These two form a violent, uneasy alliance, one marked by frequent double-crosses and mutual distrust.  When she first tries to use her feminine charms to beguile him he responds by slapping her silly and storming out.  Oddly, Jane only becomes more drawn to him, or at least continues to attempt seductive means of persuasion, albeit notably more cautious and calculated.

The changes in her behavior begin to be more marked.  Greed has grown deep roots in her soul.  The next time she meets with Fuller, she’s armed and prepared to bargain, arranging her plans with the kind of careful though that frequently accompanies obsessive, avaricious drives like that which she exhibits.   Fuller see it too, calling her “Tiger,” when addressing her.

When Alan insists at the end of the week that they turn the money over to the police, she is already too invested in the fantasy life she has built on that foundation of stolen wealth, and she makes a fatal decision- rather than give up the money and all her dreams of the high life, she will give up her husband, killing him if necessary to get what she wants.  The prime opportunity to do that comes when, in an effort to re-spark their old romance, he takes he out to reeenact their first date, including a late night row on a lake is a rented boat at a local amusement area.  His pitched woo almost seems to give her second thoughts as she remembers the love they first shared, but when he accidentally finds the gun in her purse, she desperately grabs for it and shoots him down.

Fuller is waiting in the shadows on the remote banks, and together they sink the body into the lake and return to her apartment with Fuller posing as the husband, wearing the dead man’s clothes, which also happen to contain the claim ticket in the lining. Unaware of what he possesses, Fuller leave her there, fretting over whether he will find the claim and take all the money for himself.

But the obstacles for her desires are only multiplying.  Arriving at her door is another mystery man, calling himself Don Blake (Don Defore), and claiming to be an ex-Air Force buddy of Alan’s, just happening to have arrived in town and looking up his friend to catch up on old times.  But is he who he claims?  Is he a detective, or another thief after the money?

After being kindly turned away by Jane,  he makes inquiries with other tenants, specifically Kathy Palmer, and learns enough about Alan’s disappearance from her to give him reason to pursue the matter farther.  Romantic feelings gradually form between these two, and they work together to find Alan, or at least discover what’s happened to him.  Their combined search efforts net them the claim slip and the revelation that Jane is hiding the truth about her husband’s vanishing to make them suspect foul play.

When Jane realizes that her sister-in-law has the ticket to her money, she puts pressure on Fuller to help her get poison to eliminate Kathy. but something unexpected happens - the prospect of this second killing is oddly discomfiting to a man who has until now played to part of a cold, heartless brute.  When he shows up to deliver the poison to her, he is intoxicated and is bitterly resentful toward Jane’s dragging him into her murderous plans again.  “Don’t every change, Tiger,” he growls drunkenly, with a mournfully acidic cynicism. “I don’t think I’d like you with a heart.”

The reasons behind the change are a startling and unusual twist in the plot, and I’ll leave them unspoiled here, except to say that it is a big part of what makes this character so unique after intially seeming like a typical type-cast role for Duryea.

While Fuller’s shell shows cracks, Jane however, only becomes more hardened and twisted.  Violence and murder become easier and more frequent as her desperation for this tantalizing treasure intensifies.  Fuller, his weakness apparent, becomes the next victim of her treacherous trigger finger. Defore is luckier, getting off with a good pistol-whipping as Jane finally succeeds in getting the ticket from his unconscious body and runs away to Mexico with the money, where she seemingly has escaped and is free to enjoy it.

But when Defore surprises her by showing up in her apartment, and he finally reveals his own real identity to her, all her dreams are shattered.  This climactic finale ends with her body being equally shattered by an uunexpected tumble from her hotel balcony into the street below, taking her precious money with her.

How far she has come from the loving wife we saw at the beginning!  and yet, through the course of the story, that scene of domestic bliss is stripped away and it is slowly revealed that she was *never* that saintly bride she appeared to be.  Alan, it seems, was her second marriage, after the first, to a man named Blanchard, was ended by her husband’s suicide.  Nor was Alan completely blind to his wife’s grasping avarice.  When Jane shows up to collect the money at the baggage claim, and asks a stranger to pick it up for her due to the presence of police who are watching for her, a note alerts the man something is wrong.  That note is from Alan, warning that if a woman shows up to collect the bag, to immediately inform the police.  Is it possible he really didn’t even trust her not to go behind his back and take the money without him? The view of the American housewife and domestic life in general taken by the film, it serms, is very dim indeed. There is a nominally happy ending for Defore’s character and Kate, whom he marries, but how will such a dramatic series of events affect their own nuptial gaity?

Directed by Byron Haskin, the film is based upon a screenplay by Roy Huggins, taken from his serially published story.  Director of Photograpy William Mellor captures this pitch black vision of post-war american disillusionment in all its deadly shades of murderous nighttime horror.  A picture produced outside the main studio’s confines, one senses the liberation the artists felt, unrestrained from painting the tale in the bleakest of tones.  The result is an outstanding sample of vintage film noir.

**** out of 5

Cry of the City (1948)

 
“Marty, why did you have to shoot? Why did you kill?”

This is the refrain Martin Rome (Richard Conte) hears over and over again, from the smashing opening scene as he lies wounded and dying with the girl he loves weeping over him, to the dramatic confrontation with his heartbroken mother late in the film, when she turns him out of her house after he breaks prison to escape the punishment he is justly due.

Like many noir films, this is the tale of a doomed man, who makes his way through his world with Death always at his elbow, waiting to collect the body when it finally drops.  Here, we have a man who in one of the very first sequences has a priest performing last rites over him as he lies in a hospital bed barely holding onto life.  The theme is ever-present through the length of the film with many characters even stating as much, as when Lieutenant Candella (Victor Mature) directly states that he’s “already dead,” in a confrontation with Rome’s mother who is protecting him from arrest.

The central symbolic contrast in the tale is between this cop and this criminal. Candella plays the light (candle?) to Rome’s darkness, and as the names may be manipulated to imply (together they can be made to form “Rome ‘n’ Candle”), the mixing of the two is explosive.  Rome understands this world and its attractions, having grown up in the same neighborhood.  In this way the story is similar to a number of gangster films from the 30’s and 40’s - a tale of two street kids who take different paths to wind up on opposite sides of the law. “You chose your way, I chose mine.” Rome casually replies to Candella’s earnest efforts to convince him he is on a path to destruction.  There is some ambiguity in this black-and-white depiction, and the audience certainly feels sympathy with the character, even if it of the “no, don’t do it, Marty” kind, but ultimately his guilt is laid bare in all its selfish darkness by the story’s tragic end.

Rome has killed a police officer in a shoot-out (self-defense, he claims), but, being nearly killed himself, starts the film in police custody, in a hospital.  Despite already being captured, he find himself a wanted man.  Lieutenant Candella and his wisecracking partner Lieutenant Collins (Fred Clark) think he’s shielding an accomplice, and pursue the lead when a nurse reports seeing a girl in the hospital room with him the night he is brought in.

W.A. Niles (Berry Kroeger) is a cool, slimy lawyer who comes to Rome with some deceptive attempts to pin a recent jewel theft on him. His logic seems plain and logical, if unsavory and unethical-  since Rome is already sentenced to death for the cop shooting, why not take the fall for the suspected jewel thief, Whitey Ligate (a character we only hear of but never see on screen). But Niles’ motive run deeper than that, as it is revealed that he had more direct connections to the “DeGrazzi Heist.”

An intersecting subplot that results in Rome’s escape from the prison hospital involves “Orvy” (Walter Baldwin), a simple but clever trustee and his subversive plan to get revenge on Ledbetter (Roland Winters) the warden who mistreats him and others.  He has a perfectly laid out plan for breaking out, but doesn’t have the boldness to pull it off himself, so he gives Rome the chance to use the plan himself and get Ledbetter fired for allowing it to happen. The execution of this plan is a dramatically tense sequence that slowly escalates suspense through various complications that are involved in the escape.

His first step after escaping is to meet with Niles, and pay him back for trying to pin a crime on him he didn’t do.  The confrontation ends badly, with Niles and his secretary both killed in a shockingly sudden flurry of violence and disaster is compounded when Rome find the jewels in Nile’s possession and decides to pocket them and track down the other party involved in the theft.  

He goes to his mother’s house then to hide, but Mama Roma (Mimi Aguglia) won’t have any of it.  This isn’t the boy she raised.  “Why must you kill?” she implores, but he shows no remorse, and in a moving scene, she summons up the strength to rejects her own son and send him away to find somewhere else to hide.

He finds an old girlfriend to help in part of his search.  Shelley Winters has a terrific early featured role as Brenda, the good-times girl who finds herself in for more than she bargained.  After helping get the address of the person he’s after, she finds he is in need of immediate medical assistance, which adds an extra layer of  urgency to the desperate race against time.  Police are already tracking him down, so they must find some unlicensed doctor willing to do the patch-up job for ready money. The scene of the back seat surgery manages to blend humor & tension, when Brenda must go into a bar for brandy, and comes out with a tag-a-long drunk (Howard Sullivan) who won’t take no for an answer.

Finally, patched up and on his own after ditching Brenda, Rome tracks down the third party in the jewelry robbery he was blamed for - a to-this-point mysterious figure named Rose Given. Hope Emerson is the absolute embodiment of this, the most unique and entertaining and intimidating figure in the film. Given is a former singer who now runs a massage parlor, but was also in on the jewel theft with Niles & Whitey...maybe even orchestrated it. She’s a tough old broad, big and imposing of frame, and crafty and dangerous if intellect, a sort of cagey Kate Smith with bad table manners and a deadly and powerful pair of hands that quickly manage to get around Rome’s neck. The interplay between these two is some of the most riveting in the film.  She is the most terrifying threat to Rome’s plans and life in the picture, but is not without nuance.  When not solely focused on her desire to get back the jewels from Rome, she has moments in which she opines on her miserable life, expressing her cynical views on her regular massage clients, and their eternal quest for fleeting beauty.

Forging a wary agreement, they arrange to collect the jewels from their hiding place in a locker at the train station, and Rome double-crosses her, calling in the cops to pick her up, an event that brings about another shooting as she wings Candella during the arrest.

Like Rome, Candella is too tough to let a bullet wound keep him cooped up in a hospital.  Still  following his leads, he tracks down the mystery girl from the hospital room, deducing somehow that the nurse on duty had taken her and hidden her for Rome. Candella finds Rome and his girl in a church.

This dream girl is Tina (Debra Paget), the girl for whom Rome tells himself he has done all this for.   Early on, when questioned about her, he denies she was real-  “it must have been a dream I was having,” he says. Those words are truer than he knows.  The angelic, perfect, saintly object of his affection is little more than a figment of his imagination that he has built up for himself and used to justify all his wrongdoing. Though Paget’s character is certainly a wonderful person, Tony Rome’s fantasy of her is inevitably disappointed. When she sees all the awful things he’s done for her sake, she is rightly horrified and crushed.  This is not the man she knew. That Rome is dead. This is a wrenching, devastating end to all his hopes for happiness.

Candella’s words to Rome confirm what Tina has seen in him, and perhaps opens Rome’s eyes to his own dreadful deeds.  Candella points to all the lives Rome has ruined- the dead cop and his family, the secretary at Niles’ office, Brenda for aiding and abetting him, the doctor who would be sentenced for illegal practice, and Rome’s own family who will lose him to prison or the electric chair.  His mother, his father, his young brother Tony who had idolized and looked up to him and was headed down the same road.   The focus of the narrative turns a spotlight on the destructive impact Rome’s crimes have on those around him, the collateral damage. He has so concern for the needs of others, but uses and manipulates everyone for his own ends.  “You didn’t forget about those people,” Candella says, “You never even thought of them.”

Of course it all must end with some fatal gun-play, brutal in its impact and chilling in its finality.  younger brother Tony arrives in time to witness his brother’s death, then stumbles away sadly until he sees Candella lying hurt on the sidewalk, and confesses to Candella that a conversation they had earlier had affected him, that he had just been coming to tell his brother he couldn’t follow in his doomed footsteps.  The film ends with him crying into Candella’s shoulder, a simple and moving image of the lasting and deep destruction brought by the choices of one man who wouldn’t go straight, but trudged on, intent upon throwing himself deeper and deeper into trouble, drawn on by the power of his own fatal decisions.

 The music by Alfred Newman is pitch-perfect, and though some bits are recycled from other scores, all of it is apropos to the story. In particular, his theme for Street Scene (1931) shows up here as it does in numerous other films from around this time, including I Wake Up Screaming, The Dark Corner, Kiss of Death, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Gentleman’s Agreement, and even How to Marry a Millionaire.

Directed by Robert Siodmak, with script by Richard Murphy (Panic in the Streets, Boomerang) from the novel The Chair for Martin Rome, by Henry E. Helseth, this film is filled to the brim with brilliantly limned characters, both major and minor, each with well fleshed-out motivations and complex, nuanced desires, all intricately woven into a perfectly arranged web of darkness and grim tragedy to form a memorable morality tale.

**** out of 5

Snowbound (1948)

“You’re young, Mr. Blair. you’ve got your life ahead of you... I hope. Cultivate a little less curiosity.”

Scripted by David Evans and Keith Campbell from the novel The Lonely Skier by Hammond Innes, this film features some expressive cinematography by Stephen Dade, appropriately scored by Cedric Thorpe Davis, whose most notable films today are probably Kidnapped and Rob Roy: the Highland Rogue, two of Walt Disney’s London-produced live action features. This film is edited by James Needs (later a Hammer studios regular), and directed by David MacDonald, who began his film career working for Cecil B. DeMille as a production assistant. in 1929.

The cast is the real reason to come to this production, which as a convoluted and occasionally muddled plot as the audience is frequently lost trying to keep track of who is doing what to whom and why. The actors here are seldom less than entertaining, even when the script gives them difficult material to work from.

We are first introduced to our lead character, Neil Blair (Dennis Price) on the set of a movie studio, where he is working as an extra. He is spotted by the director, Derek Engels (The great Robert Newton), who was his former officer during the war (WWII, that is). He picks him out for a special project of his own, but gives him only the most vague of instructions on what is expected of him - go to a cozy ski lodge (referred to in the film as a hut, but quite a bit more expansive than one might think of as such) in the alps, and watch certain people who he finds there. Engels also gives Blair a photograph of a woman he is to keep an eye out for, and a name to go with it - Carla Rometta (Mila Parely).

Blair’s cover story is that he is to pose as a script writer, off on assignment to capture local color, and is accompanied on the excursion by a cameraman named Joe Wesson (Stanley Holloway), who is to know nothing of his real reasons for the trip (as if Blair has any real idea himself!). The only additional clues Engels gives Blair is that the mission is based on a lead Engels picked up while he was working for British intelligence during the war. This is supposed to serve as a set-up for the plot, but with such vague information, the direction of the story seems more unfocused than mysterious.

At the lodge, Blair soon encounters a disparate cast of variously menacing and peculiar characters. There is Valdini (Marcel Dalio), an overly-friendly Italian who accompanies Carla, who is currently posing as a Countess. The innkeepers at the lodge (Willy Fueter & Catherina Ferraz) are oddly reticent to receive any guests, but are pursuaded by Valdini to give them two of the several available empty rooms.

Each of these residents of projects mysterious private motives and there is much skulking and poking about the lodge and the surrounding slopes. Here we see one of the more unique aspects of the film, particularly in regard to its subversion of the typical noir tropes of darkness and shadows. Though there are plenty of these elements at play in the visuals during the scenes inside the lodge, it is starkly contrasted by the bright, white open spaces and clear bright snow-covered ski slopes where the lodgers spend their time when not nosing about for the as-yet unnamed treasure they seek. Both those dark, shadowy places and the clean quiet mountains turn out to be equally treacherous.

Two more guests arrive after this and are given a similar welcome. First is the secretive Greek visitor, Karamikos (Herbert Lom), who acts friendly enough, but whose words and actions carry an ominous undercurrent of danger. His interactions with the other guests exudes a sly, casually evil confidence in his own superior intellect and abilities. The last guest to join the party is a man calling himself Gilbert Mayne (Guy Middleton), who mostly keeps to himself and lurks in shadows when no one is looking. He reacts violently to cameras, for unknown reasons unwilling to allow his picture to be taken.

Off on a ski run together, Mayne leads Blair off a steep embankment and leaves him for dead there. He denies knowledge of Blair’s whereabouts on his return to the cottage, but “Countess” Carla suspects something is wrong, and calls for a search party to rescue him. Their relationship is not deeply enough established by the filmmakers, but the implication here is supposed to be that they have fallen for one another.

Though Blair’s disappearance is little more than a plot detoir and does little to move the story forward, the torch-lit search sequence at least provides some unique visuals. He is brought back to the hut, sore, exhausted, cold, but otherwise still enough alive to stay in the lodge and conveniently not require hospitalization.

After a brief flashback scene explaining how the gold came to be here (narrated by Karamikos/Von Kellerman) the final battle for the treasure begins with a flurry of back stabbings, shootings, and gun-play all coming to a boil at once. After a brief and slightly out-of-tone comic interruption by Wesson, the tense drama continues. bullets fly, glasses smash, and, while Kellerman forces a dig in the cellar at gunpoint, a fire starts in lodge. only Blair, Wesson, and Carla escape the blaze, and, as they watch the flames glow against the white, silent mountains they vow to leave the gold wherever is was hidden. This abrupt ending to a plot that never really found its footing is at least in keeping with the despair and dark bitter mood of the noir era, but one finds it difficult to watch this film and particularly this excellent cast, and, like the characters at the finale bemoaning their lost treasure, not think of what could have been.

His return creates a precarious tension among the lodgers, as accusations are thrown about and distrust is sown among these familiar strangers who not exactly friendly when they started out. Adding to the conflict is the appearance at last of Engels, who has decided it is time to check up on his “writer” in person and see how things are working out for his assignment. Just as he shows up, a storm begins to blow over, isolating them all together in the lodge for the night, forcing a final stand-off between the various treasure-seekers.

As they sit around eating together, Engel begins to unmask each of the guests. The Countess and Validini are the ones who, during the war, had found out from a soldier about a secret nazi gold shipment and plotted to steal it. Mayne is not the English ex-soldier he claims to be, but a fortune-hunting partner in her scheme, living under a stolen identity obtained from a dead body. And Karamikos, it seems, is not Greek, but a German, Herr Von Kellerman, a former intelligence rival from the Nazi army, come to claim the Nazi gold that was hidden somewhere on the property where the lodge is situated. This, then, is the great reveal, the great Maltese Falcon MacGuffin Dingus they are all after.

** out of 5

The Man I Love (1947)

"Who's looking for happiness?  At the present time my life is a comfortable blank, and it's ok with me!"

Add this one to your list of Christmas noirs.  Sure, it's heavier on the christmas and domestic drama than the noir, but there's no extricating the two elements from one another in this relatively obscure entry in the Raoul Walsh directing oevre.

Based upon a Maritta Wolff novel, the script is crafted by the under-appreciated Catherine Turney, who also wrote for such noteworthy film noir classics as Mildred Pierce, A Stolen Life, Cry Wolf, and No Man of Her Own. also credited with writing duties is Jo Pagano, perhaps best known for his screenplay for The Sound and the Fury.

 Sprinkle into this mix a liberal helping of music by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, and others, excellently arranged and woven into the score by Max Steiner, and the result is an intriguing and hard-not-to-love piece of entertainment that engages the audience on multiple levels.

The great Ida Lupino is the central figure around whom the various dramas and plot threads revolve. She plays Petey Brown, a nightclub singer (singing voice performed by Peg la Centra, who also doubled for her voice in Escape Me Never, as well as for Susan Hayward in Smash-Up: Story of a Woman) who comes home for christmas with her two sisters, brother, and their families, and winds up finding herself in the position of having to resolve all their problems for them before she can leave again. She also finds herself caught up in a two-sided romantic triangle that I'll go into in more detail shortly.

Upon her arrival on Christmas Eve, we are introduced to the whole family.  First is married sister Sally Otis(Andrea King), whose soldier husband Roy (John Ridgely) is in a mental hospital recovering from some kind of war fatigue, who works as a server at a local Italian restaurant while trying her best to raise their young boy, who we first encounter showing off his black eye.  She has a brief flashback sequence to relate to her sister the troubles with Roy, which seem to be very severe, including and irrational jealousy and suspicion of his wife's faithfulness to him while he's been at war and in the hospital.

Also living with Sally is the younger sister, Virginia "Ginny" Brown (Martha Vickers), a happily single young lady who'd rather stay at home than run around trying to find a man. The third sibling is Joey Brown (Warren Douglas), who, despite his siblings' objections, has taken a position working for the big bad guy in the film, Nicky Toresca (Robert Alda, who, incidentally, made his start in Hollywood playing Gershwin in the entertaining, if not completely accurate, biopic Rhapsody in Blue), who owns the local night club and perhaps most of the illegal business in town as well.

Petey catches Toresca making unwanted advances toward Sally, and seems to conclude that the best way to protect her sister is to draw all the fire to herself by taking a job  performing in Toresca's club. Working there, she also manages to keep an eye on her brother Joey, who manages repeatedly to get himself into trouble while doing Toresca's dirty work for him.

It is as a result of one of these incidents that she first encounters San Thomas (dependably stolid but largely forgotten actor Bruce Bennett), a famous pianist whose work she has admired from afar, and whose spirit she falls for when they wind up drawing closer during the course of the story.  She has gone to bail her brother out of jail for a brawl, and when she meets Joey leaving the police headquarters with a self-sufficient strut, she decided to bail the other guy out instead.  This turns out to be Thomas, who is initially ungrateful, but who by their second meeting is a bit more receptive to Petey's charms.

They quickly bond over a piano and some booze.  His playing (dubbed evocatively by the fingers of Raymond Turner) strikes deep resonant chords (sorry not sorry) that pluck at her heart strings (I told you I wasn't sorry!).  Their romance is not all hearts and flowers, though.  He is divorced, but still hung up on his ex-wife, the named but never on-screen presence that haunts the couple's relationship and hopes of happiness.

He warns her not to fall for him. "Petey, you're swell - I don't want to ruin your life, too."
But his words fall on deaf ears. "Look, let me handle my funeral in my own way, will ya?" Petey says, pulling him down to embrace and kiss him. There is some attempted dramatic conflict when each separately sees an article in the paper announcing that his ex wife will be in town, but there is little real question of whether he will leave Petey to chase after her. The event causes them temporarily to be separated, but it is clear by now that more than their mutual love of music connects them.

This little fling does not sit well with Nicky Toresca, who wants her for himself, and doesn't care if she doesn't want him back, saying almost exactly that to her at one point.  Meanwhile, other problems are brewing.

The wild card in the deck is the family's neighbor, and particularly his boozy, floozy wife.  Johnny O'Connor (Don McGuire) is a good honest hard working guy, but he works nights and can't find time to spend with his wife Gloria (Dolores Moran), so she finds other men to give her attention, letting Virginia watch her twins while she's out on the town at night.  Where troubles begin to accelerate for everyone is when she begins to spend her time with Toresca, and word of her philandering gets back
to her husband, who throws her out.

Toresca, who is not interested in her except as some free side action, tasks Joey with getting rid of her.  This job goes horribly wrong, with her jumping out of the car and stumbling drunkenly into oncoming traffic and to her own death. At this point, film takes a sudden turn from fairly standard drama to a twisted noir convergence of broken people lashing out at one another, with only Petey able to bring things to a peaceable conclusion.

Johnny O'Connor is out to kill whoever was responsible.  Petey hides her brother in her apartment (not a very creative hiding spot, but it works to move the plot along).
Toresca, unaware of Johnny's vendetta, tries to use the situation to force her to abandon Thomas in exchange for not calling the cops and pinning the blame for Gloria's death on Petey's brother Joey. Then the big showdown happens, as Johnny shows up to get his justice.  How Petey resolves the situation is unique for its time in the position of dominance it bestows upon her as a female character.

Petey is here shown to be a stronger presence than any of the men in her world.  How many film from the era can you think of where the final confrontation has the lady doing all the slugging? She ends up literally slapping sense into Johnny and figuratively doing the same to Nicky with the same blows. It's a dramatic encounter, and much like in real life, it is over as quickly as it erupted.  Petey's actions protects Joey, keep Johnny from doing something foolish, and stun Nicky into doing the right thing by not railroading her brother.

This conflict resolved, we are given the coda to her romantic fling with San Thomas, in a wistful goodbye in the fog.  Though they are parting for now, he going back to sea with the merchant marines, and she going away to Chicago to work, the both seem to have been better for the time they had together.

In their parting words, there is an exchange that seems like a riff on Bogart's line from Casablanca.

Thomas calls back to an earlier conversation, "Remember you once told me, 'all of us are standing in the mud,' "
She remembers. " 'but some of us are looking at the stars...' "
Taking her in his arms and looking far out into her eyes, he says, "Here's lookin' at you, babe."
Then they embrace with a longing farewell kiss.

With Roy returning home to his wife Sally, all cured somehow from his mental issues, Petey leaves town having pretty well fixed everyone's problems, except the widowed Johnny O'Connor and his infant twins, but there is, if one looks hard enough, a possibility that he might find happiness with young Virginia Brown, who at one point is accused of having a crush on him.

As I mentioned at the beginning, there is a lot to appreciate about this film, particularly all the music, even if it is mostly the work of off-screen talents.  Ida Lupino is the clear stand-out in the picture, but she has a solid cast supporting her, which in addition to those already listed, is audience favorite Alan Hale, working the comedy relief angle as Riley, a man in Toresca's employ at the club.  Unfortunately the plot at times lacks focus, like it is juggling too many threads (let my mix my metaphors how I like), and the end result is some nice colors that never completely mesh into a proper tapestry, but is still an interesting window dressing to look at.

*** out of 5

Appointment With Crime (1946)

Appointment with Crime starts with the crash of a storefront window.  Lowlife thug Leo Martin (William Hartnell, the original Dr. Who) reaches in to grab the jewels there, but has his arms pinned there by the heavy metal emergency bars as they come smashing down.  His two accomplices in the care drive away in a panic, leaving him alone to face the law.

His screams of pain ring out, "My wrists! My wrists!"

A brief flashback shows the plans being laid out for this theft gone wrong.
Gus Loman (Raymond Lovell), the leader of the little gang, reiterates to Martin the simplicity of the part he has to play in their aptly-named smash-and-grab operation: "One smash, two grabs, and flee away! Just remember, we won't let you down, *whatever* happens!"

But when the only thing smashed and grabbed are his own wrists, Martin soon discovers the insincerity of Loman's promise, and ends up with several years in prison to stew about it, letting hate and vengeance rot in his gut.  By the time he gets released, Martin has been transformed from young punk to a vicious beast who deserves to be ranked among the most jaded brutes in noir.  There's hard-boiled and there's Leo Martin, a hand grenade slipped into a carton of hard-boiled eggs- looks tough, feels tough, but with a dangerously explosive interior.

Upon release, Martin looks up his old friends and tries to get back in with them, but Loman turns him down with a sneer, telling him he's been out of the game too long and times have changed.  How can he keep up with the modern pace of the criminal world? So Martin set off on a spree of his own to prove them wrong.

Once he's established his prowess, he returns to complete his revenge on the old gang.  First, he elaborately arranges his alibi - that he has spent the night at a dance hall with one of the girls there, Carole Dane (Joyce Howard - who also was they met in the dark), only leaving her once to get some two glasses of orangeade for them (drinks which he had previously purchased and hidden behind some potted plants).

Then, he kills the getaway driver who had left him hanging, and frames Loman with a gun that carries his prints. Either blackmail or prison time; either option is fine with him.

Unfortunately, in the plotting of this set-up he makes two fatal mistakes. One is that the gun turns out to be the property of the city's biggest crime boss, Gregory Lang (Herbert Lom).  The second involves the apparent popularity and limited supply of orangeade as a drink at the dance hall. As a result he is soon being hunted by both sides of the law.

On the side of the law is Inspector Rogers (Robert Beatty), an intelligent, persistent, but fair-minded policeman who very quickly suspects Martin is the guilty party. but seems to hope Martin will come clean and help lead him to the rest of the gang. Somewhere in between the law and Martin is Carol Dane, who does her best to defend him.  There is clearly a bond that forms between them, but except for a few scenes, such as one in which Inspector Rogers is trying to persuade her she is being manipulated and used by Martin, this relationship is a bit under-explored by the film.

The criminal side is led by Herbert Lom's character, a cunning, but icily detached mastermind who sits around in his den with cigarette holder and smoking jacket with his fey adviser, Noel Penn (Alan Wheatley) who is equal parts cruel and clever, with a penchant for calling everyone "darling" while fingering the keys of his piano.

And performing all the dirty work is Jonah Crackle, an atypical hit man, who we first see carrying out  Penn's plan to eliminate the bungling Loman for being so stupid as to allow himself and Lang tangled up in the murder and making Lang subject to the blackmailing demands of Martin.
Then we see him torturing Martin to find the whereabouts of the incriminating gun, experimenting with different methods until he pinpoints Martin's weakness and exploits it, threatening to crush his wrists again in a press.

Martin relents and promises to tell Lang where the gun is hidden, but then strikes a deal with Lang to get work for him on a train heist in exchange for money and the location of the gun.  The train heist naturally goes badly for him as the converging forces close in on him at last- criminals attempting to use the chance to eliminate him, and police finally trapping him as he attempts to get away with the loot and the girl, who he has taken on the train with him.  

In some ways this film is more of a gangster movie than what one might think of as noir.  It has an unusual distinction of casting a murderer as a protagonist - the ultimate definition of an antihero. Despite his lack of redeeming characteristics, his enemies are painted in even worse light, so the audience must root for him to beat them, at least until the point near the end when we see him turn on the girl,  who was so kind, forgiving, and trusting of him, and use her as a human shield. Omly at that moment does it become satisfying to see the cruelly iron way in which he is caught-  once more pinned by his wrists in a window, howling like the trapped beast he is, "My wrists! My wrists!"

Direction and script for the film are both adequately provided by John Harlowe, from a story by Michael Leighton.  The music is tautly strung through the picture by the future popular mood music creator George Melachrino, here credited with his first credited film score.  Tense and grim are the best words to describe this drama, and it supplies enough of both those elements to make this a worthwhile view for noir fans looking for something new and different on the fringes of the genre.

** out of 5