Fate Opens The File on Thelma Jordon

Now Playing: The File on Thelma Jordon (1949)

Pros: A good, mid-level effort that represents a sort of watershed in Barbara Stanwyck’s noir career; Features a relatable “everyman” in Wendell Corey
Cons: A head-slapper of an ending that manages to be both brutal and cloyingly sentimental

This post is part of the It’s in the Name of the Title Blogathon, hosted by two big names in movie blogging, Gill at Realweegiemidget Reviews and Rebecca at Taking Up Room. Gill and Rebecca tasked their fellow bloggers with reviewing a movie in which a character’s name (first, last or full) appears in the title; for more contributions, see either or both of the hosts’ blogs.

Speaking of big names, there weren’t many that were bigger in the classic era of screen entertainment than Barbara Stanwyck. From the risque pre-Code talkies in which she played plucky women of questionable virtue, to TV dramas like The Big Valley where she portrayed tough-as-nails matriarchs, Stanwyck blazed her own distinctive cinematic trail, eventually garnering four Best Actress Academy Award nominations, an honorary Oscar, three primetime Emmys and a multitude of lifetime achievement awards, among other honors. 

A rundown of Stanwyck’s title roles alone demonstrates the depth and variety of her career: as Mexicali Rose (1929) she’s a “loose” woman who likes to use men; as Annie Oakley (1935) she can do anything a man can do, and better; as harried, working class Stella Dallas (1937), she would do anything to help her daughter get ahead in life; as The Mad Miss Manton (1938), she’s a fun-loving debutante who proves to be more adept at discovering clues than the police; as Martha Ivers (The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, 1946), she’s an intimidating business woman with a dark secret; and as Mrs.Carroll (The Two Mrs. Carrolls, 1947), she’s the new wife of a tortured artist who may or may not be utterly mad.

Stanwyck reached her noir femme-fatale peak as cold-as-ice Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944). But as the war years receded and America settled down into a dull but comfortable suburban existence, Stanwyck’s screen image shifted. The noir roles were still there, but she was just as likely to be on the receiving end of dark designs as not.

Fred was sorry that he wasn't double indemnified against laser death stares.

Only a year after her dicey stint as the second Mrs. Carroll, Stanwyck was again in peril in Sorry, Wrong Number, portraying an invalid, Leona Stevenson, who inadvertently overhears a murder plot from her bedroom phone.

The difference between calculating Phyllis Dietrichson and panicky, bed-ridden Leona couldn’t be more stark, yet when Thelma Jordon rolled around in 1949, Stanwyck’s crime drama roles -- both as the Femme Fatale and the Suffering Woman -- were starting to get on her nerves:

“‘My God, isn’t there a good comedy around?’ [Stanwyck] asked at the time. ‘I’m tired of suffering in films. And I’ve killed so many co-stars lately, I’m getting a power complex!” [Quoted in Dan Callahan’s biography, Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, University Press of Mississippi, 2011, p.159]

As if to punctuate the grimness of the roles she was getting, Thelma Jordon is both a femme fatale and a sufferer. Thelma takes a long, circuitous route to get to both states of noir-ness (maybe too long and too circuitous; more on that later), and drags a noir Everyman in the form of Assistant District Attorney Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey) along for the ride.

Fate arranges for a “meet cute” between the duplicitous Thelma and her ostensible patsy, DA Marshall. One night at the District Attorney’s office, Cleve is downing shots and complaining about his depressing marital situation to his boss, Miles Scott (Paul Kelly). After Scott calls it a night and goes home, alluring Thelma shows up at the office asking for Scott, wanting to report an attempted burglary at her aunt’s house, where she is staying.

Now inebriated and not wanting to go home where his wealthy, domineering father-in-law is holding court at a dinner party, Cleve convinces Thelma to go out for drinks. Pretty soon Cleve, disenchanted with his hum-drum middle class life, falls hard for the alluring and mysterious Thelma.

Cleve: "I'm fed up. Ever heard that phrase? No, you wouldn't, you're not married."

It seems that a combination of alcohol and infatuation has painted a big P for Patsy on Cleve's forehead.

First, there’s Thelma's story about attempted burglaries at her aunt’s house that smells to high heaven. When asked why she didn’t just go to the police, Thelma responds with a laugher of an explanation that her aunt is afraid of uniformed cops. Then, having allowed Cleve to think that she was single, Thelma belatedly admits that she herself is married -- to a low-life crook and con man named Tony (Richard Rober).

The noir stuff soon hits the fan when, on the night that the pair are planning to go off together on a romantic trip, Thelma calls Cleve in a panic that her aunt has been shot. Cleve steals over to the house to help clean up the mess. Wanting desperately to believe that it’s Thelma’s no-good hubby Tony who has shown up unannounced and killed the old lady in an attempt to rob her, Cleve, with his extensive DA experience, frenetically barks orders at Thelma to set the scene to look like a garden-variety burglary gone wrong.

If Thelma is truly a cold-blooded murderer she’s an excellent actress, as she seems genuinely panicked, like an innocent bystander who realizes how much the circumstances make her look guilty. And despite the lovers’ best efforts at rearranging the crime scene, she most definitely looks guilty.

Thelma: "I wish so much crime didn't take place after dark. It's so unnerving!"

When Thelma’s sketchy past becomes public, along with the news that Aunt Vera changed her will in Thelma’s favor, means, motive and opportunity line up against her. Combined with Vera’s butler’s testimony about Thelma’s furtive behavior on the night in question, DA Scott decides that a murder charge is a slam dunk.

With the ball in his court, Cleve goes to work, anonymously suggesting to Thelma’s lawyer (Stanley Ridges) that he hire the Chief District Attorney’s lawyer brother to work for the defense, forcing the DA to step down due to conflict of interest. Cleve gets the lead prosecutor assignment, and proceeds to do everything he can to throw the case.

Is he the dupe of a cold-blooded Phyllis Dietrichson type, or is it more complicated than that? And where was the shadowy Tony on that fateful night?

The File on Thelma Jordon invites the viewer to be an alternate juror on the case. We haven't witnessed the actual shooting, but we have seen Cleve’s and Thelma's hurried rearrangement of the crime scene. The circumstantial evidence -- like the convenient change to the will -- is strong, but there are seeds of doubt. Thelma’s distress on the night of the shooting seems genuine, which is uncharacteristic of a shrewd, heartless manipulator -- or was she just acting?

Stanwyck synthesizes Thelma’s contradictions over the course of the film, from wry bemusement at Cleve’s drunken advances, to smoldering passion, to panicked helplessness in the middle of the night, to tight-lipped stoicism after she’s been arrested, to an almost regal dignity as she leads a swarm of reporters and onlookers from the jail to the courtroom to hear the jury’s verdict.

You'd be confident too if you had both the defense and the prosecution on your side.

Thelma’s ultimate fate comes completely out of left field and it’s both shocking and cloyingly sentimental. It's the sort of ending guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye of any blue-haired upholder of public morality. 

Fortunately, Thelma's ending hasn't erased fond memories of the film. Biographer Dan Callahan relates that at the American Film Institute’s fete of Stanwyck, in which she received a Lifetime Achievement Award, Walter Matthau singled out Barbara’s performance in Thelma Jordon:

“[P]articularly the way she sighed, ‘Maybe I am just a dame and didn’t know it.’ Matthau then went on to knock her co-star, Wendell Corey, an unprepossessing actor who was good when he was doing a menacing type in Budd Boetticher’s The Killer is Loose (1956), but who was hard-pressed to hold his own as a leading man opposite Stanwyck.” [Callahan, p. 158]

While I’m hesitant to disagree with the great Walter Matthau, I think “unprepossessing” is just what the film calls for. Cleve is a post-war, suburban “everyman” who is fed up with domestic life and resents being dominated by his overbearing father-in-law. Cleve would be far less believable in the hands of a more charismatic leading man who could “hold his own” with Stanwyck. Men like Cleve don’t often score with sensual mystery women like Thelma, and it makes sense that he’s willing to endanger his family and career for her.

Thelma: "I'm no good for any man for any longer than a kiss!"

In the same year as Thelma Jordon, Corey lost Janet Leigh to Robert Mitchum in Holiday Affair. Corey was the epitome of the reliable but unexciting second male lead who loses out in romance to the charismatic star. At least he had Stanwyck all to himself for most of The File, even if it wasn’t entirely due to his animal magnetism.

The File on Thelma Jordon was directed by Robert Siodmak, who was one of a generation of filmmakers who got their start in Germany during the silent era, but fled to Hollywood as Hitler rose to power. In the 1940s he made a string of crime pictures that years later would come to be seen as some of the very best examples of film noir, including Phantom Lady (1942), Christmas Holiday (1944; with Deana Durbin and Gene Kelly), The Killers (1946; Burt Lancaster’s film debut and Ava Gardner’s first featured role), Cry of the City (1948; Victor Mature and Richard Conte), Criss Cross (1949, Burt Lancaster and Yvonne DeCarlo), and of course The File on Thelma Jordon to round out the decade.

Besides having such an assured director in her corner, Thelma benefits from George Barnes’ standout cinematography. Many of Cleve’s and Thelma’s scenes together take place at night, with the play of light and shadow serving as a visual metaphor for the lovers' dark sides and conflicting emotions.

Thelma Jordon is not Barbara Stanwyck’s best title role, and it’s not the high point of director Siodmak’s noir career, but it is a solid crime thriller with a relatable everyman in the person of Wendell Corey and enough plot twists and turns to make things interesting. But be forewarned: the slap dash ending might induce cognitive whiplash.

Where to find it: Streaming | DVD

Jack Nicholson's Big Breakdown: The Cry Baby Killer

Now Playing: The Cry Baby Killer (1958)

Pros: Generally solid acting; several good moments of suspense and psychological drama; good jazz score
Cons: One of the more interesting characters disappears midway through; too much talk from the adults and not enough teen delinquency

This post is part of 'The Favorite Stars in B Movies' blogathon hosted by yours truly. Please check out the contributions from my fellow bloggers on a wide array of stars who appeared in B movies on their way up or down the career ladder, or who made Bs their own personal domain.

• Blogathon: Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

Superstars have to start somewhere. Sports stars typically prove themselves by grinding through a long succession of school, amateur and/or minor league programs. The path to movie stardom is more circuitous and subject to luck (that is, if you’re not part of an established Hollywood family), but over the years, B movies have helped serve as the minor leagues for aspiring stars.

“King of the Bs” Roger Corman has been producing movies since the mid-1950s. Once he perfected the art of making films quickly, cheaply and profitably, he reinvested the proceeds and leveraged his knowledge to become a sort of Hollywood minor league commissioner and film school director rolled into one.

The list of high-powered Hollywood icons who learned their craft on Corman productions is a long one. Among directors, such household names as Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, and Martin Scorsese, among others, got invaluable early experience from “The Roger Corman Film School.” 

Actors who got career boosts working for Roger include such luminaries as Charles Bronson, Sandra Bullock, David Carradine, Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones and Sylvester Stallone.

In 2010 Corman received a long overdue honorary Academy Award for his “rich engendering of films and filmmaking.”

One of Roger’s most successful “engenderment” projects is Jack Nicholson, a 12 time Oscar nominee and 3 time winner. Although Corman helped jumpstart many acting careers that were already spluttering along, Nicholson was only 20 and had just one small TV part to his credit when he was picked for the title role in The Cry Baby Killer (Corman was executive producer and financed the film).

Who knew this man would go on to collect all those Oscar statuettes?

Cry Baby wasn’t the most auspicious of debuts -- the movie is only an hour long, and Nicholson spends most of his screen time pouting, scowling and waving a gun around. But it was the start of a productive relationship that saw Jack appearing in seven more Corman productions. In addition, under Roger’s tutelage Jack secured a producer credit for the western Ride in the Whirlwind (1966) and two writing credits, for Ride and the groundbreaking psychedelic exploitation film The Trip (1967).

Jack later summed up his work with Corman in typical Nicholsonian fashion: “He saved all of our careers. He kept us working when no one else would hire us. For this, we are all eternally grateful. For the fact that he was able to underpay us, he is eternally grateful.” [Philip di Franco, ed., The Movie World of Roger Corman, Chelsea House, 1979, p. 134.]

Corman may have wished he’d paid the cast of Cry Baby Killer even less -- it was the frugal producer’s first movie that failed to make a profit in its theatrical release (although it eventually recouped its costs with sales to TV).

Certainly all the elements of ‘50s drive-in popularity were there: a title character with James Dean-like angst, teen gang fights, gunplay, a tense stand-off with the cops in a hostage situation, and of course, adult squares looking on disapprovingly of the whole mess.

Roger Corman (center) holds hearings on why Cry Baby Killer didn't earn more at the box office.
(Or is this his cameo as a U.S. Senator in Godfather II? Hmmm... I'll get back to you...)

It’s hard to imagine in our current age of ubiquitous smartphones, social media and video games, but back in the day teens spent much of their free time engaging with the real world, and as a result had a lot more potential for getting into trouble.

Although the U.S. emerged from WWII more prosperous and powerful than ever, Americans spent much of the following decade finding things to be anxious about, from supposed communists in Washington and Hollywood, to the Bomb, to -- you guessed it -- teenagers that spelled Trouble with a capital T.

The “Greatest Generation” was resentful of youths who had the audacity to enjoy the freedoms and prosperity that had been bequeathed to them. Teenagers were the new anti-Boy Scouts: Untrustworthy, unhelpful, unfriendly, unkind, disobedient, sullen, cowardly and definitely not reverent.

Congress set about investigating the baleful influence of comic books, and religious zealots across the country denounced rock and roll as the Devil’s music designed to lead kids astray. 

Hollywood jumped on the juvenile delinquent bandwagon with pictures like The Wild One (1953), The Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The problem, at least from the censorious adult perspective, was that in trying to maximize ticket sales, the studios made bad kids, exemplified by the likes of James Dean, positively glamorous (okay, maybe not so much in the screenshot below).

James Dean paved the tearful way for teen anti-heroes like the Cry Baby Killer.

Bad kids were so good for business that movie screens exploded with Untamed Youth (1957) Running Wild (1955) and committing Crime in the Streets (1956). And it wasn’t just the boys who were leading the charge into delinquency and degradation. Hot Rod Girl(s) (1956), High School Hellcats (1958) and various Girls on the Loose (1958) competed with the males to Live Fast, Die Young (1958) or else pay their debts to society as Reform School Girl(s) (1957).

Roger Corman was never one to let a hot topic go unexploited, and indeed, he dove into it with a vengeance, producing four teen-oriented films in 1957 alone: Rock All Night, Teenage Doll, Carnival Rock and Sorority Girl.

The next year Corman rode the crest of the teen wave with Hot Car Girl, Teenage Caveman (playing off the popularity of I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein that had come out the year before), and of course, Cry Baby Killer.

Somehow, Jack Nicholson’s big screen debut ended up being the box office weakling in this gang. It may not have helped that the teen delinquency movie market was thoroughly saturated by this point. But Cry Baby has its share of problems beyond the obviously miniscule budget.

Jack plays Jimmy Wallace, an average teenager who gets beaten up in the opening scene by the school alpha male Manny (Brett Halsey) and his cackling cronies Joey (Ralph Reed) and Al (James Fillmore). Of course, the fight is over a girl, Carole (Carolyn Mitchell).

Jimmy’s friend Fred helps him get back on his feet while Manny takes his crew to the local diner, where he meets up with Carole. Manny holds court in the diner like the King of Teenland, and he has a cruel streak to match. He browbeats Carole into denouncing poor Jimmy as a punk while Joey eggs everyone on.

Jimmy shows up at the diner with Fred in tow to reclaim his girl Carole. When things look like they’re getting out of hand, the diner owner, Pete Gambelli (Frank Richards), barks at everyone to take it outside.

Jimmy confronts Manny as he holds court at the diner.

When the simmering confrontation turns into yet another fight, Jimmy grabs the gun that Al was wearing in his waistband, and off camera, shots ring out.

Policeman Glen Gannon (John Shay), who has been outside flirting with Julie (Lynn Cartwright), a waitress at the diner, confronts Jimmy, who is still holding the gun. At just the wrong time, a young mother with an infant (Barbara Knudson as Mrs. Maxton) exits the restrooms, and oblivious to the drama unfolding, walks into the standoff.

From the adjacent storeroom, Sam, the kitchen assistant (Smoki Whitfield), sees the woman’s dilemma and stealthily pulls her to safety into the building. Confused and scared, Jimmy refuses to throw down the gun and instead slowly backs into the storeroom and shuts the door.

Now Jimmy’s in a real fix -- he thinks he’s killed Manny and Al, and he’s backed himself into a corner as an accidental hostage-taker. The lives of an innocent man, woman and baby hang in the balance as the panicky young man grapples with what to do next.

"Will somebody please tell me today's diner specials?!"

One of Cry Baby’s biggest problems is that its title character isn’t all that interesting. All we know about Jimmy is that he’s infatuated with Carole and he’s willing to get beaten up in desperate attempts to claim her as his girl. He’s somewhat scruffy looking and not all that bright. In the climactic standoff, he alternates between pouting and yelling at the woman to shut her baby up. Ultimately Nicholson would score a true breakout role in another low-budget youth picture, Easy Rider.

In contrast, Brett Halsey’s Manny is handsome, stylish (he wears a jacket and tie to his fights!), and self-assured to a fault. He has his own retinue of lackeys, and commands people and places with ease. He’s a mafia don, or maybe a Fortune 500 CEO, in the making. Even the middle-aged diner owner sucks up to Manny and looks the other way as he spikes his friends’ drinks with alcohol. He’s the privileged, amoral character you love to hate.

Instead of setting up a dramatic climactic clash between underdog Jimmy and his alphadog nemesis, Cry Baby dispenses with Manny mid-way through the film (we don’t even see him get carted off to the hospital after the gunshots), and introduces Jimmy to a new nemesis, a crying baby (which, come to think of it, gives a disturbing new meaning to the title -- don’t worry, no babies were harmed in the plot or filming of this motion picture!).

"Of course I wear Pierre Cardin to all my gang fights - why do you ask?"

During the standoff, it’s the adults who steal most of the scenes. Upright, serious-as-death Lt. Porter (Harry Lauter) takes over the crime scene (and several of the film’s scenes) delivering fatherly advice to the innocent and a good old-fashioned throttling to the guilty, specifically Joey, whose smartass attitude is too much for the exasperated cop. Porter even reads the riot act to the slimy diner owner Gambelli, who he finds out was allowing Manny and his friends to sneak alcohol into the establishment.

But it’s Julie the world-weary waitress who delivers the film’s most searing indictment of youth culture. We learn from her conversations with patrolman Gannon that Julie is a widowed single mom who is barely scraping by. Mid-way through the stand-off, when she sees that Carole is only thinking of herself and whining about the possibility of going to jail, she delivers a zinger:

"I’ve been working in this dump for six months and I’ve seen a lot like you. You think because you’re 16 the world owes you something… well it doesn’t. You get what you work for, and you work to get Manny Cole! You’ll wind up in the gutter before you’re old enough to vote!"

It’s a powerful scene, but the film spends too much time on adults standing around bemoaning the “youth of today," slowing things down and distracting from the very real drama of the hostage situation.

In addition to the overly-long scenes of Lt. Porter interviewing witnesses and Julie chatting up the lonely bachelor cop, there’s a lot of business around the carnival atmosphere that develops as the standoff plays out. Several of Corman’s regulars show up as onlookers. Ed Nelson, who plays a TV reporter, had already made a half dozen Bs for Corman, including Rock All Night, Teenage Doll and The Brain Eaters, and would make several more before becoming a fixture on TV. (Corman himself makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance as the TV truck flunky).

Two other Corman regulars, Bruno VeSota and Leo Gordon, appear intermittently as a pair of chuckleheads kibitzing with the crowd and impatiently waiting for something bad to happen. Gordon, who is credited with Cry Baby’s story as well as co-writer on the screenplay, has a couple of choice lines, including a rant as he grabs the TV reporter’s microphone:

"I’ll tell you what I think mister, they oughta take these punk kids, throw ‘em in jail and throw away the key! My old man, if I did something wrong, he’d really sort me out!”

Leo Gordon and Bruno VeSota do their poor man's Abbott and Costello routine.

The line is especially ironic, considering that Gordon, who ended up with a couple hundred acting credits and dozens for writing, was an authentic tough guy (and presumed juvenile delinquent) who had served five years at San Quentin for armed robbery before getting his first acting break. One of his directors, Don Siegel, called him “the scariest man I have ever met!” [IMDb]

But apparently Gordon wasn’t scary enough to prevent his script from being messed with. Corman recalled being unpleasantly surprised when, upon returning from an overseas trip and checking in on the production, he was informed by his assistant that everything was great and they had “licked the script.”

"I said, ‘What do you mean, licked the script? It was a fine script. There was nothing wrong with that script.’ He [the assistant] said, ‘It had all kinds of problems. We’ve rewritten it totally and we solved all those problems.’ Well, they had wrecked the script, but were to begin shooting in two days. We put back a few things, but it was too late. The only good thing about the film was that Jack Nicholson made his debut in the picture and did a very nice job. … Leo Gordon, who wrote the original script, had one good line. Playing a bystander, he said, ‘Teenagers -- we never had ‘em when I was a kid.’ I think that was true.’"  [The Movie World of Roger Corman, p. 17]

Roger was definitely proud to have given Nicholson his feature film debut, but he’s a little too hard on the film. In spite of its problems, the acting is generally solid, and it has several good moments of suspense and psychological drama. Plus, the brass jazz score by Gerald Fried livens things up considerably (also of note is the title song "Cry Baby, Cry," which is quite an anthem for the bottom half of a drive-in double bill.)

Jack was on the verge of tears when he finally saw his paycheck for Cry Baby Killer.

Cry Baby Killer could have been improved with more backstory for Jimmy (admittedly difficult for a 60 minute movie), and more of Manny, who is so delightfully bad that we’re sorry to see him get shot and disappear midway through. But hey, it was Jack’s party, and he got to cry like he wanted to.

Where to find it: Streaming 1 | Streaming 2

Film Noir's Most Wanted: Raymond Burr

Years before Raymond Burr became a good guy defending the innocent as Perry Mason and fighting crime as Ironside, he gave new meaning to the word heavy in a string of crime pictures and film noirs from the late ‘40s through the mid-’50s.

Canadian by birth, Burr was born in 1917 in New Westminster, British Columbia. When still a young boy, his mother moved the family to Vallejo, California. Raymond was sent to military school, where he was mercilessly teased because of his weight. At 17 he quit school to join Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which gave him the opportunity to work a variety of jobs.

Burr soon gravitated to acting, working summer stock in Toronto, traveling to Europe for a stint at a UK repertory company and a singing gig at a Paris nightclub (!?), then heading back to California for more acting work at the Pasadena Playhouse.

With that experience under his belt, Burr decided to try his luck on Broadway. By 1943, good reviews for his performance in the play The Duke in Darkness attracted the attention of Hollywood, and he soon had a contract with RKO.

After the war, Burr’s film debut was in an RKO comedy, Without Reservations (1946). But the physically imposing, intense-looking actor was quickly destined for villain roles, appearing as the bad guy in three 1947 films: San Quentin (as an escaped convict), Code of the West (as a typical western black hat), and Desperate (as a revenge-seeking mobster). A new (dark) star was born.

The star of Desperate, Steve Brodie, took credit for starting Burr down the villainous path:

“Ray was… testing for a biblical part, so I suggested his name to the producer, Michael Kraike, for our picture.” … Kraike liked the idea, and for the next decade villain roles were about the only parts Raymond Burr played.” [Karen Burroughs Hannsberry, “Raymond Burr,” in Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir, McFarland, 2003, pp. 70-1.]

Those who only know Raymond Burr as the unflappable defense lawyer Perry Mason might be surprised at how flappable and violent he could be in these early roles. If anything, Burr was heftier than in his later Perry Mason days, an intimidating brick wall of a man in a bulky suit and fedora and wearing a permanent scowl for good measure -- the perfect noir antagonist.

Anyone doing villain roles in Hollywood during this period would have been hard pressed to avoid the kinds of crime pictures that came to be known as film noir. In her book Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir, Karen Burroughs Hannsberry counts nine noirs on Burr’s resume. IMDb lists 21 noirs and near-noirs to his credit.

Without further ado, here’s a “rap sheet” of some of Burr’s more notable film noir appearances:

As Walt Radak in Desperate (1947)

Wanted for:
Grand larceny
Transportation of stolen goods
Attempted murder

Case file summary: Steven Randall (Steve Brodie), a hard-up truck driver, needs work fast because his wife is expecting a baby. He signs up for a driving gig with an old childhood acquaintance, Walt Radak, but soon learns that he’ll be transporting stolen goods. Randall is coerced into going through with the job, but at the staging area, he manages to get the attention of a nearby policeman.

In the resulting shoot-out, the policeman is killed, and Walt’s kid brother Al (Larry Nunn) is charged with murder. Al is sentenced to death, and Randall flees town with his pregnant wife to avoid Radak’s wrath. The gang leader relentlessly tracks down the frightened couple, determined to kill Randall at the same time that his brother is executed in prison.

Quote:
Walt Radak [to Randall]: “In fifteen minutes they're going to throw the switch on Al, and you're going with him... both of you at the same time. It's not very much to do for my own brother, but it's something. It's all I can do now, I guess. Guess Al's already had his last dinner. You might as well have yours too.” [IMDb] 

As Rick Coyle in Raw Deal (1948)

Wanted for:
Robbery
Racketeering
Aiding and abetting
Aggravated assault

Case file summary: Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe), is serving time in prison for a botched robbery masterminded by his boss, Rick Coyle (Burr). Coyle, fearing Sullivan will rat him out, arranges for Joe to escape, but sets him up to be shot during the attempt.

Against the odds, Sullivan makes good on the escape with his girl Pat (Claire Trevor) and his lawyer’s assistant Ann (Marsha Hunt), in tow. Learning of his boss’ attempted double cross, Sullivan decides to go after Coyle for the $50,000 he’s owed.

Quote:
Coyle: “He [Sullivan] was screaming he wanted out. When a man screams, I don’t like it. He might scream loud enough for the D.A. to hear. I don’t want to hurt the D.A.’s ears. He’s sensitive.” [Hannsberry, p. 72]

As J.B. MacDonald in Pitfall (1948)

Wanted for:
Stalking
Harassment
Conspiracy to commit murder

Case file summary: The humdrum middle-class life of married insurance investigator John Forbes (Dick Powell) takes a sharp turn into danger when he meets beautiful and alluring Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott), girlfriend of convicted embezzler Bill Smiley (Byron Barr). Originally intending to retrieve stolen items from Mona for his company, he falls hard for her instead.

Complications ensue when J.B. MacDonald (Burr), an unbalanced private eye working for the insurance company, becomes obsessed with Mona and wants her for himself. He stalks Mona, and plans to set up Smiley, who is soon to be released from prison, to eliminate his competition for Mona’s affections.

Quote:
 MacDonald: “She probably doesn't appeal to you but for me, she's just what I told the doctor to order.” [IMDB]

As Nick Ferraro in His Kind of Woman (1951)

Wanted for:
Kidnapping
Conspiracy to commit murder
Assault with a deadly weapon

Case file summary: Crime boss Nick Ferraro (Burr) has been deported to his native Italy, but plots to return to the States. Ferraro has his henchmen offer down-on-his-luck gambler Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum) $50K to stay at a toney Mexican resort, where he plans to kill Milner and assume his identity.

En route to Mexico, Milner meets wealthy heiress Lenore Brent (Rosalind Russell), who wows him with her beauty and vivaciousness. At the resort, the initially clueless Milner encounters a cast of eccentric characters, including has-been actor Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price), any one of whom may or may not be in on the dastardly plot.

Quote:
Ferraro: “I want him [Milner] to be fully conscious. I don't like to shoot a corpse. I want to see the expression on his face when he knows it's coming.” [IMDb]

As Harry Prebble in The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Wanted for:
Assault

Case file summary: When Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) learns that her fiancé stationed overseas has fallen in love with someone else, she goes on a blind rebound date at the Blue Gardenia nightclub with Harry Prebble (Burr), a cheesecake photographer and professional lounge lizard. Harry gets Norah drunk on multiple cocktails, and takes her back to his apartment with less than honorable intentions.

Norah fends Harry off with a fireplace poker and flees back to her apartment. Waking up the next morning with no clear memory of the previous night’s events, she is shocked to discover that Harry is dead, and the police are looking for a mystery woman who just happens to be her. Norah realizes her only hope is to enlist the aid of a newspaper columnist, Casey Mayo (Richard Conte), who has dubbed the mystery suspect “The Blue Gardenia murderess.”

Quote:
Harry Prebble: “These aren't really drinks. They're trade-winds across cool lagoons. They're the Southern Cross above coral reefs. They're a lovely maiden bathing at the foot of a waterfall.” [IMDb]

Bonus Burr: Two Gorilla-noirs

Bride of the Gorilla (1951)

Written and directed by Curt Siodmak, creator of The Wolf Man, this entertainingly cheesy B features Burr as Barney Chavez, the manager of a remote South American plantation. Barney is in lust with beautiful Dina Van Gelder (Barbara Payton), wife of the plantation’s owner. Barney kills his boss to get to his wife, but his crime is witnessed by a local witch-woman (Gisela Werbisek), who puts the curse of the “Sukara” on him, whereby he turns into a rampaging gorilla by night. Is Barney truly a were-gorilla, or is it all in his head? The local police commissioner (Lon Chaney, Jr.) and doctor (Tom Conway) are on the case.

Quote:
 Police Commissioner Taro (narrating): “This is Jungle - lush, green, alive with incredible growth - as young as day, as old as time. … Isn't it beautiful? But I have also learned that beauty can be venomous, deadly, something terrifying, something of prehistoric ages when monstrous superstitions ruled the minds of men … something that has haunted the world for millions of years rose out of that verdant labyrinth.” [IMDb]

---

Gorilla at Large (1954)

This simian pot-boiler, filmed in 3-D, features Burr as Cy Miller, owner of a carnival called “The Garden of Evil.” The main act features a beautiful trapeze artist, Laverne Miller (Anne Bancroft), who teases Goliath, a killer gorilla, as she swings dangerously close above his head. Cy comes up with the idea of having carnival barker Joey Matthews (Cameron Mitchell) dress up in a gorilla suit and catch Laverne each night as she falls from the trapeze. Soon, various carnies are turning up dead -- could it be Goliath, or someone dressed in the gorilla suit? Detective Sgt. Garrison (Lee J. Cobb) has to sort out the mystery amidst a love quadrangle consisting of Cy, Laverne, Joey and Joey’s fiancée Audrey (Charlotte Austin).

Quote:
Sgt. Garrison: “You've always been this alert, Shaughnessy?”
Shaughnessy: “Always on my toes!”
Sgt. Garrison: “Well, get off 'em. You're a cop, not a ballet dancer.” [IMDb] 

The Dark Before the Dawn of Hammer Horror: Stolen Face and Blackout

It’s blogathon time again! This post is part of the 9th annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon hosted by Terence Towles Canote at his A Shroud of Thoughts blog. After you’ve explored the dark world of Hammer film noir here, check out Terence's blog for more thoughts on films from the UK.

Mean streets. Dark alleyways. Conniving crooks. Corrupt cops. Double-dealin’ dames. To the classic film fan, it all seems as American as apple pie. Of course, greed, shady schemes and murder rear their ugly heads everywhere. And successful movie formulas have a tendency to spread far beyond national boundaries.

The term “film noir” originally circulated among French film critics in the late 1940s to describe Hollywood films of a certain dark, cynical type, but eventually grew to encompass a significant slice of world cinema that shared the same themes and style.

After the unprecedented horrors of WWII, the world’s popular culture could be forgiven for turning to the dark side, even in a country like the U.S. that emerged from the war stronger and more prosperous than ever.

Great Britain’s film industry had good reason to explore dark themes, as the war accelerated the decline of the empire and left Britons with shortages and rationing that lasted for years afterward.

Years before Hammer Films became famous for its technicolor Gothic horrors, the studio cranked out low budget programmers in a variety of genres: mysteries, thrillers, comedies, a smattering of science fiction, and, especially in the post-war years, Hollywood-style crime dramas.

The director who was instrumental in helping Hammer usher in its horror renaissance, Terence Fisher, refined his craft on several gritty B crime pictures before unleashing The Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula on the world.

Many of these films were made by Hammer in arrangement with American distributor Robert L. Lippert, and featured at least one American star, backed by a solid British cast, to ensure box office appeal in the states. (The stars were either on their way up in the business, or more often, on the way down, and thus available to work cheaply.)

In many cases the titles were changed for American distribution -- it’s easy to imagine a frenetic, cigar-chomping Lippert dictating the snappy, hard-boiled titles to his gum-chewing, buxom secretary.

In addition to the two films discussed below, Fisher directed such noirish titles as Man Bait (1952), Dead on Course (1952), Man in Hiding (1953), The Black Glove (1954) and Kill Me Tomorrow (1957), among others. Other noir-sounding titles (directed by others) include: Bad Blonde (1953), Paid to Kill (1954), Heat Wave (1954) and The Glass Tomb (1955).

Beginning in 2006, VCI Entertainment, in association with Kit Parker Films, released DVD sets of what they called “Hammer Film Noir,” focusing on the Hammer-Lippert output of the early-mid ‘50s. While noir purists might take issue with the film noir designation for many of the titles, it’s nonetheless a great service to fans, highlighting an interesting period of Hammer film history that otherwise might swirl down the memory hole. Best of all, many of the sets are still available from online sellers.

Now Playing: Stolen Face (1952)

Pros: Presence of veterans Paul Henreid and Lizbeth Scott lends a veneer of A picture class
Cons: Character motivations and actions are contrived and unbelievable, as is the ending, which is also abrupt and unsatisfying

Despite the presence of once-superstars Paul Henreid and Lizabeth Scott that shouts FILM NOIR in all caps, Stolen Face is barely even a crime drama, instead shading into romantic melodrama territory, albeit with occasional glimpses into a somewhat tame British criminal underworld.

The film wastes no time in establishing its main character, Dr. Philip Ritter (Henreid), a renowned plastic surgeon, as someone too good to be true. In the opening scene, Ritter is playfully bantering with a young boy whose hand mobility he has saved, and reassures the mother who tells him she can’t pay him immediately. Then, after turning down £1000 to perform unneeded cosmetic surgery on a rich, vain dowager, he’s off to the local women’s prison to perform free plastic surgeries on deformed and disfigured inmates.

Ritter believes that correcting the women’s physical deformities can help them reintegrate into society. (A noble aspiration, but one wonders where the money for his practice is coming from, or if he’s just so rich that he doesn’t need it.) The warden has a new case for him -- Lily Conover (Mary Mackenzie) an habitual thief whose face was severely scarred in the London blitz.

Ritter interviews the coarse young woman and is intrigued. But on the drive back from the prison, the exhausted doctor nearly wrecks the car he’s driving, and is given marching orders by his associate to take a needed vacation.

Next thing he knows, Ritter is having a meet cute at an out of the way country inn with a glamorous American concert pianist, Alice Brent (Scott), who is similarly decompressing due to career stresses.

Ritter hears someone in the next room coughing and sneezing, and in reflexive doctor-mode he scribbles out a whimsical prescription for “two aspirin and a shot of whiskey,” which he slips under the door. The prospective patient turns out to be the beautiful and classy pianist. Fortunately, Alice has the aspirin and Ritter has the whiskey, (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

The doctor prescribes rest and relaxation in front of the fireplace.

They both decide to stay on a couple of extra days, she supposedly to recover from her bad cold and he to take care of his new patient, but of course it’s all about the mutual attraction. They conduct a whirlwind romance via a montage sequence, saving some wear and tear on the viewer’s patience.

Just as Ritter is falling head over heels in love, Alice packs up and leaves with no notice. Later, back at his surgery, Alice calls, explaining that she is engaged to be married (to her manager, David, played by Andre Morrell).

Devastated, Ritter distracts himself with work, remembering his promise to Lily to make her into a new woman. In 1950s Britain, there’s no give and take between doctor and patient, especially for a patient who is a female convict. Lily is grateful for Ritter’s magnanimous attention, but she has no say in the ultimate outcome. She asks him twice what she will look like, and he tells her he doesn’t know. It’s just assumed she will look completely different, and presumably far more beautiful than she was prior to her injuries.

Ritter is set to go all-out Pygmalion on Lily. His surgical office looks more like an artist’s studio, with sketch pads lying about and a large clay bust representing the idealized Lily -- covered, so as not to spoil the surprise -- situated prominently in the center of the room. Lily’s face is just so much clay in the “artist’s” hands.

While outwardly solicitous and professional, inwardly Ritter is roiling with disappointment, so we know what’s coming. In yet another montage sequence, we see Alice playing the great concert halls of Europe, while Ritter uses his surgical skills to recreate his lost love. While I think montage sequences tend to be a bit tacky, in this case the intercutting between Alice and and the new “Alice”-in-the-making effectively serves to foreshadow the clash of doppelgangers at the climax.

As Lily/New Alice is recovering from her surgery, there is a shot, where Ritter is tenderly holding her bandaged arm, that reminded me of Colin Clive in the original Frankenstein hovering over the monster on the lab table like a proud new dad, or for that matter, the monster trying to take Elsa Lanchester’s hand in Bride of Frankenstein. Unfortunately from that point, instead of a horror-tinged noir, we get a rather staid British lesson in manners and class distinctions.

An updated mad scientist's lab, circa 1952.

Of course Ritter’s work is a complete success, and Lily emerges from the bandages an absolutely fabulous duplicate of Alice, at least physically. When Dr. Frankenstein’s Ritter’s associate learns of the doctor’s plans to marry his creation, all the do-gooder pretenses go out the window and upper crust revulsion at the lower classes takes over -- he protests that Lily is a recidivist criminal and psychopath (so much for salvaging the the not-so-good, the bad and the ugly through plastic surgery).

If this had been an American noir, there would have been a body count and hell to pay for the sheer hubris for trying to make a vulnerable, not-too-bright prisoner into the spitting image of a lost love. But instead, Stolen Face fritters away its potential with scene after scene of Ritter the dyspeptic elitist disapproving of his new wife’s lifestyle choices.

Lily’s/new Alice’s worst misdeeds in this ostensible crime drama are preferring jazz clubs to the opera, shoplifting a gaudy brooch and fur coat that her wealthy husband won’t buy for her (he uses his influence to make the charges go away), drinking too much and having raucous parties at their mansion.

The worst crime of all is that the film seems to side with the arrogant and selfish doctor, making him out to be the victim, and figuratively tsk-tsking at Lily’s antics like some blue-haired grand dame complaining about the help.

The court of stiff-upper-lip opinion brings the Hammer down on Lily at the climax. When Alice's fiancé David realizes who she is really in love with, he does the civilized thing and releases her from the engagement. Alice, unaware of the existence of Lily and the marriage, rushes to Ritter. Let’s just say there is hell to pay, and I’ll leave it to you to guess who pays it.

Despite the lost opportunities and the sour ending (your results may differ), the film is saved by the presence of ‘40s icons Lizabeth Scott and Paul Henreid (kind of like good plastic surgery that smooths over sagging spots and wrinkles).

Both were on the downslopes of their careers: Scott was still under contract to Paramount at this point and kept getting loaned out to indifferent film projects by a studio that didn’t know what to do with her; Henreid had been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a “communist sympathizer” and was in no position to be choosy.

Scott is as beautiful and glamorous as ever in her dual role, believable as someone who could drive an esteemed physician batty with love/lust. Henreid, with his usual urbane sophistication and calm, assured manner, almost makes you believe that surgically altering a poor, hapless stranger and marrying her is a reasonable thing to do.

It suddenly dawns on Lily that she's wearing someone else's face.

Although crime dramas were numerous for Terence Fisher leading up to Hammer’s horror renaissance, they weren’t the only pictures he worked on. Just a year after Stolen Face, Fisher both wrote the screenplay for and directed Four Sided Triangle (1953), a low-budget, oddball sci-fi picture with an eerily similar premise.

Young, slightly mad scientists Bill and Robin (Stephen Murray and John Van Eyssen) have invented a matter duplicator. Both are in love with their childhood sweetheart Lena, who is back in England from an extended stay in the U.S. (Lena is played by blonde bombshell Barbara Payton, who -- yep, you guessed it -- was on the downside of her career due to scandals arising from her off-camera love life, including a fraught love triangle.)

When Robin successfully woos Lena and marries her, Bill decides to use the invention to make a duplicate of Lena for himself. Except that he didn’t figure that Lena 2 would be an exact replica in every detail, including her love choices.

In his book on Terence Fisher, film critic Peter Hutchings found at least one common thread in the director’s work from the early - mid ‘50s:

“As in the case with those other pre-1956 Fisher films that are distinctive in some way or other, there appears to be a conservative tone to the proceedings here. A comment made by the old doctor in Four Sided Triangle might well stand for this aspect of the work generally: ‘There is often less danger in the things we fear than in the things we desire.’ Desire is threatening, sexuality is dangerous, and anyone ‘infected’ with desire -- whether it be Bill in Four Sided Triangle, Ritter in Stolen Face, Duncan Reid in Portrait from Life or Chris in The Astonished Heart -- will suffer because of it. Yet at the same time this fearful emotion of desire is also an object of considerable fascination for the films. One outcome of this is that both Stolen Face and Four Sided Triangle reveal and dwell upon some of the more disturbing aspects of male desire, and their conservative but also somewhat contrived conclusions do little to resolve issues raised elsewhere in the films.” [Peter Hutchings, Terence Fisher, Manchester University Press, 2001, p. 67]

Lily rips off the bandages to reveal her new face... Oops, wrong movie!

Bonus Review:

Now Playing: Blackout (1954)

Pros: Dane Clark’s energetic performance; Belinda Lee is the coolest of cucumbers
Cons: One too many plot twists make it hard to keep up without a scorecard

Unlike Stolen Face, Blackout is the real noir deal. It asserts its credentials in the opening scene, where a down and out American, Casey Morrow (Dane Clark), is getting stinking drunk at a London jazz club, with only an ashtray full of cigarette butts to keep him company.

Enter a luminously beautiful and classy mystery woman (Belinda Lee) who, before Morrow passes out, offers the broke American £500 to marry her that night! In the morning, he wakes up with a huge hangover in a strange artist’s studio/apartment, with no memory of the night's events, and bizarrely, sitting in the middle of the room, a portrait on an easel of the very same mystery woman. 

The artist/apartment tenant, Maggie Doone (Eleanor Summerfield), tells Morrow that he showed up in the middle of night banging on her door. Neither Maggie or Morrow know how he got there.

Things start to get interesting when Morrow finds out from the morning newspaper that the mystery woman is wealthy heiress Phyllis Brunner, her father has been murdered, and Phyllis is missing.

When Morrow goes to pay the newspaper vendor, he discovers a wad of pound notes in his pocket. It wasn’t a dream after all, and now he’s a person of interest in the murder. Morrow is going to have to become his own private investigator if he’s to clear his name, and there are a lot of possible guilty parties: was it Phyllis herself in a bid to inherit the family fortune and pin the murder on Morrow; or the sketchy solicitor Lance Gordon (Andrew Osborn), Phyllis’ supposed fiancé and the family business manager; or even Mrs. Brunner (Betty Ann Davies), who may have suspected that her husband was stepping out on her?

If a beautiful blonde who is way out of your league takes a sudden interest in you, watch out!

Blackout is another in a long line of noirs featuring protagonists suffering from memory lapses or amnesia who have stumbled into a world of trouble, and must race against time to clear their names -- Two O’Clock Courage (1945), Fear in the Night (1946), High Wall (1947), The Crooked Way (1949) and Man in the Dark (1953) are just a handful of examples.

The film checks off a bunch of noir elements, including apparent double-crosses, real double-crosses, red-herrings, corrupt wealthy families and their equally corrupt lawyers, psychopathic henchmen, and best of all, the patented icy blonde femme fatale who can turn on the charm when she needs something from a man.

Leading man Dane Clark owns the film from beginning to end. Clark is a man apart in a world of pursed-lip Britishness, rattling off screenwriter Richard Landau’s hard-boiled dialog and borderline non-sequiturs like a Brooklyn-accented dervish:

Morrow: “The last time Miss Opportunity knocked at my door, I let her in.”
Phyllis: “Oh, what happened?”
Morrow: “Now I haven’t even got a door.”

And,

“Because when he turns up, if he turns up, he’s going to be the deadest man ever killed!”

After some work on Broadway, Clark jumped into movies in the early ‘40s. His first credited role was in the war picture Action in the Atlantic (1943) with Humphrey Bogart. He spent the war years playing average Joe, All-American soldiers, sailors and airmen in such pictures as Destination Tokyo (1943), God is My Co-Pilot (1945), and Pride of the Marines (1945).

By the late ‘40s he was “decommissioned” as a Hollywood soldier and joined the ranks of noir protagonists, appearing in Whiplash (1948), Backfire (1950), and two other Hammer near-noirs, The Gambler and the Lady (1952) and Paid to Kill (1954).

Clark is one of the Hammer-Lippert partnership’s better leading men, and his spirited, wryly humorous performance is ample reason to check out Blackout.

"Where have I seen that face before?"