Dark Moon Over Miami

The Chase (1946)

A veteran comes home from a long war to a supposedly grateful nation, but instead of finding a job and a caring community, he finds himself staring longingly through the window of a diner in a cold, impersonal city, unable to afford even the cost of a good breakfast. It's an old story, and unfortunately, a very current one as well. Lost in all the heroic tales of the "good" war -- World War II -- is the fact that countless veterans struggled to find jobs in an economy that wasn't ready for them, and bore physical and psychological scars that remained with them the rest of their lives. During the war years and the following period of angst and malaise, a new kind of crime drama emerged. Heroes were replaced by anti-heroes, deduction replaced by seduction, and the world in which these dramas played out was dark, unforgiving, and festering with corruption.

The Chase's opening scene finds luckless Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) walking the grimy streets of Miami, wondering where his next meal is coming from. As he dejectedly turns away from the diner window, he stumbles into a seemingly lucky break in the form of a wallet lying on the sidewalk. After helping himself to a hearty breakfast from the wad of cash, he decides to do the right thing and return the wallet. In typical noir fashion, this small, honorable act propels him into a seething world of sociopathic gangsters, illicit love, murderous jealousy, and danger.

Chuck traces the owner's address to an ornate, gleaming white mansion in a swanky part of town. Sporting a cheap, dirty suit and a heavy five o'clock shadow, Chuck is a bit uneasy as he rings the bell. In a neat little visual twist, the grinning head of a winged cherub on the door swings up and is replaced by a an eye staring out of a peephole and a gruff voice asking "what do you want?"  The door opens and Chuck is confronted by a life-sized, sneering "cherub" in the form of assistant Gino (Peter Lorre), an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. Gino plays it cagey, refusing to introduce himself. "What have you got?" he languidly asks Chuck. "You're not Mister Roman," Chuck counters. "How do you know?" "You just don't fit," Chuck says, a little of his confidence returning.

Chuck knows he's not in Kansas anymore as he cools his heels in an opulent waiting room with huge chandeliers and classical statuary. Two women emerge from an adjoining room-- one is crying and the other is consoling her companion. This is a big clue that Chuck needs to turn tail and run, but then, film-noir protagonists tend to be stubborn, unlucky, and not always the sharpest pencils in the box. Gino introduces Chuck to the master of the house (and apparently master of lucrative schemes) Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran). Eddie is obviously very well off, dressed in an expensive double-breasted suit and hat, with a carefully folded handkerchief in his breast pocket. He's busy with a phone call as Chuck hands him the wallet. The ensuing conversation is a second big clue that Chuck should turn and walk away:

Eddie: Where did you find it?
Chuck: I don't remember the name of the street… it was in front of a restaurant…
Eddie (warily): How much was in it?
Chuck (sheepishly): 81 dollars. I spent a dollar and a half for breakfast… there's 79.50 there now.
Eddie (pausing, not quite believing what he's hearing): How do you like that… an honest guy!
Gino: I don't! Silly law-abiding jerk!
Eddie: How do you like that? He comes all the way out here just because he found it! … You know, you ought to get a medal… Gino, go buy him a medal.
Chuck (perturbed): Thanks, I've got a medal.

The ultimate set-up for the backseat driver.

Apparently Eddie's contempt for honest men doesn't extend to veterans, and in a weak moment he offers Chuck a job as his chauffeur. Circumstances being what they are, Chuck has little choice but to accept the offer. However, the seemingly innocuous job very quickly puts him in deadly danger. The dapper pillar of Miami society decides to test Chuck his first time out. Eddie's car has been rigged with a second accelerator and brake on the floor of the back seat. With a cruel smirk, he overrides Chuck's controls and slowly presses the back-seat accelerator to the floor. As the car speeds up seemingly by itself, an alarmed Chuck reports to his boss that there seems to be something wrong, only to be reassured by a very calm Eddie: "Relax, I take care of all of that back here… just keep your hands on the wheel." Eddie is apparently both a control freak and an adrenaline junkie. The car is speeding at 100 miles an hour toward a train, as Gino pleads with his boss, "But you don't know how he drives!" Eddie brakes just in time, allowing Chuck to swerve to avoid hitting the speeding train.

This is only a small taste of the dangers that lie ahead for Chuck. Like many noir chumps, he falls for an alluring dame, only this dame is the boss' wife! Ouch! One moment he's driving the sad, beautiful Lorna Roman (Michele Morgan) to the beach to stare vacantly and longingly at the crashing waves, and the next he's fleeing to Havana (pre-Castro Cuba) on a tramp steamer with her. And the next, he's being framed for her murder, desperately explaining to the Cuban police inspector that the knife that killed her only looks like the one he purchased in an out-of-the-way curio shop.

The Chase is based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, The Black Path of Fear (Doubleday, 1944). Woolrich was an odd duck-- a near-recluse who lived most of his life with his mother and rarely ventured outside of New York City. Yet this sheltered man wrote dozens of dark, wildly imaginative novels and short stories that helped launch the film-noir wave of the '40s and '50s. Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) is the best-known Woolrich adaptation (originally published as "It Had to be Murder"). An IMDb search on Woolrich's name demonstrates his extraordinary influence-- nearly 160 films and TV shows based on his work. In his essay "Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich," David Schmid cites Woolrich as one of the signal founders of the genre:

Although his work is not as widely read as that of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich almost single-handedly invented the noir genre--creating a dark, psychologically menacing world--and producing some of the greatest works of pure suspense fiction ever written. … Woolrich's heroes [are] victimized and damaged by forces of evil that are often abstract, nameless, and all-powerful. Woolrich's plots and techniques reflect a worldview far more bleak and pessimistic than that of most other hard-boiled writers, and his ability to evoke the dilemmas of those unfortunates caught in his world is his most signal contribution to the genre. ("American Hard-Boiled Crime Writers" in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 226. Gale, 2000.)

Lorna wonders if she can ever truly escape
from her psychopathic husband.

The Chase takes some liberties with the source material. The book starts off with Mrs. Roman's murder (Eve in the book), while the film leisurely works up to it, immersing the viewer in the pathos and near-hopelessness of the illicit love affair before setting the chase and the murder in motion. Lorna is a beautiful, ethereal vision in her expensive evening dress and long, flowing hair, yet living for three years with a sociopath has left her cold and bloodless, almost zombie-like. Her only joy is to stand on the shore, watching the crashing waves and wondering what it's like beyond. "What's out there, straight ahead?" she asks Chuck, the new chauffeur.

Chuck: "Havana I think."
Lorna: "Have you ever been there?"
Chuck: "Yes, I was a long time ago."
Lorna: "What was it like?"
Chuck: "Oh, for me it was cheap hotels, cheap restaurants, cheap friends… all places are alike when you're broke you know."

The next thing you know, she's offering him $1000 to take her there-- and their fate together seems to be sealed. Having almost immediately fallen in love with her, Chuck begs off the financial part of the deal. They flee to Havana, but realize it can only be a brief way station. They plan to go to South America to get as far away as possible from the implacable Eddie. Stranded in the heart of the chaotic city with little time left before their ship sails, she asks Chuck, "How much time do we have left?", and it's not quite clear if she means how much time before the boat leaves, or how much time before her psycho husband catches up with them.

The Chase employs a very different narrative structure, and springs a plot "cheat" about two thirds of the way through that is risky for a B movie aimed at a fairly broad audience. It ultimately wraps things up a little too neatly for film-noir, especially for something based on Cornell Woolrich's dark, pessimistic visions. Still, it rewards the open-minded viewer with fascinating characters, biting, hard-boiled dialog, and haunting imagery.

Eddie (Cochran) and Gino (Lorre) make a deliciously evil pair. They act like a couple who've been together just a little too long-- mercurial Eddie alternates between bored and disinterested one minute and homicidal the next, while dour Gino grumbles and second-guesses his boss at every opportunity. A scene in which the black-hearted pair, nattily attired in white dinner jackets, have some cruel fun at the expense of a clueless business rival is priceless (see the clip below). Steve and Peter specialized in meaty, villainous roles, and their combined film-noir resume includes some of the great classics: Stranger on the Third Floor (1940, Lorre), The Maltese Falcon (1941, Lorre), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944, Lorre), White Heat (1949, Cochran), and The Damned Don't Cry (1950, Cochran).

Doomed love in the shadows.

Michele Morgan / Lorna Roman is achingly beautiful, and almost unreal-- like a too-perfect robot. Three years of marriage to a manipulative, controlling psychopath has practically drained her of any emotion. We don't often see characters this beautiful and this pitiable. Cinematographer Franz Planer saves his best stuff for Lorna: standing silhouetted on the shore, longingly staring at the waves; looking apprehensively out of the porthole of the Havana-bound ship, shadows creeping up and down the side; embracing Chuck in a hansom cab, her face glowing in soft, white light, his obscured in deep shadow.

Cummings, better known for light comedy and the folksy The Bob Cummings Show of the late '50s - early '60s, is nonetheless effective as the down-on-his luck everyman thrust by fate into the arms of a sad, angelic beauty. His everyman image also appealed to Alfred Hitchcock, who featured him in two of his better mystery-thrillers, Saboteur (1942) and Dial M for Murder (1954).

With the economy still sputtering and more and more politicians, business executives and entertainers acting like Eddie and Gino, it seems like we're all living in a noir world. But while the Eddies and Ginos of the world may be bat-sh*t crazy, they also make for great entertainment. So don't despair-- sit back and enjoy the show!

The Chase is available online at the Internet Archive, and on DVD from Alpha Video.


Crime boss Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran) and henchman Gino (Peter Lorre) practice their own special art of persuasion on a rival businessman:

Gunslingers and Graveyards

Curse of the Undead (1959)

If it weren't for the unambiguous title, I'd be tempted to classify Curse of the Undead as a western, albeit with strong horror elements. Certainly all the classic Western plot elements are there: a dispute over water rights; a beautiful, plucky heroine doing battle with a corrupt land baron; the heroine's hot-headed younger brother who itches to mix it up with the land baron and his hired thugs; the straight-as-an-arrow fiance who at first urges caution, but in the end must fight for what's right; a well-meaning but ineffectual sheriff trying his best to keep the peace; drunken cowboys drawing on each other in a saloon, and of course the hired gun dressed in black… who just happens to be a vampire.

While I was never a big fan of westerns as a kid (I've certainly come to appreciate them over the years), Curse grabbed my attention when it first played on local TV. It never occurred to me that you could mix monsters and six-guns, so, despite being a bit slow and talky in places, it made a bigger-than-average impression on me. It was like discovering that Little Joe on Bonanza was secretly a teen-age werewolf.

It didn't occur much to filmmakers of the era to mix the two genres-- an IMDb search for horror-westerns between 1940 and 1970 only pulls up 30 or so titles, most of them obscure, low-budget Mexican films made in the 1960s. What's left is a small, undistinguished list including z-grade fare like Teenage Monster (1958; a boy in a western town becomes a hideous killer after being irradiated by a meteor), Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966), and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (also 1966). The less said about these, the better.  Obviously, the film industry didn't see much potential in this sort of genre melding. (Although, horror-westerns seem to have come into their own in the past decade, with some very interesting-sounding titles: Legend of the Phantom Rider, 2002; The Ghosts of Edendale, 2003; Dead Birds, 2004; The Quick and the Undead, 2006; The Burrowers, 2008; Blood River, 2009; Gun Town, 2009; and the forthcoming Dances with Werewolves, 2012.)

In the midst of a horror-western desert, Curse of the Undead stands out as a very interesting, if somewhat flawed, genre-blending experiment. Set in an unnamed western town, Curse starts off on an ominous and somber note as Doc Carter (John Hoyt) and his daughter Dolores (Kathleen Crowley) drive their carriage past house after house with funeral wreaths on the doors. The doctor has come to see yet another young woman who is wasting away from some mysterious illness. The pair meet the worried parents and preacher Dan Young (Eric Fleming), who has spent the night by the girl's bedside, praying for her recovery. The doc admits that he's baffled by an epidemic that seems to affect only young women: "I'm tempted to throw away my bag and come over to your side." Dan responds affectionately, "You've always been on my side."

The bedridden girl seems to be recovering, so the relieved caretakers and parents assemble in the kitchen for a needed break and some breakfast. The pleasant scene is suddenly interrupted by a cry from the bedroom, and as they rush in they see to their horror the girl's lifeless corpse sprawled over the side of the bed. The roller blinds in a nearby window are flapping, as if someone or something has just escaped outside. Discreetly, preacher Dan examines the dead girl's neck and finds blood flowing from odd puncture wounds.

With a different setting and costumes, this could be the set-up for any gothic vampire film. But the film veers quickly from classic horror set-up to classic western, as we learn from Doc Carter's son Tim (Jimmy Murphy) about greedy land baron Buffer (Bruce Gordon) and his nasty plot to dam up the stream providing needed water to the Carter homestead. Tim's just been beaten up by Buffer's hired thugs, and he's itching to get back at the arrogant landlord and redeem the family name. In short order, the good Doc turns up dead, his blood-drained corpse falling out of the carriage seat just after it pulls up to the front door of his home. Tim, blinded by rage, blames his father's death on the no-good Buffer, and ends up in a pine box himself after baiting Buffer into a shoot-out. Interspersed in all the mayhem is the figure of a mysterious, black-clad gunman, who is first seen spying on the Doc, and then hanging around the cemetery on the day of his funeral.

The mysterious man in black takes a nap between gunfights.

Grief-stricken Dolores is suddenly head of the Carter household, and in a simmering rage tries to nail up wanted posters for Buffer around town, but the by-the-book sheriff pulls them down as fast as she can post them. The upstanding preacher (and Dolores' beau or fiance, it's not quite clear which) tries to calm her down. In a neat little bit of business, she replies to him in exasperation, "If the Devil can stop some of this pain in me, I'll even pray to him!" Just at that moment, the shadowy gunfighter in black, Drake Robey (Michael Pate) comes calling with the wanted poster in hand. Dan tries to get her to throw the "professional killer" out, but she's too intent on revenge, and Robey's silver tongue wins the day: "Preacher, you've been reading the good Book too long. You should look at life as it really is. Miss Carter's in trouble… why don't you think of me as a professional soldier come to help…?"

Preacher Dan knows evil when he sees it, and spends the rest of the film's running time trying to get his beloved Dolores to see the man for what he really is. His fears are doubly-realized when he stumbles upon an old diary at the Carter place, and finds out that it was formerly the site of Casa Robles. It seems that the two Robles brothers were in love with the same woman, but she ended up marrying Don Drago Robles. When he came back from a journey to find his brother making love to his wife, he killed him in a fit of rage, then, filled with remorse, committed suicide. The father writes of the terrible curse that fell on the village in the aftermath, as one-by-one young women were found drained of their blood. He describes the horror of grappling with a phantom figure in the dead of night, only to discover that it is his son Drago! Just in case there's any question about who's who and what's what, Dan finds a small portrait conveniently tucked into the diary's slipcover-- and it's the spitting image of Drake Robey! Hmmm… Drake Robey, Drago Robles…

It's interesting that Curse's director and screenwriter Edward Dein (along with co-writer and spouse Mildred Dein) dredges up the old eastern European conception of vampires as the revenants of suicide victims. What he lacks in budget and overt thrills, he makes up for with unique touches like this. We never see so much as the hint of a fang, and precious little blood. What we do see is a tortured soul (Drago/Drake) wrestling with two desires: to love the beautiful and strong-willed Dolores, and to feed off her blood. Despite being a monster, he has a strict code of ethics. When Dolores has a change of heart and tells him to forget about killing Buffer, she offers to compensate him for his time. "No thanks," he responds, "I don't take money for something I didn't do."

Like many a good movie villain, Robey is so dynamic and interesting that the ostensible good guy suffers in comparison. Preacher Dan is straight-laced and conventional to a fault, and it doesn't help that Eric Fleming's performance is mostly stiff and colorless to match the character. Watching Dolores calmly negotiating with hired gun Robey to kill Buffer, Dan rudely inserts himself into his fiance's business: "I'm not asking you to turn this man [Robey] out, I'm telling you to!" When she rebuffs him with "You keep your telling to the pulpit!", we cheer for her (and by extension, Robey).

The final showdown between good and evil.

As the preacher and and the monstrous gunslinger battle for the good woman's soul, it hardly seems a fair fight. Robey is dark, handsome, and sophisticated. Dan is conventionally handsome, but self-righteous and wooden-headed. Toward the end of the film, after Dan has learned Robey's secret, they duke it out not with guns, but with words. Robey protests that he never wanted this curse, but to simply live and love. Now he has another chance-- with Dolores. Dan of course, is having none of it:

Dan: How can you speak of love, when all you do is kill?
Drake: I kill to exist -- that is my life -- it's a force I can't control!
Dan: Why don't you call that force by its right name? Your force is the Devil!
Drake: He's so much a part of this world, he must be in me too. Now remember, without the Devil, you'd have no profession. You should be grateful!

Some deft use of eerie imagery and other unusual touches complement the elaborate dialog and help the film stand out from the usual B picture fare. After discovering the sheriff's body with familiar bite marks on his neck, Dan is chased through dark, deserted streets by a shadowy presence. Cowering at the front door of his church, he's saved by the well-placed shadow of the church's cross (see the clip below). Additionally, we get to see not once but twice what an unfair advantage an undead gunfighter has-- he can be as slow on the draw as he wants, since bullets can't kill him! Robey saunters away as one of his bewildered victims insists with his dying breath that "I'm sure I hit him dead center!" And, the climactic showdown between good and evil features a very unique, but logical method for killing an immortal vampire gunslinger. (Interestingly, the shootout appears to take place in broad daylight!)

Curse of the Undead is a neat little neoclassical tragedy masquerading as a B horror-western. It deserves a better fate than near-total obscurity. Creepy Classics has a good DVD-R copy for sale.


Preacher Dan Young is stalked by a shadowy figure as he walks down the dark, dusty street: