Category Archives: November 1946

Nocturne (Nov. 11, 1946)

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Edwin L. Marin’s Nocturne is close to being a great film noir, but not that close. It’s an entertaining mystery thriller with plenty of clipped, hard-boiled dialogue that’s fun to listen to, if not particularly credible.

George Raft plays Lt. Joe Warne of the Los Angeles police, and it’s a role that seems designed to play to the public’s perception of Raft as a gangster and a thug. Warne conducts his murder investigation with the subtlety of a steamroller, pushing a mustachioed Lothario into the pool when he gets in his way and ripping up the roll of a player piano in a diner when the owner won’t cooperate with him.

And when was the last time you saw a hard-boiled detective who lived at home with his mother? It’s the kind of oddball detail that feels as if it would be more at home in a gangster movie starring James Cagney.

Raft’s first big role was as Paul Muni’s sidekick in Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932). After that he starred in a string of gangster pictures, and was one of the most popular actors in crime melodramas, along with Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. His boyhood friendship with gangster Owney Madden and association with men like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky aided the public’s perception of him as a hard man who didn’t just “talk the talk.”

By the ’40s, however, his star was beginning to fade. Turning down the lead roles in High Sierra (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Double Indemnity (1944) didn’t help matters. (Raft was reportedly functionally illiterate, which may have made choosing scripts difficult.) It’s safe to say that by 1946, he was getting the scripts that Humphrey Bogart used to line his birdcage.

Raft wasn’t a very expressive actor, and he had the range of a T-bone steak, but his tight-lipped acting style was perfect for B movies like Nocturne.

A flamboyant pianist and composer named Keith Vincent (Edward Ashley) is murdered, presumably by one of the nine brunettes he was running around with. He has glamour shots of all of them lining one wall of his living room, and it’s clear they were all interchangeable for him, since he called them all “Dolores.” (This may seem like a clever device to hide the identity of the murderess from the viewer, but it’s not.)

Lt. Warne investigates with ham-handed glee, and his investigative technique is as sloppy as the filmmaking. For instance, in one scene his chief (Robert Malcolm) bawls him out for bothering a character named “Mrs. Billings,” but apparently her scenes were left on the cutting room floor. This is fine, but why leave references to her in the film? Similarly confusing is the fact that Warne’s chief gives him two days to investigate Vincent’s murder on his own, but we only find this out after the two-day period is over. And it’s only after this two-day investigative blitz that Warne goes back to Vincent’s house and notices that one of the pictures is missing, since the pattern is disrupted, and there’s an enormous nail hole in the wall. Looking at the stamp on the back of one of the other pictures leads him to a sleazy photographer named Charles Shawn (John Banner). Wouldn’t a detective worth his salt have noticed all this immediately?

The most enjoyable thing about this film is the atmosphere. Lt. Warne spends a lot of time in smoky nightclubs, including the unique Keyboard Club, in which a hulking man-child named Erik Torp (Bern Hoffman) pushes a pianist named Ned “Fingers” Ford (Joseph Pevney) and his upright around on a rolling platform so they can take requests, table by table. When they get to Warne’s table, he hands Vincent’s unfinished piece “Nocturne” to Fingers to play. When he reaches the end of the handwritten sheet music, Fingers asks, “What did your friend do, run out of notes?” Warne responds, “More or less.”

Plenty of sex and sleaze run right below the surface of the picture, but it’s all pretty lighthearted. There’s a funny scene in a dance studio in which Warne can’t learn even the most basic steps (it’s mostly funny because Raft was a professional dancer), and his romance with his prime suspect, Frances Ransom (Lynn Bari), doesn’t carry much sense of danger or menace.

Nocturne is a really fun picture, despite its shortcomings. It has some of the snappiest, most hard-boiled, least naturalistic dialogue I’ve heard since I watched The Dark Corner (1946). Fans of B noirs are encouraged to seek out this picture.

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Beauty and the Bandit (Nov. 9, 1946)

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Maybe I should stop watching these Cisco Kid pictures. They’re dead-on-arrival Saturday matinées from Monogram Pictures that have now thrice failed to entertain me. After sitting through The Gay Cavalier and South of Monterey, feeling like a drunk who’d fallen asleep in a grindhouse on a Friday night in 1946 and woken up the next morning surrounded by kids yelling at the screen and throwing popcorn at each other — too hungover to get up and leave — I figured I could call it quits with the series and not miss much.

But Gilbert Roland is a lot of fun to watch as Cisco. While these movies seemed pitched at a pretty young audience, his smooth line deliveries and double entendres are clearly aimed at adults. And the presence of Ramsay Ames as the heroine made it hard to say no to Beauty and the Bandit. I fell in love with Ames in the Universal horror picture The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), and will watch her in anything, although in both Cisco Kid pictures I’ve seen her in she’s skinnier, less voluptuous, and a little harder-looking than she was in her earlier horror-movie appearances in The Mummy’s Ghost and Calling Dr. Death (1943).

In the first scene of the film, Cisco (Roland) gets a tip from his old friend Sailor Bill (Glenn Strange) — who has given up a life of crime for a home, wife, and eight children — that a young Frenchman is traveling to San Marino with a chestful of silver. This young man is played by Ames, who is the least convincing young “man” I’ve seen since Barbara Hale put on drag in West of the Pecos (1945). Perhaps this is by design. If Ames was convincing as a fellow, the scene in which Roland leans forward and lights her cigarette would be the most homoerotic image of 1946, since they stare at each other with more heat and longing than you’d see during a day at the beach with Cary Grant and Randolph Scott.

Later he teaches Ames to drink tequila (with lemon and a little salt) and engages in all manner of sexual teasing, like trying to sleep in her bed and then kicking her out when she objects.

Once the idiotic cross-dressing subterfuge is done away with, Ames looks great in a pair of pants and boots. She has more swagger dressed in men’s clothes with her long hair free than she does in drag, but her accent is still all over the place, and the “n’est-ce pas” that often ends her lines sounds about as French as Steve Martin playing Inspector Clouseau. Her character, Jeanne Du Bois, is trying to buy land from the disgraced and drunken Dr. Juan Valegra (Martin Garralaga), land which was stolen, and which Cisco wishes to return to the peasants. His devotion to the Mexican people of Old California gets in the way of his romance with the headstrong Jeanne, but as usual, a good spanking fixes her right up.

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Courage of Lassie (Nov. 8, 1946)

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Pal rides again! In Fred M. Wilcox’s Courage of Lassie, the irrepressible little scamp from whose seed all dogs who ever played Lassie are descended plays an orphaned collie. The little guy is left behind in an idyllic, Technicolor wilderness after the old fisherman who owns Lassie rows off with her and what he thinks are all of her puppies.

There follows a delightful montage of the little collie frolicking in the woods for days with birds, other four-legged beasties, and even a big black bear. This being a kid’s movie, however, you can be sure that gut-wrenching tragedy is right around the corner. Sure enough, the collie puppy and his little fox friend are caught in stormy rapids, and the fox is washed away, presumably to his death. The puppy, balanced on a tangle of branches, safely makes it to shore. Seemingly unfazed by his little buddy’s demise, the puppy’s next move is to happily run off with Elizabeth Taylor’s pants, and a lifelong bond is formed.

Taylor was 14 years old when she appeared in this film. Just like Pal, she’s playing a different role than she played in the film Lassie Come Home (1943). I think Taylor was a fantastic child actor. Just like in National Velvet (1944), she takes material that could be laughable or treacly and performs it with such conviction that you can’t help but be swept along. As Kathie Merrick, she believes in her dog, whom she names “Bill,” even though her family doesn’t think he has what it takes to be a sheep-herding dog.

By the end of the film Bill will prove that he not only has “the right stuff” in the pasture, but that he can be drafted and serve under heavy fire just like any other red-blooded American boy.

Bill goes through a lot in this film. He’s shot by a couple of dopey young hunters with quick trigger fingers, he’s run over by a truck while herding sheep across the road (and carried off by the well-meaning driver who doesn’t realize Bill belongs to someone), he’s renamed “Duke” at Dr. Colman’s Dog and Cat Hospital in the big city, and he’s trained for war and shipped off to the Aleutians to fight the Japanese.

“Duke” performs bravely despite a bloody neck wound, dragging himself through the mud to deliver a message, then leading the reinforcements back to the troops. He saves the day, but suffers from shell shock. He escapes the train that is taking him home and runs off into the area of the country where he remembers being with Kathie. Unfortunately, his PTSD has taken a toll, and he lives as a feral animal, raiding hen houses and killing local livestock. Kathie saves him from a farmer’s bullet, but he’s still put on trial as a mad dog.

Things look pretty grim for Bill until Harry MacBain (Frank Morgan, who played Prof. Marvel and the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz) makes an impassioned plea for understanding. This is the most interesting part of the film, since MacBain has looked up Bill’s war record, and his speech is a thinly veiled reference to human veterans who may be acting differently after their service overseas. Violent, antisocial behavior and drastic personality changes can be a byproduct of serving in combat, he says, and we on the homefront shouldn’t be so quick to judge our returning veterans. Even if they’re not lovable border collies.

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Secret of the Whistler (Nov. 7, 1946)

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Secret of the Whistler
Secret of the Whistler (1946)
Directed by George Sherman
Columbia Pictures

George Sherman’s Secret of the Whistler is a solid but unremarkable entry in Columbia Pictures’ series of bottom-of-the-bill programmers based on the radio show The Whistler. Each film in the series starred Richard Dix, a he-man of the silent era whose star was fading. Dix delivered sweaty, paranoid performances in a variety of roles in The Whistler series; businessman, drifter, private investigator, homicidal maniac. His health may have been failing, but he was still a solid performer.

In Secret of the Whistler he plays a painter named Ralph Harrison who is living the high life on his wealthy wife’s dime. He throws lavish parties in his studio/bachelor pad for people who aren’t really his friends, but who don’t mind eating his food and drinking his booze. Among the many attractive young women who pose for Harrison for big money is Kay Morrell (Leslie Brooks), a beautiful blonde with gams that won’t quit.

Meanwhile, Harrison’s wife, Edith Marie Harrison (Mary Currier), lies in bed at home, at death’s door. When the film begins, Harrison seems to genuinely care for his ailing wife, and she adores him. Slowly but surely, however, Harrison begins to fall for Kay. (And after the scene in which she poses for him wearing a small one-piece undergarment, I thought to myself, “Who wouldn’t?”) He buys her expensive presents and lavishes her with attention. His wife isn’t long for this world, so what’s the harm?

The only problem is that Mrs. Harrison comes under the care of a specialist, and makes a miraculous recovery. (Her cardiologist’s course of therapy seems to mostly involve getting out of bed and taking long walks, which is still good advice today.) When she drops by her husband’s studio unannounced, however, her excitement turns to horror when she overhears her husband pitching woo to Kay. She suffers a major setback and promises to write Ralph out of her will.

Fans of The Whistler radio show will have no trouble predicting what will happen next, or the panoply of complications that will arise. True to the radio show, the Whistler himself shows up several times in the film, always as a dark silhouette or a shadow thrown on a wall, speaking directly to Harrison and revealing his murderous thoughts.

The screenplay for Secret of the Whistler by Richard H. Landau and Raymond L. Schrock is the most thematically similar to the radio show of all the films in the series I’ve seen so far. If murdering your wife was your thing, The Whistler was the best show on the air. Nearly every week it seemed as if someone’s spouse was being bumped off for an inheritance and a chance at life with a younger boyfriend or girlfriend, although things never went according to plan.

With a little more than double the running time of a typical episode of the radio show, Secret of the Whistler has more time to develop its characters and its story. On the radio, there just wouldn’t be enough time to show Ralph’s tepid devotion slowly changing to disinterest. At the same time, though, the film feels a little longer than its 65-minute running time, and while its twist ending is good, it doesn’t have the devious ingenuity of the best twists of the radio show.

Still, this is a really good mystery series, with heavy doses of noir atmosphere and performances by Dix that are always interesting to watch. Secret of the Whistler is a lesser entry in the series, but it’s still a pretty good one.

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Wanted for Murder (Nov. 2, 1946)

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Lawrence Huntington’s Wanted for Murder, which was originally released on June 17, 1946, in the U.K., premiered in the United States on November 2, 1946. It’s an effective chiller with a dependable cast and an excellent screenplay by Rodney Ackland and Emeric Pressburger, based on the stage play by Percy Robinson and Terence de Marney.

The film boasts a terrific sense of place, with scenes filmed in Hampstead Fairground, Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, and the center of London (which, when necessary, appears as rear screen projection stock footage, a technique that can be distractingly fake-looking but here is done fairly skillfully). There are also several atmospheric nighttime murder sequences in Hampstead Heath, Regent’s Park, and Hyde Park.

Particularly effective is the music by Mischa Spoliansky, whose pop-orchestral tune “A Voice in the Night” is a motif that follows the murderer around like his shadow, and which you’ll be hard-pressed not to hum after seeing this picture.

Eric Portman plays middle-class mummy’s boy Victor James Colebrooke, a man who feels haunted by the specter of his late father, William Colebrooke, an executioner to Queen Victoria whose eerie likeness stands in Madame Tussaud’s.

Colebrooke is a handsome, superficially charming gentleman who drink Hendrick’s Gin, lives at home with his mother and a servant, and whose single-breasted suits often sport a white boutonniere and a pocket square. He’s the embodiment of the British fascination with “the murderer next door” — the outwardly ordinary man whose wife’s remains are bricked up in the basement or who strangles working girls on the weekend.

Wispy brunette Dulcie Gray plays Anne Fielding, a young woman who works in a gramophone shop and is dating Colebrooke. A starry-eyed young bus conductor named Jack Williams (Derek Farr) finds her waiting at the fairgrounds and mashes her as hard as he can. She’s attracted to him, but Colebrooke is manipulative and possessive.

Rounding out the fine cast are Roland Culver as Chief Insp. Conway and Stanley Holloway as Sgt. Sullivan, the two Scotland Yard detectives who are on the trail of the killer. Their scenes are some of the film’s most light-hearted, but they are never less than professional, and are dogged in their pursuit of the strangler.

When the first murder occurs, the audience doesn’t know who the killer is, but we strongly suspect Colebrooke. It’s not long before the film removes any doubt about his guilt, which allows for a more interesting and creepy character study than in a whodunnit, where the murderer’s identity is a secret up until the climax.

Most of the film is a game of cat and mouse, with the detectives fairly certain Colebrooke is guilty, but unable to gather anything but circumstantial evidence.

Meanwhile, Colebrooke goes about his dastardly business at night in the parks, telling young women he takes out on dates and strangles that his name is “Tom Mahon.”

Colebrooke blames his sickness on his father, whose killings were all committed in the course of his duty, but whose grim pride in his work earned him the nickname “The Happy Hangman.” The Freudian-minded viewer might blame his overbearing, possessive mother, but the film itself doesn’t draw any such trite conclusions. His father is just a picture on the wall or — in one scene — a disturbingly realistic wax figure, and his mother isn’t a bad person, even encouraging him to find a nice girl and marry her.

Wanted for Murder is a first-rate thriller. Although the adjective hadn’t been invented when it was made, I’d go so far as to call it “Hitchcockian.”

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Nobody Lives Forever (Nov. 1, 1946)

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Jean Negulesco’s Nobody Lives Forever is far from a great film, but it’s crackerjack entertainment. Warner Bros. had been making crime pictures for 16 profitable years at this point. While the heyday of the Warner gangster film may have been in the ’30s, this is a fine example of the quality product the studio was still churning out in the post-war era.

The screenplay is by W.R. Burnett, whose 1929 novel Little Caesar was made into a film in 1931 starring Edward G. Robinson — the first of Warner’s great cycle of gangster movies. Nobody Lives Forever is based on Burnett’s novel I Wasn’t Born Yesterday, and while it may not be as significant as Little Caesar, it’s still a tight thriller with plenty of snappy tough-guy dialogue.

Besides the good script and excellent direction, the picture works as well as it does because of impeccable casting. When you’re looking for a hard-bitten but essentially decent con man, you can’t ask for a better protagonist than John Garfield. A kindly, doddering old mentor of cons named “Pop”? Who better than Walter Brennan? A sweaty, bug-eyed, paranoid louse named “Doc” who desperately needs one decent score to get back on top? Is George Coulouris available?

Garfield plays Nick Blake, a World War II veteran honorably discharged after being wounded in action. One of his hands doesn’t close quite right, but other than that he’s none the worse for wear. After his sidekick Al Doyle (George Tobias) picks him up from the hospital in Governor’s Island, they take the ferry back to Manhattan, where he reunites with his girl, Toni Blackburn (Faye Emerson). As she sings “You Again” in a swanky nightclub, Nick follows the mustachioed club owner Chet King (Robert Shayne) into his office to settle a beef over money. Rudi Fehr’s editing in this sequence is superb, cutting between Toni on stage, Al standing guard outside the office, and Nick bracing Chet inside.

After Toni finishes her number, Nick confronts her, then kisses her passionately, then smacks her in the face for double crossing him.

The action soon switches to California, where Al has gotten a line on a widow with a $2 million fortune, which — as Pop points out — is a lot of money, even after taxes. Nick, a handsome “diamond in the rough,” is the perfect candidate to pose as a shipping magnate and charm her out of her cash.

Unlike most long cons, Nick, Pop, Doc, Al, and the other members of their crew meet in smoky back rooms as if they’re planning a bank heist. The only problem with the job is that Nick actually starts to fall for the widow, Gladys Halvorsen (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who turns out to be younger than most widows, and a dish to boot.

When Doc pushes Nick to close the deal, he shoots back, “I’m not used to operating with a bunch of cheap, hungry chiselers who should be in the strong-arm racket. Big deals take time.”

Garfield has great chemistry with his co-stars, particularly the ladies, but the relationships take a back seat to the action, especially during the final climactic 20 minutes.

Sure, there are some holes in the plot, and there’s nothing deep about Nobody Lives Forever, but it’s a hell of a way to kill an hour and 40 minutes.

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