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The Thirteenth Hour (Feb. 6, 1947)

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Adam Lounsbery

The Thirteenth Hour
The Thirteenth Hour (1947)
Directed by William Clemens
Columbia Pictures

Let us bid adieu to Richard Dix.

His role in William Clemens’s The Thirteenth Hour was his last. Dix’s health was in decline when he was starring in the series of B movies based on the radio show The Whistler. After appearing in The Thirteenth Hour, the seventh in the series, Dix retired from acting. He died a couple of years later, at the age of 56, on September 20, 1949, following a heart attack he’d suffered a week earlier. (There would be one last Whistler movie, The Return of the Whistler, in 1948, starring Michael Duane.)

When asked about his role in The Thirteenth Hour, Dix said, “The part is more dramatic than the ones I used to do at Goldwyn’s and Paramount. Then, I played devil-may-care, brassy boys who were strong on wisecracks, and back in some of those early films I made the jokes via printed titles.”

His mention of printed titles is a reference to his early days in Hollywood, when the movies were still silent. Dix had a 30 year-long career, and was one of the first “he-men” of the silver screen; a rugged, square-jawed presence who loomed larger than life. His Whistler films aren’t the best of his career, but they’re nothing to be ashamed of, either. Unlike most of the formulaic, single-character mystery series of the ’40s (e.g., Boston Blackie, the Falcon, the Crime Doctor, Charlie Chan), Dix played a different role in each Whistler film, from the nastiest bad guys to the most well-intentioned good guys.

In The Thirteenth Hour, he plays a regular Joe named Steve Reynolds, a truck driver who operates his own trucking firm. He’s engaged to a roadhouse waitress named Eileen (Karen Morley), who has a young son named Tommy (Mark Dennis).

After a hot-rodding drunk runs Steve off the road one night and straight into an old man’s gas station, his license is revoked for six months. The accident wasn’t Steve’s fault, but a disappearing witness and a motorcycle cop named Don Parker (Regis Toomey), who has a vendetta against Steve, conspire against him.

To make matters worse, Steve has a competitor, Jerry Mason (Jim Bannon), an underworld character who’s undercutting Steve and is determined to run him out of business.

Finally, the night comes when Steve’s mechanic and driver Charlie (John Kellogg) is too sick to work, and Steve has no choice but to deliver a shipment himself. His license hasn’t been reinstated yet, so the decision could have terrible consequences. He starts out in the wee hours of the morning and sticks to back roads, but of course, something goes wrong. When he stops to service his truck, he’s knocked out by a masked man. The mysterious figure not only absconds with Steve’s truck, but he uses it to run over and kill a cop.

Steve goes on the lam and attempts to prove his innocence with the help of Charlie, Eileen, and Tommy. (There’s one weird, funny moment when the cops bust in on Eileen and Tommy right after Steve has slipped out the back. Tommy sits in a living room chair, looking innocent, reading a book. The detective peers at him suspiciously, and the camera zooms in on the book’s title — Studies in Necrophobia.)

If you’ve awake for most of the movie, you’ll have no trouble figuring out exactly who the killer is before Steve finds out. Even so, The Thirteenth Hour is a well-made, brisk mystery that packs plenty of excitement into its barely one-hour running time. The presence of the Whistler (an uncredited Otto Forrest) is less obtrusive than in some of the series’ entries, but he still sets the stage nicely, just as he did on his weekly radio show, which told the stories of “men and women who have stepped into the shadows.”

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Johnny O’Clock (Jan. 23, 1947)

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Adam Lounsbery

Robert Rossen’s Johnny O’Clock — yes, it’s really about a man named “Johnny O’Clock” — isn’t as good as some of Rossen’s later films, like The Hustler (1961), but it’s a great start. Rossen was a prolific writer of screenplays, but Johnny O’Clock was his first time in the director’s chair.

The improbably named protagonist is played with a light touch by former crooner Dick Powell. Johnny is a partner in a New York gambling syndicate run by an oily, overweight gangster named Pete Marchettis (Thomas Gomez).

Marchettis is married to a beautiful sloppy drunk named Nelle (Ellen Drew) who’s still carrying a torch for her ex-boyfriend, Johnny, but who loves the dough too much to ever leave Marchettis. Powell’s scenes with Gomez and Drew are some of the best of the picture, as the boozy moll falls all over Johnny in front of Marchettis and his heavy-hitters, seemingly oblivious to her husband’s jealousy. At the same time, Marchettis seems desperate for approval from both Johnny and his wife. In one scene, he goes on and on about the portrait he had a Mexican boy paint of him. When he shows it to Johnny and asks him if he likes it, Johnny simply responds, “It looks like you.”

There’s a police inspector named Koch (Lee J. Cobb) who’s hounding Johnny O’Clock, lurking in the lobby of the hotel where he lives and constantly trying to catch him riding dirty. Johnny’s association with corrupt cop Chuck Blayden (Jim Bannon) rubs the honest Inspector Koch the wrong way, especially since Blayden’s been on the winning end of more than one shootout with Marchettis’s rivals. Koch suspects that Marchettis and Johnny are using Blayden to do their dirty work under the guise of “justifiable homicide.”

When a pretty hat-check girl who works at Johnny O’Clock’s casino goes missing, things heat up. The girl, Harriet Hobson (Nina Foch), was dating Chuck Blayden, and when her body is found in her gas-filled apartment — an apparent suicide — Koch smells foul play. As soon as Harriet’s sister, Nancy Hobson (Evelyn Keyes), arrives in New York to claim her sister’s body, cracks begin to appear in Johnny O’Clock’s carefree exterior. He and Nancy are attracted to each other, but are from different worlds. She makes him want to cash out and run away with her, but if you’ve ever seen a gangster movie, you know that cashing out always comes at a price.

Johnny O’Clock is the third of many noirs to star Powell after he shed his image as a boyish Depression-era crooner and appeared as Philip Marlowe in Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944). Johnny O’Clock gives Powell a chance to craft a more three-dimensional character than he had a chance to in either Murder, My Sweet or Dmytryk’s Cornered (1945), and he’s mostly successful, although he didn’t seem fully up to the challenge of some of the more emotional moments in the film’s climax. (Powell was a breezy and charming actor who could project toughness and nastiness when he had to, but raw, naked emotion wasn’t one of the tools in his actor’s toolbox.)

While the story’s twists and turns are sometimes hard to follow, the actors are all good, and enjoyable to watch. Lee J. Cobb’s most famous role is probably as Lt. Kinderman in The Exorcist (1973), so it was fun to see him in a similar role, more than 25 years earlier.

Writer-director Rossen has a fuller vision of his criminal demi-monde that we see in most ’40s noirs, and his characters are convincing within its context. I really liked Johnny O’Clock, and I’d love to see proper DVD releases of more of Dick Powell’s film noirs in the future. I had to watch this one on a janky DVD-R recorded off of television.

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A Walk in the Sun (Dec. 25, 1945)

Posted on February 5, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

A Walk in the Sun
A Walk in the Sun (1945)
Directed by Lewis Milestone
20th Century-Fox

A Walk in the Sun had its premiere on Monday, December 3, 1945, and went into wide release on Christmas day. Produced and directed by Lewis Milestone, the director of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), A Walk in the Sun tells the story of the ordinary men who serve in the infantry. Long stretches of the film are filled with the men’s meandering thoughts (both in voiceover and spoken aloud) and their circuitous conversations. When violence occurs, it comes suddenly, and its larger significance is unknown. The film’s exploration of the infantryman’s P.O.V. is similar to William A. Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe, released earlier the same year. (Burgess Meredith, who played Ernie Pyle in that film, narrates A Walk in the Sun, although he is not listed in the film’s credits. When I first watched this film I was sure it was Henry Fonda’s voice I was hearing. I was surprised when I looked it up and found out it was Meredith.) Unlike The Story of G.I. Joe, however, A Walk in the Sun covers a much briefer period of time (from a pre-dawn landing to noon the same day), and its ending is more heroic, with little sense of loss or tragedy.

Based on the novel by Harry Brown, A Walk in the Sun takes place in 1943, and tells the story of the lead platoon of the Texas division, and their landing on the beach in Salerno, Italy. Square-jawed Dana Andrews plays Staff Sgt. Bill Tyne, a simple man who never had much desire to travel outside of his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. Richard Conte plays the Italian-American Pvt. Rivera, a tough soldier who loves opera and wants a wife and lots of children some day. George Tyne plays Pvt. Jake Friedman, a born-and-bred New Yorker. John Ireland plays PFC Windy Craven, a minister’s son from Canton, Ohio, who writes letters to his sister in his head, speaking the words aloud. Lloyd Bridges plays Staff Sgt. Ward, a baby-faced, pipe-smoking farmer. Sterling Holloway plays McWilliams, the platoon’s medic, who is Southern, speaks very slowly, and just might be a little touched. Norman Lloyd plays Pvt. Archimbeau, “platoon scout and prophet,” as Meredith describes him in the opening narration; Archimbeau talks incessantly of the war in Tibet he theorizes will occur in the ’50s. Herbert Rudley plays Staff Sgt. Eddie Porter, an opinionated guy who’s always looking for an argument (Normal Rockwell’s wasting his time painting photo-realistic covers for the Saturday Evening Post, Porter says. He should use a camera. Some day magazine covers will have moving pictures on them anyway.) Richard Benedict plays Pvt. Tranella, who “speaks two languages, Italian and Brooklyn,” and whose fluency in the former will prove useful when the platoon runs across two Italian deserters.

All of these “types” seem clichéd now, but they’re probably not unrealistic characters for the time. The only really dated thing about A Walk in the Sun is the song that appears throughout the film, and helps to narrate the action. “It Was Just a Little Walk in the Sun,” with music by Earl Robinson and lyrics by Millard Lampell, is sung by Kenneth Spencer in the deep, mournful style of a spiritual. I didn’t dislike the song, but its frequent appearance as a kind of Greek chorus felt intrusive.

One thing that really impressed me about A Walk in the Sun was the cinematography by Russell Harlan. While A Walk in the Sun is clearly filmed in California, Harlan makes the most of starkly contrasted black and white shots that could have been shot anywhere. One of the film’s motifs is black figures against a white sky. There are a couple of scenes that reminded me of the famous final scene in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) in which death leads a procession of people down a hill. Several times in A Walk in the Sun, the platoon is depicted as groups of indistinguishable black figures walking down a black hillside, silhouetted against a completely white sky. And in keeping with the infantryman’s P.O.V., when the platoon lies down to rest there are a couple of shots from the ground, looking up at the sky, while arms reach up across the frame and exchange cigarettes.

A Walk in the Sun is one of the better World War II films I’ve seen, and it’s generally well-regarded, but not everyone liked it. Samuel Fuller, who saw combat in World War II as a rifleman in the U.S. 1st Infantry Division and would go on to direct many cult favorites, wrote a letter to Milestone complaining about the film. “Why a man of your calibre should resort to a colonel’s technical advice on what happens in a platoon is something I’ll never figure out,” he wrote. “When colonels are back in their garrison hutments where they belong I’ll come out with a yarn that won’t make any doggie that was ever on the line retch with disgust.”

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