Pitfall (1948)

Pitfall is certainly a film noir and although it mostly lacks the characteristic noir visual style it manages very effectively to convey the necessary mood of paranoia and doom.

It was directed by André De Toth, produced by an outfit called Regal Films and released through United artists in 1948.

The basis of the plot is that one small mistake is all it takes to turn a perfectly happy life into a waking nightmare. Johnny Forbes (Dick Powell) works for an insurance company. He has a lovely wife and he has a son and they live in a comfortable suburban house and his life is placid and well-organised. It’s so well-organised that when he leaves for work he can tell his wife he’ll be home at exactly 5.50 pm.



It’s an idyllic life but it’s the sort of life that a man can easily take for granted. Johnny’s problem is that he’s basically quite happy but he doesn’t realise it. He thinks he’s bored. Today we’d probably say he was having mid-life crisis.

The conviction that his life is dull and routine hits him with special force when he meets Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott). Mona’s boyfriend Bill Smiley has been imprisoned for embezzlement and Johnny’s company had to pay out as a result. Johnny’s job is to try to get some of the money back. Smiley had stolen the money to buy expensive presents for Mona.



Mona seems to represent what’s missing from Johnny’s life. She’s sexy and exciting and she’s bad. Or at least she looks like she’s bad. Johnny loses his head completely. Unfortunately he’s not the only one who’s fallen under Mona’s spell. J. B. McDonald (Raymond Burr) is a private investigator who does work for the insurance company from time to time and he’s well and truly obsessed by her. He’s also completely mad, dangerously violent and entirely untroubled by a conscience.

Johnny and Mona on the other hand are very much troubled by pangs of conscience. Mona immediately breaks off their affair when she finds out that Johnny is married. While she looks like a femme fatale and she has the effect of a femme fatale on Johnny’s life she’s actually not bad after all. She never wanted poor Smiley to steal for her and she has no intention of wrecking Johnny’s marriage. But she just can’t help being the sort of woman who makes men crazy.



Johnny has been badly frightened by the whole thing and just wants to go back to being a respectable family man again but McDonald is getting crazier and crazier and he’s not going to leave either Mona or Johnny in peace.

Johnny really hasn’t done very much wrong. The affair with Mona was extremely brief. In the whole of his married life he’s misbehaved for a day or two; all the rest of the time he’s been a devoted husband and father. He has never inhabited the world of film noir. His life has been lived in the sunshine, a life of neatly maintained lawns and duty and responsibility. But that one misstep has changed everything and his orderly life has been plunged into chaos and violence and ultimately murder. He can be accused at most of weakness and poor judgment.



Mona has also done very little wrong. If she has a fault it’s simply that she’s not a very good judge of men. She certainly doesn’t deserve the nightmare that her life becomes.

Dick Powell and Lizabeth Scott are terrific, giving nicely understated performances. Powell is convincing as a nice guy who can’t believe that one little mistake really can destroy his life. Raymond Burr on the other hand goes totally over-the-top, giving us a memorable portrayal of evil and obsession. Jane Wyatt has the relatively thankless role of Johnny’s devoted wife but she does a fine job.



The relative lack of overt noir visuals works to the film’s advantage. This is a nightmare played out in broad daylight and bright sunshine. The ending is where a lot of very good film noirs fall apart but Karl Kamb’s screenplay shows a sure touch in this department - it manages to be both downbeat and hopeful. There is tragedy and there is a price to be paid but there’s no cheap nihilism. These are grownups not teenagers and they don’t have the luxury of adolescent nihilism.

One thing I found amusing was a review describing this as a subversive noir. In fact it’s quite the opposite in most ways. It’s very pro-marriage and the message is that respectability and duty lead to happiness. And I really don’t think this message is intended to be ironic. The lesson Johnny learns is that accepting adult responsibilities is more conducive to happiness than chasing glamorous blondes.

Synergy’s DVD presentation has attracted a lot of negative comment but I have no idea why. It’s a perfectly decent print.

This is film noir at its best. Highly recommended.

The Golden Salamander (1950)

The Golden Salamander is the sort of movie the British film industry used to do supremely well - a solid unpretentious but well-crafted and highly entertaining thriller benefitting from a superb cast. This one has the added bonus of some great location shooting in Tunisia.

Trevor Howard plays David Redfern, an English archaeologist who has been despatched to Tunisia to retrieve a collection of Etruscan artifacts belonging to a British museum. The collection had been salvaged from a sinking ship and are now in the home of the wealthy and mysterious Serafis in a small Tunisian village. On the way to the village Redfern finds the road blocked by a landslide and has to abandon his car and continue the journey on foot in darkness and driving rain. He’s not the only one having problems - he passes a lorry that has ditched. And, fatefully, he accidentally discovers the cargo the lorry was carrying - guns. He has stumbled upon an international gun-running operation.



Redfern has no wish to become involved and pretends to have seen nothing. Unfortunately the two men running the arms smuggling operation, Max (Jacques Sernas) and Rankl (Herbert Lom), are certain that he spotted them. And Rankl is a sinister and rather frightening figure.

Redfern finds that apart from the collection that he has to catalogue prior to its shipment to the UK the village has other distractions that are perhaps even more enticing. Most notable among these is a young and beautiful Frenchwoman, Anna (played by Anouk Aimée who at that stage of her career was known simply as Anouk). The attraction is mutual, although the situation is complicated by the fact that Anna and Max have been lifelong friends. Redfern is, against his will, finding that he cannot avoid taking some sort of stand in relation to the gun-running that Max is mixed up in. He tries to find an easy solution that will get Max off the hook, keep Anna out of the situation altogether, and clear the decks for his gradually blossoming romance with Anna. He will soon discover that there are no easy solutions, and finds he has become involved with murder as well as smuggling.



Now Redfern can no longer avoid taking a moral stand but he has no idea of the scale of the criminal activity and corruption that he has inadvertently wandered into. And the gun-runners have decided that the meddling English archaeologist must be eliminated. For David Redfern the challenge now is to stay alive.

Director Ronald Neame had a long and varied career as a writer, cinematographer and director. He did not direct a huge number of films but his output included some remarkably interesting projects. He handles the directing duties on this film with considerable skill.



Trevor Howard was of course one of the greats and he’s excellent as a man who is very reluctant indeed to become a hero, a man who thought he could go through life successfully ignoring things that were unpleasant or inconvenient. When he’s pushed too far he discovers within himself the strength to fight back.

Anouk Aimée is an engaging enough heroine. Herbert Lom gives one of his trademark vicious thug performances and he’s terrific as always. Miles Malleson as the village’s French policeman, Walter Rilla as the smooth but villainous Serafis and the always delightful Wilfred Hyde-White as a seedy but good-natured barfly round out the impressive cast.



This is a movie that succeeds admirably in what it sets out to do - to be an entertaining thriller. And that’s enough.

Odeon have released this one in their Best of British DVD series which includes a multitude of lesser known but intriguing British movies. The DVD is all-region and the transfer is quite acceptable.

The Prowler (1951)

It has been said that there is no such thing as a bad film noir, that even the weakest noirs have something going for them. I used to believe that, until I saw Joseph Losey’s The Prowler.

Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) calls the cops when she spots a prowler outside her bathroom window. One of the cops is Officer Webb Garwood (Van Heflin). Right from the start we know there is something creepy about Garwood. He’s inclined to be dismissive of the woman’s claims but some time later he calls at her house again, alone, telling her that it’s a routine check. The fact that it’s four in the morning and her husband works nights and she’s all alone in the house might have something to do with his call.



Susan is obviously not all that happily married, and she’s just as obviously keen for male company. Especially when her husband’s not home. It’s not long before she and Officer Garwood get to know each other really well. His nocturnal visits become a regular arrangement. Garwood wants to take things further. It’s not so much Susan he wants though. Snooping around her house he discovers her husband’s will - she stands to inherit a great deal of money if something happens to hubby. The money would be enough to set Garwood and Susan up in a motel. That’s always been Webb Garwood’s dream. He even has the motel picked out, on the road to Las Vegas.

If only Susan’s husband were to meet with an accident Garwood and Susan would be on easy street.



So far it sounds like a Double Indemnity rip-off, which it pretty much is, the difference being that both protagonists in Double Indemnity are equally corrupt and equally guilty (and equally sleazy) whereas in this case Susan could be seen as more or less an innocent party. Perhaps not innocent, but certainly less guilty than Garwood.

Everything would be swell except for one problem, and it’s a big problem. Susan is pregnant, and there’s some awkwardness about the timing. Garwood’s fool-proof plan relies on the fact that their affair has been kept secret. If it were to become obvious that they’d been sleeping together since well before her husband’s unfortunate accident then that might raise very inconvenient questions about this remarkably convenient accident. And the baby can’t be her husband’s since it’s an open secret that he couldn’t have kids.



Now the trap starts to close in.

This really is a horrendous mess of a film. The major problem is Dalton Trumbo’s script. It’s frankly ludicrous. Too many things that don’t add up, that aren’t remotely plausible, too many plot holes where events develop in the way the script requires them to do so even though it doesn’t make any sense. We have to believe that the moment someone realises Susan is pregnant then the whole dirty scheme will be revealed whereas in fact it would certainly take quite a while for anyone to connect up all the dots. As the plot unwinds things get sillier and sillier.



There are problems with the characterisations as well. Susan is all over the place and her abrupt emotional transitions are unconvincing. Whether the blame lies mostly with Evelyn Keyes’ acting or Trumbo’s script is difficult to say. Van Heflin is somewhat better as Garwood but the character is so crudely drawn that it’s hard to take him too seriously. The supporting performances are hammy and embarrassing.

On the plus side it’s a visually impressive film with Arthur C. Miller’s cinematography giving it a nicely paranoid edge.



It’s certainly a sleazy little film. The relationship between Garwood and Susan is perverse to an extreme. He’s so obviously a psycho that no sane person could possibly be taken in by him so we have to conclude that Susan is excited by the idea of carrying on a relationship with a dangerous madman.

Thee are good moments in the movie if you can overlook the extreme silliness of the plot. I suspect this movie has been wildly overpraised because both Trumbo and Losey were targeted by the blacklist thus making them automatically heroes in the eyes of the film school crowd.



VCI have done a splendid job presenting this movie on DVD. The transfer is good and there are extras aplenty. If you’re a connoisseur of bad movies then it’s worth a look.

Theodora Goes Wild (1938)

There are several problems with Columbia’s 1938 screwball comedy Theodora Goes Wild. Firstly, it isn’t very screwball. Secondly, it isn’t very funny. But worst of all, it’s not merely unfunny and dull, it’s actively annoying.

Theodora Lynn (Irene Dunne) lives in a small town and is a pillar of the local community. She plays the organ in the local church and teaches Sunday School. She is also, unbeknownst to the townsfolk, the author of a scandalous novel. And it’s not just a scandalous novel, but a huge bestseller as well. She has managed to keep her real identity a secret until her publisher persuades her to go out on the town during a visit to New York. She makes the acquaintance of a rich young artist named Michael Grant (Melvyn Douglas). Unfortunately he follows her home and proceeds to harass her unmercifully.



He taunts her about her small town life and tries to convince her that she needs to break away and become a free spirit, a rebel. Like he is. He proceeds to create a major scandal in the town. He’s a thoroughly unpleasant and irritating young man so naturally Theodora falls madly in love with him. And then discovers he’s not a free spirit after all. He’s trapped in a loveless marriage. He cannot get a divorce because his father holds a political office and dreads the thought of scandal.

Now Theodora turns the tables on him, following him back to New York and disrupting his life and creating scenes and being generally troublesome.



Now at this point you might be thinking that this doesn’t really sound like a zany fun-filled screwball comedy, and you’d be dead right. In fact it’s a mean-spirited and miserable movie. It even resorts to animal cruelty to try to get cheap laughs, and that pretty much sums up the type of movie this is.

A year later Irene Dunne gave a wonderful performance in another Columbia screwball comedy, The Awful Truth, but that one was a real screwball comedy and she had a great co-star in Cary Grant and in Leo McCarey a director who thoroughly understood comedy. In Theodora Goes Wild her performance is patchy at best. The fact that she falls for a creep like Michael makes it difficult to feel any sympathy for her character.



Melvyn Douglas on the other hand is thoroughly and comprehensively obnoxious as Michael. Generally speaking I have no problems with Douglas as an actor. The blame for his annoying performance here can therefore largely be laid at the feet of director Richard Boleslawski and screenwriter Sidney Buchman. Buchman must accept much of the blame for the film in general since his script is conspicuously lacking in actual humour.

The movie drags along for 94 minutes and let me tell you it was a very very long 94 minutes.



Columbia have released this movie in their Icons of Screwball Comedy series. This DVD series comprises two four-movie sets and is to be welcomed although I certainly hope the other movies are of a higher standard than this one.

Cry of the City (1948)

Cry of the City is a superb example of late 40s film noir from 20th Century-Fox, enlivened by some terrific performances and directed by one of the masters of the noir style, Robert Siodmak.

The story is not strikingly original. Two kids, childhood friends, grow up in New York’s Little Italy. Martin Rome (Richard Conte) is seduced by the glamour of crime and fast living; his friend Candella (Victor Mature) becomes a cop. It’s a story Hollywood loved - two kids from the same background whose fates are very different but indissolubly linked. Now Rome is in hospital in a critical condition with four bullets in him after killing a policeman in a bungled robbery. He’s so far gone he receives the last rites. If he lives it won’t make any difference because he’ll get the electric chair anyway. We naturally expect that we’re going to get a classic noir flashback to explain how Martin ended up in this situation.



But that’s not what happens. This is not the end of the story, it’s just the beginning. Martin pulls through and finds himself in the prison hospital. While he lay apparently dying he was visited by a crooked lawyer who tried to get him to confess to a jewel robbery, a robbery that ended in a vicious murder, a crime that has been attributed to another criminal who just happens to be the shady lawyer’s client. He’s also visited by a young woman, apparently his girlfriend.

This jewel robbery is a major current case. The jewels have not been recovered and only one of the robbers was ever caught. Detective-Lieutenant Candella and his partner Lieutenant Collins (Fred Clark) start to think that maybe there’s something in the lawyer’s story, and maybe if they can find the girl they can find the real answers.



Martin breaks out of prison, determined to find his girl before the police do. He’s been a notorious womaniser but this time it’s different. He really loves her. He loves her almost as much as he loves himself, which is really saying something. Martin is still in a bad way, his wounds have opened up again and he can barely stay on his feet. He gets help from an old girlfriend, Brenda (Shelley Winters), and a shady doctor but he’s still not much more than a walking corpse. But he’s still capable of killing people. His latest murder has left him in possession of the much sought-after missing jewels and he’s closing in on the person who really committed the jewel robbery, hoping to do a deal - to exchange the jewels for money and a ticket out of the country.

Martin is also being assisted by his kid brother Tony who idolises him. This is one of the major things driving Lieutenant Candella - he’s known the Rome family all his life, he’s very fond of the patents and he can’t stand the thought that Tony is going to end up just like Martin. Candella is a cop who combines toughness with sensitivity and the thought that one day he’ll be watching Tony take the walk to the electric chair upsets him greatly.



The support cast is extremely strong. Shelley Winters’ role is all too brief but she’s excellent. Hope Emerson is extraordinary as one of the most villainous women in film noir.

Interestingly enough it was originally intended that Victor Mature would play Martin Rome. There are those who think this would have produced a better picture, Mature being a more likeable actor than Conte and therefore more likely to make us care about the fate of this killer on the run. I’m not convinced by this. Richard Conte makes Martin a glamorous but rather unsympathetic character. He’s incapable of feeling any real emotions. He uses people and he kills people without hesitation. This actually makes the film better balanced. In a movie such as this you can’t help feeling some sympathy for the hunted criminal but by making Martin so cold-blooded Conte ensures that we also empathise with the dedicated cop who’s hunting him.



Victor Mature’s finely judged performance perfectly complements Conte’s. Candella is a good cop and a good man, but without being dull or sanctimonious. It’s the less glamorous role but Mature shows his quality as an actor by making the most of it. Mature has been criminally underrated as an actor. If you put him in a costume epic he’d give you an outrageously camp performance, because that what’s he thought (no doubt correctly) was expected. But if you put him in a role that required real acting he’d deliver the goods.

In fact everything about this movie is perfectly judged. The cinematography is in the classic noir style and is suitably moody and atmospheric. Robert Siodmak’s direction is faultless. The acting is superb. Everything works just as it should. This is 1940s Hollywood film-making at its best.



Strangely enough although Fox have released most of their notable film noir titles from this era on Region 1 DVD Cry of the City has not been included, a bizarre omission. It is however available nearly everywhere else. Aztec’s Region 4 DVD lacks extras but it’s a nice transfer and is definitely recommended.

Stray Dog (1949)

Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 Stray Dog (Nora inu) is a crime film that is often seen as an example of Japanese film noir. It certainly has many affinities to film noir and Kurosawa was almost certainly influenced by American film noir but there are some crucial differences as we’ll see.

Murakami (Toshirô Mifune) is a rookie homicide detective. His inexperience causes him to fall victim to a pickpocket on a bus, and his gun is stolen. He assumes he will be dismissed from the force for such an egregious failure but his chief has no time for that kind of self-pity and tells Murakami to get on with his job.



Murakami becomes obsessed by the necessity of getting his gun back. The stolen gun will have fatal consequences and will also drive the plot. The gun is used in an armed robbery and Murakami is convinced that it’s only a matter if time before it’s used in a murder, and his sense of guilt takes him to the edge of self-destruction.

He is teamed with an older detective, Sato. This then becomes the classic cop movie combination of the wise old detective teaching the green youngster the ropes. The gun itself becomes merely a symbol, an example of the workings of fate but Kurosawa is mostly interested in how we respond to fate.



Murakami’s quest for his lost firearm will take him on a journey into the seedy depths of the world of petty crime, a world of casual violence and nihilism. His fate becomes entwined with that of the man who now has his gun, a man who seems set on destroying himself and others with a vicious disregard consequences.

Like American noirs Stray Dog deals with the difficult adjustment to the new post-war world. But Kurosawa has little sympathy for those who use the war as an alibi for failure and despair.



There are major differences compared to American noir (or French noir for that matter). The idea of wallowing in victimhood is explicitly rejected. Yusa and Murakami have both suffered from the blows of fate but the most important line of dialogue in the movie occurs when Murakami’s boss tells him that bad luck can be an opportunity or it can destroy you. What is crucial here is that it doesn’t have to destroy you. It only destroys you if you choose to allow that to happen.

The noir world of chaos and self-pity can be defeated. If Murakami chooses the path of duty, if he accepts that as a cop he has a job to do and gets on with it he will survive. Survival is a choice, a message you can’t imagine finding in an American or a French noir. Kurosawa’s movie is dark but there’s a fundamental optimism that is antithetical to the universe of film noir. Family and duty can bring salvation, another message you don’t normally associate with film noir.



While Murakami feels some sympathy for the criminal the movie in general presents criminals as rabid dogs who must be destroyed. The violent world of the criminal is not glamorous, it is a squalid and pathetic world of losers.

The very fact that Kurosawa takes elements of film noir and puts them to his own uses makes this a particularly interesting film. This is one of Kurosawa’s less known movies but it’s arguably one of his best. Recommended.

Dance, Fools, Dance (1931)

You could be forgiven for assuming that the 1931 MGM release Dance, Fools, Dance is another of Joan Crawford’s early flapper comedies, something along the lines of Our Modern Maidens (1929). In fact this is a gangster movie. She does start the movie as a flapper however.

Bonnie Jordan (Crawford) and her brother Rodney (William Bakewell) are the offspring of a fabulously wealthy industrialist. They have been indulged for the whole of their young lives, lives that have been a constant search for pleasure, revolving around yachts, parties and bootleg liquor. Then comes the Wall Street Crash. It’s such a shock that their father promptly drops dead of a heart attack. His fortune had been completely wiped out and Bonnie and Rodney are now penniless.

What are they to do now? Bonnie suggests that the best option might be to get jobs but Rodney has no intention of demeaning himself by performing useful work. Bonnie finds employment as a cub reporter on a major daily newspaper; Rodney goes to work for notorious bootlegger Jake Luva (Clark Gable). He assumes that no actual work will be required - he will simply use his society connections to find more customers for Jake’s bootleg hooch.

He soon finds out that he will be required to do rather more than this, and that working for a gangster can be rather unpleasant. Especially when he finds himself in the middle of a major gangland killing.

Bonnie finds that being a cub reporter mostly involves covering things like poultry shows. She gets her big break in tragic circumstances. The paper’s star reporter is gunned down by Jake Luva’s goons. This reporter had taken Bonnie under his wing and she takes his murder rather personally. She jumps at the chance offered to her by her editor to undertake a very dangerous assignment - to infiltrate Jake Luva’s organisation.

She gets a job as a dancer at one of Luva’s night-clubs and soon catches the eye of the mobster. The facts she uncovers will come as a devastating blow to her.

The movie can be seen as a transitional vehicle for Crawford. She plays the kind of wise-cracking hedonistic flapper that had become her specialty but Bonnie is a flapper who grows up and takes on adult responsibilities. This grown-up Bonnie is a resourceful, brave and determined woman and points the way forward to the roles she would play in her later career. We get to see her dance (and she’s a remarkably energetic and sexy dancer) and we get to see her do some serious acting. She completely dominates the movie, as she was to do time and time again in her subsequent career. It’s a fine performance.

Clark Gable was still playing stereotyped gangster roles at this stage of his career but his star quality is already evident. The supporting players are generally solid. There are a few definite pre-code moments, such as Bonnie suggesting to her boyfriend a kind of trial marriage.

MGM is not the studio that comes to mind when you think of early 30s gangster movies but they did make a few very interesting forays into the genre (Beast of the City being a particularly interesting example).

Dance, Fools, Dance is very much a melodrama but it has some very dark moments and on the whole it’s a fairly effective gangster flick with the addition of Crawford’s feisty girl reporter making it part of the newspaper movie genre as well.

This is one of the best of Crawford’s early movies. It’s been issued in the Warner Archive DVD-R series, and it’s a pretty good print. Definitely worth a purchase.