Women’s Prison (1955)

Women’s Prison is, as its title suggests, a movie about women in prisons. This 1955 Columbia production may well be the worst movie of its type ever made.

Helene Jensen (Phyllis Thaxter) has just arrived at the women’s penitentiary. She’s a meek housewife who was convicted of manslaughter after she killed a child in a traffic accident. She is befriended by Brenda (Jan Sterling), an old hand who is just about to start yet another prison sentence.

Helene can’t cope with life in prison. She goes from one hysterical episode to another. The prison doctor, Dr Crane (Howard Duff) feels sorry for her, but then he feels sorry for all the prisoners. He’s one of those people who spends his whole life feeling sorry for people but he reserves most of his pity for people who don’t deserve it.

The women’s prison is separated by a wall from a men’s prison, and one of the male prisoners has found a way to get into the women’s prison. Glen Burton’s wife is in the women’s prison and he wants to get a message to her, a message so important that it has to be delivered personally.

Meanwhile Helene is still getting hysterical and spends most of her time in the infirmary.

The women’s prison is run by Amelia van Zandt (Ida Lupino). She’s the stereotypical wicked sadistic prison warden. She and Dr Crane have had many confrontations about the treatment of prisoners. Things come to a head when it is discovered than Glen Burton’s wife Jane is pregnant. This is embarrassing for the prison authorities since she has been behind bars for the last two years. Warden Brock (from the men’s prison) and Amelia van Zandt have to discover how Glen Burton got into the women’s section. In trying to get the information from Jane Burton van Zandt gets a bit carried away and after being slapped a couple of times Jane promptly collapses.

When the women prisoners find out about Jane Burton they start a riot, which threatens to get out of control and leave the prisoners in charge of the prison.

There’s not a single character in this movie who feels real. They are all stereotypes. The prisoners are all good while the authorities running the prison are all bad. Ida Lupino does the best she can but her character is such a two-dimensional villain and the entire movie is so phony there’s little she can do. It’s a complete waste of a fine actress.

Howard Duff has an even more thankless role as Dr Crane. Dr Crane is a smarmy, smug, self-satisfied bleeding heart and that’s how Duff plays him. He’s irritating beyond belief.

Cleo Moore and Jan Sterling play sympathetic prisoners but again they’re mere stereotypes. They’re the victims of a wicked oppressive system. Phyllis Thaxter is excruciating as Helene Jensen. If only Helene could stop feeling sorry for herself and give some thought to the parents of the child she killed we might be able to respect her but the script never even suggests such a thought. We’re simply supposed to pity her as another victim of an oppressive system.

The entire movie is one long bleeding heart sob story about the inhumanity of the system, and of course no mention is made of the price that victims of crime have to pay. The movie makes it plain that we’re supposed to be on the side of the prisoners but conveniently it forgets to mention the trail of misery that criminals leave behind them.

Lewis Seiler directed this mess and shows no signs of inspiration or imagination. There’s nothing even vaguely noirish about the visual style of the film.

This movie is included in Sony’s Bad Girls of Noir volume 2 DVD set. It’s an acceptable print although it is rather grainy. There are no extras.

By no stretch of the imagination can Women’s Prison be considered a film noir. It is a social problem message movie, and it’s one of the most annoying and heavy-handed examples of that genre ever made. This is simplistic rubbish that tries to manipulate the viewer into an emotional response. This is a movie to be avoided at all costs.

Private Hell 36 (1954)

Private Hell 36 came out in 1954, fairly late in the Hollywood film noir cycle. It was made by The Filmakers, the production company set up by Ida Lupino and her then husband Collier Young. Young and Lupino co-wrote the script while Don Siegel directed.

It starts out as a fairly routine if well-made and well-acted police procedural. Off-duty LA cop Detective-Sergeant Calvin Bruner (Steve Cochran) stumbles onto a drug store hold-up. It seems like no big deal, until one the $50 notes found on one of the suspects (Bruner killed the other robber) turns out to be linked with a very big robbery in New York a year earlier. Bruner and his partner Detective-Sergeant Jack Farnham (Howard Duff) trace the stolen note to a night-club singer at the Emerald Club. She got the note as a tip. The singer is Lilli Malowe (Ida Lupino).

Lilli can offer only a vague description of the man who passed her the note but this is a big case and she is their only lead. She mentioned that the guy said he’d had a big day at the track. So the two detectives, accompanied by a willing if unenthusiastic Lilli, stake out the racetrack. It’s a job that requires patience and it takes a week to get results, during which time Bruner and Lilli fall for each other.

Lilli is a fairly hardboiled dame. She’s waiting for a man with lots of money. And Detective-Sergeants don’t make enough money for that sort of woman.

The racetrack stakeout eventually brings result, a suspect is pursued and is killed when his car plunges over a cliff. The proceeds of the New York robbery are scattered all over the hillside. Lots and lots of money. And nobody could possibly know exactly how much money  - there’s no way of knowing if this haul represents all of the money from the robbery. If some of the money were to disappear, were for example to find its way into somebody’s coat pocket, nobody would ever be any the wiser. It’s a big temptation for any cop, and it’s too much for Calvin Bruner. This is where the noirness of the movie starts to kick in, in a very big way.

Farnham wants nothing to do with all this. He’s happily married with a kid and while it’s sometimes a struggle on a cop’s salary he’s always had the satisfaction of knowing that every penny they do have has been honestly come by. But Bruner is his partner and you can’t turn your partner in so Farnham finds himself a very reluctant participant in a very sordid undertaking. The money is stashed in a trailer Bruner has rented, trailer Number 36.

It all seems so simple, but of course it doesn’t turn out that way. Guilt is steadily gnawing away at Farnham and pretty soon the whole business shows signs of becoming uncomfortably complicated. Jumping every time the phone rings, the two cops become more and more jumpy and their once close friendship is soon in tatters. Things are closing in on them and that trailer full of money will become their own private hell.

Film school types like to see every Hollywood movie of the 50s as an indictment of the American Dream. That whole “dark underside of the American Dream” thing has become one of the most tedious clichés in film criticism. Of course they also try to apply it to this film. The problem is that Farnham and his wife are not trapped in “stifling suburban conformity” - they’re happy, they have a pleasant little house and they have a good relationship. It’s the dissatisfied hedonism of Bruner and Lilli that seems shallow and empty. Lilli doesn’t love Bruner - she loves the idea of a guy with lots of dough. Bruner doesn’t love Lilli - he loves the idea of dating a glamorous night-club singer. Neither is ever likely to find happiness, and Lupino plays Lilli as a rather sad and tragic figure. She’s chasing the wrong things. Bruner is equally sad. He’s a good cop and he throws it all away, chasing an illusion.

The relationship between Farnham and Bruner is obviously a crucial element in the film. Bruner is unable to accept that Farnham may have found the recipe for happiness. He sees marriage as a trap to be avoided and his rejection of that kind of commitment is one of the things that dooms him.

Steve Cochran was a good choice to play Bruner - he makes the character suitably selfish and egotistical without succumbing to the temptation to chew the scenery. Howard Duff was one of those honest journeyman actors who could always be relied upon for a solid performance. Dorothy Malone as Farnham’s wife Francey also resists the temptation to overact (something she was certainly capable of). Ida Lupino is wonderfully world-weary and cynical, but not too cynical. All the performances work splendidly.

Olive Films’ DVD release offers an excellent widescreen transfer, although sadly without any extras.

A very fine B noir, and highly recommended.

Moontide (1942)

Moontide was the picture that was supposed to launch Jean Gabin as a Hollywood star. Like almost everything else connected with this movie it didn’t work out as intended, but it’s still a fascinating movie.

Filming started on this 20th Century Fox production in November 1941 but it had already encountered numerous obstacles and its troubles were only just beginning. The Production Code Authority had absolutely vetoed the original screenplay. The original writer, Nunnally Johnson, was replaced by John O’Hara. Jean Gabin insisted on major changes to the script. Studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck insisted on further major changes. Soon after shooting began director Fritz Lang walked off the picture. Plans to film on location had to be scrapped. As a result it’s a bit of a mess in some ways but paradoxically many of these problems ended up working in the movie’s favour.



It’s a kind of film noir fairy tale love story. French dock worker Bobo (Gabin) arrives in San Pedro, California. He meets up with his old buddy, Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), who has a job lined up for him. Bobo celebrates his arrival by getting so drunk that when he wakes up next morning he has no memory of the night before. Nor does he have any idea how he ended up on a bait barge in the harbour. The arrival of the Chinese owner of the barge, Henry, clarifies things slightly. Bobo and Henry had ended up drinking together and Henry had offered him a job, selling bait.

Bobo’s initial reaction after this is to move on as quickly as possible, but then fate steps in. A young woman tries to drown herself and he saves her. The woman is Anna (Ida Lupino). Like Bobo she’s an outsider and she has a past although we never actually find out any details of either her past or Bobo’s for that matter. That’s mainly due to problems with Production Code Authority. In the original novel and in the early version of the screenplay Anna is a prostitute and Bobo is a man who has had many lady friends, quite a few of whom had followed Anna’s profession.



All this had to be cut but in some ways that strengthens the film. Enough is left to suggest that both have seen quite a bit of life, and to lead us to suspect that both have had colourful pasts, but the fact that we don’t know the details gives them both an odd kind of innocence. All we really need to know is that both of them are outsiders, homeless strays.

Bobo takes Anna back to the barge to recuperate. He’s a tough guy with a fiery temper but he’s the sort of tough guy who would take in a bird with a broken wing. Like Anna. He has a gentle side to his character and it responds to her immediately. She obviously not used to men showing this type of tenderness, and it doesn’t take her too long to realise that she likes it.



Their blossoming love soon faces some obstacles. Tiny has a weird kind of hold on Bobo and Tiny dislikes Anna. He apparently dislikes any woman that Bobo likes. Tiny more or less lives off Bobo - he arranges jobs for Bobo and then pockets half the paycheques. There has also been a murder - an old and rather unfriendly character named Pop Kelly who happens to have been drinking at the same bar as Bobo on the day Bobo arrived in town. Since Bobo remembers nothing of this night, and since Bobo’s friend Nutsy (Claude Rains) finds Pop Kelly’s cap in the barge, we suspect that either Bobo was involved or someone was trying to frame him. It’s not long before Tiny puts this idea into Anna’s head.

The odds seem stacked against the two ill-starred lovers. They set up housekeeping on the barge and they are soon talking of marriage but Tiny is determined to thwart their plans.

The film’s reticence about the characters’ pasts and the downplaying of Bobo’s violence were the results of demands made by both the Production Code and Darryl F. Zanuck. The influence of the Code on Hollywood films in the 30s and 40s is today almost universally viewed as being pernicious and disastrous, as is the kind of studio interference that Zanuck indulged in. In practice however the results were not always entirely destructive and in this case Zanuck’s instincts were undoubtedly correct. The changes forced on the writers have the effect of making both Bobo and Anna much more sympathetic and also much more vulnerable. They give the two central characters a kind of innocence that makes their outsider status much more poignant. We desperately want them to make it and that gives the movie a much greater emotional impact. We feel that they are ill-equipped to deal with a hostile world.



Jean Gabin did not find favour with American audiences at the time and he made only one more film in Hollywood before returning permanently to France. Gabin could not adapt to the Hollywood system of movie-making. That’s perhaps a pity since his performance is extremely good.

Ida Lupino is even better. This is a more vulnerable Lupino than usual and she gives a marvellously subtle performance. Claude Rains was cast against type as the scruffy but wise Nutsy and his performance is very unselfish - Rains could chew scenery with the best of them but he backs off in this picture allowing Gabin and Lupino to maintain centre stage. The big surprise is Thomas Mitchell as Tiny. Mitchell usually played loveable types but Zanuck insisted he’d be wonderful as the sinister Tiny, and Zanuck was right.



Visually the movie is extraordinary. Charles G. Clarke was nominated for an Oscar for his cinematography and deservedly so. It’s a mix of visual styles - there’s a lot of film noir and quite a bit of German Expressionism but it owes its biggest debt to the French poetic realist films of the 30s. This may have been indirectly due to Jean Gabin. The visual approach is strikingly reminiscent of Marcel Carné’s 1938 French hit Port of Shadows which starred Gabin. It’s impossible to believe that Moontide wasn’t influence by that film. One suspects that with Gabin as the star someone at 20th Century-Fox must have watched Carné’s film and decided that the look of that film would be perfect for this one. There’s also a debt to Salvador Dali, who did the original drawings for Moontide’ s celebrated drunken dream sequence. Zanuck also had a major input and at least one important (and very effective) scene was entirely Zanuck’s idea.

Part of the look of the movie was entirely fortuitous. The outbreak of war on December 7 1941 meant that plans to film on location at San Pedro had to abandoned so the studio recreated the harbour setting on a sound stage. This magnificent set, combined with the fog-shrouded cinematography, gives the movie an incredibly artificial look. It’s as if the four main characters are trapped in a strange fairy tale word of their own, with Bobo as the hero, Anna as a kind of princess of the slums, Tiny as the wicked witch and Nutsy as the fairy godmother. This fairy tale ambience suits the material perfectly and proves to be the best thing about the film.



Fritz Lang was director for the first two-and-a-half weeks of filming (before Archie Mayo took over) and many of the scenes he shot remain in the film, although apparently no-one is now sure which scenes they are. Lang and Gabin clashed repeatedly on set but both wanted the movie to be more doom-laden and pessimistic and disagreed vehemently with Zanuck on the general direction the film should take. Much as I revere Lang and Gabin I think Zanuck understood the material better than they did.

Moontide was not a commercial success, probably because it’s so uncompromisingly non-realistic and really seems like a strange hybrid. It’s a combination of European and American sensibilities, of film noir and romance, of crime movie and fairy tale. Like Charles Laughton’s 1956 masterpiece Night of the Hunter (which resembles Moontide in many ways) it was a movie that contemporary audiences were not prepared for. Although by no means a perfect film it’s a strange and rather wonderful experience which I recommend very highly.

The DVD in the Fox Film Noir series looks sensational and includes some terrific extras.

The Man I Love (1947)

The Man I Love is another film noir that turns out not to be really a film noir. It belongs more properly in the genre of the 1940s woman’s melodrama, but with a film noir sub-plot. And it’s a pretty good movie.

This 1947 Warner Brothers movie stars Ida Lupino, which always helps. Lupino is Petey Brown, a nightclub singer. Sometimes I think that all women in the 1940s were nightclub singers. Maybe I’ve watched too many 1940s movies. Petey seems to be the archetypal world-weary cynical tough girl but as we will find out she has a tender side.

In a moment of particular world-weariness Petey decides to return to LA to see her family. It’s getting close to Christmas and she’s temporarily without a man and she’s feeling a bit on the lonely side and she’s fond of her family.



Her sister Sally is holding things together there. Her husband is a GI who suffered a severe case of shell-shock during the war and he’s in an army mental hospital. The kid sister of the family is Ginny, a rather shy girl who’d rather babysit her neighbour’s kids than go out to nightclubs. And then there’s the one brother, Joey.

Joey is the big problem. He works for nightclub owner Nicky Toresca (Robert Alda). Joey thinks he’s a tough guy but unfortunately he’s not as tough as he thinks he is and he’s definitely not as smart as he thinks he is. He’s an accident waiting to happen. Petey goes to Nicky’s club to try to persuade him to stop leading Joey astray, but what she actually succeeds in doing is talking her way into a job there as a singer. Nicky is one of those guys who expects that if he employs a female singer she will also perform certain extracurricular duties of a personal nature. That’s OK by Petey. He’s a good-looking guy and she likes men and she especially likes men she’s not likely to get too involved with. Love ‘em and leave ‘em is her approach.



That’s all well and good but fate is about to step in. Joey gets involved in a fight and gets arrested. When she arrives at the police station to bail him out she finds that he’s already talked his way out by putting all the blame on the other guy. Now the other guy will get to spend New Year’s Eve in a cell. Petey knows quite well well that it was Joey who started the fight and her basic decency impels her to do something that will have major consequences. She bails the other guy out, even though he’s a complete stranger.

This stranger turns out to be a merchant seaman. When she runs into him again in a club they have a drink together and she makes a surprising discovering. This rather taciturn sailor is actually legendary jazz piano player San Thomas. Their mutual love of music draws them together and pretty soon they’re going around as a couple. But this guy is not like other guys she’s had. She really likes him. In fact she’s done something that is against all her principles. She’s fallen hopelessly in love with him.



San has a quality guaranteed to make him attractive to a woman like Petey. He’s a three-time loser who turned to the bottle when his musical career faltered and his first wife dumped him. He still hasn’t recovered from his marriage breakup. He’s emotionally damaged and vulnerable and afraid of being hurt. As it happens if there’s one thing Petey loves to do it’s rescue people. During the course of the movie she tries to rescue her brother, both sisters and her neighbours as well as San. It’s not that Petey is gullible. She’s actually pretty good at rescuing people and occasionally she even succeeds. She just can’t stand to see people destroy themselves.

It’s not long before brother Joey needs rescuing big-time. With Petey running around with her new boyfriend Nicky has been on the lookout for new sources of female companionship. He’s picked Gloria O’Connor. Gloria lives on the same floor of the apartment house where Petey’s family lives. Gloria is married with two kids but motherhood doesn’t seem to agree with her. Being married doesn’t seem to agree with her. What does agree with her is getting drunk and chasing good-looking rich men. When her husband finds out about this Nicky orders Joey to get Gloria away from the club to avoid a scene. Joey of course bungles this job disastrously and now he’s looking at the prospect of death row.



The plot might be a bit contrived but with Raoul Walsh in the director’s chair and Lupino in top form it works very well. Robert Alda is enjoyably smooth and sleazy as Nicky. Bruce Bennett is a little on the dull side as San but that kind of suits the character.

The movie of course belongs to Ida Lupino. Lupino had every qualification to be a great film noir femme fatale but oddly enough hardly every played such a role. On the other hand one thing she did supremely well was to play a basically decent woman and make her interesting, sexy and exciting. One slight disappointment is that her singing voice was dubbed by someone else. The next time she played a nightclub chanteuse (in Road House) she did her her own singing and she was fabulous. Not a fantastic voice, but a voice that reek of too many cigarettes, too much whiskey and too many men. In other words, the perfect film noir singing voice.



While it’s not exactly a hardboiled movie it does have some great lines, like Petey saying to San, “I might have known it was a dame. Nothing else makes a guy cave in like that does.” And Nicky telling Petey, “Grow up, baby. Stick with me in my gutter. We both talk the same language.”

It’s a movie that could very easily have become either sentimental or preachy but it never does. And the ending has a nicely bitter-sweet feel to it. Not a conventional happy ending, but definitely not tragic or hopeless. Hollywood in the 40s distrusted open endings, so full marks to Walsh and to Warner Brothers for daring to end the film this way. All in all a superbly made slightly noir-tinged romantic melodrama. Highly recommended. It’s available in the Warner Archive DVD-R series, and the picture quality is excellent.

Road House (1948)

By 1947 Ida Lupino had grown tired of being in Bette Davis’s shadow at Warner Brothers and elected not to renew her contract with the studio. As a freelancer she still had mixed success in getting roles that interested her but in 1948 she leapt at the chance to play the female lead in Road House for Fox. The result was one of her best performances.

The movie had stated life as a treatment heavily influenced by James M. Cain. Darryl F. Zanuck hated it, regarding it as a sordid tale of unsympathetic losers, and insisted on major changes. The final screenplay was an intriguing mix of film noir and melodrama.

Jean Negulesco was to direct, with Lupino, Cornel Wilde and Richard Widmark playing the three corners of a classic romantic triangle. Celeste Holm as the obligatory good girl rounded off the cast.



Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde) manages an amazingly palatial road house near the Canadian border for his old buddy Jefty (Widmark). Jefty treats the road house as a kind of hobby combined with a means of attracting women. He hires the talent. He makes regular trips out of town and returns with a succession of female singers. The reactions of the staff lead us to believe that they have all been beautiful and that none of them have been overly talented, but the suspicion is that the last thing Jefty cares about is whether they can actually sing or not.

Jefty’s latest find is Lily (Lupino). Right from the start Jefty says that this one is different. And she is. She immediately makes it clear she isn’t going to be pushed about. She also rapidly establishes herself as the biggest attraction the road house has ever had. She admits she hasn’t got much of a voice, but she knows how to use it and she knows how to get an audience eating out of her hand. And Jefty’s reaction to his new chanteuse is different - he falls hopelessly in love with her. In fact he wants to marry her.



It hasn’t occurred to Jefty that Lily might not be interested in marrying him. For all his bravado about his conquests it is clear that Jefty knows little or nothing about women. And despite their initial heated clashes she soon finds herself falling for Pete. Jefty does not take this well. Not well at all. He comes up with a twisted method of gaining his revenge, a method that will have both Pete and Lily dancing to his tune.

If there’s a potential weakness to this movie it’s the way the characters of both Lily and Jefty change dramatically halfway through. But then Lily has never really been in love before, and Jefty has never really been seriously thwarted before. In the hands of lesser talents these sudden dramatic changes might have undone the movie but Lupino and Widmark carry it off fairly convincingly.




The three leads all do splendid jobs. Lily is set up to appear as the femme fatale but as the film progresses we realise that while she’s certainly hardboiled she isn’t destructive. At least no intentionally, although her arrival in town does create an explosive situation. Lupino did her own signing in this picture and while it’s not a big voice that she has she’s rather effective. It’s a voice that speaks of too much whiskey, too many cigarettes (Lupino literally smokes thousands of cigarettes during the course of this movie) and too many men. Lupino also gets the opportunity to show she could play a sexy glamour girl, and she does it extremely well.

Widmark gives one of his giggling psychopath performances but it’s also weirdly sympathetic. Jefty obviously has some major sexual and emotional issues. He’s really a little boy who has never had to grow up and he just isn’t equipped to deal with rejection.

The underrated Cornel Wilde also does a fine job. The important thing is that the attraction between Lily and Pete is totally believable.



The small town setting provides a useful atmosphere of claustrophobia. The town seems to consist of little more than the road house, one hotel and a railway station. In a big city Lily and Pete could easily disappear but in a small town there’s nowhere to hide.

The road house itself dominates the movie. It’s difficult to believe that such a one-horse town could support such a lavish venue but that’s the magic of Hollywood. The art direction is impressive. Also impressive is Lupino’s wardrobe - those ludicrously sexy shorts, her improved bathing costume and the slinky dress she wears for her performances are all delightful.

The Fox DVD includes an enthusiastic audio commentary by Eddie Muller and Kim Morgan. Muller’s most interesting point was his theory that Jefty, despite his womanising reputation, is actually a virgin. The great thing about 1940s American movies is that the sexual aspects of the story can never be spelt out directly so there’s always a fascinating sexual ambiguity which woks particularly well in Road House.

Highly recommended.

High Sierra (1941)

In 1941 High Sierra made stars of both Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino and it was one of the movies that started the trend later to become known as film noir.

Bogart is Roy Earle, a bank robber who has just been released from prison after a pardon was issued, apparently organised by his former underworld colleagues. His old crime boss ants him for a major job on the West Coast, an ambitious hotel robbery. Roy heads west to meet up with the rest of the gang.

On the road he encounters a family who seem to have stepped straight out of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. The family includes an attractive girl with a club foot. The girl is named Velma (Joan Leslie) and this is the first sign that Roy Earle isn’t a mere thug. He helps out the grandfather after a traffic accident and he ends up paying for an operation to fix Velma’s foot. And he falls for Velma.



His rendezvous with the other hotel robbers (Babe and Red) is a fateful one, since he also meets Marie (Ida Lupino). Both Babe and Red want her and Roy is initially inclined to send her back where she came from. He has no problem with dames but he can see that there’s going to be big trouble between the two men over her and someone is likely to get shot. Marie manages to persuade him to let her stay however, our second sign that Roy is a very soft-hearted hoodlum.

In fact it’s soon pretty obvious that Marie is more interested in the middle-aged Roy than she is in either of the two young punks. And he’s getting to be interested in her.

Of course you know the robbery isn’t going to go smoothly, and Roy and Marie end up on the run. Accompanied by an engaging mutt named Pard. Roy was also too soft-hearted to leave the dog behind. You’ve heard of the Whore with a Heart of Gold. Well Roy Earle is the Gangster with a Heart of Gold.



Stylistically it’s perhaps more like a western than a film noir with most of the crucial scenes, including the climactic ones with Roy and Marie on the run, taking place in the great outdoors, in the foothills of the Sierras. Raoul Walsh was an ideal director for this type of movie and does his usual very fine job.

The script (by John Huston and W. R. Burnett based on Burnett’s novel) stretches credibility quite a bit. It has the kind of noir cynicism mixed with romanticism that you get in several of Huston’s noirish movies, especially The Asphalt Jungle (also based on a W. R. Burnett novel).



The problems with the script don’t really matter with both Bogart and Lupino in great firm. Bogart’s career had taken years to take off with several false starts but by the beginning of the 40s things were finally falling into place for him. Perhaps most importantly, Warner Brothers were starting to make movies that were tailor-made for him. Lupino had had similar problems. She’d been making movies for a decade (she was 13 when she scored her first movie role in Britain) but had failed to find her niche. In 1940 Bogart and Lupino both landed great roles in They Drive By Night which set them up for their breakthrough in High Sierra.

Bogart is extremely impressive, especially given that the character as written is scarcely believable. But Bogart makes us believe in him.



One of the more interesting aspects of the movie is that we have Joan Leslie as Velma set up to be the good girl and Lupino as Marie set up to be the bad girl, but that’s not how it pans out. Marie is as complex as Roy Earle but she’s more convincingly written. Lupino is superb.

It’s only real claim to noirness is that we have two sympathetic protagonists who clearly have the odds stacked against them. If it isn’t a real film noir it’s still a fine example of 1940s Warner Brothers film-making.

The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (1939)

The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt is a lightweight spy thriller played mostly for laughs. It’s really a sort of screwball comedy with spies.

Michael Lanyard was a notorious safe-cracker who used to go by the name of The Lone Wolf but he’s long since reformed. His past comes back to haunt him when a spy ring kidnaps him and tries to frame him for stealing top-secret weapons plans from a safe in the War Department.

Lanyard isn’t all that easy to get the better of though and when they try the same stunt again he switches the plans on them. The spies make various attempts to retrieve the plans while Lanyard not only has to try to foil their plans, he also has to keep one step ahead of the police.

The plot isn’t exactly inspired and the twists are fairly predictable. Since it’s being played mainly as a comedy that doesn’t matter too much. Unfortunately the script doesn’t really have too much sparkle to it. But it does boast an interesting cast.

Warren William plays the Lone Wolf and while he’s always watchable one can’t help thinking that this sort of essentially comic role was a reprehensible waste of his unique talents. The really interesting casting choices are the two main female roles, two actresses who had not yet found their niche in Hollywood and are playing roles that are very unexpected.

Firstly we have Ida Lupino as the hero’s ditzy blonde girlfriend, and she’s there to provide most of the comic relief. Whatever misgivings she may have had when she read the script it has to be admitted that Lupino approaches the part with her usual commitment and energy. And somehow or other she just about carries it off. In fact she’s probably the best thing about this movie.

Secondly, and even more surprisingly, we have Rita Hayworth as a heavy! She’s the number two in the enemy spy ring but she gets to do most of the dirty work, using a mixture of threats and seduction. She handles the seductive aspects fairly well but being threatened with violence by Rita Hayworth isn’t particularly scary. It’s a bizarre piece of miscasting and she never comes to terms with the part.

So far it must sound as if I really disliked this movie but while it reaches no great heights it’s still harmless entertainment. It’s strictly B-movie stuff but if you can accept it for what it is then it’s reasonably enjoyable. And Lupino is fun.

Deep Valley (1947)

Deep Valley, Ida Lupino’s last film for Warner Brothers, is sometimes described as a film noir. You probably have to define film noir fairly broadly to accommodate this one but I think it can just about qualify. In any case it’s an interesting movie in its own right.

Directed by Jean Negulesco in 1947, it combines crime and romantic melodrama. Ida Lupino is Libby, who lives with her parents on a rundown farm in an isolated valley. They live like hillbillies and it’s a very troubled family. The father has a chip on his shoulder and a tendency to see himself as a victim. Years earlier he lost his temper and hit his wife. She took to her bed and became a permanent professional invalid. She hasn’t been downstairs for years. Libby witnessed the incident and the shock left her with a speech impediment and caused her to withdraw totally from the world.

Then comes the day when a road is being built, a road that will end the valley’s isolation. It’s being constructed by a convict chain gang. Libby watches fascinated from the top of a hill. Of course it’s quite possible that the sight of a group of young, fit, half-naked men doing hard physical work is of more interest to her than the actual road construction! One convict in particular catches her eye. I think we’re certainly meant to assume that Libby is sexually repressed and that she’s now about to experience a belated awakening of her sexuality.

When the overseer brings a group of convicts to the farm to fetch some water he catches her eye again, and he notices her with equal admiration. One of the guards makes an unfortunate remark, and the convict (we later find out his name is Barry) slugs him. He is punished by being locked in a toolshed and threatened with having an extra five years added to his sentence. That night a violent storm causes a disastrous landslide. Many of the convicts are killed, and several (including Barry) take the opportunity to escape.

Other dramas are unfolding during the storm. Her father strikes Libby and she takes off for the woods with her dog. She intends to set up solitary housekeeping in a small cabin but then Barry turns up. They recognise each other as outsiders who’ve been misunderstood, and they fall hopelessly in love. But the posse is out in the woods searching for him, so what future is there for this ill-starred couple?

There are quite a few interesting things about this movie. Barry is in many ways a typical noir hero. He was originally sentenced for manslaughter but he was never an actual criminal, just a hot-headed guy lacking in self-control whose volatile and violent temper as destined to land him in continuous trouble. In a key scene he tells Libby that he’d never thought of himself as a criminal, but now he realises that his temper has made him one.

And Barry is quite similar to Libby’s father. He’s also not really a bad man, just weak and self-indulgent and unwilling to take responsibility for his temper. Like Barry he isn’t truly cruel or vindictive. They both regret their actions afterwards but seem unable to learn from their mistakes. Libby’s problem is that she’s now fallen in love with a man so much like her father.

While it’s set entirely out in the backwoods it’s shot very effectively in a very film noir style, with even some hints of German Expressionism. Visually it’s quite impressive.

The acting is generally good, with particularly good performances by Lupino and Dane Clark as Barry. They’re both very intense and this adds to the sense of desperation in their love. They work exceptionally well together.

Deep Valley is a rather obscure movie that is well worth seeking out. Unfortunately I’ve heard that the Warner Archive DVD-R is atrocious. My copy was recorded from TCM and they certainly managed to find a beautiful print. It’s definitely worth setting the recorder for this one.

The Bigamist (1953)

The Bigamist, released in 1953, was the last of the handful of movies Ida Lupino directed for The Filmakers, the production company she and her then-husband had set up. It’s a low-key little B melodrama that, despite the title, is not the slightest bit lurid. It’s a good example of the greatest virtue of the old-fashioned Hollywood B movie - the Production Code Administration was likely to let you get away with things you couldn’t get away with in an A picture, simply because B movies were perceived as movies that didn’t really matter all that much.

Edmond O’Brien is travelling salesman Harry Graham. He’s just a regular guy, living a fairly dull and uneventful life. He’s married to Eve (Joan Fontaine) but she’s unable to have children. He spends an enormous amount of time away from home on business, especially in Los Angeles. When she finally comes around to his idea of adopting a child all seems to be well until Mr Jordan (Edmund Gwenn) from the adoption agency informs them that their past will have to be rigorously investigated. In the course of this investigation Mr Jordan discovers Harry’s secret life. He has a second wife, and a child, in Los Angeles. How this came about is then revealed in a lengthy flashback.

Harry wasn’t the kind of guy who picked up women for casual sex when on business trips, nor did he make use of the services of ladies of the night. And that proved to be undoing. When the loneliness really started getting to him, he met a nice girl (Phyllis, played by Ida Lupino) and fell in love with her. He tried to convince himself that nothing was going to come of it, that it would just remain an innocent friendship, but on his birthday he and Phyllis ended up in bed. And she got pregnant. And being a decent guy, he did the right thing and married her. So he ended up with two households in two different cities, with two different wives. Until the nosy Mr Jordan started poking around and Harry’s double life caught up with him.

It’s a movie that provokes surprisingly heated responses. I suspect that your reaction to this film will depend very much on how you feel about its refusal to take a moral stance. There are no villains. Phyllis isn’t “the other woman” - she knows nothing about Eve’s existence. She’s a very sympathetic character. Eve is troubled by her inability to have children and over-compensates by throwing herself into the business that she and Harry own, but she’s no monster. Harry is a decent guy who wants to make everybody happy. As the surprisingly non-moralistic courtroom speech by the judge at the end suggests in a covert sort of way (this was 1953), it’s a complex situation and perhaps having the state acting as moral policeman and treating this as a criminal matter isn’t helpful and only serves to make an unhappy state of affairs more unhappy.

Audiences at the time apparently didn’t approve of this non-judgmental attitude and the movie was not a commercial success. The ambiguous ending probably didn’t help the movie’s prospects in 1953. And many modern viewers also seem annoyed by the movie’s failure to take sides, and especially by the movie’s unwillingness to condemn Harry. Personally I think that’s its strength. These are essentially good people who find themselves caught in a predicament where there’s no easy way out. Someone is going to get hurt.

Lupino’s direction is unobtrusive. She’s content to let this be an actor’s picture, and given the high quality of the acting by O’Brien, Fontaine and Lupino herself this is a sound move. Lupino is particularly impressive, demonstrating her ability to give a subtle performance where it’s appropriate. The one real weakness is Edmund Gwenn as the annoying busybody Mr Jordan. Apart from not adopting a moralistic tone the movie is also notable for being rather frank about extra-marital sex, by the standards of 1953 anyway. It’s a fascinating and absorbing little movie that is well worth watching. And it’s public domain so it’s very easy to get hold of, or even to download.