Tonight's film was called "5 Against The House" (1955), a nifty little Noir about four college buddies who are visiting Reno during a break from school. While there, they visit a casino and are highly impressed by the sight of an employee wheeling a "cash cart" from the main counter to a back room where the night's take is stored in the casino vault. One of the pals is a bit of a math whiz. He calculates what the casino might bank on an an average night : 100 grand, an impressive sum, especially in 1955.
Two of the college friends look a few years too old to be in college : Brian Keith and the handsome Guy Madison. This is not miscasting. They are older because their education was deferred by a stint in the Korean war. They are now back in school to finish up their law degrees and are several years older than the other two buddies, played by the handsome Kerwin Matthews and the distinctive Alvy Moore, who looks like his name sounds, and who wound up playing the hard-to-decipher Hank Kimball on the classic series "Green Acres".
So there you have 4 of the "5" in the title. The two Korean War vets (Keith and Madison), and the two younger guys, one handsome and highly intelligent (Matthews) and one wry and goofy (Moore).
The dialogue in the first 20 minutes was non-stop wisecracking between the guys, spoken in a 1950s hipster slang, and because of that I was a bit worried that the whole movie was just gonna be a bunch of slick talk and no action. But that was just the set-up. Then two things happen. The first is that we are shown a major crack in the Cool Guy facade of Brian Keith. He gets in a fight with a smart aleck in a nightclub, and it is clear now that he is suffering from PTSD, though back then there was no such term. In the movie, he is called a psycho after he beats up the smart aleck.
The second thing that happens is that we are introduced to the sultry Kim Novak, who is singing in the nightclub. She also happens to be Guy Madison's girlfriend, who he hopes to marry. Novak winds up becoming #5 from the title. "5 Against The House" is so named because the four college friends and Kim Novak are gonna rob the casino. Most of them would never even consider such a thing, but the Intelligent Friend (Kerwin Matthews) concocts a plan which he swears is foolproof. The other friends demure, and say they won't participate, but they didn't figure on Brian Keith. Remember, he is a war psycho with PTSD. He sees no future for himself, in college or otherwise. He attaches himself to Kerwin Matthews' robbery plan, and pulls a gun on the others while they are on their way back to Reno.
Now he is gonna force them all to go along with the plan, which began as a College Boy prank thesis of trying to outsmart casino security. But now the pals have Keith on their hands and he has gone full PTSD crazy.
"5 Against The House" is quite an effective thriller once it gets going, after the snappy dialogue is out of the way. It has great location photography in Reno from 1955, shot in black and white. Brian Keith is the star, with his considerable Method Acting ability. When the big plot twist comes, midway through the film, it is Keith who turns the story into hard drama, after it began as a light comedy.
One again, for the third night in a row, I have seen a little-known but very enjoyable Noir, and as with the films of the last two nights, I give "5 Against The House" a big thumbs up. The B&W photography is fantastic, as is the idiosyncratic script by Sterling Silliphant, who would go on to become a major screenwriter.
Every time I think I have seen all the Film Noirs there are to see, I get lucky and find a few new ones, and this time I got my fix once again. Three things I've gotta have are my Noirs, my Westerns and my Sci-Fi, all from the late 40's through the late 50's, and all in black and white. :)
Well, I don't know if I have the energy to finish the story of "K", but I will try. It will be important for anyone following the tale to re-read the blogs of the past few days, if you even hope to understand the context. To reiterate, "K" had first been the girlfriend of my best friend Mr. D. Then, in June 1993, in a strange turn of events, Mr. D kicked her out of his house on Burton Street, and she came to live at my house, in our garage. She achieved this tenancy not by asking me directly if it was okay to move in, but by aligning herself with "T", who had already lived in our garage for over three years, since October 1989. In hindsight, years later, I came to wonder how "K" knew "T". "K" was shy to the point of reticence. She often would not respond when you said hello, that kind of thing. "K" was extremely withdrawn, not the kind of person to introduce herself to anyone, let alone to insinuate herself into a person's house. My take on how it all came about was that she had known "T" beforehand. Otherwise, why did she go straight to him in the garage when she wanted a place to stay? Why did she not come to me? I was the main man at 9032, and I was also a close friend of her brother and her ex-boyfriend Mr. D. "T" had once been a close friend too, and was still a "friend" in 1993, but only because my memory had yet to return.
"K" was caught in the middle of all of this. I will cut to the chase now and tell you what "K" said to me in June 1994, one year after she moved into our garage at 9032 Rathburn Ave. At the time, my memories of 1989 were just beginning to emerge, but I could not make sense of what I was remembering. It was an overwhelming time. We were just months removed from the earthquake.
As my amnesia broke, the fragments of memories of 1989 made me feel on the verge of something incredible, something frightening and mindboggling but also very important. It felt to me like the world depended on my making sense of what I was remembering.
I didn't trust "T", living in my garage. I was getting a very bad memory of him from 1989. Read my book for the story. So one day I asked "K", his girlfriend, who had also been the girlfriend of Mr. D, if she could help me to understand what I was remembering.
And she said, "Do you know how, sometimes, when something happens that you can't do anything about, that you just have to blow it off"?
I said "Yeah, but what do you mean"?
And she said, "Well this is one of those things. It's bigger than you are. You just have to blow it off because you can't do anything about it".
So said "K" in June 1994. That was almost 25 years ago. "K" was the first person to clue me into the fact that something major league had happened to me.
The point I have been building to in the blogs about "K", however, leads us back to my best pal Mr. D.
Because, just as there is no way that "X" could have had a connection to Howard Schaller without the help of Mr. D, neither could his then-girlfriend "K" known about the events of 1989 unless Mr. D told her. He was involved, she wasn't. How else could she have known?
How could she then have related to me, in 1994, that something so big had happened to me in '89, that the only alternative I had, in her opinion, was to "blow it off"?
She knew what had happened to me because Mr. D told her, when she was still his girlfriend. He must have told her sometime between September 1989 and 1993. Then, when he kicked her out of his house in June of that year, she ran to the only other guy who held the same secret she knew : "T", the lowlife false friend of mine who lived in my garage.
"K", a secret keeper for 25 years now, wound up marrying "T" about 20 years ago.
So there you have it; the people I used to know. As "BC" said to me when I was taken out of Rappaport's house, "they aren't your friends, Adam".
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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