"Johnny O' Clock"

Tonight I watched the fourth and final Noir acquired from the Central Libe last Friday : "Johnny O'Clock" (1947), starring Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes. Powell, in the title role, plays a smartly dressed gambler with an unusual name. We learn that he has several aliases as well, but we are never told whether O'Clock is his real last name or one of the fakes. In any event, the screenwriter takes every opportunity to have the female characters in the movie use Johnny's full name in sentence after sentence, even when they are talking directly to him. I will conclude my preamble by saying that someone sure loves the name "Johnny O'Clock", because we hear it over and over again during the course of the film.

The story plays out slowly and diverts to romantic themes, just like last night's "Between Midnight And Dawn". Johnny sets up furtive, high stakes card games and hidden back room casinos with roulette wheels and blackjack tables. He has help from a bad cop, but even so, most of his efforts are short lived because the honest hard ass cop, Lee J. Cobb, is riding his tail, following Johnny everywhere he goes.

For his part, Johnny plays everything as safe as possible. He is not a risk taker, which sets him apart from the malevolent cop who is his partner. The bad cop seeks bigger game. He wants to team up with the corpulent local crime boss (Thomas Sanchez), who is a friend of Johnny's but whom Johnny keeps at arm's length because he is having an affair with Sanchez' wife, the insouciant Ellen Drew. As you can see, a three way conflict is created here, made worse by the murder of a naive hat check girl who works in one of the crime bosses' nightclubs. This girl had sought Johnny's advice on how to get rid of the bad cop, who had dated her and beat her up. This is some rough Noir stuff we are experiencing at this point. Johnny tries to help the kid out, but it's too late. She is killed (made to look like suicide), and suddenly her sister (Evelyn Keyes) flies from the East Coast to enter the picture, intent on exacting revenge on the person(s) responsible for her sister's death.

She finds Johnny and immediately falls for him, standard procedure for Film Noir, and that is when the plot gets diverted to a romantic interlude, just like last night, except this time the romance is tortured. Keyes' interest in finding her sister's killer declines as she discovers Johnny's association with the bad cop and the crime boss. Now she is worried about losing him, too, and she just wants him out of the whole situation. But it's not gonna be easy, because dapper Johnny, who has always played everything down the middle so as not to make enemies, is now smack in the middle of Bad Guys and Murder, and has the perpetually gruff Lee J. Cobb on his tail for good measure.

"Johnny O'Clock" has the tough-talking style of a Bogart/Bacall Noir, where everybody speaks in rapid back and forth wisecracks, and even the romantic dialogue is tough as nails. The women are coiffed and dressed to the 1940's hilt; the men are suit and tie on the surface, thugs underneath. Only Johnny is different, because he is neither straight nor crooked, yet he can talk the lingo better than any of them. This was Dick Powell's specialty as an actor, to be a regular seeming guy who is also badass,  which made him an alternative to the darker Bogart for ambiguous Noir lead roles. With Powell, you never quite know whose side he is on. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? That is also his appeal to the dames of '40s crime dramas. Women are intuitive and can sense his heart, no matter how indifferent he plays himself toward them.

In the long run, at 96 minutes, "Johnny O' Clock" gets most of it's points for style, which it has in spades, and for the acting, especially by Evelyn Keyes as the distraught sister of the murder victim. Dick Powell is rock solid in the lead role (check him out in other Noirs, too), and Ellen Drew steals her scenes as the frustrated alcoholic wife of crime boss Sanchez. She is in love with Johnny too, and all of this can only lead to something that is decidedly not good.

The style outweighs the writing, however, and so the story meanders quite a bit in the middle. There isn't the direct scene after scene plot construction that builds to a climax with no excess, as we saw in "The Burglar" and "Drive A Crooked Road".

"Johnny O'Clock" is a movie that wants to be as Noir as it can be, and for that it gets Two Thumbs Up from me. I was surprised to see the fan reactions at Amazon and IMDB. People love this film, and that is good because it tries so hard to give fans everything they want. All I would have asked for is more cohesive plotting, or perhaps a directorial rein-in of the script to tighten things up a bit.

Good stuff at any rate, and that brings us to an end of our Noir Score from the Central Libe. That was an unexpected bonus of my trip Downtown, and I enjoyed all the films very much. :)

That was all the news for today, and I am back at work, writing from the kitchen table at Pearl's.

See you in the morning.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)