We're back to American Noir, and this one's pretty high concept. It's also really convoluted, and while it's easy enough to follow as a movie, I don't know how well the numerous twists and turns will translate to the confines of the blog. I'll do my best to review it for ya, but forgive me if I can't sufficiently boil it down.
We're talkin' "99 River Street"(1953). John Payne is "Ernie Driscoll", a hard nosed boxer who's just lost a bout for the heavyweight championship. As the movie opens, he's reviewing the fight on tv, some sports show is broadcasting it as a rerun. The announcer notes that in addition to losing, Ernie was also suspended by the boxing association because of damage to his eye. He's in danger of a torn retina, he can't fight for a year. To make ends meet, he's been driving a cab.
This is all a backdrop for his wife "Pauline" (Peggy Castle) to give him grief. She's a bimbo, a gold digger boxing groupie who waited at his dressing room when he was up-and-coming. She slept with him to marry him and now that he's a has-been, she can't wait for a divorce. Ernie's an earnest Joe, and hopes to win back Pauline's heart. He tells her he'll save his money to buy a gas station and earn his living that way. "It'll make us a lot of money", he promises. But it's not just about the money with Pauline (though it's definitely that, too). It's also the prestige. She sought Ernie out because she thought he'd become champ. Now that his career is finished she doesn't want him.
You'd think Ernie would give up, but he doesn't. He wants Pauline to love him, so he buys her a nice box of candy on the advice of his dispatcher. But just as he comes home to deliver it, he sees her making out with another man, the boyfriend he didn't know she had. Instead of confronting them, he drives off in a rage.
Back at the taxi dispatch, while Ernie is stewing, "Linda James" (Evelyn Keyes) shows up. She's an actress that Ernie knows from the local coffee shop. Linda's beside herself with worry and wants Ernie's assistance. "Please, Ernie! I need your help.....I......I just killed a man"!
Ernie is so shocked by her statement that he forgets all about his wife. He asks Linda for details and they run down the street to a theater, where she says the killing occurred. "I swear it was in self defense", she tells him. The body is lying on the stage. "He's the director of the play I auditioned for. The long and short of it is that he said I'd won the part, but now I owed him a favor. I'm not that kind of woman, but he wouldn't take no for an answer. Finally he grabbed me and I didn't know what to do, so I picked up a pipe that was leaning against the wall and I hit him with it. Now he's dead! Oh, Ernie.......what should I do? I'm scared to go to the police.......oh please help me, please tell me what to do".
Ernie offers Linda his advice, which is to go to the police and tell the truth. "It was self defense. The guy deserved it". But Linda says the cops won't believe her. "So many girls in this business are like that, you know? They'll play that game to get parts. It's accepted. The police will think I'm that way, too, and that I killed him cause I was mad about not getting the role". She asks Ernie if he'll help her hide the body, and of course he's reluctant to do so. While he's hemming and hawing, Linda grows hysterical. Just when it seems she's gonna lose her cool completely........the lights go on, someone says "Fantastic"!, the dead body gets up off the floor and it's the director of the play, who isn't dead after all.
The play's producer walks down the aisle and steps up onstage to join the director and Linda, who is beaming. "I told you she was a terrific actress"!, the director exclaims. The producer agrees. "As far as I'm concerned, she's got the part, in this play and any other I'm involved in"! Everyone's thrilled, except for Ernie, who's just been played for a chump. He scowls at Linda. "Thanks for using me to advance your career". When she tries to placate him, he gets even madder. Thinking of his wife, he says "I've got someone like you at home, who only thinks of herself. I don't need two of you in my life". Then the producer insults Ernie by offering him twenty bucks for his trouble. This sends Ernie over the edge and he punches out the two men. Because he's a boxer, his punches do damage. Later on, the producer and director will file assault charges against Ernie, but mainly for publicity. "Just think of the ad copy", says the producer. "A play so convincing, you can't tell the difference from real life"!
I told ya this was gonna be convoluted. But you don't know the half of it.
Linda feels terrible about deceiving Ernie and even worse now that he's got an assault charge hovering over him. She comes back to the dispatch and pleads for a chance to redeem herself. Ernie won't listen. "You wanna make it up to me? You can make it up by leaving me alone"! Linda's distraught and follows Ernie to his cab. When she opens the back door to get in, a body falls out - a real body this time - and it's the body of Ernie's wife! Holy Smokes! Now the tables are turned and he needs Linda's help. He forgets all about his anger toward her, muttering "Linda, I......I didn't do it".
"I know you didn't", she replies. "The question is 'who did' "?
"I think I know", says Ernie, reconsidering the boyfriend he saw his wife with earlier.
Linda becomes his partner, helping him to solve the crime while they stay one step ahead of the police, who want Ernie on the assault charge. They discover that Pauline's boyfriend is a guy named "Victor Rawlins" (Brad Dexter), a grinning diamond thief. I must cut in here to note that we have a surplus of diamond thieves of late. Must've been a popular Villain Model at the time. At any rate, Victor is a particularly bad guy, a big mofo and a sociopath. He acted like he loved Pauline (we saw the two of them together before Ernie did), but when his fence said he wouldn't pay because a woman was involved, Victor simply murdered her with no compunctions. Then he put her body in the back of Ernie's cab, to frame him. Now Victor has returned to see "Christopher" (Jay Adler), the fence who works out of a pet shop.
"I got rid of the dame, I want my fifty grand". But Christopher is not a man you can bargain with. Once a deal has gone sour, it's overwith. "I'm sorry Victor, but you should've thought of that before. You know I don't deal if a woman's involved. It screws things up, loyalties, you understand".
"But I told ya, I got rid of her. She can't possibly talk. Just give me my money and we're done".
Christopher is a small man, in late middle age, so Victor thinks he can bully him. But he's making a mistake, because Christopher is a Peter Lorre type, and as everyone knows, Lorre is the absolute Last Man on Earth you should ever mess with, because he will Plan Your Demise as if it's The Most Important Matter in the History of the World, and he has infinite patience. In Christopher's case, he also has Jack Lambert for a henchman, and as everyone also knows (or at least every casting director), Lambert is the last man in motion pictures that you ever want to get into a punchout with, because he's never lost one. Between the two of them - Christopher and Lambert - they've pretty much got the bases covered. Victor doesn't yet see this, but he's gonna find out.
I hope this is making even one iota of sense.
What it all boils down to, is that Ernie is trying to avoid the cops, as - in addition to the earlier assault charge leveled by the theater people - he's being framed for the murder of his wife. He's got Linda the actress on his side, as well as his dispatcher and fellow cabbies, who assist by misdirecting the cops. Ernie's also trying to track down Victor, so he can prove his innocence in the murder. Victor, in turn, is being trailed by Peter Lorre and Jack Lambert, who want their 50 thou back.
So you've got three entities - the Payne/Keyes coupling, the Lorre/Lambert nexus, and Victor as the lone ranging psychopath and they're all converging on each other. Many Epic Punchouts take place en route (and a cautionary note is in order because these punchouts are extraordinarily brutal).
It's a good movie, entirely implausible but well directed by Phil Karlson and well acted all around. You could consider it a forerunner of today's hipster Retro-Noir, though by itself, it's not trying to be hip in any way, just super complex.
It's traditional overall, in the sense that the bad guys get what's coming to them, and Ernie finds redemption in a chance for true love. Watch it for yourself and see. Two Big Thumbs Up for "99 River Street". /////
The previous night we had another genre shift, this time due to a Youtube recommendation. "Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence"(1939) is a Depression-era road movie with a social conscience, as you might expect from a film written by Dalton Trumbo. Glenn Ford, only 23 and in his feature length debut, stars as "Joe Riley", a New York City sales clerk who's saved his money to buy a ranch in Arizona. In a terrific opening scene, he explains to a street cop why he's leaving the big city. I won't give line-for-line dialogue, but the gist is that he's tired of working in a warehouse, earning pennies on the dollar for the big shots. He wants to live where the air is fresh and the land wide open, where he can be his own boss. He's not afraid of hard work, he just doesn't want anyone telling him what to do. On his ranch, he'll be the shot caller. Now all he's got to do is get there.
The next time we see him, he's hitchhiked his way to Cleveland, Ohio where he stops at a diner in Newhall, California for a bite to eat. There he meets "Tony" (Richard Conte), a train hopping vagabond. Tony tells Ford he's traveling the wrong way. "Hitching's dangerous, brother. You never know who you're riding with, and even if the guy's okay, you can only do a couple hundred miles at best. You say you're goin' all the way to Arizona? Take it from me, the train's the way to go. Getcha there in two days". Ford asks him if train-hopping isn't as dangerous as hitchhiking, or even moreso, but Conte provides a good argument, and he looks pretty clean for a hobo (i.e. he looks like Richard Conte), so Ford joins him on the next choo-choo that passes by.
I must break in here to say that The Great Mystery of Life is answered by the words "Got to do with where choo-choo go". But you already knew that.
In their freight car, Ford and Tony are startled when a hatch opens. Is it a vicious train bull, like Shack from "Emperor of the North"? If so, they might be dead meat, but it's only a young man with a funny accent, who's equally down on his luck. They allow him to stay, and in the process discover that he's a she. In this respect we wonder if Trumbo is paying homage to the Louise Brooks character in "Beggars of Life", which we saw and reviewed about three years ago. She also dressed as a boy, which a young woman traveling alone would do for obvious reasons. In the current film, "Anita Santos" (Jean Rogers) is an illegal immigrant from Spain, and again we have Trumbo - later to become the political poster boy for Hollywood Blacklist commies - taking on a social issue years ahead of when it would hit mass awareness.
A train bull eventually does come, and the three are forced to jump from their freight car. Wandering beside the tracks they come across a hobo camp, in the wilds of Saugus, Kansas. There they meet Tony's old mentor "Professor B. Townsend Thayer" (Raymond Walburn), a former educator turned professional vagrant. He's good at living free and runs an honest camp; no thievery, no drunks. Some of his campers are pretty rough customers, however. During their first night in camp, "Hunk" (Ward Bond), the Professor's enforcer, finds out Anita is female. He tries to rape her; Tony and Ford beat him up. The travelers then leave, with the Professor in tow. His doesn't want to stay in his dangerous camp, and besides, like Ford and Tony, he's interested in the wide open West.
The group is now four, and the men have to protect Anita from the Immigration authorities. Word's gotten out that she's illegal. A local Saugus sheriff, trying to be helpful, tells them that one way for Anita to avoid deportation is to get married. The obvious candidate is Glenn Ford but he doesn't want it. "I'm self made and self reliant"!, he says. He envisions Anita dragging him down, but really he's afraid of domestication. At this point, the film's producer kicks in with a romantic subplot ("Hey, we've gotta sell tickets to this thing"!) : boy rejects girl, boy strikes out on his own, boy sees his dream go down the tubes, girl rescues him at the end cause she's from Spain and knows about desert farming. Translated, that means that Ford separates from Anita and the Professor after Tony winds up in the hospital. He feels bad about leaving, but there's no way he's gonna get married. So he jumps another train and makes his way to Arizona, where he locates his ranch. Now remember, he bought it sight unseen, so when he gets there and discovers it's twenty acres of dust, he's devastated.
That bring us to the return of Anita (girl rescues boy at the end). She's followed him to Arizona, not to badger him to marry her, but to help on his ranch. "I thought you might need some assistance. You can't work the land alone". She wants to repay him for standing by her in their travels. Ford is dismayed because the soil's all dried out. He won't be able to grow the corn he envisioned. "But that's a Midwestern crop", Anita tells him. "Out here, you can grow oranges, olives and tomatoes. I should know, I grew up on a farm in Spain, on land just like this"! And that's the happy ending, putting a Hollywood bow on the Grapes of Wrath-ish message.
It's a wonderful little film, very folksy and entertaining rather than depressing despite the subject matter. The travails are kept light, and the whole thing rests on Glenn Ford's handsome-but-casual appeal and the overall acting. Ford was a heck of a different performer as a young man : charming, witty and charismatic, and thin as a rail. When he aged, he was still a great actor, but he turned hard looking and crusty, and his characters were taciturn. Must've been a heavy smoker and drinker, but then.....weren't they all?
"Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence" benefits from Dalton Trumbo's very tight 62 minute script that, while short on plot, manages to develop fairly complex characters in a number of scenarios as they cross the open country.
I give it Two Big Thumbs Up. ////
So there you have it once again. I'm still on the lookout for British Crime Thrillers, but as always, the law of diminishing returns is kicking in. We'll see what we can find.....and oh yeah! - I forgot to mention that I saw Ron Foster in an episode of "The Virginian"! He had a substantial role as the partner of a con man (Steve Forrest), who's come to Medicine Bow to scam the local bank on a phony oil discovery. But I mean, imagine that. Just when I'd given up on finding any more Ron Foster movies, there he is in an episode of The Virginian. Miracles never cease......
That's all I know for tonight. I send you Tons of Love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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