Last night's film was an eccentric Noir with a political subtext called "The Argyle Secrets"(1948). William Gargan stars as "Harry Mitchell", a tough-as-nails reporter who's on the hunt for a notebook called "The Argyle Album", which supposedly has the names of American businessmen and their Nazi collaborators. Expository dialogue, which is in abundance in this film, hints at surreptitious art thefts, but nothing is ever spelled out. As the movie opens, a newspaper columnist named "Allen Pierce" (George Anderson) is dying in the hospital from heart failure brought on by his job. He was the one to break the story on the existence of the Argyle Album, and his protege Mitchell is the last person to visit him. Mitchell asks him about the album because he'd like to take over the case, but just as Pierce is about to give him the lowdown, his doctor comes in the room with his medicine, which turns out to be poison. The doc was a hired gun to shut him up.
Harry Mitchell finds himself in a tight spot, in the hospital room of a man who knew too much, so he stages a ruse with his photographer to sneak out. But then the photog is also killed inside the room, and Mitchell, having split the scene, is wanted for both murders. From there, the movie is narrated by Mitchell, in the style of the Fearless 1940s Reporter: "I found myself at the waterfront." Of course he did, because "the waterfront" just plain sounds good in a sentence, and as a metaphor, it's at land's edge, where bad guys and good guys alike run out of real estate. Mitchell himself is more of the former, he's not nice, and he even punches women in the face (sorry to have to mention that), and thus his character is not very likable. But as I said, this is an eccentric Noir, and the woman in question doesn't seem to mind. Then another woman shows up, named "Marla" (Marjorie Lord), who Mitchell keeps pronouncing as "Mahler". She's a seductive blackmailer who also wants the Argyle Album, and she's got a trio of hoodlums to help her obtain it. But, after she has them beat the tar out of Mitchell, to the tune of a "room spinning" montage, she then backtracks and feels guilty, and volunteers to let Mitchell choke her into unconsciousness so that he can escape. "They'll need to see bruises" she says of her henchmen, "go ahead and do it." And then he does. He chokes her. So as I also said, he is not a likable character.
However, all of this is done in classic, even exaggerated, Noir style, so it's almost (and would be) a caricature of a Noir if it weren't so dead serious, and in that way it's like an Orson Wwelles flick, with exaggerated character personas, i.e., the Marla chick is too cool for school, so much so that she asks Mitchell - a newspaper reporter - to choke her, and he does, so that tells you something about the psychosexual undercurrent of the plot, which I don't even wanna get into.
The thing is, this movie has Noir style to boot, so it's kind of a shame that the mystery of the Argyle Album (the whole point of the plot) is given short shrift. All we get is the old shell game: "Album, album, who's got the album?", but we never really get to know what's in it. The cops want to get Mitchell for the murders, so he has to beat them to the punch by remaining on the lam and finding the killers himself. Sgt. Schultz is the main suspect. He claims to have been a concentration camp survivor (by exposition), but he's really a Nazi collaborator, and his show is being run by the mysterious Marla, though its never explained how, and that's because this flick is very short on substance but saturated with style, and in that regard, it succeeds. It's been restored by some filmic society that I don't remember the name of (it's in the opening credits), and it flows well enough to keep you watching (and even riveted in places), but as I say, the Mitchell character is just a rotten guy, so you can't root for him. Nonetheless, it gets Two Big Thumbs Up (and almost Two Huge), just for its hard-core Noirness and the focus on style. The picture looks like it's off of a dvd. Give it a watch, it's highly recommended. ////
This is a Double Noir blog, and for our second feechum, the previous night we saw a hard boiled flick from Lippert Pictures, who've brought us some good ones in the past such as "Motor Patrol" and "Train to Tombstone". You'd better bring your score cards to keep track of the double crosses in "Shoot to Kill"(1947), in which a crooked assistant D.A. named "Lawrence Dale" (Edmund MacDonald) frames a small time hood for a murder he didn't commit. The story is told in flashback from the hospital bed of Dale's wife "Marian" (Luanna Walters). As the movie opens, she's been in an accident with her husband and the framed criminal, who's escaped from prison. Both men are now dead. They ran off the road while being chased by the cops, who are puzzled as to how they came to be together. What were they doing in the same car, and why were they running from the police? As Marian tells it, Lawrence Dale was a crook, who was campaigning for the top job of District Attorney in the coming election. His platform was that he was tough on crime (as opposed to his out of town boss), but in truth, he was in the pockets of the three mobsters who run the town. Hence the murder frame-up of one of their enemies.
"George Mitchell" (Russell Wade; we've got reporters named Mitchell in both movies) is a hotshot who wants a scoop on the case; he also happens to be a close friend of Marian. When he visits her in the hospital, she tells the story of how she met Wade in the first place. She was looking for a job and got hired on the spot. She's an excellent Gal Friday and soon she and Wade fell in love. But behind the scenes, we see that he was a crook, making deals with the mobsters, to cover-up their hold on the city. Marian didn't know this and helped him campaign for the election. Soon, he popped the question and she said yes and they got married. But no sooner did they leave the courthouse, than someone took a pot shot at her. We already know why. Marian figures it out soon after.
This is why I tell you to bring your scorecard, because I'm gonna tell you that she married Wade to set him up. As she reads him the riot act after nearly getting shot on her wedding night, we assume she's been working on behalf of reporter George Mitchell the whole time, as his undercover filly, trying to bust her husband Wade for framing the hood at the beginning of the movie. But boy, the trickery goes a lot deeper than that, and just when you think you've got it all figured out, they spring a whopper of a twist on ya.
Keep in mind the mob bosses and the escaped framed hood, and then wife Marian, and you'll see that Lawrence Wade has his head in a vice. The plot moves slow for the first 20 minutes, but when it gets going it's a steamroller. There's also some killer piano playing during a nightclub scene, from a guy named Gene Rogers, demonstrating pre-rock n roll stylings later made popular by Jerry Lee Lewis. "Shoot to Kill" also does The Fearless Forties Reporter thing, if less spectacularly than "The Argyle Secrets", but it's plot probably makes more sense. I give it Two Big Thumbs Up and a high recommendation. The picture is again razor sharp. On a side note, we know and love Luanna Walters as one of our favorite Western Sweethearts, and it's also worth noting that she appeared in more 60 minuters than any actresses except Elizabeth Holt and Joan Barclay. Walters plays "Marian" in "Shoot to Kill" and though she looks well enough, I didn't recognise her in this role, and was sorry to read in her IMDB that she had a drinking problem by this time and died in 1963 at age 50 from alcoholism. A sad story, but she sure is great in the movies. God Bless all of our actors and actresses, for to entertain is a great thing. It takes folks out of the everyday and away from the chaos of the world. ////
That's all I know for tonight. I hope you are enjoying your week. I'm listening to "Die Walkure" by Wagner (conducted by von Karajan), and also "The Devil You Know" by Heaven & Hell, and I send you Tons of Love as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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