Things get off to a roaring start when Paul is shooting his mouth off at a political gathering about Ralph Henry, the candidate for the Reform Party. This earns him a slap across his face from Veronica Lake who probably had to be lifted up to slap his face instead of his belly button. She’s sneering at him and let’s on that she’s Janet Henry, Ralph’s daughter.

Paul, being like most men and attracted to women that mistreat him, immediately declares that he’s fallen in love, must marry her, and will switch his support to the Reform Party in an effort to win her heart. I suppose people have supported candidates for stupider reasons. This is after all the country where Nick Nolte won People’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1992!

Paul’s sudden change in his support in the gubernatorial race causes him some problems with some less than reputable types, such as Nick Varner. Nick is a mobster who runs the local gambling joints. He and Paul had been both supporting the same candidate before Paul went and got himself bitch-slapped into a relationship. Now Nick is somewhat dismayed that Paul is using his new-found morals to get his casinos closed down.

There are further complications with Paul, Janet, and Ed. Janet has a brother (Taylor) who likes to think that all he needs is one big win to get ahead and then he could pay off his gambling debt to Nick Varner. To further muddy the waters, Paul has a sister named Opal. Guess who Opal is in love with? Janet’s brother, Taylor!

At Paul’s behest, Ed tracks Opal to a room with Taylor and hauls her back to Paul’s. Taylor is a pretty big guy and tries to “bring it” with Ed, but Ed barely changes expression and kicks him hard in the shin, incapacitating the big dope. It was a great scene that demonstrated what made Alan Ladd such an effective tough guy. He’s not very big, but he has an economy of action that makes every movement he takes appear that much more powerful.

It’s against this backdrop of political intrigue and personal passions that the defining event of the movie is played out. Somehow or other, Ed stumbles onto the recently deceased Taylor. His pal Paul is implicated. Paul denies he had anything to do with it and doesn’t seem too concerned about being charged with murder, figuring that he’s too powerful for anyone to do anything about it and goes about his business.

Ed, who has no illusions about the nature of people and their ability to desert a “friend” in need, tries to tell Paul to go get everything cleared up. Eventually, they have a falling out, and Ed supposedly goes to see Nick Varner about a job. Ed, though, has this fierce, almost religious, loyalty to his friend and is only there to ascertain what, if anything, Varner has on Paul and this murder. Varner knows a good soldier when he sees one and makes Ed a generous offer of money and his own gambling business.

The meeting goes as expected: Ed sneers at Varner, throws his money back at him, and tears up an affidavit that implicates Paul. Varner sics his boys on Ed and one of them, Jeff (William Bendix), takes a great deal of pleasure (probably a little too much pleasure) in administering one of the more brutal beatings you’re likely to see. Ed manages to escape and tells Paul that Varner is fixing things so that the murder beef will be hung on Paul.

Ed spends the reminder of the film driving men to suicide, causing others to strangle their friends, and even manages to frame Janet for a murder she didn’t commit. Ed knew she didn’t do it, but it was all part of his scheme to smoke out the truth so its perfectly understandable that they’d end up falling in love. She could also understand where Ed was coming from since she had already tried to frame Paul for a murder he didn’t commit!

Alan Ladd is once again captivating in his portrayal of a man who doesn’t exactly conform to the values most people would appreciate, yet he has his own internally consistent code of conduct that you stand by a friend no matter what. Raven from This Gun For Hire remains his greatest role, being a more fully formed character with a past and flashes of emotional pain. Ed is a lesser character, essentially a more distilled version of Raven, with none of the tortured past to provide context for his actions or give him any depth.

Lake doesn’t get much screen time and her character doesn’t fare too well, conforming to the “women as scheming Mata Hari” stereotype that many film noir films employ. Maybe she’s redeemed by admitting her love for Ed and in their scenes together they share the same kind of smarts about the way the world works. Perhaps that’s why they’re attracted to one another – they see themselves reflected in each other, but that wasn’t fully explored and the ending seemed abrupt, forced, and downright false. Still, The Glass Key is well worth watching, not as good as This Gun For Hire, but better than The Blue Dahlia. Plus you also get some crazed Bendix scenes!

© 2009 MonsterHunter

You won’t be surprised to see Barbara Stanwyck as the beautiful dame who destroys every man she breathes on. That character is typical of these movies and Stanwyck is more than up to the challenge of appearing to be played by Fred while in fact she was really playing him in a much bigger way.

Also along for the ride is Edward G. Robinson playing a claims investigator named Keyes who works in the same insurance office where Fred works as a salesman. Keyes spends a lot of time talking about some “little man” inside of him that he always listens to. It’s a little creepy since Eddie is so little to begin with and you wonder if he isn’t going to go psycho some day if his “little man” gets particularly ornery.

MacMurray’s Walter Neff stumbles into his insurance office in the middle of the night, obviously wounded and records what happened to him on a Dictaphone. Walter sells insurance and one afternoon he makes a house call to someone who needs their car insurance renewed.

The guy (or “mark” in insurance parlance) is a rich oil baron named Dietrichson. As with most oil tycoons, he is usually away at the oil fields, putting down wildcat strikes, drilling new wells, and generally ruining the environment all the while his smoking hot wife (Stanwyck’s Phyllis) is back at home, steaming up the joint with her pent-up desires and unmentionable fantasies. (Like how she wants to kill her husband.)

Walter is immediately taken with Phyllis and engages in some pretty raunchy repartee (well, raunchy for 1944) that involves some fantasy of his where she’s a cop who pulls him over for speeding and gives him a warning and raps him across the knuckles and I think you know how it all ends up if you’ve ever read the “Letters to Forum” in Penthouse.

Walter gets a time set up with her where he can come back and meet with the husband to go over the insurance paper work and that should be that, right? Not exactly because when he goes back over there, the old man is still gone and she’s all about whining and complaining about her husband and his bitchy stepdaughter Lola. She’s also whining about how he’s not as rich as he seems and starts to wonder about a life insurance policy on him.

Walter has been around the block a few times in his life though and immediately sees that she is looking to bump the old codger off. He acts put out about it and leaves in a huff. Of course after he leaves, he immediately begins to formulate a plan that would be foolproof and allow them to kill the guy and collect the money!

Walter has been in the biz long enough that he figures he can be the guy to beat the system. The big problem though is to get the claim past Barton Keyes and that dang little man inside of him that suspects every single claimant as being a scammer.

The plan is simple. And by simple, I mean that it involves an insurance policy with a double indemnity clause, a strangling, a body dumping, and a train ride in disguise. In fact, it’s such a simple plan that almost as soon as Walter puts it into action, things begin to unravel!

A great movie that reveals its twists and turns at the right time for maximum effect. The best part is that these doublecrosses aren’t so outlandish that they’re unbelievable. The viewer gets to slowly realize along with Walter that he wasn’t the clever guy he thought he was and that he was being manipulated by Phyllis the moment he walked in the door.

Double Indemnity easily remains one of the toughest pieces in the film noir oeuvre, offering an apocalyptic look at love and trust and coming to the conclusion that neither exist, both supplanted in the film’s world by opportunistic and deadly liaisons. At least that’s what the little man inside me keeps saying.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Things begin hopelessly enough with that most dreaded of cinema tricks – the framing device. I loathe the framing device because it is almost always superfluous to the story. I am already listening to your story, therefore I don’t need to waste my time by having your main character stand around at the beginning of the movie saying, “here’s my sad little tale, why don’t you take a listen”.

Frank’s framing device is that he goes to the cops and says he wants to report a murder – his own! Gasp! Memo to Frank: Next time you pull that gag, you’d be better served having Rod Serling do the opening. Anyway, this leads us into the story of Frank and his unfortunate encounter with a little something the bad guys like to call “luminous poisoning”.

Frank is just your everyday jerky guy, mistreating his suffocating sometimes girlfriend/secretary Paula, by doing stuff like planning a week long vacation in San Francisco without telling her. Uh, let’s see, your boyfriend has scheduled a secret trip to San Francisco and refuses to let you go along. You know, it may be time to seriously consider whether he’s really watching all those musicals because you want to.

Anyway, Frank is bound and determined to go and when he gets there the movie makes its only missteps when every time Frank sees a sexy broad in the hotel, this cheesy circus whistle goes off, giving the movie this eighties frat-party movie vibe that is completely out of place with everything else that is going on.

Thankfully it all ends rather quickly when he gets invited out by some visiting salesmen to chill with them down at the local jazz club, The Fisherman. It’s here that he tries to ditch one woman, tries to pick up another and ends up drinking a nice tall glass of poison.

The next day he’s feeling a little blah and goes to the doctor for a check up. I guess that’s another fake thing about this movie. No guy would ever go to the hospital the first morning he felt sick. Oh sure, he’d lie around for a week moaning and groaning about how much pain he was in, but under no circumstances would he wuss out and go see a doctor.

They tell him he’s got this thing called luminous poisoning which the movie admits it made up at the end of things, but assures us is based on fact. So to all you kids out there, I know the movie wasn’t specific about this, but do not drink a shot glass full of either uranium or radium. You probably better steer clear of Zima as well, but consult your physician to be sure.

Frank finds out that he only has a week or so to live and the movie follows Frank as he charges from lead to lead in his quest to find out who poisoned him and why.

I’ll give it to him, he was investigating up a storm, all with the bad attitude that you would expect from someone terminally ill. In fact, he’s about the most unpleasant hero you’re likely to see in a film, though some of his surliness could probably be excused what with him dying and all.

I tried like hell to follow Frank through all his discoveries and nodded my head knowingly whenever he figured out that someone had double-crossed him or that George was really Raymond and that Raymond had really been dead for five months, but he never had nothing to do with anything anyway and that it was all on account of the sneaky widow, but not really because it was her shady and secret boyfriend. I may have nodded my head, but it was the same vacant way I nod my head whenever anyone starts talking to me about something other than sex or college football.

Still, the very helter skelter nature of what was happening illustrates the way life for these doomed noir heroes bounces them from one dirty trick to another, the randomness and impersonality of what happens to them merely illustrating the pointlessness of existence and our powerlessness to do anything about it.

D.O.A. is a movie closer to films like Kiss Me Deadly than it is to earlier noirs like Double Indemnity or Criss Cross. As the atomic age begins to dawn, woman is replaced as the ultimate destroyer of men lead astray by a general sense of paranoia related to science and technology’s inevitable march forward. Death by slow-acting radioactivity supersedes Barbara Stanwyck’s machinations and the result is a more impersonal and therefore bleaker outlook on our fate.

We are no longer threatened just by those closest to us. There is a faceless, cold world snapping at our heels, with all sorts of scary futuristic ways of sealing our fate. D.O.A. isn’t so much a story about a guy pursuing his own killers, but a requiem. It’s an extended suicide note written by this new world on behalf of everyone in it. It’s as if it isn’t just Frank Bigelow’s file that they stamp “D.O.A.” in large block letters at the end of this film, but all of ours.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

The only question this movie left me with was whether everyone involved knew just how cool it was when they were making it.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that it’s the greatest film noir ever. Heck, I wouldn’t even call it a proper film noir, despite the fact that it has all the trimmings what with the hard boiled voice over, treacherous blonde, psychotic thugs, and a world-weary protagonist who doesn’t trust broads, but still manages to get love sick the first time he gets a gander at Lizabeth Scott.

Really though, its questionable noir status doesn’t matter because it all comes down to watching Bogart talking tough, staying one step ahead of the competition and taking beatings from dumb mugs while never deviating from his crusade to clear Johnny’s name.

Johnny and Rip are brought back to the States and given the royal treatment en route to Washington D.C. Johnny doesn’t know why they’re headed to Washington and Rip plays along like he doesn’t know either, but secretly he’s put Johnny up for the Congressional, but once Johnny finds this out, he begins to act strangely. Well, if you consider jumping off the train and hopping a freight train going in the other direction strange that is!

Rip tells General Steel that he’s going to bring Johnny back whether the military authorizes it or not. Obviously, you don’t tell a guy named Captain Rip he can’t do anything, so Rip heads off to Gulf City, a metropolis that’s positively teeming with blondes that need romancing, goons that need whupping, and secrets that need exposing.

A trip to the library and perusal of the back issues of the Gulf City Daily Planet reveal that a few years ago, Johnny was making the front page for something far removed from his kick ass parachuting.

Seems good old Johnny boy went and got himself hung with a murder beef. A blonde gal named Coral (AKA Dusty) had a rich old husband who had an argument with Johnny and the next thing anyone knows, Coral is a widow and Johnny is a fugitive.

Now, you, I, and Rip know that that fresh faced kid who only loved two things in this world, the guys in his platoon and the husky-voiced Coral, didn’t go and off any old coot. (One of the life lessons I’ve picked up from these movies is that you never trust these tomatoes with breathy voices. Sure, chicks with squeaky voices are irritating as hell, but they usually don’t get you all mixed up with death row either.)

This brings to mind one of the issues I had with the movie. If, like Rip believes, Johnny has somehow been framed up, then he had to be framed up by someone, right? Now, who in the whole wide world could possibly want to frame Johnny up for the murder of a rich old coot? Who would conceivably benefit if the old timer suddenly took a powder? Who’s blonde and sounds like she’s in need of a really strong throat lozenge?

Come on, Rip! Isn’t it painfully obvious from the very beginning that little miss ice maiden more than likely played some role in all this? You don’t have to be Magnum P.I. or Matt Houston to figure that one out!

So, why in the world is Rip almost immediately cozying up to this woman, even after her connection to a local mobster is revealed? Oh, sure, he pretends to be hard to get, even going so far as to give a completely incoherent monologue about how he wishes women could be shrunk down and put in his pocket. He should have guessed she was nuts when she didn’t hop right out of the car when he started spewing that crazy talk.

Rip discovers shortly after arriving in Gulf City that Johnny has been crispy fried in a road accident and manages to arouse the suspicion of the local cops in the process. An encounter with the smarmy villain of the piece, Martinelli, results in a feeble attempt to frame Rip for the murder of a guy who was supposed to give him a letter from Johnny.

We follow Rip as he attempts to retrieve the letter, which he assumes contains the truth about the murder of Coral’s husband while he also romances Coral and avoids being rubbed out by Martinelli and his violence-loving henchman Krause.

As is the case in these types of movies, the truth proves to be a rare commodity with slightly differing versions of the murder coming to light at regular intervals.

In spite of Rip’s street smarts, the movie requires him to ignore the obvious in order to keep things rolling along, but Bogart is so good at portraying the only character in the movie with pure motives (loyalty and love) that his convenient dimwittedness doesn’t particularly mar things.

The movie’s ending may surprise many used to how film noirs play out, but it’s indicative of why this isn’t a noir in the truest sense of the word. It’s more of a murder melodrama that slipped on a film noir costume. All the doom and gloom atmosphere, the film’s partial reliance on flashbacks narrated by a desperate and on the lam Rip, and the presence of film noir stalwart Lizabeth Scott (Pitfall, The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers, Too Late For Tears) contribute to this.

Dead Reckoning may not get as much mention as some of Bogart’s other work and while it may strike some as being derivative of those better regarded movies, he and the rest of the cast here all nail down their respective roles with such authority you can’t help but be swept up in its twisting and brutal wake.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

We first meet Steve as he strolls into the local nightclub where he and his ex-wife use to hang out. She still hangs out there, it’s just that now she’s hanging out with and married to a hoodlum named Slim Dundee.

Steve and Slim get into a fight and we learn that the brawl wasn’t supposed to get as ugly as it did, but Slim shot his mouth of about this and that, and Steve being the steely-eyed hunk that he is took offense.

See, this fight was suppose to establish that Steve and Slim hated one another and that Slim was going off to Detroit that night. If the cops bought it, then the next day when Steve’s armored car is hijacked, no one will ever believe that it was Slim or that Steve had any involvement in it.

The next morning, it’s time to haul the very hefty payroll for some really big factory. They normally use a three man crew, but Steve’s plan calls for one of those guys to be gone. It gets rigged so that only Steve (the driver) and a 150 year old man named Pop (the old geezer who gets killed) are on the truck.

Pop has been around since the Crusades so he knows that when his bunions itch, it’s usually a good indicator that something isn’t quite right. As they drive off to make their delivery, Pop starts getting nervous and suggests they turn back. Steve stalls him and continues to drive.

You’re probably wondering how a good guy like Steve got himself into the armored car heist racket. Well, Steve’s glad you asked, because having an extended flashback is a good way to drown out the senile ravings of Pop.

It all started several months ago when Steve returned to L.A. He’d been married to Anna a while back and they broke up and got divorced and he left town to try and get her out of his system. After a couple of years he comes back home. A good portion of the middle part of the movie is then spent with Steve alternately trying to forget and trying to get back together with Anna.

Steve frequently engages in very noirish narrative voice over and drops classic tough guy dialogue about how it is with dames like Anna. He compares her to a piece of apple that gets caught between your teeth and then you use a piece of cellophane from your cigarette pack to try and get the piece of apple out and then the cellophane gets stuck too. I don’t eat fruit or smoke cigarettes so I really had no idea what he was talking about.

When Slim confronts Steve about his intentions towards his wife, Steve tells him there’s nothing between him and Anna and that he was just using her to get into contact with Slim. Steve wants to pull an armored car heist and he needs Slim and his crew to help him do it.

Slim hears this and immediately decides that it’s the truth and signs up for this heist. Everyone throws themselves into planning for the robbery and they seek out a old guy with a drinking problem to help them plan it.

The plan sounds like one the A-Team might have come up with in their prime or as B.A. might have said when they were “on the jazz.” (It involves an oil tanker blocking a bridge, an ice cream truck and a bunch of gas bombs.)

Steve is one of those doomed men who is the subject of so many noir thrillers. We know he’s doomed right from the beginning of the movie when he’s fighting mobsters and driving toward his appointment with destiny in the armored car.

In fact, as he’s driving, he realizes what is happening and the flashback that tells the story of what led up to him being in that situation can be likened to a dying man’s life flashing before his eyes.

In fact, in his headlong march to destruction, he seems to be resolute at accepting his fate. He tries nothing to change it. He’s warned by family and friends that Anna is no good for him, Slim tries to warn him to stay away, maybe even Anna tries to warn him by first divorcing him and then marrying Slim.

None of it matters though, because Steve’s destiny is inescapable once he returns to Los Angeles. He admits as much when he says he travelled all around, but just couldn’t get her out of his system. Like an addict returning for a fix that he knows will surely kill him, Steve seeks her out as soon as he gets back.

Director Siodmak fills the screen with his trademark German expressionism, with the shadows and nice camera shots (the aerial shot as the armored car enters the factory isn’t seen too much in movies like this) and the entire heist is played out like some nightmare out of World War One, with faceless men in gas masks moving through the fog shooting at anyone who moves.

Lancaster is a movie star here the way he fills the screen and commands every scene with his intensity while Duryea (who has little to do in the picture) looks right at home in another sleazy role. A muscular effort from all involved. Movies don’t come much more hard boiled than this.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Despite appearances and how it’s sometimes sold, Borderline is not a film noir let alone a film noir classic. The best film noir posits a degree of alienation from things. It was a metaphor for postwar readjustment returning soldiers often had to contend with. It was about trying to fit in to the regular world again. The characters in these noir movies either don’t fit in, can’t fit in, or have simply given up trying.

Another aspect of those films is the inevitability of doom that permeates things. The tragic end that befalls most of these characters is predetermined and unavoidable, but it is the struggle these people put up before falling to destiny that is instructive and entertaining.

Borderline has none of that and truth be told, this movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. Sometimes it’s one of those tough-talking-pistol-whipping-let-go-of-my-dame movies. Other times it thinks it wants to try its hand at comedy.

You know the kind of comedy I’m talking about. The kind where these two people like each other but are always bickering. The kind where if it isn’t just right you sit there wishing everyone involved would get pistol whipped.

With the last half of the movie it becomes kind of a road picture with the two leads trying to get back up to the U.S. border and encountering all kinds of trouble. The result is a strange hybrid that is ugly in the way Frankenstein’s monster was ugly – you could see the stitches and nuts and bolts holding all the disparate parts together. Also like with Frankenstein’s monster, I was ready to form an angry mob and storm my TV with torches and pitchforks about 13 minutes in.

Raymond Burr is in this film as a bad guy. You know he’s a bad guy because he’s a fat guy in a white suit. Never in my life have I seen a fat guy in a white suit that didn’t have some sort of nefarious scheme hatching beneath his double-breasted coat.

So periodically Burr shows up and just glowers and spews tough guy talk about how MacMurray will not always be lucky and the like.

Burr’s character is some sort of drug kingpin that MacMurray screws out of some shipments by working with another guy that I guess MacMurray thought was a good guy but turned out to be a bad guy.

As a result, Burr is tracking Fred all over Mexico trying to get even with him. All the time I’m thinking, “how can you not see this fat dude in the giant white suit coming a mile away in the hot Mexican badlands?” Come to think of it, how could you not smell him?

Fred MacMurray is the only bright spot in this film. He’s actually pretty good chewing on his periodically hardboiled dialogue and is one of those stars that always elevates whatever project he’s in.

The female lead, Claire Trevor, just couldn’t seem to get it done in this film. She may have won an Oscar for Supporting Actress in Key Largo , but this movie is not Key Largo and she’s not the supporting actress here. She and MacMurray have zero chemistry which leaves their witless banter twice as deadly.

There is of course a dash of misplaced angst, as both of them fret over having to turn the other in to the cops once they get back home. It all gets straightened out though in an idiotic scene where her superior shows up and apparently knows them both.

Borderline is at once both tedious and forgettable and demonstrates that Hollywood was just as capable of making cruddy movies with big name stars 60 years ago as it does today.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Ladd plays a soldier named Johnny who is coming back from the Pacific theater after a successful tour as a Navy flier. Getting off the bus with him are his Navy buddies Buzz and George. William Bendix delivers a fine performance as Buzz, depicting the toll war can take on a man both physically and mentally, while George is played by Hugh Beaumont, depicting what Ward Cleaver did way back when his career was going somewhere.

The noir themes of alienation and assimilation run throughout the film and are illustrated from the very beginning. Buzz has a plate in his head and it has messed up his hearing. This is supposed to explain why he runs around holding his head in anguish whenever music is played and why he constantly screams “I can’t stand that monkey music!”

Buzz is also very quick to anger and frequently gets himself into fights. This is one soldier that’s going to have a little trouble readjusting to civilian life. George and Johnny try to play peacemaker and George eventually lives with Buzz and tries to keep him out of trouble.

Buzz though merely reflects openly the isolation and confusion that Johnny feels inwardly. When Johnny left to go fight for his country, he had a wife and a kid, but when Johnny came marching home again, things weren’t the same. His wife had written him to tell him his son had died of diphtheria, but at least he still had the little woman to go home to, right?

Well, he comes home and surprises her, but the surprise is on him because she’s having quite the shindig with all these louts and everyone’s drinking and having a good time and Johnny sees a local mobster named Eddie kissing his wife goodnight!

Johnny, showing the great discipline he learned in the military waits until everyone leaves to backhand her. Then he tries to talk to her, but all she wants to do is drink. She later tells him that his son died when she got into a car wreck while she was drunker than a skunk!

Johnny gets his gun and kind of points it at her, but tells her she ain’t worth the lead and drops it next to her, packs his stuff (hell, he hadn’t been there more than 15 minutes, how much packing did he need to do?) and takes off into the rainy night.

Johnny is picked up by a beautiful blonde stranger who Johnny probably remembers from their previous films together like This Gun For Hire and The Glass Key. This time Veronica Lake’s name is Joyce. They exchange some witty banter and Johnny cleverly says his name is Jimmy and they eventually part ways.

The next day Johnny is ready to take on the world, to get a fresh start, forget and forgive and let love rule and all that, but before he can do anything, he notices that his wife has turned up with some bullet holes in her that weren’t there when he left her! And guess whose gun was found at the scene?

Johnny’s on the lam now and even though he didn’t part with his wife on good terms, he still would like the real killer brought to justice. Immediately Johnny suspects Eddie, the mobster-owner of a nightclub called The Blue Dahlia. A good chunk of the movie is devoted to Johnny confronting Eddie and the police harassing George and Buzz.

The movie concludes at the police station where everyone assembles and Johnny shows up to reveal the real killer. One of the highlights is when Johnny has Buzz perform some kind of Annie Oakley trick by shooting a match that Johnny is holding and causing the match to ignite into flame. What this is supposed to demonstrate beyond the fact that Johnny is a complete idiot was lost on me.

The conclusion of the movie is a complete travesty. The entire film is built around the screwed up Buzz and his mounting craziness, yet the killer is revealed to be someone else. As such, the killer has virtually no presence in the film other than to appear once in awhile to squeeze some money out of somebody.

Originally, Buzz was supposed to be the killer, but the Navy didn’t like one of their own portrayed like that so it was rewritten and bastardized into the version you have to choke down today. Apparently the Navy didn’t mind that Buzz was portrayed as a shell shocked lunatic, it just didn’t want him to take the rap for a murder. The end result renders most of what went on in the movie pointless and leaves you clutching your throbbing skull Buzz-like and screaming “I can’t stand these monkey endings!”

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Brian Donlevy has the most interesting role in the movie, the right hand man of a gangster named Mr. Brown. Donlevy’s Joe McClure is routinely humiliated by Brown, who never fails to remind McClure that the crime organization could have been his if he was more of a man.

The constant emasculation of McClure is probably the really only interesting twist in this film. McClure is completely pathetic, yet still harbors hopes of someday unseating Brown. Brown though is able to show him rather frequently why that won’t happen since McClure is whipped like a dog.

Just to drive the point home that McClure is not a complete male, he’s wearing a hearing aid! A gangster with a hearing aid? How could this movie not be better?

As with fully one third of all gangster flicks, this one starts off at a boxing match. A blonde chick, who we learn is Mr. Brown’s squeeze Susan Lowell, is trying to leave the match and two goons have been dispatched to stop her.

They tell her that Mr. Brown doesn’t want her leaving the match and finally she says that she’s hungry so they go out for a bite to eat. One of the goons explains that if that’s what makes her happy, that’s okay, because Mr. Brown wants her kept happy. Why can’t she be happy sitting around watching one of Brown’s palooka’s getting his brains bashed out? Didn’t she realize that was in the job description when she signed up to be a gangster’s moll?

In the locker room after the fight, we meet Mr. Brown. He’s a serious looking guy who talks in a fast, clipped style that is supposed to come off as being tough and criminal, but eventually makes you think that he talks that way just so that he doesn’t get interrupted.

We get a peek into Brown’s mentality when he slaps his loser boxer and tells him that if he really “wanted it” he would have punched him back.

He also tells the boxer that the key to succeeding in life is hate. You have to hate the other guy and want to destroy and kill him and eat his children and stuff. He makes a point of saying that the boxer is pretty much like that old wuss McClure (McClure is standing right there) and that hate is the reason why Brown runs the show and why McClure runs a Miracle Ear.

There is someone else in this movie with a bunch of hate balled up inside him. His name is Lieutenant Leonard Diamond and he is one of those super-square cops who is constantly having to explain to his lazy, unambitious, and three days away from retirement superiors, why he keeps spending all the department’s money trying to bust the town’s biggest gangster.

Diamond has somehow managed to spend $18,000 on his investigation of Brown. This money seems to mainly include the cost of following around his sexy blonde girlfriend, Susan. In fact, Diamond even spent his own money to follow her to Cuba!

His boss says that he thinks Diamond is in love with her. Diamond insists that she’s just a grody girl who probably has cooties and that he’s bound and determined to bring Brown to justice.

And what of this blonde? Well, she’s out eating and dancing and overdosing on pills. She obviously feels like her and Brown’s relationship needs work and this causes Brown and Diamond to meet up at the hospital. There’s a lot of tough talk and Diamond tells Brown that he’s going to charge her with trying to kill herself and that she could face up to six months in the county lock up for that and Brown goes and gets a court order to let her go.

Before Diamond has to release Susan, he obtains a nugget of information that propels his case and the movie’s plot along. Suzy mentions the name “Alicia” and Diamond finds out that she saw Brown writing that name in the fog on a window and then erased it and played dumb when Suzy asked him about it. Immediately, Diamond realizes that this Alicia must somehow hold the key to unraveling Brown and his nefarious Combination!

Diamond arrests 95 people in Brown’s Big Combo (it is pretty big, isn’t it?) including Brown and questions everyone about Alicia, but no one knows anything. Then they get Brown hooked up to a polygraph machine and start asking him questions. Brown doesn’t have to do it, but he’s one of those wiseguys who’s a little too wise for his own good. An unlikely slip during some word association sends Diamond down the path that ultimately unravels the case!

There’s plenty of action to keep you involved in this movie and it’s pretty rough and tumble with some nice visuals, but the story is such a generic crime melodrama, that The Big Combo has to rate as a fairly major disappointment.

Outside of McClure, the characters are your standard issue bad guy, good guy, and gangster girl, with little depth or dimension to any of them. Brown is a one-note villain and though he is done in by his women, he treated them like so much crap that the only question you had about them turning on him is what took so long.

Diamond isn’t even mildly conflicted about anything in this movie. He’s just after Brown for being a bad guy. There is mention that he’s motivated by his feelings for the girl, but there’s never any information that they had any past together.

Am I supposed to think that he just saw her and got obsessed with her and now is trying to destroy her boyfriend so he can have her? That’s fairly creepy (and interesting), but that angle is never really followed up on or developed beyond the initial comments from Diamond’s boss and the fact that they end up together.

The film’s got plenty of hard boiled dialogue and atmosphere to keep aficionados of that sort of thing happy and it’s a sturdy enough crimebuster movie, but it never transcends its story and develops into anything beyond that due to its run of the mill characters.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The Big Clock‘s big problem is that the story is so badly structured and executed that it reduces everyone in the movie to standing around talking about how they should catch the mythical Jefferson Randolph for the last half of things. And that’s after a first half that is so slowly paced that Milland’s wife gets tired of waiting for him to come home goes off to West Virginia on vacation!

George Stroud (Milland) is the head of the crime magazine Crimeways. Its owner is Earl Janoth (Laughton) a guy obsessed with increasing circulation and clocks.

Janoth has a whole bunch of clocks and they are hooked up to this really big clock that never goes off (except toward the end of the movie when Stroud punches out a mute gun-toting masseuse played by Harry Morgan – providing the sole source of anything remotely resembling action in this flick).

Stroud, who is just one day away from vacation, has been running the magazine for something like five years and has never had a vacation. He’s promised his wife that this time they really are going on vacation, but even his little kid doesn’t believe him. See, this is actually going to be the long-delayed honeymoon that he never got to have with his wife since he went to work for Janoth on the very night of his wedding!

It is therefore understandable that when Janoth tells Stroud that he needs him to stay and keep that rag of his afloat that Stroud tells Janoth he can take this job and shove it! Naturally it takes him way too long to tell him this and he ends up getting home way too late and his antsy wife has already left.

Instead of hightailing it out there along with coming up with a million ways to suck up to the old lady so that she’ll take him back, he falls back instead on Plan B. Plan B is to go out to the bar and get wasted with the boss’ mistress!

The boss’ mistress is somewhat dissatisfied with Janoth’s treatment of her and is wanting George’s help in exposing him for the fat horny toad he is. George agrees to this by ordering a bunch of Green Stingers and going on a tour of the city in search of a green clock. Why? Because the movie is called The Green Clock! Oh, it’s not? Then I don’t know why.

He ends up with a sundial with a green ribbon tied around it and also manages to end up at her apartment! As George leaves her apartment, Janoth shows up, but Janoth can’t make out who he is. Once inside, Janoth and his mistress have an argument over who she was with and she makes up the name of Jefferson Randolph.

Janoth eventually gets mad at her and plants the sundial in her face. Janoth then goes over to see his right hand man, Steve Hagen and Steve decides that they need to pin it on someone else, someone by the name of Jefferson Randolph.

In order for this to work, they need to find Jefferson Randolph, especially since he was seen all over town with her that evening. Of course everyone really saw George, not this fictitious Jefferson.

Since George is an expert in tracking down criminals for his magazine (he’s kind of like a less annoying version of John Walsh), Janoth calls him in West Virginia (he finally sobered up and made it out there to see his family).

Despite the threats from his wife about what will happen if he leaves, George realizes he needs to be there leading the search, otherwise they might figure out it was him with her that night.

Back at the office, George takes charge of the investigation and begins using his famous “irrelevant clues” system he has developed for cracking cases. This system involves him figuring that if the police can’t solve a case with relevant clues, it must be the irrelevant ones that hold the key to the solution.

Since he doesn’t really want anyone finding out that there is no such person as Jefferson Randolph or that he was with this woman the night she was dead, he sends people out on wild goose chases, assigns them to tasks they aren’t suited for and even hides his hat in a refrigerator!

Proving that these older movies have every chance to stink the joint up like the new ones, The Big Clock, though sometimes billed as a film noir is everything a real film noir isn’t. There isn’t any question of morality in this one. At all times George is a stand up guy. He just gets caught up in a stupid situation. He isn’t destroyed by anything like a woman or his destiny. In fact, he ends up better off than when the whole boring plot began.

The movie itself wasn’t even photographed in any creative fashion to at least approximate film noir. There was a clumsy attempt at a fancy shot early on and you get some of George running around in the dark hallways and around this big clock’s control room, but most everything took place in his brightly lit and badly decorated (think art deco meets sixties mod) offices.

Laughton is okay as the slimy boss, but his real-life wife, Elsa Lanchester (Bride of Frankenstein) merely serves to fill time and provide inept comic relief as the artist that fought George over her own artwork and who might be able to identify him as Jefferson Randolph.

With talents such as Laughton and Milland on board, The Big Clock‘s status as forgettable time waster isn’t due to incompetent performers, but to a script that is wholly lacking in any surprises or thrills.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Martin Blair is a drunken piano player who gets embroiled in the murder of his wife, Mavis. She refuses to see him one evening at her swanky apartment building (I know it’s swanky because it’s got a large doorman that Martin threatens) so Martin has a gigantic heart-shaped broach sent up that was so gaudy no one but that great-aunt who smells like diapers when she tries to kiss you would think about wearing it in a million years.

As Martin is leaving the building he spots a rotund grease ball that can only be Peter Lorre, going up to see her. After that, another dude, Kirk Bennett rolls up to see her, but he finds only her strangled body.

Somehow or other the killer manages to steal the heart shaped broach while Kirk is lollygagging around in the room, so that Kirk notices it has been swiped. He leaves and eventually gets tapped for the crime, but we have our hook. Whoever has the broach is the killer.

Bennett’s wife, who is a lot less perturbed that Kirk was having some type of affair with this dead woman than she ought to be, is convinced that Kirk is wrongly accused. Since he is wrongly accused, he is convicted in about a week and sent to the Big House where they’ve booked him a reservation in the gas chamber in about two weeks!

Even though his wife, Catherine, is a dunderhead when it comes to men, she knows how to investigate a crime! She immediately rolls up to that drunk Martin to find out what he knows. Eventually, Martin agrees to help Catherine find out the truth.

Using a mysterious phone number that was on a matchbook that Mavis had, they figure out that they need to go down to this nightclub run by Marko (Lorre). Martin thinks that maybe he’ll see the man that was going up to Mavis’ apartment as he was being kicked to the curb by the doorman.

He sees Marko and says that’s the guy! In a scheme that reeks of one of the better episodes of Hunter, they decide to go undercover as a nightclub act!

She used to be singer so she uses an assumed name and I guess hopes that no one’s been reading the papers about the big murder and these two get jobs as a piano and singing duo at the nightclub. This allows them investigate and to slow things down with a bad song or two.

Lorre has her up in his office and lets her watch as he opens up the safe that he keeps a box in marked “Incriminating evidence – do not open!” Later, Lorre goes out on a date with a male gossip columnist so Catherine goes up to his office and gets into the safe. She also calls the cops. Marko comes back unexpectedly and it turns out the business with the safe was all a set up!

Martin starts to think maybe that Bennett did do it after all and with him getting gassed tomorrow it sure seems like a waste to have this blonde widow out there all by her lonesome, so he makes his move and she just shoots his ass down! She doesn’t want to give up on her no-good husband and she says he is the only man for her!

Marty checks his watch and notices that it is now officially beer-thirty and will be for the next several days! Binge time! You get a pretty sweet montage of Marty getting ripped all over L.A. which consists of him not combing his hair, sweating a lot and getting a three o’clock shadow on his pretty little mug.

He has an encounter during his bender that causes him to go crazy and he gets himself locked up in the nuthut. This gives him time to reflect on what has happened.

Through the hazy fog of his on-going alcohol detoxification he sees what really happened that night Mavis was whacked!

Dan Duryea (Criss Cross, Too Late For Tears) elevates this movie from it’s fairly tawdry True Detective-type story and turns what could have been merely a pathetic character into someone that fails in life in spite of his own heroic efforts.

Duryea, who looks a little like William H. Macy and sounds a bit like Willem Defoe, gives us a performance where we believe that the character of Martin Blair is a drunk and when not drunk, fragile enough that he may go careening off the wagon at the first sign of trouble.

When we meet him, a woman has done him wrong, and we presume that that is what caused his drunkenness in the first place. It takes another woman who shares his interests to dry him out. But even so, the specter of the bottle is just another failed relationship away.

As in many film noirs, women are portrayed as the great destroyers of men. Marko survives everything precisely because he hates women. Paradoxically, that trait is limited only to evil characters – heroes and good guys always just want to be loved by women, even though it seals their fates. This film and so many like it then recast the mating game into a protracted dance of death with women as black widows who literally mate, then annihilate their partners. But do you really need some classic movie to tell you that?

© 2011 MonsterHunter