Pursued (1947)

Pursued is a 1947 western that sometimes gets described as a noir western. We shall see.

It was directed by Raoul Walsh and photographed by James Wong Howe so you expect it to be visually impressive, and it is. The movie was shot in black-and-white in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio.

It was written by Niven Busch, a fine screenwriter who also wrote some great western novels including Duel in the Sun and The Furies, both of which were made into excellent movies.

It opens with a man obviously on the run from someone. The man is Jeb Rand (Robert Mitchum). A girl has come to him with some food and other necessities. She tells him he has to get as far away from here as possible but that he can’t go with him. We then get the backstory an extended flashback.

It begins in Jeb’s childhood. Something very bad happened. He was taken in by Mrs Callum (Judith Anderson) and raised with her son Adam and her daughter Thor (Teresa Wright) on a ranch just outside the town of Lone Horse.

Shortly afterwards, for no reason whatsoever, someone tries to shoot the young Jeb.

Jeb grows up. Mrs Callum’s ranch thrives. Then war with Spain comes. Jeb is sent off to fight and comes back a hero.

Jeb and Thor want to marry. Thor wants a long courtship. Jeb wants to get married straight away. He then wants them to move away. He doesn’t know why but he is sure something bad is going to happen. He is still troubled by bad dreams.

Jeb isn’t paranoid. There’s someone from his past who has spent years plotting against him, and he’s right here in Lone Horse.

There is tension between Jeb and Adam, which leads to a major confrontation.

There are shootings but Jeb can’t figure out why these things are happening. He ends up going into partnership with Honest Jack Dingle (Alan Hale) in a gambling saloon.

Things get weird between Jeb and Thor. There’s another shooting. And eventually Jeb ends up back at his childhood home for a kind of climactic showdown.

Some movies makes the mistake of revealing too much too soon. This movie perhaps conceals things for too long so that the behaviour of most of the characters is so incomprehensible that it’s hard to get engaged with the story.

There are obvious affinities with film noir, especially the use of the extended flashback. What strikes me much more forcibly are the film’s affinities with Spellbound. Hitchcock had made Spellbound just two years earlier and it was a major hit. Like Hitchcock’s film Pursued deals with a man haunted by traumatic childhood events which he cannot clearly remember or understand. And like Spellbound Pursued includes dream sequences.

Pursued also resembles Spellbound in being a muddled mess. Jeb has no idea what is going on in his head and nor do we. His behaviour is bizarre. Thor’s behaviour is bizarre. There’s a sinister character with a grudge against Jeb but the reasons for the grudge are obscure. When we find out the reason we can’t help thinking he’s been holding a grudge against the wrong person.

One interesting aspect to this movie is that there are several gunfights but not one of them is a fair fight. These are not the formalised duels you get in so many westerns. These are ambushes. You don’t give the other fellow a chance to draw his gun. You just plug him, preferably in the back.

Mitchum is OK. Teresa Wright is truly awful.

There really is nothing remotely film noir about Pursued. It’s more of an attempt at a psychological thriller western. Or a psycho-sexual thriller with the sexual bits left out. It has the hallmarks of a screenplay that had been butchered by the Production Code Authority or the studio. It just gives the impression that the characters’ actions are not sufficiently motivated. I suspect that there may been some more obviously Freudian themes that got watered down to the point of virtual non-existence.

For me Pursued is an interesting movie but a bit disappointing. It just doesn’t quite work. It’s still worth a look.

The Olive Films Blu-Ray looks great.

Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

Farewell, My Lovely is a 1975 neo-noir directed by Dick Richards based on Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name. This movie gave 57-year-old Robert Mitchum his first opportunity to play Philip Marlowe.

Marlowe is feeling old and tired. He’s just completed a case, finding a runaway teenage girl, and it didn’t make him feel good.

At the same time Marlowe has had another case go sour. Lindsay Marriott was supposed to pay $15,000 to some thieves in exchange for the return of a very valuable jade necklace which was stolen from a lady friend. Marriott is a little nervous. He just wants someone to hold his hand while he pays over the money. It’s a simple job but it ends with Marriott dead. Marlowe feels he owes it to Marriott to find his killer.

Now Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran) wants Marlowe to find Velma for him. Malloy, a huge guy, has just spent seven years in prison for a bank robbery. Velma is his girlfriend but he hasn’t heard from her for six years. Marlowe is sceptical of his chances but Moose insists and there’s no reasoning with him.

Finding Velma isn’t easy, but Marlowe doesn’t give up easily.

What puzzles Marlowe, and it puzzles him more and more, is why so many people are looking for Moose Malloy. Moose just isn’t very important. He’s just a big dumb ex-con who wants to find his girl. But it seems like a lot of people want to find Moose, and it also seems that a lot of people want Moose dead.

As far as the Marriott case is concerned, it leads Marlowe to Judge Grayle, and to Judge Grayle’s wife. She was the one who asked Marriott to get her necklace back. Judge Grayle is very old. His wife Helen (Charlotte Rampling) is very young and very beautiful. And judging by the passionate way she kisses Marlowe, probably not very faithful.

Marlowe keeps running into dead ends and people keep getting killed. All those corpses cause Marlowe problems with the cops, since Marlowe seems to be mixed up in whatever is causing all those murders.

The cops are crooked but Lieutenant Nulty (John Ireland) isn’t such a bad guy and he’s willing to cut Marlowe some slack. Detective Billy Rolfe (Harry Dean Stanton) on the other hand is both crooked and vicious.

People keep shooting at Marlowe and he keeps getting beaten up and he gets kidnapped, drugged and brutalised by sadistic madam Frances Amthor. Her whorehouse has some connection with the case. Velma was in showbusiness but she was a prostitute as well and she had been one of Amthor’s girls. Big-time gambling operator Laird Brunette (Anthony Zerbe) also wants Moose, which doesn’t make sense.

There’s one obvious link that Marlowe should spot, but doesn’t.

Mitchum’s performance as an ageing world-weary Marlowe is both impressive and interesting. Charlotte Rampling makes a superb femme fatale. Marlowe doesn’t know what Helen Grayle is up to but he’s getting involved with her which maybe isn’t too smart.

The supporting players are uniformly excellent. Watch out for Sylvester Stallone in a very small role as a hood.

This movie gets the look just right. Chinatown might be slightly the better movie but Farewell, My Lovely has the edge when it comes to the visuals. This is a neo-noir that has all the classic film noir atmosphere and feel you could possibly wish for. Incidentally John A. Alonzo did the cinematography for both Chinatown and Farewell, My Lovely.

Farewell, My Lovely boasts one of Chandler’s best plots. It’s intricate but it all comes together nicely and that’s true of this movie adaptation as well. But of course with Chandler atmosphere and character matter a lot more than plot.

What makes this a great movie is that neither screenwriter David Zelag Goodman nor director Dick Richards have any interest in deconstructing the genre or playing clever games with it or being ironic. The aim was clearly to make a movie with an authentic Chandlerian feel and an authentic 1940s film noir feel.

Shout! Factory have released both this movie and the 1978 The Big Sleep on a single Blu-Ray and both films look wonderful. Farewell, My Lovely looks simply stunning.

Farewell, My Lovely can stand comparison with any of the great film noir/private eye movies of the 40s without any difficulty. The violence is slightly more graphic and there’s some nudity but overall it’s a movie that successfully transports the viewer into the world of Raymond Chandler. It also features Mitchum giving one of his best-ever performances. This is a truly great neo-noir and it’s very highly recommended.

Thunder Road (1958)

Thunder Road was very much a personal project for Robert Mitchum. He starred in it, he produced it, he wrote the story and he even co-wrote the songs. It was released by United Artists in 1958.

Mitchum plays Luke Doolin, a Korean War veteran who makes his living running illegal whiskey. It’s a small family business but Luke is finding himself squeezed by agents of the Treasury Department on one side and big-time gangsters on the other.

The action takes place in Harlan County in Tennessee, and illegal whiskey is the main industry in the county. These are hillbillies who have been distilling moonshine, and avoiding the revenue agents, for generations. It’s not just as profitable business. It’s part of their culture.

The transporters are guys like Luke, driving specially modified cars with racing engines and 250 gallon concealed tanks for the whiskey.

Carl Kogan (James Aubuchon) is a smooth but unscrupulous operator. He aims to control the whole illegal distilling business throughout the state. He aims to turn the operation into big business. He makes the moonshiners of the valley an offer he thinks they can’t refuse but he hasn’t taken account of Luke Doolin’s bloody-mindedness and intense dislike of being pushed around.

Luke’s charisma, resourcefulness and daring has made him the de facto leader of the illegal distillers in the valley. Luke certainly has guts. The question is whether his judgment is entirely sound. He doesn’t just refuse Kogan’s offer, he goes out of his way to antagonise and humiliate him. Kogan has a reputation for ruthlessness and one might think that it would have been wiser not to push him so far. But subtlety is not Luke’s style, and he possibly figures that if he refuses Kogan’s offer then Kogan is going to try to destroy him anyway so why bother refusing him politely?

It’s clear from the start that this is a high stakes game. One whiskey runner is ambushed and killed early on. Revenue agents might be implacable enemies but they don’t do that sort of thing. It has to be Kogan. Then Luke has an encounter with a couple of hoods in a car. The encounter ends fatally for the hoods. Then things really get out of control. A Treasury agent is killed in a bungled attempt on Luke’s life. This is the one thing that everyone in Harlan County feared. If a federal agent gets killed the government tends to react in a rather extreme way. In this case they send 200 additional agents to Harlan County with orders to track down and destroy every single still.

Things are getting so grim that Luke’s Daddy decides it’s time to get out of the whiskery business, temporarily at least. Luke will make one last run and that will be it.

One of the cool things about a film noir-tinged 1958 movie is that you can’t be certain whether it’s going to have a downbeat ending or a happy ending. From the late 60s onwards movies started to become terribly predictable. You just know there’s going to be a nihilistic downbeat ending. But in 1958 there was no way to be sure which way a movie like this would go. And I’m certainly not going to tell you!

Thunder Road does have some definite claims to film noir status, and those claims rest to a large degree on Luke’s personality. Luke is the kind of guy who just cannot compromise. He’s a guy who is either going to smash his way to victory or destroy himself trying. He is wildly over-confident. He is used to winning, but now he’s facing tougher odds than ever before. He’s the kind of guy whose whole approach is likely to get him in trouble. He’s a nice guy and he’s fundamentally decent but those flaws could well be enough to make him a doomed film noir hero. He’s a man who is at least half-aware of being on a road to destruction. If Kogan doesn’t get him the Federal Government will. The smart thing to do would be to quit, but he just doesn’t know how to do that. It’s an ideal role for Mitchum, combining charisma, charm, sensitivity and fatalism.

Gene Barry (an actor I’ve always liked) plays Treasury Agent Troy Barrett. In this case Barrett doesn’t really care about Luke Doolin. It’s Carl Kogan he wants. Luke is a bit of a bad boy but Kogan is a gangster and a cold-blooded killer. Barrett’s problem is to try to persuade the moonshiners that this time he’s on their side.

Mitchum’s son James makes his film debut here as Luke’s kid brother Robin.

The illegal whiskey business isn’t just a criminal enterprise. For the people of communities like Harlan County it’s a kind of symbol. A symbol of resistance to intrusive governments. A symbol of a man’s freedom to live his life in his own way. A symbol of the right not to be a wage slave. And also a symbol of a traditional way of life. Apart from being in the illegal whiskey trade the people of Harlan County are law-abiding God-fearing folk. They just want to be left alone. But of course being left alone is not going to be an option.

Thunder Road is available on DVD in Regions 1 and 2 and there’s a U.S. Blu-Ray release as well. I caught the movie on cable TV so I can’t comment on the quality of those releases.

Thunder Road has no shortage of action. It was just about the first Hollywood move in which car chases were the main focus of the action, and those car chases are extremely well done. The film also benefits from lots of location shooting. This is a very entertaining mix of film noir and action movie, with some of the flavour of an exploitation movie as well. Highly recommended.

The Enemy Below (1957)

The Enemy Below is one of the classic submarine movies. It tells the story of a duel between an American destroyer and a German U-boat in the South Atlantic during World War 2. Dick Powell produced and directed the film which was based on a bestselling novel by Commander D. A. Rayner.

The U.S.S. Haynes has had an uneventful war and while it’s an efficient ship and morale is quite high the crew members are rather sceptical about their new skipper, Lieutenant Commander Murrell (Robert Mitchum). Murrell is not regular navy and his previous command was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat. There’s some speculation that he may not know his business and that, even worse, he may have lost his nerve. 

The ship’s uneventful war is about to become very eventful indeed. They pick up a radar contact and Murrell is convinced it’s a U-boat. The closest supporting Allied ships are a long way away so it’s destined to be a one-on-one duel between the Haynes and the submarine. As Murrell admits, on paper the odds are slightly in favour of the submarine. Nonetheless Murrell is determined to to accept the odds.

It soon becomes obvious that the crew needn’t have worried about their new captain. Murrell does know his business. Unfortunately the U-boat’s commander, Kapitan von Stolberg (Curd Jürgens), is equally competent.

What follows is a tense cat-and-mouse game, with the difference that this mouse has teeth that are every bit as sharp as the cat’s.

This is a movie that doesn’t waste too much time giving us the backstories of the characters. We learn just enough about Murrell to know that he has good cause to be very determined to win this duel, and we learn enough about von Stolberg to know that he is an old-school German officer who regards the Nazis with contempt. While the “good German” can be a bit of a cliché in this case it’s absolutely necessary. This particular story can only work if the audience has equal sympathy with both sides. In fact that’s the whole point of the story - war might be unpleasant but it is possible to wage it with courage and honour and, paradoxically, war can forge unexpected bonds between enemies. Both Murrell and von Stolberg are brave and skillful officers and as their duel progresses they develop a healthy respect for one another. The crews of both the American destroyer escort and the German U-boat are also courageous and highly professional. They’re all men trying to do their duty as best they can. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this movie is that it is a 1957 war movie in which not a single character expresses genuine overt hatred for the enemy.

In order to succeed this movie also needed not just good actors as the two opposing captains but actors with a great deal of charisma. Mitchum and Jürgens were ideal choices, and as well as charisma they are able to bring genuine humanity to their performances. The supporting players are less important but Theodore Bikel as von Stolberg's second-in-command 'Heinie' Schwaffer and David Hedison (in those days still going by the name Al Hedison) as the Executive Officer of the Haynes both do well. Look out for an impossibly young Doug McClure as a junior officer on the Haynes.

Dick Powell demonstrates considerable skill and judgment as director. This is a movie that wastes very little time in getting to the action. And once the hunt is joined the suspense is maintained relentlessly. There’s also plenty of action. The action scenes are exceptionally well done. 

The special effects are mostly impressive and the underwater sequences are convincing.

Not everyone will approve of the ending but I think that once you grasp the movie’s major theme it becomes obvious that it’s the right ending.

In 1966 The Enemy Below was remade (surprisingly well) as an episode of Star Trek, Balance of Terror. Even more surprisingly that episode preserves not just the basic structure of the story but the tone as well.

The Enemy Below has had a number of DVD releases including the one I bought - a double-movie pack from Fox which pairs it with an equally good British naval war movie, Sink the Bismarck. The movie was shot in colour and Cinemascope and the anamorphic transfer looks great.

The Enemy Below avoids the obvious temptation of pushing a simplistic anti-war message.  That’s not to say that it glorifies war but it has a more subtle message, that the experience of war can lead to mutual respect and even sympathy between enemies. This is an intelligent war movie that is also tense, exciting and thoroughly entertaining. In fact I rate is one of the best war movies ever made. Very highly recommended.

His Kind of Woman (1951)

His Kind of Woman is one of those films that can best be described as a glorious mess. It is in fact two different films spliced uneasily together, films from entirely different and incompatible genres, but both films are terrific and compulsively watchable.

Why is it such a mess? The answer to that one is easy - Howard Hughes. John Farrow directed the movie and came up with an excellent film noir. Hughes meddled, ordered Richard Fleischer to reshoot many scenes and beefed up Vincent Price’s role to the point where it becomes a film within a film. So you have a fine film noir but mixed in with it you have a delirious Hollywood comedy spoof. But it’s a genuinely funny and delightful comedy spoof and although it doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie it’s so much fun that in a perverse way I’m almost grateful to Hughes. Without his meddling Price would never have had the chance to play one of his best ever comedy roles.



Robert Michum is down-on-his-luck professional gambler Dan Milner. To pay off his debts he accepts a job. All he has to do is fly to Mexico and hang around for a while and then sail off on a yacht, and he will get to collect $50,000. Yes, it does sound too good to be true, and Milner is no fool but he’s a Robert Mitchum film noir hero and a mixture of curiosity and fatalism (plus the rather pressing need for money) decides him to accept the offer.

In fact it’s part of a scheme to get deported gangster Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr) back into the United States. Ferraro will have plastic surgery to make him resemble Milner and then Milner will have an unfortunate accident. Milner realises even at the start that there’s a good chance the men paying him fifty grand don’t intend for him to live long enough to spend it but he figures he might be able to double-cross them and get away with it. And if not, well those are the breaks. And he is a gambler.



He shares a plane down to Mexico with singer Lenore Brent (Jane Russell). She claims to be a fabulously wealthy heiress. Milner has his doubts. He suspects that whatever she’s up to it’s probably not strictly legal but he likes her and she’s a looker and she’s fun. She’s his kind of woman and he can overlook one or two minor character flaws. It’s soon clear that he’s her kind of man as well. Unfortunately she has a boyfriend, movie star Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price). Mark has everything a gal could want - he’s rich and famous and he’s a nice guy and he’s generous. Unfortunately he also has a wife. Dan Milner and Mark Cardigan hit it off pretty well. Milner is hardboiled but with a soft centre and he’s an easy-going guy. Mark Cardigan and Lenore Brent are both phonies but he likes them.

Milner starts to figure out what the bad guys have planned for him. Luckily he finds an unexpected ally in Mark Cardigan. Mark is a keen, indeed obsessive, hunter. His hunting and marksmanship skills will prove useful. Mark knows he’s a phony but now maybe he’ll finally get the chance to be a real hero, just like the hero of a Mark Cardigan movie.



Once Milner is in Mexico the movie starts to fragment into disconnected and often irrelevant subplots, with the Mark Cardigan subplot gradually developing to the point where it’s pretty much an entirely separate movie. The constant intercutting between the main plot and this subplot becomes distracting but Mitchum and Burr are so good in the main film noir plot and Price is so good in his subplot that you can’t stop watching.

Jane Russell provides the only real link between these subplots and it must have been difficult for her switching between the femme fatale role in her scenes with Mitchum and the scenes with Price that become more and more like screwball comedy. She keeps her footing though and her sure-footedness is all that holds the movie together. Lenore Brent is the kind of lighthearted “bad girl who’s really not so bad after all” role at which Russell excelled.



Mitchum gives one of his trademark performances as well. Milner is no Boy Scout but he’s forced into acting the hero and he accepts his destiny with typical Mitchum fatalism. Burr is wonderfully vicious and sadistic as Ferraro.

The main film noir plotline is nicely developed and Farrow and his cinematographer Harry J. Wild get the film noir atmosphere right. There are an extraordinary number of low-angle shots. I’ve never seen so many ceilings in a Hollywood movie of this era, and all the ceilings seem to be pressing down on the characters as if the roof were about to literally fall in on them. It’s an odd but interesting touch. The suspense is well-maintained despite the constant intercutting between action/suspense scenes and action/comedy scenes and it’s a tribute to Farrow’s skills that this remains so despite Hughes’ meddling.



The scene in which Mark Cardigan sets off in pursuit of the bad guys in a small boat full of Mexican policemen and takes up a heroic position in the prow quoting inspiring lines from Shakespeare as the boat slowly sinks serves as a perfect metaphor for the whole movie. It’s a disaster but it’s a heroic disaster that is enormously entertaining to watch. With all its faults it’s definitely worth seeing.

It was released in Region 1 by Warner Home Video but my copy is the British all-region DVD from Odeon, with no extras but a very satisfactory transfer.

Where Danger Lives (1950)

Australian director John Farrow made only a handful of movies that could be described as film noir but the ones he did make are exceptionally interesting, and the best of them may well be his 1950 production for RKO, Where Danger Lives.

This is a somewhat underrated entry in the noir cycle and it’s rather odd that it hasn’t received more attention. It was an A-picture with some big name stars (Robert Mitchum and Claude Rains) made by a well-respected director and it not only ticks most of the noir boxes it also has some interesting features of its own.

Mitchum plays a dedicated young doctor named Jeff Cameron. He loves his work, he’s highly thought of and he’s engaged to be married to an equally dedicated nurse (Julie, played by Maureen O’Sullivan). Life is good and it promises to get better. Then fate steps in. Just as he’s about to leave the hospital to go on a date with Julie he’s called back to attend an emergency, an attempted suicide.

The attempted suicide is Margo (Faith Domergue). She’s not in any real danger but she seem a little evasive, and the guy who brought her in seems even more evasive. The following morning when Jeff goes to check on her he discovers she’s given a false address and has discharged herself. Then he gets a cable from her, asking him to meet her at a night-club.

He’s instantly smitten by her. She’s sexy and glamorous and (given the fact that she’s just tried to kill herself) she’s obviously emotionally disturbed. He’s a sensitive man who’s devoted his life to helping people (we discover as the movie progresses that he really is a man who chose medicine as a career for the highest motives and is relatively indifferent to money). A man like that really doesn’t stand a chance - here’s a chance to save somebody who also happens to be sex on legs. Pretty soon they’re dating.

She tells him her sad story. She lives with her father, an elderly man with not long to live who is something of a control freak. He could, and would, cut her off without a penny (and he’s a wealthy man) if she wanted to mary a man he didn’t approve of. And it sounds like he’s a man who’s unlikely to approve of a penniless young doctor who doesn’t even have a practice of his own. Of course she loves Jeff and wants to marry him but she tells him it’s going to be tricky handling her father. Jeff doesn’t care about her father’s money. He just wants to marry her. After having a few too many drinks he turns up at her house with the intention of trying to talk the old boy around and he quickly discovers that nothing that Margo told him was true. Most importantly, Mr Lannington (Claude Rains) is not her father.

Things get out of control rapidly, there’s a struggle and Mr Lannington attacks him with a poker. Jeff punches him and Lannington is knocked out cold. Jeff had received a very nasty blow on the head and he’s extremely groggy but everything is OK, he’ll just get some water and bring Lannington around and then he can leave and go back to his decent ordinary everyday life. He just needs to put his head under some cold water to clear it a bit. When he returns from the bathroom he finds that everything is not OK and he’s not ever going to be able to go back to the daylight world. He’s trapped in the noir nightmare world and there’s no escape. Margo announces that Lannington is dead.

Jeff still thinks everything is not lost. After all it was a clear case of self-defence. But he’s very groggy and he just can’t think straight and Margo tells him nobody will believe him but it’s OK because she has two plane tickets booked for Nassau and they should just head for the airport. Jeff isn’t sure that’s a good idea, they should just call the police and explain everything, but his head is swimming and maybe Margo is right. The airport turns out to be a bad idea and pretty soon they’re in her car heading for the Mexican border and the noir nightmare world has claimed them well and truly.

Jeff is not your typical noir protagonist. He’s not a chump. He’s not the kind of guy who would normally be caught in this kind of nightmare. He’s not a Walter Neff, with the seeds of corruption already inside him just waiting to blossom. It’s the blow on the head that dooms him. All the evidence he needs to work out what is really going on is there before him and normally he’d work it out in quick time but his head just keeps spinning and he can’t put his thoughts together.

Mitchum is terrific, as always. Faith Domergue is the big surprise. She’s not particularly well thought of as an actress (she got her contract with Howard Hughes for the usual reasons) but she’s perfectly cast and does a fine job in a difficult role. Margo isn’t quite the typical femme fatale -she’s clearly not playing with a full deck and we’re never quite sure just how conscious she is of what she is doing and the effects it has on others. The ambiguity is never fully resolved, one of the features that make this movie slightly unusual as 40s Hollywood movies go.

John Farrow shows himself to be a master craftsman. His framing of the scenes involving Mr Lannington, Jeff and Margo is constantly shifting reflecting the unstable dynamics between the three of them, with Jeff and Margo seeming to be drawn together at one moment only to be split apart the next. At times Lannington recedes into the background and seems insignificant only to be suddenly brought into the foreground as the power shifts. The scenes between Margo and Jeff show the instability and ambiguity of their relationship. One moment they seem to be synchronised and then we realise they’re not in tune at all. It’s all done with subtle manipulation of the framing.

Farrow makes extensive use of long takes. One vital scene is done in a single shot, seven minutes without a single cut. Farrow was apparently a prickly character and even more than most directors he detested having his work interfered with. Perhaps long takes were his way of preventing studio interference. When you do your most crucial scenes in very long takes there’s not much the studio can do - they can’t eliminate the scene or shorten it or recut it. Either way it’s a technique that requires not only great skill and self-confidence from a director but also enormous confidence in his actors, and Mitchum and Domergue are equal to the challenge.

Farrow has the advantage in this film of having the great Nick Musuraca as his cinematographer. That, combined with an intelligent and literate script by Charles Bennett, superior acting performances and a director who is in complete command of his craft, makes Where Danger Lives an object lesson in just how good classical Hollywood film-making could be. Highly recommended.

When Strangers Marry (1944)

In the 50s William Castle would become one of the great B-movie showmen, his low-budget horror films benefitting from his genius for publicity and his extraordinary talent for coming up with gimmicks. Before that he’d directed the usual quotas of B-movies, including the highly regarded 1944 film noir When Strangers Marry.

The second lead in this picture was a young actor called Bob Mitchum. By the time it was re-released in the early 50s (under the less relevant but unquestionably more noir title Betrayed) Robert Mitchum was a huge star and he was hastily promoted to top billing.



It starts with a murder in a Philadelphia hotel. A man has been boasting that he is carrying $10,000 on him and he pays the price for his folly. He is found strangled with a silk stocking.

The scene then switches to New York where we’re introduced to a young woman named Mildred Baxter (Kim Hunter) who has just married, and it’s been the proverbial whirlwind romance. She knows he’s a salesman but she doesn’t even know the name of the company he works for. After one day of marriage he left on a business trip and she hasn’t seen him since. Now, a month later, she receives a cable from him in Philadelphia informing her that he will meet her at the Sherwin Hotel in New York.



He doesn’t show up, but as luck would have it she runs into an old friend (in fact an old flame), Fred Graham (Robert Mitchum). He’s very supportive and suggests she should go to the police and he even persuades Lieutenant Blake of the Homicide Squad to give the matter his personal attention. You might be wondering why a homicide cop would be interested in a routine missing persons case but Blake does in fact have his reasons, and those reasons are connected with the murder case in Philadelphia.

Mildred does eventually find her husband Paul (Dean Jagger) but he seems nervous and secretive. Mildred starts to suspect that something is very wrong, and that it may have something to do with Philadelphia. Then Paul announces he has to leave again, but this time it’s no business trip.



The plot will keep you guessing for about 30 seconds. This is definitely a minor noir B-movie (it was released by Monogram) and it’s not as good as its reputation would suggest. Still, it does have some atmospheric noirish moments and it has a solid cast.

Mitchum seems a little tentative. He would of course improve very rapidly but this is not one of his more memorable roles. Kim Hunter is fine and her character is the emotional centre of the movie. Dean Jagger was always pretty reliable and delivers an excellent performance. Neil Hamilton (best known as Commissioner Gordon in the 1960s Batman TV series) makes a good homicide cop. He’s a decent guy and a good cop.



Considering the deficiencies of the screenplay Castle has made a reasonably entertaining and fast-moving noir thriller and it’s interesting to see Robert Mitchum at a time when he was still learning the ropes and his film persona was not yet solidified. Just don’t expect too much.

Castle’s later horror movies were essentially lighthearted tongue-in-cheek exercises but When Strangers Marry doesn’t show any real evidence of this tendency.

The Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD-R is of perfectly acceptable quality.

Track of the Cat (1954)

William A. Wellman’s 1954 western Track of the Cat suffered a similar fate to Charles Laughton’s 1955 Night of the Hunter. Both were exercises in style for which the movie-going public of the 1950s was not ready, both failed commercially at the time, and both went on to be highly regarded examples of art cinema at its best.

Track of the Cat hasn’t undergone the same degree of rehabilitation as Night of the Hunter but in its own way it’s just as impressive.

The plot is very much a secondary consideration. A painter (puma) has been attacking stock on a remote ranch owned by the Bridges family. The two oldest Bridges brothers, Curt (Robert Mitchum) and Arthur (William Hopper) set off to track down the predator.



The old Indian who lives at the ranch, Joe Sam, believes the attacks are the work of a mysterious black painter, a kind of supernatural beast. To Joe Sam the painter symbolises the violence in the world, the violence that destroyed his own family. It will come to be seen as having much the same significance for the Bridges family.

In fact the movie has nothing whatever to do with hunting marauding pumas. It’s a family melodrama, with the painter being a personification of the passions, jealousies, resentments and hatreds that collectively make up the Bridges family.



Pa Bridges is a hopeless drunk with only the haziest idea of what’s happening. The family has been dominated by two overwhelming personalities, Ma Bridges (Beulah Bondi) and Curt. Ma Bridges is a pious fraud, a controlling monster of a matriarch. Curt easily dominates brother Arthur, and younger brother Harold (Tab Hunter) is practically a nonentity, existing merely to serve as the butt of Curt’s jokes. Harold has fallen in love with Gwen Williams (Diana Lynn) but nobody believes he’ll ever have the courage to ask her to marry him. Harold has never had the courage to do anything. Sister Grace (Teresa Wright) retreats to her room and to her music.

But now the painter has come and Curt is off in the mountains hunting him and the family tensions are coming to the boil.



Director Wellman conceived this movie as a experiment in colour. He’d long had the idea of making a black-and-white movie in colour. His idea was that if a movie were to be shot in mostly monochromatic shades, with stark blacks and whites and otherwise mostly very subdued colours that were almost shades of grey, he could use bright colours very very sparingly for intense dramatic effect. In fact the only bright colours are Curt’s red jacket and Gwen’s yellow blouse. Curt has always been the central figure in the family, the de facto boss and patriarch, while Gwen is the disturbing new element . They’re the two characters with the power to make things happen. Everyone else reacts to what they do.

In practice this visual idea results in a movie with a distinctive and rather disturbing look. And Wellman doesn’t stop with the colour. He uses spectacular location shooting for the scenes in which Curt hunts the cat, but as soon as we move back to the ranch we’re obviously on a sound stage. The exteriors of the ranch are filmed in such a way as to emphasise their artificiality, to make sure we’re in no doubt this is a sound stage. Wellman wants us to see the ranch as something artificial and unnatural, something that doesn’t belong, something that should be alive but isn’t. It’s a kind of surreal doll’s house, and again the resemblances to Laughton’s vision in Night of the Hunter are striking.



Wellman (with the able assistance of his cinematographer William A. Clothier) took huge risks with this film and while they didn’t pay off commercially at the time they certainly paid off artistically. And the movie’s reputation has slowly grown.

Wellman had the advantage of having a fine cast to work with and the performances are uniformly good. The role of Curt required the kind of vaguely sinister charisma that Mitchum could always produce when needed and his presence dominates the film even when he’s not onscreen, just as the personality of Curt dominates this bizarre family even when he’s not there.

It’s a movie that is something of an oddity but it’s well worth seeking out as an example of just how edgy 1950s Hollywood film-making could be. It was produced by John Wayne’s production company which was responsibly for so many interesting and offbeat 1950s movies.