OUTSIDE THE WALL (1950)

Larry Nelson gets thirty years in a big boy cell after he accidentally snuffs a reform school guard. But fifteen years later, he’s a rehab poster boy: educated, good-looking, trained in the prison infirmary, the pride of inmates and staff alike. Best of all, his parole just came through. It ain’t all rosy though: Nelson is institutionalized and nervous to leave “home,” never having lived on his own. He’s also never driven a car, had a bank account, or taken a drink. He’s practically a doctor, but knows nothing of the birds and the bees. With the promise of a job at the city hospital and $600 in the breast pocket of his prison-issue suit, he hits the busy streets of Philadelphia, braced for a new life somewhere Outside the Wall.

And he ends up washing dishes at a greasy spoon. The hospital’s applications and background checks — not to mention candy stripers — scare the hell out of him. At first pots and pans suit Nelson just fine, but when a pair of stick-up men crash the diner he decides that big city life is just too much to handle. He hoofs it out of town and into rural Jewel Lake, where he answers a help wanted ad at the local TB sanitarium. The lab job pays little more than room and board, but the boss doesn’t ask too many questions. Nelson settles in with ease, and soon earns the respect of his superiors and the attention of two pretty nurses. Elegant brunette Ann (Dorothy Hart), is the girl next-door type, while Charlotte (Marilyn Maxwell) is an ambitious blonde who likes men with “nice cars and money to spend.” Hard-to-get Charlotte is everything Nelson ever dreamed of in a skirt, but he needs a ragtop and wad of cash before she’ll give him the time of day.

Back in Philly, ex-cons take an armored car for a cool million. Their tuberculosis-stricken leader, Jack Bernard (John Hoyt), needed a big score to bankroll his remaining years. Back in Jewel Lake Nelson couldn’t care less about the headlines — until Bernard checks into the sanitarium. The convalescing crook needs a courier to run weekly payoffs to his scheming ex-wife Celia (Signe Hasso), who he fears might flip on him for the reward. Nelson agrees — tired of getting the cold shoulder from Charlotte. Celia wants the entire million though, and hires thugs Red (Lloyd Gough) and Garth (Henry Morgan) to help her get it. Bernard is the only one who knows where the money is, but Celia and her boys wrongly assume that Nelson was in on the heist and try to torture the information out of him. He escapes and hurries back to the sanitarium, where he finally sees Charlotte’s true colors and turns his attention to Ann, confessing his knowledge of the heist as well as his past. She’s elated, but insists that before they can be together he has to come clean with the cops. Meanwhile, Celia and her goons are barreling to the sanitarium for a final reckoning with destiny…

This is a solid crime picture, even if it isn’t a full-bodied film noir. Larry Nelson comes to grips with freedom altogether too quickly and too well. He isn’t plagued by the crushing insecurity, self-loathing, or self-doubt that makes Steve Cochran’s character in Tomorrow is Another Day (1951) infinitely more interesting. (That special movie also manages to capture the bad blonde and the angelic brunette in the same character!)  Nor is Nelson the product of the typical noir prison, as in Brute Force, but rather the very real Eastern State Penitentiary — Cherry Hill — where the golden rule was rehabilitation. Instead of cruel treatment and an uncaring bureaucracy, he is carefully educated and highly trained. The system dotes on him. And the everyday folks he bumps into aren’t suspicious or frightened noir regulars. Instead of being shunned, exploited, or ripped off, the people of Outside the Wall try to lend a helping hand: the warden lines up a job, a uniformed cop helps him navigate traffic, and instead of looking for a kickback, his boss at the diner is ecstatic to have found such a hard worker. Sure, a barfly tries to lift his wallet, but he swats her away with ease.

Speaking of Nelson, his feathers never get ruffled, even though he’s got zero life experience. He isn’t paranoid or desperate — he’s not even mildly neurotic — and like a jailhouse Sam Spade he uses his prison smarts to stay a step ahead everyone else. But even if we don’t have both feet fully in noir territory here, Outside the Wall is plenty worthwhile. Marilyn Maxwell has a lot of fun making like a bad girl, and Harry Morgan is a grotesque (if underutilized) villain even by his lofty standards — like a pint-sized inquisitor gets people to spill by jamming scalpels underneath their nails. Noir or not, this is unabashedly a crime film, and occasionally a brutal one.

I’m ambivalent about the bland Richard Basehart, even though his early movie career is steeped in noir, and Outside the Wall was one of his better roles. I’ve read much about what a great actor he was, and how he could have been big star if only Hollywood had given him the chance. Rubbish. Basehart was good-looking in a vanilla sort of way and he had some depth, but he lacked above-the-title, big star screen charisma — and said so himself. Rather than compare him to Burt Lancaster, the bland Basehart was rather a stone’s throw away from Kent Smith, which, in the end, isn’t a terrible thing. Both enjoyed lengthy careers and appeared in more memorable films than most actors could have dreamed of. Maybe Basehart simmered a bit more than Smith, but he was certainly no Lancaster.

One of the best things about Outside the Wall is writer-director Crane Wilbur’s dialog: “You’re being born all over again kid, except this time you’re a man.” “Where you been all your life?” “I just found out what money can buy.” “I always was a sucker for a dame.” Smart, pulpy stuff that sometimes hints at epigram and always makes me smile. Wilbur had a thing for prison pictures. He penned a bunch of noir screenplays, most dealing with jailbirds and ex-cons. A Hollywood lifer with who began as an actor, he wrote for the ear and punctuated his scenes with good lines, no matter what he was working on — it’s hard to imagine that screenplays as contradictory as The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima and House of Wax both sprang from his typewriter in the same year (1953). But if Wilbur was a fine writer he was a pedestrian director. Canon City (1948) and Outside the Wall are plenty good enough, but they pale next to He Walked by Night and CrimeWave (1954), Wilbur scripts brought to the screen by more gifted directors.

Outside the Wall is cheap, enjoyable, unspectacular, and entertaining. It has too much brotherly love for a bona fide film noir, but it offers a rare glimpse at the mid-century streets of one of America’s great cities, and it serves up plenty of what crime and noir fans get jazzed on: prisons and parolees, bad girls, torturous thugs, and killers who pull heists with hand grenades. Everything about it may have been done better in some other picture, but what’s not to like?

Outside the Wall (1950)

Written and Directed by Crane Wilbur

Starring Richard Basehart, Marilyn Maxwell, Signe Hasso, John Hoyt, and Harry Morgan
Cinematography by Irving Glassberg
Released by Universal International

Running time: 80 minutes

HOLLYWOOD STORY (1951)

Like many of you I’m often surprised by the inclusive definition some have of film noir. I once cared about whether or not a particular movie “qualified” as a noir — as if there were a checklist of traits used to keep score. It seems that many enthusiasts still think this way. I stopped doing so because it gets in the way of a more meaningful and rewarding look at the films, robbing them of much of their value and individual identity. A film can’t “add up” to noir status — just like a list of ingredients haphazardly thrown in a bowl don’t “add up” to a well-prepared meal. Something has to bind the ingredients together — something thematic, purposeful, and altogether more difficult to put a finger on. The best way to identify a noir for sure is to watch enough, read enough, and learn enough to recognize the ties that bind when you see them. Like so many other things in life, the right answers come with education and experience. Thinking about film noir this way still allows for debate about what exactly it is and what films are representative, inching all of us closer to a shared truth,while keeping the films alive and breathing.

That being said, there is a central set of about 200, maybe 250 films that most agree on, and the great thing about film noir is that it’s possible to pull any two at random from such a list and find that they have little in common. Nonetheless, we seem to exist in a world where any movie with a bad girl or a private eye is called a film noir, which has led to a multitude of movies being codified as such that just … aren’t. A few lists available in cyberspace attach the noir label to as many as 1,000 movies. Hollywood Story appears on most of these lists — but it isn’t an especially strong film noir.

Cashing in on the renewed interest in the silent film era generated by Sunset Blvd., Hollywood Story, released by Universal in 1951 and helmed by William Castle, stars Richard Conte as a filmmaker lured west after a successful career in New York City. Conte’s Larry O’Brien is such a hot commodity that his deal gives him the juice to greenlight any picture on any subject he wants. Larry’s introduction to the sights and sounds of L.A. comes from agent / war buddy Mitch Davis (Jim Backus), who takes him to scout a decrepit silent film studio. Larry’s engine starts purring when he learns of a sordid killing, still unsolved, that took place on the lot way back in 1929. He decides the story of a murdered silent film director would be big box office and wants it to be his first picture. Over the next few weeks he researches the details around the crime and begins to develop the project. But as he learns more and more about the killing, various people in his life try to dissuade him from making the film — it seems everyone he knows in Hollywood is somehow connected. Eventually Larry’s prying reveals the killer’s identity and the case is finally put to rest.


Hollywood Story is pure whodunit hokum, with a story better suited for any one of the endless Perry Mason-style television dramas of the period. There’s little action, and the dialog simply pushes the complicated plot towards an obvious and inexorable conclusion. Missing is tension, character development, and pace. Nothing builds. What we have is a routine mystery that solves itself, and by the time the killer is revealed most viewers will have stopped caring.

There are a few redemptive qualities worth mentioning. First, it’s a movie about movies and consequently promises a peek into the secret inner workings of the industry. Second is man-around-town location shooting which provides plenty of shots mid-century L.A. and various Hollywood landmarks. The only problem is that most of these glimpses are second-unit shots that accompany the opening titles. And finally there’s Richard Conte, absolutely one of the greatest film actors of the fifties not accorded the respect he deserves by contemporary audiences — so consistently enjoyable he could do the actor’s equivalent of “singing the phone book.”

Yet Richard Conte is miscast in Hollywood Story. Besides being wrong for the part, he’s just too good for it — and consequently sticks out like a sore thumb. That’s not to suggest that the other cast members were second rate, but Conte is the only above the title performer in the cast. Some of the actors, Jim Backus and Fred Clark in particular, are simply using Hollywood Story as an excuse to chew scenery. The female lead is Julia Adams, and although the camera winces at her — especially in tight — she does well alongside Conte, and her performance improves a little with time. Adams has had a long film and television career, and at the time of this writing is still banging away at it, having appeared recently in episodes of Lost and CSI. The rest of the cast is unremarkable, though it does include a few moments with stars of the silent period and one with the relatively contemporaneous Joel McCrea. After all Sunset Blvd. features the famous “waxworks” scene with Buster Keaton and H.B. Warner, so Hollywood Story just had to respond with Francis Bushman and William Farnum.

As for film noir, I didn’t find much. There are one or two dark visuals, including a dramatically lit confrontation in a flop house and a well-conceived (given the rest of the film) cat-and-mouse at the close, but that’s it — and a few nods to a popular style does not a film noir make. Conte’s character doesn’t internalize any of the film’s drama, and neither do any of the others. There’s no cynicism, no obsession, no neurosis. As a matter of fact, Conte is so controlled, self-assured, and infallible that he epitomizes everything the noir protagonist is not. Frankly, he’s less a Hollywood player in this film than he is a pre-war private detective. He does all of his investigative work under the auspices of research for his movie — but he never actually loads a camera, and the movie doesn’t otherwise feature any scenes showing the nitty-gritty of movie making. Nothing is done to establish Larry’s Hollywood credibility, but he is made out to be one hell of a private eye. As for the girl — no dice. Adams’ Sally Rousseau enters the film bitterly, but she warms into the proper fifties sweetheart so fast your head’ll spin. The rest of the cast members are cardboard cutouts.

The film frustratingly introduces a few cynical notions that might have inched it closer to film noir, but it fails to capitalize on them. Coming back to the exteriors that frame the opening titles, it’s interesting to note that many of the shots depict television studios like CBS and NBC — odd because the film was made during the early days of Hollywood’s war with television, and espouses those values. In an early scene where a few characters are reminiscing about the early days of the movie business an ancient studio guard says,” You don’t see pictures like that anymore.” to which Fred Clark responds “Sure you do Pop, every night on television.” Yet the movie decides to drop it and never returns to the subject. Given the prominent placement of TV production facilities in the first few images of the film I expected TV or those working in it to play some part in the drama, yet it isn’t so. It’s bewildering, unless we consider that the opening footage may have been poorly-chosen stock. Another notion in play is that of the incompetent police force. Familiar-faced Richard Egan plays the cop, and despite the fact that Richard Conte is an East Coast movie maker he’s able to unravel a generation-old unsolved murder despite no personal connections and only a neophyte’s sense of L.A. culture. As Conte digs deeper into the case the police glom on to his efforts, but he stays a step ahead of them, eventually leading Egan’s Lt. Lennox around by the nose. Yet again the film fails to follow through: there’s no hardboiled rivalry between Conte and Egan, rather an almost a healthy respect; and by the end of the film Conte has to count on Egan to save his life.

Hollywood Story is a mediocre mystery made watchable because of Richard Conte. It doesn’t rate as a film noir, and in spite of its self-referential themes, nostalgia for the good ole days and lofty title — it would have made better fodder for hated television.



Hollywood Story (1951)
Directed by William Castle
Cinematography by Carl Guthrie
Story and Screenplay by Frederick Kohner and Fred Brady
Produced by Leonard Goldstein
Starring: Richard Conte, Julia Adams, Jim Backus, Fred Clark, and Richard Egan
Released by Universal International
Running time: 76 minutes

THE WEB (1947)

Look, Ella Raines is in it. Now go find it and watch it.

That’s not advice — it’s just how I tend to Ella Raines pictures. There are only about twenty or so out there, and I savor each one of them (well, maybe not Singing Guns). As a Raines film noir The Phantom Lady has no peer, but The Web is a good film with a big role for the elegant brunette. Most of the conversation about The Web tends to focus on whether or not the movie is a true film noir or a straight mystery / thriller. For what it’s worth: it is a film noir, albeit a lesser one, written and filmed in that brief window of time following the war when the fear of nuclear devastation hadn’t yet permeated the American psyche, and the ensuing cynicism and paranoia hadn’t taken root in film noir. That’s not to suggest that the film is without cynicism — the presence of Edmond O’Brien guarantees it. Instead, The Web is a film noir with roots in the mystery tradition of the 1930s. Working against it is a lack of hopelessness and a dogged determination towards a positive outcome. It is different from the more iconic films to follow only in that it occurs earlier in the cycle — a cycle with evolving conventions.

The story is intriguing: A little old man named Kroner does five years in stir after getting caught selling a million dollars’ worth of forged T-bonds. He clams up, knowing that if he does his time he’ll be taken care of when he finally gets to breathe fresh air again. Meanwhile, his partner in crime figures it makes more sense to kill him than to pay off, so he sets up a patsy to do the job. After the deed is done the patsy gets wise and sets out to bring down the one who hired him. In addition to a guilty conscience he realizes that he has fallen for the man’s secretary / girl Friday. In the end though, the patsy and the girl are caught in the downward spiral of cruel luck, unable to save themselves (there’s the noir!) until fate takes a hand and the bumbling, overconfident killer foolishly incriminates himself.

 The scheming businessman is Vincent Price, the patsy is Edmond O’Brien, the girl Friday is Ella Raines, and the smug cop investigating them all is big Bill Bendix. Price was born for these sorts of parts, his mannered performance here reminiscent of his work in Laura. Replace Shelby Carpenter’s whininess with smooth self-confidence and you’ve got The Web’s Andrew Colby. Price may have even borrowed from another “web” — Clifton Webb, his costar in Laura. One way in which this can be seen in Price’s character is the suggestion of his homosexuality: Colby spends his days and evenings with Raines’ Noel Faraday, and although their relationship is more than merely professional, the film carefully avoids any suggestion of romance, which clearly defies Hollywood convention. In many ways their relationship is similar to that of Waldo Lydecker and Laura Hunt — except that in The Web Colby encourages Regan’s passes, demonstrating his lack of romantic feelings for a woman so beautiful that other men fall over themselves to be near her. And make no mistake, the typical noir villain had no problem using his own woman as a pawn in his scheming. In The Mob, a man actually convinces his own wife to come on to Brod Crawford, fully expecting her to come back home to him after the deal was closed.

O’Brien is well-cast as attorney Bob Regan — smugness being an integral part of O’Brien’s screen persona. His brand of confidence is usually perceived as arrogance, which is exactly how he is meant to be seen in The Web. His comeuppance when he discovers he’s the sucker somehow seems all the more real or gratifying to audiences when the joke is on O’Brien.

Raines’ beauty was more sophisticated than sexual, and it’s obvious in The Web that Noel Faraday is a match for any man in the film. Though she plays Colby’s secretary, she’s clearly his right hand and first choice for advice. The script calls for Regan to come on like a drooling heel when they first meet, though it’s apparent the scene is intended to develop her character much more than his, by showing us how deftly Noel fends him off. The script is talky, but Raines does a plum job of making the conversations seem believable, even contemporary. The typical blunt noir dialog is replaced with slick witticisms, especially between Regan and Faraday. Even Bendix gets the intellectual treatment in The Web. His signature physical presence is diminished by his character’s sarcastic and biting remarks. Big Bill even wears glasses!

In spite of the good dialog in The Web, the plot suffers from a large glitch that strains credibility. Needing the old accountant, Kroner, dead and gone, Colby contrives to have Regan shoot and kill him. Remember, his whole plan hinges on Regan killing the old jailbird, but it can only succeed if Kroner is shot cold dead — if he is merely wounded and has the chance to tell his story, Colby knows he’ll get the hot seat at Rikers Island. Sure, it’s possible to imagine that he could scheme to get Regan to pull the trigger, but no reasonable man would take such a chance. But that’s how it plays out. The scenario is repeated with a different victim at the film’s climax, when Colby himself guns down an employee who might incriminate him — while framing Regan for the job. In the film’s best use of irony, the police inform Colby that his victim is still alive, and he’s finally undone when he sneaks into the wounded man’s room late that night in order to finish the job.

The Web’s production values are middling. In film noir it’s crucial for the film’s visual crew, the director of photography, art directors, and set designers to accentuate character emotions and reinforce specific aspects of the narrative through visuals. In other words: form follows function, especially in noir. DP Irving Glassberg disappoints. He captures Raines well, but his attempts to make The Web distinctive fall short, resulting in a film with little more going for it than lackluster surface gloss. There are some dark corners and foggy streets, but what separates the great noirs from the not so great are the reasons for all those velvety shadows. What does that dark corner hold? What do the elongated shadows, absurd camera angles, and extreme close-ups suggest? What do they tell us about the protagonist’s predicament or state of mind? In late 1946 Glassberg didn’t know. The lighting is especially weak, and eventually becomes annoying. All of the scenes, regardless of staging, are photographed with a single key light, which creates a theatrical quality. Also suspect are the exterior back lot exteriors, which fail to properly evoke New York. The promising opening titles roll against a car’s-eye view of Manhattan streets, but the film fails to follow up. 

The Web is an entertaining crime thriller with a good script and a good cast. though it fails to distinguish itself as a film noir.

The Web (1947)

Director: Michael Gordon
Cinematographer: Irving Glassberg

Screenplay: William Bowers and Bertram Millhauser.
Story: Harry Kurnitz
Starring: Edmond O’Brien, Ella Raines, Vincent Price, and Bill Bendix.
Released by: Universal International
Running time: 87 minutes

KISS THE BLOOD OFF MY HANDS (1948)

With such an evocative title, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands stood out like a beacon on my list of not-yet-seen film noirs. With A-listers like Burt Lancaster and Joan Fontaine at the top of the bill, I assumed it was locked up for legal reasons and would never be available for viewing. Thanks to the magic of bootlegs I’ve now seen it. My DVD copy (quite good) is a recording from American Movie Classics, circa 1990. It must have aired during prime time, because the recording included Bob Dorian’s introduction, as well as fifteen minutes of network promos at the end of the picture, before launching into the first few moments of “The Flame and the Arrow” with Burt and Virginia Mayo. Those were the days when AMC reigned, and few cable providers offered TCM. 

In Dorian’s introduction to Kiss the Blood Off My Hands he mentions that the film was made by Norma Productions, formed in 1948 by Burt and his agent, Harold Hecht, because the star was nervous about being typecast in the beefcake parts he was becoming known for. Norma’s first film was Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, for which Burt turned down the lead in a new Elia Kazan production that both the young director and Tennessee Williams thought he was the ideal actor for: A Streetcar Named Desire. With Lancaster not available, the part went to newcomer Marlon Brando. There are a million stories out there where an actor or actress famously turns down a landmark role (half of them seem to involve The Godfather), but this one resonates with me — what a picture Streetcar would have been with Burt in angst on his knees under that streetlamp. Misstep or not, things for Burt would turn out just fine. Norma productions made only five pictures, though that small number included important films such as Sweet Smell of Success, The Bachelor Party, and Birdman of Alcatraz.

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands was a pleasant surprise, though I was initially skeptical as to whether or not it would live up to its salacious title. The film screams noir from the opening moments, as Burt, having accidentally killed a bartender, leads the Bobbies on a ten-minute foot chase through the maze-like London waterfront. He only escapes by climbing through an open window and forcibly shushing the woman he finds inside — a mousy blonde (Fontaine) startled from a restless sleep. The sequence plays without much dialog, and Russell Metty’s cinematography establishes the mood. Close-ups of a sweaty, terrified Lancaster abound. As do handhelds, chiaroscuro lighting, high angles, low angles, and seedy waterfront exteriors. The film’s noir motif is so strongly established that is compares favorably with Jules Dassin’s later London masterpiece Night and the City. 

The opening sequence alone isn’t enough to make this a bona fide film noir, but Kiss the Blood Off My Hands still rates. There are several stylish scenes, including a rain-drenched one where Burt dukes it out with some London riff-raff, and another where he mugs an elderly pub crawler. Regardless, the movie's primary noir statement is made through the characterization of Lancaster’s Bill Saunders. Having endured much of the war in a Nazi POW camp, and with no family to return to in the wake of his experiences, Saunders wanders aimlessly through postwar London. More than just alienated, Saunders is truly a man apart — precariously close to coming unglued. What’s most telling isn’t the ferocity with which he battles his demons, but how he reacts when things don’t go his way. Time and again when confronted with a difficult choice Bill lowers his head and flails until he’s the last man standing — then he runs. A heated exchange with Jane in the final reel is all noir: 

“You mean you can say it was self-defense and get it off. But if I go back I won’t get off — I’ll be sticking my head in a rope……listen, nobody gives anybody a break, not me anyway. It’s been run, run, run all the time — run from my old man, run from the kid I hurt in school. That’s why I didn’t mind the army — when you hit you didn’t have to run. Everybody’s against you, everybody!”

No actor of the classic noir period could project doomed angst like Burt Lancaster, and no actress wore empathy on her face like Joan Fontaine. It’s this damaged quality that draws her to him, and what keeps her around. She eventually pulls Saunders away from the abyss — metaphorically kissing the blood off his hands —and proves her love by waiting him out as he does a six-month stretch for punching a police officer.

In the noir tradition, Foster employs setting to visually reinforce his players’ emotional states. In an important scene early in their relationship, Bill and Jane meet at the zoo, where the caged beasts remind Bill of his imprisoned past. Lancaster plays it well, at first joining in with the school children who “ape the apes,” before realizing how much he has in common with the creatures on the other side of the bars. Another interesting moment happens when Bill goes to prison. In addition to hard labor, the judge also demands a flogging — yes, a flogging! The scene is brings to mind the inquisition, or something from Billy Budd, as Lancaster, bound by hands, feet, and neck to a torture device, is whipped mercilessly, while a bureaucrat at a desk ticks off strokes.

Another strong element is the presence of Robert Newton in a featured supporting role. Newton should be familiar to most film fans as either Bill Sykes in David Lean’s exquisite Oliver Twist, or as Long John Silver in Walt Disney’s Treasure Island. Here he plays a sleazy confidence man who witnesses Bill’s accidental killing at the beginning of the film, and holds it over him for the duration. His character at first appears to be nothing more than an amiable trickster — the kind of rascal who does nothing worse than claiming goods that have “fallen off the back of a lorry.” Yet when the stakes are at their highest at the end of the picture, he’s transformed into a grotesque, desperate ogre, and his welcomed fate foreshadows that of Anthony Dawson in Dial M for Murder.

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands is a fine noir — beautifully photographed, well acted, and assembled with great skill. With everything it has going for it I hope it becomes available on DVD in the United States soon. I can’t imagine that most noir fans wouldn’t join the queue to purchase a disc, and maybe even a tin of biscuits.

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948)

Director: Norman Foster
Cinematographer: Russell Metty
Writers: Bercovici (story), Bernstein (adaptation), Butler (novel), Gray (dialog), and Maddow (adaptation). (Yikes!)
Starring: Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, and Robert Newton.
Released by Universal Pictures
Running time: 80 minutes

RAY DANTON DOUBLE FEATURE: The Night Runner (1957), The Beat Generation (1959)

Ray Danton starred in two pseudo-noirs in the late fifties, The Night Runner and The Beat Generation, both of which I caught recently. Despite the triple play of being tall, dark, and handsome, Danton’s limited skill forever doomed him to a low budget existence in Hollywood — though he did manage the occasional part in a big picture, and had a relatively successful run both behind and in front of the camera in Europe. In both of these films Danton plays a character with a screw loose, in the first a killer and the second a serial rapist, yet his good looks and likable demeanor begged audiences to find external forces to blame for his eroded mental condition.

In the The Night Runner (curiously titled because it takes place mostly in broad daylight), Danton plays Roy Turner, ex-mental patient. Turner is a victim of bureaucracy, cut loose by his doctors and unprepared to cope with the world. As an examination of the merits of the system which set the mentally ill free without any sort of support structure, The Night Runner is a failure, laughably so when compared to a film such as 1961’s The Mark with Stuart Whitman and Rod Steiger. Despite the attempt to be taken seriously, The Night Runner is B-exploitation that plays more like a bedtime story told to frighten children.

We never learn much about Roy Turner, but considering that audiences require a reason for all mental illness, there’s a token effort made to give him a troubled past: young Roy owned a pet seagull, shot and killed by his father, who Roy decries as a “mean old man.” The act of pet-murder causes Roy to flee his home for a new life as a cabin boy on a freighter, a story recounted to a dreamy-eyed girl in a moment of signature Danton deadpan. Somehow life’s winding paths have led Roy to his current profession of draughtsman at an engineering firm.


If The Night Runner doesn’t score points as a social exposé film, it’s hardly more successful as a thriller. Most of the running time is devoted to scenes of Roy trying to assimilate into the idyllic seaside community where he finds himself after wandering off the Greyhound bus. He fits in marvelously well, and we forget his past as he gets frisky with the innkeeper’s daughter and chummy with everyone else. Only the innkeeper is wary, though his suspicion is no more than that of any father with a 22 year-old daughter whom he rightly suspects is in heat. Sure, there are a few moments when Roy stares oddly into the distance as he is questioned about his past, but for the most part he displays a collected, bland exterior. The jump to murder is abrupt and hard to swallow. Roy conks the innkeeper over the head when the old man gets wise to his checkered past, and the film assumes we’ll go along with the idea that murder is Roy’s only option. This might make sense if Danton played Roy as a legitimate psycho, but instead he comes off as completely sane person guilty of a crime of passion. Following the act, Roy cleans up his mess, wipes the room, and tries to make the scene play as a robbery gone wrong.

The rest of the film deals with Roy’s attempt to conceal his crime unraveling, until he finally comes clean to his shocked sweetheart, who then falls from a cliff into the raging surf below. In the one moment in the film that Roy actually appears frightening, he stares vacuously down at her body as it is buffeted about in the cove. When Roy’s sanity finally reasserts itself he plunges in after her, and carries her limp and unconscious body home, where he calls the police. The film closes as Roy calmly waits for the sirens in a front porch rocker.

The Night Runner’s flaw is that it doesn’t depict Roy’s insanity, instead asking us to accept it on faith. Even though Roy commits murder, his motive is a too common to be cuckoo: he’s merely trying to conceal his past. Even after the murder, his attempts at concealment are coolly methodical. The fact that Roy is supposed to be a lunatic is immaterial.

Danton is a much more convincing psychopath in The Beat Generation, a film that in spite of its many flaws and its complete lack of a identity is engrossing. Undoubtedly the credit goes to legend-ary scribe Richard Matheson. It’s one of those pictures that tries to capture lightning in way too many bottles, even though each of the bottles is still interesting. Here Danton plays Stan Belmont, The Aspirin Kid, a psychopathic rapist with an itch for married women. In order to set up his victims, he waits for the husband to leave home, then shows up at the door on the pretense of wanting to repay a small loan. “Is your husband home?” — “No? Well, can I leave him a check?” — “Oops I don’t have a pen, could you get one for me?” — “Thanks, do you mind if I wait inside?” Stan’s nickname comes from the final step in his elaborate ritual: he feigns a migraine, and as his host is fetching a glass of water for his aspirin, he dons a pair of black leather gloves and slips into his criminal identity. Stan’s a rapist, not a killer, so each victim is left to share her story with the police.

The detective assigned to the case is Dave Culloran, played by one of the most underrated actors in all of film noir: Steve Cochran. Dave is a hard-boiled man’s man with his own ideas about the willingness of the Kid’s victims — until his wife becomes one of them. Cochran’s rough-and-tumble exterior and manner demonstrate inspired casting: he’s the spit to Danton’s polish. When his wife turns out to be pregnant, Dave can’t seem to come to grips with the situation, and it shows in his physical presence as much as it does in the dialog. Much of the running time deals with the debate between the Cullorans about the future of their unborn child, though it eventually strays to melodrama as the Mrs., played by Fay Spain, has a front lawn heart-to-heart about abortion with the local priest.

The presence of beat culture is wholly exploitative. Stan chums around with a bland clan of ‘Hollywood-ized’ beatniks, though his best friend is played by Robert Mitchum’s son Jim, who makes for a piss-poor Neal Cassady. The dialog is wonderfully over the top in a few segments, and there are scenes where young people cavort around or simply whine about ‘the man,’ but only when the film feels compelled to give the audience a dose of beat-this or beat-that. In a few of the club scenes we meet a young Vampira and an old Louis Armstrong— though like us Louis seems painfully aware that he’s in the wrong movie. Ostensibly Stan uses the beat crowd as a cover for his half-life as the Aspirin Kid — easy since the film presents his cronies as a bunch of vapid numbskulls. This is fine as a story point, but Stan’s role as a beat is that of willing fraud or con-man, which forces one to reexamine the reason for giving the film this title, and showcasing Mamie Van Doren on the poster, much less in the cast — though to her credit she injects some life into the second half of the picture. That is, before the climactic underwater harpoon gun battle.

The Beat Generation is a smorgasbord that deserves a larger audience. It’s by far the more interesting of the two films discussed here, and certainly provided the juicier part for Ray Danton. There’s no space to cover the bits with Jackie Coogan, Dick Contino, Charles Chaplin, Jr., or Maxie Rosenbloom, not to mention the harpoon guns.

The Night Runner (1957)

Director: Abner Biberman
Cinematographer: George Robinson
Screenplay: Gene Levitt
Starring: Ray Danton and Colleen Miller
Released by: Universal International Pictures
Running time: 79 minutes 

The Beat Generation (1959)

Director: Charles F. Haas
Cinematographer: Walter Castle
Writer: Richard Matheson and Lewis Meltzer
Starring: Ray Danton, Steve Cochran, Mamie Van Doren, Louis Armstrong, Fay Spain, and Jackie Coogan
Distributed by: MGM
Running time: 95 minutes

SHAKEDOWN (1950)

In Shakedown, Howard Duff plays the aptly named Jack Early, a driven news photographer out to make a name with one of the big San Francisco papers. His ambition is such that he’s willing to do anything in order to get his foot in the door, including taking a vicious beating. The film opens with verve: Early is chased along the waterfront by a group of hoodlums. Just before losing the footrace with the thugs, we see him round a corner and hastily stash his real camera while pulling a dummy rig from his coat pocket. The thugs throw the dummy off the pier and proceed to wallop the daylights out of Jack before tossing him into the path of an oncoming dock train. He staggers out of the way, retrieves his treasured camera from its hiding spot, and the scene cuts to his dark room where he appraises his handiwork, a series of freshly printed negatives. The snaps are good enough to land Early his dream job: a one-week tryout on the paper, which he quickly makes the most of.


The protagonist of Shakedown is the quintessential anti-hero. His flaws are so damning that he can only find redemption in death, and so apparent that his ultimate doom is never in question, the film moves determinedly towards Early’s date with destiny. Yet the more fascinating aspect of the film, and by extension film noir, is the way in which the second World War and its effects on American culture and the individual fighting man loom unspoken over the film. The implied wartime experiences of the male leads in post-war noir were so universally taken for granted by audiences that the protagonist’s combat record not only goes without saying, but his jaded and cynical attitude is intuitively understood. Having participated in the war first hand Early is so desensitized by his experiences that recording horrible images of carnage and calamity for an eager (and likewise numb) public seems a natural way to earn a living. His moral system has been so skewed by the war that he thinks nothing of exploiting his photographic ‘victims’ in order to make his images more sensational and consequently more attractive to his public. Their insatiable appetite for the sensational and their complicity in empowering Early makes his profession not just an acceptable meal ticket, but also a fast track to fame and fortune.

The character development of Jack Early occurs in two generally distinct phases: in the first third of Shakedown Early is a rising photographer, shooting those sorts of ubiquitous urban calamities like burning buildings or a smashed taxis, and using his warped sense of theater to create a more sensational tableau — by offering ‘direction’ to the woman in the window of the building and the man trying to escape the wrecked cab. These scenes in particular bring to mind the opening sequence of the 1952 Broderick Crawford film Scandal Sheet, in which reporter John Derek and shutterbug Harry Morgan glibly deceive and manipulate the distraught sister of a murder victim in order to get the most sensational and visually horrifying photograph possible. Both films deal indirectly with the ethics of journalism and the ways in which the blind ambition of the men in the news racket have powerful repercussions on public morality and the erosion of personal integrity.

The much more contrived second two-thirds show Early’s machinations after achieving success and some warped degree of professional notoriety. The transition happens when Jack receives a tip from a slick racketeer (Brian Donlevy) that places him in the ‘right place at the right time’ to snap a crew of department store heisters. Early gets the precious shot of the gang (led by Donlevy’s rival Lawrence Tierney) at the moment of their getaway. Instead of sharing the incriminating photograph with his editor or the authorities, Early burns the candle at both ends — providing his paper with an obscured image while using the clear shot to blackmail Tierney. Early’s big leap into full-blown criminality steers the narrative into more convoluted territory after he double- and triple-crosses his underworld contacts, each time believing an incriminating photo will keep him off the hook. The ironic and fatal flaw of Jack’s scheme is that while his plans are indeed logical, he fails to grasp that is not in the nature of hoodlums (particularly those brought to vivid life by Lawrence Tierney) to solve problems rationally. So in the end, Jack Early falls victim to one of the greatest character flaws of the film noir heel: he’s simply too smart for his own good.

And although in the ingeniously ironic climax he finds redemption, he lacks the good nature fate demands in order to allow one to save his own life.

Shakedown (1950)

Director: Joseph Pevney
Cinematographer: Irving Glassberg
Screenplay: Goldsmith and Levitt
Starring: Howard Duff, Brian Donlevy, Anne Vernon, and Lawrence Tierney
Released by: Universal International Pictures
Running time: 80 minutes