(1950)
Deaccession? Oh,
hell, no! Here are some of the things I'd forgotten since first seeing this, shortly after acquiring it as part of a Warner noir collection, which would have been about seven years ago:
- that John Huston directed it;
- that Marilyn Monroe plays the young squeeze of the corrupt lawyer Emmerich (Louis Calhern);
- that a young Strother Martin appears in a police lineup (actually, I'm not sure I noticed that the first time: he's there for just a moment, he's uncredited, and I wasn't absolutely certain it was he until checking IMDb just now);
- that the script, by Huston and Ben Maddow from a novel by W. R. Burnett, is as grittily perfect as a noir could be;
- and that Sterling Hayden brings heartbreaking honesty and, yes, ethics to his portrayal of "hooligan" Dix Handley.
Handley, the hired muscle, is low man in the heist hierarchy, but he shares with the brains of the operation--
Sam Jaffe's Doc Erwin Riedenschneider--the moral center of the action. Meanwhile, the voice of law and order is carried by
John McIntire as the smug, self-righteous, just-this-side-of-smarmy police commissioner. The film must have had enough plausible deniability to satisfy the Hays Office, but it's hard to imagine anyone watching this and hoping that Commissioner Hardy's (!) men will track down Dix and Doc.
No comments:
Post a Comment