BELLA DONNA. Twickenham Studios, UK, 1934. Mary Ellis, John Stuart, Nigel Armine, Cedric Hardwicke, Conrad Veidt, Jeanne Stuart. Based on a novel by Robert Hichens. Director: Robert Milton.
TEMPTATION. Universal Pictures, 1946. Merle Oberon, George Brent, Charles Korvin, Paul Lukas, Lenore Ulric, Arnold Moss. Based on a novel by Robert Hichens. Director: Irving Pichel.
Bella Donna is one of those unique little films that will stay on my mind long after better-known flicks have gone their way. Based on a novel by Robert Hitchens and a play by James B. Fagan, it weaves, rather than tells, the story of a divorcee apparently used to using men and using them up, who marries a chump and goes with him to Egypt where he’s apparently some sort of busy muckety-muck with a job that entails long separations.
Bored and horny, she falls under the spell of a sinister Egyptian — himself something of a rat with women — and finds herself hopelessly addicted to his charms. So much so that when he expresses annoyance at her husband’s infrequent presence, she decides on divorce-by-poison, with intriguing consequences.
This story is put across in a series of rather stagey confrontations — the plot is developed and moved around by long scenes of dialogue rather than action — but this in no way diminishes the charms of a film whose chief allure is in mood and atmosphere. Bella Donna starts out as a very properly British sort of thing, with smoking jackets, drawing rooms, and a nearly palpable sense of Stuffie Olde Englande, furthered by the playing of Mary Ellis as the divorcee, John Stuart as the chump, and especially Sir Cedric Hardwicke as the chump’s wise doctor-friend, looking ruefully on as his old chum hastens to ruin.
Once the couple leaves England, though, we get an equally visceral sense of Egypt as some eerie fairyland, a kingdom suffused with dread and desire in equal measure. Conrad Veidt turns in a magnetic performance as the sinister Egyptian (despite the fact that his makeup keeps changing from pale Eurasian to something resembling a minstrel show) stalking through sets of literally byzantine splendor, and director Robert Milton maintains a slow but insistent pace, like the music of a snake-charmer, as the story plays itself out to a conclusion I will probably never forget. The last shot of Bella Donna is one of those rare cinematic codas, like the last shot of Vertigo, The Searchers or Shock Corridor, that says much more than words ever will, and one that’s a lot of fun to get to.
The story was remade in Hollywood in 1946 as Temptation, directed by Irving Pichel, with Merle Oberon as the femme-would-be-fatale, who marries George Brent over the objections of Paul Lukas and subsequently falls for Charles Korvin. Temptation seems to have set the pattern for subsequent Victorian noir films like Ivy (1947) and So Evil My Love (1948) but it also shows the sad censorial effects of its time:
Where the Mary Ellis in the earlier film seemed warped by lust, Merle Oberon is merely enslaved by passion. Poisoning the chump becomes her lover’s idea, not her own, and both lover and erring wife must come to some explicitly sticky end. And I mean sticky. The writers apparently got themselves into a corner on this one, deciding that a big star like Merle Oberon had to meet her own fate (rather than get picked up by the cops) but Suicide as a plot resolution was not permitted in films then.
The result is a rather muddled off-screen affair recounted by Lukas to an unbelieving cop (nicely played by Arnold Moss, usually a heavy in the movies, and a very good one). There is, however, a rather nice wrap-up, and the rest of the film is done with enough grace and Hollywood polish to make it a pleasant 98-minute trip.
From all accounts, Ernest Hemingway wrote To Have and Have Not (Scribner’s, 1937) in fits and starts, cobbling it together from two earlier short stories while mucking about in the Spanish Civil War. And frankly, it reads a bit sloppy and disjointed, with shifting time frames, clashing narrative modes, and here and there the terse, fascinating prose that made Hemingway a name. Reading it through, with its sudden jumps in time, location, narration and focus, one wonders if the legendary author was pointing the way for writers like Ken Kesey and Carlos Fuentes or just being lazy.
The first part deals with Harry Morgan, a charter boat skipper operating around Key West and Cuba who gets stiffed by a Mr. Johnson and helped out by Eddie, an alcoholic buddy (an important character in future incarnations of the book, but this is his only appearance here) when he’s forced to take on an illegal load of Chinese immigrants — a job that ends in gunplay and murder. This is pretty good stuff, violent and fast-moving, with Hemingway writing in the style of W.R. Burnett, with maybe a touch of James Hadley Chase.
Then we make a jump and it’s some time later, months or a year maybe, and Harry is now apparently smuggling full time and trying to make it home with a shot-up arm and a dying mate. This part is tough too, but Hemingway now spends time with a wealthy, officious politician who sees a chance to get some publicity by “capturing†Harry, who couldn’t put up much fight. Thus we get the first conflict between the “haves†and “have nots†— along with an infusion of social commentary into what had been just a tough crime novel.
Which sets the scene for part three: Harry is up against it now; his boat’s been confiscated and he has to get it back to do a job for some dangerous customers — so dangerous that murder and double-cross are taken for granted, and the crooked lawyer who sets up the deal (a violent bank robbery in Key West followed by escape to Cuba) is the first to go. In a tough, suspenseful scene that anticipates Key Largo, Harry shoots it out with his passengers and then …
And then Hemingway spends the last third of the book detailing the tribulations of a bunch of rich folks, with occasional contrasting scenes for Harry’s wife Marie. No kidding. What had been a tough crime novel on the order of Red Harvest is suddenly supposed to be Meaningful Social Drama. The idea, I suppose is to ennoble Harry Morgan and his people by showing us how effete and shallow their “betters†are, but it doesn’t come off.
Maybe I like David Goodis so much because when he writes a crime novel with a low-class working stiff or drunken stumblebum as the hero, that guy, be he ne’er so vile, is simply The Hero and ipso facto a man who gets our respect; he don’t gotta be Christ on the Cross too. When Hemingway turns Harry Morgan into the martyred representative of the Working Class, he loses me.
To Have and Have Not was filmed three times, and the first version (Warners, 1944) starred Humphrey Bogart, introduced Lauren Bacall, and was punctiliously faithful — to the title. Aside from that, it’s kind of jarring to see bits and pieces of Hemingway’s novel popping up here and there in what is essentially a Howard Hawks movie that seems to have little relationship to anything Papa wrote.
The story (written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner) is moved up to 1940 and south to Martinique, which was at that time (like Casablanca) technically French but heavily influenced by the Third Reich. Naturally then, the would-be illegal immigrants become Free French resistance fighters, the officious politician becomes nasty Vichy cops, and Harry and his wife have now just met and call each other “Steve†and “Slim.â€
In this version of the story, Mr. Johnson doesn’t get away with stiffing Harry (this is Bogart, after all) but gets inconveniently killed in a shoot-out (one of those scenes from the book that somehow make their way into the film). Eddie, the drunk in the opening of the story is here played by Walter Brennan, and he sticks around for the whole movie. He’s rather good, too. So is Hoagy Carmichael as a friendly pianist and Marcel Dalio (also from Casablanca) as a protective hotel owner — a character who would later reappear in another Hawks film, Rio Bravo.
In fact, this film is much more Hawks than Hemingway, but it’s Howard Hawks at his best, which is saying quite a lot. Not much action, but what there is comes across nicely. The characters (including Lauren Bacall in her film debut) are skillfully developed, and the whole thing has that easy, improvised look that only comes from hard work and genius — and produces a classic.
But I guess someone at Warners noticed that they’d bought this whole book and never filmed it, so in 1950 Director Michael Curtiz and writer Ranald McDougal came up with The Breaking Point, a noirish exercise with John Garfield as Harry Morgan, Phyllis Thaxter as his wife (now named Lucy!) and Patricia Neal as a gold-digger/femme fatale apparently added to throw a little glamour into the mix. Eddie is gone, replaced by Juano Hernandez as a dependable wing man, and the porcine Mr. Johnson is now Mr. Hannagan, played by Ralph Dumke.
The action is moved to Southern California, but otherwise this stays a bit closer to Hemingway and even includes the bent lawyer from the book, incarnated here by Wallace Ford looking agreeably slimy. There’s a tense race track robbery (not in the book of course) and an even more tense shoot-out on the boat as Garfield tries to thwart his would-be killers.
Unfortunately, the story spends a bit too much time with Phyllis Thaxter worrying about looking dowdy, Patricia Neal worrying about staying glamorous, and Garfield just worrying over bills and the odds against him. To Have and Have Not was a working class story, but The Breaking Point can’t decide whether to be a working class film or a caper movie in the mold of The Killers and this ultimately does it in.
Nothing daunted, Seven Arts/United Artists picked up the story again in 1958 and produced The Gun Runners, directed by Don Siegel and starring Audie Murphy as an unlikely Harry Morgan — now named Sam Martin(!) Eddie is back, this time played for seedy pathos by Everett Sloane of all people, and Patricia Owens (who that same year was the fretful wife of The Fly) is Audie’s wife Lucy.
The action is moved back to Key West and Cuba, and Mr. Johnson is now called Mr. Peterson, played with slippery relish by an actor named John Harding, who had a long career but seldom broke out of bit parts. Too bad, because he’s an all-too-brief delight here, cheerfully ruining a man out of sheer self-indulgence.
There’s a Mr. Hanagan in this version too, and he’s Eddie Albert, surprisingly nasty as the eponymous dealer in firearms who uses Audie to double-cross some very nasty customers. Albert is everything a movie bad-guy should be: smiling, generous, easy to get along with, and never losing that look behind his eye that says you mean about as much to him as a bug on his windshield, and you should expect to live about as long.
This is a pretty good movie. Siegel handles the action with his usual aplomb, Daniel Mainwaring’s script strays pretty far from Hemingway but moves things along neatly, and the playing is mostly well above average, particularly Patricia Owens, who manages to get across a very earthy lust for her husband. It’s nothing that’ll make you forget Bacall and Bogart, but it’s there and you can feel it.
My only problem with the movie is Audie Murphy at the heart of it. Like many real-life heroes (Wayne Morris comes to mind) Murphy could never convey genuine toughness on the screen, and this is a part that calls for it.
Too bad he has such a pivotal part in a film that would have been a lot better without him.
…AND SUDDENLY IT’S MURDER. Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, Italy, 1960. Originally released as Crimen. Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Dorian Gray, Franca Valeri, Bernard Blier, Silvana Mangano. Director: Mario Camerini.
Intersecting in this mildly entertaining comedy mystery are the lives of three couples: two Italian newlyweds trying to return a lost dog they find in Rome to its owner, a wealthy old woman who lives in Monte Carlo. On the train they meet a man who swears he’s given up gambling in order to save his marriage. He in turn gives some good advice to another couple, a pair of hair stylists (male and female) also heading for Monte Carlo to make their fortune and set up their own salon, based on a roulette system the husband has developed.
The advice? The only way not to lose by gambling is not to play. Do they take his advice? No. Does he take his own advice? No. Do the newlyweds return the dog to its owner? No, they find her murdered instead, and instant funny business ensues, as they want no part of the police, who they know will take them as their primary suspects.
Without boring you with the details of how it happens, each of the three couples comes under suspicion in turn, with Bernard Blier playing the frustrated head of police whose job it is to deal with them. Unfortunately at 108 minutes, the movie’s a little too long to reach its full comedy potential, with the first third, especially after the body is found, the most laugh-out-loud funniest. (And if this suggests to you that the movie starts to sag from there, indeed it does. In my opinion, of course.)
One thing about Italian movies like this one is that all of the women are beautiful and glamorous. One has to wonder how (and why) they hooked up with such nebbish (and not overly handsome) men. It is one of the great mysteries of life.
Note: The movie was remade a couple of times, once in the US as Once Upon a Crime in 1992 with John Candy, James Belushi and Cybil Shepherd as three of the stars. I’ve not seen that movie, unfortunately, but I know it involves a married couple (Richard Lewis and Sean Young) trying to return a lost dachshund to its owner in Monte Carlo. From there, I have no idea how closely the two plot lines coincide with the other.
SWORDFISH. 2001. John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Don Cheadle, Sam Shepard, Vinnie Jones, Camryn Grimes. Director: Dominic Sena.
As a recently released felon, famed computer hacker Stanley Jobson (Jackman) is recruited by the beautiful and alluring Ginger (Halle Berry) to work for the mysterious (and ruthless) Gabriel Shear (Travolta). Needing money to help regain custody of his young daughter (Camryn Grimes), Stanley accepts, and during the rest of the movie he learns to regret his decision, many times, over and over again.
This is one of those movies where you are better off not asking questions and sitting back to enjoy the ride. If, that is, you are not bored with watching someone typing at a keyboard and pretending they are breaking into various money accounts scattered around the world. The less-meaningful (but visually far more spectacular) action that takes place is largely confined to a mini-prologue that works about as well as anything in the movie (with a bank under siege with hostages wired to blow up) and in the last thirty minutes or so, when all of the safety latches are set loose.
Lots of large-scale explosives going off, in other words. Cars careening around busy city streets and smashing into each other, large guns being fired and causing all kinds of havoc, and tons of other vehicles of several makes and models veering out of control and smashing into tall buildings and on several different levels. That still leaves an hour to fill, which of course does not mean there are not plenty of bad guys willing to do all kinds of bad things in those remaining sixty minutes.
Travolta and Jackman have the good parts, and both do well in them, with Travolta taking (in my opinion) top honors as a truly Machiavellian mastermind, over the top and subtly clever at the same time. Amazing. (Unfortunately, with the need for pyrotechnics to keep the action crowd happy, “over the top†seems to prevail, more often than not, over common sense.)
This following statement may seem to be totally contradictory, or maybe it’s just me, but Halle Berry appears too aware of herself to be truly sexy, but those commentators who have described her much-maligned topless scene as “gratuitous†should watch the movie again.
THE COUCH. Warner Brothers, 1962. Grant Williams, Shirley Knight, Onslow Stevens, William Leslie, Anne Helm. Screenplay by Robert Bloch, based on a story by Blake Edwards & Owen Crump. Director: Owen Crump.
ROBERT BLOCH – The Couch. Gold Medal s1192, paperback original, based on the film of the same title, 1962.
I spent last October reading ghost stories and watching old monster movies, as I usually do, and I like to close out a month like that with some Robert Bloch, so this year I picked The Couch, the 1962 Warners film and Bloch’s tie-in novelization (Gold Medal, 1962) of the screenplay he wrote with Blake Edwards and producer/director Owen Crump.
Which makes me wonder who was responsible for spinning a story out of what is essentially a shaggy-dog joke; imagine the set up: a guy walks down the street, murders a perfect stranger, then hurries to his psychiatrist’s office to talk about his mental problems.
The film that results could hardly be called stylish, but The Couch has a certain blunt impact I found hard to resist. Director Crump (also a writer and producer in his time, mostly of shorts and TV shows) puts the images on screen with a minimum of fuss—no tricky camera angles or long takes—but with admirable efficiency, probably thanks to cinematographer Harold Stine, who cut his teeth on TV shows like Dick Tracy and Superman.
As far as the story goes, it’s as fast and simple as the direction, with David, a mental patient just released from Prison, seeing a psychiatrist as a condition of his parole, and passing his time with random killings just before each visit — which probably beats reading old magazines, but still….
As the story proceeds, though, we get more than a loose catalogue of killings as the narrative is pegged to the things David’s shrink (and we the viewers) learn about him and his motives for mayhem. Or maybe what we think are his motives. Or maybe what David thinks are his motives, as the story turns into a tricky game of mental cat-and-mouse: the psychiatrist’s search through David’s psyche mirroring the Police hunt for the killer.
The acting, like the directing, is generally efficient and unfussy, but Grant Williams (best remembered as The Incredible Shrinking Man) plays the killer with a hysterical charm that adds nicely to the tension; one never knows whether (or when) he’s going to be the All-American Clean-Cut Boy or the Out-of-Control psycho, and he conveys both aspects of the character energetically and artfully enough to make one wish his career had gone further.
And speaking of the cast, I should add that the perplexed psychiatrist at the center of it all is played by none other than Onslow Stevens. To most folks that is hardly a name to conjure with, but he is known to fans of old monster movies as the last Mad Scientist of Universal’s grand old days, in the delirious House of Dracula, where he contended with Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s Monster, carrying his part with the seriousness proper for a final farewell.
Moving on to Bloch’s novelization of this, I was impressed that he put more effort into it than it really needed, and came out with a book worth reading in itself. Bloch adds a subtle sexual context to the tale where the movie couldn’t (not in 1962 anyway) and he takes time out to carp about the L.A. traffic and the collapse of civilization in general.
There are even a couple of eerily prescient bits where Bloch looks into the minds of people hearing about the serial killings and describes reactions—ranging from normal shock to paranoid fantasy — that seem to strangely pre-echo those of today (Events caught up to me as I wrote this.) However much I like Robert Bloch, I never thought of him as a writer for the ages until I read this and reflected sadly on how short a distance we’ve come in fifty years.
THE MAD DOCTOR. Paramount, 1941. Basil Rathbone, Ellen Drew, John Howard, Barbara Allen (aka Vera Vague), Ralph Morgan, Martin Kosleck, Kitty Kelly. Screenplay by Howard J. Green; cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff; art direction by Hans Dreier & Robert Usher; music score by Victor Young. Director: Tim Whelan. Shown at Cinevent 38, Columbus OH, May 2006.
Paramount was not known for its horror films (Universal pretty much had a lock on that genre in this period) but was obviously attempting to capitalize on their popularity with this rather deceptive title, which probably suggests a rather different film than the one its makers had in mind. (It was released in England under the production title, A Date with Destiny.)
In this elegantly directed and produced film, with its black and white cinematography gloriously highlighted in the pristine print, Rathbone, a doctor whose wives have a habit of dying under suspicious circumstances, moves to New York after the death of his third wife arouses the suspicions of a local practitioner (Ralph Morgan) and sets up a Park Avenue practice as a psychiatrist. He effects an apparently miraculous cure for troubled heiress Ellen Drew, with whom he becomes infatuated and whom he makes his fourth wife, an unenviable role as it inevitably turns out.
Rathbone is a smooth, polished villain who is attended by a companion (Martin Kosleck) who is very attentive to his employer’s every need and is clearly more eager to see the quick dispatch of wife number four than Rathbone. Kosleck’s dislike of women is obvious and he dreams of retiring to some foreign country where he and Rathbone can live on the inheritance from Rathbone’s most recent conquest.
Rathbone’s dramatic control contrasts nicely with Kosleck’s tendency toward scarcely contained hysteria. The net result is a rather curious film that could have benefited from some of the panache of the Universal product but impresses nonetheless with its superior production.
THE WEB. Universal, 1947. Ella Raines, Edmond O’Brien, William Bendix, Vincent Price, Maria Palmer, John Abbott, Fritz Leiber, Howland Chamberlin. Director: Michael Gordon.
Films beget films. At least the popular ones do. In a process not unlike evolution, successful films breed films like themselves which in turn permutate into others like themselves, and on and on until the trend overpopulates itself and dies off.
But along the way, some interesting specimens pop up. Case in point: The Web, a nifty little semi-noir mystery that deserves to be better known. Unpretentious, fast-paced and intelligent, this was scripted by a team of writers (William Bowers, Bertram Milhauser and Harry Kurnitz) with solid credentials, and directed by Michael Gordon (who he?) with an eye for personality and atmosphere.
Edmond O’Brien (back when he was merely chubby) stars as a struggling young attorney hired by wealthy industrialist Vincent Price (back when he was merely nasty) as a bodyguard. So, all obvious jokes aside, why hire a lawyer as a bodyguard?
Well, there’s a complicated story about an ex-partner (Fritz Leiber) convicted of stealing bonds, now out of jail and maybe carrying a grudge — though Vinnie assures us he himself had nothing to do with the whole messy business. To further complicate matters (he goes on, in his most urbane manner) there’s a business deal pending, and if word got out his life was threatened it might scare away investors. So what more natural than to have a lawyer on his staff who happens to carry a gun?
Yeah, any mystery fan can see something phony coming down the road like a float in a Macy’s parade, and O’Brien senses it too, but he takes the job anyway, mainly because of Price’s Personal Assistant, played by Ella Raines, one of the most uniquely alluring femmes of the 40s. The script says there’s a romantic spark between them, but frankly, she looks so far out of his class he might as well be in another movie.
And it seems Price has another personal assistant, this one more appalling than appealing, played by John Abbott, a 40s character actor who projects a prissy ghoulishness all his own. Just what work he does for Price ain’t exactly clear, but one quickly gets the impression it’s nothing very saintly.
So with some misgivings, O’Brien sees his old cop-pal (William Bendix, surprisingly bespectacled and cerebral here) gets a gun permit, and the show is on. What follows is a splendid game of move and counter-move involving murder (or is it?) blackmail (or is someone bluffing?) and carefully-plotted traps that seem to snare those who set them. Or as Bendix puts it to O’Brien, “Don’t you see? If you prove it’s murder, then you’re the murderer.”
This is an unusually intelligent film, with stops along the way for well-realized minor characters, like Leiber’s bitter daughter, broodingly portrayed by one Maria Palmer, an actress who should have gone further. And we also get the patently unsympathetic Howland Chamberlain — you may recall him as the loathsome druggist in Best Years of Our Lives or the smarmy hotelier in High Noon — as a pretentious author with clues to Price’s past. Fleeting pleasures in a film that provides an engaging and entertaining eighty-seven minutes well worth your time.
THE TATTERED DRESS. Universal International Pictures, 1957. Jeff Chandler, Jeanne Crain, Jack Carson, Gail Russell, Elaine Stewart, George Tobias, Edward Andrews, Phillip Reed, Edward Platt. Director: Jack Arnold.
Back in the 1950s, Universal Studios had two really fine trashy directors under contract: Douglas Sirk did garish melodramas like Written on the Wind, and Jack Arnold handled the more overtly pulpy stuff, Westerns and monster movies like Tarantula and Creature from the Black Lagoon.
The Tattered Dress finds Arnold encroaching on Sirk’s territory with a tawdry tale penned (or typed, as the case may be) by George Zuckerman, who churned out Written on the Wind and the engaging scripts for Dawn at Socorro and The Brass Legend. The results in Tattered maybe aren’t purely successful, but they’re at least fun to watch.
The story starts in a small desert town where wealthy Phillip Reed murders the guy who seduced his wife (said wife played with classy trampiness by Elaine Stewart, one of three actresses here who deserved better). Reed gets arrested by that perennial comic foil Jack Carson, playing a hick-town Bozo-Sheriff, and Jeff Chandler shows up as a high-powered attorney hired to defend him in court.
Chandler coolly gets Reed acquitted by making a fool of Carson on the witness stand (not a terribly difficult task, given Carson’s persona) and prepares to go back to the Big City — only to find that the sheriff isn’t such a hick ass he seems, and Chandler is on the receiving end of some rather sticky and perhaps deadly revenge.
Jack Arnold always seemed to like desert locations, and he does well with this one, evoking a lonely isolation where passion and violence seem to simmer below a hot, dusty and deceptively still surface. Zuckerman’s script has its slack moments, but director Arnold gets through them as quickly as possible to highlight the occasional scenes of tension and violence.
As far as the acting goes, Jeff Chandler delivers his usual clapboard performance, and Jeanne Crain simply marks time in a role so thankless as to make her casting seem positively churlish, but Gail Russell, a sad-eyed actress who died tragically young, does a fine job in an interesting bit, and Jack Carson trades on his buffoonish image impressively as the apparently-dumb cop.
It’s not a totally riveting ninety minutes, but The Tattered Dress has its moments, and it sure won’t put you to sleep. I might add that this was produced by one Albert Zugsmith, an auteur too colorful to explore here in any depth, but definitely a subject for further research.
Editorial Note: The video you see above consists of only the first four minutes of the movie. For some reason I haven’t been able to embed the entire movie, but you can watch it on YouTube, here.
THE PHANTOM EXPRESS. Majestic Pictures, 1932. William Collier Jr., Sally Blane, J. Farrell MacDonald, Hobart Bosworth, Axel Axelson, Lina Basquette, Eddie Phillips. Director: Emory Johnson.
There are some good moments in this semi-supernatural-thriller-with-a-logical-explanation movie, but they’re separated in the middle by a lengthy scene that makes no sense at all.
Starting at the beginning, though, an engine with a lengthy component of railroad cars is derailed when it tries to stop too quickly rounding a curve heading straight for what appears to be a train coming directly toward them. Funny thing is, there was no train. None passed the signal posts along the tracks farther down the line, and none was seen by the survivors once the accident happened.
Two of the survivors are the engineer (J. Farrell MacDonald), who is blamed, and his best buddy, the fireman (Axel Axelson, whose first and only movie this was, and whose Swedish-sounding accent is a delight all the way through). Investigating the crash is the president of the company’s son (William Collier, Jr.) , a ne’er-do-well who decides to change his way once he spots the beautiful girl (Sally Blane) who is the engineer’s daughter.
There are any number of scenes with the boss’s son working in the railroad yard, making this movie an outright bonanza for fans of old trains. My grandfather and great-grandfather both worked on cross-country trains, so you can count me in as one of those very pleased to see them. No fake sets here. This was the real deal.
Overall, though, the mix of comedy with tragedy is an uneasy one in this would-be thriller than doesn’t really have many thrills in it. The scene in the middle is a strange one, as a gang of the bad guys attack a couple of signal posts unmasked, tie up the workers inside, and force them to watch as the invisible train zooms by. For what reason, I do not know. No investigation is made of the incident – you’d thing the police would have at least a passing interest in it – and in fact, it is not mentioned again.
Could the ingenious trick that was played be copied in real life? It’s ingenious, all right, but I wouldn’t go any further than that. Maybe it suffices to say, “Only in the movies!â€
THE NICKEL RIDE. 20th Century Fox, 1974. Jason Miller, Linda Haynes, Victor French, John Hillerman, Bo Hopkins, Richard Evans, Bart Burns, Lou Frizzell. Screenplay: Eric Roth. Director: Robert Mulligan.
There is a lot of similarity between The Nickel Ride and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (reviewed here ), but one of the differences is that the former takes place in LA and the latter in Boston. That’s only in terms of the weather: almost always sunny and warm in LA vs. crisp and chilly in Boston in the fall.
But other than that, the lives of the lower and mid-level echelons of the underworld are very nearly the same. Not knowing when their lives are going to be cut out from under them at the whims of anyone at a higher level, for example, or pressured from all sides to close a deal and make the next one; pressures sometimes strong, others only subtle.
Another big difference is that Jason Miller as Cooper, the man with the keys in The Nickel Ride, while extremely effective, is no Robert Mitchum, the lugubrious star of Eddie Coyle. As a much younger man, Miller has to work harder at it. To Mitchum, by the time he made Coyle, it seemed to come naturally.
Miller’s career began with The Exorcist, the movie he made just before this one, in which he played Father Damian Karras. He won an Oscar nomination for that particular film, but his career faded badly, and I doubt that even the most ardent of movie fans know his name today.
I’ll end any other comparisons between the two films here. Cooper is trying to make a deal involving a block of warehouses where stolen goods can be stored, and as hard as he tries, he can’t seem to get the other side to agree to terms, which keep changing. Cooper’s superior, John Hillerman (pre-Magnum) brings in a garrulous rowdy in a buckskin shirt (Bo Hopkins) to keep an eye on him, while Cooper has to keep his cool with his wife and close buddies, including a small-time boxing promoter who can’t follow through and make his protege take a dive.
The plot seems to have confused a lot of people, basing that statement on the various online reviews and comments on IMDB that I’ve read. It’d true that it’s never quite clear what started Cooper’s downward spiral, you (the viewer) can sense it’s happening just as well as he can.
This is neo-noir at its finest. Beautifully photographed by Jordan Cronenweth, who later worked on Blade Runner, which is the finest accolade I can give him, and directed by Robert Mulligan, of To Kill a Mockingbird fame, there is a lot to watch and see, and I know I’ll see more the next time I watch this movie.
PostScript: Thanks to IMDB, I can tell you something interesting. I’ve been watching episodes of Mike Hammer, the 1950s series with Darren McGavin, and while I didn’t recognize him, Bart Burns, the guy who Cooper is trying to negotiate with, also played Captain Pat Chambers on the Hammer show.
PPS. For an excellent analysis of The Nickel Ride, including details you never see by watching a movie only once, you might want to read Mike Grost’s comments on the film, found online here.
