PRIVATE HELL 36 (1954)

This eighty-one-minute noir centers on two detective pals coming to odds when one turns to the noir side. It is an independent film produced by The Filmakers Inc team of Ida Lupino and Collier Young. Directed by Don Siegel, do not expect anything ground-breaking but it will not disappoint, thanks to a competent cast. The opening, in particular, is excellent as it leads to an off-duty detective stumbling perilously upon a store robbery. Leith Stevens' score with muted trumpets at the beginning adds a jazzy, low-key element and never overpowers the scenes. Unfortunately his best bit, the bouncy, multi-faceted tune entitled, “Daddy Long Legs,” is hidden in barely audible background music a couple of times in the film, the last being the meeting of the detective pals at a diner near the ending. Revealed in the closing minutes, 36 refers to a trailer park address. 

Detectives Howard Duff and Steve Cochran are tasked with tracking down fake fifty-dollar bills from a three hundred grand robbery. The duo first encounters two famous character actors and one less famous. King Donovan is one of the robbers and a frequent guest of the police department. His face and torso hurt after a one-sided fight of realistic proportions with Cochran in that opening sequence. Dizzy Donovan has trouble keeping his aliases straight. Another stolen fifty ends up with a pharmacist, Richard Deacon, who is questioned about it. He is well cast in a meek, unassuming role. His prescription payment from a gall bladder patient leads them to one of the best character actors in the business, Dabbs “Marv” Greer. He is, as usual, one hundred percent believable. This time as a local bartender who thinks the cops are accusing him of a crime because he had one of the bills. He is quite defensive about it. Duff has a funny line here to reassure them they are just asking where he got the fifty. He tells Greer, “Uh-uh, mind your bladder, Marv.”

The duo turns next to money enthusiast, Lupino, a nightclub singer, questioning her at length about how she came upon her fifty. She delivers a few witty lines at the expense of the detectives which Cochran finds very appealing. Against her preferred judgment, she is convinced to go along with their plan and ultimately identifies the man with the phony bills. A realistic car chase ensues with automobiles racing to the edge of tire adhesion. The fleeing thief is killed in a crash, learning too late that the mountain's “Road Closed” sign was not a mere suggestion. You might say Cochran goes over his own cliff when he pockets part of the stolen loot at the crash site. Most of it, he hopes, going to keep Lupino happy. 

Police Captain, Dean Jagger, who also opens and closes the film with sonorous voice-overs, calmly asks the cops later about the shortfall from the thief's suitcase. Cochran concocts a likely scenario. Duff sits silently fuming over his partner's blatant dishonesty. Obviously, the partners have a falling out with Cochran taking his obsessive downward spiral even lower with murder not out of the equation. The final scene offers a twist, all explained by Jagger's script. 

Notes: Ida Lupino performs part of one number, “Didn't You Know?” yet she really does not sing it. She talk-sings it, never really zeroing in on any particular note. Unlike others who must talk their way through a song because they cannot carry a tune—Eva Gabor's “Green Acres” television theme is a prime example—she was musically talented. Her song interpretation simply was a bit humorous as Cochran goes off in dreamland listening to her “talk” while the piano plays.  

Seemingly in his element, Duff earlier played a U.S. Treasury agent in the lesser-known film, Johnny Stool Pigeon, and would star as a detective in his own 1960s television show, The Felony Squad.