THE CHASE (1946)

Michel Michelet's opening Cuban “piano concerto” for this film noir seems to fit crashing waves along an ocean shore. A place the female lead longs to be. It is befitting a passionate love story, too, but passion is in short supply during its eighty-six-minute run. He got plenty of mileage out of his score, doubling as a spinning record tune and for badly faked piano playing for this United Artists release. The score beyond this does not seem noticeably necessary. On the camera front, there are a few slow transitional shots that may try your patience. In particular, one long pause of the female lead as she stares out a ship's porthole window.

Robert Cummings plays a penniless Navy veteran with a small prescription bottle. His easy-going acting style made him friendly to audiences. His vocal tone is comforting and trustworthy. Just a nice young man. He is every bit that in this film. On the opposite scale is Steve Cochran, a ruthless Miami gangster with an accountant-assassin, Peter Lorre, who eliminates any competition by death. In another signature role, Lorre is always concerned about Cochran's expenses. Renowned French-born actress, Michèle Morgan, is Cochran’s property wife of three years. Cochran's rather brief screen time ignites the film, unlike Morgan's extended film time.

The film opens with a light moment as we witness Cummings salivating outside a diner window as a cook flips pancakes and turns bacon. In resignation, he departs, stepping on a loaded wallet. After his breakfast, he returns the wallet and remaining cash to Cochran at his ostentatious mansion. Their first meeting is a gem. Being uncomfortable in his surroundings and fending off many questions, Cummings shyly admits he returned the wallet, probably because he is just a sucker. This elicits a singular chuckle out of deadpan Lorre. Given his own lifestyle, Cochran is amazed that anyone would do this. He likes Cummings' unassuming nature and honesty. He is immediately hired as the new chauffeur while the current one is fired. Perhaps fired upon.

Cochran certainly has a screw loose upstairs. His menacing glare makes one wonder what is turning inside his head. He may also have a death wish of sorts. He has access to an additional accelerator and brake pedals at the floorboard from the rear seat. He can override the chauffeur anytime he wants. He is quite amused by it, though Lorre seems bored with it all. All the driver can do is steer. It brings a whole new dimension to driving dynamics. He surprises Cummings with his toy by going over one hundred miles per hour to beat an approaching train. Cochran applies the brakes just in time, only skidding about fifteen feet. A testament to the amazing stopping power of skinny, radial tires, drum brakes of the era, and the audience's gullibility.

Morgan came into Cochran's life with nothing and now wants to be let go the same way. Who better to arrange a getaway trip than a chauffeur? Thus begins a tedious, forty-minute middle section, which is simply used to lead the audience on a fantasy journey by way of two subtle transitional film scenes. One may wonder why Cummings makes some clichéd decisions in the face of danger. Illogically, he leaves his meek persona behind to become a debonair risk-taker. Once he awakes in a cold sweat, your first words might be, “You have got to be kidding!” Cummings suffers from “anxiety neurosis” due to combat shock, which explains the prescription bottle he carries. In hindsight, though established better in other films, the dream excursion adds the only real excitement beyond Cochran's backseat driving. Too bad it never happened.

The recurrence of amnesia sends Cummings back to the Navy hospital to consult with his former Commander and current doctor, Jack Holt. In the back of his memory, Cummings seems to think he is supposed to be somewhere and constantly watches the time. To help take his mind off things, Holt takes him to a nightclub, the same haunt of Cochran. What are the odds? They sit on opposite sides of a partition. Intense. After taking a phone call, Holt is spotted by Cochran, who was briefly a patient after his own discharge. Considering Cochran’s behavior, he should re-establish those appointments. Predictably, before Holt returns, Cumming's memory kicks in, and he leaves to get Morgan off to Havana.

Near the film’s beginning, “Fats,” played by the famous announcer, Don Wilson, spotted Cochran’s new chauffeur buying tickets for Havana. Assuming they were for him and his wife, he mentions this during the aforementioned club scene. Awkward. The two gangsters are in extremely hot pursuit of his lousy, stinking, dishonest chauffeur. The ending scale model train/car chase is quite obvious, but good movie-making. Still, the old sedan going one hundred ten miles per hour around thirty-mile-per-hour curves is a bit much. Lorre, never a fan of Cochran’s pedal toy in the back seat, only hopes he and his rear-seated boss can again make the rail crossing before the train. Perhaps an alternate meaning behind the movie's title.

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 end. 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 that 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 talks-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 is a bit humorous when considering Cochran going 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. Duff and Lupino's nuptials were in 1951. Their thirty-three-year marriage ended in divorce.

HIGHWAY 301 (1950)

Produced by Bryan Foy with a screenplay by Andrew Stone, who also directed, Warner Brothers released this disturbing eighty-three-minute B-movie noir starring a real-life bad boy, Steven Cochran. The film made a sizable profit. Narration by actor Edmon Ryan, also playing a detective, provides background in pseudo-documentary fashion. Appropriate as this film is a twenty-year update on the crime spree in the Thirties by the Tri-State Gang through the nation's east coast. So the viewer is not exiting the highway that connects three states any time soon. Common for the era of low-budget crime films are comments by three of the east coast's Governors that suggest the tri-state crime is once and for all finished.

The film has all the noir visuals one would expect but it is not perfect. Standard fare in one sense, the film holds one's attention with a well-paced script. Cochran is a ruthless gang leader and cold-blooded killer. The film was a bit of a shocker during its day. His (once) girlfriend is making disparaging remarks about the truth behind the gang's activities. There are startling scenes as he tracks her down in her attempt to leave town. The apartment's elevator ascends to where she waits. As the elevator doors open, he shoots her in the back while she heads for the stairs. Needless to say, the elevator operator is a bit shaky when trying to hit the down button. Noted is the film debut of television's perennial bad guy, Robert Webber. His girl is Gaby André. After discovering the gang's real business, she wants out. There are tense scenes as she attempts to escape from Cochran. Scenes where composer William Lava does his best Dimitri Tiompkin impression. The future gets bleak for two others in the gang after playing dodge bullet with the police. B-movie regular, Richard Egan, has a small role as a fourth wheel in the gang, on-call as needed. Virginia Grey's character cannot be without a portable radio and her favorite program: organ music. Grey provides the wisecracks. With André recovering from a Cochran bullet in the hospital, he devises a ridiculous plan to infiltrate the hospital to finish her off. He thrusts Grey into a role as a newspaper reporter with a handgun and finds herself quickly in over her head with Ryan stationed next to André's room. Her constant lying buries her. After a shootout escaping the hospital, Wally Cassell's character accepts a bullet or two. Cochran meets a more definitive end facing down...well...it is worth the wait.

Note: Virginia Grey always reminded me of a bad composite drawing of Loretta Young and Lucille Ball.