Florence Bates | The Brasher Doubloon | Dir. John Brahm | 1947 | 72 mins

John Brahm’s The Brasher Doubloon, an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1942 novel, The High Window, is a mixed bag of a film. It’s held back by the central performance of George Montgomery whose breezy take on detective Philip Marlowe doesn’t stand up well against earlier turns by Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell. The film fares better in its rich atmosphere of gothic melodrama and expressionistic villainy. The latter is exemplified by the memorable turn of Alfred Linder as one-eyed henchman Eddie Prue, who seems to have stepped out of a German era Fritz Lang film (indeed, his boss’s nightclub bears an uncanny resemblance to the criminal’s bar in Lang’s 1931 masterpiece M). The gothic melodrama is provided by The Murdoch household, the shady dysfunctional family who have called in Marlowe to find a stolen heirloom, a rare and valuable coin named the ‘The Brasher Doubloon’. 

The film begins with Marlowe driving up to the family home in Pasadena. He enters a doom-laden atmosphere, haunted by shifting shadows, heavy curtains, and endless howling wind. He has been summoned by a Mrs Murdoch (Florence Bates), the matriarch of this oneiric domain. Inside he encounters an attractive, nervous secretary Merle Davis (Nancy Guild), who feels it necessary to warn him of her employer’s troublesome manner and her shifty son (Conrad Janis), who tries to block his meeting. Finally, Marlowe is introduced to the lady herself, sitting in a high-backed wicker chair in her ornate conservatory. She bluntly tells him where to sit and not to smoke, then makes a grab for her large glass of port and informs him it’s for medicinal purposes and he’s not getting any. Florence Bates is more than in her element here, she’d been playing Grand Old Dame roles since her theatre debut as Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma in the mid-thirties (the character she subsequently took her stage name from). She’d played variations on the role over the next 20 years in films like Rebecca (1940) and The Mask of Dimitrios (1944). But Mrs Murdoch is not your average Grand Old Dame. There’s the usual prim stuffy manner that one associates with a Bates performance but there’s variations at play which hint at something darker and more disturbed. Firstly, there’s a slight slurring of words, suggesting Mrs Murdoch may have consumed a rather large amount of her ‘medical port’. It’s not played for comic effect, rather it shows a woman composing herself with great will against any sign of drunkenness.  Then there’s the sharp cruel way she snaps at the secretary, Merle, leaving an impression on Marlowe that something suspicious is at play in their dynamic. Finally, there’s the moment, unnoticed by Marlowe but seen by the audience, where she pulls a bizarre facial tick just after shouting out Merle’s name, it’s surreal in its discrepancy and so brief as to make you wonder whether it really happened. Mrs Murdoch tells him she knows who took the doubloon but won’t give the name and generally annoys Marlowe with her haughty manner of self-importance to the degree that he initially refuses the case (he eventually takes it due to his not entirely professional interest in Merle). 

Two murders later and Marlow is back at the Murdoch household, they all claim the Doubloon has been returned but Marlowe has it in his pocket. He confronts Mrs Murdoch about Merle; about why she seems constantly terrified and isn’t allowed callers. Mrs Murdoch claims her secretary is “easily disturbed”. Marlow picks up on the word and notes that it’s a term used to describe insane patients. Mrs Murdoch leans forward and replies: “Is it?” Bates delivers the line in a wonderfully ambiguous fashion, there’s a deliberate mock coyness but it’s hard to read, she would initially seem to be implying that Merle is indeed troubled, but the delivery also has a strange vulnerability, as if Mrs Murdoch has something more personal invested in the question. Again, for a moment we get a glimpse of something “easily disturbed” that may be lurking just under the surface of this outwardly indomitable personality.  

What the audience is beginning to suspect is finally confirmed in the last scene. Marlow has worked out that Mrs Murdoch was being blackmailed over a piece of film which showed her husband being pushed from a window several years earlier; she had somehow manipulated Merle to believe that it was she who had killed Mrs Murdoch’s husband but Marlow has enlarged the film to reveal it was Mrs Murdoch herself who was the killer. Finally, the mask slips and in a genuinely disturbing paranoic rant Mrs Murdoch’s murderous psychopathy is revealed. She lunges at Merle, accusing her of trying to seduce her husband and then revels in the fact that she’s broken her and made her a nervous wreck: “What man would fall in love with a lunatic!” she screams. This last word is delivered with such physicality that it’s a genuine shock. One imagines Bates must have relished the role, which gave her a rare chance to explore some of the darker regions of the human psyche. The way she slowly peels back the veneer of her character’s identity to reveal the psychopath beneath is masterful and is certainly the takeaway performance from this lesser-known but enjoyable Chandler adaptation. 

Sandy Milroy.

View Movie at: https://archive.org/details/the-brasher-doubloon-1947 

Glenn Anders | The Lady from Shanghai | Dir. Orson Welles | 1947 | 88 mins

Anders (George Grisby) first appears gazing lewdly through a telescope at the stunning Rita Hayworth (Elsa Bannister) as she gambols on the rocks somewhere in the West Indies. Perspiring heavily in geographically misplaced standard noir uniform––suit, tie, fedora––he steers his small boat to a yacht where Orson Welles (Michael O’ Hara) awaits. He immediately gets under O’Hara’s skin, both for his own palpable leering pleasure and on behalf of his scheming lawyer partner Arthur Bannister, the husband of Elsa Bannister, played with malevolent broken-ness by Everett Sloane. With a maddening grin and a false casual air, he grills O’ Hara on his past and how he once killed someone: ‘I’m very interested in murders … How did you do it? Now let me guess. You did it with your hands didn’t you?’ Cut to a close-up of Anders––all Lewis Carroll’s ‘grin without a face’––‘Tell me, would you do it again? Would you mind killing another man? … Would you kill me if given the chance?’ Then a typically eccentric contortion in his voice: ‘I might giiivve you the chance’. 

The spell is broken when Rita Hayworth, immaculate and statuesque, calls to Welles from the rocks: ‘Is there lunch?’ We know Anders will be a malign presence from this point when he twists his head and leers: ‘Is there enough for two?’ Welles gets him off the yacht, but not before Anders intimates that Welles and Hayworth will become embroiled and that it won’t go well. Sure enough, a tremendously ambivalent love scene ensues in the very next scene, only to interrupted by Anders delirious call from boatside: ‘So long kiddieees!’––a phrase that would return later in the film when the voyeur interrupts another intimate moment. This is followed by another one of Anders’ utterly bizarre, elongated vocalisations: ‘BYIEEEEE, BYIEEEEE!’ O' Hara should have heeded the warning. Grisby is onto them. These scenes set the stage for a truly unhinged performance by Anders. In Welles’ deliberately idiosyncratic film, Grisby is at the most extreme edge in a spectrum of excess all around. In a general anatomy of cold and calculated self-interest, Grisby’s strangely irrational actions and expressions provide an overloaded barometer of the social madness that undergirds the clinical economic machinations of the Bannisters.  

The plot itself revolves around Grisby’s plan that O’ Hara ‘murder’ him in a scheme to fake his own death. Promising $5000, he explains that since he would not actually be dead and since there would be no corpse, O’ Hara would not be convicted of murder (based on corpus delicti laws). O’ Hara agrees, thinking to use the money to run away with Elsa, and so furthering another classic noir doomed lovers’ plot. Apart from O’ Hara––a typically self-flattering creation by Welles: Irish rebel, radical dockworker, and Spanish civil war anti-Fascist––the characters are driven inexorably towards human ugliness by monetary concerns. An impromptu soliloquy by O’ Hara captures the tenor of this theme when he likens the behaviour of the Bannisters and Grisby to a pack of frenzied sharks he had once seen cannibalise each other in a zero-sum bloodbath of avarice. Two scenes are rightfully famous for their startling visual inventiveness and must be mentioned in digressive passing: an aquarium scene signifying both the murky, subterranean relationship between O’Hara and Elsa Bannister and O’ Hara’s descent into the world of ‘sharks’; and a brilliantly shot and choreographed shootout in the hall of mirrors of an empty fun house. 

Despite Welles being Welles, Hayworth’s blond-headed statuesque presence and Everett Sloane’s quintessentially noirish portrait of a decadent, alienated man of wealth, Anders’ many eccentric utterances and gestures steal the show. In one cleverly constructed scene on the yacht Bannister lectures O’Hara on money while bikini-clad Elsa lounges nonchalantly on the deck. Grisby, in the foreground, provides a tittering meta-commentary on the discussion and at one point, in unflattering close-up, turns his head to the conversation with a deeply enigmatic and knowing grimace. Why? What does this strange ambivalent gesture mean? The magic of Anders’ performance is in how he raises such questions in the most idiosyncratic manner. When he makes his proposition to O’ Hara, all intense staring eyes and sweating brow––framed from above a vertiginous cliff––Anders growls, ‘I want you to kiiiill me’, before leaving Welles hanging precipitously with an unexpectedly cheerful: ‘So long fella’! In another scene he asks Welles to sign the confession of murder, ‘nothing very binding or important really, just a confession of murder’, before toasting the proposal with a ‘here’s to crime!’ and a bizarre little gulp-cum-sneer that no description can adequately capture. In another, after shooting Bannister’s aide––who is trying to bribe him––he barely misses a beat before pinning Welles to his car seat with a narrative of the murder O’Hara is yet to commit, replete with manic snorting and cackling:  ‘Yeah, I was just doing a little taaarget practice, that’s what you’re going to say isn’t it when you shoot the gun down by the boat landing?...You’re going to say, I was just doing a little target practice’. ‘Course really you’re suppooosed to have shot me and later when no-one is looking, you’re suppooosed to have thrown my coooarpse into the bay’. Welles knew what he was doing with Anders, whose unexpectedly gleeful and queer utterances are framed in extreme close up to enhance their eccentricity. 

Ultimately Anders’ character is killed by Elsa Bannister offscreen with little fanfare, going the same way as so many noir characters before him. This is perhaps a fitting allegory for the celebrated stage actor who made only a handful of films. With Lady of Shanghai especially, and also to a lesser extent in a small but notable part in Joseph Losey’s excellent 1951 version of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), he elevated the minor character to something far greater than the sum of its small part, memorably imposing his beguiling strangeness on proceedings. Noir fans can only mourn what cinema lost to the stage and be thankful for what we got. What we got in The Lady from Shanghai was an unrivalled performance of unpredictable and outlandish brilliance.

Neil Gray.

View Movie: https://archive.org/details/the-lady-from-shanghai-1947

Paul Kelly | Crossfire | Dir. Edward Dmytryk | 1947 | 86 mins

Although in the noir style, Crossfire is often referred to by film historians as a ‘social problem film’ in that it tackles the subject of antisemitism within American society. The film’s plot revolves around the murder of a Jewish man and the hunt for the suspected murderer Corporal Mitchell (George Cooper), on a drunken night of leave with two other soldiers, Floyd (Steve Brodie) and Montgomery (Robert Ryan), the actual killer. The problem of antisemitism is treated with some heavy-handed moralising that is not the film’s strong point. The film fairs better in its depiction of a fragile, disillusioned post-war American masculinity, really the main concern of the film. Every male character seems damaged––the army sergeant Peter Keely (Robert Mitchum), who’s been roped in by the police to try and find Mitchell, mentions a malady he’s observed amongst his men he calls ‘the snakes’. In an early flashback to a bar we see Brodie, Montgomery and Mitchell drinking with the murder victim, each displaying their own variation of ‘the snakes’; Brodie is a fantasist, always dreaming his dream of magically attaining enough money to go to Mexico. Montgomery is a restless bully harbouring murderous hatred in his broken psychology. Saddest of all is Mitchell, a sensitive soul clearly traumatised by war and pining for his wife. He drifts through the early part of the film lost in a world of his own, only half aware of what’s going on around him. He gets separated from his buddies just before the murder, and somehow finds himself talking to a hostess called Ginny (Gloria Graham) in a dive bar. Ginny seems tough but she is clearly lonely too and responds to the sensitive Mitchell’s advances, giving him keys to her apartment and telling him to wait for her there once she finishes work. 

We next see Mitchell awakened by knocking inside Ginny’s apartment, still disorientated, he answers the door. A man stands at the door (Paul Kelly), a man whom we never learn the name of. A man whom we never get close to knowing at all, because for the next four minutes he will do nothing but contradict himself in a bizarre and confusing monologue that leaves Mitchell and the audience utterly disorientated. The man knows Ginny in some capacity, but what that capacity is never becomes clear. He does concede that he is a man and that he is, indeed, waiting for Ginny. From here on in it’s a litany of pointless lies. He tells Mitchell he’s her husband, that he was a soldier but that he couldn’t wait to get back to his wife, even though he knew she was a tramp. He stalls for a moment, then confesses that story was a lie, then he tells another version, then says that’s a lie too, then denies even loving Ginny, then changes direction completely and asks for some money, then enthusiastically asks if Mitchell thinks he could join the army, then immediately dismisses the idea and scornfully asks Mitchell ‘Why would I want to be a soldier?’, as if it was Mitch’s idea in the first place! 

Finally, he slumps in a chair and says, ‘I don’t know what I want’. Even Mitchell, who so far has been the most fragile and damaged man in the film, looks concerned. The man’s identity is hopelessly adrift, we don’t know who he is, and we never will. The suspicion being that neither will he. Kelly’s performance is extraordinary, the series of personas and moods he goes through in this short period of time is breath-taking. He performs it all with a quiet intensity that gives the whole thing a surreal quality which places the scene outside the rest of the film, or perhaps at its heart. The film critic Chuck Stephens once described Kelly’s face as: ‘more comical than creepy, really, but never exactly funny’. This serves well as a description of his performance too, there is something almost amusing about his pathetic confusion, but he somehow undercuts it with an ambivalent quality that stops you from laughing and has you keeping one eye on the door. When he asks Mitch if he has any money, there is a flash of genuine threat, but it’s gone as soon as it came and he’s back to maudlin reminiscences. 

Kelly had lived a fraught life by the time he made Crossfire, surviving a scandal in the 1920’s (he’d beaten a love rival to death and served time for it) he went on to have a varied and successful career. He would have undoubtedly been a familiar face to an audience in 1947 but what that audience would have made of the Paul Kelly they were presented with here is anyone’s guess. John Paxton, the writer of the screenplay, clearly wanted ‘The Man’ (as Kelly’s character is referred to in the script) to represent the crisis of masculinity which the other men in the film display at various points. His role is that of a metaphorical everyman, a personification of something broken at the heart of mid-20th century American life. Later in the film The Man appears again, helping police with their enquires. He begins to ramble to the police captain about himself and Ginny but the Captain has long since switched off and is walking away from him. The Man is left alone at the top of the stairs outside his apartment uttering the line: ‘We made a lot of plans, but they all fell through’. It’s a line that seems to sum up much more than just his relationship, feeling more like a statement for a generation of post-war Americans wondering where they found themselves and what would happen next. He may only be on the screen for a few minutes but it’s a credit to his performance that Kelly manages to pull off the role and deliver something equal to the significance the writer intended for it.   

Sandy Milroy. 

View Movie: https://archive.org/details/crossfire-1947

Vic Perry | Pick Up on South Street | Dir. Samuel Fuller | 1953 | 80 mins

Certain passages from cinema are submerged in the memory and only released on second viewing, often many years later. I remember the shock and pleasure of seeing Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967) as a by-now confirmed cineaste in my late-20s and realising that the moment when Oedipus kills his father in the blinding sun of the desert had once knocked me sideways, though beyond my real comprehension at that point, as a 14-year-old working-class boy with little to no inherited cultural capital. Such moments of inchoate revelation sparked a curiosity in the possibilities of cinema that never left me. In October 2022, I had another one of these memories when I re-watched Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street in my early-50s, a good 25 years since I had seen it last. 

The plot itself is McCarthyite Communist spy hokum: low-life criminal comes into contact with secret microfilm––commies and FBI give chase. But in Sam Fuller’s hands the moral ambiguity is such that J Edgar Hoover was known to detest Pickup for its unpatriotic message and representations of FBI bribery. Aside from the woeful plot, the film is pure hard-boiled, gut-punching noir: no-one comes out smelling of roses; but in classic noir style that does not mean we remain untouched by their plight. The performances are brilliant throughout: Richard Widmark (Skip) reprises the desperate, scheming persona last seen in Jules Dassin’s incredible Night and the City (1950); Jean Peters (Candy) delivers one of the great noir performances as Skip’s tough and tragic romantic interest; and Thelma Ritter’s performance as ‘Moe’ is rightly celebrated for its doleful pathos. Yet, in a single one and half minute scene, Vic Perry near steals the show in a great noir bit-part performance.  

The scene begins in media res, with Perry observed in head and shoulders close-up in a Chinatown restaurant: greased back hair, bowl up to chin, gazing downwards into the near distance while incessantly prodding Chinese noodles into his maw. In a brilliantly directed sequence––typifying the illicit paranoid air of the film throughout––he inscrutably, almost offhandedly, interrogates Candy (offscreen initially) about her presence: ‘So who told you to ask me? …. So who told you to ask him? … So why don’t you go to the police?’ Never once looking at Candy or interrupting the mechanical shovelling of noodles down his gullet. Candy has lived a bit and is no fool: she knows people like this. Impatient for information about the lost microfilm, she chucks twenty dollars on the table to find out who ‘Lightning Louie’ is. Without ever facing her, Perry casually picks up the note with his chopsticks and slips it into his breast pocket before informing Candy that he is Lightning Louie. Candy doesn’t believe him and calls him a ‘blubbermouth’, at which point, barely perceptibly, and without breaking the constant rhythmic stroking of food into his mouth, he casually pokes her in the face with the ends of his chopsticks. 

After calling the restaurant owner over to verify his ‘downtown’ identity, he offers to give up the ‘stoolie’ for another twenty dollars. Soporifically plucking the notes into his breast pocket with his chopsticks again, he gives up the address of Moe (Thelma Ritter), and his own name in the process: ‘tell her I sent you’. Cynicism, self-interest and the need for survival have entirely eroded any criminal code of honour between Lightning and Moe; and this is later mirrored in Skip’s weary acceptance that his old pal Moe has herself identified him to the police. Food first, morals later––as Brecht would say.

Perry’s performance is quintessentially noir in that it represents in unvarnished form a gross vision of self-interest and transactional moral vacuity. Failing to even as much as look at Candy while he conducts business with her, Lightning Louie expresses the social alienation such a position guarantees. Shovelling down his food without interruption, he embodies both self-satiation and the hunger for survival at the bottom-end of class society. That this is pulled off in barely one and half minutes without once meeting eyes with his on-screen co-actor is a remarkable, extracting the absolute maximum from a few meagre lines. Fuller’s understanding, even empathy, with moral ambivalence in the film sets it apart from its McCarthyite moorings, lending real pathos to the drama. Perry’s performance fulsomely embodies this ambivalence, elevating a bit-part role to the status of synecdoche for Fuller’s entire filmic design. 

Neil Gray

View Movie: https://archive.org/details/pickuponsouthstreet1953_202001

Robert Warwick | In A Lonely Place | Dir. Nicholas Ray | 1950 | 93 mins

There are two types of loneliness in Nicholas Ray’s In A Lonely Place. First is the individual loneliness felt by Dixon ‘Dix’ Steele (Humphrey Bogart), who, through his destructive personality finds himself isolated as a human being. Second is the loneliness Dix shares with nearly every character in the film, that of an insecure employee watching their relevance diminish within a system that doesn’t care, the ‘lonely place’ of the title referring not just to the situation Dix finds himself in, but to Hollywood itself.

Bogart gives one of his finest performances as Dix, a cynical charmer with an erratic violent streak. A screenplay writer, struggling to get work, he finds himself the suspect in a murder investigation. Luckily, his neighbour Laurel Grey (Gloria Grahame) not only provides him with an alibi but also a reason to live when they suddenly find themselves in love. The story charts the demise of their relationship as Dix’s behaviour deteriorates into paranoia and psychopathic rage. Gloria Graham brings a hardened worldliness to the character of Lauren, whose vulnerabilities spill out as her trust in Dix begins to fade. She had been engaged to a rich producer but left him and now finds herself financially insecure. Both her and Dix’s precarious position within the Hollywood pecking order is reinforced by two other characters who form part of the small loyal band centred around Dix. One is his agent, Mel Lippman (Art Smith), who is desperate to find Dix work, partly because he cares for the man and partly because he needs his 10%. The other is Charley Waterman (Robert Warwick), a star from an earlier era, who hangs around the Hollywood watering holes, perpetually drunk.

It’s Charley who best personifies the fear of all the other characters, for he really is washed up. His acting style is out of fashion, he’s a hopeless alcoholic and pretty much unemployable. Dix is both fond of the old boy and unsettled by him, perhaps seeing a future vision of himself. Warwick was tailor-made to play Charley, he’d been a matinee idol during the silent era and a successful talkies star but was by this point struggling for work. Bogart, who had worked with him in his youth, insisted on Warwick for the role, and there is genuine warmth between the two actors on the screen. Warwick clearly relished the part, taking what could have been a caricatured role and breathing real pathos into it. He makes his first appearance early on in a bar where Dix is meeting colleagues to discuss a film. They don’t want anything to do with Charley, but Dix is happy to have him in the company and buys him a drink. A hot-shot producer bursts in on the scene and for no good reason begins to humiliate Charley in front of the entire bar. As he loudly sets out Charley’s failings, the old actor’s face freezes into a forlorn mask for a few moments, before he regains some dignity and comes back with a gentle retort. But for those few seconds he looks utterly lost and broken, a man who is drinking to forget the failings of his life and who has just been cruelly reminded of them. 

The next time Charley makes an appearance is round at Dix’s flat, where Dix and Lauren are putting together a script. It’s Thursday and he’s come around for his weekly hand out from Dix. He immediately falls down the steps into the lounge, then decides he will recite poetry to Dix to help him to sleep. The scene takes on an added depth when he begins to recite Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 29’, a poem which touches on both his own situation and Dix’s: ‘When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’. Warwick manages to pull off a tightrope walk between drunken ham and genuinely moving recital, his large physical presence and deep baritone voice adding a layer of gravitas to proceedings. The scene reaches a crescendo of emotion, underpinned with a swell of orchestration, as Charley delivers the last line direct to Dix, a heartfelt eulogy to his friend’s loyalty and kindness: ‘For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings’. His face is full of poise and dignity, but it vanishes almost before he’s finished, replaced by drunken absentmindedness as he’s handed his hat. Earlier Lauren thrusts some money into his hand, and he winces with a mixture of glee and embarrassment. They are subtle moments but they’re devastating. 

Charley’s last scene in the film is back at the bar. He has arrived to celebrate the engagement of Dix and Lauren. Dressed in Top Hat and Tails he informs the hostess, who thinks he’s still in costume, that he is wearing the ‘formal attire of a gentleman’. It’s played for laughs but there’s genuine nobility at work. Charley knows he really is a gentleman, and the audience know it too. In the brief moments he has appeared in the film, we have seen glimpses of a fine human being, one who values friendship, is courteous and respectful, kind and gentle. He understands none of that stands for much in the world he inhabits but he still stands tall, ironically requesting there be no applause when he enters in his finery, knowing full well he is being completely ignored. It’s this image, Charley in the garb of an older time, a representative of older ideals, which best sums up his character. He appears ludicrous yet honourable at the same time. In the hands of a lesser actor this combination would have slid, inevitably, into the realms of broad comedy; in the hands of Robert Warwick it becomes a fitting tribute to the spirit of a vanishing age of cinema and the forgotten men who embodied it. 

Sandy Milroy.

View Movie: https://archive.org/details/inalonelyplace1950

Art Smith | Brute Force | Dir. Jules Dassin | 1947 | 98 mins

In 1947, Jules Dassin began a brilliant streak of noirs: Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves Highway, Night and the City. Our focus here, Brute Force, is a classic prison-breakout or ‘social problem’ film, but with a Sam Fuller-like commitment to the portrayal of brutality it avoids the tendentious worthiness sometimes associated with that genre. The title perfectly captures the harsh structure of violence throughout the film, modelled on the recent ‘Battle of Alcatraz’, a two-day riot that wracked the infamous prison in 1946. Burt Lancaster is typically fantastic as the valiant yet doomed ‘Joe Collins’, recently released from solitary confinement and now hell-bent on escape. Another standout performance comes from Hume Cronyn as ‘Captain Munsey’, the unscrupulous prison guard whose fascist tendencies are illustrated by his penchant for sadism, Wagner and the classical Greco-Roman busts and portraits adorning his office. Yet the tattered moral heart of the film is the prison doctor, Dr. Walters, played with great pathos by Art Smith, who would deploy a similar chastened fatalism playing the long-suffering agent of Humphrey Bogart’s volatile Dixon Steele in In A Lonely Place. 

No-one is ever clean in noir, and Walters is no exception. His moral probity is undermined by an addiction to alcohol induced by long exposure to the sheer brutalism of the prison industrial complex. Walters has a weak position in the prison hierarchy, and he knows it. This ambivalence is established immediately when he encounters Joe returning from solitary in the prison corridor. He calls to Joe, indicating he meant to come down and visit … before trailing off unconvincingly. Collins’s disdainful scorn leaves Walters cowed and shamed in his wake. Immediately afterwards, Walters is advised to ‘straighten out’ by a secretary in preparation for a meeting with the Warden, while a black prisoner servant called ‘Calypso’ (Sir Lancelot), who acts as a singular Greek Chorus throughout the film, adds another sympathetic dose of whiskey to Walters’ glass when it becomes clear Munsey will be present. The darkly comic character of this exchange is undercut when Calypso asks Walters why he doesn’t leave the prison: Walters response is that Calypso has little choice and neither does he.

Walters lowly position within the prison hierarchy is clarified in a meeting with Munsey, the revanchist prison governor, McCallum, and the decent but defeated Warden, Barnes, concerning the age-old punishment or rehabilitation debate. After one intervention, the governor derides Walters as a ‘better philosopher than a doctor’, with neither role welcome. However, after the governor demands absolute discipline and the ‘strictest control’ of the prisoners under threat of dismissal, Walters rises to his feet, passionately decrying the prison as ‘one big human bomb’, kicked, smashed and provoked until an inevitable explosion arrives. Neither the Warden nor Munsey back him up and the governor responds to Walters’ calls for greater understanding and patience by dismissing him as a ‘drunkard’ and a ‘dreamer’. From this point onwards every time Walters’ speaks, he calls into question the entire prison regime. This burden of ethical responsibility, complicated by a serious drink problem, is carried off superbly by Smith. 

  

As the new disciplinary regime ratchets up the tension, the Warden, Munsey and Walters gather to discuss a forthcoming meeting with McCallum. When the Warden leaves, the cocksure Munsey extols the fascist virtues of authority, order and control to Walters, mocking the ‘infection’ of the Warden’s weakness. The scene compounds the key ethical themes in the film, with Munsey advocating strength, discipline, power and punishment and Walters, pouring drink after drink, defending tolerance, compassion, understanding and rehabilitation. When Munsey chastises Walters for his drunkenness, Walters responds by saying he is an ordinary man getting drunk on whiskey, while Munsey––ensconced in the Warden’s seat like ‘Caesar, trying out his throne’––is ‘drunk on power’. It’s 1947, two years after the fall of Nazism, Dassin had been in the Communist Party until 1939 and would end up being blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1949. When Walters accuses Munsey of sadism and the suicide of a prisoner he had been leaning on for information, and Munsey’s response is that he is ‘just following orders’, the connection between the crimes of the past and present are crystallised. Munsey’s response to Walters’ unflinching accusations is ‘the brute force’ that Walters had accused him of all along. 

Walters’ affinity with the prisoners is illustrated with two beautifully performed sequences. Firstly, Joe visits Walters’ office on a fabricated errand and casually asks him the time. At just this moment a prisoner who had planted a gun on Joe is killed by fellow inmates in the workshop. In a masterful scene of understated dialogue, Walters subtly intuits Joe’s role in the murder and recognises the cruel informal justice of the prison population, fatefully accepting his complicity as a constructed alibi. Secondly, utilising Doctor’s privileges to access prisoners at work, he whispers in Joe’s ear that Munsey is onto his plan of escape. The dreary resignation etched across his face following Joe’s doomed response, ‘thanks for trying Doc’, encapsulates his forlorn position as a decent man in a terrible place and time. After the failure of the escape plan and an ensuing prison riot, Walters tends to the injured Calypso, who winces in agony. ‘This place is full of pain, Calypso’, he says, before beseeching his friend: ‘why do they do it, they never get away with it … but they keep trying’. He rises from his seat and turns directly to camera, framed by the bars of a prison window, and declaims in a bleak address that reaches out beyond the prison population, to both himself and the audience: ‘Nobody escapes. Nobody ever really escapes.’  

Smith’s performance bursts through the confines of a minor role to provide both the film’s ethical centre and tragic coda. Most intriguing is how he mediates a posture of progressive certitude with a defeated air of melancholy. For anyone with even a hint of compassion or social conscience his tragic performance speaks powerfully across the ages.

Neil Gray. 

View movie: https://archive.org/details/bruteforce1947_202003