Review by
Jason Abbey
Directed by: John Cromwell, Nicholas Ray, Stuart Heisler, Curtis Bernhardt, Henry
Levin, Mark Robson
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Lizabeth Scott, Morris Carnovsky, John Derek, George
Macready, Alexander Knox, Florence Marly, Lee J. Cobb, Marta Toren, Jody
Lawrance, Rod Steiger, Jan Sterling
Noir has always been that most chimeric of genres and this box set is no
exception, offering a range of films that run the gamut from duplicitous
dames, juvenile delinquency, bootlegging and match fixing. The one
immovable object this time is Bogie, proving himself every inch a film
star in so much as the films change but his persona is so deeply ingrained
that he might as well have kept the same name throughout. Anyone confused
by The Family Secret being included in this boxset should be
aware it was made by Bogart's production company although his name is
nowhere in the credits.
Dead Reckoning
The opener in this boxset is the closest you get to a standard noir.
Bogart plays Rip Murdock, just back from Paris after World War 2 with his
pal Johhny Drake (William Cross), who finds out he is to receive
the medal of honour and promptly does a bunk at the nearest station.
Understandably confused, Rip seeks to find out why, which leads to death,
corruption and a frame-up. Rip runs a cab stand in civilian life but to
all intents and purposes might as well be playing a shamus. Told mainly in
flashback, this starts faintly middling but once it gets its claws in
reveals a jet black heart. And if the "man takes the rap for a crime he
didn’t commit" story is familiar, this takes some interesting detours from
the formula.
Case in point, Drake waxes lyrical to Rip about his partner Coral (Lizabeth Scott), which leads Bogart to seek her out ostensibly for some facts and
background but soon puts the moves on her with no equivocation. That she
is a chanteuse in a Club with some seedy backers and a barman willing to
spill the beans gives it a Casablanca mixed with
Double Indemnity vibe. Couple this with a flashback
narrative as Rip confesses to a priest what has happened, and it feels
like it has been machine tooled in a Noir App. Ostensibly Drake has taken
the fall for the murder of Coral's husband, however Martinelli (Morris Carnovsky), the club owner, seems to have an unusually possessive interest in
Coral. To reveal more would spoil the pleasures of a particularly sinuous
plot. Bogart and Scott have good chemistry together. Coral's personality
changes depending on her environment so you're never quite sure of her
motives. The badinage between the two is less flirty and more spiked LSD
trip as Rip talks about shrinking her and putting Coral in his pocket (for
reasons both convoluted and extremely sexist).
A slick and proficiently directed piece of work that if familiar, throws
up enough surprises to be worthy of your attention and also elevated
higher in the canon of great noir films.
Knock On Any Door
Bogart may have the flip persona down pat at this stage in his career but
still has space for a little more nuance in this juvey court case noir. As
Andrew Morton, he plays a happily married lawyer and if on the seamier end
of the client roster, he still has something of the idealistic crusader in
him. Morton is a lawyer from the slums who has made it good but takes on
the case of juvenile murderer Nick Romano (John Derek, very much a
Poundland James Dean) to expiate his guilt for the botched criminal trial
of Nick's father.
Told in a twisty flashback structure, this foreshadows the taut angst of
director Nicholas Ray's later teenage drama while also adopting the
slightly hectoring and moralistic approach of the films of Stanley Kramer.
The pull of social conscience is strong, but the dice is so loaded in
favour of justice that Romano never comes across as anything other than a
wrong 'un, the nuance possibly fighting against the Hays code's
requirements for a Manichean dynamic when it comes to criminality. Derek
may be somewhat lightweight as the lead, his petulant thuggery imbued with
a "why me?" solipsism rather than a railing against an unfair system. That
may well be the point though. Morton may have the blinkers on with this
kid, seeing in himself the potential to be in the same scenario if the
breaks had gone the wrong way for him, his own complicity in the death of
Romano's father tugging at the guilt strings at what may have already been
an incipient psycho before tragedy struck.
Now mostly known for introducing the phrase "live fast, die young and have
a good looking corpse," it would have been fascinating to see how this
would have turned out with original choice Marlon Brando in the role of
Romano. The method against the stagier aspects of Bogie's craft would have
been one showdown. As such he overpowers the more callow Derek in the
scenes they share.
Tokyo Joe
As ex Colonel Joe Barrett, Bogart is on more familiar territory. The hook
here is that scenes were actually shot in post war Japan. Unfortunately,
these scenes were done with an unimpressive body double which give those
scenes a rinky-dink Ed Wood quality. Barrett is back in Tokyo to see what
is left of his gambling joint. Not only is it intact and run be his friend
Ito (Teru Shimada), but he also discovers his wife Trina (Florence Marly), who he thought was dead, is very much alive and married. Barrett's
relationship with Ito is one part Sam from Casablanca and
two parts Kato from The Pink Panther. After a masculine bout of Judo with all the energy you’d expect from a
40 a day man, he is off to win back Trina.
This is one of the more convoluted offerings in the set. What starts out
as a wistful return to old haunts veers towards a post war spy movie.
Barrett wants to get a small airline freight franchise on the go, which
leads him into cahoots with Baron Kimura (Sessue Hayakawa), the
former head of the Secret Police. Kimura finances his operation if he will
transport frozen frogs to the American markets. Clearly believing it to be
a front for more nefarious cargo, Barrett attempts to find a way out.
Trina though was forced to broadcast Japanese propaganda during the war
and Kimura has the goods on her. What Kimura wants transported is far
worse than Kermit on Ice.
This plays very much into the weary brand of wholesome cynicism with a
heart of gold that Bogart made his own through his sadly curtailed career.
He may know some morally dubious chancers and blur the lines of legality,
but when backed into a corner you know he’ll take a bullet for you.
This would have played as daringly contemporary on release, but now feels
stage bound with intrusive interludes. This may be one of the few films
from the '40s in which a character is chivalrously trying to palm his wife
off on to another.
Sirocco
We find ourselves in Casablanca territory (or to be precise,
Syria) in this tale of bootleggers, love and rebellion. This is a more
dyspeptic take however. Harry Smith is a black marketeer with a heart of
lead selling guns and armaments to the rebellion fighting French
colonialists. As the French are planning to execute civilians every time
an officer is killed we can assume the film sides with the indigenous
population. Bogart's Smith may be a WWI hero but here he cuts a more
pessimistic figure up against Colonel Feroud (Lee J. Cobb, adding a
confusing note by being a very American French man), who is trying to
curtail his business dealings. It’s a film that attempts to put a good
spin on Smith by making the more honourable Feroud (a man who insists on
imprisoning rather than executing civilians) a controllingly abusive
husband, thus giving Bogie the go ahead to put the moves on his wife
Violetta (Marta Toren). It fails in trying to replicate the love
triangle of Casablanca because Violetta's relationships seem
more transactional than romantic. What it lacks in emotional charge it
makes up for with its moral flexibility and complicated characterisations.
Director Curtis Bernhardt was a German Jew émigré during the war.
His career may have been somewhat pedestrian, but his staging of a
nightclub bombing is surprisingly brutal and seems to have an innate
understanding of the complexities of surviving in a hostile environment.
Smith may in the end be forced to do the honourable thing even if in this
bittersweet film it may not amount to a hill of beans. Worthy of
rediscovery.
The Family Secret
The anomaly in the boxset as it features Bogart in a hands off role. So
hands off he isn’t even in the credits (the film was made by his
production company). This is borderline noir at best and the weakest of
the set. John Derek is back this time playing an entitled little shit who
kills his best friend after an argument. More a Douglas Sirk melodrama
with Leave it to Beaver staging, this attempts to mine the
guilt that David Clark feels after killing his friend. Lee J. Cobb returns
as the paterfamilias Howard, who as a lawyer hears his son’s confession
and expects him to do the right thing. As the dead man was also in hoc to
a bookie named Joe (Whit Bissell) it makes sense that the police
will finger him for the crime. David then keeps quiet to the chagrin of
pops, who represents Joe in court with David also working the case.
It's a convoluted tale that never quite makes us understand why we should
care about David. He is an entitled middle class jock, whose relationship
with Secretary Lee (Jody Lawrance) would be deemed an abusive work
environment now (it also hints at rape). David only finally confesses
after Joe drops dead of a heart attack - doing the right thing has never
taken so long. The fact that the film expects you to pat him on the back
for it is annoying to the point of insulting. Derek is much better here,
an abusive shallow preppy plays more to the moral blankness in his acting
than the conflicted hoodlum of Knock on Any Door.
Henry Levin's direction is of the sober and sedate variety. It’s a film
that would work just as well as a stage production as it moves from house
to office to courtroom. It may be burdened by its middle class morality
but it can be viewed as one of the first of the cycle of films that looked
at the rottenness beneath the veneer of civility in Suburbia.
The Harder They Fall
The final film in the set and also Bogie’s swan song is the pick of the
bunch and a fitting finale to an illustrious career. Based on
Budd Schulberg’s original novel from a screenplay by writer
Philip Yordan (a man with a lively and controversial career all of
his own). Set in the milieu of professional boxing, Bogart plays broke
sportswriter Eddie Willis, whose contacts prove useful to mob fixer Nick
Benko (Rod Steiger) when he wants to fix it that big hulking lug
Toro Moreno (Mike Lane) gets a shot at the title despite the not
minor inconvenience that he is woefully inept at the pugilistic arts.
Unable to resist the lure of a big payday, Eddie goes along with the match
fixing until a fatal bout with a former contender leads to a crisis of
conscience.
Willis has all the usual charm of Bogart's previous raffish rogue’s
gallery but the benign world weariness is now imbued with a more
fatalistic demeanour, his star persona a contrast to the more method
leanings of Steiger’s nefarious boxing promoter (not the final time he’ll
put the fix in during his career). This is a world made of chumps, guys on
the make and losers on the take. Less a sporting arena and more of a freak
show carnival with the audience baying for blood and punishment. If it may
seem a little familiar now it is only because it helped establish the
tropes of the boxing movie. The climactic bout has a brutality that hits
even now and must have been an influence on how Scorsese lensed the fights
in Raging Bull. The closest it comes to an innocent is Moreno and his manager Luis (Carlos Montalban) but even then you wonder if he has his best interests at heart and this
gets to the heart of the one problem with the film. Toro is so comically
inept at the fight game, barely able to land a punch that it is farcical
that he would even get a sniff at the big league. Knowing the rudiments of
the pugilistic arts would have made for a more convincing but more vicious
movie. Schulberg likes his innocent heroes to suffer before redemption and
Moreno’s battering to a form of redemption is no exception.
Mark Robson has previous with the boxing arena having previously
directed Champion for Kirk Douglas. This is less concerned
with the ring and more the people ring side, and if he doesn’t quite have
the sharp eyed view of the lower end of town, he also doesn’t have the
sense of weaselly special pleading that Elia Kazan brought to
On the Waterfront. This is an environment where even the top dog is clearly in the thrall
of something bigger and any success is short lived. Migrants are
exploited, a man on his uppers is easily corrupted and Joe Public is a
schmuck just waiting to have their dollars extricated from their pocket.
Robson's light touch ensures that this is not just a wallow in the mire
even if any hope of victory in the final round is liable to be short
lived.
Bogart's redemptive arc is fatalistic to the core. Turning the tables on
the mob and giving his cut to a boxer who is going to be traded like so
much meat so he can return to Argentina is a dicey proposition but newly
inspired, he is about to bring the whole corrupt edifice down with a
journalistic final flourish. Bogie hammers the typewriter keys and we fade
to black knowing this story will be more epitaph than expose. A final
flourish and a final farewell from one of the most iconic stars of old
Hollywood.
Extras:
As per previous noir boxsets, some of the extras are more period adjacent
than directly relevant to the films but all are worthy of attention. Audio
commentaries on all films as well as appraisals from the like of Tony
Rayns, Geoff Andrew, Bertrand Tavernier, Tom Vincent and Christina
Newland. As per the previous box sets there is a nicely curated selection
of war propaganda pieces (some featuring the same director or actor in the
adjoining film), the pick of which is The Negro Soldier. Add to that a South Bank Show episode featuring Bogart's son looking
back at his career and footage of Max Schmeling's fight against Primo
Carnera and you have a pretty compelling excuse to work your way through
these additional items. All films come with subtitles and Image Galleries
featuring promotional and publicity materials. If that isn’t enough for
you there is also a 120 page book featuring essays from Imogen Sara Smith
plus archival and contemporary essays and interviews. In short, it’s quite
the package.
Columbia Noir #5: Humphrey Bogart is on blu-ray now from Powerhouse Indicator.