NIGHT EDITOR (1946)

By Gary Deane

Director Henry Levin never met a film genre that he didn’t like or — perhaps more accurately — that didn’t like him. While taking his craft seriously, Levin was a genial extrovert who showed no inclination toward anything that smacked of self-importance. To him, a successful movie was just a good story well-told, period. For nearly four decades, Levin cheerfully marshaled a long parade of popcorn projects, including westerns, adventure stories, musicals, comedies, family dramas, crime pictures, spy thrillers, and action flicks nearer the end of his career.

Night Editor, a tightly-wound little crime chiller released in 1946, was one of Levin’s earliest assignments and clearly demonstrates the brisk yet personable directorial style that would mark his work until the end. Though the low-budget Columbia programmer was never intended by the studio to have a long working life, Night Editor to this day has refused to turn in its gun and badge.

The movie was based on a weekly radio series in which a newspaper editor would give the listening audience the inside on some tawdry crime tale. Its story, as recounted to a young reporter who’s foolishly been boozing it up, dogging it at work, and neglecting his family, is cautionary. The film, unwinding in flashback, focuses on Tony Cochrane (William Gargan), a dour, charmless cop and faithless husband. This time, Cochrane’s got it bad for a high-class society babe, Jill Merrill (Janice Carter), who also happens to be hitched.

One night, while working themselves into a sweat in a lovers’ lane, the two watch in shock as a woman is beaten to death with a tire iron. Cochrane instinctively moves to go after the killer but Merrill holds him back. As a result, the detective fails to pursue the culprit or report the murder. Not a good situation, but one which only gets worse after the body is found and Cochrane finds himself assigned to the case. The detective now has to work hard to cover his tracks, both figuratively and for real. Those of his car, found at the crime scene, are a key part of the evidence. 

Little by little, the cover-up starts to fall apart — that is, until a man whom the detective knows for certain not to be the killer is arrested and ultimately sentenced to death. Though Cochrane feels remorse, it's clear that events still take a back seat to his lust for Jill Merrill.

What's not so clear in Night Editor is why the likes of Merrill would bother with a lumpen character like Cochrane, unless he’s maybe got a python in his pants. The glamourpuss does seem to have a thing for sex — though of what kind we are not sure. In one of the film’s most notorious scenes, she lifts off like a rocket, shouting, "I want to see the body!" Rattled by Merrill’s frenzied voyeurism, Cochrane decides to get out of there as fast as he can. Though obsessed with Merrill, he’s now beginning to understand what she’s about. He later tries to ditch her in an exchange that’s as ripe as pulp noir ever gets:

Him: “You’re no good for me. We both add up to zero. I’m sick of the whole crazy mess. I’m sick of playing games. You’re worse than blood poisoning. You’re a rotten—rick through and through. Like something that’s served at the Ritz that’s been laying out in the sun too long.”

Her: “To hear you talk you’d think I was crawling after you. I don’t need you and I can buy and sell you. That’s right, Tony. You’re not my kind. But your little tootsie-wootsie loves her great big stupid peasant.”

You get the picture.

Another thing that’s not clear — at least to today’s audiences — is why Janis Carter, a strikingly beautiful, vivacious, and multi-talented actress, never had a bigger career. Though Carter featured in thirty-odd films, she never came close to achieving lasting stardom. If it were not for her appearances in several minor crime dramas including Framed (1947), I Love Trouble (1948), The Missing Juror (1944), The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) as well as in several titles of The Whistler series, Carter, sadly, would be all but forgotten.

Carter’s recognition problem is the result of her bifurcated screen persona. On one hand, she was the personification of the 1940s calendar pin-ups à la Edward Runci or T.N. Thompson — an alluring mix of movie star beauty, sophistication, and girl-next-door high spirits and playfulness. By rights, Carter would have at least found sure footing in comedies and musicals (her background had been in opera and theater). However, the actress also could play it aloof, willful, and calculating — perhaps too easily and too well. Carter's career path took her down some of B-noir’s seediest side streets to places where she joyously acted out her inner bad girl. If conventional stardom eluded her, certainly lasting status as one of film noir's most exuberant and deadliest femme fatales has not.

Night Editor also wastes no time thanks to Levin's fast-ball direction and the supple camerawork of Burnett Guffey. The latter was one of film noir’s most emotionally attuned stylists, working on In a Lonely Place (1950), Nightfall (1956), The Brothers Rico (1957), Scandal Street (1952), Tightspot (1955), The Harder They Fall (1956), Knock on Any Door (1949), The Reckless Moment (1949), Human Desire (1954), and The Sniper (1952).

Night Editor was first intended as a pilot for a series of like films with stories being told by veteran police-beat reporters. Though the series never happened, Night Editor did, and on its own terms. Without it, and so many other B-titles with similarly deranged impulses, classic film noir would hardly be as compelling and, frankly, not nearly such an unruly joy to watch.

HOT CARS (1956)

 

By Gary Deane

 

Her: “Do you always sell every car you demonstrate?”

Him: “No, but I don’t always get taken for a ride either.”

 

No surprise if Hot Cars, released in 1956, had turned out to be just another ‘sinsational’ teens-gone-wild drive-in pic, the likes of Dragstrip Girl, Teenage Thunder, Hot Rod Gang, Speed Crazy, Hot Rod Girl, Young and Dangerous, or Joy Ride.

But rest easy. There's not a street rod in sight, only deluxe production coupes and foreign sports jobs that are ‘hot’ only because they're stolen — something Nick Dunn (John Bromfield) figures out only after a few days on the job as a sales jockey for a string of Los Angeles used car lots.

Dunn soon realizes that owner Arthur Markel (Ralph Clanton) is fronting what his boss calls "a refrigeration plant”, a place where hot cars are brought to cool down. But Dunn, fired from his last car sales job for being straight with the customers, has nowhere to go. His infant son Davy needs an operation for which Markel will pay if Dunn will play. Even before hiring him, the dealer was hip to Dunn’s plight and uses a blonde knockout named Karen Winter (Joi Lansing) to bait the hook. By the time Dunn figures out he’s been duped, it’s too late, as Markel moves to fit him up as a one-size-fits-all chump.

A trim little programmer, Hot Cars was a release of Bel-Air Productions, a joint venture of 20th Century Fox producer/ director Howard W. Koch, and independent producer Aubrey Schenck. For a time in the ‘50s, the company turned out a bunch of low-budget, quick-buck features, including titles familiar to fans of B noirs: Big House U.S.A. (1955), Crime Against Joe (1956), Three Bad Sisters (1956), The Girl in Black Stockings (1957), and Hell Bound (1957).

Hot Cars runs fast and smooth on a well-tuned script by screenwriter Don Martin, whose film and television credits extended four decades. Martin scripted several of the original Falcon releases and from 1947 to 1958 contributed to a list of B-thrillers, among them: Lighthouse (1947), The Hatbox Mystery (1947), Search for Danger (1949), Destination Murder (1950), Shakedown (1950), Double Jeopardy (1955), Confession (1955), The Man is Armed (1956) and The Violent Road (1958). His pulp novel Shed No Tears was filmed in 1948. Once a 'lost noir', the movie was released a few years back by Alpha Entertainment, a low-end media outfit.

Much of Hot Cars was shot on location, offering tantalizing sightings of mid-century Los Angeles e.g., the iconic Jack’s at the Beach restaurant and lounge where Joi Lansing begins stroking John Bromfield to see if he’s up for the ride. Lansing was on the scene in Hollywood from the day the bus pulled up. A teenage model who later moved on to films and TV, she soon got known as a party girl who had affairs with a host of the usual suspects such as George Raft, Mickey Rooney, and Frank Sinatra. Along the way, she also found time to run up a total of four marriages.

However, Lansing had her head screwed on straight when it came to her career — though she was never much of an actress nor encouraged to be one, given her famously alluring pout and purpose-built figure. Her movie appearances were limited mostly to bit parts (including Touch of Evil) though she did better on television, landing supporting roles plus regular stints on The Bob Cummings Show, Klondike, and The Beverly Hillbillies.

All said, Hot Cars is worth the price of admission for Lansing alone. She’s smart, spirited, and something to see as she goes to work on the straight-arrow Dunn:

Him: “I told you already, I’m married.”

Her: “I have a terrible memory.”

However, the film also provides a better-than-usual part for John Bromfield, himself a ready-made leading man who never found solid footing in Hollywood. Though tall, dark, and athletic, he had to warm the end of a bench that already included Hollywood hunks like Rory Calhoun, Ray Danton, Brad Dexter, Steve Cochrane, Richard Egan, William Campbell, Jeffrey Hunter, Vince Edwards, and John Russell.

Bromfield had started out encouragingly enough in tryout roles for Paramount in Sorry, Wrong, Number (1948) and Rope of Sand (1949). But as a featured actor, he eventually found himself having to settle for an assortment of cheap westerns, horror titles, and crime programmers like The Big Bluff (1955), Crime Against Joe (1956), and the exuberantly trashy Three Bad Sisters (1956). Bromfield was a capable enough performer, just not that interesting a one, evincing no great charisma, sexual intensity, or dark places. He was what he was: a handsome, rugged Hollywood straight-shooter well-suited for the role of Nick Dunn. He’s just fine in it.

Hot Cars is as much a conventional crime thriller as a film noir. It doesn’t bother itself with moody atmospherics or, visually, much else. Karen Winter is plainly a femme fatale, though one who fails ultimately to damage or destroy. For his part, Nick Dunn is neither a doomed protagonist, a total patsy, or a victim of his own device. While he is a man in a trap, he’s still able to find his way out. 

That said, Hot Cars does feel like noir. All the basic constructs are there, needing only to be framed as they might have been a decade or so earlier. In that way, the movie is no different from the many others now categorized as ‘late-period’ noir.

However, none of this impacts Hot Cars’ high-velocity performance as it rockets along like a monkey on a zip line, propelled by a vibrant hipster jazz track by bandleader Les Baxter. In all, the film is a totally cool ride, one that’s definitely worth taking out for a drive.

 

 

 

 

STRANGE BARGAIN (1949)

By Gary Deane

Sam Wilson (Jeffrey Lynn) assistant bookkeeper and family man, struggles to make it to the end of the month. As it turns out, so does his boss, who tells Sam that the business is failing and on the verge of bankruptcy. He confides also that he’s had enough and is planning to kill himself. He then asks Sam to help in making the suicide look like a robbery-murder, forcing the insurance company to make good on the death claim. In return, he promises Sam a large sum of money up-front. Needing the cash, Sam reluctantly agrees to go along, hoping he'll be able to go through with it.  As we know though, in film noir things seldom go as planned.

Strange Bargain, a tense RKO programmer, packs a lot into its one hour and eight minutes, including a nicely imagined storyline, a surprise ending that is actually a surprise, and good performances across the board. Lynn is convincing as a man at a moral crossroads, as he attempts to find a way out of a hopeless situation for which he's partly to blame. Martha Scott, later nominated for an Academy Award, is equally affecting as Sam’s domesticated but take-charge spouse, while Harry Morgan,  as an investigating detective, is as sardonic and engaging as ever. 

Though a minor title, the movie is not without ambition. Director Will Price made only three films in his movie career, with Strange Bargain being the first. You'd have to call it a pretty good start.

Classic Noir's Last Gasp: The Scarlet Hour (1957)

By Gary Deane

When trying to nail down an endpoint of the classic film noir cycle, four titles generally find their way to the head of the line: Touch of Evil (1958) for its baroque inflections of character and style; Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) for its modernist tonal shifts; Psycho (1960) for its narrative and generic dislocations; and Blast of Silence (1961) for its utter moral desolation.  In each case, the film represents a defining shift from what had gone before and, in doing so, extends the period’s time frame.

However, it might also be argued that the real endpoint could be a late-period noir from 1957, which looks back to exactly what had gone before. That film is The Scarlet Hour, which exemplifies — thematically, narratively, and visually —film noir’s most resonant motifs, as framed in the 1940s and early '50s: a male protagonist obsessed with a sexually alluring woman; another female, good, dutiful, and in love with the man; an urban setting where lives are lived out unhappily by day and by night; a lurid and convoluted plotline conveyed with hard-boiled urgency; and a shadowland of expressive and unsettling camerawork.

The Scarlet Hour, unseen and little known until a few years ago, was produced and directed by Hollywood great Michael Curtiz, with studio backing from Paramount. However, the film was released with little fanfare, receiving far wider distribution in the UK than in the US. After that, it languished in obscurity for more than fifty years, with little reference to its existence other than some harsh assessments of the film in the British press, like that in the UK Times:

“(The Scarlet Hour) is a very drab hour and a half, in the company of actors who have not yet established their reputations and are unlikely to achieve them as a result of this movie. The story combines a rather unsavory triangle with a jewel robbery and the director Mr. Curtiz has achieved a certain amount of suspense but little else.”

However, to present-day eyes, The Scarlet Hour isn’t drab at all. It is a deeply noir-stained tale of dark love, obsession, duplicity, and murder — dense in its generic underpinnings and saturated with character types that seem both contemporary and anachronistic at the same time.

Tom Tryon plays E.V. ‘Marsh’ Marshall, the protégé of land developer Ralph Nevins (James Gregory). Marsh also is having an affair with his boss’s wife, Paulie (Carol Ohmart). Paulie wants the life Ralph’s wealth affords her, but she doesn’t want him. Her chance to get away comes when she persuades Marsh to hijack a jewelry heist the two overhear being planned while parked in a lovers’ lane. However, Ralph is aware that Paulie has something going on the side. The plot both thickens and darkens when he decides to do something about it.

That is about as much as you want to know going in. Much of the pleasure to be had from these tales of triangulation and treachery is in the details, supplied here by screenwriter Frank Tashlin, best known for his comedies, including The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957). Although The Scarlet Hour would be Tashlin’s only association with noir, there was a palpable undercurrent of desperation in his comedies. As observed by writer/ curator Dave Kehr, “More than most of his contemporaries, Tashlin was attuned to how our desire betrays us.”

Unfortunately, some of The Scarlet Hour’s potential is hampered by Tom Tryon’s limited range and a script that leaves little leeway for his character to connect the dots between virtue and temptation. A more adroit performer might have found the connection, but the most Tryon can manage is a hangdog haplessness.

On the other hand, former model and beauty queen Carol Ohmart was the perfect choice for Paulie, a far more complex and sympathetic character than noir’s stereotypical femme fatale. While Paulie uses Marsh and is prepared to betray him, she does so out of jealousy, not malice. Her actions and betrayals are never that straightforward. An unusually self-reflexive femme fatale, she goads herself into a criminal act seeking some nether region of self-worth. Paulie is Double Indemnity’s Phyllis Dietrichson and Walter Neff combined. With her wintery affect and smoky voice, Ohmart harkens back to the ‘fire and ice’ sirens of the 40s, but without seeming derivative.

Adding to the mix is Elaine Stritch as Phyllis Rycker, friend and confidante to Paulie. Phyllis is a retired-but-not-quite-reformed B-girl who’s found true love in the arms of a blue-collar hedonist. She and Paulie have a history and through their exchanges, we learn more about who Paulie is and what motivates her. While always dressed to kill, Paulie appears confident, but she’s both damaged and sad with regret. When Phyllis toasts her slightly sozzled husband, “Here’s to happy marriages made in heaven,” Paulie replies, “Here’s to happy marriages made anywhere.” Stritch, always a brash scene-stealer, challenges Ohmart to stand up to her. Ohmart responds in kind and their time together on screen juices up the film.

James Gregory as the vengeful husband, David Lewis as the jewel heist mastermind (who makes a memorable reappearance via the film’s bravura plot twist), and E. G. Marshall and Ed Binns as the investigating police officers were ready-made for film noir. The four would all go on to become fixtures on the small screen.

Jody Lawrance, playing Nevins’ secretary, Kathy Stevens, is the ‘good girl’ who pines for Marsh, a la Virginia Huston in Out of the Past. Lawrance does what she can with her role but, in her bottle-blonde incarnation, begs comparison with Jan Sterling, a more arresting actress. On the rebound from an aborted launch at Columbia at the time, Lawrance faded from view in 1961.

Clearly, The Scarlet Hour doesn’t shy away from its indebtedness to Double Indemnity. Curtiz pays further respect in a scene where Marsh and Paulie furtively meet up across the aisle in a record store. Their troubled tryst could easily have taken place just down the street at Jerry’s Market on Melrose. The script also has its share of well-turned one-liners, most of them handed to Paulie. Many of the lines function in the way Walter Neff’s voiceover frames Double Indemnity. Not only are they memorably hard-boiled, but they also add resonance to the characters, such as when Paulie says to Marsh: “Don’t try to brush me off, Marsh — when I stick, I stick hard.” and “I never thought about the things I wanted, only the things I didn’t want.”

Curtiz’s attempt to return to the more embellished noir style — one that he’d virtually invented in Mildred Pierce, embroidered in The Unsuspected (a textbook example of Foster Hirsch’s notion of “italicized visual moments”) and finally synthesized in The Breaking Point — was compromised to some extent by a combination of factors he couldn't overcome. In those earlier films, the complicated choreography of plot, visuals, and actorly presence meshed into something greater than the sum of its many parts.

In 'The Scarlet Hour, all the elements of a top-notch 40s noir are present, as is the framework for a great and satisfying movie. Unfortunately, the combination of a weaker lead actor and the ultimate lack of velocity in the film’s final reel means the component parts manage to not quite fit. However, what we do have is a categorical study on celluloid of how classic noir was supposed to operate, The Scarlet Hour unquestionably is the last honorable attempt to build a noir from the classic recipe. The film also can be seen as a look into the ‘what if’ career of Carol Ohmart, in every sense a compelling actress who was made for a style of film style on the verge of extinction — just as she was offered the chance to be the very embodiment of it. Ohmart’s portrayal of icy, sexual cunning brings the arc of the true noir cycle to a close — an arc that would not be revisited until Body Heat (1981) nearly a quarter-century later.