Dead Reckoning - 1947

Dead Reckoning(1947) is Easter noir.  The incongruity of Easter and noir melded together might be why the movie has such an offbeat, almost comic touch to it, more than one usually sees in noir, which is usually humorless.  Noir is despair, it’s fate clutching at the throat, dragging down an already doomed soul into depths of accepting that life is hopeless.  It’s more than just shadows from window blinds; there’s a psychological reason for the shadows.

Easter noir? 

Yeah, it can be done, and Dead Reckoning does it, bold as brass and a little cheeky.

Since the story is a mystery, I’ll try not to spell it all out, but just hit the high spots with a few observations. 

There’s the image of an Easter lily and a Medal of Honor on the title credit, but Easter is not thrown right at us like Judy and Fred in their Easter bonnets strolling down Fifth Avenue.  It’s only hinted at, and we have to connect the dots.  The action starts with Bogart darting through darkened, rain-soaked streets, obviously on the lam, and as he stops by a florist’s shop to mix with a small crowd observing the display of lilies, a newsstand guy’s voice hollers for us to get our Sunday paper.  Then Bogie ducks into a Roman Catholic church before early Mass.  It’s Easter Sunday, but we won’t know that until the inevitable noir flashback plunks us a few days earlier when he registers in a hotel on April 17^th, and remarks in a later scene when interrogated by cops inspecting his room that if they’re looking for Easter bunnies, it’s a day early.  (Easter fell on the 21^st in 1946.)  His flippant remark is the only time Easter is mentioned.

But these touches are only add-ons; the real Easter reference is in the flirtation with an afterlife, if not exactly resurrection, with a few poetic symbols of parachutes for a soft landing into whatever awaits.

Parachutes, silken, billowing, harrowing are the image and emblem of the film, more than the lilies and the Medal.  Bogart returns from the war, a captain in the paratroops, getting the VIP treatment with his pal and sergeant, played by William Prince.  Prince did not have a long film career, but did TV work for decades, including many soap operas.  He’s a handsome, likeable guy, with enough personality to hold his own with Bogart, which is impressive.  His role is short in this movie, but he makes such a strong impression I’m surprised it didn’t launch him on a longer film career.

Bogart used to own a fleet of taxicabs in St. Louis—love his line that they got sunk at Pearl Harbor—and the young sarge was a college professor, but the working class officer and the enlisted man professor, as well as their close friendship despite a rule against fraternization, is only one of many instances of flaunting the norms we’re supposed to expect.  Perhaps the biggest one occurs at the end when Bogart won’t stand by his new dame, Lizabeth Scott because, though he loves her, he says of Prince, “I loved him more.”  Sidekicks are not pushed aside for women in this movie, especially when she’s nobody he can trust.  His sidekick is not a comic foil, but a man to put on a pedestal even at the price of his own life.

From John, Chapter 15: Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Okay, so this is from the Douay-Rheims, but Bogie did stumble into a Catholicchurch, after all.

He and his sergeant are bound for a special appointment in Washington, D.C., because he recommended Prince for the Medal of Honor.  (One note here, it’s commonly known as the Congressional Medal of Honor, but that’s not really its official title.  It’s the Medal of Honor, and even if the Hollywood screenwriters didn’t know that, Bogart and the military brass escorting them to D.C., should have. Calling it "the Congressional" is just wrong.)

But sarge jumps off the train and runs away and leaves Bogie with a mystery.  Sarge has something to hide, and Bogie spends the rest of the movie figuring out what it is.  Bogie gets drugged, beaten up, but nothing deters him from finding out the truth, and the search takes him to a newspaper morgue (one of my favorite places for research), a real morgue (I’ll pass), and a streamline moderne nightclub where he meets noir queen Lizabeth Scott, “Cinderella with a husky voice,” as he says.

She’s in Gulf City, a steamy burg in the South where he has trailed his buddy.  (Funny that while pausing in Philadelphia, he talks on the phone in his hotel room and we see Independence Hall out the window.  Must be like if you get a room in Paris, you always see the Eiffel Tower.)

Morris Carnovsky is the club owner, who’s got Lizabeth Scott, and everybody, under his thumb.  He plays the erudite mobster with the pretense of culture wonderfully.  Unfortunately, Mr. Carnovsky would have his film career cut off at the knees by the Blacklist in 1950, but Broadway became for him, like so many other actors and writers, a refuge in those dark, disgusting days.

Charles Cane plays a detective, sarcastic and perhaps not so bright, who spends the movie tailing Bogie, and even being held hostage by Ruby Dandridge, Lizabeth Scott’s African American maid when Miss Dandridge is told to hold the gun on the cop tied up in the closet so Scott and Bogie can escape.  Black woman gets to hold a gun on a white cop—even if it’s through a door and meant to be comic, it’s still a bold stunt.

Marvin Miller plays Carnovsky’s hired goon, a cruel gorilla in a white dinner jacket.  We last saw Mr. Miller playing Genghis Khan here in The Golden Horde (1951).  Casting directors evidently never saw him as the cuddly type.

Our old, dear friend Wallace Ford is an ex-safe cracker who provides Bogie with some helpful gadgets, and it’s a pleasure to see him in any movie.  Got to write a post about him sometime. 

Lest we forget:

For a guy on a chase with no time to lose, Bogart changes from uniform to civilian clothes and a Fedora mighty quickly.  Though he and his sergeant briefly bask on the train about houses with roofs, kids who can eat, and all the pleasures of peace in a country not destroyed by war, there is no sense of homecoming to the U.S., no period of adjustment.  This is not The Best Years of Our Lives. 

Blink and you miss ‘em: Ray Teal as the motorcycle cop, partygoer Bess Flowers in the nightclub, and according to IMDb, Matthew “Stymie” Beard, too grown for Our Gang, as the bellhop who brings Bogie’s prank note to the detective tailing him.

Bogie kills time by practice pitching into a chair in his hotel room, and being from St. Louis, ruminates on pitching in the World Series and downing the Red Sox for his team, the Cardinals.  The Cardinals, did, indeed, win over the Sox in October of ’46, but the movie takes place in April, so it’s as if Bogie is predicting what will happen.  As a Red Sox fan, I must admit the pain this caused, since the Sox had not won the Series since 1918.  However, in the spirit of good sportsmanship, let me offer my belated congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinals.  Well done.

The Cardinals also beat the Red Sox in the 1967 World Series, which I’m afraid we still haven’t quite gotten over yet.

Oh, all right.  Congratulations on that one too.

Bogart is not his usual grim anti-hero in this one; he doesn’t play it with the bitterness and dissatisfaction of his returning vet in Key Largo, or Rick in Casablanca.  His quips are less sarcastic than they are simply funny.  He’s got some great lines in this movie, and his character is less haunted than his other roles. 

He plays well with Lizabeth Scott.  She had a really fine way of appearing both vulnerable and yet as inscrutable as noir dames were supposed to be, so that we don’t know whose side she’s on.  Unfortunately, her singing is dubbed in this movie, and I’m not sure why, as she was certainly able to sing.  She had a limited range, but it was a pleasant singing voice, very suitable to jazz and blues numbers.  Here’s her album on YouTube.

And she wears a black beret.  Can a woman be more perfect?  I think not.  I refer you to our previous post on black berets in the movies here.

For all the gloss of her glamorized scenes in the nightclub, I really think one of the most beautiful shots of Lizabeth Scott is at the end when she’s sitting in the car with Bogie, her hair stringy from the rain.  The camera view is from the back seat as she turns sharply to Bogie, her eyes bright and intense, and her expression taut, fire in her soul and murder in her heart.  I don’t have a screen cap of it, but here’s a publicity shot with a similar appearance:

Bogart tells his troubles to a Catholic priest in church at the beginning of the movie, jump starting the flashback.  The priest, played by James Bell, is in uniform.  He, like, Bogie, is just returned from overseas and is also a paratrooper, so Bogart feels a kinship with him.  Bogie hides in the shadows as one making Confession.  At the end of the movie, Father will return, softly intoning a Latin prayer for the dying, and one last image of a billowing parachute in the blackness is seen, carrying the weird juxtaposed themes of afterlife, parachuting, guilt and punishment, but oddly without of any suggestion of redemption, which would be all we need to tie up the Easter message.  But this is where the noir finally kicks in: there is no redemption, just settling scores.

May I wish all who celebrate, a Happy Easter. If you like noir, remember, jelly beans also come in black.

Two-Gun Man from Harlem - 1938

“Two-Gun Man from Harlem” (1938) creates a world for us that is both strange and familiar, an image placed over another image. We see a separate world, but it is our world and we are at home here, even if we are not cowboys, even if we are not black, even if we are not white.

This movie is one of a handful of B-westerns starring Herb Jeffries, and the first of a series of three featuring him playing the cowboy called Bob Blake. We discussed Mr. Jeffries in this previous post, how his stature as The Bronze Buckaroo, the Singing Cowboy of the Black Cinema in the 1930s put him on par with the likes of Gene Autry and a posse of others who were all white and all more famous.

The Bronze Buckaroo traveled in somewhat different circles. He rode the range in movie houses that played to African-American audiences. General audiences, i.e. theaters where patrons were either mostly white, or, as in the South, all white, were not shown these films.

They missed out on something big, those white patrons. A simple message a lot of them would have to wait another 20 or 30 years to hear, and under much more turbulent circumstances. If they had only seen Herb Jeffries riding into town on his white horse to save the day, heard him sing “I’m a Happy Cowboy”, one wonders if the battles for social justice fought in the streets and on the back of the bus, and at the lunch counter would have been necessary.

Not that “Two-Gun Man from Harlem” was the greatest movie in the world. It wasn’t even the greatest movie in the small neighborhood movie houses where it played. It was typical B-western.

That is its charm, and the very magic of its power.

Herb Jeffries is the hero. We know that because he’s jaw-droppingly handsome, he’s taller than everybody else, and he wears a white hat. He’s no great actor - none of the singing cowboys were, although in this movie he gets to play a dual role. As the gunfighter “The Deacon” he looks like he’s having a blast.

Manton Moreland is his shorter, funnier brother. He is sly and loyal, and a lot smarter than most cowboy sidekicks. He tells a story to divert the bad guys, about Lot’s wife. Only in his rambling version, Salt Lake City is the result of the biblical curse.

Mae Turner is the ranch owner’s wife, who is unfaithful and tries to lure our Herb. Failing that, she frames him for murder. Unlike most of the other awkward and wooden performances here, Miss Turner had stage training at the University of California, and played Lady Macbeth among her professional roles. She knew how to do evil ladies.

Spencer Williams, who would go on to write and produce in Black Cinema, played Butch, the bad guy who did the bidding, for a hefty fee, of Clarence Brooks. He gives a quite natural performance and has great screen presence.

Mr. Brooks played the head bad guy, a man of means and just plain mean. He tries to buy the love of the beautiful young ingénue, played by Marguerite Whitten. He is as oily as Snidely Whiplash.

Miss Whitten is the guardian of her younger brother, Matthew “Stymie” Beard, who you’ll recognize as one of the Little Rascals. Here, he’s a funny, talkative, know-it-all kid who hero-worships Herb Jeffries.

And who wouldn’t?

That’s all pretty standard for a B-western. The writing is stilted and corny. The acting isn’t the best. The production values are distinctly low budget. Even the fight scenes are funny because they lack proper choreography, and the sound effect of the punching sounds a lot somebody slapping a tennis ball against a garage wall.

But look again. Jess “Jesse” Lee Brooks, one of the finest actors and singers of his generation (see this previous post with a clip of his “Let My People Go” in “Sullivan’s Travels”), plays the sheriff.

He is a man of authority, no-nonsense, steely-eyed, but fair. You can put your life in his hands. He always gets his man.

Films exhibited for “general” audiences did not show dark-skinned sheriffs. Nor dark-skinned rapacious landowners paying off henchmen. Nor dark-skinned cowboy heroes.

Which is why when offered a chance to “pass” in the movies, light-skinned Herb Jeffries, who was of mixed African and European heritage on his father’s side, and Irish on his mother’s side, refused. He did one better and wore darker makeup on screen. Mr. Jeffries reasoning was:

"In those days, my driving force was being a hero to children who didn't have any heroes to identify with," Jeffries says in a quote from his website. "I felt that dark-skinned children could identify with me and, in The Bronze Buckaroo they could have a hero. Many people don't realize (to this very day) that in the Old West, one out of every three cowboys was a Black... and there were many Mexican cowboys, too."

The familiar image of the B-western types: the hero, the villain, the pretty girl, the hero-worshiping little boy, and the loyal sidekick, they are all played out here by black people. African-American audiences could enjoy the same storybook sagebrush fare as the “general” audiences without fear of being demeaned or stereotyped, this time.

White audiences, however, missed out on a revelation. The hero, the villain, the pretty girl, the hero-worshiping little boy were all people they knew very well. They saw them all the time at the movies.  The only difference -- the only difference -- was skin color.

About ten minutes into the movie, one sees that is no difference at all.

Powerful stuff, and not what some people wanted to hear.

For more on Herb Jeffries, have a look at his website.

Wishing you a meaningful Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.