DVR Diary: SHIELD FOR MURDER (1954)

In the year he earned the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Barefoot Contessa -- it can be assumed that three co-stars of On the Waterfront cancelled each other out -- Edmond O'Brien directed himself in this adaptation of a novel by William P. McGivern, who also provided source material for the late noirs The Big Heat and Odds Against Tomorrow. Howard W. Koch, a co-producer of the picture, shares the directing credit, and I can't tell you who directed what. Which one allows the shadow of a boom mike or crane to crawl across the front of a building in the opening scene? Which one stages a remarkable shootout at a crowded high-school swimming pool between O'Brien and a head-bandaged Claude Akins? Which one shot the scene where Akins gets that early beating, a moment of appalling violence despite the absence of any gore because the camera focuses on O'Brien's expression of desperate rage as he pistol-whips Akins and a cohort for what feels like a full minute, cutting only to show the horrified expressions of other restaurant patrons? By no measure is Shield For Murder a polished film, but it probably shouldn't be. Had O'Brien more subtlety as a director or an actor the picture would lose much of its dark turbulence. He plays Barney Nolan, a plainclothes detective grown tired of his work. He's looking for a big payday and a new life and like a fool he thinks he'll get it when he murders a mob bookie with $25,000 on him and tries to cover it up by calling it a line-of-duty shooting of a fleeing suspect. As if the bookie's boss Packy Reed won't guess where the money went once it turns up missing. As if someone wasn't watching the whole thing happen, even if that guy, in a bit of pulpy melodrama, is a deaf-mute. The old man can still read and write, which the plot requires so our default hero, Barney's stolid protege (an inert John Agar) can discover a written account of the crime. Inevitably, Barney sows the wind and reaps a shitstorm, accidentally killing the mute while attempting to convince him to accept a bribe. Another great scene, whoever directed it, is when Barney pushes the corpse down a flight of stairs to simulate an accident, leaps over the body and bolts down a flight of stairs and out into the night. O'Brien is a house afire throughout, embodying the frustrated fantasies of a beaten-down audience and affirming their futility. I've said before that I consider him the definitive noir actor, noir for me being less about cool than about hapless passion and hopeless persistence. O'Brien is the opposite of cool, but the essence (or part of it) of noir. Like a clown in a slapstick silent, only made up in sweat rather than whiteface, he acts out and lashes out and gets his comeuppance as order inevitably prevails, only it isn't very funny and you don't cry, either. Shield For Murder may be O'Brien's definitive noir performance. Directing himself, it should have been, and the fact of his direction, whatever the actual extent of it, is an assurance that he knew himself as a performer and understood his genre. It's the nearest he comes to being an auteur and he lives up to the opportunity. He should've earned something for that, too.

Holden and O'Brien in THE TURNING POINT (1952)

William Dieterle's 1952 noir is a case of a screenplay trying to do too much at once. About fifteen minutes into it, I thought it had the makings of a great film noir, but by the halfway point -- or should I say "turning point" -- the movie had moved on to other things. And at that point it still had a shot, but before long it was heading in yet another direction. With the cast it had, it should have been much stronger. But let me explain it a bit more. In an American city that looks a lot like San Francisco, law professor John Conroy (Edmond O'Brien) is appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the rackets allegedly led by Neil Eichelberger (Ed Begley). Conroy's girlfriend Amanda Waycross (Alexis Smith) joins him on the job, which reunites him with his old pal Jerry McKibbon (William Holden), now a high-powered newspaper reporter. Adding to the old home week feel, Conroy hires his father (Tom Tully), a veteran cop, to be his special investigator, despite the older man's clear reluctance. Dad's reluctance is explained to us soon enough; unbeknownst to his son, the old cop's been on the take from Eichelberger for years, and he only accepts John's offer so he can spy for the racketeer.

William Holden pauses to watch Tom Tully take a walk in The Turning Point

Right there, I thought, you had potent noir material, but there was already something odd about the film's approach. The father-son story would be plot enough for a noir if the son were the central character, but Turning Point isn't really about John Conroy. Sure, O'Brien gets plenty of screen time, including a great scene in which he interrogates a cagily indignant Begley in a televised hearing, but mostly we see him and everyone else in the film through Jerry McKibbon's eyes. That could still work, since we can still empathize with someone reunited with an old friend who finds out something terrible (Dad's betrayal) the friend doesn't know. But in short order Jerry himself becomes a betrayal, starting an affair with Amanda behind Conroy's back. It turns out, however, that Conroy isn't quite as clueless as he seems. In a nicely written scene, just as Jerry and Amanda try to convince him not to quit the investigation, John makes it clear in one sentence, without histrionics, that he's on to them both. There's something almost Arthurian about this triangle, since all three people are plainly good guys, but there's also something forced about it, since I didn't really feel much chemistry between Holden and Smith.

A demoralized Edmond O'Brien sulks despite the entreaties of his so-called friends.

This being 1952, someone's got to take the fall, but not before more plot complications kick in. Along the way, Conroy's dad has been whacked for threatening to turn, and the man who shot him in a pretend-robbery was in turn shot down on the spot. McKibbon encounters this last man's widow, who can name the second shooter and potentially bring down Eichelberger's empire. Jerry saves her from some goons in a diner but loses track of her. As the widow frightfully makes her way to Conroy's office, McKibbon gets a tip that takes him to a boxing arena, where he's been set up to be taken out, he being the only good guy who can identify the widow. Someone squeals to Conroy, but it's Amanda who rushes to the arena to rescue Jerry, forcing the question of which of the lovers will pay for their indiscretion....

What really hurts the film is that neither Holden nor O'Brien seems fully committed to it. Holden's character is almost voyeuristically omniscient and doesn't seem weighed down by conventional responsibilities. He can come and go wherever he wants, whenever he wants, as if his job was wandering plot device rather than deadline-bound reporter. Holden just seems to float through the picture; even after Sunset Blvd., he doesn't yet command the screen as he would from Stalag 17 forward. Edmond O'Brien, arguably a definitive noir type, doesn't get to play that type here. He has to be a bland authority figure instead, and he invests the part with all the blandness in his power. Alexis Smith's part is simply underwritten; her character is in the picture just so there can be a triangle. The only actor fully on his game here is Ed Begley, who's masterful as Eichelberger. He's convincingly businesslike in his ruthlessness and defensive about his vocation. When you think of all the bluster Lee J. Cobb would have brought to this role you really appreciate what Begley does with it. Tom Tully is also very good as Conroy's compromised father, but we don't really get enough of a character around whom the whole film could have been built.

For the most part, Turning Point isn't noir in the strictest visual sense. It makes effective use of locations like many noirs, but it's low on expressionistic shadows and other obvious noir devices. Director Dieterle does come up with several strong set pieces, including the shootout that kills Conroy's father, the hearing showdown between Conroy and Eichelberger, and especially the climactic sequence at the arena. Dieterle milks this for maximum suspense as a gunman lurks on the catwalk above the action, waiting for his chance to shoot McKibbon, then pursues him urgently as the crowd flows out of the arena following an abrupt knockout. Overall, the film isn't really as bad as my disappointed review may suggest, but given everyone involved, it should have been much better.

TWO OF A KIND (1951)

Of the four films in Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's new Bad Girls of Film Noir Vol. 1 collection, only one, The Killer That Stalked New York, is listed in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's "encyclopedic" reference book on noir. Has Sony unearthed some deeply buried treasurers for restoration to the noir canon, or are they selling us a bill of goods? Moving on to the second film in the set, chronologically speaking, Henry Levin's Two of a Kind looks promising up front. It teams up two noir icons, Edmond O'Brien and Lizabeth Scott, in a hard-boiled tale of a scheme to sell O'Brien as a fake heir to a fortune. It starts off very hard-boiled. After looking for a likely subject across the country, Scott, conspiring with lawyer Alexander Knox, recruits O'Brien from a Bingo hall. He's an orphan, a grifter, a fighter and a sort of a war hero, an irresponsible sort except in a pinch. His recklessness matches Scott's ruthlessness. He's game for easy money even though it means getting the tip of one of his pinkies amputated to cinch his resemblance to a rich old couple's long-lost boy. He's got to do it the hard way, too. He can't just waltz into a doctor's office and say, "Cut that for me, will you?" He's got to mess his finger up so the doctor has to operate. That means letting Scott slam her car door on his doomed digit. He takes it like a trouper, though.

What would you rather do? Check other people's Bingo cards or get the tip of a finger lopped off on the chance of inheriting a fortune? Ask Edmond O'Brien in Two of a Kind.

One virtue of this script by Lawrence Kimble and James Gunn is that all our schemers are smart cookies, O'Brien included. They know better than to plant him on the old folks' doorstep in a bassinet. Instead, they work their way in through a relative, the couple's comely niece (Terry Moore) who's a friend of the Scott character. O'Brien is just a friend of a friend, taking his time and letting Moore notice the pinkie and ask questions about his past. Our hero enjoys taking his time, or making time, with the girl, and Scott finds herself feeling a little jealous.

Terry Moore is plenty tempting but too much of a "screwball" for O'Brien's taste. Howard Hughes thought differently, of course.

When Moore finally introduces O'Brien to the old man, his approach is a masterpiece of reverse psychology. He tells mostly the truth about his legitimately disreputable past and expresses profound skepticism about possibly being the old man's kid. Of course this makes the codger all the more impressed with O'Brien's sincerity, while a more rehearsed scene with the old lady appears to seal the deal. The old man tells the lawyer that he'll recognize O'Brien as his son, but adds that he'll leave the lad nothing, fearing that wealth would steer him back on the wrong road. Learning the news, O'Brien is resigned, Scott incensed and Knox murderous. A nice twist here is that, come the crisis, it's not the grifter nor the femme fatale but the weaselly lawyer who turns bloodthirsty, determined that his employer should meet an "accidental" death and somehow end up intestate, leaving it to Knox to divy up the estate to his satisfaction. O'Brien and Scott draw the line at homicide, but with all the dirt Knox has on both of them, what can they do?...

While Two of A Kind is a good, entertaining little hard-boiled comedy-drama, noir it is not. Stylistically, it doesn't come close. As for the story, in a way it's too hard-boiled to be noir, because in noir people hurt. In this film everyone's too smart to get hurt (except intentionally, of course, when you have a chance to make money from it), and the one character who gives in to a compulsion is the one least capable of carrying out his intentions. In the end, O'Brien and Scott are too intelligent to give in to temptations, unless you count their attraction to each other. I honestly didn't see the story developing that way from the first ten minutes. In a way, it was a charming surprise, with the leads doing some of their most likable work, but it is a bit of a cheat to have this film in a film noir collection -- though it's still far more worthy than the set's other Scott movie, Bad For Each Other. Both films are included solely because Scott is in them and is, career-wise, a Bad Girl of Film Noir. But don't hold Sony's sales tactics against Two of a Kind. It's not noir, but it's not bad, either.