Director: Richard Fleischer
Cast: Bill Williams, Barbara Hale, Richard Quine, Richard Loo
Have I Seen it Before: Nope.
Did I Like It: It’s a little difficult to write a review of this immediately after my review of Night Editor (1946)*, as they both have the same fundamental problem: a softness that flies in the face of the very core of film noir. A happy ending might make the second, b-picture in a double-bill go down smoother, but it leaves me thinking that the lengths which Jim (Williams) goes to get out of his bind—including becoming a fugitive from justice and manhandling the wife (Hale) of the army buddy he may be responsible for killing—as perfectly reasonable and something somebody ought to do when they’re in trouble.
Imagine if Touch of Evil (1958) had ended with Orson Welles, and Charlton Heston letting bygones be bygones and went out for tacos at the end of that film? Or take a neo-noir like Fargo (1996), and have it end with William H. Macy and Frances McDormand meeting Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare at the Radisson at the end, chalking the whole kidnapping plot up to a misunderstanding.
It’s even worse when one considers that the film could have been expanded and made a halfway decent 1970s paranoia thriller in the vein of Three Days of the Condor (1975) or The Parallax View (1974), and has been self-consciously imitated by Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014). Everyone wants to seem to call this noir, it was programmed in an ongoing noir series, but I think the film isn’t even all that interested in wanting to be noir. That’s okay! It can be another kind of film, we just need to finally tie down just what is and what isn’t noir. Not a problem. I’ll wait patiently here while the rest of you figure it out.
*After watching them both in a double feature at Circle Cinema.