Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the crime noir, Dark City.
DVD Review
Dark City, starring Charleston Heston, Lizabeth Scott, Dean Jagger, Jack Webb, Harry Morgan, Paramount Pictures, 1950
No question after running through a seemingly endless run of crime noir films that not all the films in the genre are equal. The classics like The Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon, Gilda, and Out Of The Past speak for themselves with fine plot lines and slightly awry femme fatales to brighten things up. The film under review, although not in that category, could have been better had it not gotten caught up in some melodramatic flim-flam and stayed the hard-boiled, gritty classic grifter story that it set out to be. The outlines of the plot surely gave more promise that was delivered.
Down in those post-World War II means streets out West a lot of war-weary, war-tousled, war-scarred guys tried to do, well, the best they could. And the best they could usually was some grifter scheme to make a score off some bozo mark and hit the road, hit the road fast, and leave no forwarding address. That is the substance of the plot here. Ex-soldier (World War II just in case you might have forgotten, or were not sure what war I was talking about since there are many to choose from these days) Dan Healy (played in an understated, post-war alienated, existential man kind of way by Charleston Heston before he became Moses or Ben Hur or whatever big screen techno-color champ he became later) make his downwardly mobile way to grifter-dom in some seedy skid row town.
Dan's thing is gambling and, of course, for such an endeavor you need suckers with dough, easily parted with dough. And, as well, some confederates in on the scam. That is the case here as Dan and two fellow grifters (one played by Jack Webb before he got “religion” and became Sergeant Friday on the 1950s television show, Dragnet) rope in the sucker, a guy holding a five thousand dollar check (serious money, serious money down on mean street then) although the money is not actually his. Needless to say a fool and his dough are soon parted.
And that is where things start to go wrong with this film (as well as in the lives of our three gamblers). Filled with remorse the mark (played by Don DeFore) can’t face the horror of going back and confessing to his employers that he blew the dough on gambling, and instead hanged himself in his lonely room. Not for him the easy road of blowing town and changing his name, toughing it out, or even filing a court claim against the miscreant gamblers. In short, nobody, nobody this side of Hollywood takes the rope on the facts presented here. And then it gets worst. See the mark has an older dominating brother who watches out for him. Now this suicide business once he finds out the cause gets him a little exercised. See the brother is a stone-cold psycho and he is out to even the score-three dead, very dead gamblers.
Well, if you have been paying attention you know that Charleston Heston, the star and therefore kill-proof, is one of those marked for extinction so the other two get their just desserts and old Heston squeaks by after some close moments. The problem is when we see finally see who the killer-brother is there is no way that anyone could believe, or at least I could believe, that this gorilla was anybody’s brother. Come on.
The other place where the film goes wrong is on the inevitable love interest angle. Now Danny boy, who spends a good part of the film moodily cutting up old torches from back in the day, has a sort of girlfriend. A very fetching smoky-voiced chanteuse, Fran, (played by Lizabeth Scott) girlfriend who wears her heart on her sleeve for him, although he is mostly indifferent to her. No femme fatale here-just a what you see is what you get gal who can sing the blues, while having them over her man who done her wrong. The problem is that the chemistry between Danny and Fran is all wrong, all wrong alls ways. Fran is the girl next door and Danny, is well Danny, a grifter and the two don’t mix. And the plot gets further muddied when Dan, trying to get a lead of where the mark’s brother is, starts to play footsie with the dead mark's non-grieving widow. So you see now what I mean when I say that not all crime noirs are created equal.
No comments:
Post a Comment