***Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Crime Noir Night- Fred MacMurray’s “Pushover”-A Review

DVD Review

Pushover, starring Fred MacMurray, Kim Novak, Columbia Pictures, 1954

Okay, once again, here is the drill, the crime noir drill anyway, crime does not pay. We have had our noses rubbed into that little ditty every time we check out a black and whites 1950s crime film (maybe earlier too but the film under review is a classic 1950s cinematic production). So yes we have got it. Yah, but what they didn’t tell you, not that it would have helped once a guy got his wanting habits on. Got all fouled so bad that he would face the gallows with a smile, or half-smile anyway and though he had spent his luck well when some stray femme fatale, all blond and curvy, not Marilyn Monroe blond and curvy but still a nice package, came at a guy. Came at him with her one hundred dollar an ounce perfume scent, in 1950s dollars scent, some sandalwood, gardenia, orchid, who knows, and her come hither smile.

That same blonde, that same package, and damn that same scent that got a guy, guys, usually rationale and business-like stick-em-up bank robber guys or guardian of law-and-order guys, kind of screwy and dreaming funny dreams. Yeah, and like I said have, in the end, the latter, Jesus, hard-nosed cops, doing screwy stuff with enough moxie to face the chair, or face a stray bullet or two, with kind of an ironic smile just for another whiff of that expensive perfume. Yah, they don’t tell you about that part. But I will, because in that just mentioned end, the film under review, Pushover, is all about that crazy stuff a good-looking dame can make a guy, maybe any guy, do. And even Karl Marx, and his kindred, haven’t figured a way around that one when they were figuring how to deal with the three great tragedies of life-hunger, sex and death.

I might as well start at the beginning. Harry, like a lot of guys, didn’t like nine-to- five work, although such guys, like the rest of us, needed dough for this and that. Dough to spend on some wanting habits she mainly, but also coffee and cakes. So Harry did what came natural to such guys-rob a bank (with a confederate of course). Hey like the old time bank robber Willie Sutton said –“that’s where the dough is.” He got the dough okay, a couple of hundred thousand (not much today, hardly walking daddy money, but serious money in the 1950s, serious easy street money until it ran out and you needed to plan another caper), but the heist got fouled up, as usual, when some bank guard (seemingly unaware that the bank was probably insured and, in any case, that it wasn’t his dough) decided to play hero. Harry threw a couple of bullets his way and that was that.

Except in 1950s law and order America, and now too, killing bank guards sets the citizenry aflame and so the cops had to press hard on this one to stop the bad press. And here is where the fatal perfume scent comes in. See, Harry, like many a guy has a woman, a “kept”woman in the parlance of the day, Lona (played by Kim Novak), who he keeps coming back to for one more whiff of that scent that he has paid for. (And other stuff too but remember this is a 1950s movie so we won’t mention s-x.) And that is where the law gets a break. Somehow they find out about Lona and have her followed. Why? You know why just as well as you know the cat will go after catnip.

Lona is followed by a kind of cynical, hard-bitten, seen it all career cop, Paul (played by Fred MacMurray), whose “job” is to get close to her. Well he does, but he doesn’t figure on that scent. The scent that will lead him, and gladly, down a crooked road. See Lona had her own agenda.

Her own agenda being to get Harry’s dough and run off, maybe to Mexico, where the living is cheap and nobody, nobody with any sense, asks questions. Nobody who wants to stay alive past the age of twenty-one. In any case somewhere far away, some white picket fence cottage for two far away. Paul resisted the idea for a while but you know it would be a very short film if he didn’t succumb. And if you saw Lona, and the whole package, you would know why too.

Of course the best laid plans of mice or men go awry, real awry. The plan is to set up Harry, bump him off under the usual “trying to escape” police gag, grab the dough and scram to that little dream cottage future. No problem, easy as pie, just like clock-work and all the other clichés. Not. The thing unravels by the minute and every improvisation by Paul only gets turned around against him. As his fellow cops finally get around to figuring out he has gone “rogue” he has gotten into such frenzy about the dough that he kind of fatalistically pushes on. And in the end takes those stray cop bullets that have his name on them kind of smiling, an ironic smile. See what a dame will do to a guy, a rationale guy. But what are you going to do.

Note: Fred MacMurray should have seen this coming. It is not like he hasn’t been down that blond femme fatale road before. He took a couple of stray bullets for a smile from Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity after an insurance scam they were running went south on them (with her dead, very dead but very insure husband as the odd man) so he was forewarned. Hell, he didn’t even need to smell that perfume all she had to do is show a little ankle bracelet coming down the stairs and he was a goner. But what are you going to do, what is any guy to do. All I can say is he had better stay away from those blonde dames with big crooked plans. I suggest a brunette next time.