Hear No Evil
Cornell Woolrich's novel The Black Path of Fear from 1944 was adapted into the 1946 film The Chase, directed by Arthur D. Ripley, starring Robert Cummings, Steve Cochran, Peter Lorre and French actress Michèle Morgan. The presence in the film of Lorre and Morgan points out the cultural benefit one nation may receive when another nation transforms into a totalitarian society.
Hollywood became the wartime home and workplace of numerous performers and film artists, a holding pool from the brain drain caused by Adolf Hitler's policies toward the arts. Once war came, French and British film stars, directors, and composers crossed the Atlantic Ocean to work in a warmer (figuratively and literally) environment. They brought with them original artistic ways of working and crafting a cinema that became, by war's end, a less light-hearted enterprise, generally, than Hollywood's wartime output of musicals, comedies, light dramas about families or young couples making do with restrictions required by rationing or housing shortages, plus lots of combat-oriented films in which the enemy, especially the Japanese, are depicted as subhuman automatons.
German directors like Fritz Lang (who made M in 1931, see the post about it in this blog) brought a dark viewpoint to their work, his film Scarlet Street, for example, one of the finest examples of not only a femme fatale (Joan Bennett) but also of the archetypical poor dumb cluck (Edward G. Robinson) who gets involved with her, manipulated by outside forces but also by his own desire for her. This same formula exists in The Postman Always Rings Twice from 1946, a watered down version of James M. Cain's original brutal novel, but still a powerful depiction of a sexed-up duo acting out of a need to remove themselves from a desperate situation that spells lack of freedom for the woman (Lana Turner).
By 1946, when The Chase came out, Hollywood was still producing lighter movies, but the post-Pearl Harbor attack period of nearly four years of total warfare that saw the defeat of the three Axis powers, massive casualties in the tens of millions, and what I imagine was a collective sigh of relief mixed with "What the fuck just happened?" led to a change in tone at the movies. When French film critics, after four years of occupation by the Germans, got to see new American movies they noticed the darkness and dubbed these crime and passion-tinged movies, "film noir," literally "dark movie."
Enter Robert Cummings, a genial actor with a pleasant handsome face, hardly the kind of rough-edged leading man one might expect in a typical dark film of the period. It's his soft and mild presence in The Chase that makes him perfect as the kind of protagonist to get sucked into a bad situation. Chance's role, which is to say randomness, comes to the fore when he finds a wallet with eighty-three dollars and an i.d. of someone named Edward Roman. He goes to a restaurant, he's clearly run down, penniless, and hungry. After eating and buying a cigar he makes his way to the address in the wallet.
It's an expensive place. Two men (one of them Peter Lorre) give him a hard time before they even let him inside the house, where Roman-type statuary overpopulates the spaces. Whoever lives here is rich, and, like many wealthy power-mongers, lacking in good taste. Lorre is Edward's "Eddie's" right-hand man. His movements are slow and silky, he smokes lots of cigarettes in a languid manner, he cracks wise in front of his boss, doesn't hold back from expressing his disagreements.
When introduced to Eddie Roman, Cummings (Chuck Scott) meets a man getting attended to by two women, a hairstylist and a manicurist. He overpraises the haircut as if he's making fun of her abilities, gets close to her face, leering at her. She's visibly disgusted by him, even though he's a handsome man. Steve Cochran fits the "tall, dark, and handsome" cliche. He was a good actor, playing Virginia Mayo's doomed lover in White Heat, and in Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido, he gave a powerful performance as a man down on his luck wandering the Italian countryside with his daughter. As Eddie Roman, he has a thin mustache, the kind that looked elegant on George Brent, but on him it looks like a trail of gunpowder.
It's never specified what Eddie does, but he's apparently a crook with several years of working various rackets that have led him to the kind of wealth that generates a sense of invincibility. He has a wife, Lorna, a gorgeous blonde woman with magnificent jewels and fashionable expensive clothes. She has no freedom away from her husband, except the drives she likes to take with Chuck Scott, who gets hired as Eddie's chauffeur. The former chauffeur just gets fired by Eddie without a moment of regret, an act that unsettles even the faithful Gino (Lorre's character).
Eddie is amused greatly by Chuck's returning his wallet and admitting up front that before he did so he bought himself breakfast and a cigar.
"How do you like that? An honest guy!"
Chuck moves in, taking a small room next to the garage. On call whenever Mr. or Mrs. Roman want a ride, he proceeds with a simple life with a steady income, at least until he begins to get a sense of what a lunatic his boss is. On the floor in the car's back is a contraption consisting of two pedals, a brake and an accelerator. With a switch, Eddie Roman can drive the car from the backseat, except he can't steer. Chuck, steering in the front, has to sometimes deal with speeds of 100 to 120 miles per hour, Roman all the while in the backseat smiling at the discomfort and fear he's causing Gino and Chuck.
The grossness of this disgusting human being (even while he dresses impeccably, in a white tuxedo for instance) gets worse and worse, especially when he deals with his wife, who exists for his own vanity. He sometimes locks her in her bedroom; he intrudes on her privacy, seizing at one point a note she's writing to him to explain her leaving him. Throughout the film, he's quite still most of the time, but then snapping into action like a striking snake. He hits his wife across the face with a rolled up newspaper.
Chuck, meanwhile, falls in love with Mrs. Roman; she wants him to take her to Cuba, to escape. He has no problem with this idea; he seems to be a go along to get along type, but there's something else going on in his character makeup: a Navy veteran, Chuck Scott suffers from Combat Stress Reaction, or Battle Fatigue--now called PTSD. He suffers memory lapses, and in a significant middle portion of the film, he acts urgently, as if an emergency is present. The emergency is Mrs. Roman's welfare, her need to escape from the prison of her marriage to a controlling asshole. Chuck must rescue her, but here the film enters a subplot I won't reveal, since it's crucial to the overall whole, especially the final twenty or so minutes.
It's a very good film, and a strange one at that. Cummings does a good job just by being a pliable character that other characters can stand out to in sharp contrast. Michèle Morgan seems too exotic for an American film noir, but she fits as a trophy wife. It's fun to hear her sexy French voice say, "Chuck."
Peter Lorre is, as always, excellent, a good example of a great actor playing second fiddle to the villain. His expressions and movements are so subtle, but he's always present in the scene, even when he looks weary or bored.
Steve Cochran is great as the asshole, Eddie Roman. A man completely full of himself. Had he lived as a Roman Emperor long ago, he may have deified himself, like Caligula did.
His contempt for women (he shoves his manicurist to the floor), his utter lack of conscience, have close parallels to some wealthy and powerful men in our own time. This type of asshole, unfortunately, exists in every century, every decade.
Vic Neptune
Cornell Woolrich's novel The Black Path of Fear from 1944 was adapted into the 1946 film The Chase, directed by Arthur D. Ripley, starring Robert Cummings, Steve Cochran, Peter Lorre and French actress Michèle Morgan. The presence in the film of Lorre and Morgan points out the cultural benefit one nation may receive when another nation transforms into a totalitarian society.
Hollywood became the wartime home and workplace of numerous performers and film artists, a holding pool from the brain drain caused by Adolf Hitler's policies toward the arts. Once war came, French and British film stars, directors, and composers crossed the Atlantic Ocean to work in a warmer (figuratively and literally) environment. They brought with them original artistic ways of working and crafting a cinema that became, by war's end, a less light-hearted enterprise, generally, than Hollywood's wartime output of musicals, comedies, light dramas about families or young couples making do with restrictions required by rationing or housing shortages, plus lots of combat-oriented films in which the enemy, especially the Japanese, are depicted as subhuman automatons.
German directors like Fritz Lang (who made M in 1931, see the post about it in this blog) brought a dark viewpoint to their work, his film Scarlet Street, for example, one of the finest examples of not only a femme fatale (Joan Bennett) but also of the archetypical poor dumb cluck (Edward G. Robinson) who gets involved with her, manipulated by outside forces but also by his own desire for her. This same formula exists in The Postman Always Rings Twice from 1946, a watered down version of James M. Cain's original brutal novel, but still a powerful depiction of a sexed-up duo acting out of a need to remove themselves from a desperate situation that spells lack of freedom for the woman (Lana Turner).
By 1946, when The Chase came out, Hollywood was still producing lighter movies, but the post-Pearl Harbor attack period of nearly four years of total warfare that saw the defeat of the three Axis powers, massive casualties in the tens of millions, and what I imagine was a collective sigh of relief mixed with "What the fuck just happened?" led to a change in tone at the movies. When French film critics, after four years of occupation by the Germans, got to see new American movies they noticed the darkness and dubbed these crime and passion-tinged movies, "film noir," literally "dark movie."
Enter Robert Cummings, a genial actor with a pleasant handsome face, hardly the kind of rough-edged leading man one might expect in a typical dark film of the period. It's his soft and mild presence in The Chase that makes him perfect as the kind of protagonist to get sucked into a bad situation. Chance's role, which is to say randomness, comes to the fore when he finds a wallet with eighty-three dollars and an i.d. of someone named Edward Roman. He goes to a restaurant, he's clearly run down, penniless, and hungry. After eating and buying a cigar he makes his way to the address in the wallet.
It's an expensive place. Two men (one of them Peter Lorre) give him a hard time before they even let him inside the house, where Roman-type statuary overpopulates the spaces. Whoever lives here is rich, and, like many wealthy power-mongers, lacking in good taste. Lorre is Edward's "Eddie's" right-hand man. His movements are slow and silky, he smokes lots of cigarettes in a languid manner, he cracks wise in front of his boss, doesn't hold back from expressing his disagreements.
When introduced to Eddie Roman, Cummings (Chuck Scott) meets a man getting attended to by two women, a hairstylist and a manicurist. He overpraises the haircut as if he's making fun of her abilities, gets close to her face, leering at her. She's visibly disgusted by him, even though he's a handsome man. Steve Cochran fits the "tall, dark, and handsome" cliche. He was a good actor, playing Virginia Mayo's doomed lover in White Heat, and in Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido, he gave a powerful performance as a man down on his luck wandering the Italian countryside with his daughter. As Eddie Roman, he has a thin mustache, the kind that looked elegant on George Brent, but on him it looks like a trail of gunpowder.
It's never specified what Eddie does, but he's apparently a crook with several years of working various rackets that have led him to the kind of wealth that generates a sense of invincibility. He has a wife, Lorna, a gorgeous blonde woman with magnificent jewels and fashionable expensive clothes. She has no freedom away from her husband, except the drives she likes to take with Chuck Scott, who gets hired as Eddie's chauffeur. The former chauffeur just gets fired by Eddie without a moment of regret, an act that unsettles even the faithful Gino (Lorre's character).
Eddie is amused greatly by Chuck's returning his wallet and admitting up front that before he did so he bought himself breakfast and a cigar.
"How do you like that? An honest guy!"
Chuck moves in, taking a small room next to the garage. On call whenever Mr. or Mrs. Roman want a ride, he proceeds with a simple life with a steady income, at least until he begins to get a sense of what a lunatic his boss is. On the floor in the car's back is a contraption consisting of two pedals, a brake and an accelerator. With a switch, Eddie Roman can drive the car from the backseat, except he can't steer. Chuck, steering in the front, has to sometimes deal with speeds of 100 to 120 miles per hour, Roman all the while in the backseat smiling at the discomfort and fear he's causing Gino and Chuck.
The grossness of this disgusting human being (even while he dresses impeccably, in a white tuxedo for instance) gets worse and worse, especially when he deals with his wife, who exists for his own vanity. He sometimes locks her in her bedroom; he intrudes on her privacy, seizing at one point a note she's writing to him to explain her leaving him. Throughout the film, he's quite still most of the time, but then snapping into action like a striking snake. He hits his wife across the face with a rolled up newspaper.
Chuck, meanwhile, falls in love with Mrs. Roman; she wants him to take her to Cuba, to escape. He has no problem with this idea; he seems to be a go along to get along type, but there's something else going on in his character makeup: a Navy veteran, Chuck Scott suffers from Combat Stress Reaction, or Battle Fatigue--now called PTSD. He suffers memory lapses, and in a significant middle portion of the film, he acts urgently, as if an emergency is present. The emergency is Mrs. Roman's welfare, her need to escape from the prison of her marriage to a controlling asshole. Chuck must rescue her, but here the film enters a subplot I won't reveal, since it's crucial to the overall whole, especially the final twenty or so minutes.
It's a very good film, and a strange one at that. Cummings does a good job just by being a pliable character that other characters can stand out to in sharp contrast. Michèle Morgan seems too exotic for an American film noir, but she fits as a trophy wife. It's fun to hear her sexy French voice say, "Chuck."
Peter Lorre is, as always, excellent, a good example of a great actor playing second fiddle to the villain. His expressions and movements are so subtle, but he's always present in the scene, even when he looks weary or bored.
Steve Cochran is great as the asshole, Eddie Roman. A man completely full of himself. Had he lived as a Roman Emperor long ago, he may have deified himself, like Caligula did.
His contempt for women (he shoves his manicurist to the floor), his utter lack of conscience, have close parallels to some wealthy and powerful men in our own time. This type of asshole, unfortunately, exists in every century, every decade.
Vic Neptune
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