Bodyguard

Up until a few weeks ago, I only knew cult 40s tough guy Lawrence Tierney from his role in Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS (1991); recently, however, I managed to watch his 2 vehicles released on DVD by Warners as part of their "Film Noir Collection Vol. 2", namely DILLINGER (1945) and BORN TO KILL (1947). This Richard Fleischer film, then, would be my third from Tierney's short period of glory.

Actually, the actor is the best thing about the whole movie - whose story, amazingly, was co-written by a very young Robert Altman! - as it's certainly a minor noir, albeit an enjoyable one; indeed, Tierney's cynical, no-nonsense attitude (reminiscent of Bogart, Mitchum and Robert Ryan) provides a good deal of amusement throughout. Still, the plot - a discredited cop uncovering corruption in a meat-packing company, when appointed to protect the elderly female proprietor - is nothing special and also kind of dreary; besides, the jovial personality of leading lady Priscilla Lane is as much unsuited to Tierney's hard-boiled façade as she is to the inherent bleakness of the genre!

This film is not about bodyguards. It is based on a story co-authored by the 23 year-old Robert Altman, his first screen credit. Dick Fleischer, just getting into his stride, here directs his first noir thriller, which was followed the next year by his brilliant 'The Clay Pigeon'. This film is not brilliant, but it is good, and would have been better if many minutes had not been cut out of it. Lawrence Tierney (no relation to Gene Tierney), who for years was a reliable tough guy, here plays a sympathetic cop who wants to get rough with the bad guys and is thrown off the Force, briefly taking on a bodyguard role (though that is just incidental), and becomes enmired in a frame-up and plenty of trouble. His doting girl friend is played charmingly by Priscilla Lane, in her last film before retiring from the screen at the age of 33. Tierney has a knockabout charm of his own, and grim-faced though he tends to be, can be grimly determined to nail the baddies and not only grimly determined to be wicked, as he was in other movies. There is a lot of harrowing business in a meat-packing plant, with dangerous saws and hooks on all sides, people getting killed by them, etc. So the menace is not spared. This is a solid if light-weight B thriller.

Tough-talking mug Lawrence Tierney is the hero of this quick and dirty cheapy from 1948. He plays a detective who's kicked off the force for being a hot head, and gets a job moonlighting as the bodyguard for an elderly lady (Elizabeth Risdon), matriarch and acting manager of a large and successful meat-packing company, whose life is being threatened for unknown reasons. Of course it's not long before we and Tierney realize that he's been set up to be the fall guy for a crooked plot to swindle the company away from the old lady, and he helps crack the case with the help of his girl Friday Priscilla Lane.

"Bodyguard" is almost laughingly short and inconsequential, but it's an awful lot of fun. There's nothing especially striking about the writing or visual style, but yet it doesn't feel anonymous either. There are some clever set pieces to distinguish the film, most notably a scene that takes place in an optometrist's office and that uses some clever lighting and framing. And Tierney has a cute relationship with Lane, and it's refreshing to see a woman in a film like this take an active role in solving the crime rather than simply be someone the leading man has to rescue.

Robert Altman (credited as Robert B. Altman) wrote the story for this film at the ripe old age of 25.

Far from a must see, but enjoyable if you can find it.

Grade: B-

Slick,speedy 'B' thriller with on(and off!)screen tough guy Lawrence Tierney as a suspended cop eventually agreeing to do some work on the side as a bodyguard for a wealthy family.The plot is inevitably fairly routine,but there are some well-handled scenes,and it remains watchable.One fact not usually mentioned;this was the final screen appearance of Priscilla Lane(best known for her roles in WARNER BROS. classics in the 30's,and Hitchcock's SABOTEUR);she was still far too young and surely had more years ahead as a screen actress.Her performance in her screen bow is OK,like Tierney and the rest of the cast.Director Richard Flesicher had better 'B' efforts up his sleeve though(THE NARROW MARGIN),a few years later.

A consensus seems to exist among commentators on Richard Fleischer's Bodyguard, based on a story by the young Robert Altman. The consensus is that, as it stands, it fails to satisfy; the background to this verdict is that somewhere there is – or at least was – a longer cut of the picture that probably would have been, if not a little masterpiece of film noir, a less nettlesome movie.

Feral Lawrence Tierney, a detective fired from the force for insubordination, gets offered the job of bodyguard to a old woman whose wealth comes from the meat-packing industry. At first reluctant, he accepts when shots shatter a mirror in the woman's home. Following her on a nocturnal errand, he's coshed on the head and comes to in his car parked on railway tracks; riding shotgun is the police officer who fired him, dead. Now the prime suspect, he lams up.

Assisting him in his efforts to clear himself is Priscilla Lane, his mole in police headquarters. (They devise a curious means of communication. She reads the files onto 78s and delivers them to a record store where he listens to them in a booth.) It turns out that his murdered superior investigated the death of a meat inspector at one of the plants owned by his employer....

What remains of the movie is directed with pace and even some style by Richard Fleischer (The Narrow Margin, Armored Car Robbery, The Boston Strangler; he showed a lot of sass in his early days, before he ossified into a hack.) But what we lack compromises what we have. The 13 minutes excised from the movie somewhere along the line no doubt patch up the holes in the leaky plot – like, who knew Tierney was off to the optometrist's office and set up the ambush?

A fuller version would probably make, as has been remarked, for a more grisly final confrontation, a la Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, in the meat-processing plant; in the print in common circulation, it abruptly fizzles out. Certainly, that's the lack most keenly felt. What with the meat saws whining and the meat grinders rumbling, surely Fleischer did not conclude the story with the malefactor hurling an empty pistol, bootlessly, at Tierney – to be followed, almost instantly, with Tierney and Lane leaving on their honeymoon. Somewhere out there, a few links of blood sausage are missing.