Pitfall

It's sad it is now 60 years after this film was released and we still don't have this available on DVD. You even have to pay big bucks to find a used VHS copy. It's "sad" because it is a fine film noir and would make an excellent addition to anyone's noir collection. So many film noirs are now on disc, where is this one??!!

I found you can't go wrong with Dick Powell in a film noir, and Lisabeth Scott certainly ranks among the all-time femme fatales in the genre's history. Add an unlikely pair of actors like Jane Wyatt and Raymond Burr, and Director Andre de Toth and you really have an interesting "old" crime story. "Crime Wave" and "Ramrod," two other fairly unknown-but-excellent hard-bitten noirs were also done by de Toth.

I am always amazed how Powell made such a tremendous career switch from Busby Berkely crooner and romantic to the hard-boiled detective or whatever (a restless insurance agent in here, believe it or not) while Scott seems to have always owned those "loser dame" roles. Between those two and the menacing Burr, who always was that until his Perry Mason TV days, I really enjoying watching this trio.

The film also featured Harry Wild's fine noir photography. Wild was the cinematographer on at least a half dozen film noirs, beginning with "Murder My Sweet" in the beginning of the period, so he knew what he was doing.

Dick Powell is the insurance investigator. Raymond Burr is the private eye who does contract work for the insurance company. Lizabeth Scott is the girlfriend of the guy who stole a bunch of loot.

Naturally, every guy falls in love with Scott. Director Andre De Toth draws out a believably warm, human quality in her performance. Powell's character is so bored stiff at home with super-sweet wife Jane Wyatt that he chases the first dame who bats an eyelash at him. His wry delivery of some very clever lines seems fresh to this day. Burr's character is a nasty creep who probably murders h00kers in his spare time so his stalking Scott is completely believable. Once they mix in the old boyfriend, who gets sprung from jail in time for the Third Act, things get murder-y.

To be honest, I expected a different character to die. Or at least get arrested. In any event, the wrong character got the comeuppance. It may have had something to do with the Hayes Office. Would be fun to see a remake.

This is an all-around great noir film, as well as a very chilling anticipation of the sterlingness of the coming 50's ethos of home and fidelity at any price. Dick Powell gives a great performance as a man so tired of life and full of malaise that he can hardly stumble through his days as an insurance adjuster and "loving" father . Raymond Burr is the antithesis of his later Perry Mason (or the good-hearted Paul Drake) as a creepy detective stalking the low-rent Lizabeth Scott. And Jane Wyatt is (unintentionally?) the scariest of them all as Powells' homemaking wife. (After her son has a nightmare, she blames his comic books - and takes them away to be burned!) Pitfall is a fine example of the type of noir film that explores not the criminal underworld but the hidden pain and loneliness of the "everyman".

It's still funny to think that Powell was originally a song and dance man. He does the hard boiled noir character fairly well. Straight laced, stiff but a sucker for a femme fatale. Burr is sufficiently creepy - not perhaps to the extreme of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal but sufficient nonetheless. It's often interesting to see what kind of careers many actors played before they became famous or landed their most well known roles. This is one of those roles for him. I don't find Lizabeth Scott very believable as a model. She has a funny speech pattern and looks like a heavy smoker. Of course, smoking was considered glamorous in those days. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy her acting in the right roles. But a seductress she is not.

The story works as a basic noir plot. When I read that Jay Dratler was the author I understood why I liked it. He is the author of the original story of Call Northside 777 and Laura which are both well written.

It feels Jane Wyatt is still trying to play Margaret Anderson. Maybe that's what the director wanted but her acting seems out of place. She does well as the faithful, sweet wife. But it just doesn't fit.

Unfortunately the film quality of the version I watched was not too good. It was either washed out or overexposed. That\s not the fault of the film makers but it did effect my further enjoyment of the film. It would be worth restoring.

All film reviews are opinions and you know what they say about opinions...

Overall I liked the film and I'm glad I discovered it. Thank you again TCM!

Andre De Toth's Pitfall opens in the shaky sanctuary of post-war domestic bliss. Jane Wyatt cracks eggs into a cast-iron skillet, to be served to her insurance-claims adjuster husband Dick Powell and their tousle-haired young son; the cozy breakfast nook where they exchange morning what-if banter looks out upon a vista of the New California of subdivisions and revolving credit and sunny possibilities yet to be realized. But, as Wyatt drives Powell into downtown Los Angeles (two-car families still being around the corner), he grouses absently about his routine job and clockwork schedule before giving her a perfunctory peck on the cheek. The canker has invaded the rose. As he later confesses, he feels he's in a rut `six feet deep,' and yearns for freedom – adventure. He gets more than he bargained for.

Waiting for him in his office is `Gruesome,' private investigator Raymond Burr, who's done some legwork concerning a convicted felon who has defrauded the company. The felon (Byron Barr) squandered most of his ill-gained money showering his girlfriend (Lizabeth Scott) with furs, an engagement ring and even a little speedboat. Burr, in the course of his sleazy sleuthing, has taken quite an obsessive fancy to her, but Powell warns him off, saying he'll wrap the case up himself.

At first Scott dismisses Powell as just `a little man with a briefcase,' an assessment that tallies too well with his own worst self-image. But to no one's surprise, in this climate of Pacific air and marital dissatisfaction, he ends up taking his own fancy to her, one that turns out to be mutual. They tear around the harbor in her boat, then fritter away the rest of the afternoon in a dim cocktail lounge. He doesn't get back to hearth and home ‘till the wee small hours.

One night when his son is awakened by nightmares, Powell lectures him: `Take only good pictures and have only good dreams.' It's a case of do what I say, not what I do. By veering off from the straight and narrow, Powell has set into motion a chain of baleful events. The vindictive Burr assaults him outside his garage. Scott discovers that Powell's been hiding his life as a married father. Ex-cop Burr starts visiting Barr in stir, sowing seeds of jealousy and plans for revenge. Events converge one dreadful night with an unplanned pair of killings that leave the quick, arguably, worse off than the dead....

Jay Dratler's script (from his own novel) shows a progressive streak in dealing with the short and unpredictable fuses of controlling, potentially violent males – stalkers. The script also serves the assembled cast well. True, there's not much to be done with Wyatt, with her cap-sleeved house-dresses and finishing-school elocution, but she's more plausible than she would be two years later as a highly unlikely femme fatale in The Man Who Cheated Himself. Here, she's the distaff side of those male dictators, a wife whose ideals of suburban decorum are chiseled into cold marble (she's a faint forerunner of Joan Crawford's Harriet Craig).

But Powell gets to tap deeply into his key emotion, snappish discontent, and lets it deepen into something close to small-time tragedy. Scott, always an iconic presence but an actress with limits, finds a comfortable part as a bewildered and vulnerable victim of the men who come into her life, bidden and unbidden. Burr, billed fourth (after Wyatt!), possibly fares best. Much in demand in the late ‘40s as one of the creepiest heavies, he earned that demand by providing extra (and maybe unasked-for) dimensions to the thugs he played. Like the giant Fafner in Das Rheingold, he lets a bit of yearning, of desperation, show under all his intimidating bulk (and in sheer avoirdupois, it's one of his biggest roles).

De Toth, better remembered for his westerns and 3-D horror pix like House of Wax, made, in Pitfall, one of the more distinctive titles of the noir cycle. Not often mentioned in top-ten lists, even those of black-and-white crime films of the post-war era, it has the effrontery to situate deceit and duplicity and betrayal where it surely ought not to belong – not in road houses or tenement flats but right at the heart of a storybook American family (it's one of the more subversive films of the era).. Yes, there are lapses, chief among which is a score that keeps trying to crack corny little jokes. But in the denouement – far from unleashing a hideous storm of terror, De Toth opts for cold detachment – he casts a chill that lingers still.