Whiplash

Shake together John Garfield's roles as a violinist in Humoresque and a prizefighter in Body and Soul (hits of the previous couple of years), and out comes Dane Clark's character in Whiplash. He's a beach bum who daubs canvases in a coastal town near San Francisco. But when reclusive vacationer Alexis Smith buys one of his seascapes, she ignites a torch in him that won't sputter out. When she abruptly departs, he travels east and sets up a studio in New York while he tracks her down. It proves a bad career move.

He finds Smith singing in a nightclub, only to discover that she's married to Zachary Scott, its owner and a former middleweight champ now confined to a wheelchair. Scott, sadistic and embittered, lives the fight game vicariously – through the cohort of ex-boxers who keep his wife in place and through new talent he exploits then drops. In Clark, he sees a contender. Wanting to keep close to Smith (who keeps warning him off), Clark signs up for work on another kind of canvas....

In addition to the always welcome Alexis Smith, the movie boasts good supporting work from Eve Arden, a gal pal with a crush on Clark, and from Jeffrey Lynn, as Smith's alcoholic brother, a doctor working in Scott's gym. Scott himself brings nothing new to the kind of part he found himself typecast in: the effete, insinuating villain. That leaves Clark, who was plainly being groomed as the second-string Garfield but who never left much of an impression on the movies.

The direction, by the undistinguished Lewis Seiler, can only be graded adequate; he keeps things moving along but never tries for anything different or offbeat or striking. In this he's matched by a lackluster script (it was the late ‘40s; couldn't the dialogue have been a little more etched?). Nonetheless, Whiplash endures as a routine B-movie, with noirish coloration, that reflects the themes and plot-lines of post-war melodrama.

Mike (Dane Clark) is a nice guy who loves to paint. One day, he meets Laurie and they fall in love. However, Laurie is an odd one...hot one minute, cold the next. And, soon, without warning, she simply disappears. Not surprisingly, Mike is a mess and spends a lot of time looking for her. His search leads him back east and he eventually learns that she's the wife of a hood. Rex (Zachary Scott) is a rich, menacing sort of guy who seems, at times, like a cat playing with mice. So, when he offers to train Mike and make him a champion boxer, you know that somehow it's all part of Rex's machinations...and you wonder WHAT he has in mind for his wife and Mike.

This film has some wonderful and snappy noir-style dialog. So much of what Rex says seems to be oozing with menace and the writers did a nice job of this one. It also helped that although this was more of a 'second-stringer' sort of movie with the lesser stars at Warner, they all are simply terrific. My only complaint, and it's a problem in most boxing films, is that the matches are unrealistic...with WAY too many punches being thrown and landed throughout the fights. Still, a hard-hitting film with lots to recommned it.

By the way, I was originally going to give this one an 8. However, the ending turned out to be so cool and satisfying, it earned an extra point. WOW...what a finale!

I couldn't get past the preposterous meet-cute opening premise: that unsuccessful artist Dane Clark was so morally outraged by the purchase of one of his paintings (his first sale!) by Alexis Smith, that he goes to her place to refund her money. I mean, what struggling painter does that? Much less enter her home unbidden to snoop around. Van Gogh lopping off an ear makes more sense.

Still, nice to see Zachary Scott doing what he does best, playing a dapper heel, albeit a slightly psychotic one with no wheelchair brakes.

Plus S. Z. Sakall, comfortably Casablanca cast as a restaurant owner. It gives you a sense of what Rick's Place must have been like after Bogie split for Brazzaville and left Carl the Waiter in charge.

"Whiplash" was a routine offering from Warner Brothers in the late forties but routine in those days also meant efficient, entertaining and well worth seeing. It is only when you see films like this one which are sixty years old and in black and white to realise that the equivalent does not exist in cinema any more. Television has taken over this sort of story but still cannot do it as well or cover effectively scenes in boxing arenas or large scale venues in their stories. The Warner Brothers rep company was also a very good one: Davis, Crawford and co were, of course, the front runners at this time, but this cast shows how professional and talented the second string actors were in those days. Dane Clark was never a star but here he gives a highly efficient and convincing performance, carrying the film with ease and confidence. Alexis Smith (cruelly underestimated and underused until her later years) is excellent as the unhappy heroine, married to sadistic Zachary Scott but in love with Clark. She had a much wider range than most people gave her credit for (She was to win a "Tony" on Broadway for her performance in Sondheim's "Follies") and was always a welcome actress in anything she did. Scott plays one of his usual villains but always played them with style and panache. The divine Eve Arden has a few good scenes but is wasted - and Jeffrey Lynn, usually a somewhat pallid and passive actor, is here very good as Smith's drunken brother who finally resolves the story by his actions. Not a marvellous film, of course, but thoroughly watchable and carefully made.

Boxing film. But it takes a long time to get there. At the beginning, Mike (Dane Clark) tell the kids how he used to a fighter, and then we're in flashback. We see how he was an artist when he met Laurie (Alexis Smith). He gets in a brawl, and is talked into earning big money as a boxer. Fun co-stars... SZ Sakall Cuddles was in every single b&w film in the 1940s, along with Alan Hale Senior. Hale was Dad of The Skipper, on Gilligan's Island. Eve Arden and Zack Scott were both so awesome in Mildred Pierce. A couple of fun numbers done at the Pelican Club; a ballad "sung" by Laurie, and a fun bit by "a vocal group", according to imdb; it's a shame they aren't credited in the cast list or the Soundtrack page, as of today. It looks like they changed the lyrics from A Girl to The Guy when it's sung by a female group. The story is good enough, but it never really takes off. The first five minutes the film really jumps around, so i hope you don't get seasick. Directed by Lewis Seiler. Started in silents, making shorts. This one is okay. Not a lot of chemistry, but the story is sound.