Flaxy Martin

Catch that great scene where Flaxy (Mayo) beats up a blackmailing Peggy, (Westcott) with the timid hotel clerk hovering outside the door. Big-eyed Westcott really delivers in spades. Too bad the rest of the movie fails to reach that intense level. Looks to me like Warner Bros. used the film as an A-team try-out for cast principals and director. Now, Scott, for one, comes through perfectly as the lawyer with a wobbly compass— I'm just sorry this fine, exotic actor never got the recognition his talent deserved. The material, however, with its nifty double- cross, really merited an A-team director, like Walsh or Curtiz. Instead, the studio gave featurette director Richard Bare a shot, and the result shows he had little feel for the dark material.

Unfortunately, the movie is inferior grade noir, lacking in both style and edge. Take the early scene where Walt (Scott) and Hap (Kennedy) iron out wrinkles in the plot to free Caesar (Overman) from a murder rap. They're standing stock still in Hap's living room, talking, and that's the trouble: they stand stock still for about two minutes doing little more than delivering their lines. Thus, a potentially dramatic scene of rivalry calling for an expressive dynamic falls flat, drained of needed energy and tension.

But Bare seems most at sea in directing the lead actresses. Mayo looks lost in her key scenes with Scott— the second side of Flaxy's devious personality, the calculating side, fails to appear, and thus we're left with a very pretty girl speaking the lines, but without the necessary depth. Catch Malone too in the graveside scene. She's an unsophisticated librarian staring into the open pit of her own doom, but judging from the absence of needed emotion, she might as well be reading a book. Now, Malone later proved a fine actress of many dimensions, (e.g. Written on the Wind {1955}). Here, however, she's stuck in a thankless good girl role, so likely director Bare is at fault for not giving her the necessary cues. I suspect the movie would have improved had actresses Malone and Mayo switched roles.

Then too, Walt's sudden turn-around with 40 grand in his pocket is awkwardly handled. Even an A-grade filmmaker would have trouble making this bit of Production Code hokum believable, but in Bare's hands it comes across as little more than a clumsily developed happy ending. Thus, it's not surprising that the studio returned the director to making the humorous shorts he was so good at following this failed experiment. I also better understand why editors Silver and Ward omitted this entry from their highly successful tome Film Noir. Unfortunately, the movie may have all the trappings of the genre, but like bread dough in the hands of a neophyte baker, the loaf simply fails to gel.

Zachary Scott has most of the best lines and Virginia Mayo gets the complete glamor treatment in the title role of FLAXY MARTIN. Both of them score heavily in this tight little crime melodrama that suffers only when the plot's loopholes begin to show. Dorothy Malone gets third billing as the wholesome librarian who sticks her neck out to help a man she almost runs over on a dark and stormy night. Her motivations for taking him in and then discovering he's a man on the run from the law are never completely believable.

Nor is the way Scott tries to shield Mayo from the police by pretending that he's the man who murdered a woman the mob wanted to get rid of. He's a lawyer for the gangsters and sticks his own head into a noose by thinking that he can back himself into a corner and then get out.

But aside from these plot contrivances that don't ring true, the story about a lawyer being double-crossed by the gangsters he was protecting is tight and suspenseful. The supporting cast includes Douglas Kennedy, Elisha Cook, Jr., Tom D'Andrea and Douglas Fowley, all well-used and fitting into the noir-like atmosphere of the melodramatic turn of events.

The amusing tough guy talk from Zachary Scott gets the kind of delivery that shows he was a very capable actor who deserved more recognition with better roles in A-films. He's excellent here and Virginia Mayo is so convincing as a scheming tramp that it makes me think Bette Davis was right when she told Warner Brothers they should have offered the role of Rosa Moline in "Beyond the Forest" to Mayo. She's that good.

A really good cast puts over a noir feature from Warner Brothers that's undone by an incredibly, unbelievable plot component. As another Warner Brothers star used to say, "what a maroon".

Zachary Scott plays a criminal attorney who gets off mob hit man Elisha Cook, Jr. on some perjured testimony by Helen Westcott. When Scott finds out about the perjury he fears bar association sanctions and determines to break with mob boss Douglas Kennedy. But Kennedy has other plans that involve Scott's girl friend Virginia Mayo who is in the title role of Flaxy Martin.

Mayo's trading up and she goes to Scott with a tearful story about how she's suspected in the murder of Westcott. So what does this brilliant lawyer do who is now thinking with his male member? He offers to confess and says he's so good at his job that he can win acquittal at trial. But not against some perjured eye witness testimony that Kennedy gets to help the prosecution along.

Of course Scott escapes and starts looking for more than vindication. In that he's aided by friend Tom D'Andrea and farm girl Dorothy Malone who feels sorry for him.

After that horrible premise, the film does pick up and ends rather well. If you've seen Virginia Mayo in White Heat you know how it ended for her there. Ends even worse for her here, but similarly. In fact I'm sure Mayo was cast in Flaxy Martin on the strength of White Heat.

As for Zachary Scott the part he has is one I think might have been written with Humphrey Bogart in mind, but Bogey left Warner Brothers the year before.

Though it's rather unbelievable Flaxy Martin is good display of the talents of both Virginia Mayo and Zachary Scott.

Odd little noir film with Virginia Mayo as the title character, a total conniving bitch! This must surely be Mayo's most unsympathetic character and shows that she was a better actress than we remember. She played so many "glamour" parts that we forget she could act.

Here she plays a moll working both sides of the fence. She's with a local racketeer (Douglas Kennedy) but also plays his lawyer (Zachary Scott) for a chump. Lots of murders here and there and plot twists aplenty.

Dorothy Malone plays the nice country girl, Tom D'Andrea is Sam the mechanic, Helen Westcott is the hapless Peggy, Elisha Cook plays the gunsel again, Marjorie Bennett is the nosy neighbor, Douglas Fowley is the detective, and Bill McLean is the hotel desk clerk.

Scott actually gets the most screen time because Mayo disappears while he has his country adventure and meets Malone. But everyone is good and works well together. While Malone is stuck in frilly frocks and aprons, Mayo does the glam bit and looks just great.

Aside from solid work from the trio of stars--Mayo, Scott, and Malone--D'Andrea and Westcott are very very good as well. For those of us who remember D'Andrea as the neighbor on The Life of Riley it's always pleasant to see what a good supporting actor he was. I'm not that familiar with Westcott but she is solid here as Peggy. And I always enjoy seeing Marjorie Bennett!!

Zachary Scott isn't a name on the tips of too many tongues these days, but in the late ‘40s he was a very busy boy. However, in his best remembered movies, like Mildred Pierce and Flamingo Road, he had the misfortune to play second fiddle to the domineering Joan Crawford; many of his roles, too, were as weaklings, leaving the false impression that he was a weak actor (his visage – deeply waved hair, a Tomas E. Dewey mustache – was considered quite dashing in the post-war years but now looks seriously passé, which doesn't help his legacy either).

Flaxy Martin preserves one of his stronger starring performances, as a mob mouthpiece who finds himself in over his head. He's been balking at his shady job as a syndicate lawyer for a long time, but his girl (Virginia Mayo, who takes the title role) keeps urging him to stick with it until he assembles a nice nest egg. Unfortunately, she's really the moll of syndicate kingpin Douglas Kennedy, stringing Scott along to keep him quiescent. When a murder by one of Kennedy's goons threatens to implicate Mayo, Scott takes the rap, confident that he'll get himself off. He didn't count on being double-crossed. The plot traces his rude awakening and plans for payback.

The movie mixes a lot of tight, hard scenes with some soft and sappy ones; the redemptive sub-plot with, as Scott's new love interest, Dorothy Malone (wasted yet again as a good girl) proves flat and superfluous. Mayo, along with Scott, has one of her better parts; she might have been one of the noir cycle's more memorable femme fatales had her acting skills been on a par with her pouty blonde looks. And Elisha Cook, Jr. contributes another turn as a bantam rooster barely bigger than his gun.

Flaxy Martin, along the the previous year's Smart Girls Don't Talk (also starring Mayo), marks a rare break for director Richard Bare, who from the early ‘40s until the late ‘50s and his passage into series television directed little but dozens upon dozens of `humorous' shorts with titles beginning `So you think you're...' and `So you want to be...'. They're a part of Hollywood better left undisturbed. The overlooked Flaxy Martin, on the other hand, ought to be a bit better known