Unerschütterliche Liebe

Real life husband and wife Cornel Wilde and Patricia Knight star as parole officer / parolee in this quasi noirish post-war drama. Wilde, who is assigned as Knight's parole officer, insists that as a condition of her parole she no longer associate with her former boyfriend, unsavory gambler (John Baragrey). Wilde who is smitten almost immediately by Knight, begins to bend the rules as Knight ignores the conditions of her parole and continues to see Baragrey. Because of her parole violations, Wilde being a concerned officer of the court, suggests Knight move into his home that he shares with his blind, widowed mother and younger brother. The situation continues on a downward trend.

Written by hard edged, cigar chomping, World War II vet Samuel Fuller and directed by melodrama master Douglas Sirk, this movie is a contrast of styles between writer and director. In this case the director Sirk called the shots. With the assist of a script revision from Helen Deutsch (I'll Cry Tomorrow, Valley of the Dolls), Sirk plays it out more as a tortured romantic triangle with dribs and drabs of writer Fuller's permeating cynicism occasionally popping through.

Despite a title suggesting more lurid content, 'Shockproof' offers little to actually be shocked by, probably because of the lack of any real criminal intent by the characters beyond parole violations. What tension this movie engenders is more human conflict from the soap opera style re-draft by Deutsch. With a script basically hollowed from Fuller's fatalistic influence, what's left is a sort of a well-crafted but tepid potboiler complete with a contrived populist ending.

'Shockproof' isn't a bad movie just more of a disappointment of what could have been.

"Shockproof" is a 1949 Douglas Sirk film starring Cornel Wilde and Patricia Knight. Wilde is Griff Marat, who gets a paroled prisoner, Jenny Marsh (Knight) on his caseload. She refuses to give up the bad acquaintances that got her into trouble in the first place; this includes her old boyfriend, Harry (John Baragrey) whom she continues to meet secretly. Griff has taken Jenny into his home to care for his blind mother (Esther Minciotti), and over time, they fall in love. Though she's still pulled toward Harry, she balks when Harry wants her to convince Griff to marry her, a clear violation of his job ethics and her parole. Because Griff has political ambitions, they will then have them where they want him. Gradually Harry realizes that Jenny is not going to cooperate, and he ends up gravely injured. Griff and Jenny go on the run to avoid her arrest.

This is a pretty good noir with two heavyweights attached, Sirk, the director, and Sam Fuller, who co-wrote the script. Unfortunately, the characters aren't fleshed out enough so that we understand their sudden turnarounds - a man on the side of the law with political ambitions decides to throw it all out the window, marry a client secretly, and go on the run riding in boxcars and living in shacks because though the shooting was accidental, Griff feels Jenny won't be believed. That's just Griff - in reality, all three of the main characters do complete reversals during the course of this film with little or no justification.

Wilde does a good job here, and Knight, a new actress to me, is beautiful and has good chemistry opposite her then husband Wilde. She didn't work much longer, as after their divorce, her career dried up.

Entertaining.

Shockproof (1949)

Sam Fuller, the writer of this film, is admired for breaking rules and being a little bit edgy. Douglas Sirk, the director, is known for sumptuous, no compromise melodramas with gorgeous dreamy sets and an arch and affecting artificiality. They make an odd mix, and something doesn't quite click here.

The plot is standard fare but good--a parole officer falls for a reluctant parole, who still has a thing for a thug up to no good. The officer is terrific, Cornell Wilde at his regular guy best, a kind of echo of Dana Andrews with a little more warmth. But the main woman, Patricia Wright, is a bit wooden. You can feel her trying too hard too often, and it's just one of those things that cuts the rest of the effort down to size. Not surprisingly, she was only in five feature films, and was the lead in only one other.

But setting aside her presence and its deadening effect, there are some things to really enjoy here. You might find the movie ordinary for awhile, with some nice clichés and a steady development. But then, halfway, there's a huge and really sudden twist. And a believable one, a great scene. Suddenly there is a whole new plot. We aren't quite involved enough with the two leads to get swept away in their love affair (as we certainly do in "Gun Crazy" two years later, or in "They Live by Night" the same year), but it's exciting anyway. There are some scenes at an oil rig and the worker's cabins (I assume it's a set) that are gorgeous.

And then there's a sixty second surprise ending that doesn't do the movie justice and is very unlike Fuller. It's almost like someone took the script from Fuller and said, no Sam, that won't do. And rewrote it. And in fact that's what happened. One of the Columbia producers, Helen Deutsch, stepped in to remove Fuller's violent first intention. In fact, that final scene wasn't even directed by Sirk, who quit Columbia and left the country in anger (only to return and start a string of his famous 1950s masterpieces). A detailed account of all this is at www.tcm.com/this-month/article/208688%7C0/Shockproof.html.

What else? The photography by Charles Lawton Jr. is great (he had just done Welles's vigorous "Lady from Shanghai"), and a lot of the side actors are really good, especially the gambler boyfriend played by John Baragrey. This is one of those films to enjoy in pieces, or to enjoy for how it fits into the chronologies of some of the people who made it. Wilde and Knight, by the way, were still married during the filming (Wilde insisted Knight get the part) but they split up in 1951.

If the movie were an airplane, then it wobbled a lot before finally crashing and burning with an utterly illogical ending. Up to that point, this crime drama is mediocre at best. The best part follows the couple (Wilde and Knight) as they flee the cops after running out on Knight's parole and in the process sinking into society's lower depths. That 20 minute sequence is done with both flair and zip.

Director Douglas Sirk is known for artistic soap opera, so it's not surprising that this film emphasizes the love story over the crime element. The trouble is that Wilde is woodenly uninvolving, while Knight's character remains muddled, to say the least. A key part of the plot lies in tracking her evolving emotions. But that's hard to do since these developments are confusingly portrayed, helped neither by the turgid script nor by Knight's thespic limitations. Apparently cult movie-maker Sam Fuller co-authored some of the screenplay, which, on the face of it, seems hard to believe. Nonetheless, I'm sure he had nothing to do with the ridiculous climax that instead smacks of outside interference of the most thoughtless kind.

Calling this a noir film is, I think, a stretch. It's certainly not filmed as noir, with none of the usual trademark light and shadow. True, the plot contains a number of noirish elements, but Sirk's style doesn't bring these out in recognizably noir fashion. Even so, the many SoCal location shots are both entertaining and appropriate for crime drama. (Too bad we don't get more of the dingy oil field setting, which has definite and exotic noir potential.) But noir or not, this is a rather poorly done crime drama, having neither the force nor the panache of the better examples of the period. With better casting, a more cogent screenplay, and more attention to the oil field, this could have been a memorable film.

A parole officer falls for one of his charges, but is she playing him for a sucker? Not so much a noir as a noir-esque romantic melodrama, and not up to the level of the best from either director Douglas Sirk or writer Sam Fuller. The story could have gone one of two ways, and it chose the less interesting path (from what I've read, this might have been a studio decision). However, Cornel Wilde and Patricia Knight (actual spouses at the time) handle their performances quite well, and play off each other with conviction and chemistry. The script has some nice touches, the photography is pretty sharp, and the supporting roles are good. It's certainly a watchable movie, just rather bland... and it wraps up far too easily.