The Man Who Cheated Himself

Eddie M. Is great at pointing out a film's strengths and weaknesses, and he did a great job on this recently restored film. This film was made on a shoestring budget and produced by Jack M. Warner, who was constantly feuding with daddy, THE Jack Warner,, and wanted to make films on his own. If the film had a bigger budget, the womanizing workaholic senior detective would have been played by Robert Mitchum, not Lee J. Cobb. The wealthy femme fatale would have been Ida Lupino instead of Jane Wyatt???. John Dall is a little off the tracks in this one, coming across like a young Jimmy Stewart rather than the straight arrow one woman younger brother of Cobb's character, anxious to learn the trade of detective from big brother, but with a deep sense of justice and honesty that overrides even kinship.

The set-up is this. The opening scene shows a man in a plush living room who is burning any sign that he just bought a gun. He then hides the gun. However, the bill of sale falls to the floor. Lois, the wife, played by Jane Wyatt, comes into the living area yelling at and accusing the husband, distractingly dressed to the nines and looking a bit too much like a woman wearing her daughter's prom dress. The husband says he has had it and is flying to Seattle and leaves. But wealthy Lois finds the bill of sale, she finds the gun, and she finds that her husband has been looking over the changes she has been planning to make to her will, and those plans did not include hubby.

Frantically believing that her husband plans to return and kill her (I don't blame her) she calls her boyfriend, who just happens to be Lieutenant Ed Cullen (Cobb), and tells him to get there right away. He does. While there the husband does return, and enters the house by jimmying a lock, there are angry statements back and forth between husband and wife, and Lois shoots her husband dead. Lois appeals to her policeman boyfriend to help her. He does. The husband left his car at the airport - probably as an alibi for his wife's murder. Ed ironically uses that alibi and returns the dead body of the murdered would be murderer to the airport, outside, so it will look like a robbery gone wrong.

But things go wrong for Ed. He is seen at the airport by an older couple - but it is night. He throws the gun off the Golden Gate Bridge, but again is seen by a policeman who knows him. And worse, a few days later the gun Ed threw in the bay shows up in another killing. How does this all turn out? Watch and find out.

There are some spectacular shots of 1950 San Francisco in this one, and the cinematography is excellent. Stay for the story, and just endure the complete lack of chemistry between Cobb and Wyatt.

Probably the most interesting and noirish story in the cast is that of Lisa Howard, who plays John Dall's wife. She left movies in the late 50s and reinvented herself as a journalist, scoring interviews with Fidel Castro, the Shah of Iran and Nikita Khrushchev. Her behavior and politics got extreme though, and she was fired from NBC news in 1964. Suing her employer made her a pariah in her industry, and on July 4, 1965 she killed herself with a bottle of barbiturates in a parking lot. Eddie Muller said her story would make a great film - "The Woman Who Cheated Herself".

Lee J. Cobb and John Dall give nice performances in this medium-slow paced noir thriller. It is also nice to see a 20 year-old and lovely Lisa Howard in a supporting role as Dall's new wife (famous for her news coverage of Kennedy and Castro in the early 1960s, and her subsequent suicide/overdose at the age of 35).

Contrary to popular opinion, I believe that Jane Wyatt did a fine job of playing the femme fatale. Her role is a bit different from the standard noir FF, and Wyatt is a bit strange as well. Wyatt's Lois Frazier is a rich, beautiful, seemingly naive and nervous woman suffering through an abominable marriage. Senior Police Lieutenant Cullen (Cobb) is having an affair with her.

Lois' husband has just left on a suspicious business trip, when Lois discovers he has purchased a gun. She believes that her husband plans on killing her. Eventually, he returns to their house and sneaks in through a door connected to his study. His wife shoots him twice at close range in the chest. Cullen, knowing that the husband had an airline ticket for that night (his planned alibi) dumps the body off at the airport. This is the basic premise. What follows is an edgy, tense and nicely photographed story, as Cullen's younger brother (Dall) - a smart fledgling detective - begins to unravel the plot.

The chase scene offers some really nice noir cinematography, and interesting sets. The soundtrack is also fairly good and the editing and directing are fine (though the edition I saw did have a few missing frames and other problems. The plot offers some interesting convolutions, but also mixes these with clichés.

All considered - a good film for noir fans.

This is one of the better second tier film noir .... within its limits, it seems to me rock solid: performances,(save one), script, photography, and is surely commensurate with excellent Fleischer B's of the same period such as "Armored Car Robbery"...however perhaps not quite in the same league as the latter's "Narrow Margin"...there are these kinds of films in which, under obvious budgetary circumstances, it is hard to imagine what could be done better, with the exception of Jane Wyatt, who does indeed give a horrible performance...but hey, that's why it's a B...and one often wonders, given more money in the budget, whether the whole thing would have been somehow ruined...this last seems to be to be the best way of defining the undefinable "B" that I have come across. John Dall lends that undefinable air of perversity, of which he was the acknowledged master, and, to the viewer's delight, seems wonderfully and profoundly miscast as a policeman. Dall makes this worth seeing.

The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950)

"Yes, for one thing, a dame."

A fast, curious, edgy crime film that depends on a fabulous, simple twist, which you learn right at the start and keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time. The clash of two cops who are brothers begins innocently, and turns and builds in a very believable way, as the details of a murder are revealed. By the end, with a fabulous scene below the Golden Gate Bridge, it's a chase scene of pure suspense.

Lee J. Cobb (more usually a brilliant secondary character) takes the lead as a cop who does his job with steady weariness, and yet when faced with a woman he loves too much, puts everything in danger. He's just perfect in his role, right to the last scene when you see him look down the hall with the same feeling he has at the beginning of the film. His kid brother played by the slightly quirky John Dall ("Gun Crazy") is all virtue, almost to the point of sweet sadness. And the two main women play believable supporting roles (especially Cobb's love-interest, who is selfish and panicky to just the right degree).

This Jack M. Warner production was released by Fox but by the looks of it, it can't be quite a full budget feature movie, and because of that it is relentless and edgy, with no time for polish or emotional depth. Cameraman Russell Harlan ("Blackboard Jungle" and much later "To Kill a Mockingbird") does a brilliant job with great angles and framing. It isn't elegant, but it's visually sharp. Throw in a talented but little known director, Felix Feist, and some top shelf editing (by David Weisbart, one of absolute best) and you have just the mix you need for a small film much larger than life.

This is a film noir in the usual sense of style, but also in substance--a lead male who is alienated and casting about for meaning in life, and a lead female who leads him astray.

But in the end, what's it about? Crime? No. Love? Yes. The only subject that matters.

Cobb: "Do you think I'd throw that away on a sucker play like this?"

Dall: "Yes, for one thing, a dame."

Those who love San Francisco locations in films will get plenty of joy out of watching all these shots of how it was in 1949. It is eerily predictive of Hitchcock's later 'Vertigo', especially the Fort Point location at the foot of the Golden Gate, so near to where Kim Novak was later to stand (oh eternal moment of mystery and suspense, in the film that might have been called 'The Girl who Never Was'). It was certainly unusual for heavy-jowled and growly Lee J. Cobb to land a leading man role, but here he is, romantic even, grabbing the gal in his arms whenever the opportunity offers and slobbering his great big bear's mouth all over her pretty, pert lips like the beast that is in all of us. And she loves it, spoilt rich brat that she is. (That's part of the plot.) And so, passion triumphs, the honest cop is compromised, covers up for the hysterical beauty and all that ensues can be guessed. The DVD issue has been made from a print with lots of scratches, hiss, and missing frames, so the negative must have disappeared. But at least this 'nice little noir' remains in some form, and is eminently watchable. There are some nice lines: 'The truth can get you twenty years.' But it is a mild thriller, and its locations are its chief recommendation.