Backlash

Yikes, but there's a load of dialogue in this film-noir. It's almost exhausting to listen to after a period of relentless chatting and precious little actual action. "Moreland" (John Eldrdge) features much more prominently in this detective yarn about his own murderer than you might expect. That's because it's told via a series of flashbacks as the pursuing police detective "McMullen" (Larry J. Blake) interviews all the suspects and tries to piece together the evidence from his widow "Catherine" (Jean Rogers), the DA "Conroy" (Richard Travis) and just about everyone else from within a ten mile radius of the crime. Thing is - there is a twist, and one hell of twist at that, and that leaves "McMullen" and his theories all well and truly up in the air. We are given enough clues to anticipate the denouement, but Eugene Forde still manages to keep us guessing for some of this - it's just that there's way too much verbiage and the retrospective style of storytelling is a bit repetitive after a while. None of the acting, or the writing, really sets the heather on fire and at times it felt like quite a long hour-long watch. Watchable, but forgettable.

I wasn't really familiar with any of the cast members in Backlash but despite a rather verbose script, I thought they all did a decent job and I found most of them likeable. I'm new to Jean Rogers but I liked her here. As for the male cast members, they seemed to all be styled to look exactly alike. So the story premise is good but it just doesn't go anywhere. I think there are just too many moving parts and characters to keep track of them all, particularly for a film with a comparatively short running time. Despite a solid cast Backlash just can't create enough momentum to make it worth the viewers time.

This is one of those Twentieth Century Fox B pictures about crime and detection made in the forties, with little known actors (I am being polite, frankly they were and are more properly described as 'unknown', and only a few of the actors in such pictures became 'known', a prominent example being Lloyd Nolan, though he does not appear in this one). It is directed by the regular B picture director, Eugene Forde, who directed many Charlie Chan detective films. (It is a curious fact that Forde's real name was Ford, and that he added an 'e' on the end, which seems rather affected, don't you think?) The script is by Irving Elman, who the next year did the screenplays for the Bulldog Drummond films 13 LEAD SOLDIERS (1948, see my review) and THE CHALLENGE (1948, see my review). After those Drummond films, Elman only wrote for television and never returned to features. Immediately after doing BACKLASH, Elman worked again with Eugene Forde ('He with the E') twice again, and wrote JEWELS OF BRANDENBURG (1947) and THE CRIMSON KEY (1947), both directed by Forde. The plot of this film is somewhat contorted. A criminal lawyer meets up with a former criminal client who has just robbed a bank and wants to leave a bundle of money with him. Then the lawyer's car is found burnt out, having gone over a California cliff. What appears to be his body is inside, with .25 calibre bullets in the heart. (Strange that. Why .25? Why not .32? Was Elman unfamiliar with that inescapable American accessory, a gun?) Then the gun is found and it belongs to the lawyer's wife, who is having an affair with the District Attorney. Murkier and murkier! The criminal, with the literally colourful name of Red, disappears. But then he reappears. He says he did not kill the lawyer. The film is full of flashbacks when the various characters narrate their recollections to each other and to the police. These work very well. Who really wants to kill whom and why? Who is up to what? There are red herrings aplenty swimming around in circles, and some of them are salted. This is all good entertainment for those who enjoy crumby old black and white B pictures. I like watching them because I am absolutely fascinated by the manners and mores of the people portrayed, as they vary from decade to decade. Every decade, the character types cease to exist and are replaced by new types more typical of their times. For instance, if you searched the whole of America today from Maine to Florida and from South Carolina to Seattle, you could not find a single person like any of the characters in this film. They have all gone. There are no people like that anymore. Sociologists should give much more attention to these things, and should watch old movies like hawks for signs of vanishing species of individual. This film has only been reviewed by one other person, ten years ago, and he was absolutely right to call attention to the one strange expressionistic scene where two people, one a hobo (uncredited and what is more, unlisted as a character in the IMDb credits) and the other a desperate man on the run, both crouching in what was then called a 'flop' at night, are talking to one another. This unusual scene does indeed look like it came from another movie, and it is as if a different director and cameraman were used to shoot it. Wouldn't it be interesting to know what lay behind this anomaly? Well, we will never know, but it is fun to spot such things, and can even beat trying to guess whodunnit.

Backlash is a pretty decrepit programmer built upon a nifty premise: A jealous husband so hates his wife that he frames her for his own murder. He's a successful lawyer, middle-aged, grey and sporting a Thomas E. Dewey mustache, and, as such, indistinguishable from just about every other adult male in the cast (which may be among the most anonymous in the history of movies; the collective Q-rating of Backlash would be in the negative numbers).

When a burned-out car with a body in it turns up in a ravine, the police potter around trying to find out first who was killed and then who killed him. There was a cop-killer the lawyer saved from a murder charge; his law partner who owned him big money; the district attorney who may have been seeing his restless younger wife; another temptress connected to both the partner and the cop-killer; and so on. In fact there are a few too many red herrings squeezed into this compact (66-minute) can.

Surprisingly, Backlash boasts one fine scene which looks as though it was cut from a much better movie and spliced in by mistake. In a railroad yard at night, one of the principals meets up with a drifter who offers to share his bottle and some philosophical musings. It's filmed as an extended, highly shadowed two-shot that grows tighter and more oppressive as the talk turns to the murder case that dominates the headlines - and then to more urgent concerns. It's a sequence that makes Backlash almost worth a look.

I agree with everyone about that scene with Leonard Strong as the bum or hobo, a sort of philosophizing, theatrical proto-beatnik. Ad-libbing perhaps? And well shot. It's the only reason I came here to rate this. The rest was largely throwaway by comparison. I've watched the film noir titles from the '40s, and that part is worth watching, but perhaps it is improved by the comparative dullness of the other scenes.