Backfire

Backfire (1950)

A complicated, interesting and sometimes forced story about two ex-G.I.s with dreams of a ranch. But the realities of post-War America set in, with shades of old gangsterism (this is a Warner Bros. film, remember) and with siren calls from lonely women and a murder unexplained. The story is made more complicated (and interesting) by layering a number of flashbacks into the flow, and you have to really pay attention to keep the chronology straight. But this is a plus, in the end, because it's a richly dense movie you could easily watch a second time. Just the range of scenes is ambitious, from gorgeous pouring rain at night to a boxing arena to a sunny army rehab swimming pool to, of course, a detective's office. The photography (under Carl Guthrie) layers up many scenes, some are visually sensational (he also shot the great "Caged" a few months later).

Viveca Lindfors makes some stunning appearances here as Lysa, and you can see why Hollywood thought she might make a new Swedish import like Ingrid Bergman. And she can act, too, with an emotional intensity and range that makes you wonder why her career didn't, in fact, take off. Almost to set her off as the mysterious brooding beauty, the lead woman is the cute, cheerful, all American Virginia Mayo, who plays nurse and friend Julie perfectly. In a way you see in just these two how well cast, and typecast, two women can be, and how the director, Vincent Sherman, works so well with their differences, though we all wish for more of Lindfors.

Likewise for the two leading men. The main star is a pretty boy, and a decent actor, Gordon MacRae as Bob, but MacRae lacks presence and magnetism, and maybe true ability. At first we accept this because Bob is just lying in a hospital bed, with Julie cheerfully attending. But then up he gets, pain all gone, and the real movie starts. His best friend is the underrated noir staple Edmond O'Brien, who isn't pretty at all, but trying, I think, to be something of a Bogart, a regular guy named Steve, with guts and depth and reserve.

With Lindfors, he's still the best performer here, and they have a few scenes together that are the best acted, if not the best written, parts of the movie. If we take the Bergman/Bogart comparison out of "Casablanca" to an extreme here with Lindfors/O'Brien in "Backfire," we can see their scene by the piano as a kind of wartime flashback, shoehorned into the movie for no good reason except to say they must be fated to meet and fall in love. But this isn't easy when someone else already loves the girl, and that someone has a gun, and a warped mind.

Why exactly this doesn't all come together is one of the mysteries of the movies, where there are so many pieces to a puzzle that contribute successively, and concurrently, and getting them perfect is really really hard. Ultimately it's the director we look to for the big decisions (as well as the day to day control), and Sherman had shown once before his mastery of a complex story in "Mr. Skeffington." In a way, this one is just so fractured, following the film noir penchant for flashbacks and femme fatales and confusing plots, it would take a miracle, or a Michael Curtiz, to pull it off (I'm thinking "Mildred Pierce" more than "Casablanca" here).

Still, it's a great film to get lost in, and to pull out the subtleties where they really work well.

Although Gordon MacRae was signed for musicals by Warner Brothers, Jack Warner like the rest of his fellow Hollywood moguls did not believe in keeping players idle. With no musical properties at the ready, MacRae starred in Backfire about a World War II veteran trying to locate a friend whom the police suspect of murdering gambler Richard Rober.

The friend is Edmond O'Brien and MacRae thinks so because he got a woman visitor with a mysterious foreign accent while he was still all doped up on anesthetic from a final operation. The visitor turns out to be Viveca Lindfors and MacRae despite warnings from police captain Ed Begley is on the hunt, aided and abetted by his nurse Virginia Mayo who took a real liking to MacRae while in her care.

Backfire is not a mystery as such because the more MacRae looks, people get bumped off right and left. When MacRae is finally closing in on solving the mystery, the suspect is rather obvious.

For the most part however Gordon MacRae confined himself to musicals of varying quality and later on left the Hollywood scene altogether for nightclubs. Still he did show he could handle a straight acting job in Backfire and Warner Brothers did give him a strong supporting cast. Backfire still holds up well for today's audience.

Perhaps not the best of film Noir, but more than serviceable with a fine cast and a haunting performance by Viveca Lindfors. What a babe when young and quite exotic in this role. "Backfire" may well have been written with the matinée crowd in mind as it has many weaknesses, but the director, Vincent Sherman, was efficient in the sequences of action and brutality. Gordon McCrae was a little flat, but I think the studio was trying to give this singer the benefit of the doubt. That has always been the way of things in the movies: give the popular singers of the day a chance to become known in some other milieu. It might have worked better if Edmund O'Brian had played the lead, but such was not the case. Anyway, a slightly better than average trip down the darkened alleyways of Noir's mean streets.

No need to recap the plot. Those first few scenes in the hospital are charming, when not also spooky. The chemistry between Mayo and McRae is so infectious, I expected them to burst into song at any moment. But then there's that spectral visitation at the foot of McRae's bed. It's expertly staged, surpassing in impact anything else in the film.

However, both the screenplay and the direction go downhill following this promising start. It's a complicated narrative whose alternating threads between flashback and real time are clumsily woven. At the same time, focal shifts between McRae and O'Brien further dislocate the viewer, (and why is Dane Clark given top billing with such limited screen time ).

At the same time, director Sherman doesn't appear to have a feel for the material, filming in flat impersonal style despite noirish touches from cinematographer Guthrie. Good thing that fine actor Eddie O'Brien is on hand to carry the acting department. McRae is handsome and likable, but without the needed gravitas of crime drama, while the ravishing Lindfors's best scene is as the apparition.

I like reviewer Brocksilvey's comments on the male-bonding aspects that I overlooked. In my experience, it's a very real part of military life and need have nothing to do with same sex attraction. Rather it has to do, I think, with the sharing of grueling experiences and the bonds thereby established, ones which can go deeper than more conventional types. Happily, the movie suggests the very sort of bonding Brocksilvey expresses.

Anyway, in my view, the movie's a passable crime drama, but nothing more.

Bob Corey, a war veteran recovering in a V.A. hospital for a spinal injury, becomes alarmed when his war buddy Steve Connolly vanishes. One night while under sedation his visited by mysterious woman who informs him that Steve has been seriously injured and is in trouble with the law. Bobs nurse convinces him its all a dream. But when Bob is released from the hospital, he is questioned by police who want to know if he knows where he thinks Steve can be found. The police inform Bob that Steve is suspected of killing a gambler. Bob then sets out to find Steve and find the real killer. Along the way bodies pile up and Bobs search for leads him into the clutches of mysterious mobster named Walsh.

BACKFIRE! is a well directed, photographed and acted noir mystery which holds one interest throughout. The ending comes as quite a surprise when the identity of Walsh is revealed. The cast is excellent, including many of the minor players. It was nice to see Virginia Mayo playing a good girl for a change in a film like this. The writers of this film must have had an obsession with spinal chord injuries, since both male leads suffer such injuries during the film.