Pitfall

Pitfall is about precisely that. Forty something insurance man Dick Powell is getting restless. He's seemingly achieved the American dream, wife, kid, nice home and car. And the nice wife is played by Jane Wyatt who was using this film to warm up for the queen of nice wives in the Fifties as Betty Anderson in Father Knows Best.

Powell is brought a report on a claim that one of the hired investigators Raymond Burr has. Byron Barr has embezzled money that Powell's insurance company is covering. Barr has spent the money lavishly on presents for Lizabeth Scott. Powell has to check this one out for himself. Of course he meets Lizabeth Scott and nature takes its course. Barr mean time is serving time in jail and Raymond Burr has decided to stake out Ms. Scott for himself. Or maybe the right word is stalk.

So we've got Barr serving, Burr stalking, Powell cheating, what's this Lizabeth Scott got to get all these guys hormones working in overdrive?

My description of Pitfall may have been flip up to now, but it really is a fine drama with no real heroes in it, except maybe Jane Wyatt. The best performance in Pitfall goes to Raymond Burr who is really a malevolent figure with his obsession about Scott.

There are a number of ways you can look at this movie, but for me it's a film about a nice girl who can't catch a break with guys. The underrated Lizabeth Scott is effective as a nice girl who's too sexy for her own good; she made me think of the famous Jessica Rabbit line, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."

Unfortunately, the men in Lizabeth's life are a psycho stalker, beautifully played with understated menace by Raymond Burr, a cheater having a mid-life crisis, and a jailbird. And my impression is every one of them would blame Lizabeth for their own failings.

Taken with the film's other major female character, who has man problems of her own, this movie thinks little of men (unless they are very young or very old), and pretty highly of women.

For me the standout performances were Burr and Scott, but the funny thing about this movie is that, outside of Burr, no one here at IMDb seems to agree much about who's good and who isn't.

While noir films are associated with the detective genre, what makes something noir is its exploration of the darkness within its characters souls and the awful things people are capable of, and this movie takes that on very effectively. It's not a great movie, but it keeps you interested.

a bit like cape fear problem with the film--the answer to the problem ISN'T that difficult

Dick Powell plays an insurance investigator named John Forbes. His life is very routine and he makes a point (perhaps too much of a point) of beginning the film complaining about how routine his life is. Soon, he meets a woman on a case, Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) and they begin seeing each other--which is a problem since Forbes is married. However, before it goes very far, she breaks it off with him when she learns he's married.

This is not the end to it, though. An insane private investigator (Raymond Burr) is infatuated with Mona and MUST have her. And, when he follows her and sees her with Forbes, this maniac decides to threaten to expose Forbes unless she agrees to be his girl. When this doesn't work, he beats Forbes senseless. And, when that doesn't seem to work, he goes to Mona's old boyfriend and gets the man worked up--so worked up that the old boyfriend comes gunning for Forbes. What's next? See this dark little film to see.

So is this film worth seeing? Yes, though it's far from perfect. As far as the good goes, Raymond Burr is wonderful and is really in his element playing this creepy and sociopathic jerk. He was great in this sort of role and played it in several other films, such as "The Blue Gardenia". Also, the basic story idea is good. However, the film is flawed--seriously flawed. This is because the entire film is based on characters who repeatedly make stupid choices. Any semi-sane man would have told their wife about what had happened or at least they would have gone to the police after they were assaulted and threatened. Many times he COULD have stopped the threats, attacks and eventual catastrophe that occurs at the end--a weakness in an otherwise enjoyable little noir movie. On balance, the good does outweigh the bad.

PITFALL (United Artists, 1948), a Regal Film Production directed by Andre De Toth, is a well constructed melodrama starring Dick Powell in one of his best screen performances as Johnny Forbes, a claims adjuster for Olympic Mutual Insurance Company living in a nice home in the suburb of the Los Angeles area with a wife, Sue (Jane Wyatt) and young son, Tommy (Jimmy Hunt). Everything seems fine as the family is introduced getting ready for another day at the breakfast table, but there's only one problem, though. Johnny is bored, bored with routine, bored with life, bored with everything. Neither does he know that his new day at the office would start of a chain of events that's to change his routine of life forever. As his firm is to pay off on the $10,000 robbery committed by Bill Smiley (Byron Barr), now serving time in prison, with items of stolen goods given to his girlfriend, Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott), a fashion model, Johnny's next assignment is to recover some of the items by meeting with Miss Stevens himself after company detective J.B. "Mac" MacDonald (Raymond Burr) has located the girl in question. An innocent meeting between Johnny and Mona soon turns to an illicit affair with Mac menacing Johnny for stepping into his territory in wanting the girl all for himself, regardless of her rejection towards him, leading to a pitfall of lies, cover-ups, deceit and murder.

Powell, who began his screen career in movie musicals at Warner Brothers in the 1930s, established himself a decade later as a fine dramatic actor starting with MURDER, MY SWEET (RKO Radio, 1944) in which he played private eye, Philip Marlowe. Other dramatic roles followed, including CORNERED (RKO, 1945) and JOHNNY O'CLOCK (Columbia, 1947), that formulated Powell as a 1940s tough guy, but it is PITFALL that is equally as good as his previous dramatic efforts combined. Powell's Johnny Forbes is someone who can very well be any average man, bored with life and unsure of himself. A well-scripted drama based on "The Pitfall" by Jay Dratner, with able support by Jane Wyatt as his caring but somewhat suspicious wife; Lizabeth Scott as a tough girl with the raspy voice whose life meets with further obstacles when unwittingly falling in love with a married man, but it's Raymond Burr's role that goes without question, predating Robert Mitchum's performance in CAPE FEAR (1962), as a creepy stalker who won't take no for an answer when it comes to getting someone he wants. His crucial moments include beating up Forbes in front of his home as he warns him to stay away from Mona; his constant stalking of Mona at both job and home; and even going to her boyfriend in prison with intentions of getting him jealous with envy over Mona. Also in the cast are Ann Doran as Powell's secretary; Selmer Jackson as Ed Brawley; and former Warner Brothers contract player John Litel in one scene as a district attorney with advise to Powell's character what he should have done to avoid his pitfall of murder. Had he done that, there would have been no movie, no story, no PITFALL.

What originally attracted me to watching PITFALL when televised in the late 60s/ early 70s on the afternoon movie was actually getting to see Raymond Burr, whose prime time IRONSIDE TV show along with reruns of his popular TV series "Perry Mason" has made him into a public figure among TV personalities at that time. As much as Burr nearly acquires more attention than his leading players, I was equally impressed by its leads, Powell and Scott. I was even more surprised later on when I came across an early musical, 42nd STREET (1933) to find this to be the same Dick Powell from PITFALL as the baby faced singer introducing the hit tune, "Young and Healthy." There's no singing this time around, not even that of Raymond Burr crooning, "I've Got You All to Myself" to Lizabeth Scott listening to him attendedly with disgust. Overall, PITFALL is straight drama that doesn't let up for an instant. Aside from Powell's low-key character, there's Jane Wyatt, whom I've grown to know from her 1950s TV series, FATHER KNOWS BEST starring Robert Young, as a wife and mother, who, unlike housewives of the day, is a little ahead of her time as the one who drives her husband to work. Her emotions, especially its conclusion, are well handled and realistically done for its time.

Of the handful of classic "film noirs" that turned out in the 1940s, PITFALL is one that's virtually unknown to many due to lack of television broadcasts. Had it starred stronger names as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, or Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake for that matter, in the Powell-Scott roles, chances are PITFALL would be a well known classic from the 1940s, but as it turns out, entire production, including actual location footage of Los Angeles, makes this worth viewing. Rarely televised since the 1970s, PITFALL did see the light when distributed on VHS through Republic Home Video in 1991, and many years later on Turner Classic Movies, September 2, 2013. (***1/2)

It's sad it is now 60 years after this film was released and we still don't have this available on DVD. You even have to pay big bucks to find a used VHS copy. It's "sad" because it is a fine film noir and would make an excellent addition to anyone's noir collection. So many film noirs are now on disc, where is this one??!!

I found you can't go wrong with Dick Powell in a film noir, and Lisabeth Scott certainly ranks among the all-time femme fatales in the genre's history. Add an unlikely pair of actors like Jane Wyatt and Raymond Burr, and Director Andre de Toth and you really have an interesting "old" crime story. "Crime Wave" and "Ramrod," two other fairly unknown-but-excellent hard-bitten noirs were also done by de Toth.

I am always amazed how Powell made such a tremendous career switch from Busby Berkely crooner and romantic to the hard-boiled detective or whatever (a restless insurance agent in here, believe it or not) while Scott seems to have always owned those "loser dame" roles. Between those two and the menacing Burr, who always was that until his Perry Mason TV days, I really enjoying watching this trio.

The film also featured Harry Wild's fine noir photography. Wild was the cinematographer on at least a half dozen film noirs, beginning with "Murder My Sweet" in the beginning of the period, so he knew what he was doing.