Jornada de Agonia

I couldn't get past the preposterous meet-cute opening premise: that unsuccessful artist Dane Clark was so morally outraged by the purchase of one of his paintings (his first sale!) by Alexis Smith, that he goes to her place to refund her money. I mean, what struggling painter does that? Much less enter her home unbidden to snoop around. Van Gogh lopping off an ear makes more sense.

Still, nice to see Zachary Scott doing what he does best, playing a dapper heel, albeit a slightly psychotic one with no wheelchair brakes.

Plus S. Z. Sakall, comfortably Casablanca cast as a restaurant owner. It gives you a sense of what Rick's Place must have been like after Bogie split for Brazzaville and left Carl the Waiter in charge.

I never would have called myself a big fan of boxing or movies about boxing, but I've seen my fair share at this point. Whiplash is a movie that has boxing as a key plot element, but it's debatable how much this movie is focused on the sport. It's more like a mix of noir and romance in my mind. The problem is, I don't know how invested I was in the romance between the 2 leads. I certainly didn't want her getting together with the other guy, but I didn't feel many sparks between Dane Clark and Alexis Smith. One of my struggles with this film, and most plots of this type, is the fact that they rely on one of the romantic leads simply refusing to communicate properly. So many issues crop up because they don't talk about their history, or what might happen to the other person if they get involved. Nearly every story of love needs some type of conflict to make it interesting, but this method of creating a rift between two people just feels played out and a bit lazy. But even without that part of the plot there simply wasn't much that I found to latch onto in this film that was enjoyable or original. I'm about a week or two removed from when I watched Whiplash and I'm already starting to forget it. This is a film that won't stick with me, even though it's not a bad at all.

The thing that surprised me the most about Whiplash is that Warner Brothers actually teamed Alexis Smith and Dane Clark for a film. Smith had a lot of trouble in her career because she was so tell and trouble finding leading men to appear opposite her. And Dane Clark was short, James Cagney and Alan Ladd type short. If you look real carefully he's built up in height somewhat in the scenes where Warner Brothers showed both of them in full figure and those are rare in this film.

Clark was Warner Brothers back up for John Garfield and Garfield had left Warner Brothers at this point. Clark was obviously getting the scripts that Garfield had left or maybe had turned down.

In Whiplash Clark is a struggling artist who lives in southern California and a traveling Alexis Smith likes his work and they begin a hot and heavy affair. Then she abruptly walks out and Clark is all at sea. He goes east to find her and he does and finds she's married to a wheelchair bound Zachary Scott.

Scott was once a promising fighter and if he can't be champion he wants to manage one. When Clark knocks out a middleweight contender, Scott is willing to forget the affair with Smith if he'll fight for him. And Clark proves pretty adept in the ring.

Whiplash is the kind of film that would have been far better had the all pervasive Code not been in place. What we're beating around the bush not talking about is impotence. Scott is incapable and he's a nasty creature and Alexis just isn't getting any.

The ending is straight out of one of those Thirties type boxing films and I won't elaborate. Let's just say what happened no way should have happened.

The players are fine and special mention should go to Eve Arden for simply being Eve Arden and Jeffrey Lynn for playing Smith's alcoholic doctor brother who steps up to the plate at the climax. But Whiplash would have been a better film with a more realistic script and the Code not dictating a lot of pussyfooting around some frank issues.

Shake together John Garfield's roles as a violinist in Humoresque and a prizefighter in Body and Soul (hits of the previous couple of years), and out comes Dane Clark's character in Whiplash. He's a beach bum who daubs canvases in a coastal town near San Francisco. But when reclusive vacationer Alexis Smith buys one of his seascapes, she ignites a torch in him that won't sputter out. When she abruptly departs, he travels east and sets up a studio in New York while he tracks her down. It proves a bad career move.

He finds Smith singing in a nightclub, only to discover that she's married to Zachary Scott, its owner and a former middleweight champ now confined to a wheelchair. Scott, sadistic and embittered, lives the fight game vicariously – through the cohort of ex-boxers who keep his wife in place and through new talent he exploits then drops. In Clark, he sees a contender. Wanting to keep close to Smith (who keeps warning him off), Clark signs up for work on another kind of canvas....

In addition to the always welcome Alexis Smith, the movie boasts good supporting work from Eve Arden, a gal pal with a crush on Clark, and from Jeffrey Lynn, as Smith's alcoholic brother, a doctor working in Scott's gym. Scott himself brings nothing new to the kind of part he found himself typecast in: the effete, insinuating villain. That leaves Clark, who was plainly being groomed as the second-string Garfield but who never left much of an impression on the movies.

The direction, by the undistinguished Lewis Seiler, can only be graded adequate; he keeps things moving along but never tries for anything different or offbeat or striking. In this he's matched by a lackluster script (it was the late ‘40s; couldn't the dialogue have been a little more etched?). Nonetheless, Whiplash endures as a routine B-movie, with noirish coloration, that reflects the themes and plot-lines of post-war melodrama.

Boxing film. But it takes a long time to get there. At the beginning, Mike (Dane Clark) tell the kids how he used to a fighter, and then we're in flashback. We see how he was an artist when he met Laurie (Alexis Smith). He gets in a brawl, and is talked into earning big money as a boxer. Fun co-stars... SZ Sakall Cuddles was in every single b&w film in the 1940s, along with Alan Hale Senior. Hale was Dad of The Skipper, on Gilligan's Island. Eve Arden and Zack Scott were both so awesome in Mildred Pierce. A couple of fun numbers done at the Pelican Club; a ballad "sung" by Laurie, and a fun bit by "a vocal group", according to imdb; it's a shame they aren't credited in the cast list or the Soundtrack page, as of today. It looks like they changed the lyrics from A Girl to The Guy when it's sung by a female group. The story is good enough, but it never really takes off. The first five minutes the film really jumps around, so i hope you don't get seasick. Directed by Lewis Seiler. Started in silents, making shorts. This one is okay. Not a lot of chemistry, but the story is sound.