En marge de l'enquête

So, why does war hero Johnny Drake (William Prince) take a fast train away from the nation's highest military honor. It's an intriguing premise and the next 90 minutes tells us why. The movie's got noir icons like Bogart, Lizabeth Scott, and Morris Carnovski, plus a mysterious past, a smoky night club, and a barbecued corpse. In short, this ought to be classic noir, but in my little book it's not.

I've got two basic gripes. First, Scott may look the part, but she's no Jane Greer (Out of the Past. 1947). Above all, noir's spider women have to be good actresses so that we never know their true feelings. That trickiness means we can get suckered along with the hero. But it also means we get suckered against our better judgement because we and the hero suspect their sincerity all along. Scott's performance lacks that crucial element of trickiness-- hers is essentially a one note performance with no hint of a gap between how she feels and how she behaves. Thus, there's no real revelation at the end because she looks and acts the same as before. As a result, the betrayal is all in the script and crucially not where it belongs-- in the performance.

Speaking of the script-- the banter is too cute by-half. Practically every line out of Bogart's mouth shouts clever writer's device, whether it's baseball metaphors (strike one, strike two, etc), car metaphors, or the various other false rhetorical notes. For me, it gets tiresome, Bogart or no Bogart. Then too, Carnovski's queasy racketeer is made to enunciate his lines with perfectly parsed diction. Of course, that makes him a more interesting character and criminal mastermind. But, this again amounts to a device that calls attention to the words being said instead of to who is saying them or how the plot is helped along. It seems to me that a good script carries a story without competing with it.

These are my two main gripes. There are other reasons I think the movie doesn't get beyond second-rate noir, such as uninspired direction (whether Cromwell's name is elevated above the title or not), overly long love scenes (after the point has been made), and menacing figures who don't really menace (Carnovski & Miller). Together these undercut the strong points, such as the train scenes (how Prince & Bogart have bonded) or certain good story points (the unidentifiable corpse, the poignant last scene).

In passing-- this is not a gripe, but I suspect Columbia was using Bogart to build Scott into another Lauren Bacall. The two look somewhat alike, sound somewhat alike, and both built careers on appearance and attitude rather than ability. Here Bogart ends up calling Scott's character "Mike", just the sort of sidekick affection he shows for real life wife Bacall in their several movies together. Nothing obvious hangs on this, just a surmise that the movie may have been shaped for more than one purpose. However that may be, the movie amounts to okay but unmemorable noir entertainment.

Dead Reckoning appeared too early to have worn out and begun to recycle film noir's conceits and conventions, but already it has a tired, seen-it-all feel to it. Its director, the generally reliable John Cromwell (who three years later was to helm the great-grandmaw of women-behind-bars pix, Caged) works here with a by-the-numbers detachment that keeps the movie as limp and soggy as its "Gulf City" locale.

Returning vet Humphey Bogart, en route to Washington with a war buddy who's about to be awarded some Big Medal, is baffled when said buddy suddenly takes it on the lam. His investigation into what happened and why takes him to a seamy town on America's south coast where, in a morgue, he finds his friend's body, charred beyond recognition. He also meets up with Lizabeth Scott (as Coral Chandler, or "Dusty," or, even, "Mike"), a canary in a local nitery run by heavy Morris Carnovsky. It seems she and the late pal were something of an item, and she teams up with Bogart to get to the truth.

Or does she? The most problematic aspect of the film is that dealing with Scott -- game blonde or femme fatale? It's as if the scriptwriters or studio heads couldn't make up their mind about her, or as if alternative endings were contemplated, or even filmed. This doesn't help the viewer, whose empathy seems always to be out of kilter with what's happening in the plot. And this can't be written off as a teasing ambiguity -- it's a gross failure of filmmaking. So the sentimental, "redemptive" ending in the hospital ward, with high-flown talk of parachute jumps, tries to have it both ways. Well, it can't.

One can't help wondering, while watching this movie, whether one has seen it before. Not for the first time is Bogart out to avenge a friend's death. He's gone after polished, Continental Mr. Big types before, too; and Lizabeth Scott looks an awful lot like Lauren Bacall. Some of the dialogue seems to have been lifted in toto from earlier Bogart films. Yet for all this, Dead Reckoning is still entertaining. Its cliches are at least agreeably packaged, and the setting, the Gulf Coast South, is unusual. Bogart brings sublime integrity to his world-weary and life-battered persona, and however artificial and predictable the story might be, the star's authenticity is absolute. One believes what's going on because one believes Bogart.

This kind of thriller, which now falls under the general rubric of film noir, was losing a little steam by this time. For one thing, Morris Carnovksy's character of Martinelli had been done to death in the previous five years by everyone from Sydney Greenstreet to Otto Kruger. Marvin Miller's hulking, seemingly emotionally disturbed thug had become a commonplace fixture in such films; and while Miller is unique in his heavy-set, Orson Wellesian appearance, there's little that's new here, either. One can imagine script conferences of the day, with young screenwriters falling over one another trying to come up with a new psychological "complex" for the bad guy to be suffering from. Fortunately for the viewer, cliched though this movie is, it was made with extreme professionalism. Leo Tover's cinematography is understated, and nicely suggests the equatorial. John Cromwell was an old stage and movie pro by this time, though his usual magical touch with actors failed him with Miss Scott, he handles the tough guy stuff with suave authority.

This mediocre film noir, involving the usual tangle of murder and deceit, is notable mainly for Bogart's presence. He's an army captain who sets out to solve the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of a buddy. There's the usual quotient of danger and deceit and, of course, a femme fatale, well played by Lizabeth Scott who seems to have been born for this kind of part. Many of the plot points are either hard to follow or hard to swallow, and it's all much too talky, but it does have a memorable closing line! Worth seeing for genre buffs.

"Dead Reckoning" is a good, if not very original, film noir starring Humphrey Bogart as a paratrooper investigating his buddy's death.

William Prince, who later was a more visible actor as a white-haired older man, has a small role as the buddy, who runs away when he learns he's about to receive the Medal of Honor. Later, he's found dead in his home town.

There are the usual ethnic stereotypes - the de riguer black maid, the thug of Italian descent, and the torturing thug of German descent.

The thug in this case is Marvin Miller, who later became the assistant of John Beresford Tipton on the TV show, "The Millionaire." He got to give people $1 million tax free. With prices today, they'd probably all laugh in his face.

Lizabeth Scott is the woman "Johnny" (Prince) was in love with. She's an actress I always found heavy on style and slight on substance.

Beautiful, with a warm smile, and one of the best voices in films, she never exhibited the acting range of, say, Bacall, whom she seemed groomed to follow. In this role, she's not very believable, which is great for the noir films, in which she excelled. You really didn't know how involved she was or wasn't in the crime at hand.

All in all, a very entertaining film with a solid performance by Bogart.

Regarding the film's reference to the "Geronimo" cry that paratroopers made as they jumped, I asked an actual war paratrooper about this, and he said, "We were usually so scared we couldn't make a sound."