Dark Passage is a strange movie, no getting around it, and in more ways than one. The first way it is strange is in its use of subjective camera in much of the first part of the movie.  Subjective camera, which allows us to see exactly what some character in the movie sees, certainly has its place. However, it is normally used sparingly, reverting back to objective camera, the principal mode of filming, where we see what is going on from a vantage point that does not belong to anyone in the movie.

Furthermore, subjective camera is best used when the person whose point of view we share is motionless, or at least not moving in any significant way.  For example, it is appropriate when a man is lying on an operating table about to undergo surgery, or when he is watching people who are unaware that they are being observed.  In Rear Window (1954), James Stewart plays a man who is relatively immobile, owing to a broken leg, having nothing to do but watch his neighbors across the way.  As a result, subjective camera is used extensively in this movie.  At the same time, objective camera remains the primary mode of filming.

The worst possible use of subjective camera is in Lady in the Lake (1946), where the entire movie is filmed in subjective camera except for the introduction and some later commentary by Robert Montgomery in the role of Phillip Marlowe. He explains that this movie will allow people in the audience to experience it as if they were Phillip Marlowe.  It does no such thing, because when Marlowe is moving around, we in the audience know we are not moving, especially when he is interacting physically with another person, as when he punches Lloyd Nolan or kisses Audrey Totter. The screen goes dark when he kisses her, so she is made to explain it by saying, “You close your eyes too, don’t you, darling?” In addition, it wears us out having so many people look directly into the camera, and therefore at us, when talking to Marlowe. The most unfortunate part about this movie is that after it was made, no one ever wanted to produce a remake.  Maybe the novel by Raymond Chandler, on which the movie was based, is not one of his best, but filming a version in objective camera might have made for an enjoyable movie, had the prospect of such not been ruined by this one.

The motive for using subjective camera in the first part of Dark Passage is different from that of Lady in the Lake, which is to conceal the face of the protagonist, Vincent Parry.  Later in the movie, he will have plastic surgery, after which we get to see his face, that of Humphrey Bogart. The movie is filmed primarily in the objective mode from that point on.  Before the plastic surgery, we only hear the voice of Bogart. Objective camera is sometimes used even here, but only when Vincent’s face is not visible; otherwise, subjective camera is used.  At one point before the surgery, we see what is supposed to be Vincent’s face in the newspaper, and it is quite different from that of Bogart.  I don’t know to what extent a person’s face can be changed by plastic surgery, but it seems a stretch that his face could have been transformed that much.

The movie Seconds (1966) is more realistic, even if the kind of procedure used in the movie does put it in the category of science fiction.  Arthur Hamiliton is played by John Randolph.  He is bored with his life. He learns of a secret procedure that can give him a complete physical makeover, after which his death will be faked, and he can have a new identity, thereby giving him a second chance at life. He agrees to it, after which he becomes Antiochus Wilson, played by Rock Hudson. Admittedly, that is quite a change from Randolph to Hudson, but it is believable. There is a similarity in their eyes, for example.

Furthermore, by using two different actors, there was no need for the first part of Seconds to be filmed in subjective camera.  Those who made Dark Passage could have found an actor who had more of a physical resemblance to Bogart, much in the way Jerry Lacy was used to play the Humphrey Bogart of Woody Allen’s imagination in Play It Again, Sam (1972).  Such an actor could have played Vincent in the first part of the movie, with Bogart’s voice being dubbed in, and we would have accepted the change from plastic surgery more easily, as well as being spared the excessive use of subjective camera in the beginning.

When the movie begins, Vincent Parry is escaping from San Quentin. He manages to hitch a ride with a man named Baker, who becomes suspicious of Vincent. Then the radio reveals that Vincent is an escaped convict who murdered his wife three years ago.  This leads to Vincent punching Baker several times in subjective camera, which smacks of a gimmick.

After knocking Baker out, he drags the body out of the car, removes Baker’s clothes, and puts them on himself.  He grabs a rock, presumably to kill Baker, but then another car pulls up, and a woman steps out, whose name we later find out is Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall).  She calls him “Vincent,” saying she wants to help him, telling him to get in her car.

As I said, this is a strange movie.  She explains her presence by saying that she was out painting in the hills when she heard that he escaped. Then she figured this, and then she figured that, and that was how she was able to find him. Vincent doesn’t believe her explanation.  We have a hard time believing it ourselves.

Then there is her motive.  Why is she doing this for him?  When they get to her apartment, she shows him a clipping from a newspaper of a letter she wrote to the editor during his trial, how she felt he was getting a raw deal.  She reminds me of those goofy women that fall in love with men while they are on trial for murder, or later when they are in prison.  In any event, we now have to accept that not only was she conveniently painting in the hills when Vincent broke out of prison, and that she happened to be listening to the radio, and that she was able to figure out where Vincent would be before the police did, but we must also accept that she was motivated to help him escape because of her interest in his trial three years ago.  It turns out that she became interested in Vincent’s case because it reminded her of her father’s murder trial.  She says, “I know he didn’t kill my stepmother.”

Now, let’s see.  Why do you suppose the decision was made by those who wrote the script to make it be her stepmother instead of her mother who was murdered?  Most likely, we would have expected Irene to be more concerned about the murder of her mother. Stepmothers, on the other hand, are disposable.  They do not warrant the same amount of family feeling.  In fact, Irene might have resented the fact that her father married her in the first place. Children often do. It is for a similar reason that fairy tales often speak of the wicked stepmother and not the wicked mother.  So, Irene is allowed to take her father’s side when it is only her stepmother that was murdered without any misgivings on our part, whereas we would have been uncomfortable and suspicious had it been Irene’s real mother that was murdered.

Vincent asks her why she happened to be painting in the hills that morning. She answers:

When I woke up this morning, I found myself wondering how you were getting along. I don’t believe in fate or destiny, or any of those things because I know it wasn’t destined for my father to die in prison. But I guess it was something like fate to make me go out to Marin County to paint. Maybe it was simply because I was thinking of you.

Before they have this conversation, Irene gets a phone call from someone named Bob (Bruce Bennett), who is hoping for a date, but she says she is busy. Then she leaves to buy Vincent some new clothes. While she is out, a woman knocks on the door.  Because Vincent has the record player on, that woman knows someone is in there, saying, “Irene, let me in.”

Vincent says to himself, “That’s Madge’s voice.”  After she keeps insisting, he tells her through the door to go away.

This strikes us as bizarre.  Vincent knows a woman named Madge (Agnes Moorehead), who happens to be a friend of Irene, whom he met just this morning?  When Irene gets back with his new clothes, he tells her she had a caller, but he doesn’t mention that he knows it was Madge.  Later on, after the conversation about Irene’s father, Vincent doesn’t say anything about Madge, but he does ask her who Bob is.

“He was engaged to somebody else,” Irene answers. “She hates him now, but at the same time….”

“She didn’t want anybody else to have him,” Vincent says, finishing her thought.

“How did you know?”

“I’ve known people like that.”

“You know more than that,” Irene surmises. “You know she was the woman who knocked at the door. The one who worked against you at the trial.”

Filling in the blanks, we have to conclude that Irene was at the trial, falling in love with Vincent and hoping he would be acquitted, and that was where she met Madge, who testified against him and got him convicted.  On that basis, they became friends.  After the trial, Madge and Bob fell in love and became engaged, but now she hates him. Bob started dating Irene, which made Madge hate him even more.  And on that basis, Irene and Madge continue to be friends.

Vincent decides that Madge will keep coming back, so he leaves when it gets dark. He catches a taxicab. The cab driver, whose name is Sam (Tom D’Andrea), recognizes him from the newspapers. He thinks Vincent did kill his wife, but he doesn’t blame him.  “I figure you slugged her with that ashtray because she made life miserable for you. I know how it is.”

Vincent appreciates the sympathy and understanding, but he denies killing her. Sam tells him he knows a back-alley plastic surgeon that can fix him up, so people won’t recognize him.  Turns out that Irene slipped Vincent a thousand dollars without his knowing about it.  (Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $14,500 today.)  The face job will only cost a couple of hundred, so he can afford it.

In the meantime, Vincent goes to visit his friend George Fellsinger, a professional trumpet player. Through their conversation, we find out that Madge testified at the trial that Gertrude, Vincent’s wife, said, “Vincent killed me.”  That’s about as realistic as when the title character of Agamemnon announces offstage, “Ah me, I have been struck a mortal blow.”

George says that Gertrude wouldn’t have done that.  He says it was Madge who framed Vincent because she was in love with him, and when she couldn’t have him, she got revenge by telling that story on the witness stand.

Vincent leaves George’s apartment and has the plastic surgeon give him a new face.  Then, all bandaged up, he goes back to stay with George until his face has healed.  But when he enters the apartment, George is lying dead on the floor, having been killed by being struck with his own trumpet.  The police know that George was a friend of his, and when they come to ask questions, they will think Vincent killed him, especially since he left his fingerprints on the trumpet.

He has only one place to go now, and that is back to Irene’s. Unfortunately, he already dismissed Sam, the cab driver, so he has to walk all the way, or rather, climb, since this is San Francisco.  But wouldn’t you know it?  As he is about to reach Irene’s apartment, he sees Baker’s car.  You remember him, don’t you, the guy Vincent had to beat up at the beginning of this movie?  Well, here he is again.

Anyway, Vincent faints right after pushing the button to Irene’s apartment. She finds him passed out and carries him up to her apartment.  I guess Irene is stronger than she looks.

The plan now is for Vincent to stay with Irene until the bandages are ready to come off.  One night Bob calls for a date, and she accepts, saying Vincent can hide in the bedroom when Bob arrives.  But then Madge shows up before Bob gets there.

Up till now, this movie has merely been farfetched.  This section with Bob, however, is logically incoherent. Bob and Madge start arguing in front of Irene, with Bob saying that Madge is the reason Vincent murdered his wife.  “Madge pestered him,” he says, “kept after him till she had a hold on him. That’s why he killed his wife, to get her out of the way.”

And Bob thinks he knows this how?  He admits that he never met Vincent Parry.  Yet he is sure that Madge made Vicent fall in love with her, causing him to kill his wife so he could be with Madge from then on. Did Bob learn this from Irene?  No. Irene did not meet Madge until the trial, well after all this was supposed to have happened, and she didn’t even meet Vincent until after his escape from San Quentin.  As for Madge, she denies what Bob is saying.

Bob continues his accusation:

Parry didn’t have the brains to know it, but you drove him to it. He has no brains, or he wouldn’t have killed Fellsinger. Wouldn’t have come to Frisco in the first place. Now he’ll get the gas chamber.

So, according to Bob, Vincent not only killed Gertrude, his wife, but also his friend, George Fellsinger.

Madge says she’s afraid that Vincent will try to kill her next because she testified against him at his trial, and now he hates her.

Bob replies, “I never met Parry, but I know psychologically, he’s no killer.”

Huh?  Bob thinks Vincent killed Gertrude, and he thinks Vincent killed George, yet Bob is certain that Vincent is no killer, psychologically speaking, even though he never met him, so Madge has nothing to worry about.

Madge denies that Vincent ever had anything to do with her.  She says, “Somebody lied to you.”

Bob replies, “Gert wasn’t a liar. She was a lot of other things, but not a liar.”

So, Bob never met Vincent, but he knew Gertrude well enough to know she wasn’t a liar.  I guess we could assume that Bob and Gertrude were having an affair, and one night during a little pillow talk, she told Bob that Vincent and Madge were in love.  That right there could have been a lie, an attempt to justify her having an affair with Bob.  Then, after Gertrude was murdered and Vincent was convicted, Bob and Madge fell in love and decided to get married.  But they had a falling out, and Bob, having met Irene through Madge, started dating Irene.

I’m only assuming Bob and Gertrude had an affair, however, in order to make sense of how he knew her but not Vincent, her husband, but this is not confirmed through any of the dialogue.  And my assumption is doubtful, anyway, because Bob insists that Gertrude was not a liar, even though a woman has to lie to her husband when she cheats on him.

Eventually it comes out that a man was in Irene’s apartment the other day when Madge knocked on the door.  Irene tells Bob the man was her new boyfriend, breaking up with Bob and removing him from the rest of the picture. She also tells Madge she doesn’t want to see her anymore either.  So, let’s try to forget about all that nonsense Bob was talking about so we can get back to the parts of this movie that are only farfetched, like, for instance, the fact that Baker is outside, sitting in his parked convertible, looking up at Irene’s apartment.

Once the bandages come off, Vincent says goodbye to Irene, not wanting her to get mixed up in his problems.  He says he intends to find out who the real killer is so he can clear himself.  This is a common plot point in a movie, when a man wrongfully accused must evade the police long enough to find out who the real killer is and with enough evidence to exonerate himself.  I have never heard of anyone doing that in real life, but we’ll revisit this point later.

Anyway, no sooner does Vincent leave than he runs into a suspicious detective. He manages to get away from him and rent a room at a hotel, but then Baker shows up holding a .38.  He says he regained consciousness in time to see Irene’s license plate, by which he found out where she lived and that she is a rich woman.  He then followed Vincent the night he left in a taxi, so he even knows about the facelift. He wants Vincent to get Irene to give him $60,000.

Vincent agrees, and they start driving back to Irene’s.  It turns out that Baker did time in San Quentin himself, where he learned a lot of things. He tells Vincent where he can get identification papers in Benton, Arizona before he leaves the country.

Vincent gets the drop on Baker and finds out there was another car that followed him the night he took the taxi.  From the description of the car, a bright-orange convertible coupe, Vincent now knows who killed Gertrude and George.  There is another struggle, and Baker accidentally falls over a cliff.

Needless to say, the orange car belongs to Madge.  He goes over to Madge’s apartment, claiming to be a friend of Bob.  Eventually, she realizes he is actually Vincent.  Now, for the most part, this movie has been nothing like The Maltese Falcon (1941), but this scene with Vincent and Madge invites comparison to the final scene in that movie between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy.  And even though The Maltese Falcon is a much better movie than Dark Passage, and even though this latter film has been farfetched and even illogical up to this point, it is nevertheless more realistic in this scene than the movie about the black bird.

As you may remember, in the final scene of The Maltese Falcon, Sam tells Brigid that he has figured out that she killed his partner Miles Archer, and that she is going to have to “take the fall,” meaning that she will be the one who has to take the blame for that murder.  Otherwise, Sam will end up having to go to prison.  In this scene in Dark Passage, Vincent tells Madge that he has figured out that she killed Gertrude. Then he concluded that she killed George because that would further incriminate Vincent, for which he will get the gas chamber. He has it all written down on a piece of paper, which he will give to the police, saying that she will be the one who has to go to prison.

In The Maltese Falcon, Brigid admits to killing Miles, and when the police detectives show up, Sam turns her over to them.  Like a meek little lamb, she goes with them, accepting her fate without a word of protest.  In Dark Passage, however, Madge says to Vincent exactly what Brigid should have said to Sam, “That’s no evidence.  That’s just the way you figure it.”

To irritate Vincent even more, Madge defiantly admits to killing Gertrude and George.  But when Vincent asks if she will tell that to the police, she smirks and says, “No.”  In The Maltese Falcon, after Brigid admits to Sam she killed Miles, she acts as if that confession seals her fate.  In this scene in Dark Passage, Madge knows, as Brigid should have known, that she can deny ever having admitted anything to Vincent. Vincent realizes that she is right, that the police will not take his word for all this.  And so it is that Dark Passage is more believable here than was the corresponding scene in The Maltese Falcon.

His plan having been frustrated, Vincent becomes threatening, wanting to kill her. In her attempt to get away from him, she pushes up against a picture window, crashes through it, and plunges to her death from her high-rise apartment several floors up.  So, I guess you might say that she did end up taking the fall.

The reasonable thing for him to do at this point is take the elevator down to the first floor.  But he hears people talking about what happened, and he decides he must avoid them, as if they would think he pushed the woman out the window. Instead, he goes up to the roof and then climbs down what must be at least ten flights of fire escape.  But that’s all right, because nobody notices.

He makes it to the bus station and buys a ticket for Benton, Arizona, the place where Baker said he could get a passport.  He calls Irene on a payphone and tells her he is going to Paita, Peru.  While he is on the phone, a policeman comes in and starts talking to the man selling bus tickets.  We don’t get to hear what the policeman is looking for, we only hear the man selling tickets say, “I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”  Peeled for what?  Vincent Parry?  No problem.  He’s had a face lift.

Anyway, with the policeman standing right outside the phone booth, we wonder if Vincent will have any trouble getting past him and the man selling tickets.  Well, I guess we can go on right on wondering because all of a sudden, we see Vincent sitting on the bus.

Then comes the happy ending, where Irene finds Vincent in a nightclub in Paita.

I mentioned earlier that the plot of the wronged man, who must evade the police long enough to discover who the real killer is and find enough evidence to incriminate him while exonerating himself, is a common one.  And in every other movie I can think of, this wronged man does exactly that, even though nothing like that ever happens in real life.  This movie is the exception. Vincent is still wanted for murdering Gertrude and George, and we can now add Madge to this list of people he is supposed to have killed.  The police might even be able to tie him to Baker’s death.  In a strange way, the fact that he has been unable to clear himself makes this movie, as farfetched and illogical as it is, more realistic.

As suggested by the title, Out of the Past is a movie about a man who thought he had put his past behind him and could live out his days contentedly married to a nice woman in a small town.  But one day, his past catches up with him, dragging him back.  As might be expected, this precipitates a flashback.

Flashbacks are common in a film noir like this one, presumably because they help create the right mood for stories about what Foster Hirsch refers to as “doomed characters” who are “victims of fate.”  [The Dark Side of the Screen:  Film Noir, page 2.]  There is no logical reason why this should be so.  If man has free will, then he would have had it in the past just as he has it in the present. Alternatively, if events occur by chance, they could have done so in the past just as they do today. Because the past cannot be changed, however, the inalterable nature of those past events creates the feeling that those events were unavoidable when they first unfolded.

Even a movie told completely in the present tense can be experienced differently when seen a second time, for then we know the end toward which the events in the movie are headed, and we experience a sense of inevitability that was absent when we watched the movie the first time, when the future seemed open to all sorts of possibilities.  For that reason, films noirs with flashbacks age well, for the sense of inexorable fate is doubled on a subsequent viewing.

Danny Peary says, “Out of the Past repeatedly suggests that lives are determined by chance,” [Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful, page 242] after which he lists several examples, which are discussed below.  But the overriding principle is fate, which guides the flow of chance events toward their ultimate destination.

Understood this way, we can accept some of the almost unbelievable coincidences that occur in this movie, for in a world governed by fate, what is unlikely may be inevitable.  For example, viewed objectively, it is a bit farfetched that Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum), a private detective, could spend his afternoons sitting in a little café called La Mar Azul in Acapulco, drinking beer, in hopes of spotting Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), whom he has been hired to find on account of her having shot her lover, Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), a big-time gambler, when he found out she stole $40,000 from him.

When Jeff is first hired to find Kathie, Whit says he’s not worried about the money.  He just wants her back.  Jeff talks to the woman that used to be Kathie’s maid, who says that Kathie must have gone south, Florida to be exact, given the clothes she packed.  However, the maid also refers to Kathie’s having gotten sick from being vaccinated.  Jeff notes that you don’t need to be vaccinated to go to Florida, so he takes the bus to Mexico City and then to Acapulco.  Jeff figures that Acapulco is the place because “if you want to go south, here’s where you get the boat.”  And so, against all odds, Jeff’s waiting around in that café works, for one day Kathie walks in through the door.

Another example of how fate overcomes the odds occurs after Jeff and Kathie fall in love and decide to hide out in San Francisco, where Jeff starts working as a private detective again.  He says, “There wasn’t one chance in a million we’d bump into our past.”  It is helpful that Jeff acknowledged the odds against running into anyone they once knew, and it is fitting that we see him at a racetrack as he says this.  This preemptive admission of just how much of a long shot it was makes it easier to believe it when it happens.  He is spotted by his ex-partner, Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie), whom Whit hired to find Jeff and Kathie after he realized that Jeff betrayed him by running off with Kathie instead of bringing her back. But even more so, the fatalistic connotations of the flashback, in which this part of the story is told, make their being found out even more acceptable.  It was bound to happen, sooner or later, we tell ourselves.

Chance was also put in its place in a previous scene, one in Acapulco, where Kathie takes Jeff to a casino. She continually places big bets on the roulette table and loses.  He tells her that isn’t the way to win.

“Is there a way?” she replies with resignation.

“There’s a way to lose more slowly.”

Jeff adds that he especially does not like betting against a wheel.  In the movies, only women and weak men play roulette, where one must passively sit at the table while the odds slowly grind one down.  A real man likes to imagine that he has some say in the matter, which is why Jeff is happy to go to the racetrack, where a man can flatter himself that his knowledge of the horses, the jockeys, and the track enables him to beat the odds.  Of course, it is at the track where the million to one shot against him comes in.

Adding to this sense of fate is the enchanting nature of Kathie herself.  “And then I saw her coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit didn’t care about the forty grand,” Jeff says as we see her walking into La Mar Azul.  After their first meeting, she mentions a cantina named Pablo’s, adding, “I sometimes go there.”

Jeff continues his narration:

I went to Pablo’s that night. I knew I’d go every night until she showed up, and I knew she knew it.  I sat there and drank bourbon, and I shut my eyes….  I knew where I was and what I was doing. I just thought what a sucker I was. I even knew she wouldn’t come the first night, but I sat there, grinding it out. But the next night I knew she’d show. She waited until it was late.  And then she walked in out of the moonlight, smiling.

Kathie is sexually irresistible, and we know that Jeff is destined to make love to her.  She tells him she never stole the $40,000, asking him, “Won’t you believe me?”

“Baby, I don’t care,” he replies, kissing her and sealing his fate.

One night, they go back to her cabin just as it starts raining.  Because they got wet, they get a towel and start drying themselves off.  We are used to seeing old movies where the love scenes are indicated by metaphors:  two lit cigarettes burning in an ashtray, logs burning in the fireplace, fireworks lighting up the sky.  In this movie, Jeff flings the towel away, knocking over the lamp, plunging the room into darkness, just as the storm blows open the door, with the rain pouring down. Whew! That must have been some pretty good sex.

Nicholas Christopher says that the first time he saw Out of the Past, he had taken a few puffs on an opium pipe, so he attributed the dreamlike experience of watching the movie to the opium. Years later, however, he saw the movie cold sober:

And again, as I found myself entering that same vivid, darkly beautiful dream I remembered from Paris, I realized with astonishment that it had not been the opium which had engendered the dream, but the film.  [Somewhere in the Night:  Film Noir and the American City, page xii.]

After quoting the two entrances made by Kathie referred to above, he makes a general observation about how she appears to Jeff:

And he keeps referring to her as emerging from various sorts of light.  As a glowing, luminescent image.  Almost otherworldly.  Always striding into darkness….  “And then suddenly she appeared,” he says with a lift of anticipation, “walking through the moonlight, to me….”  “And then I saw her,” he says, “walking up the dirt road in the headlights of her car….”  [Ibid., pages 2-3.]

At this point, it worth contrasting Kathie with another woman, Ann Miller (Virginia Huston).  The movie begins in Bridgeport, a small town in California.  Jeff, having changed his last name to “Bailey,” runs a filling station, and he wants to marry Ann.  She is an attractive woman, but she is not sexually exciting the way Kathie is.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I would have counted myself lucky to have had a girlfriend as pretty as Ann back in the day.  But compared to Kathie?  Forget about it.  With her, I wouldn’t even have tried.  I knew my place in the world, and that did not include having a girlfriend like Kathie.

Actually, I think I would have been most comfortable with Marny (Mary Field), the wise-cracking hash-slinger who owns the café in Bridgeport right across the street from Jeff’s filling station, although nobody is interested her.  While she is talking to Jim, the local sheriff, we learn he used to be Ann’s boyfriend: “First she’s got you,” Marny says, “now she’s got you and Bailey. And the only thing I seem to get is older.”

After Jim leaves, she turns her attention to a stranger that just dropped in.  It is Joe (Paul Valentine), Whit’s right-hand man.  Wanting to find out about Jeff, he says to her, “Tell me something.”

“You don’t look like I could,” she replies.

He asks her if the Bailey she was talking about runs the filling station.  She indicates as much.  He says he just happened to be passing through when he saw Bailey’s name on the sign over the filling station, and wonders if he is someone he used to know.  Actually, Jeff went by the name of Markham when Joe knew him, but Joe doesn’t want Marny to know his reason for being there.  Rather, he saw Jeff himself in front of the filling station on a previous occasion.  Add this to the list of unlikely coincidences that only an inexorable fate could bring about.

The beginning of this movie has been compared to The Killers (1946), where Burt Lancaster is trying to escape his past by working in a filling station in a small town when he happens to be spotted by Albert Dekker, a gangster he double-crossed once.  This is one of many elements of previous films noirs that occur in this movie, discussed further below.

When Bailey returns to the filling station, Joe tells him Whit wants to see him.  Jeff realizes he has to square things, and putting on his trench coat and fedora, he has Ann give him a ride to Whit’s house on Lake Tahoe.  During the trip, he tells her about his past, which constitutes the flashback.

Before proceeding, there are a couple of points worth mentioning.  This movie is based on a novel written by Daniel Mainwaring, Build My Gallows High.  In “Daniel Mainwaring:  An Interview,” by Tom Flinn, Mainwaring says, “I had been to Acapulco a couple of years before I wrote the book.  It was just a little bitty town, not like it is today.  There were very few cafés, and one hotel.”  [The Big Book of Noir, page 66.] This makes it a little more reasonable that Jeff could hang around one café and hope that Kathie would show up.

In the same interview, he says, “The scenes in San Francisco, however, took place in New York in the book. We switched to San Francisco because we wanted to shoot there.”  [Ibid.]  The story starts in New York, where Whit hired Jeff to find Kathie.  That means that in the book, after leaving Acapulco, Jeff and Kathie went back to New York.  Had that been in the movie, their being seen by Fisher at the racetrack would have been a lot more believable.  As it is, we have to wonder why Fisher, after being hired by Whit to find Jeff and Kathie, would pick San Francisco as a good place to look for them.  Fate or no fate, that really strains our credulity.

Anyway, after Jeff is spotted at that racetrack, Fisher shows up at the cabin Jeff and Kathie have in the woods, wanting his cut of the $40,000 Kathie stole.  Jeff still thinks she doesn’t have it.  While he and Fisher start fighting, we see Kathie watching calmly as her right hand seems to be reaching for something.  A slight, determined smile appears on her lips.  The fight continues, and then a shot rings out.  We see Kathie standing there with a gun in her hand, probably the one she shot Whit with. Jeff says she didn’t have to do that.  She says, “You wouldn’t have killed him,” pointing out that Fisher would have told Whit about them.  Believing her present situation to be untenable, she runs out the door, jumps in a car, and drives off, leaving her purse behind, which has a checkbook in it, listing a deposit of $40,000.

The flashback is concluded just as Jeff and Ann arrive at Whit’s house.  He gets out, and Ann drives back to Bridgeport.  Whit tells Jeff he has another job for him to do, figuring Jeff owes him.  While telling him about it, Kathie comes walking into the room, having returned to Whit.  In many scenes, we see Jeff from behind as he walks away.  With Kathie, on the other hand, she makes dramatic entrances by suddenly walking into a room.

As James Harvey points out, however, there is a difference:

But in the second half of the movie—the part that’s in the present—Kathie is a different figure from the woman in Acapulco.  Even her reentrances (which go on) are different:  less grand than furtive—less like here-she-is! (“And then I saw her…”) than where-did-she come-from?  [Movie Love in the Fifties, page 19.]

Anyway, it seems that Whit had an accountant in San Francisco help him cheat on his taxes but who is now blackmailing him, and Whit wants Jeff to get those tax records back from the accountant.  This is the part of the movie that Bosley Crowther must have had in mind when writing his review for the New York Times, where he says that “the sum of deceitful complications that occur in ‘Out of the Past’ must be reckoned by logarithmic tables, so numerous and involved do they become.”

Suffice it to say that Whit’s plan is to have Kathie, accompanied by Joe, go to San Francisco, murder the accountant, and frame Jeff for it.  As part of the frame, there is an affidavit that Kathie signed saying that Jeff murdered Fisher.  However, Jeff is one step ahead of them and foils the plot.  He now has the tax records, which he will give up in exchange for the affidavit.  In the meantime, he goes back to Bridgeport to see Ann.

While all this was going on, Whit had gone to his Blue Sky Club in Reno.  Kathie fears that she and Joe might now be in trouble with Whit for having botched things.  She calls Whit and tells him to stay where he is.  Then she has Joe go to Bridgeport to kill Jeff.  That would mean that the tax records would make their way to the Treasury Department, in which case Whit would end up going to prison, but she and Joe don’t care because they would be in the clear.  However, Joe ends up falling to his death with the help of Jeff’s deaf-mute assistant at the filling station, referred to as “The Kid” (Dickie Moore), who hooks him with his fishing line.

When Jeff returns to Whit’s place, he makes a deal with Whit to give him the tax records that Jeff now has, in exchange for which Whit will give Jeff $50,000 and take the frame off him for killing the accountant, for which they can now blame Joe.  However, someone has to take the rap for killing Fisher, and that will have to be Kathie.

Now, where have we heard that before?  In another essay by Tom Flinn, “Out of the Past,” he notices a similarity between this movie and The Maltese Falcon (1941) in the need to have a fall-guy.  He also compares Sam Spade and Gutman to Jeff and Whit, while comparing Kathie and Meta to Brigid.  (Meta is another femme fatale in this movie, played by Rhonda Fleming, who is the tax accountant’s secretary and lover.  She plays a role in setting him up to be killed.)  [The Big Book of Noir, pages 69-70.]

In the commentary provided by James Ursini on the DVD, he says the tax records have a function similar to that of the Maltese Falcon.  To all that, I suppose we might add that just as Spade didn’t like his partner Archer, so Jeff didn’t like his partner Fisher, whom he referred to as stupid and oily.  And just as Brigid killed Archer, so Kathie killed Fisher.

Flinn goes on to note that both films have the protagonist express “mocking admiration” for the “performance” of the femme fatale, as when Spade says to Brigid, “You’re good, you’re very good,” while Jeff says to Kathie, “You’re wonderful, you’re magnificent.”  In a footnote, he goes on to say that such “masculine tributes to feminine duplicity” can also be found in Nightmare Alley (1947) and Dead Reckoning (1946).  [Ibid., page 70 and page 76, n. 2.]

Regarding all these elements in Out of the Past that are reminiscent of earlier films noirs, including similarities to Double Indemnity noted below, Flinn says the following:

In the development of any art movement (or film genre) there comes a point well after the initial breakthrough has been accomplished when the themes and ideas that marked the development of the style or genre reappear in countless elaborations, producing works of greater complexity if less originality than those that defined the style or initiated the genre.  Usually termed “decadent” or “baroque” by historians, these later efforts are frequently dismissed as “more of the same” at the time they are produced, though they often seem more interesting in retrospect than the classic works they followed….  It would be hard indeed to find a better example of the “baroque” phase of film noir than RKO’s Out of the Past….  [Ibid., page 69]

After Jeff leaves to go see Ann again, Whit tells Kathie that if she doesn’t admit to killing Fisher and take the fall, he will have her tormented, tortured, and ultimately killed.  Then he goes to Reno to get the money to pay off Jeff.  When Jeff returns, he walks into Whit’s living room where he sees Whit lying dead on the floor with a dumb look on his face, pretty much matching the one now on Jeff’s face.

It seems these guys just won’t learn.  The whole thing started when Kathie shot Whit.  In San Francisco, she shot and killed Fisher.  Then she helped arrange for Joe to kill the accountant, which he did.  And then she schemed with Joe for him to kill Jeff while Whit was away.  You’d think by this time Whit and Jeff might have realized that trying to make Kathie be the fall-guy is a dangerous thing to do.

At this point, we hear Kathie’s voice, “You can’t make deals with a dead man, Jeff,” as she makes another one of her dramatic entrances into a room.  And now she has the $50,000 that Whit was going to give to Jeff.

Kathie could kill Jeff too, but she doesn’t, probably because she is still in love with him.  Now that Jeff’s plan has been thwarted, Kathie says she wants the two of them to go back to Mexico and start all over again.  He reluctantly agrees to go along with her plan.  While she goes upstairs to pack, however, he calls the police to let them know where they will be heading.

When they get in the car, Jeff has trouble getting it started, but Kathie reaches down, presumably adjusting the choke, allowing the car to start.  This reminds us of a scene from Double Indemnity (1944), although in that case, it was the man that finally got the car started, whereas in this case, it is Kathie, reinforcing the idea that she is in charge now.

As they drive down the highway, Kathie sees a police blockade up ahead and realizes Jeff has betrayed her.  She says, “Dirty, double-crossing rat!” as she pulls out her revolver, jams the barrel into his genitals, and pulls the trigger.  Then the police riddle the car with machine-gun bullets, killing both of them.

In the novel, Whit’s men kill Jeff.  Danny Peary notes that for a while, James M. Cain worked on the script. He speculates that it was Cain who had Jeff and Kathie die together at the end, just as he did in his novel, Double Indemnity, where Walter and Phyllis commit suicide while on a ship at sea by jumping overboard together, thereby feeding the sharks.  [Op. cit., page 243.]

Following this, the movie takes us back to Bridgeport.  We see Jim telling Ann that he wants to be with her, but she says she can’t.  Then she walks over to the filling station and asks The Kid if Jeff was going away with Kathie.  Although The Kid knows that Jeff had planned to come back to Ann, he lies, nodding “yes,” allowing her to think Jeff never really loved her. This frees her to go back to Jim.  Lucky him.  He gets Jeff’s leftovers.

In the interview with Mainwaring, Tom Flinn says, “Even with the two people from the small town getting together and going away, it’s not much of a happy ending because all the interesting people are dead.”

Mainwaring replies that this ending was required by the “front office.”  “Nowadays they would have ended it with both of them dead.”  [Op. cit., page 67.]

Apparently, it was not enough for the bad people to die in the end.  Ordinary domestic life had to be affirmed.  Even so, this “happy ending” is subversive because it is based on a lie.

The Maltese Falcon (1941) is based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, published in 1930 after having been serialized in Black Mask magazine in 1929.  Because the movie follows it rather closely, references to the novel from time to time can give us a better understanding of the story.

The Provenance of the Maltese Falcon

A lot happens regarding the title statuette before the movie begins, bits and pieces of which are revealed at various points, all of which can be a little hard to follow.  Let us take advantage of hindsight and put it all together at once.

At the beginning of the movie, there is a prologue, telling us about the origin of the Maltese Falcon, made of gold and encrusted with jewels, sent as a tribute to Charles V in 1539 by the Knight Templars of Malta, but seized by pirates before it could arrive.  What happened to it after that, according to the prologue, is a mystery.

Later in the movie, Casper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) reveals additional history of the bird in the centuries since, until he became aware of where it was seventeen years ago.  However, it was stolen before he could get his hands on it.  Somewhat recently, he discovered that it was in the possession of a Russian general named Kemidov, living in a suburb of Istanbul.  Because the bird had been painted in black enamel to conceal its worth at some point during its history, Gutman surmised that Kemidov didn’t know its true value. However, he refused to sell it.  Gutman hired some agents to steal it, but they kept it instead of bringing it to him.

The novel makes it clear that those agents were Bridgid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), Floyd Thursby, and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre).  When Brigid and Thursby found out Cairo meant to double-cross them as well as Gutman, keeping the falcon for himself, they turned the tables on him and took off with the falcon after Thursby managed to steal it from Kemidov.

Brigid and Thursby went to Hong Kong, where Brigid hired Captain Jacobi, Master of the La Paloma, to bring the Maltese Falcon to her when his ship arrived in San Francisco.  Somehow, Gutman got wind of the fact that Brigid and Thursby had the bird and where they were headed.  He followed them there, along with his gunsel Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook Jr.).

At one point in the novel, Cairo claims not to know who Wilmer is, but that is unlikely, since he knew Gutman, and because he shows Wilmer affection later on, rubbing his hand, putting his arm around him. Brigid suggests that Cairo had sex with Wilmer, and Cairo says she tried to have sex with Wilmer too, for some nefarious purpose, no doubt, but with no success, probably because Wilmer was not interested in women.

Toward the end of the novel, Cairo becomes upset when Wilmer is beaten up. After Wilmer is knocked out, he is laid on the sofa:

Joel Cairo sat beside the boy, bending over him, rubbing his cheeks and wrists, smoothing his hair back from his forehead, whispering to him, and peering anxiously down at his white still face.

As for Gutman, he says he loves Wilmer like a son, but I think we know what that means.

Brigid suspects that Thursby will double-cross her, so she decides to do him in first.  To that end, she shows up at the office of a private detective agency called Spade and Archer, under the name of Miss Wonderly.  It is at this point that the movie begins.

Miss Wonderly

Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is in his office when Effie Perine (Lee Patrick), his secretary, steps inside from the outer office to tell him there is a Miss Wonderly to see him.  It is rather startling to see how sexualized the relationship between Sam and Effie is, even though it is otherwise merely professional. Sam addresses Effie as “sweetheart” and “darling.”  Later in the movie, he calls her “precious.”  When Sam asks her if Miss Wonderly is a customer, Effie says she thinks so, adding, “You’ll want to see her anyway. She’s a knockout.”

This “Miss Wonderly” begins telling her phony story about how her sister has run off with Floyd Thursby, and she wants help in getting her back home.  She says Thursby has agreed to meet her that night.  While she is talking, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) joins them.  He says he will be nearby when she and Thursby meet.  She puts two hundred-dollar bills on the table.

Because she knows Thursby is a violent man, her plan is that a confrontation will occur, and either Archer will kill Thursby, or Thursby will kill Archer.  If the latter, then she can tell the police about the murder, getting Thursby arrested, and then have the Maltese Falcon all to herself when Jacobi brings it to her. When she is unable to get the confrontation that she had hoped for, she takes one of Thursby’s pistols and shoots Archer herself, leaving the unusual revolver behind so that Thursby will be incriminated.

We don’t actually see who it is that shoots Archer.  All we see is a revolver pointed at Archer and fired. That Brigid shot him is not revealed until the end of the movie.  In the meantime, Brigid doesn’t have to frame Thursby for Archer’s murder as she planned because he is shot four times in the back by Wilmer. Later on, Wilmer also kills Captain Jacobi.

Wilmer

Wilmer is played by Elisha Cook Jr., who was 5 feet, 5 inches tall.  He often played the role of a small, thin-skinned man who is trying to compensate for his diminutive stature by acting tough, only to end up being humiliated.  Most memorable is when Jack Palance shoots him in Shane (1953), Cook’s body flying back into the mud.  He is usually nothing but feckless bluster, but on those rare occasions where he does manage to kill someone, he is almost always killed himself, as in The Killing (1956) or One-Eyed Jacks (1961).

In the latter movie, there was no need for him to die as far as the plot was concerned.  Rather, it was necessitated by his screen persona.  When Ben Johnson tries to rob a bank, Cook, as the bank teller, could have shot him dead with no harm coming to himself, and that would have worked just as well, logically speaking.  But to have a pipsqueak like Elisha Cook Jr. kill a big strapping man like Ben Johnson and then be triumphant, standing over Johnson’s body with a smoking gun in his hand, that would have been a grave injustice, aesthetically speaking, that is.  So, he just had to catch a bullet himself.

The Maltese Falcon is the only movie I am aware of in which Elisha Cook Jr. plays a character who kills someone, two in this movie, and yet is not killed himself.  At one point, he even kicks Spade in the face. However, Spade does humiliate him, taking his two .45s away from him on two different occasions. Wilmer is arrested at the end of the movie, but even that is diminished by the fact that we only hear about it.  I suspect that the reason he was able to kill two men in this movie without having to be killed himself was that there are no scenes depicting these murders.  Had we witnessed Wilmer gunning these men down with his two .45s, it would have been necessary to film a scene where he was shot full of bullets himself.

Spade and Archer

From the beginning, we see that Spade does not like his partner Archer. Although Spade was the one to start interviewing Miss Wonderly, when he tells her that they will have a man near the place where she is supposed to meet Thursby, Archer butts in and says, “I’ll look after it myself.” Spade gives him a look of mild annoyance.  After she leaves, Archer says, “Maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first.”

With barely concealed sarcasm, Spade replies, “You’ve got brains.  Yes, you have.”

Just after two in the morning, Spade gets a call from Detective Tom Polhouse (Ward Bond), telling him that Archer was found dead near the corner of Bush and Stockton.  Spade says he’ll be there in fifteen minutes.  When he gets there, he and Tom discuss what happened. Finally, Tom says, “Miles had his faults like any of us, but he must’ve had some good points too.”

Spade replies, “I guess so,” as if to say he can’t think of any at the moment. We accept his indifference to Miles’ death because we are informed that Miles had no children.  If a man in a movie has young children, we are supposed to like him.

During the opening scene in which Miss Wonderly told her story about the sister she supposedly had, we are made aware of two windows in the office, both with “Spade and Archer” written on them in big, bold letters.  One window is on the wall to Spade’s right, where Archer’s desk is.  The large window is behind Spade’s desk.  The sun is shining through it and, as a result, we see “Spade and Archer” projected onto the wall just to Sam’s left.  After Miss Wonderly leaves, we see “Spade and Archer” projected onto the floor, apparently through a third window, this one on that same wall, the one to Spade’s left, which means the sun has moved around so it can shine in through that window now.  And in what kind of building could an office of ordinary size have windows on three of its walls?

This impossible repositioning on the part of the sun so it can shine through an unlikely window was probably motivated by a desire on the part of the director, John Huston, to emphasize the way “Spade and Archer” dominates the room.  The day after Archer’s death, Spade is so glad to be rid of Archer that, unwilling to allow for a decent interval of even a few days to show some respect for his dead partner, he tells Effie to have “Spade and Archer” removed from the windows and replaced with “Samuel Spade.”

Near the end of the novel, after Spade has figured out that Brigid killed Archer, he explains why he doesn’t care about that:

“Miles,” Spade said hoarsely, “was a son of a bitch. I found that out the first week we were in business together, and I meant to kick him out as soon as the year was up. You didn’t do me a damned bit of harm by killing him.”

His saying that he “meant to kick him out” tells us that us that the year in question came and went without Spade getting rid of Archer.

Iva

Spade doesn’t say why he didn’t kick him out, but I think we can guess.  Before that year was up, he started having an affair with Archer’s wife Iva (Gladys George).  It would have been awkward for Sam to break off the partnership while he was still having sex with her.  Then, after Sam tired of Iva and wanted to break off his affair with her, he found it awkward to do so while he was still partners with her husband.  As a result, he was stuck with Miles on account of Iva, and he was stuck with Iva on account of Miles.

The night Tom calls Spade to tell him that Miles is dead, Spade says he will be there in fifteen minutes. But first things first.  He calls Effie, giving her the news, and telling her she will have to be the one to tell Iva, saying, “I’d fry first.” Although he is still having sex with Iva, he can’t stand her anymore.  He tells Effie to keep Iva away from him.  Of course, Iva thinks Sam is in love with her, and now that Miles is dead, she figures they can finally get married.  Although Sam is glad to get rid of Miles as a partner, he figured he was safe from Iva as long as she was already married, but now that protection is gone.

It’s bad enough when you’re having an affair with a married woman, thinking it’s just a little on the side, when she calls you on the phone and says, “I told Clarence all about us.  I’m leaving him.  Now we can get married.”  I suppose if you’re a tough guy like Sam Spade, you could say, “Listen sweetheart, I never said anything about marriage.”  But even he cannot bring himself to say that to a woman who has just become a widow.

The morning after Miles was killed, Iva is waiting for Sam at his office.  He is irritated that Effie didn’t keep her away from him as he told her to, but as Effie points out, he didn’t tell her how.  Once inside his office, Sam and Iva do a little kissing.  She asks if he killed Miles so they could get married, which from his point of view is preposterous.  In the novel, after denying her suggestion, they do some more kissing.  Finally, he sends her away, saying it’s not good for her to be there, promising to see her again as soon as he can.

After Iva leaves, Effie asks him if he is going to marry her.  In the novel, he says, “Don’t be silly.”

“She doesn’t think it’s silly,” Effie replies.  “Why should she, the way you’ve played around with her?” When Sam says he wishes he’d never seen her, Effie continues:  “Maybe you do now…, but there was a time.”

Effie sizes him up correctly when she tells him, “You think you know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for your own good.  Someday you’re going to find it out.”  As far as his being stuck with Iva is concerned, I think he already has.

Later in the novel, Iva says something about Sam “pretending to love” her. Like a lot of people, Iva probably believes that if it’s true love, it will last forever, forgetting that she no longer loved Miles the way she did once.  So, when she begins to suspect that Sam doesn’t want her around anymore, she figures he never really loved her in the first place and that he was only pretending.  The reality is that people can fall in love genuinely and sincerely, only to have it die with the passage of time.  Sam probably did love Iva in the beginning, and he wasn’t pretending at all.

Effie

Brigid O’Shaughnessy is a femme fatale.  As such, we expect her to be somewhat successful in deceiving men.  What is unusual, however, is the way Brigid is able to deceive Effie.  Unlike Spade, who is skeptical of Brigid and is only partly deceived by her, Effie is completely sold.

When Brigid confesses that she lied about having a sister, Spade replies, “We didn’t exactly believe your story.  We believed your $200.”  The conversation proceeds from there with Spade seeing right through her new story and her performance.  That is consistent with what we normally expect of a private eye in a movie.  But when he asks her if she had anything to do with the death of Archer, she denies it, and he believes her, saying sincerely, “That’s good.”

In the novel, Brigid spends the night with Sam at his place.  He wakes up before she does, takes her key, goes to her apartment, and searches it thoroughly.  Then he makes it appear as though someone broke into her apartment.  When she discovers that her apartment had supposedly been broken into, Sam says she needs a new place to stay.  You would think that since Sam and Brigid spent the night together at his place, he would have the decency to let her continue sleeping with him over there, but he doesn’t.  In the movie, there is only the suggestion that they had sex, when there is a fadeout while they are kissing in his apartment, and there is no indication that Sam was the one who searched her place.

In either case, Sam turns to Effie to see if she is agreeable to letting Brigid stay with her, asking her, “What’s your woman’s intuition say about her?”

“She’s all right,” Effie replies.  “Maybe it’s her own fault for the trouble, but she’s all right.”  As a result, Effie agrees to let Brigid stay with her.

In the novel, Effie is even more emphatic in the faith she has in Brigid:

“She’s got too many names,” Spade mused, “Wonderly, Leblanc, and she says the right one’s O’Shaughnessy.”

“I don’t care if she’s got all the names in the phonebook. That girl is all right, and you know it.”

“I wonder.” Spade blinked sleepily at Effie Perine. He chuckled. “Anyway, she’s given up seven hundred smacks in two days, and that’s all right.”

Effie Perine sat up straight and said: “Sam, if that girl’s in trouble and you let her down, or take advantage of it to bleed her, I’ll never forgive you, never have any respect for you, as long as I live.”

Spade asks her on another occasion about her woman’s intuition.

“Does your woman’s intuition still tell you that she’s a Madonna or something?”

She looked sharply up at him. “I still believe that no matter what kind of trouble she’s gotten into, she’s all right, if that’s what you mean.”

With all this emphasis on a woman’s intuition, especially that of a woman like Effie, who seems to be a nice person herself, we are supposed to accept her judgment of Brigid.  Maybe that is the reason Hammett put this in the novel, as a way of letting us be seduced into trusting Brigid too.  That is why it comes as a shock at the end of the movie when we find out that Brigid killed Miles Archer in an act of coldblooded, premeditated murder.

The movie ends with the police arresting Brigid and taking her away.  But the novel continues long enough to rub Effie’s nose in it.  The next morning, Spade goes to his office, where Effie is reading all about it in the newspaper.  She asks if the story in the paper is correct.  Spade assures her that it is.

The girl’s brown eyes were peculiarly enlarged and there was a queer twist to her mouth. She stood beside him, staring down at him. He raised his head, grinned, and said mockingly: “So much for your woman’s intuition.”

Her voice was queer as the expression on her face. “You did that, Sam, to her?”

He nodded. “Your Sam’s a detective.” He looked sharply at her. He put his arm around her waist, his hand on her hip. “She did kill Miles, angel,” he said gently, “offhand, like that.” He snapped the fingers of his other hand.

She escaped from his arm as if it had hurt her. “Don’t, please, don’t touch me,” she said brokenly. “I know—I know you’re right. You’re right. But don’t touch me now—not now.”

Boy, Effie’s got it bad!  Could it be that she fell in love with Brigid?  Maybe that would explain how her woman’s intuition could be so wrong.  She was as susceptible to the lure of a femme fatale just as any man would be.

The Fall-Guy

Before Captain Jacobi died from the bullet wounds inflicted on him by Wilmer, he showed up at Spade’s office with the Maltese Falcon, since that was the address Brigid had given him.  Spade arranges to have the falcon delivered to his apartment the next morning.  And so it is that near the end of the movie, Sam Spade, Casper Gutman, Wilmer Cook, Joel Cairo, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy are all in Spade’s apartment waiting for the arrival of the black bird.

Spade says they can share the loot the Maltese Falcon will provide, but he needs a fall-guy, and he suggests Wilmer.  Wilmer doesn’t like it, so Spade humiliates him again by taking his two .45s away from him.  Gutman points out that if they turn Wilmer over to the police, he will incriminate the lot of them. Spade says that he knows District Attorney Bryan (John Hamilton), saying that he’ll be satisfied to have one man to convict.  He won’t want to confuse the case by trying to convict several.  So, Wilmer can talk all he wants, and it won’t make any difference.  Even if he talks about the Maltese Falcon, Spade says, Bryan won’t care as long as he has Wilmer to prosecute.  Gutman eventually agrees, but Wilmer manages to slip away later on.

When the black bird arrives, Gutman decides to scrape some of the black enamel off it.  It is then he discovers that it is fake, made of lead, presumably by General Kemidov, to mislead anyone who might try to steal the real one. Gutman and Cairo decide to go to Istanbul and see if they can get the real Maltese Falcon from Kemidov.  After they leave, Spade calls Tom and tells him about these characters so they can be arrested, which they are.

Spade had thought for a long time that Thursby killed Archer, but by this point in the story, he has figured out that Brigid killed him.  He tells her that he now knows the truth, and he’s going to have her arrested for it.

However, Sam has no evidence that Brigid killed Miles.  In fact, the reason he was so worried about finding a fall-guy was that the police think he killed Miles so he could marry Iva.  As he says to Brigid in the novel, “You’re taking the fall. One of us has got to take it, after the talking those birds will do [referring to Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer]. They’d hang me sure. You’re likely to get a better break.”

Later in their conversation in the novel, when she asks him to let her go, he refuses, saying, “I’m sunk if I haven’t got you to hand over to the police when they come.  That’s the only thing that can keep me from going down with the others.”

Apparently, Sam thinks all he has to do is say, “She did it,” and that will be all the evidence needed for a conviction.  While we are on the subject of evidence, I’m not sure what the police would have to arrest Gutman and Cairo on.  Wilmer can be arrested for murder, sure enough, given that Spade has the two .45s Wilmer killed Thursby and Jacobi with, but what evidence is there that Gutman and Cairo are guilty of anything?

In any event, all this contradicts what Spade said earlier.  When trying to get Gutman agree to let Wilmer be the fall-guy, he said that as long as District Attorney Bryan has one man to convict, he will be satisfied with that.  After Gutman and Cairo leave, Spade called Tom so they could all be arrested. But that means that Bryan will have Wilmer to put on trial and not bother with the rest.  Wilmer will end up being the fall-guy, just as Spade wanted originally. And that means that Bryan won’t bother with anyone else, including Spade and Brigid.

In the novel, Wilmer also kills Gutman.  So, as far as Bryan will be concerned, Floyd Thursby killed Miles Archer, and then Wilmer killed Thursby, Captain Jacobi, and Casper Gutman.

In short, Spade does not need Brigid to take the fall, since Wilmer will be serving that function.

True Love

Now, it is easy enough to overlook the inconsistency regarding the need for Brigid to be a superfluous fall-guy when District Attorney Bryan will already have Wilmer, but when it comes to the idea that Sam and Brigid truly love each other, that is another thing altogether.  The first several times I saw this movie, I did not give that serious countenance.  I heard Sam saying something about love, but I figured it was all just so much hardboiled patter. Upon subsequent viewing, however, I have been forced to reach the conclusion that Sam and Brigid are sincere when they proclaim their love for each other.  Only by examining the matter in some detail was I able to convince myself that it is supposed to be true love.

First of all, let’s ask what would have happened if Brigid did not love Sam. After Gutman and Cairo head back to the Alexandria hotel, something like the following dialogue might have taken place:

Brigid:  Well, I think I just might book passage to Istanbul myself.

Sam:  Hold on, sweetheart.  I just realized that you killed Miles.

Brigid:  That’s an interesting theory you have there.  We’ll have to talk about it some time.

And with that, she walks out the door and closes it behind her.

But that is not what happens.  Instead, Brigid confesses that she murdered Miles.  Why would she do that?  The only thing that would make sense is that she is in love with Sam and is hoping for his forgiveness.

She tells Sam that it was love at first sight:  “From the very first instant I saw you, I knew.”  When I heard her say that the first few times I watched this movie, I asked myself, how can she possibly expect Sam to believe that?  But now I see that it makes sense.  People who believe in true love, the kind that will last forever, often believe that marriages are made in Heaven, that there is just one person you were made for, and when you meet that person, you know it right away.

Sam replies, “Well, if you get a good break, you’ll be out of Tehachapi in twenty years, and you can come back to me then.”

Sounds as though he’s just being a smart-ass, right?  By itself, we could believe it was a wisecrack. But when he repeats it, we have to believe he is serious.  “If you’re a good girl,” he says a few minutes later, “you’ll be out in twenty years. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Then Sam goes into this lengthy explanation as to why he’s turning her in to the police.  Essentially, it comes down to three reasons.  The first is a point of professional duty.  In the private-detective business, when your partner is killed, even if you didn’t like him, you’re supposed to do something about it.

The second is a matter of self-respect.  Twice in the movie he says he won’t “play the sap” for her.  In the novel, he makes seven references to playing the sap for her.  He has to turn her in to preserve his manhood.

The third is that he wouldn’t be able to trust her.  “Since I’ve got something on you,” he says to her, referring to the fact that he knows she murdered Miles, “I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t put a hole in me someday.”

The thing is, if Sam didn’t love her, he wouldn’t bother giving her all these reasons why he’s turning her in.  He’d simply say, “You killed Miles in cold blood, and you’re not going to get away with it.”

Then Sam and Brigid get to the subject of love itself.  “All we got is that maybe you love me, and maybe I love you,” Sam tells her.

“You know whether you love me or not,” Brigid replies.

“Maybe I do,” he replies.  “I’ll have some rotten nights after I’ve sent you over, but that’ll pass.”

As noted above, I was never able to take any of this seriously at first.  But now, for the reasons just given, I am convinced that Sam and Brigid truly loved each other, and that he really meant it when he said (twice!) that he would be waiting for her when she gets out in twenty years.

You see, if he has her sent to prison, he will be fulfilling his obligation to do something about the murder of his partner.  Second, he will still have his dignity, knowing that he never played the sap for her.  And finally, after she gets out of prison, he won’t have anything on her anymore, since she has already done her time, so there will be no danger of her shooting him. That means when she gets out in twenty years, they can get married and live happily ever after.

Yeah, right.

As mentioned previously, the novel ends back in Spade’s office.  After Effie lets Sam know how hurt she is that he had Brigid arrested, she hears the corridor doorknob rattle.  She goes into the outer office.  When she returns, she says, “Iva is here.”

These are the last lines of the novel:  “Spade, looking down at his desk, nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘Yes,’ he said, and shivered. ‘Well, send her in.’”

Since he doesn’t know how to break it off with Iva, at least he can have sex with her while waiting for Brigid to get out of prison.

In 1984, I bought a videocassette recorder.  No longer was my desire to watch a movie limited to (a) new releases at a movie theater, (b) movies that showed up later at the drive-in, and (c) movies that were broadcast on television.  Now I could walk into a video store where I could rent a movie when I wanted to see it, and not when fate should let it cross my path.

As a result, I began to take an interest in film theory, for now I could read about movies in books and then rent the movies the authors discussed.  One book I came across, published in 1981, was Film Noir:  The Dark Side of the Screen, by Foster Hirsch.  I had seen many films noirs prior to buying this book but did not realize I was doing so.  But then, according to Hirsch, the directors of those movies did not know they were making films noirs either, until the French critics came up with the term.

Right off the bat, Hirsch presented two movies that he regarded as the most famous of this genre, Double Indemnity (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). From my limited perspective, I had my doubts about that.  I had seen Double Indemnity a couple of times on television, but I had never even heard of Scarlet Street.  And whereas the former was available for rent at the video store, the latter was not.  As a result, it was a few years before I was finally able to see it.

In any event, Hirsch gives his reason for picking these two movies as paradigmatic of film noir:

In theme, characterization, world view, settings, direction, performance, and writing, the two dramas are focal points for noir style, as representative of the genre as Stagecoach is of westerns or Singing in the Rain of musicals.

In particular, he says these two movies are about “doomed characters who become obsessed with bewitching women.”  However, there is one theme they do not share, and that is masochism, which is present only in Scarlet Street.  In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) comes across as a smooth talker who is used to having a fair amount of success with women.  As for Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), no man would even think about trying to push her around.

But in Scarlet Street, Christopher “Chris” Cross (Edward G. Robinson) is easily manipulated by Katherine “Kitty” March (Joan Bennett), who enjoys humiliating him.  Chris is literally a Sunday painter, though Kitty thinks he is a professional artist who gets a lot of money for his paintings.  At one point, when Chris says he wants to paint her, she hands him some nail polish and then presents him with her bare foot, wiggling her toes, saying, “Paint me, Chris.”  As he kneels down to paint her toenails, she says, “They’ll be masterpieces.”

Kitty allows Chris to hold her foot, for which he is grateful.  This is to be contrasted with the foot of her roommate Millie, which has a different significance.  Millie has been modeling girdles, and when she comes home, she rubs her back and says she aches.  Then she sits down, removes her shoe, and rubs her foot. When two attractive women in a movie are friends, the one that indicates that her feet hurt thereby has her sex appeal diminished.  In Red-Headed Woman (1932), Jean Harlow and Una Merkel are friends. Although Merkel is an attractive woman in her own right, when she sits down, removes her shoe, and starts rubbing her foot, we know, as if we didn’t already know, that Harlow is the sexier of the two. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), when Jane Russell says to the manager of a hotel, “Show me a place to take my shoes off,” Marilyn Monroe reprimands her, saying, “A lady never admits her feet hurt.”  This reinforces the fact that, though Russell is a beautiful woman, yet Monroe is the sexier of the two. Therefore, when Millie lets us know about her aches and pains, her sore foot in particular, we know that Kitty is the sexy one.

The reason is clear.  When a man looks at a woman, he likes to imagine that it is as pleasurable for her to be beautiful for him as it is pleasurable for him to appreciate her beauty. But the minute she indicates that she is uncomfortable in any way, the effect is spoiled, ruining the man’s pleasure.  And this is especially true if she says her feet hurt.

Returning to the subject of Chris’s humiliation, we find that things are not much better for him at home. His wife Adele continually compares him unfavorably to her previous husband, Detective Sergeant Homer Higgens, whose large portrait hangs on the wall.  He (supposedly) died heroically trying to save a woman from drowning.  Although Chris has to work six days a week, we see him wearing an apron, doing the dishes, while Adele plays solitaire.  He tells Kitty that he only married Adele because he was lonely, although one suspects he would love to have his solitude back, agreeing with that fellow in The Lusty Men (1952) who says to Robert Mitchum, marriage is lonely, it just isn’t private.

Adele makes Chris do his painting in the bathroom.  She despises his paintings, which she thinks are crazy, saying, “Next thing you’ll be painting women without clothes!”

“I never saw a woman without any clothes,” he replies.

“I should hope not!”

Well, we never thought they had much of a sex life, but this confirms it.  What little sex there is probably takes place with the lights off and their pajamas on.

When Chris confesses to Kitty that he is married, that gives her an excuse not to have sex with him. She says she is not the type to run around with a married man, while at the same time indicating that she is starting to fall in love with him.  So, holding her foot is all the intimacy she allows him.

But whereas Chris’s masochistic subservience to women is psychological, Kitty’s masochism is physical. She has a boyfriend, Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea). She likes the way he slaps her around.  In fact, Chris met Kitty the night he saw Johnny knock her down and start kicking her.  Chris came to her “rescue,” causing Johnny to lose his balance and hit his head on the curb.  When Chris ran to get a policeman, Johnny took off.  Kitty let Chris think he was her hero.

Unlike Johnny, Chris is nice to her, which is why she has no respect for him.  “If he were mean or vicious or bawled me out or something,” she says, “I’d like him better.”  At one point, in an argument she is having with her roommate Millie, Kitty tells her, “You wouldn’t know love if it hit you in the face.”

“If that’s where it hits you,” Millie says right back, “you ought to know!”

At another time, Johnny is telling Kitty and Millie about how it is with men like him, in the movies as well as in real life:  “Why I hear of movie actors getting 5,000, …, 10,000 a week.  For what?  Acting tough, for pushing girls in the face. What do they do I can’t do?”

Johnny is obviously referring to The Public Enemy (1931), where Tom Powers (James Cagney) pushes a grapefruit in the face of another Kitty (Mae Clarke). But it is actually the movies Duryea himself played in that really exemplify Johnny’s point.  In Dark City:  The Lost World of Film Noir, Eddie Muller says that Duryea “developed an odd, almost fetishistic on-screen forte—beating women.”  It started with Woman in the Window (1944), where he slapped Joan Bennett there too.  Muller goes on to describe how Duryea slapped women in Too Late for Tears, Manhandled, Criss Cross, and Johnny Stool Pigeon, all made in 1949. Muller says that as a result, Duryea started getting lots of fan mail from “infatuated females.”

Why does a woman stay with a man that beats her?  Because Nature wants babies, and Nature doesn’t give a damn about her happiness. If a woman stays with a man that abuses her, she can still have his babies.  She may be miserable, but Nature doesn’t care.  Likewise, if a man allows a woman to belittle him and humiliate him, there is always the chance that by allowing himself to be treated that way, she will end up having his baby.  The pain, be it physical or psychological, is at first something to be endured for the sake of sex.  But eventually, the pain itself becomes erotic, imbued with the promise of sex, thus further cementing the sexual bond so that Nature can get the babies she requires.

We cannot imagine Walter Neff in Double Indemnity allowing a woman to humiliate him because Fred MacMurray is handsome.  But Chris, on the other hand, being played by Edward G. Robinson, is supposed to be ugly.  Toward the end of the movie, when Chris tries to forgive Kitty after having seen her kissing Johnny, she puts her face in her pillow, making muffled sounds that Chris interprets as crying.  “I’m not crying, you fool,” she says to him, rising up in the bed.  “I’m laughing!  Oh, you idiot!  How can a man be so dumb?  I’ve wanted to laugh in your face ever since I first met you. You’re old and ugly, and I’m sick of you.”  Those hateful words prove too much for Chris, and, happening by chance to be holding an icepick in his hand, he stabs her repeatedly.

But that happens near the end of the movie.  When the movie begins, a banquet is being held in honor of Chris’s twenty-five years of faithful service as a cashier in a company owned by J.J. Hogarth. He is played by Russell Hicks, an actor with a distinguished appearance, who was fifty years old at the time. When his chauffeur arrives and informs him that the beautiful woman with whom he is to have a night on the town has arrived in his limousine, he apologizes to his employees for having to leave the party, saying, “You can’t keep a woman waiting, can you?”  But before he leaves, he presents Chris with a 14-karat, 17-jewel pocket watch, with an inscription that not only mentions the years of service, but also refers to Chris as a friend.  And again, in shaking hands with Chris before he departs, Hogarth refers to him as an “old friend.”

This makes it all the more painful later in the movie when Hogarth discovers that Chris has been stealing money from him.  Chris has been using the money to pay for Kitty’s studio apartment and to supply her with luxuries, trying to keep her from finding out he is just a cashier instead of a famous painter.  Hogarth tells the police that he cannot bring himself to press charges and dismisses them. After they leave, he turns to Chris and asks, “Chris, it was a woman, wasn’t it?”  Chris, unable even to look at Hogarth, nods his head.  In a way, Hogarth is being kind and understanding.  But in another sense, unintended by Hogarth, it is a cruel form of pity.  The wealthy, handsome, and distinguished J.J. Hogarth, who is able to have beautiful women on his own terms, feels sorry for Chris, as he realizes what it must be like for an unattractive man to fall under the spell of the first pretty girl that has ever paid any attention to him.

The beautiful woman that is waiting in the limousine for Hogarth at the beginning of the movie gives a coin to an organ grinder’s monkey, prefiguring the relation Chris will have with Kitty.  Chris says to a fellow employee after they leave the banquet, referring to that woman, “I wonder what it’s like to be loved by a young girl like that.  You know, nobody ever looked at me like that, not even when I was young.”

Although Robinson is not handsome, of course, I would never on my own have said he was ugly. However, Scarlet Street is a remake of a French film by Jean Renoir, La Chienne (1931).  And in that movie, the character that corresponds to Chris is played by Michel Simon, who is even more unattractive, to put it mildly, than Robinson.  We don’t need the woman that corresponds to Kitty to tell us that she thinks he is ugly.  We know she does.

But maybe I think that way because before I saw La Chienne, I saw another film by Renoir, Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), also starring Michel Simon.  I suppose you could call that movie a comedy, provided your idea of what is funny is someone behaving in an atrocious manner, while those around him keep letting him get away with it. The title character, played by Simon, is saved from drowning (attempted suicide), and he is taken into the home of the bookseller who saved him. Boudo then proceeds to deliberately wreck everything he comes into contact with, while exhibiting revolting mannerisms. Thirty minutes into the film, you’ll wish the bookseller had let him drown. Forty minutes in, and you’ll be ready to hold his head under the water until he quits struggling.  The bookseller’s wife is a sourpuss, so Boudu rapes her and puts a smile on her face. I felt like a sourpuss watching that movie, and I felt violated by it. But unlike the wife, I did not smile.  Boudu’s ugliness is as much a matter of his disgusting personality as it is the physical appearance of Michel Simon who plays that character.

In La Chienne, it is explicitly stated that the woman that corresponds to Kitty is a prostitute, and that the man that corresponds to Johnny is a procurer.  That must have been too much to get past the Production Code in the making of Scarlet Street because Kitty is merely portrayed as a woman not averse to using sex to get money from men, with Johnny encouraging her to do so.

Speaking of the Production Code, Muller points out that the movie was controversial when it was released, even though it managed to be approved.  He says that some markets for this movie reduced the number of times Chris stabbed Kitty with the icepick from seven times to four times or even only one.  The only versions I’ve seen show him stabbing her four times.

Furthermore, Johnny is accused of being the one who killed Kitty.  After he found her dead body, he grabbed her jewelry and took off.  When captured and confronted by the police with the fact that he had stolen her jewelry, he replied, “But why wouldn’t I?  She didn’t have any more use for it, did she?” As a result, he is convicted and executed in the electric chair.  But while, strictly speaking, an innocent man is executed for a crime he didn’t commit, Johnny’s character is so despicable that he seems to be getting what he deserves anyway.

As for Chris, the real killer, while not being officially punished, is punished nevertheless.  After Chris set Kitty up in her own studio apartment, he brought his paintings over there to keep Adele from throwing them out, as she threatened to do.  Johnny tries to sell them himself, still believing as does Kitty that Chris is a famous artist who is paid a lot of money for his paintings.  When a famous art critic, Damon Janeway, sees the paintings for sale on a street in Greenwich Village, he thinks they are great and wants to meet the artist. Johnny tells him that the artist is Kitty.  Soon her work is displayed in an art store owned by a Mr. Dellarowe, and Kitty is celebrated and admired for her work.

When Chris finds out that she has sold his paintings and has become famous as a result, he is not angry. As he explains to her, “If I’d brought those pictures to a man like Dellarowe, he wouldn’t have taken them. I’m a failure, Kitty.”  I guess the idea is that if being a failure is part of a man’s essence, then he cannot succeed no matter how talented he is.  Or maybe the difference is that Chris is an ugly man, whereas Kitty is a beautiful woman, with whom Janeway seems to be falling in love.  Chris says he and Kitty will go on letting others think she is the artist.  Now she lets him paint her for real, her portrait this time, and not her toenails.  He says they will call the painting “Self Portrait.”

After Chris is caught embezzling, he loses his job.  In his imagination, he can hear Kitty telling Johnny she loves him, and Johnny affectionately calling her “Lazy Legs.”  He tries to commit suicide but is prevented from doing so, and soon ends up living on the street.  He tries to confess to his crime, but no one believes him since he is now just a bum.  The police find him sleeping on a bench and tell him to go to the Bowery where he belongs.  He walks down the street.  It is Christmas Eve, and we hear “O Come, All Ye Faithful” being played in the background.  Surely this portends some kind of redemption for poor Chris.

But then the music goes sour as he sees the Kitty’s “Self Portrait” being removed from Dellarowe’s, having been purchased by a woman for $10,000.  It is the masterpiece he can never claim as his own, the portrait of the woman he still loves but can never have.