I don’t often pick on film noir. In fact, I happen to love film noir, that genre of hard-boiled mysteries with its fast dames and tough dudes; but Dead Reckoning, the 1947 movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott, seems ripe for the picking.

Two things kept going through my mind as I watched the flick: Mystery Science Theater and Carol Burnett. Dead Reckoning was born to be pastiched.

It was directed by John Cromwell and written by a committee of hacks (including Steve Fisher, Oliver Garrett and Allen Rivkin) who had obviously been binging on James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler novels. In reality, it’s cobbled together from about a dozen other, much better examples of film noir (Road House, Out of the Past, Double Indemnity, et al). Trite follows trite, cliché cascades upon cliché, and all we’re left with in the end is the smoldering coals of a decent Bogie performance.

Come, take my hand and let’s walk these dark, silly streets together.
[Note: Despite the temptation, I did not fabricate any of this dialogue; this is the real stuff, dollface.]

The movie opens as Captain Warren “Rip” Murdock (Bogart), injured and on the run from police, stumbles into a church where he finds an Army chaplain and starts confessing a story about love and betrayal. A good portion of the film is narrated (a la Double Indemnity) by Murdock.

A few days ago, he and Sgt. Johnny Drake (William Prince) were two American paratroopers returning home to the States. The two are close friends, but as it turns out, Murdock doesn’t know as much about Johnny as he thought. The story starts as they’re being hustled off to Washington, D.C., where they’ll each get a medal for bravery. On the train, the two trade tough-guy banter about women. It seems there’s this blonde with a deep voice who’s been haunting Drake all through the war. Murdock urges him to get over it.

Johnny, why don’t you get rid of the grief you’ve got for that blonde? Every mile we go, you sweat worse with the same pain. Didn’t I tell you that all females are the same with their faces washed?

When the train stops briefly in Philadelphia, Drake suddenly gets spooked by the presence of news reporters and runs away, leaving a worried Murdock to trail after him. Seems like Johnny had a lot of dark secrets he was trying to hide…

Murdock tracks his buddy to a sultry southern town, Gulf City. When he checks into a hotel there, he gets a message from Johnny, promising to meet him that evening. Drake never shows and so Murdock waits. And waits…

What to do, with a hot wind smelling of night-blooming jasmine, except to wait and sweat and prime the body to sweat some more…I was stalled again like a cheap synthetic gas.

Suddenly, he has a hunch. Film noir guys always get hunches—they’re standard issue, along with fedoras and paranoia.

Murdock decides to check out the Gulf City newspaper morgue for anything which might have explained why Drake joined the Army two years ago. Sure enough, he finds that Johnny was involved in a love triangle with a blonde and her husband. The husband got killed one night and Johnny fled Gulf City, hitching a ride with the Army.

So that clears up some of the mystery, but where was Johnny now? That night, Murdock happens to hear a police report on the radio talking about a burned corpse which had been found in a car. The body had been there for a couple of days…right around the time Johnny disappeared. Murdock doesn’t just jump to conclusions, he pole-vaults.

He decides to hunt down the dame who seems to be at the heart of all this. She hangs out at a joint called the Sanctuary Club, owned by a very oily character named Martinelli (Morris Carnovsky). Once he’s there at the bar, Murdock catches sight of his prey: first a leg, then the camera pans up to her lap where a cigarette gets tapped, then follows the cig up to the woman’s mouth. It’s a blonde all right and her name is Coral Chandler, which is also spelled “T-R-O-U-B-L-E.” Murdock strikes up a conversation and soon finds himself getting lured by Coral’s smoke-drenched voice. Still, something nags at him. Call it a hunch, call it paranoia…

Maybe she was all right. And maybe Christmas comes in July.

He decides to tell Coral he thinks Johnny is dead, but the only way he can gauge her true reaction is to place his fingers on her spine while they’re dancing (it’s a guy thing, so don’t ask). Coral takes the news pretty hard.

Her whole body had gone soft as custard when I slugged her with it. But I kept thinking, “She has to know something.”

Before his demise, Johnny wrote a letter and gave it to the bartender for safekeeping. That letter will answer everything—and possibly bring down the bad egg Martinelli in the process. Murdock and Coral try to get their hands on that letter while staying one step ahead of Martinelli and his thugs. As he gets more and more tangled in the web of lies and murder, Murdock finds himself trapped by his longing for Coral.

I didn’t like the feeling I had about her—the way I wanted to put my hand on her arm, the way I kept smelling that jasmine in her hair, the way I kept hearing that song she’d sung. Yeah, I was walking into something, all right.

At this point, you might be walking out on Dead Reckoning. But don’t go just yet—there’s still another peachy line:

It’s funny how a kiss stays on the lips, the way you can taste it.

Okay, now you’re free to leave.

As it climaxes, truth is revealed, guns are fired and lip-lingering kisses are exchanged. The whole thing ends on a note of absurd sentiment and I can only imagine that the studio was trying to appeal to the women in the audience who needed a soft, gooey ending. The whole thing stinks like Christmas in July.

Dead Reckoning is a mirror reflection of great film noir. It has all the right moves, but none of the chemistry—especially between Bogart and Scott. I’ll confess, I’ve never cared for Lizabeth Scott. Maybe it’s the way she looks (a faux Lauren Bacall, except with Brooke Shields eyebrows), maybe it’s the way she sounds (a faux Patricia Neal), maybe it’s the way there’s no “E” in front of her first name, maybe it’s the jasmine in her hair. Hell, I don’t know. Something about her bothers me (and, as a film noir fan, I see her cropping up in these old movies all the time).

Bogie, on the other hand…Well, he could read the Gulf City phone book (which he does at one point) and still make it sound interesting. Like the cigarette dangling from his lip, Bogie smolders any time he’s on screen—especially in tough-yet-vulnerable roles like this one. Unfortunately, nothing much is required of him in Dead Reckoning. Like his character, he’s trapped—caught in a stale plot, unmemorable directing and the kind of dialogue which requires him to say “night-blooming jasmine.”

I reckon I’ll pass on this one, dollface.



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