Sunday 12/10/23
Yesterday I watched 1951's Roadblock, a film noir somewhat set at Christmas from director Harold Daniels, starring Charles McGraw, Joan Dixon, Lowell Gilmore, Louis Jean Heydt, and Milburn Stone.
I thought this was a fine film--true film noir. That label is so often misapplied. Just because a picture is a crime picture from the 1940s or 1950s doesn't make it noir. There are all of these other components, and a key one is that there is this crucial moment of decision for the male protagonist. In 1947's Out of the Past, that moment is when Robert Mitchum's Jeff Bailey decides to run off with Jane Greer's Kathie Moffat.
Yes, that moment is presented to us within the flashback--so Bailey did go on--for a while--to have a life--but that choice ultimately determines what becomes of him. His end. Smart guy who made a less-than-smart choice.
Fatalism is big in film noir, but so is believability; we have to buy into the blended combo. Detour (1945), for instance, is weakened by the death with the phone cord. It makes the fatalism chintzier, for how well it works everywhere else.
Roadblock is believably fatalistic and what I think of as a bringing-the-gang-back-together picture. People who worked on another successful movie with each other are reunited. You had that with 1932's The Death Kiss, which featured Bela Lugosi, Edward Van Sloan, and David Manner's from the previous year's Dracula, and 1949's which re-teamed Mitchum, Greer, and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring from Out of the Past.
Roadblock brings Mainwaring together again with Out of the Past cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, and also utilizes an outdoors Pacific northwest setting at times. It's very good--one of the best noirs of its decade, almost this cross between Out of the Past and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.
It took a while for Charles McGraw to become a leading man. Most film buffs know him today for The Narrow Margin, a noir set on a train from 1952, and as William Conrad's hitman partner in 1946's The Killers. Joan Dixon, meanwhile, usually featured in Westerns. She didn't make a lot of films--a handful from the 1950s.
McGraw plays an insurance detective and the film starts fast, with him shooting someone who is attempting to flee, but it's not what we think. Quite a clever gambit to nab the actual baddie, which in turns goes down in a cemetery vault. Flying home from the job, McGraw's Joe Peters character meets Dixon's chiseler of a femme fatale, Diane.
She uses him to get a half price ticket, claiming to be his wife. He plays along, because he's a guy whose thinking, "Hmmm, sure would like to do that intercourse with her." There's a storm during the flight, the plane makes a landing, and everyone has to be put up overnight in a hotel. Given the husband-and-wife ruse, our duo shares a room. Nothing sexual occurs, but she makes it very plain what she wants--money. He doesn't make a lot.
We get to LA, she's dating a racketeer, their orbits overlap again, and he makes a decision that it turns out he doesn't need to make and never should have made, because she actually falls for him, and becomes okay with never having a lot of money. Ah, but other things have been put in play.
There's a great ending in what was an unlikely setting at the time--the semi-dry LA river bed--with what is the most nihilistic version of a car chase you'll ever see. It's both a chase and a non-chase.
The title doesn't work. Gives you no indication about the picture. And the last scene doesn't really work either. (Dixon walks away from the camera, but she walks upscreen, if you will; given the role that Texas plays in the story, it'd be better if a downscreen direction was depicted.) But the rest of it? This was exciting moviemaking. Taut and smartly plotted. The blend of locations--plane, hotel room, LA at night, mountain cabin, bar at Christmastime, river bed--works very well.
Rarely do we see the femme fatale in a noir exhibit growth and reverse course, but it's believable here. For all of her scheming, Diane is callow. She's like a twenty-two-year-old woman who talks a certain game because she's picked it up from those around her, but it's a lot of attitude instead of substance, someone who doesn't even really know what they want, no matter how hard they're pushing that persona into the world.
Of course, that attitude/persona ofte becomes the whole of a person, and that's why they always end up alone, even after they perfunctorily enter into marriage and start having kids as a cosmetic attempt to suggest that they have purpose in their life, when there isn't anything else they can point to. People need to be able to point to something--which isn't a reason in and of itself to do that thing.
