THE CROOKED WEB (1955) and the Death of Film Noir

THE CROOKED WEB is a good example of how classic noir was smothered to death by the oppressive conventionality of the 1950s. With a sharper script — with one major change in focus — it might have been something interesting.

The film stars Frank Lovejoy as Stan Fabian, the owner and operator of a Los Angles hamburger stand. He’s dating one of his pretty carhops, a chirpy blonde named Joanie (Mari Blanchard). As the film opens, Joanie introduces Stan to her ne’er-do-well brother Frank (Richard Denning). He’s a loudmouth who brags to his sister and Stan about a scheme he’s concocted to recover some gold in Germany. He offers to let Stan in on the deal, and Stan accepts. Later, after Stan drops off Joanie, she meets up with her “brother.” They embrace in a passionate kiss.

This great set-up is followed hard upon by the first big reveal of the plot. It turns out that Joanie and Frank are actually cops who are trying to nab Stan for a murder he committed during the war. They want to get him to Germany where he can be arrested by the German police.

This big switcheroo came as a real disappointment, I must admit. For the first fifteen minutes of the film, we don’t know anything about the subterfuge of Joanie and Frank. When they lock lips for that kiss, the movie seems to be off and running toward being something really interesting.

Instead, what we get is a thoroughly unadventurous crime story, with Joanie and Frank as our brave protagonists and Stan as our squinty-eyed bad guy. The plot meanders around once it gets them to Germany, with Stan eager to recover the loot and Joanie and Frank trying to edge him into the daylight so he can be caught by the cops. Our stalwart heroes, however, are a pretty lackluster crime-fighting duo. Just to crank up the suspense factor, the script has Stan discover them not once but twice in compromising positions. It does nothing to help the already languorous plot to have them keep getting caught doing the one thing that can blow their cover. What kind of idiot undercover agents make out on the job when they’re supposed to be posing as siblings?

Neither Denning nor Blanchard bring much to their underwritten roles, and the film makes a common mistake (common to films of the era, anyway) by stacking the deck constantly in their favor. They’re the good guys. That’s all there is to know about them. They don’t have any salient characteristics beyond being the good guys. Their tendency to smooch at ill-advised times goes unremarked upon and exists entirely as a plot device. They’re simply the bland stand-ins for law and order.

The only spark in the movie comes from Frank Lovejoy as Stan. An excellent actor better seen in THE SOUND OF FURY and THE HITCH-HIKER, here he’s a surly presence, nervous in his quiet, restrained way. The one interesting scene in the film comes at the end when he is taken into custody and discovers that Joanie has deceived him. In full view of the cops, he slaps her across the face. She cries and says, “I deserve it.” In a better film, this scene would be tied to a nice ambiguity—that while Joanie and Frank are the good guys, Stan is the one being betrayed (think Hitchcock’s Notorious). Here though, it’s just tacked on at the end and has the feel of a sexist cliché.

THE CROOKED WEB illustrates the mindset that had become predominant in crime films by the mid-fifties. Perhaps as a result of the Hollywood blacklist (and by ‘perhaps,’ I mean, ‘almost assuredly’), film noir had started to die a slow death. As a genre, it had always unfolded along the margins of the industry — in the B-units and at the smaller studios — but as the decade wore on it came under more scrutiny. Films that explored “deviant characters” or tied crime to social conditions were forbidden. There was more pressure to make films about heroes rather than anti-heroes. THE CROOKED WEB would be interesting if it was about Stan, but by 1955 it pretty much had to be about boring ass Joanie and Frank. 

A Voice From The Dark: Frank Lovejoy's Journey Into Radio Noir

Note: This article first appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of the film journal NOIR CITY.

Before he got drafted into the movies (particularly film noir) in the fifties, Frank Lovejoy had a successful decade-long career in radio. He was a workhorse, appearing in thousands of broadcasts across a range of shows, and by the time Hollywood came calling he was already a star on the east coast.

           

He’d started out in the radio business as an announcer for the popular station WLW in Cincinnati, sometimes known as the “cradle of the stars” for all the on-air talent (Rod Serling, Red Barber, Doris Day, and Rosemary Clooney among them) who started there before springing into the big time. Like many others, Lovejoy made a name for himself in the Midwest and used it as a way to get to the larger stations in New York.

Once there, he quickly became a sought after voice man. Distinctive without being overly mannered, his work began getting noticed on crime shows like GANG BUSTERS, MR. DISTIRCT ATTORNEY, and THE SHADOW. He originated the title role on the superhero show THE BLUE BEETLE, portraying a young cop turned masked crime fighter. After 13 episodes (with titles like “The Opium Ring” and “Smashing the Restaurant Racket”), he passed on the mantle of the Blue Beetle to another, uncredited and anonymous, actor.

He stayed busy on the radio all through the 1940s. His weathered baritone made him a particularly good fit for crime shows: MR. AND MRS. NORTH with Alice Frost and Joseph Curtin, BOSTON BLACKIE with Chester Morris and Mel Blanc, THE MOLLE MYSTERY THEATER with Richard Widmark, MURDER AND MR. MALONE with Jack Webb. In 1945, he narrated the series THIS IS YOUR FBI and like virtually everyone else in radio he did work on the hit mystery series THE WHISTLER. When he wasn’t bringing his talents to bear on crime stories he did everything else on the dial from soap operas like BRIGHT HORIZON, MODERN ROMANCES, and BRAVE TOMORROW to war dramas like WORLDS AT WAR and westerns like DESTINY TRAILS.

The golden age of radio came to a close about the time Lovejoy packed up and moved out to California to go into the movie business. In the fifties, radio was hit even harder than movies by the rise of television. The days of the family gathering around the living room console to listen to stories was coming to an end. The smart money, everyone knew, was on the little box with the talking pictures.

Still, radio didn’t die overnight (though it declined steadily through the fifties) and, at least for a while, the practice of film-to-radio adaptation remained a lucrative business. Lovejoy already had practice at bringing movies to the air. He and Everett Sloane had starred in a 1941 adaptation of “Angels with Dirty Faces” for the PHILLIP MORRIS PLAYHOUSE, and after he became a bona fide movie star he was in even higher demand to do big name programs on the air. He starred in “The Deeper Shadow” with Ray Milland for THE FAMILY HOUR OF STARS in 1948. And for the LUX RADIO THEATER he did “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” with Bogart and Walter Huston in 1949, and “Strangers On A Train” opposite Milland and Ruth Roman in 1951.

From 1950 to 1952, he starred in his best series, the highly entertaining radio noir NIGHT BEAT. He played a reporter named Randy Stone who roamed Chicago at night looking for stories. In every episode (with titles like “Slasher” “Pay Up Or Die” and “Flight From Fear”), Stone met some new cast of characters, usually desperate souls in need of help. Sometimes Stone helped them. Sometimes he couldn’t.

What makes NIGHT BEAT such a treasure today is that it is a full on noir radio series. For one thing, it takes place in urban spaces devoid of daylight. In terms of style, the overall sound design is geared toward the insinuation of darkness. This means a strong emphasis on, of all things, silences. Odd moments play out in the dark when neither we nor Stone are quite sure what is happening. The show also makes inspired use of footfall, the clack of shoes conjuring the emptiness of city streets at two in the morning.

Perhaps even more importantly, NIGHT BEAT has a noir heart. Stone isn’t a hero or even a tough guy. He’s like a slightly more warm-hearted version of Weegee, the famous real life crime scene photographer who lived at night and chased his police scanner all over New York’s Lower East Side. In narration that Lovejoy reels off like a bleary-eyed David Goodis character, he recounts his “wanderings” through the city. And because Stone, even more than most noir protagonists, is a citizen of the night, his world of shadowy alleyways and late-night bars and all-night diners is inhabited exclusively by the distressed and the disturbed and the criminally inclined. 

There’s real pulp poetry here. In an excellent episode titled “Julie the Jukebox Girl” Stone begins by telling his listeners, “I cover the night, and my beat is eight square miles of darkness. Every evening I start walking into it and let it swirl around me and let it swallow me up. Part of me relaxes and part of me becomes tense and weary.”

Summing up the people he meets on his nighttime sojourns he says, “The night is filled with its own brand of people—the lonely, lost, mixed-up, screwy people of the night, drifting out of the darkness like fragments of a nightmare.”

Tying it all together is the wonderful voice of Frank Lovejoy, slipping effortlessly from narrating his adventures to being in scenes with a supporting cast that included, at various points in the show’s run, his wife Joan Banks, William Conrad, Jeff Corey, and Parley Baer. His style is emotive yet restrained, demonstrating that he was almost as subtle an actor on the radio as he was in film. As early as the second episode of the series—“The Night Is A Weapon” from February 1950—Lovejoy had created a voice for Stone that was crisp and authoritative when it needed to be but which also gave the character a certain thoughtfulness and gruff compassion.

After the show ended in 1952, Lovejoy played Randy Stone on television in an episode of FOUR STAR PLAYHOUSE entitled “Search In The Night.” The character didn’t get his own series (instead, Lovejoy starred in MEET MCGRAW, a series which had also grown out of an episode of FOUR STAR PLAYHOUSE). Fans of the character were probably disappointed that Stone didn’t get his own show, but since NIGHT BEAT lives on in various formats on the internet, Lovejoy can still be found out there in the dark, looking for a story and getting into trouble.

Frank Lovejoy and NIGHT BEAT

It's Frank Lovejoy week at the Night Editor.  Lately, I've done a lot of work on the great unheralded everyman, and in a happy coincidence, it's all coming to press at the same time.

In the new issue of NOIR CITY, I have a couple of pieces about Frank. The first is called "What Shows And What Doesn't: Frank Lovejoy and The Crisis of Masculinity" which takes an extensive look at the actor's life and career, especially his contributions to film noir in the fifties in films like IN A LONELY PLACE, THE SOUND OF FURY, THE HITCH-HIKER and FINGER MAN.
The second is called "A Voice In The Dark: Frank Lovejoy's Journeys into Radio Noir" an overview of Frank's decades-long career in radio. To read these articles--along with the usual assortment of great film writing from folks like Vince Keenan, Carl Steward and more--subscribe to NOIR CITY.

Lovejoy's great accomplishment on the radio was the terrific show NIGHT BEAT, in which he plays the dusk-til-dawn reporter Randy Stone. I have a new piece on the show over at Criminal Element. Check it out. I've also posted a link over there to a place where you can stream episodes of NIGHT BEAT.

The Sound Of Fury (1950)

Frank Lovejoy was so underrated in the fifties. He was just another character actor with a pleasant face and an authoritarian voice. Today he’s probably best known to noir fans as Humphrey Bogart’s long suffering cop buddy in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place and as one of the unsuspecting motorists taken hostage in Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker. His best role, however, was as Howard Tyler, the doomed getaway driver in Cy Endfield’s still largely unknown The Sound of Fury.

Tyler is an ex-serviceman who has recently relocated his wife and young son to California following the war. Things are supposed to be good in the sun-kissed promised land, but they aren’t. Tyler can’t get a job, and his wife’s getting fed up. He takes off one afternoon, stops by a bowling alley for a beer, and meets a guy named Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges). Slocum’s a slick, fast-talking hoodlum with a business proposition for a man who’s steady behind the steering wheel. At first, Tyler has some reservations about being a getaway driver, but Jerry spells it out: take your dignity and go home broke, or stop being a sucker and go home with some cash in your wallet. Tyler thinks about it and calls his wife to tell her he’s going to be late. By midnight, he’s waiting outside a gas station while Jerry’s inside pistol-whipping the attendant.

The money flows. Tyler buys groceries. His wife is happy, and his kid wants a television set so they can watch westerns. All Tyler has to do is keep working the night shift with Jerry, but before long Jerry decides they need to upgrade from armed robbery to kidnapping. He picks the scion of a well-to-do family, and one night they nab the guy as he leaves his house.

I won’t say more about the plot except to note that in film noir there are a million guys like Jerry Slocum. He’s got meanness and a lot of ideas for getting rich. Surveying the world around him, he just sees a bunch of suckers, so he spends his days drinking beer and bowling, and spends his nights drinking whiskey and chasing dames. He thinks he’s smart, but he’s not. In noir, when you climb into a car with a Jerry Slocum you are hitching a ride to nowhere.

As Slocum, Lloyd Bridges is all vanity and violence. His preening is the perfect counterpoint to Frank Lovejoy’s sympathetic, believable portrayal as Tyler. Lovejoy has the ease of a natural onscreen everyman, but the last third of the film takes him places that are dark, frantic and surprising. It is a wonderful performance but a bittersweet reminder of how seldom Lovejoy was given challenging roles. (He seemed to have settled into television—with shows like his private eye series “Meet McGraw”—when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1962.) Here, forming a duet with Bridges, he does the best work of his career.

The rest of the cast is hit or miss. The acclaimed Broadway actress Katherine Locke plays a disturbed spinster named Hazel, and she and Lovejoy share some nice scenes together near the end of the film. But Kathleen Ryan is shrill and whiney as Tyler’s put-upon wife. She has one good scene late in the film reading a letter from her husband, but a stronger actress in this role could have given us more insight into the nature of Tyler’s tortured decision to be a criminal. Likewise, every time little Donald Smelick opens his mouth as Tyler’s cowboy-obsessed son, I wanted him to shut up—though, in his defense, with a few exceptions most kids in noirs are generally insufferable.

The film was directed by Cy Endfield, a director who got his start as an apprentice in Orson Welles’ Mercury Productions at RKO. After Welles was driven out of RKO, Endfield wound up directing shorts for MGM, and finally got his shot at directing features at the Z-list studio Monogram. Heads started to turn for Endfield in 1950 when he made the independently produced The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury —back to back films that were intelligent, uncompromising, and dealt with the themes of the press, mob violence, and human weakness. Unfortunately, soon after the release of The Sound of Fury, Endfield was named as a Communist sympathizer in the House on Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings on Communist subversives in Hollywood. He fled to England (where he eventually worked with fellow blacklistee Bridges), and he never retuned to work in Hollywood.

It’s damn disgrace that someone of Endfield’s talent was driven out of his profession, of course, but he left behind two impressive American films. His work in The Underworld Story is strong, but his work in The Sound of Fury is superlative. It helps that he’s working from an intelligent script by novelist Jo Pagano, whose source novel The Condemned is a sharp and underrated piece of work in its own right. Pagano intended his book, and the film that followed it, as an indictment of lynch mobs and journalistic cravenness. In both the book and the film he reaches too far in this respect (in fact he and Endfield butted heads over sections of the script Endfield felt were too didactic), but the power of its narrative comes from the way it weaves these themes in with Howard’s choice and its terrible consequences. Together, Endfield and Pagano crafted a quintessential film noir.

Read my review of Jo Pagano's over at Friday's Forgotten Books.

And read my essay on Lovejoy at Criminal Element.

Frank Lovejoy aka The Face of the Fifties

Frank Lovejoy was the great unheralded Everyman of film noir. He had a gift that most actors would kill for--he was wholly believable as an ordinary man. At the same time, however, there is something boiling beneath the surface of this actor's best work.

Read my new essay on Lovejoy over at Criminal Element.