above: Burr throws a scare into Liz Scott and Dick Powell in PITFALL
As I point out in a new Goon Squad piece over at Criminal Element, it would be interesting to know if a hundred years from now the world will remember Raymond Burr's performance as Perry Mason on television. I have a suspicion that it won't. This theory is built on my gut instinct that people won't care about a TV show from the late fifties.
And yet I also suspect that there will be a small group of cinema geeks who still love film noir (I mean, people are still reading Sophocles...). If this suspicion proves true, then at least that small group of people will know and love Raymond Burr.
At this late date, most non-noir geeks still don't know that Raymond Burr was pretty much THE face of evil in the most important film genre of the 1950s. He played masterminds, henchmen, and stone-cold psychos. The one element of all of them? That stare that contained contempt for lesser beings. Everyone around him seemed to insult his intelligence.
Check out my piece at Criminal Element to find out more about the secret life and noir career of the pre-Perry Raymond Burr.
While I can say unequivocally that Andre de Toth’s Pitfall is one of the great film noirs, I cannot say with any certainty whether its final brilliance is by design. Is there such a thing as an accidental masterpiece? I’m not sure, but there is an ambiguity at the center of this film which is either a stroke of genius or a grievous oversight on behalf of the filmmakers.
Pitfall tells the story of John Forbes (Dick Powell) a married insurance agent who is bored at home and tired of being an “average American.” One day Forbes meets Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) the sexy girlfriend of a convict only days away from being released. Forbes and Mona have a few drinks, share some pointed conversation, and then spend a night together. Unfortunately for both of them, Mona is being stalked by a creepy private eye named MacDonald. He’s a bug-eyed nutjob, obsessed with Mona and none too happy about her new, married boyfriend. As MacDonald grows more violent, what might have been a brief adulterous affair turns into a walking nightmare for Forbes and Mona. This set-up is a perfect illustration of one of my favorite definitions of film noir (from Roger Ebert): an ordinary guy indulges the weaker side of his character, and hell opens up beneath his feet.
I’ve always loved that quote, and it certainly applies here, but what makes Pitfall so interesting is the way it sets up that basic situation but then, underneath, tells another story.
That story belongs to the “other woman” Mona Stevens. The plot prepares us to accept her as a femme fatale, but then an interesting thing happens on the way to the gallows. Mona turns out to be a nice person. Okay, she’s got bad taste in men. Her boyfriend is in jail for embezzling funds to buy her clothes and a boat. She attracts a psychopath like MacDonald on first meeting. Five minutes after meeting Forbes, she has him agreeing to stiff drinks in a darkened bar at three in the afternoon. Clearly, she’s got issues with men.
But she isn’t a femme fatale. Once she learns Forbes is married, she breaks it off with him. She rebuffs MacDonald, and she tries to shield Forbes from his wrath. While she makes some bad decisions, Mona never seems motivated by the greed and selfishness that are motivating just about everyone else. She is, without a doubt, the most interesting, sympathetic person in the movie. It doesn’t hurt that she’s played by Lizabeth Scott, one of the great women of noir, whose specialty was being world-weary and fragile at the same time. While she was breathtakingly beautiful, there was an undeniable sadness to Liz Scott. Her eyes, sensuous as they may be, always look as if they’ve been crying, and while she sometimes played the blond ice goddess in film noirs, more often than not what shone through in her performances was a bruised and battered quality, a sense that she was a smart woman forced to make due in a dumb man’s world.
That was never truer than in this movie. Forbes lies to her to get her in bed, MacDonald stalks her, and her convict boyfriend is a whiskey-swilling imbecile. Pitfall may have the set-up of a femme fatale story, but by the end it seems to be more about Mona Stevens and three L’Homme fatales. The thing is, though, I’m not sure if the movie knows this. On the surface, it is still telling the story of Forbes, the ordinary man indulging the weaker side of his character.
And that’s a story the movie tells well. Dick Powell is excellent as Forbes. As a dramatic actor, Powell’s specialty was inferiority masked as smugness. Even when he played Philip Marlowe in Murder My Sweet, you got the sense that the smugness was just a way to cover up the fact the character was in over his head. Powell’s character is in way over his head here. His chief adversary, the psycho private eye MacDonald, is played by Raymond Burr at his villainous best. You do not want to find yourself staring down Raymond Burr in a film noir, especially if you are Dick Powell. The movie generates a lot of suspense as it tightens the vise on this weak, normal, believable man.
And yet…
Notice what happens at the end. What happens to Mona? Is she being punished by the Production Code for sleeping with a married man? Does the District Attorney’s angry words to Forbes (“I think we have the wrong person upstairs”) reflect the feelings of the filmmakers? Look at the last shot of her. Notice that we see her from Forbes’ perspective. Is this robbing Mona of her final moment? Or is it a commentary on the real tragedy of the story? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but ask yourself: when hell opened up beneath Forbes’ feet, whom did it swallow?
***
Director Andre De Toth also directed the wonderful Crime Wave. For an interesting interview with this underrated artist, click here.
In our time we all play different parts, and just about every noir player has played the hero and the villain, the good girl and the femme fatale, the lead and the support. Yet over a career there are certain personalities that take hold. This is another addition to the roundup of faces that appear over and over in noir, like thugs pulled into a police lineup:
Raymond Burr-The Mastermind.
Long before he was Perry Mason, he put that blank stare and understated delivery to work as a supreme villain. He had a palpable intelligence that sent one message: It is your great misfortune that I am smarter than you. He appeared in many noirs but is especially notable as Lizabeth Scott’s stalker in De Toth’s brilliant Pitfall and as the brutal pyromaniac gangster in AnthonyMann’s Raw Deal. His best role might have been in another Mann picture, Desperate, in which he plays a vengeful gangster stalking poor Steve Brodie and Audrey Long in an attempt to save his brother from the gas chamber.
*
Here's an interesting piece on Burr's private life. He was so deeply in the closet most people today still don't realize he was gay.
*
Gale Storm died yesterday, and I wanted tip a hat to Abandoned the noir she made opposite Burr in 1949. Saying that Burr was good in this redundant since he was good in everything, but he gets to play a real scumbag in this movie. An added bonus: a three way fight between Burr, big lug king Mike Mazurki and goofball David Clarke.
above: Burr throws a scare into Liz Scott and Dick Powell in PITFALL
