"Doing the right thing never works out; turn the other cheek and you get hit with a lug wrench."
--Walter Williams (played by Brian Donlevy) in Impact, screenplay by Dorothy Davenport and Jay Dratler.
If Impact had had the courage of its fatalistic convictions, as Edgar Ulmer's Detour did, in 1944 -- "every time you turn around fate sticks out its foot and trips you"-- and hadn't ended relatively happily it would have been a better film. The cast was good and so was the cinematographer, but Arthur Lubin was a strange choice for director, mostly having worked on Francis the Talking Mule and Abbot and Costello pictures. There is one effectively noir scene of a murder and a flaming car crash of a roadster and an oil tanker that go off the edge of a cliff but otherwise this is more of a solve-the-mystery film, though Hitchcock would have appreciated that the audience knows what actually happened when Walter Williams is accused of murdering his wife's lover (they had tried to murder him!).
The film includes a good girl and a bad girl from others films noirs (Ella Raines and Helen Walker) and the cinematographer is Ernest Laszlo, who did the bleak Laura (1944) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The film has some effective San Francisco location work --including tracking down an important witness -- (silent film star) Anna Mae Wong-- in Chinatown, but too much of it takes place in the daytime of a small bucolic Midwest town, which does have the virtue of war widow Ella Raines running an auto repair shop and Mae Marsh (who appeared in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance in 1916) as her mother, the kinds of roles common in classical films but relatively rare in contemporary ones.
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