The MGM B film: Under Cover of Night; Code Two

Kudos to Turner Classic Movies for showing these two movies this month. MGM, of course, was known for its glossy films with big stars, but they also made B movies, i.e., features running 60 or 70 minutes to show on a double bill.  Most B films were relatively inconsequential time-fillers but there were some good directors who rather specialized in them, particularly Edgar Ulmer and Budd Boetticher, and did not quite succumb to the formula that usually included comic relief and a happy ending.

Under Cover of Night was one of seven (!) films that George B. Seitz made for MGM in 1937.  It's a clever and unusual film about academic life, with an ambitious professor whose wife does all his research and threatens to leave him when he is unfaithful with a student.  He proceeds to throw her dog out the window, causing her to have a fatal heart attack, and then in one night kills all the people he thinks his wife may have given her notes to.  This is rather an extreme example of the cutthroat aspect of the academic life but seems not so crazy for those of us who have been in graduate school.  There is also an effective subplot of the particular difficulties of being a woman professor, condescended to and denied promotion. Seitz uses an impressive array of character actors --Edmund Lowe, Florence Rice, Henry Daniell, Sara Hade, et al.-- for the various members of the academy and uses cinematographer Charles Clarke to minimize the MGM gloss, with most of the film taking place during one long night.

The director of Code Two (1953) was Frank Wilcox, who directed only ten movies in his career, the best-known of which is The Forbidden Planet (1956), a science fiction version of The Tempest. Code Two stars Ralph Meeker, who two years later starred in the corrosive Kiss Me Deadly.  In Code Two Meeker shows the same arrogance that he showed in Robert Aldrich's film but here it is seen as positive rather than destructive.  Meeker and a couple of buddies become cops and there is documentary-like footage of their training.  After being assigned jobs of typing and counting towels they all decide to become motorcycle cops, for the excitement and extra pay, as the Harley-Davidsons become the stars of the picture, with their ability to go anywhere.  But being a motorcycle cop is dangerous and one of Meeker's buddies gets killed when he stops a truck full of stolen cows. "Everything is a Western." Sam Peckinpah once said, and Meeker goes after the cattle rustlers, on a motorcycle rather than a horse.  The truck that Meeker is looking for has tires with a distinctive pattern and at one point Meeker hides in the bushes and every time a truck goes by he splashes water on the road to check the pattern of the tires.  Meeker gets the bad guys after being shot himself and there is indeed a relatively happy ending as Meeker flirts with the nurse in the hospital in an attempt to forget the death of his friend.