by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Johnny O’Clock, in a rather crude download from archive.org that came from a cable-TV
channel called Mystery and introduced some bizarre, vertiginous pans within
scenes I doubt were in the film as originally released by Columbia Pictures in
1947. It’s a film I’d never seen before start-to-finish — I’d started watching
it once in the 1970’s but turned it off midway through because I couldn’t make
heads or tails of the plot. Guess what? I still can’t make heads or tails of the plot! It’s
something about Johnny O’Clock (Dick Powell) — his weird last name is never
explained, though we are told
it’s just one of several aliases — who’s a junior partner in an illegal
gambling casino in New York City. The senior partner is Pete Marchettis (Thomas
Gomez, quite a change from his Columbo-like performance as a cop in Phantom
Lady and for some reason billed as S.
Thomas Gomez in the credits), who married
Johnny’s old girlfriend Nelle (Ellen Drew). The business of a three-way love
triangle between the boss, his assistant and the girl the assistant loved until
she dumped him for the boss (and the boss’s money) was an obvious ripoff from
Columbia’s film noir mega-hit the
year before, Gilda (with Rita
Hayworth as the girl, Glenn Ford as the assistant and George Macready as the
boss), but the main intrigue in Johnny O’Clock is the search for a missing man, a corrupt cop named
Chuck Blayden (who remains mostly a spectral presence throughout the film even
though actor Jim Bannon from the I Love a Mystery series is credited with playing him) who was
apparently bribed by Marchettis and O’Clock to kill off their competitors and
then announce to the media that he had shot all these rival gamblers while they
were “resisting arrest.” (It’s essentially the U.S. equivalent of Mexican
prisoners being shot and the authorities saying they were “attempting to
escape,” which actually became the origin of a slang term, ley fuga.)
The search for Blayden is being led by an honest
cop, homicide inspector Koch (Lee J. Cobb, his acting refreshingly free of the
Method affectations that crept into it later), who gets involved when Blayden’s
(and, occasionally, O’Clock’s — at least that’s the hint we get) girlfriend,
Harriet Hobson (Nina Foch — the Film Noir Encyclopedia gives her and her sister’s last name as “Hobbs” but
“Hobson” is clearly the name spoken on the soundtrack), is found dead in her
apartment. The police originally believe it was suicide since she was found
asphyxiated and the gas in the oven was left on, but eventually an autopsy
reveals that there was also poison in her system and therefore the police
conclude she was murdered because if she’d been planning to commit suicide, she
wouldn’t have taken poison and
stuck her head in the oven. (This is actually a rather silly plot point; many
real-life suicides have chosen more than one method so even if one method
didn’t kill them, the other would.) Johnny O’Clock was directed by Robert Rossen, who was attempting to
make the same career transition from screenwriting to directing Preston
Sturges, Billy Wilder and John Huston had done by taking a script he’d
co-written (with producer Milton Holmes) and shooting it himself. It was
Rossen’s first film as director, and it reveals both the big influences on his
head-space as a filmmaker: the burgeoning noir cycle (which he’d helped kick off as a writer with
his script for Warner Bros.’ 1936 production Marked Woman, one of the most important proto-noirs) and the Italian neo-realist movement in general and
Roberto Rossellini in particular.
What’s weird about Johnny O’Clock is that it’s a series of character studies with
virtually no plot; Rossen throws standard noir clichés (by 1947 film noir had been around long enough to have a standard cliché bank) at us willy-nilly, linking
them only peripherally. The female lead, Harriet Hobson’s sister Nancy (Evelyn
Keyes, who at least as she’s made up here looks enough like Nina Foch we believe in them as
sisters), doesn’t enter until well past the half-hour point: she’s a chorus
member in a touring musical and the telegram summoning her to New York to I.D.
her dead sister comes to her while her show is in Harrisburg. (This couldn’t
help but remind me of the famous anecdote in which Sam Goldwyn told George
Balanchine that the ballet he’d choreographed for The Goldwyn Follies was so complex “the miners in Harrisburg wouldn’t
get it.” Balanchine replied, “Mr. Goldwyn, I am not President Roosevelt and I
don’t care what the miners in
Harrisburg think.” Then he did a double-take and added, “Besides, Mr. Goldwyn,
there are no miners in Harrisburg. I’ve been there!”) Rossen seems to have been
going out of his way to make as plotless a movie as he could get away with at a
major Hollywood studio; instead of supporting a strong storyline (as in Dick
Powell’s best noir vehicles, Murder,
My Sweet, Cornered and Cry Danger), the noir stylistics are the point in and of themselves — which oddly makes Johnny
O’Clock a quite modern-seeming movie, since
in today’s films we’re used to
seeing sequences put in more for their striking visual virtuosity or high
action content than for any relevance to a storyline. It’s recently been
restored and revived, and not surprisingly it’s got better reviews now than it
did when it was new.
After nine reels of oddly slow-moving scenes Rossen and
Holmes suddenly throw an action climax at us: Marchettis turns out to have
murdered both Blayden (after he’s been missing through most of the film his
body turns up in the river about two-thirds of the way through) and Harriet —
though there’s a hint that Harriet was actually killed by Nelle out of jealousy
(over whom?) — and he wants to eliminate Johnny as well, only Johnny demands
his share of the casino’s profits in return for breaking up the business
partnership. Marchettis lets Johnny into his safe and gives him the cash (at this
point I thought he’d actually lock Johnny in the safe in a higher-tech version of The
Cask of Amontillado) but then shoots him
when he tries to leave with the money. There’s a ferocious gun battle in which
Marchettis is killed and Johnny is wounded, and Nelle walks in and states her
intention to tell the police that Johnny killed Marchettis in cold blood.
Johnny takes Koch hostage and plans to escape until Nancy — who since has
become Johnny’s girlfriend — talks him out of it and he turns himself in to Koch
instead. Then a “The End” title comes up superimposed on the final scene. Johnny
O’Clock isn’t a bad movie, but it’s also not that interesting; critic
Carl Macek said the problem with it was that Dick Powell’s character “was not
obviously vulnerable” — and indeed he comes off as a kind of noir superman instead of the two-bit detective Raymond
Chandler vividly created and Powell brought to life in Murder, My
Sweet — and therefore the film lacks “a
sense of fear and powerlessness.” But the real problem with it is that, for all
the vivid stylistics of Rossen’s direction and Burnett Guffey’s cinematography,
it lacks much sense — i.e., plot coherence — at all!
