Undertow (Universal-International, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, with Lifetime doing exclusively reruns of movies about killer cheerleaders (I’m not making this up, you know!), I dug out the Turner Classic Movies Dark Crimes, volume 2 boxed set and ran two quite interesting late films noir directed by William Castle. The full box included two films by Fritz Lang (with some rather testy commentaries by a rather prissy host to the effect that Lang considered himself the greatest director of all time -- though a case could certainly be made for that!) while Castle considered himself just a journeyman filmmaker who would take whatever budget his producer had to offer and make as good a movie as possible out of it. William Castle is best known for his 1950’s horror films for Allied Artists (formerly Monogram) and Columbia like The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler, for which he cooked up bizarre promotional devices: for The House on Haunted Hill he had a plastic skeleton come out from behind the screen and travel on a track mounted above the audience, and for The Tingler he wired certain seats in each theatre to deliver an electric shock to audience members in those chairs at the film’s climax. (John Waters recalls hearing about this gimmick, called “Percepto,” as a boy and going early to see The Tingler to make sure he got one of the wired seats.)

But in the 1940’s Castle had been a promising up-and-coming “B” director at Columbia and had made most of the Whistler crime-series movies, including one called Voice of the Whistler that ripped off Citizen Kane in its depiction of a lonely, troubled rich man keeping a trophy wife a virtual prisoner in an out-of-the-way location. Castle got to work as Orson Welles’ assistant on The Lady from Shanghai and obviously learned a lot from him. In 1949 he left Columbia and signed with Universal-International, where he made the two films of his included in this box, Undertow (1949) and Hollywood Story (1951). Undertow stars Scott Brady (Lawrence Tierney’s brother, whose acting style was considerably more understated even though off-screen both were holy terrors who drank a lot, got into bar fights and were arrested for real -- Brady was even incarcerated for bookmaking, ironic since this film casts him as a gambler!) as Tony Reagan (pronounced “REE-gun,” by the way -- Ronald Reagan was also usually called “REE-gun” during his Hollywood days but when he went into politics insisted that people use the “RAY-gun” pronunciation he had always preferred).

The film starts in Reno, where Reagan is managing a casino and gives a traveling schoolteacher from Chicago, Ann McKnight (Peggy Dow), a pair of fixed dice that allows her to win three throws at a craps table, then tells her to cash out so she can quit while she’s ahead and fly back to Chicago instead of taking a bus. Reagan runs into an old army buddy, Danny Morgan (John Russell), also from Chicago, and tells him that he too is returning to the Windy City but only to pick up his fiancee, Sally Lee (Dorothy Hart), and marry her. Then he plans to return to Reno, where he’s bought a resort on the outskirts of town and plans to run it and make sure any gaming it offers is legit. His only problem is that Sally is being raised by her uncle, Chicago syndicate master John Lee, and he had decreed that no one who’d been in the rackets -- as Tony had been before the war -- could marry her. He and Ann end up on the same plane back to Chicago and they chat each other up, but he’s already got a girlfriend and she’s got a teaching career she doesn’t want to abandon. The moment the plane lands Tony is accosted by two detectives from the Chicago Police Department, who tell him they’ve received a tip that he’s gone there to kill John Lee and if he knows what’s good for him he’ll hightail it back out of town. He asks the cops if they’re arresting him and if they have anything to arrest him for, and when they say no he leaves.

He has a reunion with Sally and an invitation to her home where he’s supposed to try to talk John Lee into letting him marry her -- only when he gets there he’s clubbed and left unconscious by two unseen assailants, and when he comes to he’s in his car with an injured left hand (one of his attackers shot him in the left hand to make it look like he’d been in a gun battle), he finds out John Lee is dead and realizes he’s been framed for the crime. He manages to trace Ann -- he goes to a drugstore for help with his hand, sees a phone book and tears out the page with her name, address and phone number on it -- and he stays at her place while he tries to prove his innocence. By this time Charles and I were starting to suspect that Sally was behind the plot to murder her uncle for his illicit fortune, especially since in just about every film noir with two women principals one was going to be the Good Girl and one was going to be the femme fatale, and Charles was ahead of me in guessing that writers Arthur T. Horman and Lee Loeb were going to have Tony’s Army buddy Danny Morgan be her co-conspirator and her lover. We get that nailed down when after Tony leaves them, Horman and Loeb give us a scene between them talking about the status of their plot, and Tony ultimately realizes it when he sees the engagement ring Danny had previously shown him on Sally’s finger. (They had both bought her rings, not realizing that they were planning to give them to the same woman -- a reversal of Bellini’s Norma, in which Norma and her friend and assistant Adalgisa commiserate about their difficulties with men when we know, though they don’t, that they’re the same man.)

Before that there’s a scene I suspect the writers were deliberately ripping off Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady, a famous noir Robert Siodmak had made at Universal five years before which also featured the gimmick of the innocent man who’s trying to clear himself of a murder charge asking for help from a supposed “friend” who’s the real killer. Fortunately, Tony has one police detective on his side, Charles Reckling (Bruce Bennett), whom he meets and turns over the gun that was used to shoot John Lee -- a captured Japanese pistol that’s so removed from most guns in Chicago the police can’t trace it to any particular owner -- and he’s convinced by the fact that the gun was totally clean, with no prints except Tony’s and Reckling’s on it, that Tony was indeed framed. During this scene Reckling is with an assistant detective from the department who’s played by the young Rock Hudson (though he’s billed in the opening credits as “Roc Hudson”!), at a time when Universal-International had just signed him and his agent, Henry Willson, was persuading Universal-International to put him in anything, no matter how small, so he’d get screen exposure and potentially be noticed, (He was, by German expat director Douglas Sirk, who cast Hudson in eight films, including his breakthrough role in the 1953 remake of Magnificent Obsession.)

It ends the way you’d pretty much expect it to, with Tony cleared, Danny murdered by John Lee's faithful Black retainer (an intriguing character and a far cry from the way most Blacks were still being depicted in 1949!), and Ann agreeing to give up her career and life in Chicago to come to Reno and help Tony run that little resort in the middle of nowhere, but overall Undertow is a fine, understated little noir that in a way benefits from Scott Brady’s very ordinariness. He’s not an especially talented or charismatic actor, but he’s good enough to be believable in the role and probably better than a more established star would have been. I tried to imagine this film with Humphrey Bogart in the lead and realized his star charisma and power would have pulled the plot entirely out of joint -- and besides, no movie audience in 1949 would have believed a Bogart character could be as totally naive as Tony has to be for the plot to work. (Bogart was also way too old for the part of a World War II veteran, though that hadn’t stopped Columbia from casting him as one in Dead Reckoning just two years before Universal-International made Undertow.)

Undertow also benefits from a surprising amount of location shooting in Chicago -- though some of it was second-unit work, enough of the location scenes feature Scott Brady it’s obvious he actually made the trip out there -- and though only a few of the scenes have the real noir atmospherics, it works as a morally ambiguous thriller and even Peggy Dow’s abrupt walkout on her life in Chicago at the end, which has been criticized as sexist and dramatically unbelievable, can be read as a statement of faith in her man comparable to Lauren Bacall’s willingness in the 1947 Dark Passage to leave the country in the company of the innocent but still officially “guilty” criminal she loves (played, natch, by her real-life squeeze Humphrey Bogart). Ironically, Peggy Dow walked out on her real-life career to get married and retire just two years after making this film!