5 Against the House (Romson Productions, Columbia, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after the showings of Rebel Without a Cause and Breathless Turner Classic Movies ran under the rubric of “Following the Thread” of fashion in movies, they ran a curious film called 5 Against the House – the numeral is part of the title – as part of Eddle Muller’s “Noir Alley” series even though it’s only tangentially a film noir. It was the third starring role Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn gave his new discovery, Kim Novak, in his campaign to build her into a major star. In 1948 he had briefly had Marilyn Monroe under contract, but had let her go after six months and just one role, as the second female lead in a “B” movie called Ladies of the Chorus, with Adele Jergens top-billed as Monroe’s mother even though Jergens was just nine years older than Monroe. Having let go a woman who would become one of the most legendary stars of all time, Cohn nursed a sense of grievance and determined to make right his mistake by discovering a new actress whom he could build into a Monroe clone. He selected a blonde he’d seen on a TV commercial; her name was Marilyn Novack (ironically the real name of the actress he was grooming her to replace was not Marilyn, but Norma Jean!), and for her first film he gave her Pushover, a true noir in which she played the girlfriend of corrupt cop Fred MacMurray.

To me one of the most interesting aspects of Novak’s career is how often she was cast as what she essentially was: a woman recruited by a powerful man and carefully groomed to take part in a scheme that involved passing her off as something other than what she was. Her part in Pushover fit this template; so would her stunning performance in what’s become by far her best-known film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; and in her last major role, in 1968’s The Legend of Lylah Clare, she plays an actress recruited by an old-line director to star in a biopic of his late wife, Lylah Clare, whose career ended with her tragically young death. Though her part in 5 Against the House is only tangentially related to this template, there are certainly aspects of it: she plays Kay Greylek, girlfriend of Al Mercer (Guy Madison, top-billed), one of four college students attending the fictitious “Midwestern University” in Kansas following their discharge from the Army after serving in the Korean war. The other three are Brick (Brian Keith), who saved Al’s life in combat but has since developed what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and is clearly in need of mental treatment he doesn’t want; Roy (Alvy Moore); and Ronnie (Kerwin Mathews, who eventually would become “typed” as a dashing young action hero in Ray Harryhausen’s elaborate monster fantasies for Columbia). Ronnie is a bored rich kid who, after the four of them take a summer-vacation trip to Reno for an hour’s play at Harold’s Club (a real casino whose owners actively recruited Columbia to film their heist movie there; probably because Reno was being out-promoted by Las Vegas as America’s gambling haven and Harold’s wanted to do something to fight back), they witness an inept attempt to stick up the place that is easiul foiled by the in-house security.

They hear a pit boss boast that no one could possibly rob Harold’s, and Ronnie takes this as a challenge. He works out an elaborate scheme to rob the casino and then give back the money, just to prove they can do it. Only the scheme needs all four of the students for it to work, and the other three trick the reluctant Al into going along by pointing out that Reno is also a place known for quickie weddings, so he and Kay can be married there. Kay has landed a job as a singer at a local nightclub (though Kim Novak’s singing was actually dubbed by Jo Ann Greer – a better match for her speaking voice than Trudy Stevens, who dubbed her in Pal Joey three years later) and she has misgivings about walking out on her job, but agrees to accompany her fiancé and his three buddies on the trip to Harold’s, which they intend to do on Thanksgiving weekend because the Western-themed club not only has a larger than normal crowd there but they encourage people to come in costume, which means it will be easier for the robbers to disguise themselves. Part of their plot involves building an exact duplicate of the money carts Harold’s uses to move cash from one part of the casino to another, and rigging the inside with a tape recorder (still a relatively novel consumer product in 1954). The idea behind this is they can take one of the casino employees hostage and tell him there’s a live assassin in the cart, a five-foot man who used to work as a jockey in horse racing, and he will kill the hostage if the hostage doesn’t follow their orders. Only, as in all the caper films inspired by The Asphalt Jungle and its success in depicting the careful planning of a single crime, things get botched in the execution. First, on the way there Al realizes what the others have planned to do and is ready to push the duplicate cart off a cliff – until Brick, who unlike the others actually wants to keep the heist money they’re going to steal, literally turns a gun on him and forces him and Kay to go along with the plot. Then the hostage, genuinely convinced there’s a small man inside the phony cart, pushes it down a staircase (or a ramp, I’m not sure which) and yells that there’s a man inside with a gun who’s part of a plot to rob the casino. There’s a chase scene between Brick and Al in the middle of a mechanical parking garage in which the cars are lifted into place by an elevator and automatically parked by gadgetry, and eventually the police arrest everybody and Al and Kay are put in the back of a patrol car while their friends grimly joke that this is the way everybody should spend their honeymoon.

5 Against the House was based on a story by Jack Finney, originally published in Good Housekeeping magazine, and Finney’s other projects around this time included creating the Mickey Mouse Club TV show for Disney and writing The Body Snatchers, which under the title Invasion of the Body Snatchers was filmed in 1956 (a vest-pocket masterpiece and the first science-fiction film noir), again in 1979 and twice more since then. Finney also published a science-fiction novel called Time and Again which Eddie Muller said in his introduction was never filmed, though I had thought the 1980 film Somewhere in Time was based on it even though Richard Matheson’s name is the only one on its writing credit). 5 Against the House was directed by Phil Karlson, who ironically was also the director of Ladies of the Chorus and was therefore the first, and quite likely the only, director who worked with both Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak, and Finney’s story was adapted by Stirling Silliphant (who also co-produced), William Bowers, John Barnwell and an uncredited Frank Tashlin (an odd name here since he was mostly associated with Jayne Mansfield and Jerry Lewis). The result was a quite solid Asphalt Jungie-ish crime film, not all that noir-ish but done with real quality and style – and its chiaroscuro cinematography by Lester White was a real relief after the relentless overexposure (literally!) of Raoul Coutard’s work on Breathless!