High Tide (Jack Wrather Productions, Monogram, 1947)

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

After Blowup TCM showed a surprisingly interesting movie on their “Noir Alley” presentation, hosted by Eddie Muller, who not only talked about how much he liked the movie but actually had been involved in its restoration. The film was High Tide, the second of a series of movies made at the ultra-cheap Monogram studio by producer Jack Wrather, an oil millionaire who used his money to buy the rights to The Lone Ranger, Lassie and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. That made him an instant Hollywood success story, and he came out to try his luck in films with his second wife, former child star Bonita Granville (which explains how she landed the adult lead in Wrather’s previous production, The Guilty), anbd his close friend, actor Don Castle. High Tide was based on an old story, "Inside Job" by Raoul Whitfield, from the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask, which launched the “hard-boiled” detective genre ald helped jump-start the careers of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. TRaoul Whitfield remains a man of mystery even though he published over 300 stories in his career (making him far more prolific than Hammett, Cain and Chandler put together!), as well as a handful of novels.

From the online synopsis of High Tide I hadn’t been sure I’d want to watch it because it sounded like a disaster film – Los Angeles Dispatch city editor Hugh Fresney (Lee Tracy, older and seedier than he’d been in his early-1930’s heyday at MGM, which abruptly ended when he literally pissed away his career; on a location trip to Mexico to make the film ¡Viva Villa! in 1934, he got drunk one night and the next morning urinated on a parade of Mexican soldiers, thereby getting the entire company thrown out of Mexico and Tracy and the film’s director, Howard Hawks, fired) and former police officer turned reporter turned private investigator Tim Slade (Don Castle) miss a turn while being chased on a road outside Malibu. Their car goes off a cliff and comes to rest on the Malibu beach, where both men are pinned in place – Slade with his leg under the vehicle, unable to move, while Fresney is paralyzed in the back. Then the film goes into flashback and we finally get the stuff of classic noir: it turns out the Dispatch is owned by Clinton Vaughn (Douglas Walton, looking more than three years older than he had in his marvelous turn as Lindsay Marriott in the film noir ciasslc Murder, My Sweet in 1944),who doesn’t approve of the hard-line anti-gangster exposés Fresney is printing but allows them to go on because they increase the paper’s circulation.

Fresney gets a visit in his office by Mrs. Cresser (Argentina Brunetti), wife – widow, actually – of one of the alleged gang leaders the Dispatch exposed. She protests her husband’s innocence even as the switches are pulled that will execute him, and Fresney adds insult to injury by having a Dispatch photographer take her picture so he can publish it in the paper. Having dispatched (pun intended) Cresser, Fresney’s next target is Nick Dyke (Anthony Warde, who bears a striking resemblance to Anthony Quinn in his early villain roles), who shows up at the Dispatch’s offices to deliver his threats in person. Sex also rears its ugly head – this is a film noir, after all, so extra-relational activities have to be part of the storyline. It turns out that Clinton Vaughn’s more-or-less estranged wife Julie (Julie Bishop, who under her original name of Jacqueline Wells was the female romantic lead opposite David Manners in Edgar G. Ulmer’s marvelously subversive 1934 film The Black Cat, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in their first film together) had been having affairs with both Fresney and Slade. What’s more, when Clinton Vaughn is murdered – in a sequence director John Reinhardt (who was born in Vienna but does not appear to have been a relative of Max Reinhardt and his family) shoots artfully as a series of indistinct shadows – Julie has just written an incriminating letter to Fresney sayiing that once her husband is out of the way, the two of them can get together.

The note falls into the hands of police inspector O’Haffey (Regis Toomey) – ironically “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller admitted that the first time he saw the movie he got the inspector’s name as “O’Happy,” and indeed that’s what it sounds like the actors are saying – and after a retired Dispatch editor named Pop Garrow (Francis Ford, John Ford’s older brother and a director in his own right until his career flamed out in the silent era while his brother John survived and prospered into the 1960’s) is also killed, Siade and we realize the truth [spoiler alert!]: Hugh Fresney is a gang leader himself, using his power as the city editor of the Dispatch to eliminate his rivals so he can have absolute power over L.A.’s underworld. The scene cuts back to the wreck below the Malibu cliffs where the film started, though there’s yet another surprise twist: Fresney turns out to have a concealed sword in his cane, and he gives it to Slade so Slade can get out his leg from under the wrecked car and make his escape. High Tide is a fascinating and well-made film which piques my curiosity about the other movies Jack Wrather and John Reinhardt made at Monogram in the late 1940’s. Reinhardt had an unusual career: he was born in Vienna and got his start directing foreign-language versions of American films, since one of the reasons the studios had been reluctant to adopt sound was fear of losing the foreign market due to the language barrier.

So in the early days of the talkies, separate casts and crews would come in after dark and shoot different versions of the same movie, using the same blocking as the original director so they didn’t have to redo the marks, and though the stars would sometimes repeat the roles in the foreign versions (Jeanette MacDonald was proud that her French was so good they let her play opposite Maurice Chevalier in both the English and French versions of their films together), more often they would replace the entire cast. Most of these films are lost today, though the Spanish-language Dracula survives and at least one important film from 1930, Charlie Chan Carries On, exists only in its Spanish version, Eran Trece (“There Were Thirteen”), with Manuel Arbó replacing Warner Oland (in his role debut) as Charlie Chan. In 1936 Reinhardt got to make one of my off-the-wall favorites, Captain Calamity, a pirate comedy-thriller from the plucky independent Grand National company, shot in color (“Hirlicolor,” named after Grand National studio head George Hirliman)and a sheer delight Reinhardt shot in both English and Spanish versions. (The Spanish one was called El Capitan Tormenta.) Reinhardt worked in military intelligence as a photographic analyzer during World War II and then returned to Hollywood for a brief but promising career as a film noir director until his death in 1953 at just 52. High Tide is a remarkable gem of a film that makes me curious to see Reinhardt’s other post-war noirs, including The Guilty, For You I Die (a marvelous title that just sums up film noir), Sofia and Chicago Calling before he returned to Germany for his final two films, Man nennt es Liebe (“It’s Called Love”) and Briefträger Müller (“Mailman Müller”).