The Guilty (Jack Wrather Productions, Monogram, 1947)

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

LAfter watching Flowers in the Attic: The Origin: Part Two: The Mother (to use its unnecessarily cumbersome full title), my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube post of one of the films noir Jach Wrather produced at Monogram Pictures in the late 1940’s, The Guilty. This was made just before the quite good High Tide, another Wrather/Monogram production we’d watched last weekend on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies, and like High Tide it was based on a script by Robert Presnell, Sr. and directed by John Reinhardt. Only this one started out as a short story called “He Looked LIke Murder” by Cornell Woolrich, a popular pulp writer of noir fiction whose most famous story, “Rear Window,” was fil;med chillingly by Alfred Hitchcock in 1954. Woolrich was a highly prolific author who probably published more than the other major noir writers of his time – Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler – put together, though his huge output came at a cost. He never seemed to care about going over his own work looking for and eliminating plot holes, and sometimes Woolrich’s stories have denouements that are preposterous on their face. This is especially true of a notorious story he wrote called “Fear in the Night,” in which a young man is hypnotized into committing an actual murder while believing he only dreamed the killing,a and he launches his own investigation once he learns that the man he dreamed he “killed” is in fact dead. (Fear in the Night was filmed twice,in 1947 and 1956, and in the earlier version DeForest Kelley, later Dr. McCoy on the original Star Trek, was the hapless hypnosis victim while in the remake it was Kevin McCarthy from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)

Doubtless Jack Wrather intended The Guilty as a showcase for two talents who were near and dear to him: his wife (at the time), former child actress Bonita Granville, who got cast in the dual role of Estelle and Linda Mitchell; and Wrather’s good friend Don Castle, who got the plum role of returned Army veteran Mike Carr. (Castle got a “Presenting” credit in the opening roll.) This was a good time for women playing dual roles in which one character was good and one bad – the year before Bette Davis had made A Stolen Life and Olivia De Havlilland had made The Dark Mirror – and as in those movies, the two Bonita Granvilles are diametrically opposed morally. Linda is the “good girl” in love with Mike’s fellow veteran Johnny Dixon (Wally Cassell), who served with him in the Battle of the Bulge, in which he was wounded and developed what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. Johnny had briefly dated Estelle before deciding that Linda was the one he really wanted, and when Linda turns out to have been killed Johnny is the prime suspect. The usual dogged police officer, Detective Haller (Regis Toomey), shows up to investigate the crime. The Mitchell sisters lived at home with their mother (Netta Packer) and a family friend named Alex Tremholl (John LItel) who formed an unhealthy attraction towards Linda, and the cops eventually arrest Tremholl for the murder – only it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Mike Carr is actually the killer. He picked up with Estelle when his roommate Johnny abandoned her for Linda, only he got so tired of her extra-relational activities with other men he decided to kill her – but because the two sisters looked alike, he killed Linda by mistake.

For a while I thought that Jack Wrather and Monogram were going to go where Raymond Chandler and Paramount had feared to tread by making Johnny Dixon the killer, motivated by what combat had done ot his psyche. Raymond Chandler had written just that ending for his original script for The Blue Dahlia – the brain-damaged Buzz (William Bendix) would have turned out to be the murderer of Johnny Morrison’s (Alan Ladd) unfaithful ex-wife (Doris Dowling) – but when the U.S. Navy got wind that Chandler was writing a movie in which a brain-damaged sailor would turn out to be a killer due to injuries he’d suffered in combat, they served notice that they would never again cooperate with any Paramount production if the film went out with that ending, so Chandler was forced to come up with a totally synthetic and unbelievable replacement finish. Alas, Weather and Monogram didn’t have the guts to confront the U.S. government censors either!

The actual ending of The Guilty reminded me of the school of thought surrounding Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1946 film noir masterpiece Detour in which the central character (Tom Neal), who narrates the story, isn’t an innocent victim of fate who ends up with two corpses on his hands that he can’t prove he didn’t kill, but an actual murderer who’s been lying to us all along in his flashbacks. The Guilty has exactly the ending as that alternate reading of Detour, and I’m tempted to attribute it to Woolrich rather than Presnell because of the many out-of-left-field finishes that abound in Woolrich’s stories. One of the quirks of cinema is that while it’s considered O.K. for a character to tell a lie in dialogue, if the action is actually dramatized and we see it on film we’re supposed to believe it’s part of the story’s truth. Alfred Hitchcock famously broke that rule in the opening sequence of his 1950 film Stage Fright – in which Ricnard Todd’s character narrates a flashback that turns out to be a lie he invented to cover up a murder he’d committed – and other filmmakers had tried that before, but there’s still a sense of dirty pool about it. Most of The Guilty is narrated in flashback during scenes taking place at a bar owned by Tim McGinniss (Thomas E. Jackson, who usually played incorruptible cops) to which Mike and Estelle frequently went on their dates – and they’re shown in hot and heavy sexual poses that in retrospect made it seem unbelievable that he killed her sister, thinking it was her. I quite liked The Guilty for what it was, but it didn’t have the extraordinary depth of High Tide (whose author, Raoul Whitfield, was a far more socially conscious author than Woolrich), with its subplot of urban corruption – and High Tide did the same gimmick ending (the character we’ve been rooting for and told to admire all movie turns out to be a gangster himself, using his power as city editor of a local newspaper to eliminate his gangland competitors) but to much better effect than The Guilty.