Undertow (William Castle Productions, Universal-International, 1949)

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

Last night I ran a movie for my huisband Charles and I called Undertow off YouTube, made by Universal-International in 1949 and directed by Wiliam Castle. It looked oddly familiar and both Charles and I realized that we’d seen it fairly recently. Charles recognized it when he saw a photo of a rural family with a tow-haired kid (the family represents the good rural people our central character, reformed gangster Tony Reagan – the last name is pronounced “REE-gun,” as Ronald Reagan did when he was a movie star, not “RAY-gun” as Ronald called himself once he entered politics – intends to go into business with on a ranch just 40 acres north of Reno, Nevada) and I recalled it even earlier, right when William Castle’s directorial credit came. Charles and I had first seen this movie as part of a four-DVD boxed set containing two films by Fritz Lang, You and Me and Ministry of Fear, and two by Castle, Undertow and Hollywood Story (the latter an intriguing production based loosely on the infamous, unsolved murder of film director William Desmond Taylor in 1922; it was made in 1951 just after Sunset Boulevard had started a brief vogue for movies in which Hollywood dredged up the more sordid aspects of its past). I bought this one mainly for You and Me, which I’d never seen before and turned out to be a lot better than I’d expected (even Lang himself called it “deservedly my first real flop”), but the other three films in the box were all capable noir thrillers.

William Castle got a schlock reputation from his later horror films, mostly for Columbia but also for Allied Artists (nèe Monogram), and the bizarre gimmicks he used to promote them, ranging from the usual $1 million insurance policy he said he took out in case anyone died of fright during a showing of one of his films to inserting frame-breaking devices like “Emergo” (in which a model skeleton was supposed to emerge from behind the screen and traverse the theatre across the screen, representing a character who had supposedly been immersed in an acid bath and all but his skeleton had been eaten away) and “Percepto” (in which he had certain theatre seats wired so they would deliver mild electric shocks on cue – John Waters recalled seeing The Tingler, the film for which Castle used “Percepto,” and getting to the theatre early so he could make sure he got one of the hot-wired seats). But he was also a former assistant to Orson Welles on The Lady from Shanghai and his skills as a director, already above average in the “B” world in which he started, only improved from his experience with Welles. Undertow is a perfectly respectable noir thriller in which Tony Reagan (Scott Brady, the sort of actor who was too homely for major stardom but superb for this type of role) shows up in Reno and has a meet-cute with Ann McKnight (Peggy Dow), a personable young teacher who’s in Reno on vacation after coming out on a bus from Chicago with her fellow teachers. Tony takes her under his wings, teaches her the basics of craps, she wins three points in quick succession and then he tells her to stop while she’s ahead – and she, unlike virtually any other gambler in a Hollywood movie, does so.

By coincidence (or authorial fiat by Arthur Horman and Lee Loeb), Tony is also going to Chicago on the same plane (thanks to Tony’s advice, Ann had the money to buy a plane ticket back instead of having to ride back on the bus), though Ann is crestfallen when Tony tells her why. He says he has a fiancée there, Sally Lee (Dorhthy Hart), and he’s going to ask her uncle, Chicago gangster “Big JIm” Lee, for permission to marry her. Only when he arrives in town “Big Jiim” is dead and Tony is beaten up by two thugs and held in a dark hall as part of a plot to frame him for Big Jim’s murder – and all of a sudden Undertow loos like a film noir. The police, represented by Captain Kerrigan (Thomas Browne Henry), accost Tony at the airport and order him to leave town. Tony protests that he hasn’t done anything, but he realizes the police will be watching him, and once he’s carefully set up for the murder of “Big Jim” he realizes that every cop on the Chicago Police Department except one will be gunning for him – as will whoever the crooks were who actually did in Big Jim. In desperation Tony hunts down Ann and asks if she can put him up – which she does. Though that doesn’t stop him from having a hot date in a waterfront park with Sally. At one point the two decide to meet at the park aquarium, and for a moment I thought Castle was going to copy the marvelous scene in The Lady from Shanghai in which Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles meet in aquarium for what they thought would be a clandestine adulterous tryst – only they’re discovered by an entire class of grade-school students whose teacher is leading them on a field trip. Alas, Castle, Horman and Loeb didn’t go there, perhaps because that would have required an additional set for the aquarium – it occurs to me that Castle and his writers could have gone Welles one better by having Ann McKnight be the teacher who’s leading the field trip and has to watch the guy she’s fallen for making love with someone else.

Instead Tony gets beaten a few more times, including once by a Black manservant of Big Jim’s who apparently had enough residual affection for his employer that he lets out his anger at the hapless Tony for allegedly killing Big Jim. Tony also hides out in Ann’s room despite her typically suspicious movie landlady,who in one scene lets herself into the room with her pass key and looks for Tony – who’s there, all right, hiding in the other room, but Ann comes home unexpectedly and chews her out for butting in. He has found her in the first place by tearing out the page of a Chicago phone book with her address and phone number, but the police find the phone book and are able to find her by tracing all the “Ann Mc-”’s on the page. Tony also contacts his one friend on the Chicago police force, detective Charles Reckling (Bruce Bennett), who helps him out with certain information on the case and ultimately is called on the carpet by Captain Kerrigan, who suspends him awaiting disciplinary action because he had Tony and let him get away. Tony says he can get help from his old army buddy, Danny Morgan (John Russell),

but what he doesn’t know – though we do – is that Danny is actually in cahoots with Sally Lee to kill Big Jim, frame Tony for the crime, and run the entire Chicago rackets by themselves. We learn this about a reeli or two before Tony does, and the cloe that gives it away is the engagement ring Tony sees on Sally’s finger, one which Danny Morton had shown him as a gift for his intended when the two of them ran into each other back in Reno. Ultimately the bad guys are taken down and Danny Morton is cornered by the avenging Black angel who was Big Jim’s manservant and, oblivious to his own life, walks straight at Danny while Danny shoots him but the bullets only slow him down. The film ends with Tony and Ann hooking up at long last and heading across country to take over that tourist resort 40 miles north of Reno. Undertow is an unambitious but well done movie, and obviously someone at Universal-International green-lighted a trip to Chicago that involved the stars (Scott Brady and Dorothy Hart, at least), since the scenes at the lakefront park are pretty obviously the real deal and not done with process screens. It’s a nice little movie and proves that William Castle was a director of real power and ingenuity who didn’t need the gimmicks to attract an audience.