Two O'Clock Courage (RKO, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Exodus Turner Classic Movies showed a film that was one-third as long and about ten times as entertaining: Two O’Clock Courage, a 1945 “B” from RKO starring Tom Conway as an amnesia victim who may or may not have been mixed up in a murder, and Ann Rutherford as Patty Mitchell, the woman cab driver who runs into him – almost literally – and takes him under her wing to help him find out who he is and whether he was involved in the murder of a theatrical producer. TCM showed it as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show, but it’s really not a film noir. Rather, it’s a good example of the comedy-mysteries that were really big in the 1930’s but by 1945 had been pretty much killed off by the noir movement. Indeed, though the original novel by Gelett Burgess was called Two O’Clock Courage and was published in 1934, it was originally filmed in 1936 as Two in the Dark with Benjamin Stoloff directing and Walter Abel and Margot Grahame in the leads. This time around Stoloff returned but merely as producer, with the young Anthony Mann directing (one of his first gigs at a major studio) just after his magnificent The Great Flamarion at Republic. The Great Flamarion really is a film noir, with superb performances by Erich von Stroheim and Dan Duryea and a great femme fatale role for Mary Beth Hughes (rivaling Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage’s in Detour).

Two O’Clock Courage is not a noir at all, but it is very entertaining and manages to balance the mystery and comedy elements quite well. The principal suspects in the producer’s murder are his former chauffeur, Dave Rennick (Carl Kent), and his butler, Wilbur Judson (Harold De Becker, proving that they didn’t break the mold after they made Arthur Treacher). But other suspects emerge as Tom Conway’s character investigates the murder and his own identity with the few clues he has – two ticket stubs to a theatre performance of a play called Menace, a matchbook from a nightclub and $500 he got from the producer (he and we both think at first he stole it from the producer’s body but later we and he learn the producer gave him the money before he was killed). Meanwhile, the crime is being investigated by Inspector Bill Brenner (Emory Parnell), the usual doltish cop in these productions, and reporter Al Haley (Richard Lane), who keeps calling his irascible city editor (whenever did a reporter in a 1930’s or 1940’s movie work for an editor who wasn’t irascible?) with fresh new theories about the murder. The editor invariably accuses the reporter of drinking on the job, while the cop presses the reporter into service to re-enact the crime by lying on the floor of the room where the killing took place in exactly the same position as the corpse.

Along the way we meet quite a few possible suspects, including Mark Evans (Lester Matthews), who claimed to have written Menace but really stole it from a script by one Lawrence Curry called Two O’Clock Courage; good-time girl Helen Carter (Jane Greer, still using her original name of Bettejane Greer two years before her femme fatale role in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past and five years before her career would be destroyed by Howard Hughes, who had just bought RKO and figured that entitled him to sex with any of their contract actresses), who makes a play for Conway’s character and gets Patty jealous; and Barbara Borden (Jean Brooks), actress star of Menace and former girlfriend of the murder victim. When Conway’s character visits the nightclub and his old college buddy Steve Maitland (Roland Drew) addresses him as “Skip” – as do several other people – he gradually realizes that his real name is Theodore “Ted” Allison and “Skip” is a nickname he got from being particularly good at college football. He also finds a note from Lawrence Curry’s mother appointing him her late son’s agent for the purpose of getting Two O’Clock Courage produced, and he goes to the victim’s home to look for the playscript. He finds it, but he’s shot by an unseen assailant; he survives, but the shock brings back his memory and he recalls his confrontation with the producer, the $500 he received as part of the play’s royalties, and that Mark Evans the plagiarist was there at the time.

Later, when Ted comes to, a shot is heard and Mark is found dead; the cop and the reporter immediately assumed he killed himself but Ted, who through so much of this film channels his recurring role as private detective Tom Lawrence in the Falcon movie series I half-expected it to turn out that he was really “The Falcon,” notices that the gun in Mark’s hand hadn’t been fired recently. Ultimately he deduces that Barbara Borden is the real killer of both the producer and the plagiarizing “playwright,” though her motive remains obscure. Though not a film noir, Two O’Clock Courage shows that even as late as 1945 there were still some chunks of meat left on the old bones of the comedy-mystery genre, and it has a great gag ending in which Patty Mitchell’s irascible landlady is about to throw her and Ted out of her room when she produces a marriage license to prove they are Production Code-legitimate cohabitors – and for good measure slaps a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the landlady’s back. Though just about everyone involved in this made better films either earlier (Ann Rutherford’s recurring role as Mickey Rooney’s girlfriend in the Hardy Family movies, and Tom Conway and Jean Brooks for Val Lewton) or later (Jane Greer in Out of the Past – even though I think that’s a good but somewhat overrated movie – and Anthony Mann in his later Eagle-Lion noirs and the noir-in-Western-drag Winchester .73, his star-making film and a sensational success that earned its star, James Stewart, $1 million in profit participation), Two O’Clock Courage is a fascinating and quite entertaining little film that deserves to be better known. Eddie Muller boasted at the end that Two O’Clock Courage is the sixth Anthony Mann film he’s shown on “Noir Alley” – but is The Great Flamarion one of the other five, and if not, why not?