Violence (Bernhard-Brandt Productions, Monogram, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, April 6) I wanted to watch an episode of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” series on Turner Classic Movies – I’d got an early ride home from the Bears San Diego party in El Cajon but didn’t quite make it back in time for the start of the movie at 9 p.m. I’d thought I’d be able to watch it on YouTube, but I’d have had to pay an online rental fee and I figured if I’d have to pay for it anyway, I’d rather order the DVD (which I did) and watch it that way. As luck would have it, I got up this morning in time to watch the movie on its rerun at 7 a.m. The film was Violence, a 1947 “B” movie from Monogram produced by Jack Bernhard and Bernard Brandt and directed by Bernhard from a story and script by Stanley Rubin and Lewis Lantz. I was particularly interested in it because it dealt with a Right-wing paramilitary organization called “United Defenders,” headed by True Dawson (Emory Parnell), aimed at recruiting veterans returning home from World War II to find inflation running rampant, their old jobs taken over by others, and almost no housing available. Dawson and his compatriots, including manager and fixer Fred Stalk (Sheldon Leonard, just about the only person in the cast you’re likely to have seen in other films) and muscleman/thug Joker Robinson (Peter Whitney), are really in it for the money; they want to build up a private veterans’ army to disrupt strikes at the behest of well-to-do capitalists and one well-to-do capitalist in particular, identified only as “Mr. X” (William Gould). Only a member named Joe Donahue (Jimmy Clark) has cottoned onto the secrets of the organization and realized it’s just a grift. He intends to go to the police with his information, but before he can do that Stalk and Joker catch him and beat him up to try to find out where he got his info. As soon as he tells them he didn’t get a leak from within the organization – he just did his own research – Stalk orders Joker to kill him and dispose of his body where it can’t be found.

But they do have a “mole” infiltrating the group: Dawson’s secretary, Ann Mason (Nancy Coleman), who’s really Ann Dwire, reporter for View magazine (read: Life). Ann has already submitted a story and photos to her View editor, Ralph Borden (Pierre Watkin), and he’s prepared to run with it but she wants to get just a little more information first. Realizing that Stalk and Joker are catching on to her disguise, she plans to take a trip to Chicago and deliver the final bits of her story in person, but Stalk crashes her apartment and looks around for the incriminating info under the guise of helping her pack. He nervously fingers an elaborate bracelet which is really a hidden camera with which she’s taken photos of the key United Defenders on ultra-miniature film. Then she takes the train to Chicago, only when she gets to the Michigan Avenue train station Stalk has someone follow her in another cab. Ann’s cab crashes and she wakes up in a Chicago hospital with amnesia – or at least movie amnesia – with no memory of her previous life. A young man named Steve Fuller (Michael O’Shea), who’s able to talk his way into her room with none of the folderol about “patient confidentiality” that would obtain today, poses as her fiancé (or maybe he really is her fiancé; Rubin and Lantz weren’t exactly the most detail-minded movie writers of all time) and asks her doctor, Chalmers (John Hamilton), for permission to take her back to Los Angeles, where the United Defenders are headquartered, to see if being in familiar surroundings will jog her memory. Instead she takes back her job as secretary for United Defenders but has totally forgotten that she took the job originally as an undercover reporter out to expose them. Instead she becomes a true believer in the organization and its ideology, which is the usual faux-populist B.S. of the independent Right, attacking corporate capitalists and organized labor with equal fervor and preaching the necessity of violence (hence the title) as a tactic for social change.

Meanwhile, Joe Donahue’s widow Sally (Cay Forester) shows up in L.A. looking for her husband, whom she does not know for sure is dead but she suspects something since her letters to him have gone unanswered. Ann lets Sally move in with her since she has no other place to stay in L.A., while Steve – who likewise is rooming with Stalk in the same apartment building, ostensibly because Stalk is doing a favor but really because Stalk wants to keep an eye on Steve – stumbles on one of Sally’s letters to Joe under a blotter on Stalk’s desk. Eventually the principals get into a fight in Ann’s apartment, she gets knocked down and hits her head on the fireplace, and this being movie amnesia instead of the real deal, the blow restores her memory completely. Ultimately Stalk and Joker tie up Ann and Steve – in the meantime Ann’s View article exposing the group as a fraud has been published – and the climax occurs at a picket of a new housing development organized by United Defenders, which was scheduled to start at 9 p.m. but was moved up two hours by Stalk. Ultimately Ann shoots True Dawson to save the life of Steve, who announces that he’s a government agent, and Stalk is also mortally wounded, though even as he’s dying he still refuses to reveal the identity of “Mr. X.” At the end “Mr. X” escapes by plane at LAX but Steve relays a clue as to his identity – an ill-fitting signet ring he wears – though he insists that someone else follow through on it because he and Ann are about to take off on their honeymoon. Violence is actually a better movie than its reputation; Eddie Muller said it was a comedown from Bernhard’s previous film noir, Decoy (another Monogram weirdie from 1946 which featured Bernhard’s then-wife, British actress Jean Gillie, as a femme fatale who has an execution victim literally brought back to life so she could find out where he’d stashed his loot; until Muller showed that one I’d always assumed Don Siegel’s original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956 was the first science-fiction film noir, but Decoy got there a decade earlier!) but I liked it better.

Certainly Violence would have been a stronger movie if Jean Gillie had been in it; I suspect Bernhard developed it for her, but they’d got divorced before the film was ready and her presumed replacement, Nancy Coleman, doesn’t have her authority. Michael O’Shea was yet another James Cagney wanna-be; he first made his mark as the male lead in Lady of Burlesque (1943), a movie about strippers directed by William Wellman and starring Barbara Stanwyck, and his best film was probably his biopic of Jack London (also from 1943). He came from a family of police officers and married actress Virginia Mayo in 1947. They stayed together until his death in 1973, and according to his imdb.com biography he “became a plainclothes operative for the CIA after retiring from show business in the 1960’s” (so he made it into law enforcement after all!). Aside from Sheldon Leonard and Peter Whitney (making a good impression as the dim-witted thug before the character became stereotyped in later noirs), the cast is nothing to write home about, though it’s nice to see Emory Parnell, who mostly played comic-relief roles for Preston Sturges, delivering an authoritative performance as the rabble-rousing faux idealist who’s really a grifter at heart. In Muller’s intro he touched on this film’s modern relevance – certainly True Dawson comes off as a beta version of Donald Trump – and one irony is that this film was photographed (brilliantly) by Henry Sharp, who 14 years earlier had shot the Marx Brothers’ satire Duck Soup, still one of the best anti-fascist films ever made in the U.S.

Though Violence isn’t the sort of “sleeper” Edgar G. Ulmer was making at PRC around this time – it’s hardly at the level of Bluebeard or Detour – it is a film of real promise even though one has the impression that it’s a good movie that could have been even better. It’s also a part of Hollywood’s last gasp of anti-fascism before the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood signaled to the U.S. film industry that the line had changed and they were now supposed to do attacks on Left-wing rather than Right-wing demagogues (though a few more movies about attempts by Right-wing organizations to take over the U.S., notably The Argyle Secrets from 1948 and the New York-filmed Jigsaw from 1949, directed and co-written by Fletcher Markle and starring Franchot Tone, did trickle out). As I’ve written before, Hollywood pretty much knew only one way to depict evil: on screen the gangsters in the 1930’s, the fascists in the 1940’s and the Communists in the 1950’s looked, sounded and behaved pretty much the same.