Dark Mountain (Pine-Thomas Productions, Paramount, 1944)

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

Last night (Wednesday, September 4) I looked on YouTube for a movie that would be an hour or less in length so my husband Charles and I could watch it while waiting for Stephen Colbert’s show to be on. We found it in Dark Mountain, a 1944 “B” from William Pine and William Thomas, two independent producers to whom Paramount subcontracted their “B” output in the 1940’s. It was directed by William Berke (who began his career making truly independent films, got picked up by Paramount and RKO for “B” work, did series television in the 1950’s and then returned to the indies, making the first two films based on Ed McBain’s 97th Precinct novels, Cop Hater and The Mugger, before dying relatively young at 54) and was written by Maxwell Shane based on an “original” (quotes definitely merited!) story by Paul Franklin and Charles Royal. It co-stars Robert Lowery (four years before he became the screen’s second Batman in the 1948 Columbia serial Batman and Robin) as Don Bradley, a U.S. Forest Ranger who just has got a promotion and a furlough, on which he intends to marry his long-time love interest Kay (Ellen Drew). The movie begins with a spectacular scene of a forest fire – undoubtedly stock footage from one or more Paramount newsreels, but still genuinely exciting – in which he defies his superior’s direct orders and sets out for a barn in the middle of the fire zone to rescue “Joe” and “Susie,” who turn out to be not people, but horses. He later explains that he’s known them all his life, along with Kay, with whom he’s grown up over the years and suddenly decided once puberty kicked in that he wanted her as a lover and a wife. Alas, though she considers him a good friend, she doesn’t feel “that way” about him. Instead she’s accepted the marriage proposal of Steve Downey (Regis Toomey), and when Don shows up at Kay’s apartment intending to pop the question, he runs into Steve and has the predictably embarrassed reaction that the question had already got popped.

Steve and Kay plan an elaborate dinner “out” so Steve can meet Kay’s relatives, and Steve invites Don to come along as the proverbial good sport – only Don turns down the invitation but shows up at the restaurant anyway and looks on from behind. While they’re at the restaurant Steve boasts to Kay’s family that he can get them a supply of radio tubes they can then sell to customers in need of them – which immediately made my husband Charles suspect that Steve was going to turn out to be a black marketeer. In fact Steve is considerably worse than that; he’s an out-and-out gangster who stages heists and steals furs, bolts of cloth and other items which he then resells from a deceptively legitimate-looking store. When an undercover cop shows up at Steve’s warehouse posing as a textile buyer, as soon as the cop identifies himself, shows his badge and tries to arrest Steve, two of his henchmen pitch a large trunk on top of him, crushing him to death. Later on Steve coldly shoots another member of his gang whom he suspects is going to rat him out to the police. Steve’s carefully constructed identity first started unraveling at the restaurant, where gang member Whitey (Elisha Cook, Jr. at his oiliest, playing much the same sort of role he did in his two most memorable movies, The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep) shows up and reports to him that one of the shipments they hijacked got hijacked in turn by a rival gang. Don notices big-time that Steve is a crook – and so does Kay, who determines to leave him. Only Steve insists that he’s not going to let her go, and instead he’s going to flee the state (the writers aren’t all that clear as to where this story takes place, though they throw out a few contradictory hints, including referencing Louisiana and Arkansas as places Steve might flee to even though the terrain looks like the West or northern Midwest rather than the South) and then send for her to join him when the heat dies down.

Don offers to hide Kay out in a deserted mountain cabin whose owners aren’t going to return for months, but the very night he installs her in the cabin and promises to be back in the morning with food, Steve shows up. He explains that he didn’t flee the state after all, but he’s going to stay there and carefully conceal himself from Don in hopes of waiting Don and the cops out and then taking Kay with him, by force if necessary. Don spends most of his time in an observation tower with his comic-relief sidekick Willie Dinsmire (Eddie Quillan), who’s knitting a sweater for his wife, who’s still in the Army on a tank crew in North Africa (at least that’s what I think the writing committee said). Only Don figures out what’s going on when he finds cork-tipped cigarette butts outside the cabin – Kay smokes, of course (almost no adult in a 1944 movie doesn’t smoke!), but not ones with cork tips – and notices that Kay’s going through the food he brings her so fast it seems like she has two people there. Where I assumed this was going was that there’d be another forest fire that would take out the inconvenient Steve and leave our two original lovebirds to get back together, especially since Don narrates a long Native legend about lightning in the area symbolizing someone’s imminent death. Instead, the deus ex machina that brings Don and Kay back together is three cases of dynamite (labeled “Hercules” brand, yet another contradictory clue as to this film’s geography, since as Charles pointed out that was the name of a California-based explosives company and also the name of the company town they set up for their workers). They’re in the back of Don’s Forest Service station wagon and it’s not clear what he’s using them for – though the obvious guess was to create firebreaks in case another wildfire starts and give the Forest Service people a chance to contain the blaze.

Steve kidnaps Kay, steals the Forest Service wagon containing the dynamite, and forces her to come with him; Don and Willie give chase, and Willie’s dog leaps into the back of Steve’s van and attacks him when he’s trying to drive. Ultimately the dog leaps out of the car, Kay is thrown from it, and just then Steve loses control and crashes into a tree, exploding the dynamite. Don and Kay get back together again, and of course there’s no longer any impediment to them marrying now that Kay’s a widow. Dark Mountain was listed on YouTube as a film noir, which it isn’t either thematically or visually: the good guys are 100 percent good, the bad guys 100 percent bad, there’s no femme fatale to lure the innocent hero into destruction or disgrace, and most of it takes place either outdoors or in non-shadowy, well-lit interiors. It’s also quite entertaining even though it’s one of those movies where you pretty much know everything that’s going to happen at least a reel or two before it does, and for a 1944 “B” it’s reasonably well acted. Robert Lowery is properly self-righteous as the hero, and there were times I was tempted to joke, “If I were Batman I could deal with this!” But his co-stars are quite good, actually: Ellen Drew is excellent at registering shock at discovering her husband’s real nature, and Regis Toomey’s transformation from nice guy to hardened criminal is effective even though, given a running time of less than an hour, it happens too quickly to be believable. Though it suffers from a lack of ambiguity, and a 90-minute running time could have given Berke and the writers more of a chance to develop the characters’ conflicts, both external and internal, more than they did, Dark Mountain still works surprisingly well on its own terms – and you’ll never believe what happens to that sweater Willie the comic-relief sidekick has spent the entire movie knitting for his wife, whom we never see!