High Wall (MGM, 1947)

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

Afterwards my husband Charles and I watched Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation of a quite good if flawed film noir from MGM in 1947, High Wall. It was based on a story and play by Alan R. Clark and Bradbury Foote, though the actual screenplay was by Sydney Boehm and Lester Cole. The director was Curtis Bernhardt, on loan from Warner Bros., where he’d arrived in 1940 as a double refugee from Germany and France. He’d fled Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933, only to discover to his horror that the French company which had hired him to direct a film called The Tunnel (1933) had cut a co-production deal with a German studio to shoot the film in Munich. According to Eddie Muller, just before the Nazis took power they had organized a film screening where Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment, showed five films as examples of what they wanted from German directors when the Nazis took over. The films were Edmund Goulding’s Love (1927) – the silent version of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert – Fritz Lang’s two-film series Die Nibelungen (1923/24); Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925); and Bernhardt’s own films The Last Company and The Rebel. Goebbels said these were all films that couldn’t have possibly been made by Jews – which astonished Bernhardt because he, Lang and Eisenstein were all Jewish. In Weimar Germany, Bernhardt had directed Marlene Dietrich in her last silent film, The Woman One Desires (1929) – despite Dietrich’s later claim that she’d never made a film at all until The Blue Angel (1930). Bernhardt told interviewers Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg that Dietrich had once run into him at a Hollywood party and yelled at him the German title of their film, adding the word “Nicht” so it became The Woman One Does Not Desire. He also said that he’d been shooting The Last Command at the same time Josef von Sternberg was directing The Blue Angel; they were the first two sound films made in Germany and Bernhardt watched Sternberg carefully because he’d already made a talkie in Hollywood, Thunderbolt (1929), and Bernhardt hadn’t.

Bernhardt also recalled that when he reported for work at Warner Bros. it was a Friday, he was given a script and told, “You start Monday.” Bernhardt turned it down and held out for enough time to prepare a film properly before he would have to shoot it. His first American film was a romantic comedy called My Love Came Back, and within a few years he was directing Warners’ top stars, including Bette Davis in A Stolen Life, Joan Crawford in the 1947 Possessed, Humphrey Bogart in Conflict (one of his worst post-stardom movies, actually, in which he murders his wife because he has a crush on his sister-in-law), and Olivia de Havilland and Ida Lupino in Devotion, a biopic of the Brontë sisters. (I remember watching that one with my husband Charles, who asked why anyone in Hollywood thought a biopic of the Brontës would be box office. I said it was probably because Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre had both been filmed – in 1939 and 1943, respectively – and had been major hits.) Though film noir as a concept was anathema to MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, he could see how well such movies were doing for other studios and he decided to green-light this one. Also, Robert Taylor, one of his biggest stars, was asking for more challenging roles than the romantic pretty-boys he’d been playing. Like Errol Flynn (and, more recently, Tom Selleck), Taylor actually improved as an actor once he got older and started to lose his looks; in Vincente Minnelli’s Undercurrent (1946) he’d actually out-acted the far more highly regarded Katharine Hepburn and Robert Mitchum. High Wall is also an early entry in an intriguing mini-cycle of films set in and around mental institutions, which had begun with Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), continued with Val Lewton’s Bedlam (1946), and would reach its apex with Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948).

High Wall’s plot is an intriguing mixture of the atmospheric and the nearly silly; it begins with a nightclub scene in which Willard Whitcombe (Herbert Marshall), an executive with a religious-book publisher, is hanging out alone while a quite good little jazz band plays. Then we get a scene in which Steve Kenet (Robert Taylor, top-billed) deliberately crashes his car. The corpse of his wife Helen (Dorothy Patrick) is in the front seat next to him, and Steve is convinced he killed her and then tried to take his own life. Steve is arrested but the police decide there’s not enough certainty about his level of sanity to hold him over for trial, so a court orders him sent to a psychiatric hospital. He has no memory of the night his wife died because of two injuries to his brain, one during World War II and another when he hired out as a mercenary pilot in Burma for two years, intending to build up a nest egg for himself, Helen and their son Richard (Bobby Hyatt). At the hospital he’s treated by Dr. Ann Lorrison (Audrey Totter, for once not playing a femme fatale) along with Drs. George Poward (Warner Anderson), Philip Dunlap (Moroni Olsen) and Stanley Griffin (Morris Ankrum). They diagnose him with a brain tumor and try to convince him to have it operated on, but Steve refuses because he figures if he can stay crazy, the law will have to keep him confined in the institution and therefore he can’t be executed for Helen’s murder. Ann takes a particular interest in Steve’s case – obviously because she’s attracted to him as a man – and behind Steve’s back she obtains a court order giving herself and her aunt custody of Steve’s son Richard. But she doesn’t tell Steve this, so Steve will get the impression that his son is in a county orphanage, and the threat of losing Richard finally convinces Steve to go through with the operation and also to let Ann put him through “narcosynthesis.” That’s a fancy name for an injection of sodium pentothal in hopes that that will awaken his memories of what really happened the night his wife died.

Meanwhile we find out what happened when Slocum (H. B. “Jesus Christ” Warner), the elevator operator at 106 Maple Street (the building where Whitcombe lives), first attempts to blackmail Whitcombe by threatening to reveal that Whitcombe was the one who murdered Helen, who was working for him as a secretary and with whom he was having an extra-relational affair. When Whitcombe turns him down, Slocum visits Steve in the asylum and offers to sell him the information. Steve points out that as a mental patient he doesn’t have control of his own money, but promises to pay Slocum as soon as he can. Slocum leaves without giving Steve the information, and he then returns to Whitcombe, only Whitcombe kills Slocum by tripping him and causing him to fall down an elevator shaft. Meanwhile, Steve undergoes the “narcosynthesis” treatment under Dr. Lorrison, and he has an hallucination of a carousel. Steve escapes from the asylum, hides out in Ann’s car, and gets her to take him to 106 Maple, where he breaks in via the fire escape and sneaks into Whitcombe’s room. He recalls the source of the “carousel” hallucination was an overturned cigarette case that contained a music box, and with his new-found memory he carefully rearranges everything in the apartment to what it looked like the night his wife died. Whitcombe comes home, freaks out and confronts Steve at the institution, only he goads Steve into attacking him and Steve is threatened with permanent confinement. Steve escapes again and this time the police are alerted that a wanted homicidal maniac is on the loose. He makes it back to 106 Maple despite a driving rainstorm and a car that runs out of gas – he pulls up to an out-of-the-way gas station and has to lock up the owner when the owner recognizes the license plate on the car and threatens to call the police – and eventually he and Ann meet and forcibly inject Whitcombe with pentothal.

Under the drug’s influence, Whitcombe tells all, and we get a flashback in which we see how the murder went down: Helen insisted that Whitcombe marry her after she divorces Steve, Whitcombe worries about the scandal that he’d been having an affair with his married secretary, they get into an argument and he kills her, then hits on the idea of framing Steve. The police and the two guys from the district attorney’s office, who had previously been pressuring the doctors at the asylum to declare Steve sane so they could put him on trial and execute him, hear Whitcombe’s confession and, while acknowledging that they can’t use it in court because it was given under drugs, declare they should be able to find other evidence against Whitcombe. Free at last, Steve and Ann kiss for the first time at the end of the movie. High Wall is an intriguing film that offers Taylor and Totter quite a few good acting opportunities – Taylor is at his best in his silent close-ups as he reacts to the events around him – and according to Eddie Muller, Taylor was so impressed with the script he asked MGM to have Lester Cole write all his subsequent scripts. Then, alas, the Hollywood blacklist intervened, with Taylor and Cole on opposite sides. Taylor and his wife, Barbara Stanwyck, were members of the pro-blacklist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, and Cole was a Communist. When Taylor was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and asked to name Communists in the movie industry, he gave them Cole – and Cole, one of the original “Hollywood Ten,” never again got a screen credit under his own name. (He wrote the original story for the 1950 Humphrey Bogart film Chain Lightning as “J. Redmond Prior,” a 1961 film called Operation Eichmann as “Lewis Copley,” and the script for Born Free as “Gerald L. C. Copley.”) I’d written a previous moviemagg blog post on High Wall, which I didn’t re-read before writing the above, at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/04/high-wall-mgm-1947.html, in which I compared it to The Lost Weekend and The Blue Dahlia. This time it seemed more like Hitchcock’s Spellbound than anything else, particularly the blending between the woman’s traditional(ist) role as the man’s nurturer and her professional role as a psychiatrist.