Split Second (Edmund Grainger Productions, RKO, 1953)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 21) I watched a quite compelling film as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies: Split Second (1953), the directorial debut of actor Dick Powell. It was based on a story by later blockbuster pop writer Irving Wallace, who co-wrote the original story with Chester Erskine (he of some wildly melodramatic films in the 1930’s, like the 1934 film Midnight with Sidney Fox as the nice girl who falls for the charms of gangster Humphrey Bogart) and co-wrote the screenplay with William Bowers, a noir writer who had a flair for snappy wisecracks. Split Second is essentially a reworking of The Petrified Forest with a contemporary “twist”: it’s set in the Nevada desert, in an old long-abandoned mining town on the eve of a nuclear bomb test. As the film begins, reporter Larry Fleming (Keith Andes, whose failure to achieve major stardom seems inexplicable given that he was drop-dead gorgeous, he was also a fine actor, and he had the sort of debut actors dream of: as Marilyn Monroe’s leading man in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night with Robert Ryan, Barbara Stanwyck and Paul Douglas) is suddenly reassigned away from covering the A-bomb test and sent to Carson City to write about the escape of convict Sam Hurley (Stephen McNally, top-billed). Along the way he picks up burnt-out showgirl Dorothy “Dottie” Vail (Jan Sterling, who’s just about as good here as she was in her underrated debut as the hard-bitten wife in Billy Wilder’s sardonic masterpiece Ace in the Hole) and offers her a ride to Carson City, which will get her closer to Reno and the nightclub job she’s been offered there.

Unfortunately, along the way his car is hijacked by Sam Hurley and his gang, mortally wounded Bart Moore (Paul Kelly, a real-life ex-con who’d served two years in San Quentin for manslaughter after a fight with his girlfriend’s husband in which Kelly accidentally killed him, then years later he married the woman) and the mute “Dummy” (Frank DeKova), who does nothing but read comic books and hold a shotgun on the others. They hole up in a deserted mining town that, unbeknownst to them – at least until they hear about it on their portable radio – is near Ground Zero for the atomic bomb test. Sam is anxious to get to the place where he and his fellow gangsters stashed the loot from an armored car robbery they pulled that landed them in prison in the first place, and to do that they rather stupidly steal a car being driven by Kay Garven (Alexis Smith), wife of Dr. Neal Garven (Richard Egan), who was on her way to Nevada to divorce him. She was with her “friend,” insurance agent Arthur Ashton (Robert Paige). The reason I described this as “rather stupid” is that the crooks steal her car at a gas station they’ve taken over but forget to put any gas in it, so naturally it runs out of gas midway through the desert and that’s why they have to car-jack Larry Fleming instead. Alas, Larry’s car is also rendered inoperable when its radiator springs a leak. Noting from a letter he finds in her car that Kay’s husband is a doctor, Sam calls him in Pasadena and demands that he come to treat Bart or else “you’ll be a widower.”

Director Powell and writers Wallace, Erskine and Bowers do a great job of ratcheting up the tension during the evening when all the principals are holed up together, including an old prospector named Asa Tremaine (Arthur Hunnicutt) who stumbles into the action. The writers created a marvelously morally ambiguous character in Kay (evoking a terrific performance from Alexis Smith), who after her boyfriend is shot and killed by Sam literally throws herself at Sam in hopes he’ll take her with him, then appears to be ready to reconcile with her husband (who’s shown up to perform the delicate operation of removing the bullet from Bart’s chest), then once again offers herself to Sam (who in the meantime has also forced himself on Dottie, explaining that one thing he hasn’t had access to in prison is women). He rejects her as a lover but agrees to take her with him, only the military has decided to shoot the A-bomb off early at 5 a.m. instead of 6. The gangsters and their innocent (or in Kay’s case not-so-innocent) hostages have no idea about this until the warning siren sounds indicating that the test will take place in five minutes. Eventually [spoiler alert!] the car carrying Sam, Bart and Kay gets stuck in a rut in the sand and ultimately blows up from the A-bomb, while Larry, Dottie, Dr. Garven and Asa escape by hiding out in an old mineshaft nearby that Asa remembered from his days as a prospector.

Split Second was originally intended for a star cast featuring Victor Mature and Jane Russell (presumably Mature would have been Sam and Russell would have played Kay), but at the last minute RKO’s mercurial boss, Howard Hughes (yes, that Howard Hughes), shifted them to a film called The Las Vegas Story and Eddie Muller said that actually helped Split Second because with Mature and Russell in the leads, everyone would have expected their characters to live at the end. With a lesser-known but still quite talented cast, we’re in genuine suspense as to how it will turn out. Dick Powell showed major promise as a director here but only got to make one other major film, The Conqueror (1955), Howard Hughes’s personal production featuring John Wayne as Genghis Khan. While Split Second was filmed entirely in California, with the Mojave Desert standing in for the one in Nevada, The Conqueror was shot in Utah near the real Nevada A-bomb test sites – and reportedly 90 members of the 200-person cast and crew died of cancers likely caused by exposure to radioactive fallout left over from the bombs. That included director Powell and all four of the leading actors (John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz and Agnes Moorehead). In Muller’s comments on the film he mentioned that the casinos in Reno and Las Vegas actually advertised themselves as safe places from which tourists could witness the A-bomb detonations. The ironies get even thicker when in 1970 Howard Hughes offered Richard Nixon a major contribution to his campaign if he’d end the nuclear tests in Nevada (by this time above-ground tests had been stopped in 1963 but underground tests still went on), which he was worried were contaminating the land around Hughes’s casinos. One of Hughes’s biographers called this the only time anyone ever tried to bribe a government to do something good!