Nobody Lives Forever (Warner Bros., 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I watched the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) “Noir Alley” presentation at 9:30 p.m. Saturday, November 2, which I had expected to be an odd-looking 1947 fugitive drama called Deep Valley, directed by Jean Negulesco at Warner Bros. in 1947 and starring Dane Clark as a fugitive from justice and Ida Lupino as the woman he falls for on the way. Instead they showed something considerably more interesting: Nobody Lives Forever, a 1946 noir melodrama set in Los Angeles and starring John Garfield and Geraldine Fitzgerald, also directed by Negulesco and based on a story by W. R. Burnett. W. R. Burnett became famous for his 1929 novel Little Caesar, famously filmed by Warner Bros. as Little Caesar in 1930 (a movie that made a star of Edward G. Robinson, who played the title character). Burnett was frequently lumped in as one of the creators of noir fiction along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, but there was a difference. As his Wikipedia page explains, “Burnett was similar to Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, but contrasting the corruption and corrosion of the city with the better life his characters yearned for. He portrayed characters who, for one reason or another, fell into a life of crime and were unable to climb out. They typically get one last shot at salvation but the oppressive system closes in and denies redemption.” John Huston once said that Burnett had revolutionized the depiction of crime on screen three times, each at a decade-long interval, with Little Caesar in 1930; High Sierra in 1940; and The Asphalt Jungle in 1950 – and Huston was involved in two of those movies, as screenwriter for High Sierra and director of The Asphalt Jungle.

Burnett was as much of a hustler off the page as his characters were on it; for Nobody Lives Forever he managed to get paid no fewer than five times for the same story. First Burnett cut a deal with Warner Bros. in 1943 for an original screen story to star Humphrey Bogart. Only Burnett and/or his agent got a clause into his contract that if the studio didn’t put the film into production by a certain date, the rights to the story would revert to him. Warners missed the deadline, so Burnett wrote the story as a serial and placed it with Collier’s Magazine (sale two!), then sold the serial text as a novel to Alfred A. Knopf’s publishing house (sale three!), then sold it back to Warner Bros. as a film story property (sale four!), and got himself hired to write the actual screenplay as well (sale five!). By the time Nobody Lives Forever was ready for filming, Bogart was unavailable – he and his new (fourth) wife, Lauren Bacall, were getting ready to make The Big Sleep – so Jack Warner cast John Garfield as the story’s male lead, Nick Blake, a con artist and petty criminal who’d fought in World War II, been wounded in battle and received a medical discharge. Once he gets out, he attempts to re-establish himself in New York City, where he grew up, but he finds that his ex-girlfriend, Toni Blackburn (Faye Emerson, who at the time was literally the President’s daughter-in-law; she had married one of Franklin Roosevelt’s sons), has lost all the money he gave her to hold for him and is now involved with nightclub owner Chet King (Robert Shayne). Blake manages to intimidate King into making good his losses on Toni’s failed nightclub venture, and Blake and his partner-in-crime Al Doyle (George Tobias) head out for L.A. with the bankroll, intending to use it to look for a high-class setup they could use to pull a con.

The first person they run into is an old friend, Pop Gruber (Walter Brennan in what is definitely a “with” performance; Brennan was famous for asking his directors, “Do you want it with or without?,” and when they inevitably asked, “With or without what?,” Brennan said, “Teeth” – in this part he’s definitely wearing his dentures because you can see them in his mouth). Gruber is running a telescope concession on a carnival boardwalk and picking the pockets of the people who pay him a dime to see the stars. Gruber also has a line on a gang of crooks who are planning to swindle a young widow, Gladys Halvorsen (Geraldine Fitzgerald), of some of the money she inherited from her late husband. The gang is headed by Doc Ganson (George Coulouris) and its other members include such similarly colorfully named henchmen as Shake Thomas (James Flavin) and Windy Mather (Ralph Peters). Nick joins this motley crew with the assignment to meet-cute and seduce the young widow, who’s traveling with her business manager, Charles Manning (Richard Gaines), who’s assigned himself precisely to protect her and her fortune from gold-digging men like Nick. Only Nick and Gladys have their meet-cute on the beach at Malibu and before long they’re in love for real, and Nick has second thoughts about swindling her. He hatches a plan to pay off the other crooks with $10,000 each from his remaining bankroll and return to New York broke, but the crooks have other plans; they demand he go through with the swindle. The climax takes place at an offshore oil drilling rig (remember that during the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s L.A. was a major center for oil production in the U.S.; it was how Raymond Chandler made his living until the Depression collapsed his oil business and he decided to keep himself going by teaching himself to write the sorts of hard-boiled detective stories he’d been reading for fun in the pulps), in which Pop Gruber is fatally wounded but manages to shoot down Ganson before he expires. “Nobody lives forever,” Blake tells him as he goes, and with Ganson dead and Shake and Windy on their way to prison for murder and fraud, Blake and Gladys are left alone to live happily ever after on her fortune.

Nobody Lives Forever is actually a pretty good movie, but it’s not what it could have been. John Garfield and Walter Brennan are top-notch – and I think Garfield is better in the role than Bogart would have been; Bogart could credibly play a certain kind of romantic figure but not a con artist who could sweep a woman off her feet. But the rest of the casting is rather “off.” Geraldine Fitzgerald was a first-rate character actress but one who rarely got romantic leads, and there’s more to Gladys’s character than she could have plumbed and I kept wishing Warners had given the role to Ida Lupino, who’d played a similar Burnett heroine so well in High Sierra. (Oddly, Eddie Muller said Geraldine Fitzgerald was John Huston’s first choice for Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, which I’d never heard before; the only actress besides Mary Astor who was considered for it was Lupino, and in a major blow to Bogart’s feelings she turned it down because she didn’t want to work with him again.) George Coulouris was so good as the personification of capitalist evil in Citizen Kane it’s hard to take him seriously as the low-level sort of villain he’s playing here. And Faye Emerson is good as the sort of femme fatale-lite she’s playing but it’s not her fault that Doris Dowling did this character so much better in The Blue Dahlia – and when she turns up in L.A. towards the end of the movie without much in the way of explanation, both Charles and I wondered, “What the hell is she doing here?” Jean Negulesco’s direction is richly atmospheric, especially in the final confrontation at the oil field, and the cinematography by Arthur Edeson is great (Edeson had also shot The Maltese Falcon, and at least one other member of the crew from that film turned up in this one, composer Adolph Deutsch), but like his cast he isn’t always fully alive to the story’s potential. Overall, Nobody Lives Forever is an O.K. movie but there’s virtually nothing in it that wasn’t done better by other filmmakers on other projects.