Nocturne (RKO, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 21) I watched two more entries in Turner Classic Movies’ “Star of the Month” tribute to actor George Raft. The rumor about Raft had been that he was a gangster himself until he had the good sense to get out of the illegal liquor business, and he found acting a safer and more lucrative occupation than bootlegging. (The Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. character in Little Caesar is reportedly based on Raft.) The two films were both made by RKO after World War II – Raft was working his way down the Hollywood food chain from Paramount to Warner Bros. and finally to RKO. They are Nocturne, directed by Edwin L. Marin from a script by old pulp hand Jonathan Latimer based on an original screen story by Frank Fenton and Rowland Brown, and Race Street, also directed by Marin and written by future producer Martin Rackin “suggested by” a story by Maurice Davis. Rowland Brown had one of the saddest careers in Hollywood; desperate to show off his unique “take” on gangster films and unconcerned with audience reactions with his elaborate but somewhat staid plots about people finding into and out of gang life, he took assignments at Fox to write and direct two quite good gangster movies with genuinely complex characters, Quick Millions and Blood Money. Then Brown ran afoul of MGM on a 1936 film called The Devil Is a Sissy, yet another tale of innocent young people drawn into a life of crime, only MGM fired him as director in mid-shoot (a real pity because Brown had actually got Mickey Rooney to underact for the first time in his career, while replacement director W. S. Van Dyke let Rooney chew the scenery as he did in all his other films). And in 1937 he sold a gangster story called Angels with Dirty Faces to the independent Grand National studio as a vehicle for James Cagney, who’d broken his Warner Bros. contract in court and signed with Grand National after no other major studio would risk Jack Warner’s wrath. Brown’s deal with Grand National called for him both to write and direct, but when Warners won Cagney back on appeal Grand National sold the story to Warners, who put their own writer (John Wexley) and director (Michael Curtiz) on it.

By 1946 the temperamental Brown was pretty much persona non grata in Hollywood, while Nocturne’s producer, Joan Harrison, was on her way up. She’d begun her career as Alfred Hitchcock’s secretary, but Hitchcock liked her ideas so much he gave her successive promotions until she was associate producer on most of his films, Then she struck out on her own and got a production deal from Universal, where she made Phantom Lady (1944) and Uncle Harry (1945) – only she was so upset by the “suits” at Universal second-guessing her on Uncle Harry she left for RKO and made Nocturne there. Screenwriter Jonathan Latimer wrote Nocturne from the Fenton-Brown story, and Edwin L. Marin (whose name was pronounced “MAAR-in” – I’d always assumed it was “Muh-RIN,” like the California county just north of San Francisco where I grew up) was hired to direct. (Marin’s best-known films are A Study in Scarlet, 1933; and A Christmas Carol, 1938, both starring Reginald Owen as classic characters from British literature: Sherlock Holmes and Scrooge, respectively.) Nocturne was one of the first films I showed my husband Charles from classic-era Hollywood when we started dating, and we were both taken by the initial plot gimmick – womanizing songwriter Keith Vincent (Edward Ashley) calls all his multitudinous girlfriends “Dolores” because he can’t trouble himself to remember their individual names. In fact, it became an in-joke between us for quite a while; we joked that if I saw any other men, I’d call them all “Charles” to avoid confusion. I remembered it as quite a bit better than it seems now – while the second George Raft item I watched last night, Race Street, I liked better than I had originally. The plot is that Keith Vincent is talking to his latest “Dolores” while he’s at his piano, writing a new song called “Nocturne” which begins as a declaration of undying love for his current conquest but ends as a kiss-off.

George Raft plays Lieutenant Joe Warne of the Los Angeles Police Department, who’s on the detail originally assigned to the case but gets taken off of it and suspended because he insists that Vincent was actually murdered even though the coroner’s verdict is suicide. Of course, this makes Warne even more determined than ever to find Vincent’s killer. The case draws him to Frances Ransome (Lynn Bari, in a more morally ambiguous role than her usual femmes fatales), an aspiring singer and bit actress who has a small role in a Sinbad the Sailor movie at RKO (we see the entrance to the real studio as Warne goes there to question her) and her sister Carol Page (Virginia Huston), a singer at the “Keyboard Club” where her accompanist was Ned “Fingers” Ford (a quite good performance by future director Joseph Pevney). Also in the cast list are Eric Torp (Bernard Hoffman), a large and rather dull man obviously modeled after Moose Malloy in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and the 1944 film of it, Murder, My Sweet. His job is to push Fingers’s piano around the Keyboard Club so he can be heard by whichever customers he’s playing for, but he also gets into several scrapes with Warne, including one in which he leaves a major gash, requiring stitches, over Warne’s right eye. The police are convinced Vincent killed himself because there are powder burns both on his forehead and on his gun hand, but Warne deduces how the real killer faked this: he loaded the revolver with a live first round and a blank second round, so the first one would kill him and then he could plant the gun in Vincent’s hand, fire the blank round leaving powder burns on Vincent’s face and hand, then carefully extract the spent blank shell so it would appear there had been just one bullet in the gun and Vincent had committed suicide with it.

Both Warne and we realize who the killer was when “Fingers” plays the complete song “Nocturne,” including the ending Vincent had played the night of his death but hadn’t had a chance to write down on the score. It turns out “Fingers” was Carol Page’s husband, Vincent seduced her from him, and he was willing to let her go if Vincent was going to marry her but decided to kill him when he realized Vincent regarded Carol as just another trophy on his wall. That last part is almost literally true: the walls of Vincent’s living room were studded with a long line of professionally shot photographs of Vincent’s various “Dolores”’es, and one of the clues that helped Warne solve the case was the photo of Carol was missing, obviously taken by Vincent’s killer. Later in the film Warne gets a call from Vincent’s photographer, who promises him some information, but when he gets there the photographer is dead, hanged in his own home. Nocturne is a strangely haunting film but not an especially good one, though cinematographer Harry J. Wild (who also shot the film noir masterpiece Murder, My Sweet) manages to get a convincing noir atmosphere even though all the dwellings and nightclubs are high-end instead of the gritty, grungy urban settings of most films noir. And like a lot of George Raft’s Warners vehicles in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, the action comes to a dead stop so Virginia Huston as Carol can sing three songs, “Nocturne” by Leigh Harline and Mort Greene, and “Why Pretend?” and “A Little Bit Is Better Than None” by Eleanor Rudolph. (Her voice double was Martha Mears, whom Charles and I had just heard dubbing for Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire. She managed to push up her pitch and lighten her voice enough to double convincingly for the higher-voiced Virginia Huston.)