Five Steps to Danger (Grand Productions, United Artists, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

One thing about this morning’s time change is it got me early enough to watch the Sunday morning rerun of the blessed return of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program to Turner Classic Movies on Saturday nights. This week’s film was a 1956 cheapie called Five Steps to Danger – a silly title that seems to have been picked more to evoke comparisons with John Buchan’s novel The Thirty-Nine Steps and Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1935 film of it, from which this movie borrows one of the most famous gimmicks: the central leads, a man and a woman brought together by a crime ending up handcuffed to each other. The film was based on a 1950 novel by Donald Hamilton, a writer who specialized in Cold War-themed espionage thrillers (he created the character of Matt Helm, a CIA superspy later brought to the screen four times with Dean Martin playing him as a James Bond knockoff) and also Westerns (one of his novels became the basis for William Wyler’s big-budget Western The Big Country in 1958). The book was called The Steel Mirror, which would frankly have been a better title for the film, too), and the story begins with a scene in which a mysterious dark-haired woman, Ann Nicholson (Ruth Roman), is driving through the southeastern California desert on her way to a rendezvous in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She’s being followed by a man, John Emmett (Sterling Hayden), in a similar but older and dowdier car, and director Henry S. Kesler and cinematographer Kenneth Peach pull back to reveal that the car is being towed. As Muller noted in his introduction, Kesler not only borrowed this gag from the opening of Billy Wilder’s 1951 Southwest-set noir masterpiece Ace in the Hole, he even acknowledged the borrowing by having the establishment Emmett’s car is being towed to called “Wilder’s Garage.”

Emmett asks how long it would take before the owner of Wilder’s Garage can repair his car, and he’s told the engine block is cracked and it will take him a week to send to Los Angeles for a new one. Then he switches plans and offers to sell the garage owner his car so the garageman can scavenge it for parts, and after an odd negotiation in which the garage owner originally asks for $250, Emmett demands $400, and the owner comes up to $380 before threatening to blow up the deal over the remaining $20 (who do they think they are, Democratic Congressmembers?) and then kicking in the extra $20. Emmett asks where the nearest long-distance bus station is, but before he can do that Ann steps in and says she needs to get to Santa Fe so quickly she’s willing to offer him a lift in exchange for him driving the car at night so they can be on road continuously, one at the wheel and one laying back in the front passenger seat. Only the car is stopped by two police officers, and at first we and they both think the cops are only ticketing them for speeding (earlier it was established they were going 80 miles per hour). Instead the cops draw their guns and order them out of the car, and in order so they won’t escape one of the cops handcuffs them to each other. The cops tell them that Ann is wanted for murder in Los Angeles – we don’t yet know whom she’s supposed to have killed but it turns out later it’s a CIA agent named Robert Stanton. We also learn that Ann is a widow who stands to inherit a large estate from her late husband, and that she was originally born in Germany until she escaped from East Germany after World War II while her known family members all died in East German prison camps.

In a flashback sequence, she tells Emmett that she went back there because she received word that her brother was still alive, but he was killed trying to escape from prison in Stettin. A fellow escapee gave Ann what appears to be an ordinary steel compact mirror but which really contains a summary of the research on intercontinental ballistic missiles done by her childhood friend Dr. Friedrich Kissel, turned into teeny-tiny type and engraved on the mirror in a pattern that only makes it looked badly scratched. We’ve also learned that Ann is suspected of being insane and her doctor back in Los Angeles, Dr. Simmons (Werner Klemperer, conductor Otto Klemperer’s son and best known for playing the doofus Nazi commandant of Stalag 13 in the TV series Hogan’s Heroes), is trying to get her committed to a mental institution. Dr. Simmons sends his nurse, Helen Bethke (Jeanne Cooper, an electrifying blonde noir presence in her own right who one would think would have been headed for a major movie career, only it never happened and instead she played for years on the TV soap opera The Young and the Restless), to intercept Ann and get her back to Dr. Simmons, but Ann talks Emmett into helping her escape. The two stop at a rustic motel and pretend to be husband and wife to explain their physical closeness to a desk clerk and a handyman who buys them food and delivers a hacksaw so they can cut themselves apart, but before he uses it Emmett realizes he’s had the key to the handcuffs all along. Back in the desert when they were stopped by the cops, Emmett was able to knock both of them into a nearby ravine and, in order to keep them from continuing the pursuit – or at least to slow them down a little – he stole the keys from the cop car’s ignition and he finally realized the ring contained the keys to the handcuffs, too.

Ann is carrying a newspaper clipping saying that Dr. Kissel has just been appointed to the staff of the physics department at Fairmount University in New Mexico by a dean named Brant (Richard Gaines), but when they visit Brant he says he’s never heard of Kissel. They accidentally leave the clipping behind and Brant burns it, letting us know He’s Up to No Good. It turns out he and Dr. Simmons are both part of a Russian spy ring, which not only killed Ann’s brother and her friend in East Berlin, they also killed CIA agent Robert Stanton in L.A. and, we learn later, they tortured the real Dr. Kissel to find out the location of the missile information (a typical Hitchcockian MacGuffin). They killed Dr. Kissel while torturing him and then substituted a Soviet scientist of similar expertise to impersonate him at the top-secret New Mexico guided missile research facility and thereby gain access to America’s missile secrets. Only when Emmett and Ann arrive at the missile test site and are surprisingly breezed through security without any particular problem (set up, we learn later, by a CIA and an FBI agent who are working in tandem to bust the Russian spy ring), Ann is allowed to meet Dr. Kissel (Karl Lindt) – only when he doesn’t recognize Ann right away, she realizes he’s not the real Dr. Kissel. She palms him off with a lipstick and says the information is hidden inside it in microfilm, and when he leaves she spills the beans to the U.S. agents. The fake Dr. Kissel is arrested and Emmett and Ann, who went through a quickie marriage earlier, are free to live happily ever after (presumably off her late husband’s estate).

Five Steps to Danger is one of those 1950’s movies that’s thematically noir (or at least noir-ish) but eschews the chiaroscuro lighting and use of shadowy interiors for a more flatly lit style, Much of the film takes place outdoors, and since camera equipment was becoming more portable Kesler and Peach were able to shoot on real locations. This gave the film a more authentic look, as if the actors were being caught on the fly as they were actually chasing or being chased through the desert on those long roads, unencumbered by any features besides saguaro cacti and Joshua trees. But it also makes the film look rather featureless and deprives us of the visual thrill of classic noir. But what Kesler, who not only directed but wrote the script himself based on an adaptation by Hamilton and Turnley Walker, was able to do makes up for the film’s relative lack of visual imagination. Their most convincing achievement is to capture the public paranoia of the mid-1950’s, the sense that there was a Communist around every corner and they were all bound and determined to help their Soviet masters do America in by any sleazy bit of espionage, sabotage or outright murder they could. As a child in Germany, growing up first under the Nazi dictatorship and then under the East German one, Ann learned to be innately suspicious of authorities and unsure whether anyone she might report to was a good-hearted patriot or an evil Soviet spy – and the fact that her caution plays out as something that looks enough like paranoia that she’s considered a suitable candidate for a mental hospital just adds to this film’s quirky thrill. We literally never know until the very end who’s on which side and what their real agendas are – and that includes the hints Kesler drops throughout the film that Ann herself may be lying and entrapping Emmett into some plot or another.

Eddie Muller said in his introduction that Sterling Hayden and Ruth Roman were both “on their way down” when this film was made – they’d tumbled from potential stardom and were forced to do quirky projects like this one, Hayden because of his mercurial lifestyle (he was constantly blowing off his career to go to sea, usually on his own yachts) and Roman because she was a reliable actress rather than a great one. In her best-known film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), she has a marvelously written scene in which she confronts her boyfriend (Farley Granger) and wonders if he really committed a murder – and one aches for the way Hitchcock’s later star, Grace Kelly, would have played it (even though Kelly was a normally icy actress who showed sensuality and allure only in her three films under Hitchcock). Hayden is oddly cast here; he was normally an explosive and rather overwrought actor, but Kesler is trying to get him to play in the remote, taciturn manner of Robert Mitchum (and by an odd coincidence, Mitchum’s brother John is in Five Steps to Danger as one of the cops). Five Steps to Danger isn’t a great film, but it is a haunting one; it’s only Kesler’s third and final feature film (most of his directorial work was done for TV, including the intriguing series Science Fiction Theatre) but it shows real promise. He got his career break on Humphrey Bogart’s independent production Tokyo Joe from 1949, and he worked on what Eddie Muller said he thinks is Bogart’s best film, In a Lonely Place (1950) – a movie I liked considerably better before I read Dorothy B. Hughes’ source novel, in which the aspiring screenwriter played in the film by Bogart is really a serial killer (which he isn’t in the movie – just a man suspected of murder because of his hot temper: remake, anyone?), and judging from his work here he had a quirky sensibility well suited to Donald Hamilton’s tale of Cold War paranoia.