Tight Spot (Columbia, 1955)

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

The next movie on TCM’s Saturday schedule was Tight Spot, a 1955 late entry in the film noir cycle from Columbia with Edward G. Robinson as a federal prosecutor, Lloyd Hallett, determined to convict mob leader Benjamin Costain (Lorne Greene, of all people, leading a quite different sort of “family” than he did in his best-known role as patriarch Ben Cartwright on the TV series Bonanza) even though at the moment the only thing he has to nail him on is being an undesirable alien subject to deportation. I’d already watched this film with Charles in 2010 and commented on it on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/04/tight-spot-columbia-1955.html, and I feel pretty much the same about it now as I did then except I found myself liking the film’s unlikely star, Ginger Rogers, a lot better this time around. Rogers plays Sherry Conley, a woman who drifted into modeling as a teenager and ended up dating various criminals, including Costain associate Pete Tonelli (Alfred Linder), who took her on a yachting trip to South America with Costain on which Costain did something definitely contrary to U.S. law.

Just what Sherry did remains obscure (she explains she let her boyfriend stay with her when the police were looking for him for robbing a bank, but it’s uncear whether she was more involved in his crime than that) – the script is by William Bowers based on a play called Dead Pigeon by Leonard Kantor (and so much of the film takes place in tightly confined spaces its origins as a stage play are all too obvious) – but it’s given her a stint in a women’s prison that still has 11 months to go when the movie opens. Hallett suddenly needs a new witness against Costain because Tonelli, who was supposed to turn state’s evidence, has just been rubbed out by Costain’s gang and the case against Costain will be dismissed the next morning unless Hallett can find someone to put on the stand in his place. He has Sherry brought to a hotel suite near the courthouse with prison matron Mrs. Willoughby (Katherine Anderson) and basically holds her hostage overnight, using a combination of appeals to her social conscience (of which she has none), bribery (mostly with four-star haute cuisine meals delivered to her) and threats to get her to testify at the trial next morning. It’s a battle of wills further complicated when Costain’s gang gets word that Hallett is holding a secret witness and finds out where she is from a cop, Vince Striker (Brian Keith), whom at first we assume is an incorruptible rock of integrity but eventually we find that he’s been on Costain’s payroll for 10 years.

He’s instructed to leave the bathroom window of Sherry’s hotel suite open so Costain’s hit people can get in. At one point Hallett traces Sherry’s sister, Clara Moran (Eve McVeagh), and brings her to the hotel room hoping she can talk Sherry into confessing, but Clara makes it clear she doesn’t want Sherry to talk because Clara’s husband Roy owns a bar and would thus be an easy target for retaliation by Costain’s gang. When I first saw this movie I thought it would probably have been better if it had been made 20 years earlier and had used Rogers and Robinson when they were still contract players at Warner Bros. – Rogers had already played her share of hard-boiled, bitter dames and it’s easy to imagine her making that her “type” if her career hadn’t taken the spectacular detour it did, ending up at RKO and becoming Fred Astaire’s dancing partner. The main difference in my reaction to this film is I had a lot more respect for Rogers’ performance than I’d had 10 years ago: she made this the year after she’d played a murderess in the quite intriguing 1954 film Black Widow (essentially a murder mystery grafted onto the plot of All About Eve – if Margo Channing had killed that ungrateful little bitch Eve Harrington, the resuit would have been the 1954 Black Widow), and it’s obvious she was reading the calendar and realizing that as she aged she couldn’t keep playing ingenues and would have to look for more challenging character roles.

This made me shocked when TCM “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller used his post-film comment to blast Rogers and also blast Columbia for casting her, suggesting that Judy Holliday, Jean Hagen or Gloria Grahame would have been better choices – though he conceded Grahame had already played a similar role in the 1953 film The Big Heat, directed by Fritz Lang and also about a hard-bitten woman who has the evidence authorities needed to bring down a major criminal enterprise. As it stands, Tight Spot is a tough movie, decently acted by the two leads and well directed by Phil Karlson, even though he seems a good deal more turned on when he can get the story out of the confines of the small rooms in which the play took place – and even though I can readily imagine my own favorite, Barbara Stanwyck (whose incredible versatility, matched by no one in her generation and only one actress, Meryl Streep, since has made her my all-time favorite female star), in the role (which she too had played equivalents of 20 years earlier in films like Ladies They Talk About), I think Ginger Rogers is just fine in the role, thank you! In fact, if anything I think Ginger turned in a better performance than Robinson, who seemed to be sleepwalking through his role; he too had played his character before (notably in the 1938 Columbia crime thriller I Am the Law, in which he played a law-school teacher turned special prosecutor to bus a particularly predatory “protection” racket) and he seemed to be pulling all the stops by rote rather than making this Edward-G.-Robinson-character-on-the-right-side-of-the-law any different from his previous ones.