The Brasher Doubloon (20th Century-Fox, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Danger in the House I ran my husband Charles a YouTube post of the 1947 film The Brasher Doubloon, 20th Century-Fox’s second go at Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window. Their first attempt was as the seventh and last entry in their series of films from 1940 to 1942 starring Lloyd Nolan as private detective Michael Shayne, Time to Kill. We had recently watched Time to Kill, also on YouTube (for some reason Fox left out the two best films in the Nolan Shayne series, Dressed to Kill and Time to Kill, out of their boxed set of four of the seven), and it made me want to re-watch The Brasher Doubloon again just to see how it compared. I remembered seeing The Brasher Doubloon for the first time at the old Cento Cedar Cinema in San Francisco in the early 1970’s and being grievously disappointed in it, mainly by the horrible casting of George Montgomery as Philip Marlowe. I’d also recorded it onto a Beta tape which I subsequently dubbed to VHS and ran for Charles when he was still living in the room on Centre Street (in a building that no longer exists) where he was when we first started dating.

What’s odd is that Time to Kill is in all respects a much better movie: though it changed “Philip Marlowe” to “Michael Shayne,” every member of its cast except one was superior to their counterpart in The Brasher Doubloon. The Brasher Doubloon was directed by John Brahm, a German expat who was essentially Fritz Lang lite; in 1939 he made a film at Columbia called Let Us Live which not only copied the plot line of Lang’s masterpiece, You Only Live Once, two years earlier – an ex-con marries an innocent (in both senses) young girl but can’t hold down a legitimate job because his criminal past still haunts him – but even used the same actor, Henry Fonda, as the ex-con. Only Brahm and his writers gave the story an unbelievable happy ending instead of the tragic one of Lang’s original. In 1942 Brahm signed with Fox and made an unusual werewolf movie called The Undying Monster, then went on to bigger-budgeted horrors including a nominal remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (Hitchcock’s version was from 1926, Brahm’s from 1944) and a film called Hangover Square (1945) based on a novel by Gaslight author Patrick Hamilton. These three were collected in one of the Fox Horror Classics boxed set and reveal that horror was Brahm’s real stock-in-trade.

In The Brasher Doubloon (a title Raymond Chandler had rejected for his novel because it seemed too clinical and obvious for him). Brahm’s’ attempt at film noir comes out all wrong; the atmospherics are O.K. (particularly the high winds that seem to be blowing every time he visits the Murdock home in Pasadena) – Lloyd Ahern was the cinematographer – but the casting is wrong. George Montgomery as Marlowe is just snotty, almost totally missing the brilliant world-weariness conveyed by Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart, and leading lady Nancy Guild is trying even harder to be Lauren Bacall than Montgomery was to be Bogart, and falling equally short of her model. In Time to Kill her part was played by the marvelous British actress Heather Angel (whom Brahm had worked with on The Undying Monster). Her fearsome employer, Elizabeth Murdock, was played in Time to Kill by the intense British actress Ethel Griffies with a force-of-nature fervor; in The Brasher Doubloon she’s played by Florence Bates, a competent character actress but hardly with Griffies’ power and authority.

The one cast member in The Brasher Doubloon who’s better than their counterpart in Time to Kill is Conrad Janis as Mrs. Murdock’s spoiled son Leslie. In Time to Kill Leslie was played by character actor James Seay, a far less interesting performer (though at least closer to the right age for the role; in The Brasher Doubloon Janis looks more like Florence Bates’ grandson than her son). Janis comes off as a sort of beta version of James Dean (seven years before the real Dean burst onto the Hollywood scene in East of Eden), mumbling his way through the role in true Method fashion. It’s hard to believe this is the same actor who achieved late-in-life TV stardom as the owner of the music store in Robin Williams’ comedy vehicle Mork and Mindy. And the flaws of The Brasher Doubloon don’t end with the surprisingly weak casting: though they had 11 more minutes of running time to work with (72 minutes as opposed to the 61 of Time to Kill), writers Leonard Praskins and Dorothy Bennett left out a lot more of Chandler’s plot than Clarence Upson Young did on Time to Kill.

They omitted the character of chanteuse “Linda Conquest” completely (in Time to Kill Diane Merrick played her; Young made her a lot more sympathetic than Chandler had and paired her with Lloyd Nolan at the end) and rewrote the character of fellow detective George Anson so we only see him as a corpse. (In Time to Kill he’s shown on screen following Shayne around and looking sinister; in The High Window he’s a joke, placing a ridiculous ad in a newspaper in what Chandler clearly meant as an overly glamorous satire of his readers’ idea of a private detective.) What’s more, Praskins and Bennett include two knock-offs of the famous scene in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon in which Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) tries to stick up Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in order to search his office. Coming from a studio like Fox that had done some pretty good noirs and at least one masterpiece in the genre, Kiss of Death, The Brasher Doubloon remains a major disappointment, not only a huge step down from Time to Kill in its treatment of this story but hardly the film it could have been if they had rethought it the way RKO did when, after they filmed Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely as The Falcon Takes Over in 1942, they considerably improved on it for the first “official” Marlowe movie (and still the best!), 1944’s Murder, My Sweet.