The Endof the line (Fortress Films Productions, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, February 10, my husband Charles and I watched another YouTube film, this one a 1957 British thriller called The End of the Line. The opening scene shows a locomotive emblazoned with the train name3 “Golden Arrow,” leading us briefly to expect a movie wholly or largely set on a train. Instead The End of the Line is a pretty ordinary thriller in which the central character is faded American writer Mike Selby (played by faded American actor Alan Baxter, who’d had a brief vogue in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, mostly playing villains, including Jesse James in a 1941 Warners “B” called Bad Men of Missouri). Mike is hired by thjeatre producer Henry Brown (Charles Clay) to rewrite a new play Edwards is doing on London’s West End, and in order to work alone he accepts an invitation from Edwards’ secretary, Ann )Jennifer Jayne), to stay at a country resort owned by John Crawford (Arthur Gomez). Only it turns out that that’s the absolutely worst place he could be in, for previously he’d lived in Paris and been thrown out in disgrace over an incident involving public drunkenness, and the instrument of his downfall, Liliane (Barbara Shelley), was his lover in Paris until she absconded with his rent money for the month. Now she’s married to John Crawford, only once Mike is within seducing distance she goes after him just to prove she can. At one point Crawford announces he’s going to invite Mike to London to visit his club, only Liliane is also on board and she and Mike sit together in the back seat uncomfortably (for Mike, anyway) close. While they

’re in London Mike accidentally overhears a dialogue between Crawford and jewel thief Charles Edwards (Ferdy Mayne), who offers Crawford some recently stolen gems – only to be angered by Crawford’s low-ball offer because they’re too “hot” and would instantly be recognized. Thus both Mike and we learn that Crawford is a “fence,” and Liliane hatches a plot for her and Mike to rob Crawford, taking the stolen jewels he has on the premises and knocking him out because the only key to his safe is on his person at all times. Only, as Mike would know if he’s ever read noir fiction – for someone who’s been narrating the whole movie in classic noir style, he seems appallingly ignorant of the genre – Liliane is actually having an affair with yet another man and the two plan to steal the lewels, kill Crawford with Mike’s gun (which they’ve stolen from his belongings) and set Mike up to take the fall. In the end Mike finally realizes what Liliane has been up to, there’s a gun battle between them, and Liliane ends up either dead or arrested while Mike, injured but not dead, tells his story to the London police. Oh, and did I mention that there’s also a “nice girl,” Ann (Jennifer Jayne), who is in love with Mike and vainly tries to pu9ll him away from the bad girl?

The End of the Line was directed by Charles Saunders from a script by Paul Erickson, and the story seems to be just a compendium of film noir clichés: the hapless protagonist, the femme fatale (at which Barbara Shelley is damned good even though not near the heights of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Mary Beth Hughes in The Great Flamarion or Ann Savage in Detour), the homely old guy the femme fatale is married to (the only surprise in Erickson’s script – and it’s a modest one – is that Crawford isn’t a hapless guy who wanted a trophy wife and ended up with a murderess, but a villain in his own right) and the overall atmosphere of loose sexual morality – but director Saunders doesn’t give it anything like the dark, chiaroscuro atmospherics of genuine noir. Instead he and cinematographer Walter J. Harvey shoot the whole thing in even gray tones that make it look, as Charles pointed out early on, more like a French New Wave film than a film noir.

Like the New Wave directors, Saunders and Harvey were likely taking advantage of the increased portability of film equipment in the 1950’s to film in actual locations instead of studio backlots. But though the locations ad to the believability of the story – the London streets are just that – it also doesn’t give the film the sordid atmosphere needed for its rather seedy story to work. In at least one way The End of the Line is a film that seems modern; like all too many movies of today, there’s no one in it we actually like. The three principals are a boorish man, an unscrupulous woman and a crook. It’s also a movie much like today’s in that it references older, far better films; when the leads get together and practically say to each other, “We’ll always have Paris,” it’s all too obvious that this is not Casablanca, Alan Baxter and Barbara Shelley are not Bogart and Bergman, and the seedy little instrumental (composed, like all the rest of the film’s score, by Edwin Astley – who contributed a big-band jazz score featuring a trumpeter he probably told to sound like Miles Davis, thereby making comparisons with Louis Malle’s French film Elevator to the Scaffold – which had a score by the real Miles Davis – almost inevitable) is hardly “As Time Goes By.”