Impact (Harry S. Popkin Productions, United Artists, 1949)

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

The next movie on TCM’s July 8 schedule was Impact, produced by Harry C. Popkin and his brother, Leo Popkin, in 1949. This was shown on TCM’s “Noir Alley” show and host Eddie Muller explained that the Popkin brothers started out as boxing promoters until they lost their license after one of their fighters accepted a bribe to throw a bout. Then they went into producing “race movies,” cheap productions with all-Black casts aimed at theatres in Black neighborhoods. Their partner in this venture was Black actor Ralph Cooper, and the most famous “race movie” the Popkins made was The Duke Is Tops (1938) because, while Cooper played the male lead, the female lead was a young Black woman who would go on to major stardom at MGM and then in nightclubs: Lena Horne. After 17 “race movies” the Popkins decided to branch out and make films with white people for white audiences. Their first such production was And Then There Were None (1945), an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel Ten Little Niggerboys (1939) whose title has been changed over the years, reflecting the horizons of political correctness, first to Ten Little Indians (the title under which And Then There Were None was remade in 1966) and then Ten Little Soldiers. And Then There Were None, directed by René Clair (a Frenchman who had previously specialized in comedies), was produced independently and released through 20th Century-Fox – the sort of deal that would become the most common way movies were made once the studio system broke down in the 1960’s. The Popkins’ most famous production was the original D.O.A. in 1949, a film noir masterpiece in which Edmond O’Brien plays a man who’s slipped a slow-acting poison that will kill him in a few days, and he determines to spend the remaining time he has finding the man who killed him.

Impact is nowhere nearly as good, but it’s got some familiar noir elements as well as the novelty (for the time) of being filmed entirely on location in the San Francisco Bay Area. Business executive and self-made man Water Williams (Brian Donlevy) has just concluded a deal to expand his company by buying three new factories when he decides to mix business with pleasure by taking his wife Irene (Helen Walker) on a trip both to visit the factories, finalizing the deal, and for pleasure. Unfortunately, Irene has other ideas; she’s having an extra-relational affair with a man named Jim Torrence (Tony Barrett) and she’s decided to trick her husband into going alone and taking Torrence with him as far as Denver, from which he’ll catch a ride to see his aunt in Chicago. Only Irene, who faked a toothache to bail out on the trip with Walter, has booked a reservation for her and Jim at the Airport Motel in Oakland as “Mr. and Mrs. John Burke,” and she intends to meet up with Jim after he kills Walter en route. But the plan goes awry as Jim lets the air out of Walter’s right rear tire while Walter has stopped for dinner, and then Jim pulls over on what he thinks is a deserted stretch of road where he intends to club Walter to death with the jack handle. But the “deserted” stretch isn’t as deserted as Jim thought it would be; first a man in another car shows up and offers to help, then the crew of a Bekins moving van shows up after Jim has just clubbed Walter, and finally, as Jim has got Walter’s car started (having to climb down into the ravine where he dumped Walter to retrieve the car keys), he gets in Walter’s car and crashes head-on into a gasoline truck, killing himself along with the truck crew and leaving his body burned beyond recognition. When the police find the wreckage they naturally assume Walter is the victim – it was his car – while Walter has escaped by climbing into the back of the moving van.

Walter gets a ride as far as Larkspur, Idaho (“played” by the real-life Larkspur in Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco), where he runs into a gas station and garage run by war widow Marsha Peters (Ella Raines). Given that the first time they meet Marsha has her hair tied back and is wearing mechanic’s overalls, Walter at first assumes she’s a man (a gag Harry Popkin also pulled with Mary Hatcher in The Big Wheel, a film noir about auto racing he produced in 1949 with Mickey Rooney as a burned-out racing star who makes a comeback), but eventually she hires him as a mechanic and her aunt, Mrs. Peters (Mae Marsh), gives him a room in their home. While all this is going on, the San Francisco police, led by Lieutenant Tom Quincy (Charles Coburn in an unusual role for him), have arrested and are prosecuting Mrs. Williams for conspiracy to murder Walter. Marsha convinces Walter – whom she knows under the alias “Bill Walker” – that he can’t let his wife get fried for a murder that did not in fact happen. The two of them go to San Francisco but Walter finds himself charged with murder. The police arrest him for killing his wife’s boyfriend and the prosecutor (William Wright) takes the case to trial. The proceedings go against Walter until Marsha thinks of tracing down Su Lin Chung (Anna May Wong in her first acting role in seven years), the Williamses’ former maid. At first she doesn’t want to come forward because she heard the Williamses having an argument in which he threw a vase at her (though we already saw this scene and we know it was just an innocent accident in which Walter accidentally broke the vase), but Marsha spots her in court just as she’s running away from the trial.

Su Lin is wearing black sunglasses that both Charles and I thought made her look like the young Yoko Ono – Charles even joked, “Stop that woman! She broke up The Beatles!” – though Marsha gets a cab to follow Su Lin’s taxi and when the two finally talk (incidentally Su Lin’s father is played by the great Korean-American actor Philip Ahn, reuniting him and Wong from a first-rate 1937 Paramount “B” called Daughter of Shanghai in which Ahn played a Chinese-American FBI agent and Wong played a Chinese art dealer’s daughter who team up to fight human traffickers), Su Lin finally realizes that she has enough information to exonerate Walter and see that his wife is convicted for conspiracy to kill him, and the film ends happily. Through much of Impact I was wishing Humphrey Bogart could have played Brian Donlevy’s role – and as good as Ella Raines is (even though her part is basically a knock-off of her star-making role in Phantom Lady) I found myself wishing he could have brought along Lauren Bacall as well. The film itself is a good but flawed one; it was directed by Arthur Lubin (best known for having made the first five Abbott and Costello starring vehicles at Universal, though before that he’d directed Black Friday with Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Stanley Ridges in a modern-dress knock-off of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and in 1947 he made New Orleans with Arturo de Cordova, Lee Patrick and two enormous African-American jazz stars that are the only reasons one would want to see it today, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday) from a script by Jay Dratler and Dorothy Reid (silent-era actress and widow of Wallace Reid, the first – but, alas, hardly the last – Hollywood star who would die from complications from drug abuse). It’s weakened by too much reliance on coincidence (including the gas-truck ex machina that takes out Jim Torrence) and the inability of Lubin and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo to create the chiaroscuro atmospherics of film noir on location with the relatively cumbersome camera equipment of 1949. But it’s also a reasonably entertaining film, and I got nostalgic twinges from seeing quite a few corporate trademarks – not only Bekins but also Rexall and Owl Drugs and Bear Photo – that have long since faded into business history.