Lighthouse (PRC, 1947)

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

Two nights ago (Thursday, July 27) I watched the first and last items on Turner Classic Movies’ last Thursday-night salute to “B” movies: Frank Wisbar’s Lighthouse (1947), made for the ultra-cheap PRC studio (the initials officially stood for “Producers’ Releasing Corporation,” but – with certain exceptions – the quality of their output was so relentlessly bad the joke around Hollywood was it really stood for “Pretty Rotten Crap”) and Frank R. Strayer’s Blondie (1938), the first in a series of 28 films based on Chic Young’s comic strip made by Columbia until 1950 and always with the same actors: Penny Singleton as Blondie Miller Bumstead and Arthur Lake as her hapless husband Dagwood. In between I watched an odd 2022 documentary on the recently deceased (at 97!) singer Tony Bennett called Tony Bennett: Forget Me Not, and after the first Blondie TCM showed a very intriguing short called What Do You Think? (Number Three), one entry in a series from MGM about events that might or might not have involved the supernatural. Lighthouse I had hopes for mainly because of its director, Frank Wisbar, who was born in East Prussia, Germany in 1899 and had a fairly substantial career as a director in Nazi Germany pre-World War II until he fled in 1939 and ended up in the U.S. Wisbar quickly found himself relegated to PRC, where he made one film of real accomplishment and quality: Strangler of the Swamp (1945), a remake of his German film Fährmann Maria (“Ferryman Maria”) (1936) and a quite good vest-pocket horror thriller. Then Wisbar was assigned to Devil Bat’s Daughter (1946), a direct sequel to PRC’s 1941 hit The Devil Bat (Bela Lugosi’s one PRC credit) and a film that tries to be Gaslight and achieves high camp.

Lighthouse was Wisbar’s next credit after Devil Bat’s Daughter, and if Strangler was actually sophisticated drama masquerading as cheap horror, and Devil Bat’s Daughter was cheap horror showing occasional flashes of something that could have been better (the female lead is former beauty contest winner Rosemary La Planche, and there are bits in her performance that suggest that had she been signed by a major studio and carefully built up, she might have become a more than competent actress; instead she got signed by PRC and plunged into leads immediately way before she was ready for them), Lighthouse was just dull. It’s a romantic-triangle story about Hank Armitage (John Litel), who runs a lighthouse just off the coast of Vermont; Sam Wells (Don Castle, top-billed and one of the many actors MGM tried out as a replacement for Clark Gable who never made the grade), his assistant; and Sam’s on-shore girlfriend Connie (June Lang, whom TCM “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller really talked up; she was a strikingly beautiful woman and she showed more than a few hints of genuine acting talent, but she blew her career when she married gangster Johnny “Handsome” Rosselli). Connie has been having an affair with Sam even though he’s already married to someone else – we hear her talked about but never actually see her – and her roommate Jo-Jo (Marion Martin), who in some ways is the most fascinating and complex character in the movie, gossips about yet another woman Sam is seeing who works at the same cannery as Connie. Upset with Sam because of all his carrying-on, both with the wife we never see and the other “other woman” we don’t see either (and after a while we get the impression she might not exist except in Jo-Jo’s overly fertile imagination), Connie agrees to marry Hank on the rebound.

They sleep together in the Production Code-obligatory twin beds under the awful PRC-obligatory wallpaper, and it’s obvious Hank is stirring with sexual frustration while Connie is still carrying the torch for Sam. At one point Hank falls into the water off the island where the lighthouse is set up, and injures his leg – and while Hank is incapacitated he notices that Connie and Sam have closed the bedroom door behind them and the light has gone out. Hank immediately assumes that the light went out because Sam was too busy having sex with Connie to notice, and though Connie insists that nothing untoward happened between them, Hank is determined at best to fire Sam and at worst to kill him. There’s a fight between the two men that for a moment looks like one of them is going to tumble to his death down the lighthouse stairs, only Connie reaches inside a bedroom drawer and extracts a gun. She holds it on both men, but only to get them to stop fighting and settle their differences reasonably, which they do by Sam taking the lighthouse’s boat and leaving while Connie stays on the island and forms a renewed determination to make her marriage to Hank work even though she doesn’t really love him because she thinks she can learn to do so. Eddie Muller compared the movie to the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice, which likewise centers around a homeless drifter, the older man who takes him in and the woman they both fall for, but The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on a novel by James M. Cain published in 1934 (it took that long for someone in Hollywood to figure out how to film it without running afoul of the Production Code), ends with the homeless drifter and the wife conspiring to murder the husband, only the drifter gets into an auto accident, the wife is killed and the drifter, who escaped justice for the murder he did commit, is executed for one that was just an accident. Nothing that happens in Lighthouse is anything either that exciting or that grimly ironic; it’s just a 65-minute “B” that fills out its running time without being interesting or exotic in any way.