I Died a Thousand Times (Warner Bros., 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 13) I flipped to Turner Classic Movies after the quite interesting Australian mystery show Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries for Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation of a 1955 film called I Died a Thousand Times. It’s the third version of W. R. Burnett’s crime novel High Sierra, first filmed in 1940 (the same year the book came out) with Raoul Walsh directing, John Huston writing the screenplay and Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino as the leads. Walsh remade it as a Western, Colorado Territory, in 1949 with Joel McCrea and Virginia Mayo, and then in 1955 Jack Warner decided to do a new version in WarnerColor (actually Eastmancolor) and CinemaScope. “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller seemed to think the role of Roy Earle, career criminal whose parole from prison is arranged by crime boss “Big Mac” (Donald MacBride in High Sierra, the very interesting Lon Chaney, Jr. in I Died a Thousand Times) to lead a robbery at a fancy Southern California resort, played by Bogart in the 1940 version, was intended for Jack Palance from the get-go. Michael Druxman tells a different story in his 1975 book on movie remakes, Make It Again, Sam: “Filmed in 1955, the most recent version of High Sierra had originally been intended as a vehicle for Frank Sinatra, but when the actor/singer demanded 50 percent of the box-office net, Warner Bros. broke off negotiations and hired Jack Palance on a straight salary.” (It’s possible that Sinatra wasn’t really interested in the film for the same reason George Raft turned down High Sierra: in Burnett’s story Roy Earle lived at the end, but the Production Code Administration had decreed that he must die at the end of the film and Sinatra, like Raft, was tired of making movies that ended with his character dying. He’d even made Warners rewrite the end of Young at Heart, his remake of Four Daughters, so that he and Doris Day got together instead of his character dying in a car crash as John Garfield had in the same role in the first film.)

The remake was originally supposed to be called A Handful of Clouds and W. R. Burnett, who was called in to write the screenplay based on his old novel, was told to write that phrase into the dialogue. He included it in the scene just before two of the fellow gang members, Babe Kossuck (Lee Marvin) and Red (Earl Holliman), crash their car on a narrow country road, killing both of them. But Marvin and Holliman couldn’t get out the line without laughing uncontrollably, and director Stuart Heisler gave up and deleted the line, forcing Jack Warner and his other “suits” to come up with a new title. The one they came up with was I Died a Thousand Times, which is also pretty meaningless and suggests a more angst-ridden reading of Roy Earle than the one we got from Jack Palance (more like Bogart’s performance in the 1940 classic). I Died a Thousand Times evokes comparison with the 1939 film Each Dawn I Die, starring James Cagney and George Raft, in which Cagney plays a reporter who’s framed for killing two pedestrians while driving under the influence by a gang he’s been working to expose; it’s not considered one of Cagney’s truly great films but it’s a whole lot better than this. It’s also all too evocative of a satirical song Robert Preston did on a Carol Burnett TV special in 1963, “I Have Died a Thousand Deaths,” lampooning all the movies Preston had made in which his characters died (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9eVFBnnbGE). I Died a Thousand Times is actually quite a good movie whose only problem is the shadow of the near-perfect original hanging over it.

The principal female role of Marie Garson, hard-bitten dance-hall girl (usually in the Production Code era a euphemism for “prostitute”) whom Red picks up en route to the job and ultimately ends up in a doomed romance with Earle, was played by Shelley Winters in a quite ingenious stroke of anti-type casting. Like Palance, she’s quite good in the part but she compares to Ida Lupino about as well as Palance compares to Bogart. Michael Druxman quotes a contemporary review from the Hollywood Reporter as saying that Palance “does not seem as doomed from the outset as Bogart did and he does not symbolize the universal yearning of an aging man for a woman and his dog as his predecessor did. Palance stresses tension and has his own technique.” Something I hadn’t realized before Muller mentioned it in his intro is that Palance had at least a nodding acquaintance with Method acting; director Elia Kazan had hired him as Marlon Brando’s understudy during the original Broadway run of A Streetcar Named Desire, and he’d undoubtedly learned something from the experience. The Hollywood Reporter reviewer noted, “According to the Warners publicity department, he runs up and down the back of the soundstage and does push-ups so that he begins every scene with every corpuscle tingling.” (Palance’s obsession with on-screen push-ups would continue at least until his 1991 comeback film, City Slickers.)

The two films actually track quite closely – my husband Charles arrived home just before the final scene and wondered if it counted as a scene-for-scene remake – and the film benefits greatly from Ted McCord’s awesome color cinematography of the actual High Sierras and Mount Whitney, where the final shoot-out was shot in both versions. It doesn’t help that the role of Mendoza, the “inside man” who works at the targeted hotel (the “Tropica” in Palm Springs), was originally played by Cornel Wilde and here is a barely talented nobody named Perry Lopez; or that Velma, the crippled farm girl Earle falls for and pays for an operation to correct her club foot, was originally Joan Leslie and here is Lori Nelson (who got a feistier and more independent character in a far less interesting movie, Revenge of the Creature – the first sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon – earlier that year). It also doesn’t help that the character of Lon, the farm boy from back home Velma dumps Roy for, is here played by Dick Davalos, the pathetic non-entity that for some reason Elia Kazan cast as James Dean’s brother Aron in East of Eden. I’ve long assumed Kazan cast Davalos only because they were both of Greek descent – Paul Newman was up for the role and the thought of Dean and Newman together in a film is one of Hollywood’s greatest and most compelling might-have-beens – and here Davalos is more tolerable than he was in East of Eden only because his part is quite a bit smaller.

But the worst aspect of I Died a Thousand Times is the casting of Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez as the Mexican-American cabin boy at the high-Sierras resort where Roy Earle and his cronies plot the big heist. Gonzalez Gonzalez got his 15 minutes of fame in 1953, when he was a guest contestant on Groucho Marx’s quiz show You Bet Your Life and Groucho found it irresistibly funny that Gonzalez’s last name and his matronymic were the same. John Wayne, of all people, encouraged Gonzalez Gonzalez to take a flyer at Hollywood. His first film was Wings of the Hawk (1953), a drama about the 1910 Mexican revolution directed by Oscar “Budd” Boetticher – which might be interesting – before Wayne gave him a major role in his airline drama The High and the Mighty. His role here is as “Chico,” a stereotypical Mexican servant type, complete with broken English, whose only plot function is to introduce “Pard,” the dog Roy Earle and Marie Garson befriend (and who ultimately betrays Earle when the dog runs to him when he’s hiding out in the high Sierras and thus shows the cops his location). Where I Died a Thousand Times scores is in the sheer beauty of the high Sierra scenery, expertly reproduced in color and CinemaScope by veteran cinematographer Ted McCord (though there are also a few scenes obviously shot as studio “exteriors” on a Warners soundstage with badly matted-in process shots of the Sierra skyline), and also in the casting of Lee Marvin as Babe. Marvin dominates every scene he’s in, and one wonders why Warners didn’t remake this story yet again in the late 1960’s with him as Roy Earle. I Died a Thousand Times is actually a quite good movie, genuinely entertaining and at times even moving. It’s just that the shadow of an even greater movie, High Sierra, hangs over it; W. R. Burnett himself summed up what was wrong with I Died a Thousand Times when he said, “Palance was too much of a villain to be as sympathetic as Bogie was.”