Pushover (Columbia, 1954))

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, March 30) I’d watched a quite interesting movie on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” series on Turner Classic Movies: Pushover, a 1954 film featuring Fred MacMurray as Los Angeles police officer Paul Sheridan, who lets himself get corrupted by Lona McLane (Kim Novak in her first major starring role in a film; she’d had a bit part in the 1953 Howard Hughes extravaganza for RKO, The French Line, starring Jane Russell). Kim Novak was the creation of Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn, who in 1948 had briefly had Marilyn Monroe under contract for six months but didn’t do anything with her except cast her as the lead in a “B” musical called Ladies of the Chorus (actually a not-bad film with a good director, Phil Karlson, who got more out of Monroe than some of her later, more prestigious directors did). When the real Monroe finally achieved stardom at 20th Century-Fox, Cohn, like a lot of other movie producers, decided to invent his own Monroe clone. As the chassis on which to build his “Monroe” body, he signed a young woman from Chicago named Marilyn Pauline Novack who’d previously done that bit part in The French Line and a number of TV commercials. Cohn wanted to rename her “Kit Marlowe” but Novak resisted; she could see why she couldn’t call herself “Marilyn” because that was Monroe’s screen name (though Monroe had been born Norma Jeane Baker) but she decided to keep her real last name, only deleting the “c.” For a first name she picked “Kim,” partly because it was the name of a female relative and partly because it was close to “Kit” but not as ugly. What’s long struck me about Kim Novak’s career is that a lot of her movies – including what’s become her best-known film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) – cast her as essentially what she was in real life: a woman heavily manipulated by one or more rich and powerful men and forced to adopt a costume and persona not her own. (In her last starring film, The Legend of Lylah Clare from 1968, she played a young actress hired by a veteran director to star in a biopic of his late wife, actress Lylah Clare, because she strongly resembles her.)

In some ways Pushover is a rehash of another, more famous film Fred MacMurray made 11 years earlier, Double Indemnity, only instead of a corrupt insurance salesman he’s a corrupt cop. But in Double Indemnity we know from the get-go that MacMurray is corrupt because he tells us so in his voice-over narration, but in Pushover there’s no voice-over and so his moral status remains ambiguous until towards the end, when he shoots and kills a fellow officer, Paddy Dolan (Allan Nourse), in a scene in which They Both Reached for the Gun (Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism attorney once again thanks you for keeping him in business). Novak’s character, Lola McLane, is the girlfriend of bank robber Harry Wheeler (Paul Richards), who in association with a partner (whom we never see after the opening robbery sequence) has just robbed an L.A. bank of $250,000. He’s installed Lola in a fancy apartment in a building; next to her lives a nurse, Ann Stewart (Dorothy Malone), who works a lot of night shifts and hosts parties during the day. Ann attracts the attention of Sheridan’s police partner, Rick McAllister (Philip Carey), during the days-long stake-out the cops stage from a building across the street through whose windows they can observe the goings-on in Lola’s and Ann’s apartments. (“Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller said this film, Witness to Murder and Hitchcock’s contemporary Rear Window are part of a mini-cycle of films noir based on the whole concept of voyeurism.) Paul Sheridan is assigned by the LAPD to pick up Lona and start an affair with her to get information on where Eddie Wheeler is and where he stashed the $250,000 loot from the bank heist, but it works too well and he falls in love with her for real. Though Sheridan’s boss on the police force, Lt. Carl Eckstrom (E. G. Marshall), has specifically instructed him to take Wheeler alive rather than kill him so they’ll be able to question him about the loot, Sheridan hatches a plot with Lola to steal the money and kill Wheeler in a way that will allow him to claim he shot him in self-defense in the line of duty. In one scene, to fulfill her role in the plot, Sheridan rattles off a complicated set of instructions to Lola that she can’t possibly remember – and neither can we. He sounds for all the world like a movie director cueing an actress in how he wants her to play her next scene.

Wheeler is duly killed and Sheridan learns from Lola that the money is in his old car, but there’s a police cruiser parked right next to it and Paddy Dolan has the only key to Wheeler’s car. It seemingly takes forever for the other cops to realize that Sheridan is corrupt and has sold them out for Lola’s dubious attractions, but in the end the other cops gun him down and Sheridan gets a last-minute dying-words speech to the effect that he might have been better off if he’d romanced Lola honestly and not tried to take the money. (The authors of the entry on Pushover in The Film Noir Encyclopedia made a good deal more of this than I thought it deserved.) Rick McAllister gets a final speech over the dying Sheridan much along the lines of the one Edward G. Robinson gave over the similarly dying MacMurray character in Double Indemnity, though the scene doesn’t work as well because the director, Richard Quine, and the writer, Roy Huggins, aren’t as good as Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. Pushover began life as two separate novels, The Night Watch by Thomas Walsh and Rafferty by William Ballinger, which Huggins artfully blended together into a single story, though much to Huggins’ dismay producer Jules Schermer (whose name is on quite a few good late noirs, including Samuel Fuller’s masterpiece Pickup on South Street) plugged in some dialogue from a film he’d produced seven years earlier, Framed, directed by Richard Wallace from a script by John Patrick (story) and The Asphalt Jungle co-writer Ben Maddow (screenplay). Producer Schermer recalled, “When Huggins eventually saw a rough cut of the latter he said, ‘You’ve ruined my picture’ — because of what I had borrowed from Framed. Fortunately, nobody else thought so.”

Though its derivations from the overall noir canon in general and Double Indemnity in particular are obvious, I quite like Pushover, at least in part because of the moral ambiguity of the characters. Pushover is stronger than Double Indemnity in at least one respect; we don’t have to hear MacMurray’s tiresome justifications of himself the way we did in the earlier film (though his voice-over in Double Indemnity has a power of its own, one that makes us wish we could walk into the screen and say, “Don’t do it, Fred!”). According to Eddie Muller, Richard Quine was assigned to direct the film because he’d had experience as an actor and therefore could help Kim Novak with her performance, because it was assumed Novak was too inexperienced to do justice to the character – but Novak, here as later in Vertigo and her other films, was able to use her limitations as an actress to good effect. Her character is one of the subset of film noir femmes fatales who were not so much immoral as amoral, hard-bitten women who’ve decided that they’re too down and out in life to accept the luxury of conventional morality. The original working title for Pushover was The Killer Wore a Badge (also the title of the original Saturday Evening Post serialization of Walsh’s novel), which like Badge of Evil – the original title for Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil – would have given the whole plot away. The more ambiguous Pushover leaves much more room for doubt as to whether MacMurray’s character will or won’t go to the bad side of the moral ledger, and it’s reasonably shocking that he finally does, even though it’s not altogether clear who’s being “pushed over” by whom, how or why!