The Woman on Pier 13, a.k.a. I Married a Communist (RKO, 1949)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 13), after watching the Sister Boniface Mysteries episode on KPBS, I switched channels to Turner Classic Movies for the 1949 movie The Woman on Pier 13, also known as I Married a Communist. This was a project Howard Hughes (yes, that Howard Hughes) launched at RKO studios as soon as he bought the company in late 1948. Hughes was a fanatical anti-Communist and wanted to make a movie that would expose the Communist Party as the vast conspiracy of evil he saw it as. He bought a story from writers George W. George (who would later help launch the career of Robert Altman when the two collaborated on a 1957 documentary biopic called The James Dean Story) and George F. Slavin called I Married a Communist, about a man named Bradley Collins (Robert Ryan) who briefly joined the Communist Party, U.S.A. in the 1930’s under his original name, Frank Johnson. Later he left the party, got a job in San Francisco as a longshoreman and gradually worked his way up to an executive position with the Cornwall Shipping Company, owned by J. Francis Cornwall (Harry Cheshire). He also got married to a woman named Nan Lowry (Laraine Day, top-billed) who had formerly dated the longshoremen’s union president Jim Travis (Richard Rober), and got her brother Don (John Agar) a job on the docks. Bradley has just worked out a plan to settle the latest longshore contract dispute without a strike by having both management and the union appoint negotiating subcommittees that would settle on a new contract in private. But his former girlfriend, magazine photographer Christine Norman (a marvelous performance by Janis Carter), is really a secret Communist and reports Brad to the local Communist boss, Vanning (Thomas Gomez in a rare unsympathetic role; usually he was the detective, anticipating Peter Falk’s role in the TV series Columbo, who solved the crime for which an innocent man had been convicted and discovered the real culprit).

Vanning in turn summons Brad out of a high-class party at the Cornwall home to a meeting at what presumes is the titular Pier 13 (though it’s never called that in the movie), where he and his hired assassin Bailey (William Talman in his second film; his most famous role was as hapless prosecutor Hamilton Burger on the long-running Perry Mason TV series, and the show’s producer, Gail Patrick Jackson, cast both Mason and Burger with actors who’d previously mostly played villains in films noir) threaten to “out” Brad not only as a former Communist but as a murderer. It seems that in the 1930’s he beat a union shop steward to death in Chicago, and the party has a signed affidavit on file allegedly proving that. The party bosses order Brad to sabotage the upcoming contract negotiations and ensure that there is a strike – though the writers (veteran screenwriters Charles Grayson and Robert Hardy Andrews worked up the George/Slavin story into an actual script) never come up with a plausible explanation for why the Communists want the San Francisco docks shut down just then. As part of their plot, the Communists assign Christine to date Don Lowry, but she falls genuinely in love with him and wants to confess all. Only the Communists get word that she’s about to change sides and kill both Don (Bailey runs him down and makes it look like just another hit-and-run accident) and Christine (Bailey pushes Christine out of her apartment window and makes it look like a suicide). I was expecting a plot twist that Brad really hadn’t killed anybody – the Party bosses just framed him to make it look like he had – and the film would end with him coming clean about his past and ratting out the Party bosses so they’d be arrested. Instead the film ends with a shoot-out in which Brad is mortally wounded, Vanning and Bailey are killed, and with his dying breaths Brad gives a ‘tis-a-far-far-better-thing-I-do speech telling his wife Nan, soon to be his widow, to go back to Jim Travis and marry him after Brad croaks.

I Married a Communist became a personal project for Howard Hughes. According to screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring, who wrote such classics as Out of the Past, The Hitch-Hiker and the first and by far best version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Hughes used it as a vetting device for writers and directors of whose politics he was unsure. If you turned it down, according to Hughes, you must be a Communist and therefore he would fire you. There were plenty of people who turned down I Married a Communist, including writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and director John Cromwell, not because they were Communists but simply because they knew it was a bad story that wouldn’t make a convincing or entertaining movie. Hughes finally got it made by director Robert Stevenson (a British-born filmmaker who was presumably not part of the American Red scare) and got Robert Ryan to star as Brad simply because Ryan was an outspoken Leftist who was worried that he’d be blacklisted if he turned it down. Hughes first released it as I Married a Communist – and it bombed at the box office, like virtually all the self-consciously “anti-Communist” movies Hollywood churned out in the early years of the Cold War. So he withdrew it and, after considering such alternate titles as San Francisco Melodrama, Waterfront at Midnight, Beautiful But Dangerous and Where Danger Lives (the last was a title Hughes ended up using for a different film altogether), he finally settled on The Woman on Pier 13.

Seen today, it’s a real political curio, and in his outro on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” screening Eddie Muller put his finger on why it’s a bad movie. He pointed out that the exact same story could have been made as a gangster movie at Warner Bros. in the early 1930’s – the young man who made a mistake and joined a criminal enterprise, then regretted it and withdrew, only to find his old gangland “pals” were coming after him and wanted him to join them again. Apparently classic-era Hollywood knew just one way to depict a criminal conspiracy. The anti-Nazi movies of World War II showed fascist sympathizers behaving the same way the gangsters had, and the anti-Communist movies made after the war showed the Communists also behaving that way. It’s a film that’s generally well acted – Robert Ryan in particular does an excellent job of depicting his character’s crisis of conscience, Janis Carter brings real pathos to her role as a femme fatale, and William Talman is excellent as the psychopathic killer – and the cinematographer is the great Nicholas Musuraca, who shot many of RKO’s best noirs. But the film also suffers from a schizoid visual perspective; up until the moment Vanning crashes the Cornwall party the film is clearly, brightly and plainly shot. As soon as Brad leaves the party with Vanning and goes to the secret offices the Communists maintain on the San Francisco waterfront, it suddenly becomes film noir visually, though thematically it’s still a black-and-white movie in more ways than one, with good-good heroes, bad-bad villains and Ryan’s and Carter’s characters the only one with any dramatic or emotional complexity. The anti-Communist movies of the early 1950’s that hold up well are the ones like The Atomic City (a crackerjack thriller with Gene Barry as a physicist who resists attempts by the Communists to recruit him as a spy) and Pickup on South Street, where the Communists are there simply to supply a MacGuffin.