Black Tuesday (Leonard Goldstein Productons, United Artists, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 18) I watched an unexpectedly interesting film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” featuring Eddie Muller as host: Black Tuesday, a 1954 “B” from Leonard Goldstein Productions, released through United Artists. Before the film Muller explained that its star, Edward G. Robinson, had become disgusted with the one-dimensional gangster roles he got again and again at Warner Bros. in the 1930’s. He’d wanted roles with more depth, and he got them at Warners when he took over the biopics after Paul Muni left the studio and got to play pioneering microbiologist Paul Ehrlich and news-service founder Julius Reuter. Then in the 1940’s he entered the noir universe with his good-guy role in Double Indemnity and then made a series of films noir in which he got to play milquetoast middle-aged men led into the noir underworld by femmes fatales, mostly played by Joan Bennett: notably Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. By the early 1950’s Robinson had got caught up in the Hollywood blacklist, and though he’d testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and gone through the humiliating ritual of naming names of other Leftists in Hollywood to be fed into the HUAC maw, he still was on a “greylist.” He was no longer up for major roles and had to revert to playing the stereotypical gangster parts he’d tired of in films like this one, though just as Black Tuesday was wrapping Cecil B. DeMille, one of Hollywood’s most prominent Right-wingers, got Robinson taken off the greylist so he could play Dathan in The Ten Commandments. Black Tuesday was an engaging film directed by Hugo Fregonese (who was born in Argentina, had come to Hollywood in 1950, worked here for five years and left to direct in Europe after Black Tuesday was finished) from a script by Sydney Boehm, best known for The Big Heat and Rogue Cop.

The central premise is certainly unique and different: Vincent Canelli (Edward G. Robinson) and Peter Manning (a surprisingly authoritative Peter Graves) are both scheduled to be executed the same night. Canelli is to be put to death for orchestrating 17 murders in his role as a gang boss (both the city and state are carefully unmentioned, though we know it’s not California because the electric chair is being used instead of California’s usual method, lethal gas; still, the exterior shots of the prison look an awful lot like San Quentin), while Manning is a bank robber who killed someone in the course of a robbery. Before he was arrested he stashed the $200,000 he stole in an undisclosed location. The governor’s office makes him an offer of a 10-day reprieve if he’ll tell them where the money is, but he refuses and won’t do it for anything less than a full commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment. The gimmick is that on the night they’re both supposed to be executed, they escape through a well thought-out plan led by Canelli’s girlfriend, Hatti Combest (Jean Parker, who a decade earlier had been in an even better Death Row movie, Lady in the Death House). One of the prison guards learns that his daughter has been kidnapped on the eve of the execution, and the ransom for her safe return is letting one of the crooks in Canelli’s employ impersonate him on execution night. Another execution attendee, local reporter Frank Carson (Jack Kelly), is also waylaid by the gang, who force him to give them the ticket admitting him to watch and cover the execution so one of them can go in his place. (There’s a plot hole here: the impersonation wouldn’t have worked if the paper had sent their regular reporter in, but the editor had decided just by coincidence to send a younger man in instead to get a fresh perspective on the execution.) The crooks take out their guns and get not only Canelli and Manning out but three other Death Row inmates, including a Black man who opens the movie singing a song by Robert Parrish called “Black Tuesday Blues,” but Canelli orders his getaway car stopped in the middle of nowhere and pushes them out to almost certain recapture and/or death. The crooks have arranged to hide out in a storage warehouse, and as a precaution they’ve taken five prison staff members, including Dr. Hart (Vic Perrin) and Father Slocum (Milburn Stone), as hostages. The cops trace them to the warehouse and the second half of the movie is an extended shoot-out sequence in which the crooks threaten to murder the hostages at half-hour intervals unless the cops allow them to get away.

One thing is that Manning was wounded in the original shoot-out at the prison and Canelli is worried that he’ll die without telling Canelli where he stashed the bank loot, which Canelli is counting on to finance their ultimate flight out of the U.S. So Canelli orders the doctor to operate on Manning, telling him to use whatever medical equipment was stashed away in the storage warehouse by medical professionals who’d used it before. The kidnapped daughter of the guard, Ellen Norris (Sylvia Findley), is also among the captives. Thematically Black Tuesday is an old-fashioned gangster movie without the moral complexity of a true noir – the closest it comes is a haunting close-up of Canelli reacting as his girlfriend Hatti is shot to death by the cops, and Robinson’s skill as an actor is good enough to let us know that he really loved this woman and wasn’t just using her as a sexual convenience the way most movie gangsters do with their “molls.” Visually, however, Black Tuesday is as noir as all get-out; Stanley Cortez is the cinematographer (he went on from this movie to the monumentally overrated The Night of the Hunter), and he shoots it all in chiaroscuro shadows and oblique camera angles. According to Eddie Muller, Black Tuesday was the first movie shot with Kodak’s new Tri-X black-and-white film, which had just been introduced and gave higher-contrast images at lower levels of light. Director Hugo Fregonese, who three years earlier had made Val Lewton’s last film (and only one in color), Apache Drums (1951), keeps the tension going and turns in a riveting movie that one of Eddie Muller’s friends described as “a kick straight into the solar plexus.” The original ads for the film said that Edward G. Robinson was tougher and nastier than audiences had ever seen him before, which is largely true; the film is summed up, in a way, in a late dialogue exchange in which Father Slocum tells him, “I thought there was some good in you I could awaken, but there isn’t. You’re pure evil!” Black Tuesday is a genuinely tough movie that is thrilling to watch even though it offers none of the moral complexity basic to film noir, and it was surprisingly good given when it was made in Robinson’s career and what was happening to him in his personal life, mostly in an expensive divorce settlement that had forced him to sell his prized collection of Impressionist art as well as the career barriers from the HUAC inquisitors. It shows that he was still a good enough professional to play this sort of snarling gangster stereotype even though he’d got disgusted with these roles long before, and to play it with an extra soupçon of menace; though the films aren’t really comparable, one could make the case that Black Tuesday did for Robinson what White Heat did for James Cagney: push his usual gangster stereotype into new heights of psychopathology.