Dead Reckoning (Columbia, 1946, released 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Turner Classic Movies was doing one of their “Summer Under the Stars” all-day tributes to a particular star, in this case Humphrey Bogart, so at 9 p.m. my husband and I watched a not particularly distinguished film vehicle for him, Dead Reckoning (1946). It was made at Columbia Pictures and TCM host Ben Mankiewicz said it was a loan-out deal from his home studio, Warner Bros. It wasn’t; in 1946 Bogart had renegotiated his Warners contract to be non-exclusive, and having already made a loan-out film for Columbia, the war movie Sahara (1943), he signed directly with them to make this. Later he and Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn would cut a deal under which Bogart’s own production company, Santana Pictures (named after his yacht), would make its films at Columbia with the studio as distributor and co-financier. The big problem with Dead Reckoning is it seems to have been assembled, Frankenstein monster-style, from Bogart’s previous films. No fewer than five writers are credited – Gerald Drayson Adams and Sidney Biddell for the story, Allen Rivkin for “adaptation,” and Oliver H. P. Garrett for the actual script – and it’s a film that definitely supports my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers. The film was directed by John Cromwell, who was on the “outs” with the studios just then because of his Left-wing politics, but Bogart insisted on him because Cromwell had given him his first role in a Broadway play, Drifting, in 1922.

Bogart plays Warren “Rip” Murdock, a veteran who’s just returned home from World War II (a bit of a stretch since he was 46 when this film was made, and looked it), where he was commander of a paratroop unit and his star private was Johnny Drake (William Prince). The film opens with Murdock running through the rain-drenched streets of Gulf City, a small beach town in Florida, and seeking refuge in a church (reminding viewers of the 1939 film The Roaring Twenties, in which Bogart and James Cagney had a gun duel to the death in front of a church), where he starts narrating a flashback to Father Logan (James Bell), who like Murdock had served in World War II and is still wearing his service uniform rather than clerical garb. The flashback features Murdock and Drake being summoned to Washington, D.C. on a secret mission, Murdock is understandably pissed off that the war is over but he’s still being ordered around on secret missions, and eventually he learns from rifling through the papers of the superior officer who’s in charge of the operation that Drake has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and Murdock is getting the Distinguished Service Cross. Only Drake has a horror of being photographed and given any sort of publicity, so as soon as he realizes what’s happening to him he literally jumps off the train. Murdock follows him but loses him as Drake hops another train. Murdock learns from various clues, including a Yale University senior pin that Drake had on him but was in a different name, that Drake was actually from Gulf Coast, Florida and enlisted in the Army just weeks after he was caught up in a major scandal involving sex and murder.

The murder victim was a rich man named Sidney Chandler and Drake was accused of killing him for the love of his wife Coral (Lizabeth Scott, on loan-out from her mentor, Hal Wallis, at Paramount, in a part Harry Cohn intended for Rita Hayworth, who was having a feud with him at the time and turned it down). Coral Chandler is a classic film noir femme fatale who was involved with a gangster named Martinelli (Morris Carnovsky, billed third), who runs a fancy nightclub in Gulf City where Coral had once sung. In a scene strikingly reminiscent of Casablanca (you see how many other Bogart movies this one references?), Murdock demands that Coral sing Drake’s favorite song and she initially refuses, but after Martinelli also orders her to, she does. It doesn’t help that the song, a ditty called “Either It’s Love or It Isn’t” by Columbia house songwriters Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher, is hardly as good as “As Time Goes By.” It also doesn’t help that Lizabeth Scott obviously has a voice double, Trudy Stevens. Murdock learns that one of the key witnesses against Drake for Chandler’s murder is a man named Louis Ord (George Chandler), who then worked as a waiter at Martinelli’s club but has since been promoted to bartender. Ord tells Murdock that Drake had written a letter for Murdock, though it was in a code Murdock and Drake had used with each other while in the service. Unfortunately, Martinelli grabbed the letter and tried, unsuccessfully, to break the code. Murdock drifts into an ambiguous relationship with Coral, including a sequence in which she deliberately loses $16,000 at Martinelli’s roulette table (shades of The Big Sleep!) because Martinelli is blackmailing her by holding onto the gun with which Chandler was killed, which has Coral’s fingerprints on it.

Murdock wins back Coral’s losses at the craps table, but shortly thereafter both Murdock and Coral are given drugged drinks by Martinelli and his sadistic assistant Krause (the marvelous Marvin Miller). Martinelli and Krause kill Ord and plant his body in Murdock’s room to frame him, though Murdock manages to get rid of the body by hiding it in a giant laundry cart. (Ord’s body, as depicted in the film, is ridiculously light and easy to carry.) Later, when Murdock breaks into Martinelli’s office to grab Drake’s letter, he’s knocked unconscious after he smells jasmine, Coral’s favorite perfume. Murdock, who had previously enlisted a former safecracker he knew named McGee (Wallace Ford) for help cracking Martinelli’s safe, took some old hand grenades from him as World War II souvenirs and uses them to set Martinelli’s office on fire, killing Krause. Murdock marches Martinelli out of the front door of his office, whereupon he’s killed by a mysterious assailant (once again, shades of The Big Sleep!). The killer turns out to be Coral, who it turns out also murdered Johnny Drake two days earlier. Murdock confronts Coral while they’re supposedly running off together in a car in lines so close to those at the ending of The Maltese Falcon it’s a wonder Dashiell Hammett didn’t sue for plagiarism: “When a man’s pal dies, he’s supposed to do something about it.” She responds by shooting Murdock as he's trying to drive, only the car crashes, Murdock survives his injuries, but Coral is hurt fatally, though not before a long closing sequence in which she confesses all to a convenient priest. Murdock is flown to D.C. to accept the Congressional Medal of Honor (ya remember the Congressional Medal of Honor?) for Drake, though he announces to the Army brass that the medal will have to be awarded posthumously. The End.

I’d seen Dead Reckoning once before on commercial TV in the 1970’s, and the ripoff of The Maltese Falcon at the ending particularly irked me then and still does. It’s an O.K. movie but Bogart did better ones both before (including all the ones the writing committee at Columbia ripped off for it) and after. There was concern around Columbia that Lizabeth Scott might not get along with Bogart because Hal Wallis at Paramount was pushing her as a threat to Bogart’s own (fourth) wife, Lauren Bacall. Scott was even nicknamed “The Threat” as a reference to Bacall’s nickname, “The Look.” As things turned out, Bogart laughed off the attempt to build jealousy between Scott and Bacall by saying that Scott actually looked more like Bogart’s previous wife, Mayo Methot, though that didn’t stop Columbia’s publicists from advertising the film as, “Bogart is out with a new woman!,” after his successful films with Bacall, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep (based on a novel by Raymond Chandler, which makes me wonder if the writers deliberately picked the name “Chandler” for both the femme fatale and the husband – alleged husband, since along the way Martinelli tells Murdock that Coral was really married to him the whole time she was with Chandler – she conveniently offed!).