It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: this tale of two sisters begins with a Reno divorce and ends with a gut-shot sibling, a sorority who may not share DNA (or wealth) but dislike turnips. Robert Wise expertly directs this sordid, nihilistic noir and turns the genre trope upside down by focusing upon a feminine drama and introducing the inciting element as the homme fatale, a clockwork orange full of juicy queer subtext. DP Robert De Grasse’s wonderful compositions, low-key lighting, and use of shadows helps to elevates this to one of the best films of the genre!
Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) gets her divorce after a brief respite in a Reno boardinghouse, and her fateful journey soon begins after a night of flirtatious gambling and corpse finding. Seems her fellow boarder Laury Palmer (Isabel Jewell) is making her own beau jealous by stepping out with a turnip, which is a bad proposition when your boyfriend is a psychotic bisexual narcissist. This leads to Helen’s discovery and her flight back to San Francisco without calling the police. But she is followed by the handsomely brutish Sam Wilde (Lawrence Tierney), her trifling tease from the casino. Helen suspects he is Laury’s jealous boyfriend and the probable murderer, but she's infatuated and turned on by his sexual assertiveness. We soon discover a four-sided triangle of tangled erotic energy as Sam’s roommate and confidant Marty (Elisha Cook Jr.) attempts to allay Sam’s aggressiveness towards Helen. But Sam’s toxic narcissism leads him to foster a relationship with the virgin sister Georgia (Audrey Long) so he can control her money...and Helen. He wants to eat his cake...and have it too. To top it all off, Arnett (Walter Slezak) is a Private Dick hired by Laury’s drunken landlady Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard), who isn’t above a bit of graft to grease his palm and bank account, in order to keep from going to the cops. It’s all self-destructive in perfectly cynical film noir fashion!
Some details worth considering.
Sam’s relationship with Marty is rather intimate and barely sub-textual, its queerness shown openly. Marty is tender and concerned like a lover, allowing his cohort’s heterosexual copulations to appease Sam’s egocentric masculinity and psychotic impulses. When we get a scene of them together in their small apartment, there is only one bed. Helen is tainted in another way, her lust like a heroin fix, a louche romantic who conflates pugilism with affection. Helen is also very dependent upon her sister’s income which diminishes her own self-worth.
The murder scenes are ferocious, mostly photographed in medium shot where we feel every punch or bullet. The first homicide lasts about a minute as Sam brawls with his victim before bludgeoning him to death with an iron poker. When Laury inadvertently stumbles into the maelstrom, her death is accomplished by strangulation, and the look of safety, then recognition before turning to pure abject horror is perfectly captured in an over-the-shoulder shot, the low-key lighting casting distorted black shadows like evil ghosts’ danse macabre. When Marty meets his fate at the hands of his partner, Sam’s position is suggestive of intercourse with a phallic knife and oral fixation. Then Helen meets her fate with indigestible hot lead while she cowers locked in the bathroom, while Sam is gunned down in a hail of police gunfire. Apropos that it occurs in Helen’s bedroom!
The acting is first rate as Claire Trevor as the protagonist is able to imbue her character with a modicum of sympathy while displaying her lustful conceits for both money and sex. We feel she is more a victim of social circumstance than deserving of her fate. Elisha Cook Jr is also wonderful as the homophile who has no romantic partner or interest outside of his impulsive boyfriend. He is soft spoken, intelligent and forgiving yet he knows his partner is a killer yet supports him unconditionally. Hell, he even plans to murder Mrs. Kraft in order to protect Sam. Walter Slezak puts the sleaze in the PI, his self-deprecatory humor barely masking his literary subversiveness. Esther Howard steals every scene she’s in, her drunken dialogues shouted in a slur of boozy accusations. Her strident demeanor also reveals a kind and loyal heart towards Laury and explains the risk she takes in finding her killer. But Lawrence Tierney dominates this film, his monotone delivery like a sucker punch, romancing Helen like a boxing match. He oozes male energy and patriarchal authority, lust dripping from his pores like a biological hazard. There is no redeeming quality to Sam any more than there is redemption for a tsunami. This is a tough role and Tierney makes it work.
Finally, Helen may not get her sister’s money or inherit her newspaper, but she does make the headlines!
Final Grade: (A)
