Dead Reckoning
                
Director: John Cromwell
Year: 1947
Rating: 7.0
After watching a faux Bogart in two films in The Man with Bogart's Face and Play It Again, Sam, I needed a dose of the real thing and this filled the prescription. It is 100% Bogart. The story is in first person with Bogart narrating it internally for us. Narrating a dark noir morass of betrayals and bad guys. Bogart's territory. He eats up these sorts of films like leftover turkey. The Maltese Falcon was the first great noir film and the year before this Bogart and Bacall had appeared in Chandler's The Big Sleep. He understands the rhythm of noir. His speech patterns with a slab of suspicion and cynicism feels just right. Don't trust anyone; especially a dame with beseeching eyes and sweet unrepentant words.



Here they team Bogart up with the closest thing they could get to Bacall. Lizabeth Scott. Often compared to each other in looks. Blonde and lanky. Both actors were on loan to Columbia for the film. They had wanted Rita Hayworth after Gilda but she was busy. Scott with her cheekbones that looked like they had been chiseled by Michelangelo is a fine placeholder, not as soft as Bacall or as desirable as Hayworth but there is something about her face that oozes noir and she was to go on to make a number of them. Maybe it was the cold eyes and the generous mouth but I always feel I would be safer kissing a cobra than her. The press nicknamed her The Threat.




This doesn't get rated all that highly in the world of noir criticsim. It doesn't even get a mention in Eddie Robson's book about noir. Only Out of the Past does for 1947. But noir was digging its heels into the cinematic landscape. Murder, My Sweet and Double Indemnity had paved the way for the many that followed into the 1950s. The end of the war had brought on a harder edge to films. Soldiers returning after killing the other guys and finding nothing was the same lent a bleak mood to films. They also made for good noir heroes. Nothing is clear in noir. Just like the war.




Bogart as Captain Rip Murdoch is back from the war with his friend and sergeant, Johnny Drake. They are like brothers. Rip has put in his friend for the Medal of Honor and they are on a train to the ceremony when Drake finds out. He isn't happy and does a runner. Rip has to track him down, find out why, help him if he is in trouble. It takes him to Gulf City, Tropical Paradise of the South they claim. Sounds like something out of Hammett and the Continental Op. All he finds is trouble. And his friend in the morgue burnt to a crisp. Wanted for an old murder. He has to get to the bottom of it, clear his friend, get him the medal.




Johnny was in love with Mrs. Chandler and so he starts there. With her ankles and works his way up to those cheekbones. He doesn't trust her, he doesn't trust women. He told Johnny that all women are the same without make-up and tells her he wishes he could make them small enough to put in a bottle till late at night when he needs them. This is pure Bogart, Scott is a femme fatale up to her eyeballs, but the film is familiar, pieces from Maltese, Murder My Sweet and Double Indemnity stitched together. But noir is always good to me and the scriptwriters give Bogart enough tough jaded dialogue to fill a book. Just how we like him.