TOUGH murder movies bear the same relationship to the great movie epics as detective novels do to the latest best-seller: they are sometimes more worth spending time on. In the case of the tough movie, characterizations are often studied with more insight and originality than they are in the epics, action is better timed and sustained, behavior and environment are less given over to superficialities and gentilities, and the dialogue is good. “This Gun for Hire” had a couple of episodes in it—the opening on a flophouse with action concerning a killer and a chambermaid, and the entire, exciting chase at the end—with more drive and invention than anything in such best-sellers as “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing.” In the same way, “The Glass Key,” with many inadequacies, has some splendid scenes, and one portrait which should be noted.
The portrait is that of a hulking, good-natured killer named Jeff, resembling Steinbeck’s Lennie and played by William Bendix. The director and Mr. Bendix, who is a more bulky blond-curled version of Louis Wolheim, create this irresponsible murderer without reserve. He loves to knock people around—he calls them bouncing balls—or choke them to death. While choking one victim thoroughly and viciously he explains that his trouble has always been a lack of aggressiveness, that anybody can work on his soft nature and get him to do anything. The light of understanding that Mr. Bendix projects in this scene is remarkable. In fact, the whole thing is a brilliant portrayal of a man proud and at the same time doubtful of his great strength, using it beyond ordinary social bounds since he hasn’t the same conception of boundaries as other people.
The good scenes have usually to do with Jeff—one vivid drunk sequence that starts with a good bleary shot of a cabaret singer, proceeds through a strange mixture of sadism and affection between Bendix and Alan Ladd, and finally to a murder; another which ends in the season’s most nervewracking fall, which should startle you considerably. It is an interesting Hollywood phenomenon that the tough movie is about the only kind to examine the character’s actions straight and without glamor, a close appraisal of personal habits being too coarse for our Mrs. Minivers. As a result the tough movie captures a descriptive power common to the other arts. For instance, the way the political boss brushes his teeth or puts on his socks, the way Mr. Bendix spits or hugs a future victim, or how someone else fondles a bottle he is about to crack over a skull, or Mr. Ladd’s speculative glance.
The film is a striking example of good movie making, which was no accident, and an equally conscious but conflicting desire to ring the box-office cash register by throwing away great hunks of film to emphasize Alan Ladd’s sex appeal, and also Veronica Lake’s. For Mr. Ladd, action stops while lights soften to a woolly texture on his face, and without blinking a lid or moving a muscle of his just-parted lips he mutters a virile monosyllable. Aside from this obvious and cheap exploitation he gives a rather nice, studied performance, though his every grimace, or lack of one, seems keyed to the memory of Rudolph Valentino. Many of the movie’s ailments are the result of a disease common to tough detective stories, where the mystery, its detection and the unity of the story are sacrificed to sensational but irrelevant data: near-seductions, sub-rosa characters, scenes of strange violence, especially the indecent mauling the hero can and always does take.
It should be said that Brian Donlevy plays his Great McGinty again, affably as always, and that the direction of Stuart Heisler is exceptionally good in the scenes cited.
January 11, 1943