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Silly, law-abiding jerk
Under no circumstances am I about to attempt to persuade you that The Chase (1946) ranks among the great classics of film noir. I am merely going to tell you truthfully that it showed me something I had not seen before in any genre of movie and over which I don't think I'm likely to get any time soon.
It begins familiarly, if stylishly, enough on the sidewalks of Miami. Down-and-out Navy veteran Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) is blinking as hungrily as a little match girl through the plate glass of a diner window, surreptitiously dry-swallowing a couple of pills and trying to look as though he's just making up his mind rather than literally tightening his belt, when just as suspiciously as a miracle he finds a wallet stuffed full of clean crisp twenties all but under his foot. $1.50 of all-day breakfast and a good cigar later, he's well-fed enough to have a bad conscience and sets out to return the wallet and its remaining $79.50 to its owner, the elegant Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran) whose rococo mansion looks like a hothouse owned by the Emperor Tiberius. We're quickly clued in that the man himself has the decadent sadism to match, but something about the amiable honesty of his visitor inclines him to engage "Scotty" as his new chauffeur over the objections of his skeptical right-hand man Gino (Peter Lorre) and then to test his new hire's nerves in a sleek Cadillac modified to give its owner backseat control of the throttle and the brakes. Chuck passes with flying colors, adroitly avoiding T-boning a locomotive at a hundred and ten miles an hour and responding to the hair-raising experience with nothing more than a bemused "I don't get it"—Gino mutters wearily, "Who does?" Praised and housed, apparently untroubled by the vagueness of Roman's "amusement business" whose import-export interests Code-skirtingly imply drugs, our directionless hero looks like he's finally come up trumps. Of course, his duties extend to driving for Lorna (Michèle Morgan), Roman's ornamental wife whose white-faced somnambulistic despair tells us even more about her husband's cruelties than the ominous sweetness of his smile; she can escape him only on the nights she has Chuck drive her down to the beach with its broken-off boardwalk and its heavy fringe of palm trees where she gazes out over the waves and weeps and gradually he comes to gaze out beside her and she weeps less. It can't be love that makes her ask him to cross her husband and book the two of them passage to Havana, but it isn't just the promise of a thousand dollars that makes him agree. He buys the first-class tickets, packs a suitcase with the trimness of the sailor he once was, casually arranges to bring the car around at nine-thirty at night per usual. "You got the kind of face women like to talk to," Eddie Roman observes of his chauffeur with deadly lightness while Chuck dissembles nervously and the eternally bored Gino glances up from his paper just long enough to sigh, "I'd say she was contemplating a voyage."
And yet the getaway goes off without a hitch, it goes off fantastically, melting from mutualism into romance with the effortless inevitability of a long-held dream. Alone as if really, finally for the first time in their stateroom aboard the SS Cuba, the fugitives exchange first names as gravely as wedding vows; discovered in a carriage outside the nightclub "La Habana," they are not making out showily like tourists but locked in one another's arms with an intensity it seems vaguely indecent to eavesdrop on. He holds her with a confidence we've never seen outside of his driving. She no longer looks like the ghost of one of her husband's classical marbles. As the crowd's chatter stills for the languorous tenor of a torch singer whose performance edges up against the fourth wall—Havana, like the stars in a dream song and guitars in a theme song, you're a promise of love—Chuck and Lorna look truly as though they are the bounds of each other's world, a private, absorbing sphere to which this one merely plays paparazzi backdrop. It's all so narcotically oneiric that when the action jags suddenly into nightmare, it only feels like a natural extension of the film's noir credentials. Quick as the pop of a flashbulb, the romantic fantasy shatters into a wrong-man thriller: Chuck with blood on his hands finds himself mazed and baffled in a mise-en-abyme as baroque and nocturnal as his employer's mansion was lazily sunlit. "My clients have a chronic tendency to color the truth," growls the hard-bitten Lieutenant Acosta (Alexis Minotis), but reality itself seems to be playing Chuck false. The crucial evidence of a carved jade covers its eyes instead of its ears; an exonerating witness (Nina Koshetz) incriminates him instead. Behind a flophouse door tacked with a quarantine notice, a young woman (Yolanda Lacca) is weeping over a table whose odd assortment of objects—an unlit candle, two empty cups, a half-eaten watermelon with a fork still standing in it—resembles one of Goya's disturbing still lifes. The black spaces that well behind such paintings have been spilling out everywhere, into morgues and stairwells and film negatives and curio shops ever since the Liebestod hit the fan. By the time Gino appears as if to clinch the long shadow of Eddie Roman, the screen is all but drowned in darkness, guttering, obliterating, lit only by thin electric cracks and the funereal haloes of candles. If you are the sort of person who cares about spoilers, you might want to get up and get a glass of water now.
I have never before seen a movie spring the it-was-all-a-dream twist ending at the top of the third act. Nightmare fakeouts, sure. I just saw two in Night of the Comet (1984). But an entire second act turning out to be an anxiety dream? That's n-v-t-s nuts. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) made no pretense of its extended Expressionist nightmare as anything but. The Chase treats its third-person events as unquestioned reality until we snap out of its downward spiral of hopelessness, paranoia, and decisively dead ends just as our protagonist does, dragged woozily into consciousness by the phone ringing in his chauffeur's quarters at the Roman mansion on the night he and Lorna are supposed to make their break. Dreamlike Havana really was a dream, but why shouldn't we have believed it? Noir is the shape-shifting genre, the genre of fears and fantasies into which the regular world stumbles and falls and becomes visible in a cinematography of shadows, a mise-en-scène of disorientation. Women are murdered all the time in this world, the wrong men held responsible for their deaths. It doesn't even necessarily break the spell when Chuck is fatally shot by Gino without ever uncovering the real killer of Lorna Roman—that might just be the moralistic hand of the Production Code swatting a couple of adulterous flies. It's heartening that it isn't, but it's head-spinning that the film does not stabilize once our hero's woken up. Swaying sweatily to his feet as the picture blurs and skips like vertigo, Chuck double-fists himself a dose of pills from that little glass bottle we saw in the first scene, catches sight of himself in the mirror, and then proceeds to take stock of his clothes, his surroundings, and his apparent employment with contracting misery. Moments later, a call comes in for the paternal Commander Davidson (Jack Holt) at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Miami: "You said if I ever needed you, I could call? Well, I need you now . . . It's happened again." The brittlely light, unhappy voice on the other end of the line belongs to Chuck Scott, crumpling a handkerchief and trying not to sound either embarrassed or frightened by his admission which flicks a new layer of unreliability back across the entire film, revising what we thought we knew about this shabby, accommodating drifter with a decoration on his lapel. He's a "shock case" with an "anxiety neurosis," or in more modern VA-speak he has PTSD; he takes medication for it; he's prone to dissociative fugues and knowing it doesn't make him feel better about the muddled blank of the last few weeks of his life. He remembers the dream and its sickening feelings of danger and failure far more vividly than wherever he got a chauffeur's uniform. His doctor encourages him to stop obsessing and let it go, but a woman's voice is echoing in his head, I could never make it— and the hands of the clock moving past nine tug at him with the conviction that they're counting down to something he was meant to do. "There doesn't seem to be any beginning," he groans. "All I can remember is the end of it." He's just summed up his film's audacious disregard for narrative continuity. Chuck may never reconstruct his recent past any more than we'll ever pin down exactly where the waking world left off and the dream began, but these gaps of plot and memory will not prevent him from recognizing the important thing when he hears it or the audience from enjoying a pedal-to-the-metal climax—complete with explosive model effects—which for last-minute garnish throws the Möbius screwball that its protagonist's dream was in some wise precognitive. I can't imagine this movie wasn't an ancestor of David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), but there is something almost stranger than Lynchian about the way The Chase wraps up as if everything is copacetic, not still reverberating with the uncanny. It's a generous gesture, but, I repeat, nuts.
I gather that The Chase differs considerably from its source material, Cornell Woolrich's The Black Path of Fear (1944): it may actually have gotten weirder in adaptation. If so, credit goes to screenwriter Philip Yordan, director Arthur Ripley, and super-noir cinematographer Franz Planer for creating a film that looks like it's just meandering along when in fact it's full of riptides and quicksand. I'm not sure it all works as well as its best reversals, but it has a pair of intriguingly fragile lovers in Cummings and Morgan, a genuinely unsettling heavy in Cochran, and no movie that has Peter Lorre in it can totally waste your time. I am quite glad to have seen this one, even if I don't know what on earth happened. In that uncertainty, it feels quite authentically Woolrich to me. This case brought to you by my reliable backers at Patreon.
It begins familiarly, if stylishly, enough on the sidewalks of Miami. Down-and-out Navy veteran Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) is blinking as hungrily as a little match girl through the plate glass of a diner window, surreptitiously dry-swallowing a couple of pills and trying to look as though he's just making up his mind rather than literally tightening his belt, when just as suspiciously as a miracle he finds a wallet stuffed full of clean crisp twenties all but under his foot. $1.50 of all-day breakfast and a good cigar later, he's well-fed enough to have a bad conscience and sets out to return the wallet and its remaining $79.50 to its owner, the elegant Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran) whose rococo mansion looks like a hothouse owned by the Emperor Tiberius. We're quickly clued in that the man himself has the decadent sadism to match, but something about the amiable honesty of his visitor inclines him to engage "Scotty" as his new chauffeur over the objections of his skeptical right-hand man Gino (Peter Lorre) and then to test his new hire's nerves in a sleek Cadillac modified to give its owner backseat control of the throttle and the brakes. Chuck passes with flying colors, adroitly avoiding T-boning a locomotive at a hundred and ten miles an hour and responding to the hair-raising experience with nothing more than a bemused "I don't get it"—Gino mutters wearily, "Who does?" Praised and housed, apparently untroubled by the vagueness of Roman's "amusement business" whose import-export interests Code-skirtingly imply drugs, our directionless hero looks like he's finally come up trumps. Of course, his duties extend to driving for Lorna (Michèle Morgan), Roman's ornamental wife whose white-faced somnambulistic despair tells us even more about her husband's cruelties than the ominous sweetness of his smile; she can escape him only on the nights she has Chuck drive her down to the beach with its broken-off boardwalk and its heavy fringe of palm trees where she gazes out over the waves and weeps and gradually he comes to gaze out beside her and she weeps less. It can't be love that makes her ask him to cross her husband and book the two of them passage to Havana, but it isn't just the promise of a thousand dollars that makes him agree. He buys the first-class tickets, packs a suitcase with the trimness of the sailor he once was, casually arranges to bring the car around at nine-thirty at night per usual. "You got the kind of face women like to talk to," Eddie Roman observes of his chauffeur with deadly lightness while Chuck dissembles nervously and the eternally bored Gino glances up from his paper just long enough to sigh, "I'd say she was contemplating a voyage."
And yet the getaway goes off without a hitch, it goes off fantastically, melting from mutualism into romance with the effortless inevitability of a long-held dream. Alone as if really, finally for the first time in their stateroom aboard the SS Cuba, the fugitives exchange first names as gravely as wedding vows; discovered in a carriage outside the nightclub "La Habana," they are not making out showily like tourists but locked in one another's arms with an intensity it seems vaguely indecent to eavesdrop on. He holds her with a confidence we've never seen outside of his driving. She no longer looks like the ghost of one of her husband's classical marbles. As the crowd's chatter stills for the languorous tenor of a torch singer whose performance edges up against the fourth wall—Havana, like the stars in a dream song and guitars in a theme song, you're a promise of love—Chuck and Lorna look truly as though they are the bounds of each other's world, a private, absorbing sphere to which this one merely plays paparazzi backdrop. It's all so narcotically oneiric that when the action jags suddenly into nightmare, it only feels like a natural extension of the film's noir credentials. Quick as the pop of a flashbulb, the romantic fantasy shatters into a wrong-man thriller: Chuck with blood on his hands finds himself mazed and baffled in a mise-en-abyme as baroque and nocturnal as his employer's mansion was lazily sunlit. "My clients have a chronic tendency to color the truth," growls the hard-bitten Lieutenant Acosta (Alexis Minotis), but reality itself seems to be playing Chuck false. The crucial evidence of a carved jade covers its eyes instead of its ears; an exonerating witness (Nina Koshetz) incriminates him instead. Behind a flophouse door tacked with a quarantine notice, a young woman (Yolanda Lacca) is weeping over a table whose odd assortment of objects—an unlit candle, two empty cups, a half-eaten watermelon with a fork still standing in it—resembles one of Goya's disturbing still lifes. The black spaces that well behind such paintings have been spilling out everywhere, into morgues and stairwells and film negatives and curio shops ever since the Liebestod hit the fan. By the time Gino appears as if to clinch the long shadow of Eddie Roman, the screen is all but drowned in darkness, guttering, obliterating, lit only by thin electric cracks and the funereal haloes of candles. If you are the sort of person who cares about spoilers, you might want to get up and get a glass of water now.
I have never before seen a movie spring the it-was-all-a-dream twist ending at the top of the third act. Nightmare fakeouts, sure. I just saw two in Night of the Comet (1984). But an entire second act turning out to be an anxiety dream? That's n-v-t-s nuts. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) made no pretense of its extended Expressionist nightmare as anything but. The Chase treats its third-person events as unquestioned reality until we snap out of its downward spiral of hopelessness, paranoia, and decisively dead ends just as our protagonist does, dragged woozily into consciousness by the phone ringing in his chauffeur's quarters at the Roman mansion on the night he and Lorna are supposed to make their break. Dreamlike Havana really was a dream, but why shouldn't we have believed it? Noir is the shape-shifting genre, the genre of fears and fantasies into which the regular world stumbles and falls and becomes visible in a cinematography of shadows, a mise-en-scène of disorientation. Women are murdered all the time in this world, the wrong men held responsible for their deaths. It doesn't even necessarily break the spell when Chuck is fatally shot by Gino without ever uncovering the real killer of Lorna Roman—that might just be the moralistic hand of the Production Code swatting a couple of adulterous flies. It's heartening that it isn't, but it's head-spinning that the film does not stabilize once our hero's woken up. Swaying sweatily to his feet as the picture blurs and skips like vertigo, Chuck double-fists himself a dose of pills from that little glass bottle we saw in the first scene, catches sight of himself in the mirror, and then proceeds to take stock of his clothes, his surroundings, and his apparent employment with contracting misery. Moments later, a call comes in for the paternal Commander Davidson (Jack Holt) at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Miami: "You said if I ever needed you, I could call? Well, I need you now . . . It's happened again." The brittlely light, unhappy voice on the other end of the line belongs to Chuck Scott, crumpling a handkerchief and trying not to sound either embarrassed or frightened by his admission which flicks a new layer of unreliability back across the entire film, revising what we thought we knew about this shabby, accommodating drifter with a decoration on his lapel. He's a "shock case" with an "anxiety neurosis," or in more modern VA-speak he has PTSD; he takes medication for it; he's prone to dissociative fugues and knowing it doesn't make him feel better about the muddled blank of the last few weeks of his life. He remembers the dream and its sickening feelings of danger and failure far more vividly than wherever he got a chauffeur's uniform. His doctor encourages him to stop obsessing and let it go, but a woman's voice is echoing in his head, I could never make it— and the hands of the clock moving past nine tug at him with the conviction that they're counting down to something he was meant to do. "There doesn't seem to be any beginning," he groans. "All I can remember is the end of it." He's just summed up his film's audacious disregard for narrative continuity. Chuck may never reconstruct his recent past any more than we'll ever pin down exactly where the waking world left off and the dream began, but these gaps of plot and memory will not prevent him from recognizing the important thing when he hears it or the audience from enjoying a pedal-to-the-metal climax—complete with explosive model effects—which for last-minute garnish throws the Möbius screwball that its protagonist's dream was in some wise precognitive. I can't imagine this movie wasn't an ancestor of David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), but there is something almost stranger than Lynchian about the way The Chase wraps up as if everything is copacetic, not still reverberating with the uncanny. It's a generous gesture, but, I repeat, nuts.
I gather that The Chase differs considerably from its source material, Cornell Woolrich's The Black Path of Fear (1944): it may actually have gotten weirder in adaptation. If so, credit goes to screenwriter Philip Yordan, director Arthur Ripley, and super-noir cinematographer Franz Planer for creating a film that looks like it's just meandering along when in fact it's full of riptides and quicksand. I'm not sure it all works as well as its best reversals, but it has a pair of intriguingly fragile lovers in Cummings and Morgan, a genuinely unsettling heavy in Cochran, and no movie that has Peter Lorre in it can totally waste your time. I am quite glad to have seen this one, even if I don't know what on earth happened. In that uncertainty, it feels quite authentically Woolrich to me. This case brought to you by my reliable backers at Patreon.
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Robert Cummings reminds me of Damian Lewis without particularly looking like him; it must be the expressions and the slightly cartoony body language.
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Well, that was an interesting thought experiment.
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Having finally seen Lost Highway last weekend, I’ve been thinking about The Chase all week, and I suddenly wondered today in the shower if the structure might in part have been a way to skirt the Code— due to the second act, we’re primed, even as it turns out to have been a dream, to think of the leads as a couple, but in RL she’s technically only asked him to help her flee her abusive spouse. By the end, said spouse has been hoisted on his own speeding petard in the previous scene, freeing them to start a relationship without the censor being able to ding them for it.
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