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I spent fourteen years where everybody was scared
If I can trust my transcription of a line of dialogue, I watched at least the first five minutes of I Walk Alone (1947) late in November of 2019. One of the earliest of the impressive run of film noir produced at Paramount by Hal Wallis, it had hit the Criterion Channel the previous month as part of a trio directed by Byron Haskin. Until the déjà vu of a shadow-grilled Grand Central Station, I had no memory of giving the film even that much of a try. I can't figure out what happened. Did I fall asleep? Tap out with a migraine? Suffer a transient episode of anterograde amnesia? It was a very bad time in my life, but I should not have been able to lose track of anything starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Wendell Corey, and Lizabeth Scott, even without Kristine Miller and Mike Mazurki on the side.
In fairness to myself prior to the last glaciation, while I Walk Alone features a banger of a premise and a cast to die for and a pivotal lesson in the corporate involvements of crime that Brecht couldn't have improved on, the screenplay by Charles Schnee never fully snaps into place as the streamlined ironization of the gangster picture it seems to be aiming for; it has a herky-jerky habit of interspersing scenes of real movement and tension with much more perfunctory connective tissue, sliding down the string of the narrative to get to the next bead. If it were just a little tighter, it would be a live wire for the ages. Fourteen years after taking the solo rap for a shared shootout, a one-time bootlegger emerges like a time traveler post-war, post-Depression, post-Prohibition to find his former partner has not only traded in the joint ownership of their speakeasy for sole control of an exclusive nightspot, through the legerdemain of paperwork that is quicker than the eye he can settle an outstanding fifty-fifty split by cutting a check for a brush-off $2912 rather than a slice of the uptown pie. Cross a guy up like that in 1933, you'd make headlines like Charlie Solomon. These days, when power resides more inexorably and slipperily in boardrooms and bylaws than in heaters and blackjacks? Article Six of the Articles of Incorporation filed with the Secretary of State in Albany is mightier than a room full of gun punks: "I told you, Frankie. The old days are gone and you're gone with them."
Kirk Douglas was never better than when playing against his sculptural face and it fascinates me that he didn't have to prove it; having been introduced to the screen as a gorgeous milquetoast, he graduated directly to magnificent bastards like Noll Turner, a greed-is-good self-actualist of the bottom line who flashes his smile like a thousand-dollar bill and luxuriates in the high-toned fortifications of the joint he's named, as if in sly one-upmanship of the long-gone Four Kings, the Regent Club. Glamour is his way of life, not just the material compensations of champagne and a solid rating from Dun & Bradstreet, but the personal touch of manipulation, the edge on his charm that takes all comers as a challenge to master: "If I know what he wants, I'll know how he'll act, and I can counteract." He looks like an eager boy with his golden hair rumpled from pulling off his sweater, but he's such an inveterate double-dipper that his maquette of planned renovations for the club includes the installation of the sleek socialite he's courting for her connections alongside the good-hearted canary he's strung along for years. "I can handle—" he's always saying, of a person, a situation. He doesn't like to be reminded of his bootlegger's nickname of "Dink." He's shrugged the past off like an insufficiently smart shirt, whereas Burt Lancaster's Frankie Madison finds it falling across him with the light: "Bars, Dave. I guess I'll never get away from them." Blunt as his faithless partner's shadow, the ex-con drags memory behind him and clings to it, a two-fisted psychogeographer of gangland slayings and warehouses of Canada-brewed hooch, a wide-eyed victim of future shock even more dislocated than the veteran his embittered sacrifice helps him resemble. He's innocent of the music, the fashions, the politics of this new roaring era, cruising up Broadway with his face pressed to the glass like he's starving for reassurance that the city itself isn't changed. With an issue of Look in his prison-cheap suitcase that argues otherwise, he repeats the grim, unattainable mantra, "It better be the same." In his drape-cut chalk stripes, prefacing his entrance with the eloquently unsigned delivery of a case of Brunswick Lager, he makes an apt enough revenant asserting its claim for redress, though he's not such a dinosaur of revenge tragedy that he can't strike sparks with the girl he finds noodling on the piano as the club fills up for the night. He was the muscle, not the schmooze, in the days of the Eighteenth Amendment, and when his pent-up anger meets its ungraspable object, he crumples less like a paper tiger than a plutonium pit.
Archetypally speaking, Dave enters this picture with a sign pinned to the back of his brown suit reading "I am regrettably your favorite character, kick me," and the narrative does, several times. I have become more interested in Wendell Corey than in any of his Hollywood contemporaries since Van Heflin and for not too dissimilar reasons, including his matter-of-fact facility for looking like a fool or a heel or a fuck-up without caring if he does, and he's on especially spectral form as the beaten-down bookkeeper of the Regent Club—as much a ghost of the old rye-running days as Frankie, a pen-pushing wraith with a voice as muted as if he's haunting his own hollow mask. He lights up like a paper lantern at the sight of Frankie released into the wild of New York, but his shy pleasure in the other man's rediscovery of life on the outside snuffs out at once at the inevitable mention of their mutual "pal Dink." Standing between the high-voltage titans of Noll and Frankie, he can look as bland as his ledgers, but there's something submerged and fragile about him, the problem of squaring his painful affection for Frankie with the spectacle of his subservience to Noll; it's a performance with its own "B" set of books, the visible tenth of an iceberg of sunk cost despair. He delivers some of the film's most devastating lines like a substitute teacher at a business school and when he has occasion to cradle an unconscious Frankie in a dim stripe of alley light, the cue of a torch song cuts so exactly across the scene that for a second I thought we were back in Johnny Eager (1942). He recalls, too, a sort of sadder and soberer Newman Noggs, although his Dickensian predecessor at least had the sense to drop his dime before telling his abusive employer off. The line I transcribed in 2019 is directed at Dave and his sudden skittish vagueness on the subject of Noll. He is the major reason I really don't believe I saw and just forgot the rest of this movie; he would have imprinted me on Corey long before The Wild North (1952).
I like Lizabeth Scott so much that I hate to think of her as one of the flaws of I Walk Alone, although it is through no fault of her own; she suffers from a particularly egregious iteration of having to be the girl in the story. Considered independently, Kay Lawrence makes an attractive addition to the roster of noir's good women, a serious entertainer who dumps her glittering sleaze of a boyfriend as soon as she understands that he played her for bait against his blindsided rival "like you'd use a bar girl to make a man buy drinks," after which his complacent expectation of maintaining her as a post-nuptial side piece was merely insulting. She's befriended the wan bookkeeper enough to fix his ties for him without flirtation and is refreshed rather than offended by Frankie's reticence over dinner: "I've never been out with a man who didn't keep talking about himself and end up thinking he knew all about me." Her dry, crackling raw-silk voice is so distinctive, it feels even ruder than usual of the studio to have dubbed her singing of "Don't Call It Love." Her contribution to the film is damn near decorative. Everything that drives its action goes back to the three-way past of Frankie, Noll, and Dave, so emotionally charged over more than fourteen years that it barely grazes the subtext when Dave greets Frankie fresh out of jail as "just like Christmas" or Noll boasts to his skeptical major-domo, "Frankie's my boy. The three years we were together, I could get him to do anything I wanted"—even taken platonically, it's echt noir, the unfinished past that will always, eventually come due, and Kay has no part in it. It doesn't make her feel like an avatar of the future so much as a witness along the way. Compounding the awkwardness of the sidelining, her trajectory in the plot is already occupied by someone bound to Noll, drawn to Frankie, and guilt-ridden over being used by one man to hurt the other, i.e. Dave. Don't call it love, her signature number accompanies his fateful decision, if it's not the thing that's strong enough to start an earthquake in your heart . . . It is impossible not to notice that she is finally cemented into the narrative just as he exits it, as if replacing an unsuitable devotion with a more Code-approved one; I think neither of them would have begrudged the other and Scott deserved better than to be relegated to het pasted on yay, especially when she could disrupt far more heteronormativity than she brought to a picture. I am glad that Haskin had the chance to direct her again in Too Late for Tears (1949), which treats neither of its women as ornamental.
I can think of few movies that make such electrifying use of accounting. It isn't a joke, except by Kafka: the scene in which Dave is obliged by Noll to educate Frankie in the niceties of legitimate business which close him out of any hope of muscling in on the new racket doubles as the film's thesis statement and an emotional wringer. "Numbers drown me, kid," Frankie declared at the start of the night, a callback of trust in the man who kept the books of the Four Kings. Now he's floundering in shares and percentages of the intricate roundelay of Regent Incorporated, Regent Enterprises, and Regent Associates, so fiscally and lawfully wormed through one another that when he demands helplessly, "Just what does Dink own?" the question can't be answered except by more weary pettifogging: "In which corporation?" I have seen noirs from the '50's that haven't caught up to this awareness of the sea-change in criminal enterprise, the corporate untouchability of syndicates and shell games so much of a piece with the expansive prosperity of the post-war boom that it feels disingenuous to call it an underbelly, it's as all-American as a grey flannel suit. It doesn't just play like a cynical rebuke to the silver-screen gangsters of previous decades, it makes the sneer explicit by putting it in the mouth of entrepreneur Noll with his controlling interest and the buzzer under his desk: "The world's spun right past you, Frankie . . . Today, you're finished. As dead as the headlines the day you went into prison." As Frankie's fierce confidence ebbs into a blind-mazed rage in the face of personal betrayal and certified public jargon, Lancaster hollows himself out before our eyes until the force of the violence with which he is subdued is shocking, but the outcome is not a surprise. A piece of paper has already knocked him down.
I Walk Alone can't sustain this crystalline outrage to its finale, but its immediate fallout brings the film's night-world to one of its strongest sequences of brief, bleak life. Watching the ex-partner he blackmailed into cooking his books for years walk as if unhearing out of an aftershock of torn papers and choke holds, Noll with one of his irredeemable smiles observes, "Dave has a lot of brains, but not much stomach." He's left the heart out of that equation; as the bookkeeper explains on his return from the alley where he entrusted Kay with the care of the man they both love, "There's not even enough room for me to be afraid anymore . . . As long as Frankie understands, that's all I care about." He predicts his tormentor's downfall with gentle and chilling detachment, more like his own shade than ever, but a scene later he's white as a sheet in a nighthawk's phone booth as he tries unsuccessfully to ring through to Frankie and the ominous percussion of footsteps down the shuttered street quickens to gunshots; the camera tracks a blood-trail across the sidewalk, finds Dave in a heap at the end of it, the streetlight still caught in one open eye. In a genre that makes set pieces of deaths like heists or flirtations, it's one of the better-staged, wordless and thick as a nightmare, at once overtaking the viewer and making them wait for the awful punch line. When Frankie picks up the early edition, his own mug shot will stare at him from the sensational headline: "Cops Hunt Frankie Madison in Murder of Pal." It may be inefficiently organized, but no one could accuse this picture of not having enough plot.
The finale itself is maddeningly, almost brilliantly executed. In the darkened library of his expensive house in Jersey, facing the deep freeze of a meat locker in the kitchens of his own club, Noll who has fallen back on the crude force of a gun he doesn't know how to use anywhere near as lethally as his words finds himself confronted by a Frankie who has turned the tables of their history, for the first time using it to taunt his duplicitous partner with nerve-rattling reminders of gruesome demises and fatal mistakes, bluffing out a countdown of bullets with the memories that Noll tried to disown. "When it comes to stocks and papers and books that don't balance, you're better than me. When it comes to guns, you're down on my level." It is delightful to watch Frankie who has always struggled in time like amber finally move with it, synthesizing the lessons of his past with the realities of his present into the kind of strength which we realize Noll for all his slick reinvention never possessed, imagining in his narcissistic hubris that the same trick would always work on the same mark; it makes his climactic confession at pen-point all the more gratifying, the glamour peeling off him in unsubstantiated accusations and an incredulous whine as he protests the cheat to the unimpressed police, unable to accept his defeat by his own clerical devices. "Get yourself a lawyer, Dink . . . You might get off with fourteen years." That the film blows the kneecaps off this ironically satisfying ending with a last-minute retreat into guns blazing is a miscalculation of such magnitude, it feels like one twist too many of the Production Code, as if the audience could not be trusted to credit a prison term as sufficient payment for crime. I have seen cheaper, sloppier noirs stick their landings more securely. The actual last lines make a liar sweetly of the title and are fine.
Although he preferred to write at length about movies which he recommended and admired, James Agee could savage a disappointment with the best of them and his thumbnail of I Walk Alone was no exception: "Good performances by Kirk Douglas and Wendell Corey; a sharp scene about an old-fashioned gangster's helplessness against modern business methods. Some better than ordinary night-club atmosphere. Otherwise the picture deserves, like four out of five other movies, to walk alone, tinkle a little bell, and cry 'Unclean, unclean.'" I respect the turn of phrase, but the picture is really not that bad. It does interest me that it was such a collectively journeyman effort. All four stars were very near the start of their careers; at the time of filming, Scott was a veteran of four productions while Douglas and Lancaster had two movies each under their belts and Corey was on his second. Working from Theodore Reeves' Beggars Are Coming to Town, which had run less than a month on Broadway in 1945, Schnee had never written a complete screenplay as opposed to additional dialogue before. Haskin hadn't directed in two decades and never a feature film or a talkie for that matter. Wallis, of course, had been a successful producer of crime dramas as far back as Little Caesar (1931), but the group project could still have crashed and burned. Instead it's an intelligent, transitional, uneven entry in a genre it was helping to form, its bugs and features equally striking. The photography by Leo Tover is terrifically moody and pellucid and the decision by Victor Young to stud the soundtrack with popular hits of the '30's adds to the aura of ambiguous nostalgia—as performed by the Flennoy Trio rather than high-schoolers playing with their knuckles, "Heart and Soul" turns out to be rather good. Mazurki gets to flex his wrestling chops as the former doorman and bouncer of the Four Kings, now providing the same services for the Regent Club; Miller as the blue-blooded divorcée is basically a garnish of catty sallies and suggestive invitations; Marc Lawrence, Mickey Knox, and Freddie Steele lend their character faces to the gang that Frankie tries to marshal for his old-fashioned takeover. It is a breach of dramatic protocol to complain that all three lead actors are far too young to have set up as bootleggers circa 1930 unless they were Frankie Darro-grade precocious, but it must be acknowledged that the internal timeline of the film is completely banjaxed in terms of the number of hours in a night. If there's a contest for heartfelt, lousy apologies, I am inclined to vote for Lancaster's "I'm sorry I shot my mouth off about killing you and all." In short, I am pleased to have finally seen the other ninety minutes of this ambitious small noir; for people who prefer not to stream their media through Paramount, Kino Lorber furnishes a Blu-Ray/DVD. I can't believe that of all the movies I have seen lately, I Walk Alone is the one with an AO3 fandom and it's all Frankie/Noll in Russian or Chinese. This level brought to you by my balanced backers at Patreon.
In fairness to myself prior to the last glaciation, while I Walk Alone features a banger of a premise and a cast to die for and a pivotal lesson in the corporate involvements of crime that Brecht couldn't have improved on, the screenplay by Charles Schnee never fully snaps into place as the streamlined ironization of the gangster picture it seems to be aiming for; it has a herky-jerky habit of interspersing scenes of real movement and tension with much more perfunctory connective tissue, sliding down the string of the narrative to get to the next bead. If it were just a little tighter, it would be a live wire for the ages. Fourteen years after taking the solo rap for a shared shootout, a one-time bootlegger emerges like a time traveler post-war, post-Depression, post-Prohibition to find his former partner has not only traded in the joint ownership of their speakeasy for sole control of an exclusive nightspot, through the legerdemain of paperwork that is quicker than the eye he can settle an outstanding fifty-fifty split by cutting a check for a brush-off $2912 rather than a slice of the uptown pie. Cross a guy up like that in 1933, you'd make headlines like Charlie Solomon. These days, when power resides more inexorably and slipperily in boardrooms and bylaws than in heaters and blackjacks? Article Six of the Articles of Incorporation filed with the Secretary of State in Albany is mightier than a room full of gun punks: "I told you, Frankie. The old days are gone and you're gone with them."
Kirk Douglas was never better than when playing against his sculptural face and it fascinates me that he didn't have to prove it; having been introduced to the screen as a gorgeous milquetoast, he graduated directly to magnificent bastards like Noll Turner, a greed-is-good self-actualist of the bottom line who flashes his smile like a thousand-dollar bill and luxuriates in the high-toned fortifications of the joint he's named, as if in sly one-upmanship of the long-gone Four Kings, the Regent Club. Glamour is his way of life, not just the material compensations of champagne and a solid rating from Dun & Bradstreet, but the personal touch of manipulation, the edge on his charm that takes all comers as a challenge to master: "If I know what he wants, I'll know how he'll act, and I can counteract." He looks like an eager boy with his golden hair rumpled from pulling off his sweater, but he's such an inveterate double-dipper that his maquette of planned renovations for the club includes the installation of the sleek socialite he's courting for her connections alongside the good-hearted canary he's strung along for years. "I can handle—" he's always saying, of a person, a situation. He doesn't like to be reminded of his bootlegger's nickname of "Dink." He's shrugged the past off like an insufficiently smart shirt, whereas Burt Lancaster's Frankie Madison finds it falling across him with the light: "Bars, Dave. I guess I'll never get away from them." Blunt as his faithless partner's shadow, the ex-con drags memory behind him and clings to it, a two-fisted psychogeographer of gangland slayings and warehouses of Canada-brewed hooch, a wide-eyed victim of future shock even more dislocated than the veteran his embittered sacrifice helps him resemble. He's innocent of the music, the fashions, the politics of this new roaring era, cruising up Broadway with his face pressed to the glass like he's starving for reassurance that the city itself isn't changed. With an issue of Look in his prison-cheap suitcase that argues otherwise, he repeats the grim, unattainable mantra, "It better be the same." In his drape-cut chalk stripes, prefacing his entrance with the eloquently unsigned delivery of a case of Brunswick Lager, he makes an apt enough revenant asserting its claim for redress, though he's not such a dinosaur of revenge tragedy that he can't strike sparks with the girl he finds noodling on the piano as the club fills up for the night. He was the muscle, not the schmooze, in the days of the Eighteenth Amendment, and when his pent-up anger meets its ungraspable object, he crumples less like a paper tiger than a plutonium pit.
Archetypally speaking, Dave enters this picture with a sign pinned to the back of his brown suit reading "I am regrettably your favorite character, kick me," and the narrative does, several times. I have become more interested in Wendell Corey than in any of his Hollywood contemporaries since Van Heflin and for not too dissimilar reasons, including his matter-of-fact facility for looking like a fool or a heel or a fuck-up without caring if he does, and he's on especially spectral form as the beaten-down bookkeeper of the Regent Club—as much a ghost of the old rye-running days as Frankie, a pen-pushing wraith with a voice as muted as if he's haunting his own hollow mask. He lights up like a paper lantern at the sight of Frankie released into the wild of New York, but his shy pleasure in the other man's rediscovery of life on the outside snuffs out at once at the inevitable mention of their mutual "pal Dink." Standing between the high-voltage titans of Noll and Frankie, he can look as bland as his ledgers, but there's something submerged and fragile about him, the problem of squaring his painful affection for Frankie with the spectacle of his subservience to Noll; it's a performance with its own "B" set of books, the visible tenth of an iceberg of sunk cost despair. He delivers some of the film's most devastating lines like a substitute teacher at a business school and when he has occasion to cradle an unconscious Frankie in a dim stripe of alley light, the cue of a torch song cuts so exactly across the scene that for a second I thought we were back in Johnny Eager (1942). He recalls, too, a sort of sadder and soberer Newman Noggs, although his Dickensian predecessor at least had the sense to drop his dime before telling his abusive employer off. The line I transcribed in 2019 is directed at Dave and his sudden skittish vagueness on the subject of Noll. He is the major reason I really don't believe I saw and just forgot the rest of this movie; he would have imprinted me on Corey long before The Wild North (1952).
I like Lizabeth Scott so much that I hate to think of her as one of the flaws of I Walk Alone, although it is through no fault of her own; she suffers from a particularly egregious iteration of having to be the girl in the story. Considered independently, Kay Lawrence makes an attractive addition to the roster of noir's good women, a serious entertainer who dumps her glittering sleaze of a boyfriend as soon as she understands that he played her for bait against his blindsided rival "like you'd use a bar girl to make a man buy drinks," after which his complacent expectation of maintaining her as a post-nuptial side piece was merely insulting. She's befriended the wan bookkeeper enough to fix his ties for him without flirtation and is refreshed rather than offended by Frankie's reticence over dinner: "I've never been out with a man who didn't keep talking about himself and end up thinking he knew all about me." Her dry, crackling raw-silk voice is so distinctive, it feels even ruder than usual of the studio to have dubbed her singing of "Don't Call It Love." Her contribution to the film is damn near decorative. Everything that drives its action goes back to the three-way past of Frankie, Noll, and Dave, so emotionally charged over more than fourteen years that it barely grazes the subtext when Dave greets Frankie fresh out of jail as "just like Christmas" or Noll boasts to his skeptical major-domo, "Frankie's my boy. The three years we were together, I could get him to do anything I wanted"—even taken platonically, it's echt noir, the unfinished past that will always, eventually come due, and Kay has no part in it. It doesn't make her feel like an avatar of the future so much as a witness along the way. Compounding the awkwardness of the sidelining, her trajectory in the plot is already occupied by someone bound to Noll, drawn to Frankie, and guilt-ridden over being used by one man to hurt the other, i.e. Dave. Don't call it love, her signature number accompanies his fateful decision, if it's not the thing that's strong enough to start an earthquake in your heart . . . It is impossible not to notice that she is finally cemented into the narrative just as he exits it, as if replacing an unsuitable devotion with a more Code-approved one; I think neither of them would have begrudged the other and Scott deserved better than to be relegated to het pasted on yay, especially when she could disrupt far more heteronormativity than she brought to a picture. I am glad that Haskin had the chance to direct her again in Too Late for Tears (1949), which treats neither of its women as ornamental.
I can think of few movies that make such electrifying use of accounting. It isn't a joke, except by Kafka: the scene in which Dave is obliged by Noll to educate Frankie in the niceties of legitimate business which close him out of any hope of muscling in on the new racket doubles as the film's thesis statement and an emotional wringer. "Numbers drown me, kid," Frankie declared at the start of the night, a callback of trust in the man who kept the books of the Four Kings. Now he's floundering in shares and percentages of the intricate roundelay of Regent Incorporated, Regent Enterprises, and Regent Associates, so fiscally and lawfully wormed through one another that when he demands helplessly, "Just what does Dink own?" the question can't be answered except by more weary pettifogging: "In which corporation?" I have seen noirs from the '50's that haven't caught up to this awareness of the sea-change in criminal enterprise, the corporate untouchability of syndicates and shell games so much of a piece with the expansive prosperity of the post-war boom that it feels disingenuous to call it an underbelly, it's as all-American as a grey flannel suit. It doesn't just play like a cynical rebuke to the silver-screen gangsters of previous decades, it makes the sneer explicit by putting it in the mouth of entrepreneur Noll with his controlling interest and the buzzer under his desk: "The world's spun right past you, Frankie . . . Today, you're finished. As dead as the headlines the day you went into prison." As Frankie's fierce confidence ebbs into a blind-mazed rage in the face of personal betrayal and certified public jargon, Lancaster hollows himself out before our eyes until the force of the violence with which he is subdued is shocking, but the outcome is not a surprise. A piece of paper has already knocked him down.
I Walk Alone can't sustain this crystalline outrage to its finale, but its immediate fallout brings the film's night-world to one of its strongest sequences of brief, bleak life. Watching the ex-partner he blackmailed into cooking his books for years walk as if unhearing out of an aftershock of torn papers and choke holds, Noll with one of his irredeemable smiles observes, "Dave has a lot of brains, but not much stomach." He's left the heart out of that equation; as the bookkeeper explains on his return from the alley where he entrusted Kay with the care of the man they both love, "There's not even enough room for me to be afraid anymore . . . As long as Frankie understands, that's all I care about." He predicts his tormentor's downfall with gentle and chilling detachment, more like his own shade than ever, but a scene later he's white as a sheet in a nighthawk's phone booth as he tries unsuccessfully to ring through to Frankie and the ominous percussion of footsteps down the shuttered street quickens to gunshots; the camera tracks a blood-trail across the sidewalk, finds Dave in a heap at the end of it, the streetlight still caught in one open eye. In a genre that makes set pieces of deaths like heists or flirtations, it's one of the better-staged, wordless and thick as a nightmare, at once overtaking the viewer and making them wait for the awful punch line. When Frankie picks up the early edition, his own mug shot will stare at him from the sensational headline: "Cops Hunt Frankie Madison in Murder of Pal." It may be inefficiently organized, but no one could accuse this picture of not having enough plot.
The finale itself is maddeningly, almost brilliantly executed. In the darkened library of his expensive house in Jersey, facing the deep freeze of a meat locker in the kitchens of his own club, Noll who has fallen back on the crude force of a gun he doesn't know how to use anywhere near as lethally as his words finds himself confronted by a Frankie who has turned the tables of their history, for the first time using it to taunt his duplicitous partner with nerve-rattling reminders of gruesome demises and fatal mistakes, bluffing out a countdown of bullets with the memories that Noll tried to disown. "When it comes to stocks and papers and books that don't balance, you're better than me. When it comes to guns, you're down on my level." It is delightful to watch Frankie who has always struggled in time like amber finally move with it, synthesizing the lessons of his past with the realities of his present into the kind of strength which we realize Noll for all his slick reinvention never possessed, imagining in his narcissistic hubris that the same trick would always work on the same mark; it makes his climactic confession at pen-point all the more gratifying, the glamour peeling off him in unsubstantiated accusations and an incredulous whine as he protests the cheat to the unimpressed police, unable to accept his defeat by his own clerical devices. "Get yourself a lawyer, Dink . . . You might get off with fourteen years." That the film blows the kneecaps off this ironically satisfying ending with a last-minute retreat into guns blazing is a miscalculation of such magnitude, it feels like one twist too many of the Production Code, as if the audience could not be trusted to credit a prison term as sufficient payment for crime. I have seen cheaper, sloppier noirs stick their landings more securely. The actual last lines make a liar sweetly of the title and are fine.
Although he preferred to write at length about movies which he recommended and admired, James Agee could savage a disappointment with the best of them and his thumbnail of I Walk Alone was no exception: "Good performances by Kirk Douglas and Wendell Corey; a sharp scene about an old-fashioned gangster's helplessness against modern business methods. Some better than ordinary night-club atmosphere. Otherwise the picture deserves, like four out of five other movies, to walk alone, tinkle a little bell, and cry 'Unclean, unclean.'" I respect the turn of phrase, but the picture is really not that bad. It does interest me that it was such a collectively journeyman effort. All four stars were very near the start of their careers; at the time of filming, Scott was a veteran of four productions while Douglas and Lancaster had two movies each under their belts and Corey was on his second. Working from Theodore Reeves' Beggars Are Coming to Town, which had run less than a month on Broadway in 1945, Schnee had never written a complete screenplay as opposed to additional dialogue before. Haskin hadn't directed in two decades and never a feature film or a talkie for that matter. Wallis, of course, had been a successful producer of crime dramas as far back as Little Caesar (1931), but the group project could still have crashed and burned. Instead it's an intelligent, transitional, uneven entry in a genre it was helping to form, its bugs and features equally striking. The photography by Leo Tover is terrifically moody and pellucid and the decision by Victor Young to stud the soundtrack with popular hits of the '30's adds to the aura of ambiguous nostalgia—as performed by the Flennoy Trio rather than high-schoolers playing with their knuckles, "Heart and Soul" turns out to be rather good. Mazurki gets to flex his wrestling chops as the former doorman and bouncer of the Four Kings, now providing the same services for the Regent Club; Miller as the blue-blooded divorcée is basically a garnish of catty sallies and suggestive invitations; Marc Lawrence, Mickey Knox, and Freddie Steele lend their character faces to the gang that Frankie tries to marshal for his old-fashioned takeover. It is a breach of dramatic protocol to complain that all three lead actors are far too young to have set up as bootleggers circa 1930 unless they were Frankie Darro-grade precocious, but it must be acknowledged that the internal timeline of the film is completely banjaxed in terms of the number of hours in a night. If there's a contest for heartfelt, lousy apologies, I am inclined to vote for Lancaster's "I'm sorry I shot my mouth off about killing you and all." In short, I am pleased to have finally seen the other ninety minutes of this ambitious small noir; for people who prefer not to stream their media through Paramount, Kino Lorber furnishes a Blu-Ray/DVD. I can't believe that of all the movies I have seen lately, I Walk Alone is the one with an AO3 fandom and it's all Frankie/Noll in Russian or Chinese. This level brought to you by my balanced backers at Patreon.
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I suspect anyone watching me read your lovely review would have seen a freeze frame and heard a record scratch as I got to the bit about the A03 fandom.
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If it ended three minutes sooner and just knew what to do with Lizabeth Scott, I'd love it. As it is, I imagine I'd have liked it in the late fall of 2019 if I hadn't tapped out for whatever probably medical reason. I do feel slightly bad about not remembering Dave, even on five minutes' acquaintance.
I suspect anyone watching me read your lovely review would have seen a freeze frame and heard a record scratch as I got to the bit about the A03 fandom.
It surprised me! I have gotten into the habit of checking because an unpredictable number of movies made between 1930 and 1959 have—usually tiny—fandoms on AO3, but this was not the result I was expecting to find.
(Thank you!)
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I think I've probably said this to a person. Do I need to acquire a 1930s hat?
This is a very good review and now I wonder what made you blank on it in 2019 (I mean in specific, not just the aforementioned bad time, because you're usually in or out on a thing.)
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You should! You'll rock it.
This is a very good review and now I wonder what made you blank on it in 2019 (I mean in specific, not just the aforementioned bad time, because you're usually in or out on a thing.)
Thank you! There's nothing in the opening scenes that would have put me off or bored me—I like Burt Lancaster, I like Grand Central Station, Wendell Corey has a compellingly weird face and looks cute shyly glowing—so all I can think is that I felt too physically awful to focus on the film and then just never got back to it before it expired from Criterion. I can't find any other references to it in my own notes beyond the one line transcribed context-free. I would later fail to make it through Dark City (1950), also a Paramount contract player noir, despite the presence of Lizabeth Scott, but in that case it was because Charlton Heston in his feature debut wasn't doing it for me.
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Oh man, I can't wait to hear what you think of Wendell Corey's character in Holiday Affair.
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The next time it runs on TCM!
[edit] Judging by the last time it did, Next On TCM (of blessed memory) was a fan.
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This movie is beginning to sound like the one love triangle in the history of cinema I actually might not hate.
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He's right and he should say it!
(I can't believe that after decades of indifference, I am looking forward to Christmas TV programming. Thanks, Wendell Corey.)
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I think he must have thought of it as soon as he decided he didn't like the film. I've decided I like it, but it could have given me reasons to like it even better. (Justice for Lizabeth Scott.)
Agee's best putdown is of the 1948 film You Were Meant for Me: "That's what you think."
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Makes me wonder how many other films make use of that: death--or near death--finding you in a clear box, coffin sized, but vertical.
If there's a contest for heartfelt, lousy apologies... --if there's not, there ought to be.
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Thank you! The film overall has that low-lit style where people get nice shadows just to have a conversation, but Dave in the phone booth is the most noir shot in the entire picture and the sequence that frames it is gorgeous, aside from the fact that I was deeply invested in him not dying, dammit.
Makes me wonder how many other films make use of that: death--or near death--finding you in a clear box, coffin sized, but vertical.
"In my glass coffin, I am waiting . . ."
What a wonderful, freezing image. If other films don't make use of it, you should.
(I have not seen Diva and I am not sure you have spoken much of it to me before, but I will look out for it.)
--if there's not, there ought to be.
We can always found one.