It's hard for me to be fair to Pushover (1954). Any noir which stars Fred MacMurray as a discontented cop who falls for the moll he's been keeping under surveillance and plots with her to double-cross his brother officers and her bank-robbing boyfriend for the sake of a hot $210,000 is going up against not just the long shadow of Double Indemnity (1944) but the more recent acid of The Prowler (1951) and while it's no crime not to be Billy Wilder or Joseph Losey, it may nonetheless help explain why I had never heard of Richard Quine's second and last genre effort until last night. Ditto Raymond Chandler/Dalton Trumbo and Roy Huggins, who wrote a fast, nasty, terrific script for Too Late for Tears (1949) and here may have been handicapped by adapting the plot from two different novels, because what made it to the screen definitely doesn't gel. The central lovers are people; everyone around them is plot machinery and the tension just sort of slithers apart at the point where it should snap tight, as the plan that MacMurray never revealed in advance—and may have been making up as he went along—totally disintegrates thanks to a suspicious partner, a well-meaning neighbor, and a really stupid gun going off. The picture at least ends well, but it opens even better, staging a bank heist under the credits with a minimum of dialogue and a maximum of uncertainty. Having no idea where it was going, I was surprised when a security guard got shot in the back and we switched promptly to the exterior of the Magnolia Theater and a blonde in a rich mink coat leaving a double feature of It Should Happen to You and The Nebraskan. That's Kim Novak and her car won't start.
Novak is one of three things the movie really has going for it, the other two being MacMurray and the low-key photography by Lester White, which offers enough night and neon and rain-slicked city streets to give Walter Hill a hernia. Lona McLane is her first credited screen role and while the camera occasionally seems to expect her to act with her nipples, the audience can watch her do it with her eyes and the little twist of her mouth that's at once challenging and sad, as though she doesn't expect it to be much, but she's waiting to see what you got. She's tough and lonely enough to pick up a man twice her age because he was the only other person seeing the late show alone, smart enough to clock him as a cop after the third day, lonely and amoral enough to use that knowledge to propose a way for them to stay together and scratch violent Harry Wheeler (Paul Richards, a hard pretty face best seen in profile, like a pulp cover, between the brim of his fedora and the barrel of his gun) out of the picture. The breathy curl of her voice can make the smallest of small talk sound like a double entendre, but she delivers the best and most noir line in the film with bitter simplicity: "Money isn't dirty, just people." MacMurray is once again a heel, but Paul Sheridan is the nicest heel I've seen him play: more weary than slick, no longer young and beginning to wonder if he'll ever have better than a police detective's pay and his self-deprecating boast that he's "doing all right. I owe the Chinaman two dollars and thirty cents on last week's laundry bill." His parents fought endlessly over money. Now here's a bank's worth in easy reach if he can just keep a cool head and kill a man. The refreshing twist on this typically sordid relationship is that they really love each other. It's not immediately obvious or perhaps even initially true: Lona makes no bones about being kept by Wheeler for the price of "things I've never had in my whole life" and Paul was working undercover when he went home with "Wheeler's girl." The conventions of the genre keep the viewer waiting for one of them to betray the other, out of weakness or opportunity or deceit all along—the characters themselves are half braced for it. It never happens. Neither of them is as cynical as they think they are. But they don't know it until it's too late, until Lona steps deliberately from cover and walks straight past the gathered cops as if there's no one in the street but her wounded man, a gesture both poignant and feral, like a wild creature refusing to leave its mate. "We really didn't need that money, did we?"
Unfortunately, the remainder of the plot around them is so much well-lit but soggy cardboard. In the same year as Rear Window (1954), it is awkward, to say the least, to see voyeurism as the device of a meet-cute—especially when the man behind the binoculars is Philip Carey's clean-cut young detective, playing good cop to MacMurray's increasingly tarnished veteran—and it is disorienting in any year since 1946 to see his designated love object, the wholesome, hardworking brunette literally next door, played by Dorothy Malone. I have seen this woman successfully hook up with Philip Marlowe. Don't tell me she needs some kid who can't even keep his glasses on the right side of a stakeout to feel protective about her. As is so often the way of the socially normative het couple, while the script lavishes time on them, they are far less interesting than the criminals they're meant to serve as a counterexample to, except insofar as I find it telling rather than charming that Carey's character describes himself as "watching her" (coming home from work, doing calisthenics, changing) "like I was her father or something." Another member of their team is cannier and less grateful than Paul was banking on, but otherwise the police are an undifferentiated mass of law and trenchcoats. A bit part with a masher at a bar feels like an in-joke or a subplot that didn't come off. I don't mind that the double cross goes all to hell, but I wish it did so with some sense of timing. I wish the movie was as good as its main characters, is what it comes down to, and it's not. Even the title is one of those generic pulp efforts that doesn't actually relate to the story if you think about it for two seconds but looks good on a poster, especially with Kim Novak posed lusciously beneath it. But it's shot like it cares and it doesn't take up too much of your time and I'm glad to have seen Novak before she became inseparable from Judy Barton. This spark brought to you by my decent backers at Patreon.
Novak is one of three things the movie really has going for it, the other two being MacMurray and the low-key photography by Lester White, which offers enough night and neon and rain-slicked city streets to give Walter Hill a hernia. Lona McLane is her first credited screen role and while the camera occasionally seems to expect her to act with her nipples, the audience can watch her do it with her eyes and the little twist of her mouth that's at once challenging and sad, as though she doesn't expect it to be much, but she's waiting to see what you got. She's tough and lonely enough to pick up a man twice her age because he was the only other person seeing the late show alone, smart enough to clock him as a cop after the third day, lonely and amoral enough to use that knowledge to propose a way for them to stay together and scratch violent Harry Wheeler (Paul Richards, a hard pretty face best seen in profile, like a pulp cover, between the brim of his fedora and the barrel of his gun) out of the picture. The breathy curl of her voice can make the smallest of small talk sound like a double entendre, but she delivers the best and most noir line in the film with bitter simplicity: "Money isn't dirty, just people." MacMurray is once again a heel, but Paul Sheridan is the nicest heel I've seen him play: more weary than slick, no longer young and beginning to wonder if he'll ever have better than a police detective's pay and his self-deprecating boast that he's "doing all right. I owe the Chinaman two dollars and thirty cents on last week's laundry bill." His parents fought endlessly over money. Now here's a bank's worth in easy reach if he can just keep a cool head and kill a man. The refreshing twist on this typically sordid relationship is that they really love each other. It's not immediately obvious or perhaps even initially true: Lona makes no bones about being kept by Wheeler for the price of "things I've never had in my whole life" and Paul was working undercover when he went home with "Wheeler's girl." The conventions of the genre keep the viewer waiting for one of them to betray the other, out of weakness or opportunity or deceit all along—the characters themselves are half braced for it. It never happens. Neither of them is as cynical as they think they are. But they don't know it until it's too late, until Lona steps deliberately from cover and walks straight past the gathered cops as if there's no one in the street but her wounded man, a gesture both poignant and feral, like a wild creature refusing to leave its mate. "We really didn't need that money, did we?"
Unfortunately, the remainder of the plot around them is so much well-lit but soggy cardboard. In the same year as Rear Window (1954), it is awkward, to say the least, to see voyeurism as the device of a meet-cute—especially when the man behind the binoculars is Philip Carey's clean-cut young detective, playing good cop to MacMurray's increasingly tarnished veteran—and it is disorienting in any year since 1946 to see his designated love object, the wholesome, hardworking brunette literally next door, played by Dorothy Malone. I have seen this woman successfully hook up with Philip Marlowe. Don't tell me she needs some kid who can't even keep his glasses on the right side of a stakeout to feel protective about her. As is so often the way of the socially normative het couple, while the script lavishes time on them, they are far less interesting than the criminals they're meant to serve as a counterexample to, except insofar as I find it telling rather than charming that Carey's character describes himself as "watching her" (coming home from work, doing calisthenics, changing) "like I was her father or something." Another member of their team is cannier and less grateful than Paul was banking on, but otherwise the police are an undifferentiated mass of law and trenchcoats. A bit part with a masher at a bar feels like an in-joke or a subplot that didn't come off. I don't mind that the double cross goes all to hell, but I wish it did so with some sense of timing. I wish the movie was as good as its main characters, is what it comes down to, and it's not. Even the title is one of those generic pulp efforts that doesn't actually relate to the story if you think about it for two seconds but looks good on a poster, especially with Kim Novak posed lusciously beneath it. But it's shot like it cares and it doesn't take up too much of your time and I'm glad to have seen Novak before she became inseparable from Judy Barton. This spark brought to you by my decent backers at Patreon.
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