I know one good reason to see Felix E. Feist's The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950) and that reason is Lee J. Cobb. To be scrupulously fair, it also has some very fine location shooting of San Francisco, but I can get that in other noirs if I have to. As far as I can tell from experience and IMDb, having Cobb in a leading role makes this one unique.
I wish the rest of the movie had thought as far outside the box. Its plot is so stereotypically noir, I'm not sure Seton I. Miller and Philip MacDonald deserve credit for a screenplay so much as a kind of narrative mixology: take one beautiful, bored, bad woman; add one corruptibly honest man; stir in their lawful counterparts; shake well with a major city and garnish with deep-focus photography; serve over the Production Code. You'll have a headache in the morning. It doesn't help that the story begins in such a flurry of forebodings that the viewer never quite knows if socialite Lois Frazer (Jane Wyatt) really shot her second husband in justifiable self-defense or if she just wanted a witness when she beat him to the draw on spousal homicide, but either way the responsibility of calling it in or covering it up lands with new man in her life Ed Cullen (Cobb) and he makes his choice with the cynicism of a veteran lieutenant of the SFPD: "The truth can get you twenty years." He dumps the body at the airport where the dead man had the alibi of a flight to Seattle waiting, ditches the gun over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge; then the hardest part is convincingly investigating a crime scene he personally fudged, which since it entails persistently misleading and discouraging his eager-beaver partner turns out to be harder than he thought. Said partner is his rookie brother Andy (John Dall), so proud of his recent promotion to homicide and the chance to work a case with his much-admired big brother that he defers his honeymoon with sunny commercial artist Janet (Lisa Howard) to ask a lot of inconveniently intelligent questions. And then a liquor store's held up with a gun Ed thought was at the bottom of the bay and an Italian fisherman's punk kid can be fingered for it and the moral event horizons start coming up fast. None of it is bad enough to check out of, but except for the street views by Russell Harlan and the novelty of seeing Dall on the right side of the law, none of it's all that gripping, either.
Except Cobb. Onstage he originated Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman in 1949; onscreen, if he was prominent in a picture, he was usually the heavy—Thieves' Highway (1949), On the Waterfront (1954), Twelve Angry Men (1957). Sometimes he played figures of authority, but they could be just as hard as his antagonists and as often as not older than the actor himself. As the presumed eponym of The Man Who Cheated Himself, he looks about his own thirty-eight, professional world-weariness not yet burned in. He's too tough and substantial to come off as a schlub, but he's a big guy and his dark hair has already receded a lot further than makes a man look glamorous in mid-century Hollywood; he has a no-nonsense bari-sax voice that always seems to have a phantom cigarette around its edges and he takes up a lot of rumpled space. And he is a romantic loser in the grand tradition, the kind of self-aware self-saboteur who, when gently nudged by his squeaky-clean brother to "find a girl that's good for you," shrugs himself out of the conversation with the prophetically philosophical rimshot "This one's good for me. She's no good, but that's the way it is." I get that many noir titles are about looking good on the marquee rather than relating to the plot, but it's especially hard for me to put much stock in this one when I can hear the affection in Ed's voice as he banters with Lois about how much they love each other and how long it won't last. "I know you too well, baby. You change your mind too fast and when you're through, you're through." When she talks of running away to the South Seas, he points out that's nowhere for him to be stranded. She draws back to study him with what looks like sincere, searching hurt: "You think I'd ever leave you?" With real, level relish as he pulls her back in for the kiss: "Yeah." He's not so much a fall guy as a man looking for something to fall for and he'll get it by the end of the picture, a stone cold kiss-off that leaves him looking after her with a wryly powerful, tender concession, as if he's lost a bet with himself but seen something absolutely magnificent in the wild, selfishness in its purest, most Platonic form. It would work even better if Wyatt could match him in any of their other scenes. She really can't and I feel it can't be her fault, because I have seen her be good—in film noir, even!—as recently as Pitfall (1948), but whether through the lines she had to work with or the direction she received, her Lois never comes to life except in her prettier, brittler aspects, leaving the heavy lifting of the bad romance to Cobb. He manages; he sells Ed's crucial combination of workplace street smarts and off-the-clock tire fire without ever looking like an idiot; but that last exchange of looks in the courthouse is the one moment the relationship feels as hot and deep and disastrous as I think it's meant to. Dall and Howard actually have a nice, playful, casual chemistry, but their characters are straight as dice and nowhere near as fun.
I had meant to write about some of the more famous noirs I watched earlier this week—Brute Force (1947), T-Men (1947), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)—but I got distracted by The Man Who Cheated Himself, which may or may not be more than it deserves. If you are not crazy about Lee J. Cobb, see how you feel about the climactic sequence shot at Fort Point, all hollow brick and echoing concrete and girders twisting the wind around themselves, chewed-out chain-link and dust-blown steel stairs clanging in a maze of dry grey sun: it's vintage ruin porn and not a word or a cue of music until the waiting is done. The whole thing runs 81 minutes, a respectable time for a B-noir; I watched it off TCM, but you can get it from Flicker Alley courtesy of recent and loving restoration by the Film Noir Foundation. Just for the pulp of the phrasing, I am fond of Ed grousing to his brother, "Eight thousand blue coupes in the city and you get married to mine." This fall brought to you by my fast backers at Patreon.
I wish the rest of the movie had thought as far outside the box. Its plot is so stereotypically noir, I'm not sure Seton I. Miller and Philip MacDonald deserve credit for a screenplay so much as a kind of narrative mixology: take one beautiful, bored, bad woman; add one corruptibly honest man; stir in their lawful counterparts; shake well with a major city and garnish with deep-focus photography; serve over the Production Code. You'll have a headache in the morning. It doesn't help that the story begins in such a flurry of forebodings that the viewer never quite knows if socialite Lois Frazer (Jane Wyatt) really shot her second husband in justifiable self-defense or if she just wanted a witness when she beat him to the draw on spousal homicide, but either way the responsibility of calling it in or covering it up lands with new man in her life Ed Cullen (Cobb) and he makes his choice with the cynicism of a veteran lieutenant of the SFPD: "The truth can get you twenty years." He dumps the body at the airport where the dead man had the alibi of a flight to Seattle waiting, ditches the gun over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge; then the hardest part is convincingly investigating a crime scene he personally fudged, which since it entails persistently misleading and discouraging his eager-beaver partner turns out to be harder than he thought. Said partner is his rookie brother Andy (John Dall), so proud of his recent promotion to homicide and the chance to work a case with his much-admired big brother that he defers his honeymoon with sunny commercial artist Janet (Lisa Howard) to ask a lot of inconveniently intelligent questions. And then a liquor store's held up with a gun Ed thought was at the bottom of the bay and an Italian fisherman's punk kid can be fingered for it and the moral event horizons start coming up fast. None of it is bad enough to check out of, but except for the street views by Russell Harlan and the novelty of seeing Dall on the right side of the law, none of it's all that gripping, either.
Except Cobb. Onstage he originated Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman in 1949; onscreen, if he was prominent in a picture, he was usually the heavy—Thieves' Highway (1949), On the Waterfront (1954), Twelve Angry Men (1957). Sometimes he played figures of authority, but they could be just as hard as his antagonists and as often as not older than the actor himself. As the presumed eponym of The Man Who Cheated Himself, he looks about his own thirty-eight, professional world-weariness not yet burned in. He's too tough and substantial to come off as a schlub, but he's a big guy and his dark hair has already receded a lot further than makes a man look glamorous in mid-century Hollywood; he has a no-nonsense bari-sax voice that always seems to have a phantom cigarette around its edges and he takes up a lot of rumpled space. And he is a romantic loser in the grand tradition, the kind of self-aware self-saboteur who, when gently nudged by his squeaky-clean brother to "find a girl that's good for you," shrugs himself out of the conversation with the prophetically philosophical rimshot "This one's good for me. She's no good, but that's the way it is." I get that many noir titles are about looking good on the marquee rather than relating to the plot, but it's especially hard for me to put much stock in this one when I can hear the affection in Ed's voice as he banters with Lois about how much they love each other and how long it won't last. "I know you too well, baby. You change your mind too fast and when you're through, you're through." When she talks of running away to the South Seas, he points out that's nowhere for him to be stranded. She draws back to study him with what looks like sincere, searching hurt: "You think I'd ever leave you?" With real, level relish as he pulls her back in for the kiss: "Yeah." He's not so much a fall guy as a man looking for something to fall for and he'll get it by the end of the picture, a stone cold kiss-off that leaves him looking after her with a wryly powerful, tender concession, as if he's lost a bet with himself but seen something absolutely magnificent in the wild, selfishness in its purest, most Platonic form. It would work even better if Wyatt could match him in any of their other scenes. She really can't and I feel it can't be her fault, because I have seen her be good—in film noir, even!—as recently as Pitfall (1948), but whether through the lines she had to work with or the direction she received, her Lois never comes to life except in her prettier, brittler aspects, leaving the heavy lifting of the bad romance to Cobb. He manages; he sells Ed's crucial combination of workplace street smarts and off-the-clock tire fire without ever looking like an idiot; but that last exchange of looks in the courthouse is the one moment the relationship feels as hot and deep and disastrous as I think it's meant to. Dall and Howard actually have a nice, playful, casual chemistry, but their characters are straight as dice and nowhere near as fun.
I had meant to write about some of the more famous noirs I watched earlier this week—Brute Force (1947), T-Men (1947), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)—but I got distracted by The Man Who Cheated Himself, which may or may not be more than it deserves. If you are not crazy about Lee J. Cobb, see how you feel about the climactic sequence shot at Fort Point, all hollow brick and echoing concrete and girders twisting the wind around themselves, chewed-out chain-link and dust-blown steel stairs clanging in a maze of dry grey sun: it's vintage ruin porn and not a word or a cue of music until the waiting is done. The whole thing runs 81 minutes, a respectable time for a B-noir; I watched it off TCM, but you can get it from Flicker Alley courtesy of recent and loving restoration by the Film Noir Foundation. Just for the pulp of the phrasing, I am fond of Ed grousing to his brother, "Eight thousand blue coupes in the city and you get married to mine." This fall brought to you by my fast backers at Patreon.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}