With all the recent excitement about Whit Bissell, I wanted not to overlook Belita. I saw her for the first time a couple of weeks ago in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1950), playing the wife of Burgess Meredith's luckless knife-grinder; she had almost nothing to do onscreen but fret over her husband, but she had a more interesting face than either of the official female leads, like a fox turned human, white-blonde, and hard to wow. Almost the next night, she turned up in The Gangster (1947), a poetically offbeat, no-budget noir starring Barry Sullivan as a disintegrating racketeer in the low-rent purgatory of a thinly disguised Brighton Beach; again she had a relatively stock part as the antihero's glamorous, alienated mistress, but she executed it so compellingly that when I saw her name above the title of The Hunted (1948), another ultra-B noir produced by Monogram Pictures under their upscale label of "Allied Artists Productions," I had to check it out. It aired this weekend on TCM's Noir Alley. It's badly flawed and Belita is great.
The title comes up over a dark road lashed with rain; it is the proverbial dark and stormy night and a blonde girl with a cheap suitcase is stepping off an interstate bus in Los Angeles. A man in a trenchcoat seems to have been waiting for her, without her knowing—she catches sight of him through the fogged-up glass doors and turns on her heel without waiting for a taxi, striding off through the drenching rain with her shoulders braced and her head down, her free hand a fist in her pocket. Four years ago, Lieutenant Johnny Saxon (Preston Foster) sent his girlfriend Laura Mead (Belita) to prison after he caught her holding the diamonds from a high-profile heist; she maintained her innocence all through the trial and swore at her sentencing that she'd kill him and her lawyer for railroading her. Her brother was murdered while she was inside. Their suspected accomplice skipped town without being tied to the "Winston job." The rest of the jewels never turned up. Now that Laura's out on parole, Saxon who claims her deceit cured him of sentiment ("She thought I was so soft or so dumb or whatever it was, I wouldn't arrest her. She thought her tears could wash out a cop's sense of duty") yet keeps her class ring like an amulet on his watch chain can't decide whether to treat her as a credible threat, a romance to rekindle, or a lead on the missing loot, so he settles for an awkward mix of all three, his dominant motive at any one time unclear even to himself. He gets her a second-floor room at the Ajax Apartments, a job teaching and skating at the Polar Palace. She's wary but not unreceptive, but there's a real edge in her voice when she mocks him for still being afraid of her; he can't tell if he's seeing the bitterness of a wounded innocent or the manipulations of an ice queen fatale and neither can we, especially since one doesn't rule the other out. She's tougher now than the aspiring star he remembers: four years in Tehachapi have put a curl in her lip and a weary contempt in her small, slight figure as she folds her arms and accuses him of accepting her guilt as a matter of macho cowardice. "Your pride was hurt . . . The other detective that was with you—you couldn't afford to look a fool in front of him, could you? Not even for the sake of your girl." Rain shadows run down her face as she sits in his window, not smoking the cigarette he lit for her; he lies on the couch, not smoking his own. "When you hate, you give it the full treatment, don't you?" They are each telling the cruelest version of the past they remember and we have no idea which of them, if either, is right.
I like Belita's approach to her character's ambiguity, which is not to plead her innocence except in long-held flashes of anger; more often she turns a challengingly indifferent shoulder, as if it's not her business to prove she's anything more than an ex-con five foot four, a hundred and twenty pounds, hair blonde, eyes green, charge robbery. She's not affectless—I especially like her fox's smile, which can be sad or knowing or sharp with nothing more than the tuck of her mouth or the tilt of her long eyes—but Laura is at her most concentrated and alive when she's practicing the art she had to shelve for four years in state prison where they don't have ice rinks. Born in Nether Wallop under the impressively barreled name of Maria Gladys Olive Lyne Jepson-Turner, Belita was a real-life figure skater, by which I mean that she skated for the UK in the 1936 Winter Olympics at the age of thirteen; she did not medal but placed sixteenth in the women's singles and turned pro the following year. We get to see one of her routines in The Hunted. It's the nightly specialty at the Polar Palace, this time right after the championship playoff between the Blue Foxes and the Emperors, and it made me wish I knew more about figure skating style and technique of the '30's and '40's—it looks simple at first because her jumps are all singles or doubles, but I had to remember that women wouldn't start landing triple jumps of any kind in competition until the '50's and even the double lutz and double axel are a couple of years away. She has a very clean line, a lot of speed and spring; she is slimly but visibly muscled under her vine-spangled two-piece costume and the overall effect is not of airiness but something vivid and lithe. Her ballet training comes out in some of her gestures and stances, the steps she takes on the darkened ice, always pinpointed by the chasing spotlight. She doesn't cross her arms or wrap her ankles anywhere near as tightly as a modern skater; it doesn't affect the sureness of her landings. Even conflicted Saxon grins for once with unadulterated pleasure, watching something beautifully done. Off the ice, she's less streamlined but just as hard to look away from. If she's luring her prey, she's doing it with such cynical panache that it would be an honor to fall for. If she's on the level, Saxon's just lucky, that's all. You don't disbelieve she could shoot him and walk away cool.
That I cannot say the same about Foster is part of the movie's flaw. He made a solid heavy in the noir Western Ramrod (1947) and I remember enjoying him in Doctor X (1932), but that's a pre-Code mad science thriller of the same vintage as Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and it would be hard for any one actor to ruin a plot chiefly compounded of serial killing, synthetic flesh, and cannibalism, garnished with Lee Tracy talking fast and Fay Wray screaming. The Hunted has no equivalent distractions and consequently late in the third act I found myself wishing that Charles McGraw had not been cast in an uncredited walk-on as a local detective because then I couldn't stop thinking how much better I would have liked the movie with him as Johnny Saxon. If you have never seen McGraw, what you need to know is that he had a jaw you could break rocks on and a voice to match and he could have coasted to film noir immortality on his physical charms alone; instead, whether he's playing criminal muscle or incorruptible law, background color or tough lead, he never phones it in. He adds intensity to any scene he just inspects his nails through. He's not even a very ostentatious actor. He's just absolutely present. Foster is not. He's not wooden, he's not on autopilot, he's not giving a bad performance in any technical sense; I just realized that most of what I felt about his character was in the script by Steve Fisher, not anything Foster was doing with his face or his voice or his body language to convince me of his muddled feelings for Laura, his soft-boiled susceptibility smudged by his willingness to believe the worst of a woman he's gone out of his way to romance and nastily shaded with the instinct to use her as bait for Hollis Smith (Larry Blake), the definite rat who couldn't be pinned to the crime. They should have chemistry it's not safe to strike a match around. Belita's guarded smolder keeps her half of the bargain, but Foster never makes me wonder as much as he's supposed to. I could wonder about McGraw and his expressive stone face.
The rest of the flaw is the ending. I have said before that I am not against noirs that end happily and I mean it. I am, however, against anything that ends leaving me feeling that all the emotional processing required for an HEA rather than a WTF must have happened offscreen or in a different movie. ( You'd sell your heart out, wouldn't you? ) The final scene has great parallelism of night and rain and two people with a lot of history in a small room together, but they could have said almost anything to each other and I would have liked it better than the actual dialogue. Was this Fisher's idea? Are we missing a scene? Is this Breen's fault again?
I can see I'll have to watch Suspense (1946), the first of Belita's noirs for Monogram; if nothing else, it has more of her skating. Jack Bernhard seems to have directed an assortment of Poverty Row B-pictures including the cult noir Decoy (1946) and Unknown Island (1948), a Cinecolor lost-world film with some of the most dubious dude-in-rubber-suit dino effects I have recently had the misfortune to put into my eyes. He and veteran cinematographer Harry Neumann get as much mood as they can out of the material they've got in The Hunted and even a few moments that need no qualification at all, like Laura in lightning and rain-shadow saying to the man who threw her over for the thin blue line, "Sometimes I wonder if the police force loves you as much as you love it." This chase brought to you by my icy backers at Patreon.
The title comes up over a dark road lashed with rain; it is the proverbial dark and stormy night and a blonde girl with a cheap suitcase is stepping off an interstate bus in Los Angeles. A man in a trenchcoat seems to have been waiting for her, without her knowing—she catches sight of him through the fogged-up glass doors and turns on her heel without waiting for a taxi, striding off through the drenching rain with her shoulders braced and her head down, her free hand a fist in her pocket. Four years ago, Lieutenant Johnny Saxon (Preston Foster) sent his girlfriend Laura Mead (Belita) to prison after he caught her holding the diamonds from a high-profile heist; she maintained her innocence all through the trial and swore at her sentencing that she'd kill him and her lawyer for railroading her. Her brother was murdered while she was inside. Their suspected accomplice skipped town without being tied to the "Winston job." The rest of the jewels never turned up. Now that Laura's out on parole, Saxon who claims her deceit cured him of sentiment ("She thought I was so soft or so dumb or whatever it was, I wouldn't arrest her. She thought her tears could wash out a cop's sense of duty") yet keeps her class ring like an amulet on his watch chain can't decide whether to treat her as a credible threat, a romance to rekindle, or a lead on the missing loot, so he settles for an awkward mix of all three, his dominant motive at any one time unclear even to himself. He gets her a second-floor room at the Ajax Apartments, a job teaching and skating at the Polar Palace. She's wary but not unreceptive, but there's a real edge in her voice when she mocks him for still being afraid of her; he can't tell if he's seeing the bitterness of a wounded innocent or the manipulations of an ice queen fatale and neither can we, especially since one doesn't rule the other out. She's tougher now than the aspiring star he remembers: four years in Tehachapi have put a curl in her lip and a weary contempt in her small, slight figure as she folds her arms and accuses him of accepting her guilt as a matter of macho cowardice. "Your pride was hurt . . . The other detective that was with you—you couldn't afford to look a fool in front of him, could you? Not even for the sake of your girl." Rain shadows run down her face as she sits in his window, not smoking the cigarette he lit for her; he lies on the couch, not smoking his own. "When you hate, you give it the full treatment, don't you?" They are each telling the cruelest version of the past they remember and we have no idea which of them, if either, is right.
I like Belita's approach to her character's ambiguity, which is not to plead her innocence except in long-held flashes of anger; more often she turns a challengingly indifferent shoulder, as if it's not her business to prove she's anything more than an ex-con five foot four, a hundred and twenty pounds, hair blonde, eyes green, charge robbery. She's not affectless—I especially like her fox's smile, which can be sad or knowing or sharp with nothing more than the tuck of her mouth or the tilt of her long eyes—but Laura is at her most concentrated and alive when she's practicing the art she had to shelve for four years in state prison where they don't have ice rinks. Born in Nether Wallop under the impressively barreled name of Maria Gladys Olive Lyne Jepson-Turner, Belita was a real-life figure skater, by which I mean that she skated for the UK in the 1936 Winter Olympics at the age of thirteen; she did not medal but placed sixteenth in the women's singles and turned pro the following year. We get to see one of her routines in The Hunted. It's the nightly specialty at the Polar Palace, this time right after the championship playoff between the Blue Foxes and the Emperors, and it made me wish I knew more about figure skating style and technique of the '30's and '40's—it looks simple at first because her jumps are all singles or doubles, but I had to remember that women wouldn't start landing triple jumps of any kind in competition until the '50's and even the double lutz and double axel are a couple of years away. She has a very clean line, a lot of speed and spring; she is slimly but visibly muscled under her vine-spangled two-piece costume and the overall effect is not of airiness but something vivid and lithe. Her ballet training comes out in some of her gestures and stances, the steps she takes on the darkened ice, always pinpointed by the chasing spotlight. She doesn't cross her arms or wrap her ankles anywhere near as tightly as a modern skater; it doesn't affect the sureness of her landings. Even conflicted Saxon grins for once with unadulterated pleasure, watching something beautifully done. Off the ice, she's less streamlined but just as hard to look away from. If she's luring her prey, she's doing it with such cynical panache that it would be an honor to fall for. If she's on the level, Saxon's just lucky, that's all. You don't disbelieve she could shoot him and walk away cool.
That I cannot say the same about Foster is part of the movie's flaw. He made a solid heavy in the noir Western Ramrod (1947) and I remember enjoying him in Doctor X (1932), but that's a pre-Code mad science thriller of the same vintage as Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and it would be hard for any one actor to ruin a plot chiefly compounded of serial killing, synthetic flesh, and cannibalism, garnished with Lee Tracy talking fast and Fay Wray screaming. The Hunted has no equivalent distractions and consequently late in the third act I found myself wishing that Charles McGraw had not been cast in an uncredited walk-on as a local detective because then I couldn't stop thinking how much better I would have liked the movie with him as Johnny Saxon. If you have never seen McGraw, what you need to know is that he had a jaw you could break rocks on and a voice to match and he could have coasted to film noir immortality on his physical charms alone; instead, whether he's playing criminal muscle or incorruptible law, background color or tough lead, he never phones it in. He adds intensity to any scene he just inspects his nails through. He's not even a very ostentatious actor. He's just absolutely present. Foster is not. He's not wooden, he's not on autopilot, he's not giving a bad performance in any technical sense; I just realized that most of what I felt about his character was in the script by Steve Fisher, not anything Foster was doing with his face or his voice or his body language to convince me of his muddled feelings for Laura, his soft-boiled susceptibility smudged by his willingness to believe the worst of a woman he's gone out of his way to romance and nastily shaded with the instinct to use her as bait for Hollis Smith (Larry Blake), the definite rat who couldn't be pinned to the crime. They should have chemistry it's not safe to strike a match around. Belita's guarded smolder keeps her half of the bargain, but Foster never makes me wonder as much as he's supposed to. I could wonder about McGraw and his expressive stone face.
The rest of the flaw is the ending. I have said before that I am not against noirs that end happily and I mean it. I am, however, against anything that ends leaving me feeling that all the emotional processing required for an HEA rather than a WTF must have happened offscreen or in a different movie. ( You'd sell your heart out, wouldn't you? ) The final scene has great parallelism of night and rain and two people with a lot of history in a small room together, but they could have said almost anything to each other and I would have liked it better than the actual dialogue. Was this Fisher's idea? Are we missing a scene? Is this Breen's fault again?
I can see I'll have to watch Suspense (1946), the first of Belita's noirs for Monogram; if nothing else, it has more of her skating. Jack Bernhard seems to have directed an assortment of Poverty Row B-pictures including the cult noir Decoy (1946) and Unknown Island (1948), a Cinecolor lost-world film with some of the most dubious dude-in-rubber-suit dino effects I have recently had the misfortune to put into my eyes. He and veteran cinematographer Harry Neumann get as much mood as they can out of the material they've got in The Hunted and even a few moments that need no qualification at all, like Laura in lightning and rain-shadow saying to the man who threw her over for the thin blue line, "Sometimes I wonder if the police force loves you as much as you love it." This chase brought to you by my icy backers at Patreon.
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