The Turning Point - 1952

 

The Turning Point (1952) depicts a government committee’s investigation of organized crime. In film noir style, it becomes a kind of anti-crusade, a bleak tale of shattered illusions, of mobsters who get away with pretty nearly everything just by seeing how far they can go, of cops on the take, and a romantic triangle that blows up into bits.

This is our entry into the Politics on Film Blogathon hosted by the Classic Movie Blog Association.  Have a look here at more participating blogs.

Edmond O’Brien plays the head of the investigating committee, a college-educated, idealistic, and unimpeachable hero out to crush the gangsters and their tenacious reach into law enforcement and politics.  Though he states he has no political ambitions himself, nailing the crime syndicate would be his ticket to fame and almost any future political office he wants.

William Holden is his boyhood pal, now a cynical and savvy reporter who will follow the doings of the do-gooders and spare them as little mercy in his crusty observations as he does the mobsters.  The two of them are 1950s men in the gray flannel suits, better educated than their fathers, and considered to be more successful, certainly with more polish. But rather than easier, their lives seem even more complicated.

Alexis Smith also has considerable polish.  She is also college-educated, and comes along with Edmond O’Brien as his gal Friday.  She holds a kind of secretary’s position, we gather, but she is seen more often pouring coffee than taking notes, and hosting cocktail parties for the committee.  Holden sizes her up with a sexist if not exactly misogynistic attitude, noting at once that this apparently high-class society dame might be slumming.  He senses phoniness.  She challenges his self-superiority and his cynicism with her own well-pointed remarks and a withering glance or two, getting him only to admit that as a reporter, he only points out the problems of life and never the solutions.

Tom Tully plays Edmond O’Brien’s father, a tough cop.  Tom Tully is one of those wonderful character actors equally adept as playing lovable as playing hard-edged and sarcastic.  Mr. O’Brien invites his dad to help in their investigation, counts on it, but Tully begs off, wanting no part of politics or some high-tone committee holding meetings in a swank hotel ballroom.  He says he’s just a cop and wants nothing more than that until they pension him off.  O’Brien insists that he wants an honest cop like Dad on his side. 

But Tully is a cop on the take.

William Holden, who always seems to be giving everybody the side-eye, suspects this almost immediately and spends a good deal time tailing Mr. Tully, who is working directly at the pleasure of the head mobster, played by Ed Begley, who is so effective in these kinds of blustering, snide roles.  Tully got involved with the mob years earlier when he wanted more money to send his boy Edmond to college.  So we have the irony of Edmond’s superior education and supposedly superior morals bought with dirty money.

Tailing Tully brings us some wonderful location shots of the more run-down neighborhoods of Los Angeles (though the movie is evidently supposed to be set in some fictional Midwest town). There is a great sequence on the Angel’s Flight funicular, which we covered in this previous post.

Don Porter is also one of Ed Begley’s boys, as is Danny Dayton.  Even Whit Bissell, whom we see briefly when Tully goes to ask for some official records to be photo-stated, is also on the take when he rats to the mobsters that Tully has copied some info on them he shouldn’t have.

The result is Ed Begley putting out a hit on Tom Tully, and also having the mobster who shoots Tully to be killed in turn.  Nobody left to implicate him.  Anybody’s expendable, according to Begley.

William Holden, along with his cynicism for do-gooders as to how much good they do, now carries the burden of keeping the knowledge from Edmond O’Brien that his father is a crook.  Holden confronted Tully and gave him a chance to go straight by getting the info on Begley, for which Tully was murdered, and for which Holden now feels responsible.  If that wasn’t enough to carry on his plate, Alexis Smith shows up at his apartment to confront his arrogant detachment, and when he takes her on another tailing of bad guys, pretty soon she’s pouring his coffee as his gal Friday. Alexis is smart, and fearless, and honest with herself and others, and he likes that.  It’s a role Alexis plays so well, her intelligence and her elegance is part of her sexiness.  Pretty soon he has another burden; he’s betraying his best buddy.

Edmond O’Brien, who declares, “I’d rather nail one crooked cop than a hundred hooligans,” will eventually be crushed to find out his dad is one.  In the meantime, his dad has been murdered.

Edmond also catches Alexis with her head on William’s shoulder, but he asks no questions.  Some things can keep, or maybe he doesn’t really want to know.

One standout feature of the movie is the televised committee hearings conducted by Edmond O’Brien as he deposes the lesser figures in the crime syndicate in order to get at the top.  This is based on the Senator Estes Kefauver hearings on organized crime from 1950 and 1951 as a special committee of the United States Senate.  This was for forerunner of all the televised investigations that would become part of our social zeitgeist through the decades: the Army-McCarthy Hearings, Watergate, right up through the Impeachment of Donald Trump. 

Such TV hearings make us familiar with the individuals of our legislature, make household names of senators from states other than our own, and become part of pop culture.  We may expect that the trajectory of his political career will only rise for Edmond O’Brien after this. (Two other films released this same year of 1952 also featured Kefauver-like committee hearings: The Captive City and Hoodlum Empire, so we can imagine the impact that first-ever live TV hearing made on America.)

Carolyn Jones stands out in her debut film performance as a comic gangster’s “moll” being questioned by the exasperated Edmond O’Brien.

One of the witnesses blurts out the information that a company owned by Ed Begley will yield documents pointing to his guilt, and while O’Brien and his men prepare to follow this lead, Begley arranges an intricate setup of a gas explosion and fire that will destroy the building, and the apartments above it. When one of his men questions him going that far, murdering a bunch of residents in the building just to cover his tracks, Begley sneers, “You wouldn’t think we’d do it?  That’s what makes it good.  I don’t think a jury would believe it either.”  Pushing evil to the extreme to dare people to believe their own eyes is another tactic used infamously today.

Walking among the bodies of innocent victims after reaching the blast too late, Edmond O’Brien is disgusted, defeated, and he wants to give up, but Holden urges him to continue.  He tells him about his father’s being a crooked cop and makes the frank, and in spite of himself, idealistic viewpoint, “Even allowing for the apathy of the people and their lack of integrity and their occasional lack of intelligence, and that’s the fact that they all want desperately to believe in a certain majesty of the law.  And for people like you and me, the greatest crime in law is the lack of faith in the law, and that’s when we join hands with the hoodlums.  If they can convince us of the uselessness of knocking out crime, the difficulty, the fact that personal sacrifices may be too great, then we might as well hand over the city and the state and the nation, too…”

Then O’Brien and Holden shift gears to separately track down the girlfriend of the mobster who shot his father, because she has more info that would nail Ed Begley and she wants to talk.  Adele Longmire is great in her brief scenes. It’s a suspenseful search, but we find ourselves in the bowels of boxing arena (which is actually the Olympic Stadium in L.A.) where Holden is hunted by an assassin, played by Neville Brand.

Alexis catches up to him, but he pushes her away just the gun trained on him is fired.  Edmond O’Brien shows up too late again, and though we are certain by now that there is enough evidence on Ed Begley to bring the racketeers to justice, we don’t see that happen in front of us, and we are left with an ambiguous ending also for what future Edmond and Alexis are going to face.  The individual stories of the trio are brushed aside, made almost irrelevant in the wake of the enormity of political intrigue.

The Turning Point can be seen, at least for now, on YouTube if you want to have a look.

Have a look at the other great blogs participating in the Classic Movie Blog Association’s Politics on Film Blogathon.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.  Her next book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available for pre-order here on Amazon.

 

Ladies of the Noir - Pt 3 - Make Haste to Live (1954)

“Make Haste to Live” (1954) is our last entry in our look at a few film noir female protagonists. What makes this film interesting is it is more of a character study than just an action piece, unusual for film noir. However, this movie has a weak thread running through it partly because it never takes full advantage of exploring characterization, and partly because in those moments when action should take over, the plot wavers and pulls punches. This may be just another case of not knowing how far to push the envelope when the protagonist is a female. The 1950s is too early for Lifetime television.

The script seems to be the culprit. The direction gives us our moody shadows, our eerie setting of a lonely, windswept, isolated Southwestern town, and a man on the prowl who has just been released from prison.

Dorothy McGuire plays Crystal Benson, a woman who runs the local newspaper. She has a daughter on the verge of graduating high school, and a devoted boyfriend with a fascinating job superintending a local archeological dig in an ancient pueblo. He wants to marry her, but Miss McGuire keeps holding him off from marriage. McGuire has a deep, dark secret, and the day of reckoning has come.

This past coming back to haunt is classic film noir, where the protagonist is caught in a web of fate, but partly at fault through mistakes made. There is also a flashback sequence here, typical of noir, where we see how she got to the mess she is in today.

Before we get to the flashback, we see a nervous Miss McGuire on edge, walking through her house at night, listening anxiously for sounds of intrusion. We see her ask her friend the local sheriff, played with familiar Old West hombre charm by Edgar Buchanan, to borrow a handgun.

We see her give a sealed envelope full of money to her daughter’s boyfriend to keep in a safe and give to her daughter in case something happens to her. She gives no one reasons for what she is doing, and brushes off questions.

Then we see her sit before her reel-to-reel tape recorder and give us the answers as to why she’s done all this.

It’s an intriguing beginning to the film. The flashback is also handled well, as McGuire recounts to the tape recorder how, as a girl in Chicago, only a little older than her daughter is now and going by her real name then, which wasn’t Crystal Benson, she fell for a handsome rogue who she soon discovers is a hit man for a mob gang. Married, pregnant, and with no other family since the death of her mother, she suffers his possessiveness and physical abuse, until she finds her opportunity to escape.

She takes off on a cross-country bus ride to nowhere in particular, when she reads in the newspapers that her husband has been arrested for her murder. It seems a girlfriend he had on the side died in an accidental explosion from some stored weaponry in his house, and the authorities assumed it was McGuire who died because she knew too much. He is likely to be given the death sentence.

If this were a 1990s Lifetime TV-movie, she’d just thank her lucky stars and keep going. But it’s the 1950s, and moral ambiguity is a dicey thing for a female protagonist. Miss McGuire would love to see her husband sent to prison, but not to the electric chair for something he didn’t do. So, with the help of her pal, played by Carolyn Jones, she gets word back to the authorities that she’s alive. The death of the other woman is ruled as an accident, his charge is reduced to manslaughter, and he gets 20 years.

Now it’s 20 years later, and handsome Stephen McNally, who plays her vengeful husband, is on the loose and looking for her. McNally could have played heroes but Hollywood seemed to prefer to place him as the bad guy, at which he was equally adept. Villainy with a charming surface is sometimes more dangerous than a mere thug.

When he finds McGuire, rather than snuff her out, he takes the more subtle route by planting himself in her life, her home, and her community, telling everyone he is her long-lost brother. His method of terrorizing her is to keep right at her side, extort money from her, and ingratiate himself to her daughter, also his daughter. In effect, to take all the trappings of her life away from her and leave her without any semblance, any feeling of security. He cleverly asserts his old possessiveness.

In a way the movie is way ahead of its time as a film noir piece, using psychological terror as an expression of villainy rather than just the same old blackjack on the back of the skull.

Mr. McNally has, in his search for his runaway wife, done meticulous research on her. He has perceived correctly that she has told no one, not her daughter, nor her beau, about her past. Before his arrival on the scene, her excuse for this secretiveness would be of course to keep herself and her daughter safe. But now that the game is up and he’s found them, why not tell her boyfriend, her daughter, her pal the sheriff? Why not scream to the rooftops that this smooth-talking man who calls himself her brother is really her ex-con husband who keeps threatening to kill her?

Here is where the film, after an orderly start, seems to unravel. There is more that could be explored about Miss McGuire’s character that could keep the suspense in this story, that could provide logical impetus for her behavior. Instead, the film does not reach far enough into characterization, and seems to shy away from too much terrorizing of Dorothy McGuire.

There is a line in the flashback sequence that is simple but very evocative. McGuire returns to her deceased mother’s rented room to claim her mother’s things after the funeral, and her pal Carolyn Jones suggests McGuire leave the sad job to her.

McGuire refuses help, wanting instead to handle the disposition of her mother’s few belongings herself. She replies regretfully, “She had six kids, and I’m the only one of them that lived.”

It’s a line that does nothing to advance the plot, but it’s a great little trigger as to the kind of hard life McGuire has led, and the kind of person she is, with a sense of honor and a sense of perspective. Later on in the film we could use more of this kind of exploration, these kinds of hints as to what is happening with the character.

For instance, McGuire adopts the name “Crystal Benson” when she arrives in this remote Southwestern town to begin her life over. Why Crystal? Why not something less glamorous like Mary Jones or Jane Smith? How did she, a girl with barely a high school diploma and no work experience, come to become editor and publisher of a small town newspaper? How did she earn enough money in this depressed little town to own a two-story Victorian house? Where did the furnishings come from? Those antique portraits on the walls we see in the background as McGuire steps cautiously through her house at night, fearful of sounds -- who are they? Did she make up fake ancestors with fake names for her daughter’s benefit?

Her daughter, about to graduate from high school is played by Mary Murphy. She is a pleasant, restless, somewhat self-absorbed and empty-headed young woman just drifting along with a nice boyfriend who bores her. When she is told this visiting Stephen McNally is her uncle, she never questions this. Most teens would be annoyed that a secret had been kept from them. They would at least express surprise.

The daughter’s boyfriend, a likeable lug played by Ron Hagerthy, has a warm relationship with McGuire. How interesting that McGuire would trust this young man with her life savings in an envelope and not her own boyfriend, a man with greater sense and maturity, and resources at his disposal to help her.

Her boyfriend, played by John Howard, who you might remember as the stuffy George Kittredge in “The Philadelphia Story” (1940), is also a likable chap, clearly devoted to McGuire. His role is like the typical supportive girlfriend/spouse in film noir where he doesn’t have much to do; he just rounds out the life of the protagonist.

The cat-and-mouse game she plays with McNally, which also involves a local murder pinned on an innocent man, comes to head when she tricks him into following her into the nearby pueblo ruins, where there is a bottomless pit.

There just aren’t enough movies with bottomless pits in them. I really like bottomless pits and sidewalk elevators. (See this post from last April.)

The ending, however, falls flat as the writers and producers resort to a kind of accident removing McGuire’s problem once and for all. She has an opportunity to kill her husband in self defense, but this is 1950s film noir with a female protagonist. Killing in self defense is still killing, still a repugnant act, at least if the protagonist is female. Though there may be perceived justice in the act, it still stains the virtue of the heroine. If McGuire’s role were being played by Gary Cooper, he would have killed seven or eight people by now and not lost his hero status.

Sinless, she runs back to the arms of her boyfriend, whom she is now presumably free to marry, and to her daughter. We may wonder if she ever tells them the truth about her past. We may wonder if she ever plays for them, or destroys, the tape recording she made telling of her past. It would have been a stronger movie if she had to confess or at least unburden herself to somebody other than us. Dorothy McGuire plays the role with her customary sensitivity and intelligence, and with her talent could have taken the character to a more edgy level, if only the script had not pulled punches.

McGuire never has to face her mistakes, not really. She just has to outrun them until the movie is over.