Backfire (1950) is a Christmas noir that begins bleakly and concludes with an abrupt and, for noir, startlingly happy ending. In between, there is a tale of friendship, murder, a twisted evil villain, and a bunch of regular schmucks caught in the web of life’s entanglements. Some of them end up dead.
It is essentially a buddy movie, though the buddies are
separated and never get back together until the end of the film.
As usual, spoilers here, a lot of them. Go play in traffic if you don’t like it. (That’s my noir tough gal talk.)
It’s also going to be a little long, so you might want to
get some ribbon candy to munch on.
Gordon MacRae, in his third film, does well as the lead in this movie made before his big musical hits. He’s a patient in a veteran’s hospital—the real-life Birmingham General Army Hospital in Van Nuys, California. He’s undergone many operations on his back—though, in true movie fashion, he’s without scars or visible limp.
His Army buddy, played by Edmond O’Brien, by this time an old movie veteran with many films under his belt, comes to visit. They are planning to pool their resources and buy a ranch in Arizona.
The pretty nurse, played by Virginia Mayo, advises O’Brien that Gordon MacRae won’t be physically fit to do strenuous work for a long time, and O’Brien considers trading the ranch idea for something else to help make it easier on his friend, but Gordon won’t have it. He intends to get well and wants that ranch. He is to be released in ten days. Edmond O’Brien cheers him up, says he’ll be back and goes off to raise some more dough for their post-war dream life.
Nurse Virginia Mayo has become romantically involved with Gordon during his treatment at the hospital (not a usual part of the treatment plan, but I'm sure it helped him get well), and they will plan a life together, too. The movie begins on November 18th, 1948. (Backfire was filmed in the autumn of 1948, but not released until 1950.)
Gordon must have one more operation. On Christmas Eve, when the hospital wards are decked out in simple decorations, and a tiny tree stands on the dresser in Gordon’s room, his operation over, he drowses from the effects of the sleeping medication Nurse Mayo has given him. We hear the soft choir singing of a carol.
But all is not calm and bright. In the middle of the night, a mysterious woman with a slight European accent comes into his room and tells him that his pal Edmond O’Brien has had a terrible accident, that he is in pain and wants to die. She does not know what to do and asks Gordon to give her direction. Gordon, barely awake and not terribly alert, tells her to tell Edmond to hang on, that he will be discharged in ten days and then he will go to him. The woman writes the address on a pad.
In the morning, the scrap of paper is gone and nobody in the
hospital believes him. He is adamant it
was not all a dream. We never do find out what happened to that paper.
Ten days later, when the Happy New Year decorations are being taken down, Gordon receives a clean bill of health by our old friend, Dr. Charles Lane, and is allowed to leave the hospital. He agrees to meet Nurse Mayo for dinner that evening, but she has not been able to convince him that no such mystery woman visited him with bad news about Edmond O’Brien. She concedes O’Brien has not contacted Gordon and has not arrived to meet him upon his release, but Gordon is not content to just wait. He must find out where Edmond is and what’s happened.
No sooner than does Gordon leave the grounds, Ed Begley, who plays police captain Garcia, has him brought in a car to police headquarters for questioning. Edmond O’Brien is wanted for murder.
Capt. Begley is no bumbling fool and can handle the investigation, but Gordon MacRae, in true noir fashion, stubbornly decides to crack the case himself. He does not believe his buddy is a murderer. He checks into the hotel that was the last known address for Edmond, the old Fremont, a run-down, little more than a flophouse, residential hotel that had seen better days. One of the delights of the movie is the filming at actual locations, like the Fremont and the Bunker Hill area.
Another is the cast of dependable character actors like Ida Moore, who played bit parts in movies since the 1920s. Here, she’s a charwoman, only too happy to help out Gordon and tell him what she has learned by eavesdropping. O’Brien, a friendly guy and great tipper, was a favorite of hers, so she’s concerned about him, too. He had money troubles, and argued with Solly Blayne, a professional gambler, in his room over the money he owed him. Edmond was trying to increase the pot to buy the ranch.
The gambler, played by Richard Rober, was the murder victim.
Gordon has only one other clue to track down his pal: a business card from a local funeral home. He goes there and talks to the owner, played by Dane Clark, who is a revelation in this film. Trim in a suit and almost mousy behind eyeglasses, he recognizes Gordon and joyfully announces he is Ben Arno, and they were in the Army together. Then Gordon remembers Clark, and shares the bad news about their mutual pal gone missing and wanted for murder. Dane Clark tells him he ran into Edmond at the fights and gave him the business card so Edmond could look him up. Edmond was the poor slob getting his brains beat out in the boxing ring – again, trying to earn money. Dane Clark wanted to help him and told Edmond he would give him a job. Mr. O'Brien was not keen on working at a funeral home.
When Gordon finally meets Virginia Mayo that evening for dinner, he hashes through the puzzle, but does not seem angry at her for sending a telegram to him with a phony message about Edmond O’Brien being alive and well in Chicago. That’s a thread that’s dropped, but we have to wonder if Mayo is part of a cover-up. She’s not, it’s just a sloppy red herring.
Actually, Nurse Mayo turns out to be a real asset in helping hunt down Edmond O’Brien. Together, Gordon and Mayo visit the gambler's widow, played by Frances Robinson. She’s distraught of course, and we see he has led a quiet life in his suburban home, no matter what nefarious business he did beyond it. We have our requisite flashbacks through the course of the movie, we experience the shooting, the calling of the doctor.
On his own, Gordon gets the idea to grease the palm of the desk clerk at the hotel for O’Brien’s phone calls (you’d think Detective Ed Begley would have thought of that), and he tracks down the address of a couple young ladies who share an apartment, one of whom Edmond was apparently dating. Gordon goes there, hoping to find out more.
Only the other girl is home, Bonnie, played by Sheila Stephens, who in real life was Sheila MacRae, Gordon MacRae’s wife. Her info sends him to a notorious racketeer for whom Edmond O’Brien was working just before he went missing.
No sooner does he leave, Sheila is killed by a gunshot from
a mystery man.
Death seems to stalk Mr. MacRae.
Plunged into another flashback, we see Edmond O’Brien (finally) at the apartment of this notorious big gambler where a party is going on, and the racketeer’s girl is played by Viveca Lindfors. Her soft European accent is somehow familiar. We will soon learn she is the mystery lady who interrupted Gordon MacRae’s dreams in the hospital.
Edmond O’Brien takes the job of being her guardian, reluctantly. He has no patience for babysitting a pampered gun moll. However, he soon sees her finer qualities; she is a lady, intelligent and more refined than he would have expected, and trapped by some sad or even tragic circumstances. She sings “Parlez-moi d’Armour,” accompanying herself on the piano.
He, and we, soon surmise that she is not so much a
girlfriend as a prized possession of the rich and powerful gambler, and she
feels oppressed and smothered by his ownership of her. She does not love him. She has grown cynical and resentful. We see that Mr. O’Brien, despite his best
efforts not to be, is growing enamored of her.
She has feelings for him, too, but both are reluctant to endanger
themselves or each other by whatever consequences there may be in betraying the
big boss.
At this point, though the big boss is in the next room at a card game in a party scene and seems ever near and omnipotent, we never see him. We know his name—Lou Walsh. Everyone seems to know him and his long reach over the lives of his underlings and enemies alike, but we haven’t seen him yet. Sheila MacRae, before she was shot to death, told Gordon that Lou is poison, that he is obsessed with Viveca Lindfors. Ah, if he is obsessed with her, and he senses that Edmond and Viveca are becoming close, that could spell danger for Edmond and might be a clue to his disappearance.
We are pulled away from the flashback when Virginia Mayo, Gordon MacRae, Dane Clark, the Fremont desk clerk played by David Hoffman, and charwoman Ida are all called to Detective Ed Begley’s office to be chewed out for not cooperating with his investigation and withholding information. When they are dismissed, Gordon and Virginia Mayo get to go along with the cops to the hospital bedside of a new person of interest.
He is the former houseman of mysterious gambler Lou Walsh, played by Leonard Strong. He is a Chinese immigrant, speaking in halting language, partly because he’s dying of a gunshot wound. Yep, the mystery gunman is getting around all over town.
We are plunged abruptly into another flashback (mind the gap, as they say) as the former houseman tells us his tale. He was working at Lou Walsh’s comfortable suburban home, where, at Christmastime, Viveca is still being guarded by Edmond O’Brien. She is kept there like a bird in a gilded cage, but by now, she and Edmond have grown closer in their relationship and stronger in their courage and decide to escape. On a dark, rainy night, he goes out to the garage, pulls out the car, gets out of the car which he has parked on a driveway with a steep incline, and prepares to close the garage door. The parking brake is suddenly released by an unknown person. The car rolls into him, pinning him against the door, shattering his spine.
The Chinese servant has seen this from the kitchen window, and he also sees the figure of a man outside—it is Lou Walsh. Walsh has overheard the lovers’ plans. We still do not see his face. Walsh had released the parking brake to hurt Edmond O’Brien, such was his obsession for his girlfriend and his unrelenting jealousy. The servant was so rattled and frightened, he ran away, afraid that Walsh would know he had been observed. Walsh evidently did, indeed, know and tracked him down, and shot him.
The man dies in the hospital before he can tell us any more, including the exact address of Lou Walsh’s home, the last known location of O’Brien. It seems anyone who has any contact with Walsh does not live long.
Gordon MacRae is stymied, so close on the trail of his missing friend and yet without a clue as to how to proceed. Then Virginia Mayo comes back into the story and proves to be the best detective of all of them. She recalls that the widow of the racketeer whom Edmond O’Brien is accused of murdering had called a doctor when she discovered her husband lying shot on their nice living room floor. The doctor’s name was Anstead. Nurse Mayo goes to his office after hours. A janitor doing his cleaning rounds in the building allows her into the doctor’s office when she lies that she is there in a professional capacity to retrieve files from the office—she has cleverly worn her nurse’s uniform.
Now playing Nancy Drew, Nurse Mayo rifles through his desk and file cabinet, and looking for a patient folder for Edmond O’Brien. The address where he treated O’Brien for his injuries is Lou Walsh’s home.
But the doc, played by Mack Williams, suddenly returns.
She’s caught. He
knows he’s caught, too, when she confronts him.
He did not report O’Brien’s injuries and treated him in the home of
mobster Lou Walsh, covering this and who knows how many other victims of Walsh
for a fat fee. He was told the injury was an accident; he did not know it was a murder attempt.
The doc puts her into another room and locks the door. At first, we might think Nurse Mayo, who thus far has shown quite a bit of moxie, is ridiculously passive in allowing herself to be locked up without a fight. But it’s a good thing, as we’ll see in a minute.
The doc, trying to ease his way out of this mess, calls Gordon MacRae and tells him the address where he can find his buddy. He attempts to destroy the file. In another minute, from behind the locked door, Nurse Mayo, overhears the doc say, “Don’t, Lou!”
Oh, jeez. Wouldn’t
you just know it? Lou Walsh (we still
don’t see his face) is out there in the outer office. He shoots the doc, and leaves yet another
dead body. He doesn’t know Nurse Mayo
has been locked in the other room, so she’s safe. Good thing she was such a wimp and allowed
herself to be shoved in there.
The janitor, played by J. Louis Johnson, will eventually return, find the body, and hear Nurse Mayo calling for help, and he frees her.
Our Gordon, in the meantime, has found his way to Lou Walsh’s
suburban home. All is dark and
quiet. He enters the house. Viveca’s piano is standing in the corner, and
a soft tune is playing, but there is no one sitting at the piano. In the dimness, we finally see that the music
is coming from a record on a phonograph.
Creepy.
Lou Walsh enters and Gordon turns to see him. We finally see him, too.
Son of a gun. It’s Dane Clark.
Mr. Clark is a humble funeral director only by day. He lives a double life as the notorious
gambler and gangster Lou Walsh. I
suppose a guy who shoots as many people as he does finds it handy to be a funeral
director.
It’s still a little dark in here, so be careful of the flashback
about to hit you right…now!
It’s back to Christmas Eve again, the night Gordon was lying
flat in his bed at the VA hospital, when Viveca, the mystery woman, came to
tell him about how Edmond O’Brien was injured and didn’t want to live. We now see what went on after Edmond’s injury
and crude medical treatment—surgery, plaster casting, metal braces—all done in
the home on the QT by Dr. Anstead at Lou Walsh’s order.
Dane Clark sits on the front step of his house, tense, smoking, waiting for Viveca to return--he would shortly learn she'd gone to the VA hospital to track down Gordon. Neighbors down the street are singing "God Rest Ye, Merry, Gentlemen."
She pulls into the driveway, approaches Mr. Clark--then the penny drops and she realizes the car’s brakes were fine. Dane Clark had previously told her that the car slipping its parking brake and smashing into Edmond O’Brien was an accident, that the brake was faulty. She knows now he tried to kill him.
She confronts Dane Clark, and in their exchange, he sees her disgust and contempt for him that he will never overcome, and we see his consuming jealousy, his rage at not being loved by her. Perhaps his most chilling line: "Tell me you love me. Don't make me hurt you."
Back from the flashback, back to the present when that fateful Christmas Eve has for many weeks been in the rearview mirror, Dane Clark confesses to Gordon that he killed Viveca.
“Why did she make me do it?” The sociopath’s ultimate defense. And he follows with, "And all time I kept hearing those Christmas carols."
We hear a slight movement, and Gordon wants to know what
happened to his pal. Dane Clark, growing
still eerier, says he’s upstairs. We
then see the stiff walk of a man in pajama-clad legs, a body cast, steel
braces, standing like Frankenstein’s monster at the top of the stairway.
Gordon has been careful and persistent thus far, but now his
own fit of rage takes over, not to say his sense of self-preservation, and he lunges
at Dane Clark, who is holding a gun on him.
They tussle, but Gordon, remember, is only a few weeks out from his
umpteenth back surgery. Remarkably,
Edmond O’Brien helps the only way he can, by tipping himself down and falling
on Dane Clark. Mr. Clark, still with gun
in hand, easily escapes the clutches of two men with broken spines lying
helplessly and in pain on the floor.
Fortunately, Virginia Mayo had the sense to call the cops, and Ed Begley and his boys show up right about now. There’s the requisite shootout, and Dane Clark’s trail of victims is at an end.
Nurse Mayo shows up, and they all ride in the ambulance together.
Dane Clark being revealed to be Lou Walsh was a terrific jolt that I must say, I did not see coming.
The second jolt was the tacked-on ending, with the three amigos riding away from the VA hospital again in a jeep when Edmond O’Brien, now good as new, is released. I like that Virginia Mayo is driving. They are all going to their new ranch called “Happy Valley Ranch.” It’s a cheerful ending, but one does not expect that in film noir. We’re glad the trio is safe, of course, but a little disappointed it didn’t all end a little more stoically. Maybe sitting on the front steps of Dane Clark’s house in the darkness after the shootout, where only a little while before, we heard the soft reprise of a Christmas carol.
There are a few loose threads here and there, and poor Edmond O’Brien, despite his solid track record in films by this time, doesn’t get a whole lot to do. Gordon MacRae acquits himself well as a nice guy and good friend, and Miss Mayo is given a more prominent role in solving the mystery than the girl usually gets in this time frame. But the film is still enjoyable, for Dane Clark’s really great performance as two characters, and for the liberal use of extras whose characters are important pieces of the puzzle—Ida Moore as the charwoman, Mack Williams as the doctor, and J. Louis Johnson as the janitor all have more screentime and importance to the plot than they probably did in any other films in their careers.
Viveca Lindfors, something like a dark-haired version of Ingrid Bergman, did not have Miss Bergman’s luck in roles or fame, but her work here is intriguing and she captures every scene she’s in.
Backfire fits into my off-beat canon of Christmas noir. Like many movies discussed in this blog and in my book, CHRISTMAS IN CLASSIC FILMS, the story did not need to be set at Christmas, but the inherent sentimentality, magic, and even mystery of the holiday season lends itself to movies that capture contemporary life of that era.
Next week, we move up a few years to 1954 and visit the Pine Tree Inn in the fictional town of Columbia, Vermont, where we discuss Susan Waverly’s White Christmas.
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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.
