"5 Against the House" - 1955

“5 Against the House” (1955) delivers social commentary in the guise of a robbery plot, sometimes on purpose and sometimes without seemingly meaning to, which is an intriguing accomplishment, to be representative of an era and yet stand apart from it objectively.

“Everybody’s got a headache today,” Brian Keith grumbles, “We’re living in the Aspirin Age.” It’s an exemplary line in a film with a constant patter of snappy dialogue. He’s just planted a label on the mid-1950s. No quick aspirin fixes for him, though.


The “5” of the title are Brian Keith, Guy Madison, Kim Novak, Alvy Moore, and Kerwin Mathews. The men are all roomies at college, and Miss Novak is the girlfriend of Guy Madison. All the men are preparing for future careers, and the lady, a townie in this Midwest college town, just started a new career as a lounge singer, teetering on the brink of commitment to marriage with Guy Madison. Despite these plans, or hopes, for the future, all are a bit stuck, floundering in static lives. The ennui will lead them to an attempted casino robbery.


It’s an interesting premise, and we build to it slowly. One of the many writers on this film was Sterling Silliphant, a prolific writer in TV’s “Golden Age”, films, and novels. One of his many notable projects was “Route 66”, and at times this movie reminded me a little of the style of “Route 66” or some similar character-study episodic TV drama show of that era.


The film begins with the boys having a last night on the town in Reno at “Harold’s” casino, having finished their summer jobs on a ranch and will head back to college for the beginning of the semester. They watch an attempted robbery foiled by the casino guards, and this gives Kerwin Mathews, who plays the rich boy with brains but little maturity, an idea that it would be fun to rob the casino in The Perfect Crime just to see if they could get away with it. He tinkers with this notion throughout the film, but at first we pay little credence to him because he seems so flighty and boyish.


Alvy Moore is the wisecracking clown of the group, with a quick line for every circumstance, but when the stakes are raised toward the end of the film, we see his smart mouth is just a cover for a very frightened person, with very little will of his own.

Brian Keith and Guy Madison are older than the other two. They are Korean War vets, attending college on the GI Bill. Madison, now at least a decade into his acting career, has matured from his earlier youthful appearances (“Since You Went Away” and “Till the End of Time”) of almost jaw-dropping boyish beauty into a rugged, near William Holden look-alike, but without Holden’s talent. However wooden Madison may still appear, he has achieved a quiet authority and plays his part well as the hardest working, most mature of the pack. His character nearly died in Korea (pal Brian Keith rescued him), and now that he has a second chance at life, Madison means to grab it with both fists. He has more drive and ambition than the others, and one of his goals is to try to get Kim Novak to marry him. She is hesitant, because commitment frightens her, and this is Madison’s particular frustration.

Brian Keith, such a fine natural actor who has so much commanding screen presence to spare he could bottle it, plays perhaps the most disenchanted member of the group. We do not see it at first, because he is so cool and calm, charming women at the casino bar, rolling his eyes at the boyish antics of Moore and Mathews, but soon we see there are cracks in his façade.

While saving Madison in the war, Keith suffered a head wound. We are still in the movie age where head wounds automatically infer evil and/or crazy. This is where we are headed in this film, but with unusual and unexpected sympathy for the vet who breaks into violent rage and beats people up, for the vet who sells out his best friend and threatens to kill him just for money.

The casino scenes are absorbing to watch. Lots of extras pulling at one-armed bandits and clustered around roulette wheels. There is such a natural feel to these shots, one wonders if the extras were actors or if a hidden camera was used.

Another character is introduced into the gang, a hapless freshman whom they haze, turning him into their houseboy. Though it seems odd that two more sophisticated and world-weary men like Keith and Madison would put up with or abet this kind of college-boy hijinks, the frosh boy does serve some purpose to round out exposition. It is he who tells us what he heard about the war careers of Keith and Madison, and it is he who lets us know that the younger two were not involved in the war, providing more social commentary and insight into the mid-1950s.

“Were you two guys in Korea?” he asks. Moore and Mathews feign insult, accusing their slave of inferring that they are cowards for not going to war.

“Are you questioning our patriotism?” This is interesting, turning talk of commitment or non-commitment to military service into a comic routine. Only four years before in “I Want You” (1951) -- see previous post here, the resentful Martin Milner regrets not being old enough to fight in World War II and moans, “It’s not my fault I was born in 1931.”

No longer any regret about being too young to fight in a war. Now there is only relief. In such gossamer ways do eras turn.


But though the Korean War, now two years past, is ancient history to these boys, its repercussions still linger for the Keith and Madison. When Keith nearly kills a young man in a blind rage, Madison drags him back to the dorm room, where Keith confesses in tears that he does not want to go back to the VA hospital for psychiatric treatment, where they “treat you like an animal”, though Madison reminds him, “a lot of guys went through shock like you did.” Without too much explanation, we are meant to infer he went through electroshock therapy, still the subject of lurid thrillers at this time.

We see the tight relationship between the two men; that close, brotherly bond between men who have been through battle. Madison gives Keith a sedative and puts him to bed, and we see that Madison is the caretaker, while suave and cool Keith is really the most needy of the gang.


Madison carries scars from the war too, but his seem to give him drive to get things done. When Miss Novak complains that their relationship is moving too fast, Madison replies, “I’ve been places where if you didn’t make up your mind in a hurry, you never got a second chance.”

She gently reminds him that he has all the time in the world now. “Honey, you’re not in Korea anymore. Nobody’s going to drop a bomb on you.”

This is somewhat reminiscent, but a different delivery and intent, to the line Virginia Mayo gives the struggling Dana Andrews in “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) - see previous blog post here - when she exhorts him to forget his war troubles and “Snap out of it.”

It’s the Cold War now, and no big public whoosh of relief came with the armistice in 1953. Wandering back to his dorm, another classmate asks Keith if he will go to the Halloween Dance, and he replies in another of this film’s unexpected comic send-ups:

“I wonder if now is the time when any of us should be dancing, when we don’t know if
Little Orphan Annie’s ever going to get back to Daddy Warbucks.”

Alvy Moore replies in deadpan woe, “She’s just got to!”

We are in the middle of what one day would be called The Silent Generation, marching in lock-step with the neighbors, but not knowing why, dogged by doubt and television aspirin commercials, and ennui.

When the plan to rob the casino gels, it gets its legs from Keith, who is a poor student and knows his chances of graduating are slim, who already feels he’s lost enough time because of the war. He wants that money. Mathew’s silly pipedream of a plan becomes reality in Keith’s ready hands, and they rope in the weak-willed Moore to help. They need Madison as well, but Keith knows the level-headed Madison will never agree. So he tricks him into joining the casino heist, kidnapping Madison and Novak without them knowing it.


Here is where we add another dimension to Keith’s considerable palette of emotions. We have accepted that he is emotionally troubled and possibly, as Madison fears, psychologically “sick”. But his determined and cool effort to stab his best pal Madison in the back is not the action of a psycho, but just of plain old-fashioned greed. (Kerwin Mathews’ character, who does not seem to connect any wrongdoing with his plot, is the one who seems more disassociated from reality.) There may also be an element of jealousy here, as Keith sees that Madison is moving forward with his life with Miss Novak, and Keith may lose his caretaker, his emotional crutch, to her.

On the Thanksgiving break, the three conspirators rent a trailer and prepare to head back to Reno, and then up to Mathew’s rich papa’s ranch for turkey. They invite Madison and Novak along, who plan to marry in Reno. They do not tell the happy couple about the impending heist.

Here is an interesting shot, by the way. Mr. Madison enters Miss Novak’s dressing room, and we see him under her leg, a provocative shot that pre-dates the famous Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman shot in “The Graduate” (1967) by 12 years. I wonder if this is where they got the idea?

On the road, Madison puts two-and-two together, and nearly puts an end to their robbery scheme until Keith pulls a gun on him and forces him to go through with it.


William Conrad has a featured role as the unfortunate casino worker they force to help them. Tension builds, and the climax occurs on the upper levels of a parking garage where Madison and Keith have a final showdown, but a showdown not with fists or weapons, but with memories.

I expected the escaping Keith to be shot or fall to his death in the usual manner of solving the problem that films employed then and now. It was a surprise to find him being escorted safely away, which perhaps was a gesture to his being a sacrificing, and sacrificed, veteran. So often when a film ends with “the problem” being shot dead, it feels like a copout. We can’t diminish our problems like that in real life (or we would all need psychiatric treatment). That’s what Madison knows. Problems can't be eliminated with weapons, or outrun. Just faced.

I think the biggest shock was the sign listing the parking rates in this garage, where cars are parked using a mechanical lift: 25 cents for the first hour, 10 cents for the next two to four hours, and 5 cents for every half hour after that.

Eras are marked in many different ways, some not so subtle.

I Want You (1951)

On December 4th, in 1950, when the Korean War was roughly about six months old, Navy Ensign Jesse L. Brown was shot down near the Chosin Reservoir. His wingman, Lt. Thomas Hudner crash landed his own plane on purpose to try to rescue Brown, but even when a rescue helicopter arrived to help, they were unable to free Ensign Brown from the wreckage of his Corsair. They were forced to leave him there, and Jesse Brown died.

That Ensign Jesse Brown was the first African-American Naval aviator in a newly desegregated U.S. armed forces, and that Lt. Hudner later received the Medal of Honor for his daring attempt to rescue his pal are more than footnotes to the tragic story. This shadowy war is a grim backdrop, but a curiously subconscious one to the movie I Want You. It’s seldom discussed out in the open; it’s just there somewhere on the radio and in the back of the mind.

I Want You (1951) is roundly acknowledged to be producer Samuel Goldwyn’s Korean War answer to his wildly successful World War II era The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) discussed here. When I Want You succeeds, it is in moments of unconscious reflection that World War II might as well have ended one hundred years ago as five years ago, because the world is in a different place. The movie creaks a bit with slavishly trying to use Best Years as a template, though this must have been understandably irresistible to the Goldwyn staff. Despite this, it is a valuable film for showing us what 1950 looks like, even if inadvertently so.

At the outset we may note that the “template” aspect of using The Best Years of Our Lives is employed first by using a handful of familiar actors from that film. Walter Baldwin, who played the worried father of disabled sailor Homer Parish in Best Years here plays the worried father of young recruit George, Jr., played by a very young Martin Milner. Ray Collins, who memorably played the insincere and controlling bank executive boss of Fredric March in Best Years here plays another man of great power over others, a judge who sits on the local draft board.

Most especially we have the central figure of Dana Andrews, who stars as a World War II vet, a husband and father, who runs a contracting firm. Sitting at a work bench, fiddling with a slide rule in his work shirt, the kind he wore at the end of Best Years when Fred Derry is finally offered a job in construction and peels off his iconic bomber jacket to go to work, Dana Andrews’ character, Martin Greer, is presented to us almost as an extension of Fred Derry. This is what Fred might have been like five years down the road, working in construction, sharing a modest suburban home with wife and kids. It’s the kind of thing Fred Derry used to dream about, but was afraid he wasn’t good enough for, or not lucky enough to ever have. We finally get to see Fred’s happy ending.

But in real life, happy endings are usually temporary. Then a new story begins.

Much of the film involves the contracting firm as being the key to avoiding the military draft. The World War II draft that ended in 1947 was reinstated in 1948 to be implemented for young men who were required to serve 24 months, eventually discontinued in 1973. The draft became a sword hanging over the heads of millions of young men and their families when hostilities broke out in Korea in the summer of 1950. Dana Andrews’ younger brother, played by charming and handsome Farley Granger, is a prime candidate for the draft, and so is his young employee Martin Milner, whose father Walter Baldwin also works for the firm.

Dana Andrews is being pulled in all directions to label the young men under his charge as “indispensable” to excuse them from the draft, like Noah pulling animals out two by two to be saved on the ark. He easily could save his brother, for as his mother reminds him, their family has given enough to their country. Another brother was killed in World War II.

The film begins with a kind of flashback to The Best Years of Our Lives, in an aerial shot of his small town, emulating the ride that the three returning vets took at the beginning of that movie, swooping low over the town. In Andrews’ narration, the scene is described as what the town would look like in a bomber run. His narration, like the character himself, is somewhat world-weary. In his voice over introduction he admits, “I don’t run as fast as I once did. I don’t sleep as well.” When he loosens his belt under the table while enjoying a big meal, he contentedly lets us know that he is going to “retire with honor” from ever being young again.

Dana Andrews also calls his father, who drinks too much, “Pop,” which what Fred Derry called his alcoholic father. His father is a bit of a fool, a man who brags too much, eats and drinks too much, and continually recounts his glory days in World War I as if he’d won that war by himself. He shirks his work at the family contracting business to socialize at the bar down the street. For all that he appears harmless and lovable, and as a result, his careworn wife appears aloof and strained, probably because she has had to bear on her shoulders the responsibility that her husband avoids.


Andrews’ younger brother is played by Farley Granger. He is a likeable rogue and as much a goof-off as his father, and borrows money from an indulgent sister-in-law played by Dorothy McGuire. Granger playfully tells her, “When I get married, I must make sure to find somebody just like you.” He will all but insist that his girlfriend played by Peggy Dow take her for a model, and there lies one of many interesting differences between the World War II era generation and the Korean War generation, even though they are not really of different generations. They might as well be. Though it is only five years since the ending of World War II, the young people are different. Their world is different. And the next generation that is really a generation apart, the little son and daughter of Andrews and McGuire, read comic books about superheroes with atomic powers.

Peggy Dow is a college girl, sassy and independent, with no immediate desire to get married, so she says. She is not the small-town beauty queen that Dorothy McGuire was when she married her solider husband on a weekend pass. Miss Dow has far more advantages and far fewer cares, yet unlike Miss McGuire’s character, has no real ambition for herself, no purpose and no direction. And the young Farley Granger is clearly not his brother. He’s not a serious solider with serious post-war dreams. He’s a happy-go-lucky guy still storming about in the same jalopy he was so proud of as a high school kid. Granger resents her college education and sulks at her time away from him.

Clearly, Dow’s college career is seen by her, by Granger, and possibly by her parents as little more than finishing school experience. This was an era where some, though certainly not all, young women went to college not to obtain credentials for a particular career but to obtain upwardly mobile college men as husbands. We get the feeling Miss Dow is toying with Granger, holding out for something better. She ruminates that “maybe” she will one day get a job.

One of the best lines in the movie goes to Jim Backus, who plays Dana Andrews’ former colonel, “You still salute like a WAC in the Bulgarian Medical Corps.” Backus, who commanded Andrews in an engineering unit, might take a job with his contracting firm, but is waiting to see what transpires with this news from Korea. Backus might re-enlist.

They discuss building being an essential industry and their being fortunate to be considered “indispensable.” Andrews is too old to be drafted and has no desire to return to the military. He intends to apply for the exemption to which he is entitled. Their conversation, a casual plot exposition for our benefit, suddenly seems heartless when we see that his employee played by Walter Baldwin, the father of Martin Milner, has been listening. Only the evening before, Dana Andrews refused, though gently and politely, to write for a deferment for Milner. Baldwin is seething in his resentment.

Milner, called Junior by everybody, which he hates, is looking forward to the Army because he desperately wants to be a man. He is told, by the bombastic Robert Keith who plays Andrews’ foolish father, that the Army will make a man of him. Andrews invites Milner for his first beer to celebrate joining the army, but the bartender refuses to serve him, because he is only 19. Another WWII vet at the bar razzes him, and Milner barks back at him, “Because you guys were old enough to be drafted in the last war, you think you’re something. It wasn’t my fault I was born in 1931.”

Poor Junior is suffering from what every generation of young men experiences who have followed in the wake of heroes. They are emasculated by their very youth and lack of exposure to danger. We can imagine how acute was the humiliation of young men, both North and South, who came after the generation that fought in the Civil War. No matter what wealth or fame they achieved in their lives, they would never be a great as the private who suffered through the heat of Gettysburg and the mud and cold of Fredericksburg.

But then the radio behind the bar announces worse news from Korea, and the bartender grants Milner his beer. We may recall Homer Parish, hoisting a pilsner glass in his prosthetic hook in his homecoming visit to his uncle’s bar in Best Years. Homer is relaxed, and looking very manly with buddy Dana Andrews by his side, who is already half drunk and both happy because they think the worst is behind them. How stark is the contrast with Milner, who hoists his first beer with boyish excitement, and how Dana Andrews by his side watches him a little sadly. All the men in the bar watch Junior in complete silence, knowing better than he what he is in for.

Perhaps the scene still plays in Dana Andrews’ mind when he sits down late at night to try to write an excusal letter for his brother. But the radio interrupts again with news about action at some parallel. It is a war of “parallels” and not very parallel to World War II.

It is interesting that we do not see a single television set in this film. Though most people did not own one in 1950, some people did and perhaps we are still at the stage where movies are ignoring the enemy.

Retiring to find his wife still awake, Andrews remarks with his world-weary demeanor that the news is the same, “People shooting each other as usual. On the domestic scene, hair tonic as usual, rumbas as usual, saloons as usual.” In a world more parallel to the one we know today, the home front is disconnected from the frontlines and society seems rudderless because of it.


Miss McGuire sits up in her twin bed, her knees drawn up to her chest and asks wistfully, “Are you pleased with me? Has it turned out the way that you wanted back in that miserable little Louisiana town when you got your weekend pass and we got married?” In a very sweet scene teasing the Production Code, he sits on her bed and rests his head on her knees as they talk quietly. It’s really more a rhetorical question, and we find this husband and wife, this World War II couple, habitually re-evaluating where they are and where they are going. They take nothing for granted. They have been through too much to take anything for granted. Another difference between them and the younger set, who seem to own the world.

Farley Granger, much more self-confident than Martin Milner, and much more carefree than his older brother ever was or ever will be, gets angry when he is ordered to report to the draft board. Andrews could not bring himself to write the request for deferment, though never articulates why.

Granger’s girlfriend’s father, the judge, sits on the draft board and for a moment we get a brief lesson to Granger on freedom and how other people in the world don’t have any. But it bounces off the fuming Granger, like telling a little kid he should eat his spinach because people in some other country don’t have any. The little kid doesn’t care, and neither does Granger.

We get another lesson in geopolitics when Dana Andrews’ little son shows a neighbor lady his toy B-17 bomber, a gift from his war-mongering grandfather. The lady is a British war bride, and she relates her experience of being bombed in London. Like all young children, he is nonplussed, and helpfully tells her that in school they learned to “duck and cover” when the atomic flash comes. He giddily romps behind a tree showing her how. I don’t know if that broke anybody’s heart in 1950, or if because we’re more aware of the futility of jumping behind a tree during “the flash” that it’s so heartbreaking now.

But his young uncle Farley Granger has a similarly defiant and naïve attitude about atomic weaponry. So self-pitying is he to be drafted, he sulks aloud that he was “railroaded” by his girlfriend’s dad to get rid of him, and wishes that we would just “drop the bomb” so he wouldn’t have to go to Korea.

Dorothy McGuire has a good scene here where she calls Granger down on the carpet for being so immature and heartless. Her moral outrage over his indifference to millions of innocent people shows us she is not just the settled suburban housewife. She is still in her heart the idealistic bride of a soldier who left his wife to make a better world, honestly believing that he would.

Her chastising Granger brings down a family rift between her and her mother-in-law, who shortly gets a fantastic scene of her own. When Granger leaves for duty, Mom, played by Mildred Dunnock, rips down all the old World War I souvenirs that Pop collected and hung on the living room walls, making their home look like a boy’s clubhouse. She knocks all the empty shell casings off the mantle, tosses aside bayonets and helmets, and berates him for what she has known all along: he was an orderly to a general in World War I in a Paris hotel. He never heard a shot fired. She calls him a liar to his face.


Robert Keith slinks, humiliated, to a chair, as she shouts, “Your son Riley was killed; you were proud. When Martin was missing for four days in France, it made you feel important…As of this evening, there are no more professional heroes in this house!” The backbone of the family has had it, and there will be only reality served up in this house from now on.

Strong women seem to be a thread running through this film, as even Peggy Dow confronts the still whining Farley Granger on his accusations against her father. She counters that her father was wounded in World War I, with the shrapnel still in his body and suffers pain every day of his life. He has kept this secret because he does not want pity. Granger, so deeply mired in his own self-pity, no sooner makes up with her than he churlishly goads her into marrying him despite her protestations. He wants her to be like his sister-in-law, to follow him from assignment to assignment.

This being an ensemble movie, we jump from character to character and most of the threads of their stories are held together pretty well. Milner and Granger, both in uniform, have a night on the town, which the jubilant Milner predicts, “It’ll be V-J Day all over again” as they imagine swarms of girls surrounding them. Another feeble and out-dated reference to World War II, and they are disillusioned when it does not happen. Milner even confesses to Granger that he has never kissed a girl. He gets his chance at the Army making him a man, though, when he is shortly sent to Korea and is listed as missing in action. “That poor little boy,” Miss McGuire remarks, and Jim Backus shakes his head, “That little boy.” Even after his sacrifice, Milner will never be called a man.

We wonder if Farley Granger will grow up. He is not going to be sent to Korea; he has drawn a luckier card and is being sent to Europe. He gets his war bride after all when Miss Dow quits college, like so many young women of her generation did, to marry him. When they leave on their honeymoon, it is in his teenager’s jalopy.

Eventually we get back to Dana Andrews’ date with destiny. We know, though it is not hammered at us, that he is tormented about re-enlisting. Jim Backus goes back into the Army and requests Andrews as part of his runway-building crew. The very essential industry of building that makes Andrews eligible for deferment, also makes him indispensable to the Army.


The notion of who is indispensable is given subtle but clever examination in the movie. Maybe nobody is indispensable, and maybe everybody is. Milner’s heartbroken father spends a lot of time at the bar down the street now. In a confrontation with Andrews, he broods on some people’s luck at being indispensable, and mourns of Junior, “Maybe he was only indispensable to me.” Sorrowing Walter Baldwin scoffs at the radio behind the bar with its updates on the war, “Bad news traveling from one end of the world to another before you can blink an eye.” He should see CNN. Or the Internet.

Mr. Andrews comes to conclusion that he can no more demand an exemption from service for himself than he could Milner or Granger. His simple articulation of this complicated decision to his wife is only, “I’ve got to make peace with myself. Ever since I was 15 years old I’ve thought of myself as honest and responsible.”

No mention of fixing of the world’s troubles; that is the remarkable thing. No end in sight to the troubles, either.

One of the most affecting scenes in the film is when Dana Andrews puts his children to bed the last time before reporting for duty. He weaves a bedtime story for his daughter who falls asleep in his arms, about a princess who is partly her mother and partly herself. He is the picture of a man of his era, in his shirtsleeves and his burdens. He tells his wife that someday his son will want to know what Daddy did “when the world was going to pieces” and he wants to be able to tell his son he did more than build luxury hotels. In the hindsight granted to us old movie fans decades later, we know both his son and daughter will come of age during the Vietnam War, and they may never understand him. Only his wife understands him.

It is peculiarly fitting that their farewell takes place not at a crowded train station, but in their own quiet living room, the Shangri-La of the 1950s suburban couple. Miss McGuire sighs, looking around the room, “This is nice. This is a nice house, isn’t it?” It’s not just small talk before the final goodbye. It’s another re-evaluation of where they stand as a couple and where they are going and what they have accomplished together.


Embracing her, Andrews’ voice seems to catch when he says, “Your nose. I’ll never be able to get over your nose.” He might even cry in another moment. Dana Andrews plays the heart wrenching combination of sad and valiant like nobody. In any film, he can be terribly moving when life forces his character to face facts.

His father has faced facts as well. Andrews and Pop hug when it’s time to say goodbye, something pretty unusual in Hollywood films of this era to see two men embracing.

Our hindsight will also cause us to remember that the Korean War never really ended. An armistice was signed in 1953, but no peace treaty. Technically, North and South Korea are still at war, and therefore so are we. Even the morass that was the Vietnam War ended. Today, long after Jesse Brown died, in the cold of a long ago December 4th, there are U.S. military personnel on duty in South Korea on guard near the Demilitarized Zone. They could be the grandchildren or even great-grandchildren of Dana Andrews’ character Martin Greer.  Or Fred Derry.
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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.