John Forbes (Dick Powell) has a boring job as an insurance agent, a middle-class suburban home, a no-nonsense wife (Jane Wyatt), and a tow-headed tyke of a son (Jimmy Hunt). He’s wondering where his life has gone. In the middle of his case of “Is that all there is?” he meets a model named Mona (Lizabeth Scott) and decides to sow a wild oat without telling her he’s married. This is the slippery slope for both of them, thanks to a vicious stalker (Raymond Burr, brilliantly cold) and Mona’s jailbird boyfriend (Byron Barr).
As film noir historian Eddie Muller explains in his excellent commentary, Pitfall (1948) is an unusual noir in several respects. Powell and Scott are cast against type to a certain extent, for he spends most of the movie feeling emasculated and chastened while she plays that rare bird: a femme fatale by fate, not choice. She’s an innocent, non-scheming, good person who’s trying to make her way in the world but keeps drawing rotten luck. She sees herself as a kind of bad-luck charm, and events bear her out.
A larger theme could be that the world demands women be beautiful and then exploits and preys on them unless they find the right masculine protection, which is the opposite of the femme fatale trope.
An independent production preserved by UCLA Film & TV Archive, this is a great example of director Andre De Toth’s eye for detail, credibility, and economy. Although the script is credited to Karl Kamb, Muller explains that the writers are really De Toth and William Bowers, based on a novel by Jay Dratler. The story is always understated yet relentless. Veteran noir photographer Harry J. Wild gets to do Los Angeles location work, and the results almost make you smell the concrete and desperation. The high resolution of Blu-ray makes the rear-projection work more obvious, but as Muller observes sensibly, this convention was accepted and De Toth even handles that in an above-average manner.
Flaxy Martin (1949)
While every scene of this film bespeaks a clammy credibility and a grasp of grown-up behavior, the following year’s Flaxy Martin (1949) is an example of throwing together routine elements. The results are entertaining enough while it’s unspooling, but never for a moment is it anything but unbelievable melodrama. The chief problem is David Lang’s script. The dialogue is a festival of clichés you can hear coming (“Smart guy… maybe too smart.” “I don’t need her! I don’t need anybody!”). The best line is “When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas”, and that was stolen from Jean Harlow.
Less forgivable is that the story requires everyone to behave with aggressive stupidity. There’s a difference between character flaws and sheer insanity.
It’s a plot full of unpleasant people in an unpleasant world of big-city corruption, where the law is twisted to serve the gangsters. Zachary Scott plays Colby, a loud, whining shyster who keeps mouthing off to his boss (Douglas Kennedy), a nightclub owner who needs one of his mugs cleared of murder. Compounding Colby’s bad judgment is the title dame (Virginia Mayo), one of the most clinically amoral femme fatales in the genre. One must admire her sang-froid, but she too behaves with incomprehensible stupidity, apparently not realizing when setting herself up for a patsy, and she’s out of the picture for most of the running time.
Instead the story concentrates on dumb angry Colby, whom you just wish would shaddup. It’s best not to dwell on his colossal gaffes before he finds the love of a good woman (Dorothy Malone) outside the city. It’s a city-to-country move for redemption, although the country turns out to be full of busybodies. He returns to the city for the most exciting activities at the climax, when gunfire in the streets doesn’t attract as much attention as you think it might.
This section proves that the actor getting the best showcase is the typically excellent Elisha Cook Jr. as a menacing punk who keeps calling the lawyer “shamus”, which he pronounces “shaw-mus”. I kept wishing Colby would snap “I’m a shyster, not a shamus!”
Director Richard L. Bare had a background in comedy shorts, including the hilarious So You Want to Be a Detective, which spoofs the genre brilliantly, and would later move into TV, finally producing and directing Green Acres. He had a gift for comic surrealism that he only rarely got to use. His work here is professional with bits of standard character comedy at the margins.