Crime Street presents
The Chase (1946)

Director – Arthur Ripley
 

Watch cLASSIC MOVIES

Plot
Film Notes
Cast and Production Credits

The Plot

Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) is a down-on-his luck World War II vet without a destitute dime to his name. He finds a wallet on the sidewalk and buys himself some breakfast. But he's an honest man, and all he takes is the cost of the meal. He finds an address for the owner and heads for Miami and the home of gangster Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran) to return the wallet.

Impressed by this honest act, Roman tells Gino (Peter Lorre) to hire "Scotty" as their new chauffer. Soon enough the new driver is dealing with the sadistic nature and criminal acts of his new boss. But he is not truly bothered by Roman's actions until he realizes Roman's wife Lorna (Michelle Morgan) is essentially a suicidal captive with a desire to escape. But here's the rub – the recovering from malaria Scott is having a hard time telling what's real from what's not. The disturbed vet and the despondent wife dream up an escape plan that winds up escaping them.

Back to top

Film Notes

"Wounded - Not Even Dead"

In The Chase, once again we have a physically and psychologically scarred World War II veteran wandering the dark, wet and mean streets of America. Film after film-noir in the late 40's and 50s took on the unconscious fear that the returned victorious soldiers were no longer conquering heroes, but damaged beings trapped and damned by the very new world order they had a violent hand in creating.

Dream a Little Dream

Based on a novel by weird-noir master Cornell Woolrich, a script by an ambitious Phillip Yordan and directed by the mysterious Arthur Ripley, The Chase is a fascinating film that runs further down a Film Noir expressonistic road than many of its better bred contemporaries.

What's innovative about this somewhat forgotten film is that without dreams being the literal subject, it uses an expressionistic dream logic style to drive the story along.

Watch carefully and it's almost M.C. Escher like in how it twists back in on itself taking no prisoners to prevent a single point of view as to where and when and why events occur and characters act. Yes, there is a big twist in middle of the film that seemingly explains everything, but a closer viewing proves this event is no more real than any other mirror in this funhouse of darkness.

The Miami-Havana Connection

The film makes the most out of its exotically mythic (and artificial) Florida and Cuba locales. It's all heat and shadows, as the malarial hero moves from one sweaty dreamscape to another.

Image = Action = Image

The Chase fills the screen with:

...men in hats, flapjacks and bacon, Cupid spy holes, a singer suspended over a nightclub audience, steam ships, little mustaches, jade monkey knives, back seat accelerators, Cuban travel brochures, Havana neon night life, Jack Benny's announcer, steamy French actress Michele Morgan sighing a slight breath onto the lips of her illicit lover, Chinese antiques, a woman sobbing at a kitchen table that holds a split watermelon, gas lamps and candles, malarial fever, amnesia...

Responsiblity Lies...

Love That Bob (or is it Robert)?

The star – Robert Cummings – actually had two actor personas. When acting in lighter fare, he was billed as "Bob" Cummings. When the casting call led him to the dark side, he was "Robert" Cummings.

If Ray Milland was Cary Grant lite, Cummings was Ray Milland lite. And actually, Cummings appeared with Milland in Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954). He also had the leading role in a much better Hitchcock film, Saboteur (1942), almost a dry run for North by Northwest (1959).

Ripley's Believe it or Not - "Reckless Passion"

The enigmatic director of The Chase, Arthur Ripley, worked his way up from the bottom of the Hollywood food chain. He started as a negative cleaner, but was editing films by the time he was 17. By the early 1920s he was a successful gag-man for Mack Sennett Studios, then a writer-director for baby-faced comedy star Harry Langdon before moving on to direct a couple of short films for W.C. Fields.

His comedy talent, however, masked his natural dark, artistic nature, and his desire to direct intensely serious films. Needless to say, his desire and the Hollywood factory were not a match, and he directed only five films after 1933.

In 1943, legendary film critic James Agee said, "In some respects I admire Arthur Ripley more than anyone else who released a picture in the past year – for his Voice in the Wind, which was made relatively far outside the mill, on very little money, in very little time. His film showed an unequivocal and reckless passion for saying the best things possible in the best way possible."

Meanwhile, fellow Poverty Row director Edgar G. Ulmer stated that Ripley was a "sick man...mentally and physically."

In the early 50s he gave up commercial film life for academia, and became one of the founders of the Film Center at U.C.L.A.

Ripley did commit one more directorial un-Hollowood sin – Thunder Road (1958), a cult film, written, produced and starring Robert Mitchum. This is an anti-art film that has somehow evolved into an art film, it's intentional lack of visual style, mixing cheap fake interior sets with grainy exterior location shooting, turns it into its opposite, a highly stylized melodrama that rivals anything by Jean-Luc Goddard.

Arthur Ripley died in 1961 at the age of 66.

Big Steve Cochran

The underappreciated Steve Cochran is gangster Eddie Roman. Watch how Cochran underplays the sadism like a cobra lying still in a basket. Early in the film out of nowhere, he suddenly strikes his young manicurist with a real violence that allows him to go through much of the film with a bizarre laconic calmness. But you never forget that bloody slap.

Look for sterling Steve performances in two truly great films – Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949) and Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido (1957).

"First You Dream, Then You Die"

For more on author Cornell Woolrich, see another Crime Street listing - Fear in the Night.

-- Ed Schneider - Alameda TV

Back to top

Cast

Production Credits

Back to top

For more on...

The Stranger Works of Screenwriter Philip Yordan

Arhur Ripley and Thunder Road

Submit a Review

Share your views of Crime Street with fellow Alamedans...