Pitfall (1948)

To me, this movie is perfection.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

This is a moderately successful noir film that has some snappy dialog and good performances by Dick Powel, Raymond Burr and Jane Wyatt. But Elizabeth Scott is atrocious. She is given one of the most meaty roles of her career and she gives one of the most wooden and passionless performances I have ever seen by a female actor. There were so many female actors of the time who could have been selected for this role and given much better performances. The standout in the film is Raymond Burr. He is brilliant and manages to act rings around Scott when they are in any scenes together. IT is a well made film and well directed. But Scott is not up to the job. It would be nice if it was remade with a better actor in the starring role.

Insurance Fraud Investigator Dick Powell (John) is fed up with his life. He has a perfect wife in Jane Wyatt (Sue) and a son, a good job and everything is just the same - and it's stale. It's doing his head in. One day he arrives at the office and takes over a case from private investigator Raymond Burr (MacDonald) which involves retrieving goods from Lizabeth Scott (Mona). Her boyfriend Byron Barr (Smiley) bought her gifts with the proceeds of an insurance scam and he is currently serving time in jail for it. Still, Powell must do his job and take back anything bought with the proceeds of the crime. Just one problem, Lizabeth Scott is a babe and he falls in love with her. As does the thuggish Raymond Burr. That's all three male characters in love with the same girl and the boyfriend is due out of prison shortly.It's an ok film that doesn't quite make it into the definite solid good category but it's worth a watch and keeping onto for a future viewing. The cast are good apart from Barr who isn't. He overacts. The film has a message of forgiveness and puts forward the reality that everything in life just doesn't get neatly resolved. It scores a point for that and this gives Wyatt her best moments.What do you do if you are fed up with the way your life is going? Don't do what Powell does. Just stick with that well-paid job and crack on. Then you can dream of a lovely retirement. Err...........on second thoughts.......break free...go for it......! This film hints that things may work out ok even if you screw up.

A crime drama with Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Burr (who got billed 4th, but plays the 2nd lead as a psychotic detective), and directed by Toth, and the foremost highlight is the style in which the leading character is played, an acting style which very much grounds the events and balances the story; the character's initial sloth doesn't involve despair and hopelessness, so that the two types of characters, the settled bourgeois and the feverish oddballs (the mistress and the detective) don't reach each other _innerly. But this isn't inadvertent and also suits the plot's realism, as the nascent liaison is crippled, disrupted, repressed, almost like stillborn. Burr provides an astonishing performance (that makes Mitchum's otherwise deservedly celebrated pair of kindred roles seem childish and harmless by comparison).Acknowledging the awesomeness of Toth's crime movie, the decisiveness of Burr's input has to be championed as well; his performance earns him a special merit. He makes this movie what it is. His handsomeness benefited of intelligence, burliness and glamour. He takes part in making this movie a masterpiece from the standpoint of enjoyment.The movie has a small cast, and the characters define each other: how Burr and Powell are defined by the woman, how she's defined by the detective. The characters are defined mutually: the weird detective, by the woman; the leading character, also by her. And she's defined by the detective. The actors' interplay has been as challenging as it's enthralling.Powell reminded me of B. Willis, with his playful, amused, lightly ironic behavior, as in the family breakfast scene, or the evening reading; he brings his ease so that the character seems good-_natured rather than bored, he makes an almost cheerful bourgeois, more impassible than resigned (his avowal that he lacks ease would of suited more a character played by Stewart or G. Peck or someone abler of gloom). The acting styles are highly contrasting: Powell's initial calm and temperate sloth, then his indecisiveness, irresoluteness after wishing to confess that he has a family, and Lizabeth Scott and Burr's feverishness, his with that sharp artistic intelligence that made meaningful each role he has ever got. Here, his role is quite large.The direction is masterly, and gives the movie its timelessness; Toth was one of the masters of the B cinema, revered by some, and his movies are the reward of the true movie buffs. The highlight scene to me is the lovers' meeting after he has recovered from the blows and she has found out that he has a family, that scene is so reasonably treated.The cast choice proved refreshing, mainly by the unconventional lead. The romance seems a whim rather than a doomed liaison. The plot may seem a bourgeois misadventure, like in 'Cape Fear', with a bourgeois confronting the underworld, meeting and facing the disinherited, and indeed the romance remains crippled in a nascent phase, begins and is stifled, gets crippled, crushed, repressed, and perhaps this makes the emotional drive so true and effective.

Like so many movies from the late 40s and early 50s, "Pitfall" is labeled as film noir when it really isn't one. It's really just a domestic drama that morphs into a crime thriller in its last few minutes. It's fairly slow and a bit talky. But its frank treatment of middle class malaise and infidelity at a time when an idealized version of the American dream was being sold to Americans wholesale makes it an almost fascinating artifact from late 1940s cinema.Dick Powell is the solid and reliable family man who's landed so deeply in a rut that he can barely see out of either side. He gets it on with Lizabeth Scott (because who wouldn't?) while perfect 1950s housewife Jane Wyatt stays at home with the little boy. But everything threatens to unravel when Scott's ex-con boyfriend decides he wants revenge on the man who stepped out with his girl while he was in prison and threatens to unbalance Powell's picture postcard home life in the worst way imaginable.Notable about "Pitfall" is that Powell seems almost more concerned about his wife finding out he had an affair than he does about being killed, which feels authentic. When caught up in a tangled web of lies, I think human instinct is that almost any outcome would be preferable to being exposed. "Pitfall" is candid about infidelity in a way that was rare for pictures of this time period, but almost as shocking is its acknowledgement that the so-called American dream post-WWII Americans were told they should be content with was actually a big bore.Powell is sardonic; Scott is sexy; Wyatt is dull. And Raymond Burr is creepy, just....creepy.Grade: B