The Chase (1946)

Fantastic!

Best movie ever!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This film "The Chase" showed on UK night time TV. The casting looked good which suggested a good film ahead. I instantly fell in love with the French female star Michelle Morgan age 26, tall, blonde, good- looking, a sort of poor man's Ingrid 'Casablanca' Bergman, then I lost the plot. So did the Director, it had at least ten story lines which we learned later was a Walter Mitty type dream sequence involving a nightclub stabbing, two murders one using a savage dog, the Police and a back street chase through Havana which the audience thought was real. After one hour had passed the dream sequence then stopped and the true film commenced which was a nasty psycho-trick on the viewing audience. Others have called this long dream sequence the 'Film-Noir'part of the film. I hope this film experiment is never again repeated. All the actors tried there very best with a crazy script. Peter Lorre had a bit part well beneath his great talents and well deserved fame, Robert Cummings throughout the film looked as if he had a train to catch, I wish he had, and the great actress star was the elderly faded Russian gypsy type woman who owned the alleged antique shop in Havana (actually a Hollywood film shed) her small cameo role rescued an awful film.

A troubled ex-serviceman gets a job with a crime boss and his disturbed wife.A 'find' for me and perhaps for other fans of noir. The 80-minutes are a perfect blend of dark visuals and surreal story. Frankly, when I think noir, I don't think Bob Cummings, an excellent light comedy actor, but hardly a figure of depth. But here, he essays the role of the troubled vet in subtle and persuasive ways. The nightclub scenes in Havana are particularly revealing, as the chaotic gaiety swirls around Scott (Cummings) and his spacey lover Lorna (Morgan)—a perfect metaphor for their circumstance.A number of touches make this a memorable film. Casting Lorre as Gino was a coup, since his quietly devilish imp casts a background shadow over the proceedings. That's significant because Cochran, the alleged crime boss, comes across as a rather charming fellow even if he's behind dark deeds. Then there's that scene in the wine cellar, unlike any I've seen, and shrewdly abbreviated to catch the imagination. Also, catch Lorna's cameo framing through the porthole with shadows rising and falling over her face, as her nature itself migrates between light and dark. Add to the mix a speeding locomotive as the hand of fate, and a weirdly backseat driver that really is a backseat driver, and you've got an appropriately noirish race against time. And, of course, mustn't leave out the final scene so perfectly calibrated to end the film on a provocatively surreal note. The movie's full of such imaginative twists and turns as penned by two of the best in the business, Woolrich and Yordan. I'm not sure why the movie's generally overlooked in the noir canon, perhaps because of Bob Cummings and his lightweight reputation, plus the lack of a true spider woman. Nonetheless, it's a provocative little gem, and one that prompts rare second thoughts long after the screen has gone dark.

Cummings character is down and out and finds a wallet and returns it to a rich gangster type who just got a haircut from a private barber. In this scene, the gangster is telling the barber what a good job she did only he is wearing a hat. Then he flinches and the manicurist nicks his finger so he slaps her to the floor and then gives Cummings a job as his chauffeur. Then a foe of the gangster is left alone in his wine cellar with a bottle of Napoleon brandy and presently he's mauled to death by the gangsters dog and the bottle is broken and spilled all over the cellar floor. How sad. And irrelevant. Then the gangsters sad wife appears and gets Cummings to help her escape from the gangsters clutches, so they high tail it to Havana on a steamer in a single room with a piano in it where he plays sad music and then he pulls the curtains and they obviously get it on. Once in Havana, she gets knifed in the back and Cummings gets busted and then he gets knocked out and wakes up back in Miami, then he has amnesia so he goes to see his Naval doctor who is treating him for traumatic, melodrama, pseudo-noir, B-movie Malady. Then Cummings and the Doctor go to a bar for a drink as part of his treatment and things happen and Cummings remembers some things so he probably had a dream about the Havana stuff so he rushes off to another boat to Havana but the gangster is rushing off there too but he crashes his car with a train he is racing from his back seat gas pedal so then Cummings and the depressed wife can rush off to Havana. But why? I love old black and white movies and I especially love them if they are really good or even make a little sense. This one is just corny but has a nice old Cadillac sedan and a house with statues in it.

In Hollywood, directors get the credit. With The Chase, a strange, fascinating, neurotic noir, the credit should go to one of the masters of noir pulp fiction, the writer Cornell Woolrich. Like Phantom Lady, another Woolrich creation, the story centers around what might be struggling to get out of a person's head. Woolrich wrote masterful pulp using his own name or the pseudonyms William Irish or George Hopley. He was a homosexual who loathed himself. He married a girl he idolized and saw the marriage annulled. Despite the money he made, he lived most of his life with his mother in decaying New York apartment buildings where his neighbors were lushes, prostitutes and drug addicts. At night, he'd troll the waterfront for anonymous sex partners. He became a deep alcoholic. And he turned out a stream of mystery novels and short stories that still are worth reading nearly 40 years after his death. Much of his material has been made into movies. If you like Hitchcock's Rear Window, you're watching a Cornell Woolrich short story. More often than not, the stories revolve around the black struggles that can happen inside a person's head. The Chase, based on Woolrich's The Black Path of Fear, is a noir worth watching. One morning a down-and-out young man, Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings), finds a wallet on a Miami sidewalk. He finds the owner's name and address and delivers it to him. The owner, Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran), is a soft-spoken gangster with a penchant for hitting women, eliminating business competitors and for always being the man in control. His partner, Gino (Peter Lorre), who grew up with him, is just as ruthless and amoral, but not as psychopathic. Roman has been married three years to Lorna (Michelle Morgan), a beautiful, frightened woman who wants only to escape from him. Eddie Roman is amused by Chuck Scott's honesty and hires him as a chauffeur. Scott quickly learns two things. First, Roman has a car that is built so that from the back seat Roman can take over the accelerator. When he flips a switch he can move the car up to over 100 miles an hour. The driver can only steer and pray. The second thing Scott learns is that he is drawn to Lorna Roman. It all comes together when Scott agrees to flee with Lorna to Havana. And then we descend into a dark swirl of murder, pay back, amnesia and fear. Half way through the movie we find ourselves in a paranoid dream of night-time Havana, of a horse-drawn carriage that rides off into a busy street, of a man glimpsed throwing a knife in a crowded bar, of a Cuban detective who casually uses a murder knife to spear a piece of melon from the table of a sobbing prostitute. Only later do we learn what is dream and what is real. If what was dream is frightening, what is real may turn out to be worse. This really is an excellently developed story, and photographed with all the poorly lit streets and shadowy rooms a good noir needs. Cummings does a credible job as the uncertain but determined hero. Steve Cochran is first-rate as the menace. He's quiet, even thoughtful, but ready to do violent and unpredictable things in an instant. He has no intention of letting Lorna go. Lloyd Corrigan, a long time character actor, makes a memorable appearance as a businessman who won't sell his ships to Roman. He spends the rest of his life, which is brief, in Roman's wine cellar with a large dog. The music score is a strange dreamy underlay that suits the movie just fine.