Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #8: "The Man Who Cheated Himself," directed by Felix Feist

After a one-week engagement at The Auteurs', this soon-to-be-concluded feature returns to its home. (Now's as good a time as any to beg, once again, any readers with a line on Appointment To Danger to help me out if they can.)

Farber: "A lightweight, O'Henry-type story about a cop who hoists himself on his own petard; heavyweight acting by Lee J. Cobb and Jane Wyatt; as a consequence, the only film this year to take a moderate, morally fair stand on moderately suave and immoral Americans, aged about forty. An effortlessly paced story, impressionistically coated with San Francisco's oatmeal-gray atmosphere; at the end, it wanders into an abandoned fort or prison and shows Hitchcock and Carol Reed how to sidestep hokum in a corny architectural monstrosity. Cobb packs more psychological truths about joyless American promiscuity into one ironic stare, one drag on a cigarette, or one uninterested kiss more than all the Mankiewicz heroes put together."

 

Mankiewicz had by this time made enough pictures to have forged a particular signature, and the prior year saw his first real masterwork, All About Eve. While Eve's not usually noted for its male characters just a year before, and while the movie wasn't unusually notable for its male characters, there is some interesting contrast to be seen between, say, Cobb's reaction to being made putty in the hands of Wyatt's not-quite-femme-fatale, and Gary Merrill's self-loathing resignation at Bette Davis' machinations in Eve. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Cobb here plays Ed Cullen, a homicide cop who's gotten himself mixed up with married rich broad Lois Frazer. After an imbroglio with her rotter husband, Frazer shoots the guy, in kinda/sorta self defense, with Cullen right there in the room. A fellow of some expertise in these matters, Cullen unwisely volunteers to ditch both the body and the gun. Several problems ensue, of course. The gun, tossed of the Golden Gate Bridge, doesn't wind up in the drink where it's supposed to. And worse, the case winds up in the lap of Cullen's eager-beaver younger brother Andy, who's just been promoted to homicide. 

 

I was reminded a bit, while watching this, of Phil Karlson's 1952 Scandal Sheet (from Sam Fuller's novel The Dark Page; it's part of the excellent new Fuller collection from Sony), in which slimeball tabloid editor Broderick Crawford murders his wife and subsequently manipulates the young protege who's covering the story for him. Both are variants of the dynamic of the immortal Double Indemnity, and of course the killer-right-under-one's-nose device goer farther back than that. But Indemnity is the most immediate point of reference for both. Of course in Indemnity Walter Neff is a slick, amiable amoral clod who's getting in touch with his inner scumbag, while in Scandal Sheet Broderick's character is a ruthless, heartless predator, at least until his very Fuller-esque quasi-redemption. Cobb's Cullen is just a regular schmoe who's gotten in way too deep. The viewer intuits, pretty much right off the bat, that there are some lines he just won't cross. And of course Cullen himself thinks he's figured things to the extent that he ought not have to cross them. The effortless pacing, then, results from a well-considered set-up (the script is by veteran writer Seton I. Miller, who goes all the way back to A Girl In Every Port, and mystery near-great Phillip MacDonald).

Gun Crazy's John Dall plays Cullen's brother Andy with a breezy goofiness that doesn't quite gel into full-fledged indignation as he grows closer to the truth; this is entirely apt, as the picture, in keeping with its respect for Cullen's character, isn't building toward an explosive climax. Andy's new wife is played by director Feist's wife at the time, Lisa Howard, who later went on to become one of television's pioneer female journalists. She was very active in covering Cuba in the early '60s, interviewing several of the revolution's principal actors, including Ernesto "Che" Guevara. In fact, she is portrayed in Steven Soderbergh's film on Che, played by Julia Ormond. How crazy is that? 

 

The film's final pursuit is one of its most impressive scenes; the "corny architectural monstrosity" Farber mentions is in fact Fort Point, built in the mid-1800s. It was to have been razed for the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, but was not; when this picture was shot, the site was abandoned, awaiting restoration into a historic landmark. It makes a pretty lonely and strangely majestic would-be hideaway...

 

Farber's evocation of Hitchcock is in a sense prescient, as Fort Point can be seen in a pivotal bit of 1957's Vertigo, when James Stewart rescues Kim Novak from the bay.

 

The Man Who Cheated Himself ends with Cobb's character leaving one cigarette unlit. Cobb could be a dreadful scenery-chewer at times—sorry, but I cringe whenever he steps into a frame of On The Waterfront—but here he's every bit as convincingly world-weary as Farber's evocations of him imply. (The only other citation of Cobb in Farber on Film is an admiring description of his interplay with Clint Eastwood in Siegel's Coogan's Bluff.) Alas, the only extant legal DVD of this picture is in a three-disc, nine-movie film noir collection from Saint Clair Vision, a public-domain cheapie if you will. The above screen caps are representative of the overall image quality on Man; worse, late in the picture there are a lot of frames missing from individual scenes, making something of a hash of said sequences. Caveat emptor.

UPDATE: The original of this post mistakenly had "Jane Wyman" standing in for "Jane Wyatt," who, you know, is actually IN the film. I've been making that mistake since my late teens. Aaargh.

 
 

Comments

[lazarus]

Glenn, Appointment With Danger came up in a search on a peer-to-peer network, but there's only one source, so it might take a while.

Let you know if I have any luck.

[Tom Russell]

"Worse, late in the picture there are a lot of frames missing from individual scenes, making something of a hash of said sequences."

This reminds me of an Italian (or possibly Spanish) vampire movie one of my cult-movie-obsessed friends insisted that I borrow. The DVD was missing several frames from each scene, but instead of just jump-cutting from one moment to the next, the screen went to black for what was presumably the duration of the shot. According to the friend, it wasn't only the DVD but the film print that featured that peculiarity; the director himself had removed the frames to make lobby cards! Dunno if that was true, but it made for a surreal viewing experience.

I can't remember the title, but boy, was it a crappy, boring, nonsensical euro-sleaze vampire movie, with ridiculous amounts of nudity. Ring any bells?

[the pouncing night eagle]

I've found 'Appointment with Danger' on a torrent site with 4 sources, so I could get it to you pretty quick if you want to pull a Rabin...

[the pouncing night eagle]

Sorry Glenn, I'm a long time reader and didn't mean to bait you on my very first comment. I would be happy to download it for you if you want to review a relatively pretty-good quality pirated copy.

[Glenn Kenny]

Actually, "Pouncing Night Eagle," I thought the first comment was pretty damn funny, and I'm interested in the proposition. Drop me a line at [email protected] and we'll work something out, peer-to-peer, collector-to-collector style. I'd try it myself but I'm afraid my hard drive would burst a blood vessel or something. Thanks.

[Ed Hulse]

Did Farber really confuse Jane Wyatt for Jane Wyman?

[Glenn Kenny]

No, Ed, that was me. As you know, I do that all the time...even when inputting other peoples' texts, apparently. All fixed. Thanks.