Serpentine Plots in L.A. Noir, Dick Powell

Richard Ewing Powell was born on November 14, 1904, in Mountain View, Arkansas, a small town once described by the actor as “ten miles from modern conveniences.” The second of three boys of Sallie and Ewing Powell, an International Harvester salesman, Powell moved to nearby Little Rock at the age of 10. In 1923, Powell enrolled at Little Rock College, where he headed up the popular dance band Peter Pan, while working part-time for the telephone company. The future star also found time to get married to his college sweetheart, Mildred Maund, on May 28, 1925. A short time later, Powell played a variety of club acts; he sang with the Royal Peacock Orchestra in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Charlie Davis Orchestra in Indianapolis, and also played vaudeville theaters, adding saxophone and clarinet playing to his performing repertoire. In September 1926, he landed a job as emcee at the Circle Theatre in Indianapolis, and a few years later became master of ceremonies at the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh. During this period, Powell also hosted a weekly radio show in Pittsburgh, The Pow Wow Club. “In my field, it was wonderful experience,” Powell once said of his varied activities, “like playing stock is for an actor.” After several years at the Stanley, Powell was spotted by a talent scout from Warner Bros., and was invited to Hollywood. Powell’s wife, who had long objected to his choice of career, declined to accompany her husband. 

Powell was promptly cast in his film debut, Blessed Event (1932), a musical starring Lee Tracy and Mary Brian. Years later, Brian praised Powell’s performance in his initial feature film outing. “He had all the stage presence and professional experience when he came out, although pictures were new to him,” Mary Brian said in 1996. “He took to it like a duck to water.” In the early 1930s Mary Brian was engaged to Powell until he romantically was linked with Joan Blondell. Powell married the vivacious blonde actress on September 19, 1936, aboard the luxury Santa Paula liner. A short time later, Powell adopted Blondell’s young son, Norman, and in June 1938, the couple had a daughter, Ellen. “My mother said she was taken with the kindness and gentleness that he exhibited toward her, and the fact that he really seemed to love me,” Norman Powell said in 1996. “I think that’s what attracted her to him more than any other thing.” 

Powell was cast in yet another musical, Bring on the Girls (1945), starring Veronica Lake and Sonny Tufts. Balking at the assignment, the actor was placed on suspension. “This went on for 10 or 12 weeks,” Powell later recalled. “One day, in an elevator, I ran into Frank Freeman, then head of Paramount’s production. I said, ‘Frank, this is silly. I’m not going to do that kind of picture anymore. So you might as well let me out of the contract.’ And he did. I then went over to RKO and told them my little tale of woe. It so happened they had just bought Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. They gave me the script, I read it, and I said I’d do it. My problem was convincing the director, Edward Dmytryk. My box-office appeal was sagging and he could only see me as the singing marine. But I must have begged hard enough because he decided to take a chance on me, and it worked.” 

Author Raymond Chandler would later claim that Powell’s rendition of Marlowe was his favorite, and co-star Claire Trevor laid the film’s success squarely on Powell’s shoulders. “He was a revelation,” Trevor said. “Up to this, he was known only as a boy singer, but now he was playing Raymond Chandler’s tough private eye, and playing it magnificently. People couldn’t get over it. The film revitalized his career.” Indeed, Murder, My Sweet had finally given Powell the role that he had sought for so many years. But his career wasn’t the only aspect of the actor’s life that was undergoing a transformation. 

Since leaving Warner’s, Powell’s marriage to Joan Blondell had been increasingly strained, fostered by long absences while Blondell accepted stage roles in New York, and damaged further by rumors of her romantic involvement with producer Mike Todd. Meanwhile, while starring in the 1944 MGM musical Meet the People, Powell rekindled his friendship with actress June Allyson, falling for the younger ingenue. “He was wonderful to all of us new kids—if we had a problem, he would tell us how to do a scene or help us learn how to read a script,” Allyson recalled in a 1996 TV homage to Powell. “And our friendship just kind of grew.” In July 1945, Powell and Blondell were divorced, and a month later the actor married Allyson.

After the wedding, Powell played in another noir, Cornered (1945). Upon the film’s release, critics once again hailed the “new” Powell; one of the best reviews was offered by Jim Henaghan of the Los Angeles Examiner, who wrote: “If there was any question about Dick Powell’s astonishing performance in last year’s Murder, My Sweet, this picture will dissolve it. For in Cornered he plays a character equally as hard and tough, and draws a role considerably more complex and difficult to portray—and plays it to a fare-thee-well.” In Cornered Dick Powell plays a man exhausted, angry, and with little hope for the future. Though marred by its serpentine plot, Cornered is an important film noir. It offers an extraordinarily bleak worldview, precocious even for noir. Certainly no Hollywood film to date had brought to the screen a milieu so desolate or a hero so pathologically dour. Coming so quickly on the heels of cataclysm, previous efforts couldn’t have imagined the world portrayed in Cornered, neither This Gun for Hire nor Journey into Fear come close — and no previous film featured a protagonist with so little hope. In terms of global change the Second World War is the defining moment of the twentieth century, and a singular one in the development of the noir style. Insofar as this is concerned, no entry is more emblematic of that change than Cornered.

Much of Cornered’s originality comes from Powell’s interpretation of Laurence Gerard. It has been said that Cornered might have suited Humphrey Bogart better, an actor for whom tiredness was natural. Yet while Bogart could do angry, his rage seemed to have a leering quality — and while Gerard is reckless he’s no head case. Violent acts, especially the up-close, dirty, wet ones, have become frighteningly impersonal in Cornered, as the survivors are now numb to the moral absolutes of pre-war society. It’s in this notion of lashing out, of poker-faced violence, that Cornered also anticipates film noir’s shell-shocked man apart, plagued by some unknown neurosis or gnawing guilt. Like most good noir, the brooding thematic elements of Cornered are supported by the mise en scene, which pushes the dark frame to extremes. Dmytryk, art director Carroll Clark, and cinematographer Harry Wild give us the expected interplay of shadow and light, as well as numerous offbeat camera angles. 

In fact the only conventional shots seem to involve one of the film’s two female characters, which is a subtle clue to her true nature. Wild often shoots from behind a pillar, around a corner, or from on high to obfuscate our sense of environment. Filming Powell in tight close-up, making him difficult to place and reinforcing the idea that he doesn’t belong further heightens this confusion. The effect is claustrophobic, disorienting, and perfectly in keeping with the film’s tone. Cornered gets progressively darker and darker as it approaches its climax, eventually to place Gerard in utter darkness, groping and bumbling through a deserted warehouse. Cornered was a bitter reminder for a people still celebrating victory that not all was well in the world, yet it did well with critics and audiences. The film’s box office owes itself directly to the casting of Dick Powell. Preview audiences were ecstatic to see him again in what they described as a “he-man” role, with hardly any comments recommending a return to musical comedy. Even New York Times grouch Bosley Crowther lauded the film: “Cornered is a drama of smoldering vengeance and political scheming which builds purposefully and with graduating tension to a violent climax, a committing of murder that is as thrilling and brutal as any you are likely to encounter. Cornered provides a vision of a world gone to hell.” 

Even in his non-film noir features, Powell continued to play tough-guy roles; he was a narcotics investigator in To The Ends Of The Earth (1948), co-starring Signe Hasso; an undercover military investigator in the western noir Station West (1948); and an army intelligence agent in Rogue’s Regiment (1948). During this period, Powell took his first step toward his future career behind the camera, forming a partnership with Samuel Bischoff and Edward Gross to create Regal Films. The company’s initial effort marked Powell’s fourth film noir, the underrated Pitfall (1948). “Dick Powell was a man of immense self-confidence, outward ease, friendliness, warmth, and humor,” Christopher Knopf wrote in a 1976 Variety article. “He gave approbation to everyone he employed. If he hired you, you could do the job, or he wouldn’t have hired you. His confidence in you injected confidence in yourself.” 

In Cry Danger (1951) Rocky Mulloy (Dick Powell) is released from the slammer after serving five years of a lifetime sentence. He was framed for a murder and hold-up, where $100,000 are still missing. Rocky becomes a free man after a marine he never met before, Delong (Erdman), provides him after all this time with a bogus alibi. However, Rocky’s best friend, Danny, also framed, is still in prison (with a lesser charge). Rocky tells the wolfish Delong that Nancy Morgan (Rhonda Fleming) is out of bounds. Delong soon learns that Nancy was once Rocky’s girl, but dumped him for his pal Danny. The one who arranged the robbery is a bar owner/racketeer named Castro (Conrad), who first tried to get Rocky to go along with the heist. When Rocky is asked: “What do you plan to do with all the dough?” Rocky responds “I plan to get an operation, so I can play the violin again.” 

Rocky beats it out of Castro that it was Danny and Nancy who framed him, and Nancy has hidden the $50,000 half share from the heist Danny split with Castro. At the film’s end, Rocky turns Nancy over to Cobb, telling him with regret that “she’s already packed.” In this feature, Dick Powell turned in one of his best performances and his role was singled out as “adroitly played”. In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote: "Cry Danger is a tidy package of fictional extravagance. Usually you don't find much occasion for laughter in a picture that is concerned with revenge and murder. But in "Cry Danger" scenarist William Bowers has found room for some sardonic lines that are tossed off most effectively. This is the story of a man who was framed into a jail term and gets out when a former marine comes up with a convenient alibi. The marine just wants a cut of the $100,000 swag Rocky Mulloy is supposed to have stashed away. Dick Powell plays Mulloy with an air of cocky toughness that inspires confidence in his ability to run down the sleazy characters who fingered him as the fall guy for a big robbery and murder rap. This report will not disclose anything more about the plot details of "Cry Danger." (Inside intelligence; Mr. Powell is in town—he appeared on the Paramount's stage yesterday—and he can be pretty rough on squealers.*) As the chief feminine interest, Rhonda Fleming turns on the charm effectively and Jean Porter is amusing as a blonde pickpocket."

When Lizabett Scott was loaned for Pitfall (1948), she was guaranteed a minimum of $75,000. Although Pitfall now ranks as classic noir (French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier considers it one of the genre's masterpieces), producer Hal B. Wallis could not have known that in 1948; he simply believed that Lizabeth appearing opposite Dick Powell, who showed his macho side in Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945), was right for a movie about a woman who ensnares a respectable married man in a web of deception and murder, from which he emerges repentant but not exactly on the best of terms with his wife. With Jane Wyatt as the sexless wife, one could understand why she would stand by her man and at the same time why her husband would be drawn to a considerably more sensuous woman. Pitfall (1948), directed by Andre de Toth, is an even more caustic examination of the American dream than Double Indemnity, chiefly because its subject is the post-war nuclear family, amidst factories such as Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. 

Eisenhower engineered tax breaks and housing subsidies to create the ideal consuming unit: the residential nuclear family with a working father, purchasing mother, and dependent children, a unit which would buy the new consumer goods the war industries would retool to produce en masse: cars, houses, and household appliances. In Los Angeles, new suburbs were born, including the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys and the South Bay-Long Beach area. Pitfall exposes—as only a noir film can—the soft center of the American social ideal. About Powell's official debut as director, Split Second (1953). the critic for The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Powell, who certainly must get much of the credit for the consistently excellent performances, does a masterful job of pacing, starting off in a staccato style and relentlessly building up the tension to a breathtaking climax.” 

Meanwhile, Powell was making headlines not for his films or television work, but because of his deteriorating marriage. *The first bump happened around 1949, after the rumors floating about a dalliance of June Allyson with Dean Martin. The Paramount stage could allude to the set where Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were filming My friend Irma (1949), which was produced by Hal B. Wallis and released on August 16, 1949, by Paramount. A jilted Powell and a conceited Martin may well have exchanged some heated words. After reconciling with Powell following a brief separation in 1957, triggered by a frustrated romance with Alan Ladd, June Allyson filed for divorce in 1961, citing his workaholic nature and his frequent absences from home. Allyson was granted an interlocutory divorce in January 1961, which would become final in a year. But Powell had other plans; on the day following the court hearing, Allyson said, “he was sitting at the little breakfast nook, having breakfast and reading the paper.” “And I said, ‘What are you doing here? We just got a divorce,’” Allyson recalled. “He said, ‘No, you didn’t—you just got a paper that said you can have a divorce in a year.’ And he said, ‘You know, I’m never going to let you go. And you’ve spent all that money for no reason at all.’ And he went right on eating his breakfast. And we never did get the divorce. For which I’m very grateful.” —Sources: "Bad Boys: The Actors  of Film Noir" (2003) by Karen Burroughs Hannsberry and "L.A. Noir: The City as Character" (2005) by Alain Silver and James Ursini