Watching The Glass Key you wouldn’t think it was the inspiration behind Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which itself inspired Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. But they’re in there if you peel back the 1942 fashions and noirish looks and swap out Alan Ladd for Toshirô Mifune or Clint Eastwood.
Ladd plays the cool, smart, tough loner caught between various interacting groups of crooks, politicians, the police and the media, all in various ways in cahoots but falling out as an election swings into view and existing power dynamics are threatened.
Ed Beaumont (Ladd) is a fixer for Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy), a man who is himself a fixer, a shady operator trying to swing the election for a reforming candidate (Moroni Olsen), not least because he has the hots for the politician’s daughter, Janet (Veronica Lake). Janet, however, only has eyes for Ed. A situation that becomes more tangled when Janet’s wayward, gambling-addict brother Taylor (Richard Denning) suddenly dies, with the finger pointing at club-owning hoodlum Nick Varna (Joseph Calleia), or Madvig, or possibly Janet, though there’s also a chance that Taylor’s girlfriend, Opal (Bonita Granville), Paul’s sister, could be in the frame.
In fact everyone could be in the frame, and increasingly Ladd’s Ed Beaumont becomes an investigator of sorts, the sole constant presence as the story weaves between all these separate groups and people, Beaumont using smarts and a fast mouth to try and winkle out the truth, and taking severe beatings on the way.
Donlevy is top billed though Ladd is clearly the lead. This is the second of four films he made with Lake, after This Gun for Hire several months earlier. The studio clearly had no idea what they had on their hands when this was being made – This Gun for Hire hadn’t yet debuted. Which explains why Lake and Ladd’s scenes together, smouldering though they are, are so limited.
Dashiell Hammett’s bejewelled dialogue and complex plot had already been turned into a film starring George Raft and is simplified here, removing much of the political chicanery and settling instead on two men tussling for the affections of Janet, the dubious, possibly deadly female.
There are quite a few sexy female characters in this. Janet, most obviously, but also grieving sister Opal. Later, in scenes that seem dropped in from a different film, Margaret Hayes arrives for precisely one scene with Ladd, in what might be called a sex-on-the-sofa moment. And there’s a nurse in hospital, played by Frances Gifford, who gets more lines than you might imagine and is asked to do more acting than her nothing role requires.
These superfluous females are odd. But maybe they are there to counter the sublimated homoerotic vibe that pervades the entire film, particularly in the scenes where Beaumont is worked over by Nick Varna’s henchman, Jeff, William Bendix excellent here as a sinister psychopath who treats Ed like an abused wife, regularly calling him “sweetheart” and “baby” before attempting to knock his teeth out again.
If you want to push the homoerotic thesis further than it wants to go then the relationship between Ed and Paul seems an odd one too. Ed is not an employee but a friend of Paul’s though he seems to be taking his friendship a lot further than most pals would – winding up in hospital once as thanks for his investigative work.
Whatever you think is going on there, both Ladd and Donlevy are excellent, Ladd the tight-lipped unsmiling gopher, Donlevy also very good as the man of the world ever so slightly out of his depth. Though Bendix threatens to outdo the pair of them as the frankly rather weird Jeff.
It’s not super-great top-rank noir, Hammett’s plot twists too many times for the 85 minutes’ running time to accommodate. But all the elements are here. Stuart Heisler’s slinky direction, Theodor Sparkuhl’s lighting (he’d be dead by 1946, or else he’d be better known), nor is it really quite as good as This Gun for Hire, which had more sizzle. But good elements is better than bad elements, and there’s something going on in the background that keeps the whole thing buzzing.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024