One for lovers of noirish movies with twisty plots, High Wall doesn’t in the end quite add up emotionally, but its serpentine bends make it an enjoyable crime thriller asking us to reconsider an open-and-shut case once any number of impediments have been thrown in the way.
The opening scene – a man is driving his car with his wife in the passenger seat. She’s dead, it seems, and in a few seconds he’ll be dead too, if his plan to crash his car off a bridge succeeds. That seems to be the story anyway.
His plan doesn’t quite succeed. He survives the crash and has soon been arrested. He admits to killing his wife. But. The man is just back from the Second World War and has recently had surgery on his head. The duty doctor insists on a psych report and it turns out that Steven Kenet (Robert Taylor) has a blood clot on the brain. More surgery is suggested, which Kenet refuses. The deputy district attorney (John Ridgely) reckons this is a ruse on Kenet’s part and he’s going to use the clot – and the memory lapses it causes – to enter a plea of temporary insanity. All along Kenet has been in possession of, in the DA’s words, “a licence to murder his wife”, and he knew it.
But what if the wife deserved to die, by asking too much of her husband after he’d returned a damaged hero from fighting in the war? That’s what several flashback scenes tentatively edge towards. What does murder even mean, when as a soldier Kenet was only weeks earlier being ordered by his country to kill as many people as possible? And what if the man didn’t commit the murder at all and the clot is befuddling his thinking and memory?
Enter several other characters to add more complexity – Dr Ann Lorison (Audrey Totter), a shrink who becomes too emotionally involved. A tricky, fast-talking lawyer called Sidney X Hackle (Charles Arnt, brilliant in a small role) who reckons he can spin that blood clot and Kenet’s motherless son into a sympathetic defence case. Kenet’s mother (Elisabeth Risdon), who has no role other than to add more emotional weight – she’s soon dead, leaving Kenet with no wife, no mother and child in care.
Plus the elevator “boy” (Vince Barnett) in the building where Kenet lived, who seems to know something that will change the focus of the police enquiries, and Willard I Whitcombe (Herbert Marshall), a smoothie and a creep who sets off dramatic alarm bells every time he appears on screen.
This is a great support cast. In fact they are better than the stars, Taylor and Totter, who never rise beyond the mechanics of the plot.
Science and the power of truth drugs also loom large, and there are several scenes set inside a humanely run asylum, where Kenet is being sequestered until the trial can be arranged, a place full of lolling looneys like “Old Man” Slocum, a music lover who loses his shit when he doesn’t get his regular dose of Chopin.
Did Kenet do it? Watch the film and find out, but the obvious answer is of course he didn’t, otherwise what would be the point of the movie? That’s what’s being dangled here – is this film going to go the way we expect it to?
As said, the story has an emotional problem – a war hero suddenly down a wife, a mother and a son shouldn’t be making any sort of eyes at his shrink, but that is eventually the way things go, and rather than nuance his way into it, director Curtis Bernhardt simply goes all in. Suddenly Dr Lorison is calling Kenet “darling”, which caused me to sit up in my chair and wonder where the hell that had come from. You may wonder the same too.
But it’s the recasting of the wife as some sort of femme fatale – unhappy that her husband is content to just bumble along in life – that’s the really jarring gear change, even though Bernhardt and his DP Paul Vogel have been signalling from about the halfway point, with nighttime scenes set on dark streets glistening with rain, that this is film noir.
In a way the wife is the most interesting character in the film, even though there’s just not enough of Dorothy Patrick in the film to put flesh on the bones of Helen Kenet.
High Wall – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
