Cinema: Bull Session

Private Hell 36 (Filmakers) is a family picture—in a peculiarly Hollywoodsy sense. The romantic leads, Ida Lupino and Howard Duff, are Mr. & Mrs. in private life, but in the picture they make love to different people. Furthermore, the picture was produced by Collier Young, Ida’s next-to-last husband and still her partner in Filmakers. Inc. This perhaps partly explains why Steve Cochran, who has never been married to Actress Lupino, keeps darting uneasy glances over his shoulder while he bounces her around on the studio couch.

As a detective sergeant who makes nickels and dimes, Steve has a hard time keeping up with Ida, who has a way of demanding folding money. So when Steve catches up with 300 stolen Gs, he turns in only about 226. The balance is just enough to buy him a slab in the morgue, but before they put him on it, he and Ida, as cop and suspect, have some amusing repartee-for-two (He, menacingly: “What did you do [with that man] for that money?” She, innocently: “I sang Smoke Gets in Your Eyes five times”).

Cochran comes closest of all the new young villains to filling George Raft’s hairpiece; and Actress Lupino, as is to be expected from a member of one of the oldest families in the British theater, flounces through her part with the sad little flourish of a hat-check girl in a customer’s mink. And Ida can flounce with a verve that would have delighted Grandpa Lupino, known as “Old George,” who held the 19th century record for successive toe spins.*

Shield for Murder (Schenck-Koch; United Artists), as a moviegoer who pays close attention can probably tell, is not just a second run through Private Hell 36. The plots are almost identical, but there is one important difference. Edmund O’Brien, as the cop, goes sour for so little money ($25,000) that the audience can hardly believe it until somebody explains that he is “probably psycho.” The climax comes in a chase through a swimming pool and into the girls’ locker room, with the air full of hard bullets and soft flesh—a scene that may make moviegoers wonder if Actor O’Brien, who also helped to direct the picture, meant to outrage their better instincts or tickle their worse ones. In any case, Shield for Murder is memorable only for the work of Emile Meyer, an actor of such massive port and seemingly minute intelligence that his performance may be recognized as the definitive Hollywood attempt to characterize the eternal flatfoot. His best line: “Nayun years ay pre-sink capting. An’ dis is duh firs’ time I ben pullt inta duh drain.”

Down Three Dark Streets (Edward Small; United Artists), for a change, is one in which the cops are not the robbers. An FBI agent (Kenneth Tobey) is killed while pursuing an inquiry at a private house. Another agent (Broderick Crawford) is assigned to catch the killer. To do that, he has to break all three cases the dead agent was working on: a filling-station murder, a hot-car shove, a small-time extortion caper.

On the first case. Actor Crawford runs into resistance from a torpedo’s well-kept woman (Martha Hyer). “I don’t like men staring at me before lunch,” she bridles, but soon goes on to tell what it’s like to be a lamster’s widow. “I thought it would last forever, like one of them watches you don’t have to wind. But we sure done a lot of windin’.” For a while the extortionist plays in-and-out-the window with the hot-car ring, but the game soon ends with the Feds an easy winner all around, and the extortionist’s victim (Ruth Roman) sighing gratefully up at the great big wonderful FBI man.

Most such movies about the FBI fall into a tiresome pattern. The criminals are incredible dabs at their work and the Federal agents are clean-cut, pin-stripey, night-school types of horrifying efficiency, who nevertheless have gentle eyes and a remote, dentist-like way of soothing frazzled women. From such pictures one would never guess that FBI men are policemen after all, just doing a dirty job well. For that they certainly deserve respect, but hardly all the candy hearts and artificial flowers.

*351.