confession and revenge
by Douglas Messerli
Steve
Fisher and Oliver H.P. Garrett (screenplay, based on a story by Gerald Drayson
Adams and Sidney Biddell), John Cromwell (director) Dead Reckoning / 1947
In
John Cromwell’s 1947 film noir Dead
Reckoning Humphrey Bogart plays an ex-paratrooper quite apparently in “love”
with his former military partner. Early in the film both men express their
closeness. Almost gushing over his friendship, he suggests he give up his love
of his mysterious female lover:
Johnny, why don't you get rid of the
grief you got for that
blonde, whoever she is? Every mile
we go, you sweat worse
with the same pain. Didn't I tell
you all females are the same
with their faces washed?
Johnny
responds: “I think you're a great guy, too, Rip, if that's what this
conversation's about. Even in the U.S.A., this world.”
Even a comic series of lines, reiterates
their intimacy. Arriving in Philadelphia, a cameraman asks if the two might
step out the train taking them to Washington to receive military honors, for a
quick shot, as the Bogart character asks:
This is the city of brotherly love?
That’s what New Yorkers all it. They don’t
live here.
I’m all for love, son.
When Rip arrives, a hotel room is
already waiting for him, as if Johnny has
expected him to follow. A note to Rip awaits at the hotel desk announcing that
Johnny will soon call. We have already been told that they “could read each
other’s minds,” and that wrote in a “special code.”
After two days, when no call calls, Rip
makes a visit to the local library to learn more of his friend’s history,
discovering that a few days before joining the military, Johnny—a former
college professor—had been indicted for murder. How could his beloved Johnny
have been a murderer?
Rip’s search for answers, we can already
guess, will lead him through a hall of mirrors which includes Johnny’s former
mistress, Coral “Dusty” Chandler (Lizabeth Scott), a club owner with mafia
links, Martinelli (Morris Carnovsky), his murdering goon, Krause (Marvin
Miller), and an ex-paratrooping priest, to whom Rip spends most of the movie
“confessing” as the film’s narrative is gradually revealed.
Discovering also that Johnny has been
murdered, Rip attempts to recover his former friendship with Johnny by getting
to know Coral; as he himself puts it:
I hated every part of her but I
couldn't figure her out yet.
I wanted to see her the way Johnny
had. I wanted to hear
that song of hers with Johnny's
ears. Maybe she was alright.
And maybe Christmas comes in July.
But I didn't believe it
Accordingly, while the plot forces him to
temporarily fall in love with Coral, Rip remains cool in their relationship,
and Coral, being a true manipulator (and the real murderer of her husband)
plays it even cooler, the combination of which makes it clear that any
relationship between them in a threesome at the center of which is the now dead
Johnny.
Yet if we look beyond the surface story to
see the film as Rip’s search through Hades to uncover the source of Johnny’s
duress, the film becomes something much more compelling.
Rip, quite literally, cannot rest in
peace until he his reckoned with the past: Johnny’s feelings for Coral, his
murdering of her husband, and the truth of Coral’s supposed love for Johnny. This
reckoning, moreover, is also a settling of accounts, which can only mean one
thing, particularly when he discovers that Coral has been the murderer: her
death, even if, in attempting to shoot Rip, she causes it herself.
Indeed, the film ends with a strange
coda, Rip standing over Coral’s hospital bed, helping her to die by letting go
of life and fall, as he and Johnny had done so many times in their leaps from
planes into space. And the last word of film, “Geronimo!” represents a battle
cry akin to Electra’s final dance and yelp of revenge.
Finally,
we can now comprehend Rip’s need for confession. In the year of my birth, 1947,
the year this film was released, homosexuality—no matter how sublimated—was a
mortal sin. It is almost as if the writers themselves felt they needed
forgiveness for the sometimes not so subtle undercurrents of their plot.
Los Angeles,
August 19, 2016
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