The film was originally intended to star Rita Hayworth in Scott's role as a followup to Columbia Pictures's successful Gilda (1946), but contractual obligations prevented Hayworth from appearing in the film. Instead, Scott was loaned out from her contract with Paramount Pictures to co-star with Bogart, who himself was loaned out for the project by Warner Bros. Filming took place in the summer of 1946, largely on Columbia soundstages in Los Angeles, with location shoots occurring in St. Petersburg, Florida; Biloxi, Mississippi; Philadelphia, and New York City.
Dead Reckoning was first released theatrically in San Francisco on New Year's Eve 1946, expanding to a wide theatrical release in January 1947. The film received mixed reviews at the time of its release.[8]
Plot
Leaving a church, Father Logan, a well-known ex-paratrooper padre, is approached by Captain "Rip" Murdock. Murdock needs to tell someone what has happened to him in the past few days in case his enemies get to him. A flashback follows:
Just after World War II, paratroopers and close friends Captain Murdock and Sergeant Johnny Drake are mysteriously ordered to travel from Paris to Washington, D.C. When Drake learns that he is to be awarded the Medal of Honor (and Murdock the Distinguished Service Cross), he disappears before newspaper photographers can take his picture. Murdock goes AWOL, follows the clues and tracks his friend to Gulf City in the southern United States, where he learns Drake is dead – his burned corpse is recovered from a car crash.
Murdock finds out that Drake joined the Army under an assumed name to avoid a murder charge. He was accused of killing a rich old man named Chandler because Drake was in love with Chandler's beautiful young wife Coral.
Murdock goes to a nightclub to question Louis Ord, a witness at Drake’s trial for Chandler's murder. Ord reveals that Drake had given him a letter to give to Murdock. Murdock also meets Coral and Martinelli, the club owner. Seeing Coral losing heavily at roulette, Murdock not only recoups her losses at craps, but also wins her an additional $16,000. For some reason, however, she is uncomfortable with the situation. When all three go to collect the money in Martinelli's private office, Murdock accepts a drink he is tipped off by Ord that the drink it is drugged. When Murdock awakens the next morning, he finds Ord's dead body planted in his hotel room. He manages to hide the corpse before police Lieutenant Kincaid, responding to an anonymous tip, shows up to search his room without a warrant.
Murdock teams up with Coral. Suspecting that Martinelli had Ord killed in order to get Drake’s letter, Murdock breaks into Martinelli's office, only to find the safe already open. Just before he is knocked unconscious again, this time by an unseen assailant, he smells jasmine, the same aroma as Coral's perfume. When he awakes, Martinelli has him roughed up by his thug Krause, to try to find out the content of the message encoded in the letter. However, Murdock is able to escape from his captors when taking him back to his hotel; the police arrive. The flashback ends, and Murdock slips away.
Now suspicious of Coral, Murdock goes to her apartment to confront her. She claims to be innocent, but finally admits that she shot her husband in self-defence, not Drake. She went to Martinelli for advice and gave him the murder weapon to dispose of, but he has been blackmailing her ever since.
Now in love with Coral himself, Murdock agrees to leave town with her, but insists on retrieving the incriminating weapon first, despite Coral's objections. He threatens Martinelli in his office with a gun, eliciting some startling revelations: The club owner reveals that Coral is his wife. He killed Chandler (having learned the man had lied about having only six months to live) and framed Drake so that Coral could inherit Chandler's estate.
Murdock lights the office on fire by throwing an unstable grenade at Martinelli, and Krause jumps to his death from a window to escape the flames. Murdock obtains the incriminating gun, and forces Martinelli to precede him out of the office. As he opens the door, Martinelli is shot and killed by Coral.
Murdock jumps into the waiting car and drives off with Coral. As they are speeding away, he accuses her of having just tried to kill him. When she shoots him, the car they are traveling in crashes. Murdock survives, but Coral suffers fatal injuries. In the hospital, Murdock comforts Coral in her final moments.
Film scholar Steve Cohan writes in Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (1997) that a primary theme of Dead Reckoning is the failure of the reintegration of war veterans following their homosocial bonding during the extreme circumstances of combat.[9] He also compares it to Bogart's The Maltese Falcon (1941), writing that it recreates the misogyny of that film through its "rejection of the femme fatale by reimagining it in masculine terms... Dead Reckoning also goes further than that earlier Bogart film in implicating the tough guy's mistrust of women and his corresponding respect for/rivalry with other tough men in a homosexual desire for the phallic virility with which he identifies as the measure of his manhood."[10] Writer Emmett Early echoes a similar sentiment, asserting that the film contains a "disturbed erotic undertone of misogyny," citing several pieces of dialogue spoken by Bogart's character that objectify women.[11]
Cohan also notes that the screenplay combines elements of several of Bogart's previous films, "pushing his tough-guy persona to the point of unintentional self-parody."[10]
Production
Development and casting
Lizabeth Scott and Humphrey Bogart in Dead Reckoning (1947)
Dead Reckoning was originally intended by Columbia Pictures' production chief Harry Cohn as a vehicle for Rita Hayworth, a follow-up to the extremely popular Gilda.[12] Cohn thought that the pairing of Hayworth and Bogart would be a guaranteed money maker. However, Hayworth was in the middle of a contract dispute with Columbia, and refused to make the film, so she was replaced by Lizabeth Scott, who was borrowed from Paramount Pictures' producer Hal Wallis.[12][13] Scott, an up-and-coming actress being promoted as "The Threat", was often compared to Bogart's wife, Lauren Bacall, as both were former models, and had deep, sultry voices.[14][15] In an interview following the production's completion, Bogart commented on working with Scott: "I was warned that she was temperamental, but she couldn't have been nicer to work with."[16] He also refuted the press's comparisons of her to Bacall, instead stating that he felt she more resembled Mayo Methot, his previous wife."[16] When Scott first met Bogart, she gifted him a yachting cap as a nod to his enthusiasm for seafaring and service in the United States Navy.[17]
Bogart was a loan-out from Warner Bros. as well, and was reportedly unhappy with being sent to Columbia at the height of his career, if only because Warner kept any extra money paid by Columbia over and above Bogart's usual salary.[18] Bogart had right of refusal over the director for the film, and picked John Cromwell. Bogart and Cromwell had worked together in 1922 on Broadway in Drifting, a short-lived play by John Colton and D. H. Andrews, when Bogart was a very young actor and Cromwell, the play's director, cast him in his first bit part.[18][19]
Bogart improvised Murdock's extended speech to Scott about men carrying women around in their pockets, taking them out when they were needed to have dinner with or make love to. This idea was one that Bogart was known to espouse when he had been drinking.[22]
Music
The film's original score was composed by Marlin Skiles.[1] The song "Either It's Love or It Isn't", sung by Lizabeth Scott (dubbed by Trudy Stevens) in the film, had words and music by Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher.[1]
Release
Dead Reckoning had its first screening in San Francisco on December 31, 1946,[3] before opening in a wide release on January 15, 1947.[1]
Promotional materials for the film highlighted the fact that Bogart was featured opposite a new leading actress (following his numerous appearances in films with his wife Lauren Bacall), with taglines reading: "Bogart is out with a new woman!"[23]
Critical response
Contemporary
Dead Reckoning received largely mixed reviews from critics at the time of its release.[8]The New York Times gave the film a mixed review, praising Bogart as "beyond criticism in a role such as Dead Reckoning affords him", with "some of the best all-around dialogue he has had in a long time."[24] However, it was less kind to his co-star, Scott, "whose face is expressionless and whose movements are awkward and deliberate."[24] Although the actions of Bogart's character are not particularly plausible at times, and the plot was considered to be "rambling" with "a lot of things about the script ... that an attentive spectator might find disconcerting," the Times found that "the suspense is skillfully drawn out."[24][8]The Hollywood Reporter published a review describing the film as "almost too tough for its own good."[10]
Variety magazine also praised Bogart and liked the film, writing, "Humphrey Bogart's typically tense performance raises this average whodunit quite a few notches. Film has good suspense and action, and some smart direction and photography ... Bogart absorbs one's interest from the start as a tough, quick-thinking ex-skyjumper. Lizabeth Scott stumbles occasionally as a nitery singer, but on the whole gives a persuasive sirenish performance."[25]
Modern assessment
In 2004, film critic Dennis Schwartz was critical of the film. He wrote, "This second-rate Bogart vehicle has the star depart from his usual tough-guy role, though he manages to get into plenty of the action. It plays as a bleak crime melodrama that is too complexly plotted for its own good ... There's some fun in watching the Bogart character romance the husky-voiced femme fatale character played by Lizabeth Scott, but not enough fun to overcome how unconvincing is the sinister plot."[26]
Film scholar Robert Miklitsch writes in Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir (2011) that, despite the studio's effort to model Scott after Bacall, "she's not without her charms. Her performance... brings out something Bogart's character that remains occluded in his roles with Bacall, isolating a certain psychic volatility characteristic of the "tough loner," the man who knows too much."[27]
Time Out calls Scott "synthetic" but "alluring", and detects a "hint of self-parody" in Bogart's performance. It says that their "relationship never quite convinces, leading to a faintly embarrassing emotional climax." The film, according to the reviewer, "tries too hard to maintain its note of doomed noir romance," but is nevertheless "[h]ighly enjoyable".[28]
Film scholar Robert Miklitsch suggests that Dead Reckoning codified star Lizabeth Scott as "a classic siren à la Kitty Collins in The Killers," as Scott went on to star as a hard-edged femme fatale in a number of films noir following it.[27]
Notes
^While the film had its wide theatrical release in January 1947,[2] it theatrically premiered in San Francisco on December 31, 1946.[3] Some sources, including the British Film Institute[4] and some bibliographic sources[5][6][7] support a year of 1946.
Cohan, Steve (1997). Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. ISBN978-0-253-11587-4.
Early, Emmett (2010). The War Veteran in Film. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN978-0-786-48339-6.
McCarty, Clifford (1965). Bogey - The Films of Humphrey Bogart. New York City, New York: Cadillac Publishing Co., Inc. ISBN978-0-806-50955-6.
Miklitsch, Robert (2011). Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir. Rutgers, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. ISBN978-0-813-55392-4.
Tuska, Jon (1988). In Manors and Alleys: A Casebook on the American Detective Film. Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN978-0-313-25007-1.
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