1947 film by Curtis Bernhardt
High Wall is a 1947 American film noir starring Robert Taylor, Audrey Totter and Herbert Marshall. It was directed by Curtis Bernhardt from a screenplay by Sydney Boehm and Lester Cole, based on a play by Alan R. Clark and Bradbury Foote.[2]
Plot
Former WWII bomber pilot and recent ex-mercenary flyer Steven Kenet crashes his car into a river, trying to cover the evident strangulation murder of his wife with a suicide. He survives but is sent to the county psychiatric hospital for evaluation to determine if he is sane enough to be charged with murder. He has no memory of what happened, due to a pre-existing wartime brain injury having been reaggravated by a crash in Burma.
Dr. Ann Lorrison takes an interest in his case, and in him. Surgery could relieve Kenet's brain injury, but he refuses to consent to it, stalling for time till he can find a way to clear himself and be able to take care of his six year-old son. In spite of pressure from the district attorney's office on hospital administrators to force a surgery on him, they refuse. However, when Lorrison informs him that his mother has died, ostensibly dooming his son to a county orphanage, Kenet changes his mind.
Henry Cronner, janitor of the apartment building where Kennet's wife's boss, Willard Whitcombe lives, attempts to blackmail him over his potential role in her death. After being rebuffed, Cronner goes to see Kenet, hinting he can save him but withholding details until Kenet can pay. Before Kenet can, Whitcombe sends Cronner plummeting to his death down the building's elevator shaft.
Kenet undergoes "narcosynthesis"—a light dose of sodium pentothal—to help him remember what happened. He recalls blacking out just as his hands were around his wife's neck and later regaining consciousness to find her dead body. Kenet hides in Lorrison's car to escape from the hospital, then breaks into Whitcombe's apartment and recreates a scene resembling that revealed under the drug. He returns to the hospital, unnoticed and unbetrayed by Dr. Lorrison, waiting patiently for Witcombe to contact him.
Whitcombe shows, but cunningly provokes Kenet into a murderous rage by confessing his two killings. In desperation, Kenet steals Lorrison's car and breaks out of the hospital. He eludes a sweeping manhunt for a "homicidal maniac" on the loose, and manages to get to Whitcombe's apartment, accompanied by Lorrison, who refueses to leave him. In a brutal fistfight he dazes Whitcombe. Seizing the opportunity, Lorrison administers sodium pentothal to him. Whitcombe recounts how he had tried to end his affair with the greedy Helen Kenet after finding her husband unconscious in his apartment, but she threatened to cause a scandal and ruin any chance of him becoming a partner in his firm. So he murdered her.
His complete confession is given in front of a waiting clutch of policemen, and the D.A., who tells Kenet he is free to go. Even if everything Whitcombe said under the truth serum will be inadmissible in court, he's confident of getting it all the old fashioned way. Kenet and Lorrison go to her home, where she has had custody of his son the entire time. Kenet is reunited with the boy, and the couple are finally able to pursue their romantic attraction.
Reception
The film had a budget of $1,844,000,[1] and earned $1,553,000 in the US and Canada and $1,065,000 elsewhere, resulting either in a profit of $744,000[1] or a loss of $101,000,[3] depending on the period sources consulted.
Critical response
A contemporary review in The New York Times said: "As straight movie melodrama, employing modern psychotherapy, High Wall is a likely lot of terrors, morbid and socially cynical. Just the thing for your holiday entertainment—unless, of course, you are sane."[4]
In 1984 writer Spencer Selby called High Wall "stylish, representative of late forties noir thrillers."[5]
In 2006 film critic Dennis Schwartz called it "a tepid and chatty psychological melodrama that is embellished with black-and-white film noir visuals by the adept camerawork of Nicolas Vogel," but thought the main cast "adequate but too bland to convince us that their romance was possible. Robert Taylor's personal despair was more like angst in a soap opera than film noir. The film's biggest faults were that it was never convincing as a mystery story, that the romance story was more Hollywood fantasy than real, that the truth serum is so casually accepted as the answer to establishing the truth and that brain surgery can so easily cure Taylor of his mental disorder."[6]
