Glum and Glummer

I had heard good things about The Hunted of 1948.  An Allied Artists (previously Monogram) noir cheapie, it was directed by Jack Bernhard, who had helmed one of the wildest, bleakest, and wackiest noirs of the 1940s, Decoy, featuring an unforgettable performance by the amazing Jean Gillie (Bernhard’s ex-wife).  I think I was hoping for something even wilder and wackier from this later effort.  The beginning promised that—a pre-credit sequence starting with two bright lights manifesting onscreen, which then float into the E’s of the film title: ThE HuntEd.  It’s as if the screen had, unnervingly, sprouted a pair of eyes and turned them round to watch…Us.

But I found the film a letdown—prolix, static, repetitive.  Was Bernhard stymied by a wordy script?  Uninspired by dull leads?  Or was it a case of an artist with only one great work in him?  Per his IMDB page Bernhard had a brief Hollywood career, mainly in low-budget noirs.  He directed the excellent (and entertainingly nasty) crime drama Blonde Ice (what a vehicle that would have been for Gillie!) and had produced a nifty little horror film, Man Made Monster (which I wrote about here).  Some of his other films, based on their titles, seem worth a viewing, such as Violence (how noir is that!) and The Second Face, starring the wonderful Ella Raines, who makes any film worth seeing.

However, I’m not not recommending The Hunted.  Its plot is that echt noir staple, Romantic Obsession—here centering on a detective who had once arrested his lover for a jewel theft she claims she didn’t do.  Now that she’s out on parole, the cop, unable to accept the girl’s innocence, (creepily) stalks her, driven, like an addict, by his fixation on her.  For her part, the woman, Laura, had earlier threatened vengeance against the cop for arresting her; she remains bitter because he won’t believe she was framed.  “What happens to a guy’s heart when he becomes a cop?”, she scowls.  Then Laura’s shady lawyer, who had deliberately lost her case (and whom she’d also threatened to kill), is murdered and the cop’s antennae again flare up—especially when he finds the rod that done the job in Laura’s flat.  She skips town, and he pursues, once again on the hunt for the Woman he can’t get out of his blood.

Much of the film, unfortunately, is Talk (the murder doesn’t happen until more than halfway through), mainly expository grousing by the leads (Preston Foster, Belita), explaining over and over their versions of the past and why they hate each other.  If not bellyaching, they’re re-falling in love, only to get re-disillusioned.  Over And Over.  Bernhard tries to distract the film’s own droning fixation by such devices as an iris effect to isolate faces and heighten tension, or by how he’ll move his actors:  During a long take on a single set, he has them circle round, saunter back and forth, and switch places, using the screen’s width and depth to imply shifting power dynamics.  Bernhard also moves the camera itself, tracking from a long shot to a close-up of Foster’s brooding face as his ex-flame lies in a bed barely five feet away from his own—a potent metaphor for blocked desire and forsworn feeling.

But too much of the film has Foster slumped in a chair or on a bar stool while another character tells him He’s Got It Bad And That’s Ain’t Good.  “You’re more in love with her now than you were then,” says one guy; “Sounds like you’ve got more than one reason for catching up with her,” says another.  How many times does the cop (and the audience) need to be told what he feels?  Can’t he figure it out?  Bernhard can’t do much with such scenes (and there are many); he’ll start with a standard master shot, then cut between the actors as they talk (and talk…), as if he only wants to get it over with.  And Foster, as the bedeviled cop, Johnny Saxon (now that’s a noir name!), doesn’t help; with his thick body and stolid face he can’t project a mood or feeling of torment that’ll grab us.  Maybe he was trying for a low-key Bogie/Mitchum effect, but he doesn’t have the star presence to hold the screen and pull us into his character’s inner life.  Mainly he just looks glum.

Foster also looks too old for, and strikes no sparks with his cinematic love interest, the thin, wiry, spike-chinned Belita (one name only), a dancer/ice skater-turned-actress, who looks as sharp-edged and angular as a Cubist painting.  In comparison to cinema’s best-known ice-skating star, the doll-faced Olympian Sonja Henie, Belita was taller, slimmer, more astringent, and reserved.  Unlike Henie, though (and Foster), Belita’s face is—interesting.  It’s too severe and pointed for conventional beauty, but forms an acute, elongated triangle of odd slopes and lines.  It’s as if someone had grabbed that pointy chin and pulled.

If for nothing else, Belita (who at age 13 competed in the 1936 Olympics; Henie won the gold) will be remembered for bringing ice skating to film noir.  Improbably, the mix worked.  At least it did in her first noir, Suspense, in which, folding a spectacular, risky ice routine into the film’s dark plot, the title gained its resonance (will she survive that leap through the Loop of Death?).  In The Hunted, however, Belita’s one routine is merely an excuse to skate (because…she could…).  Ice skating carries no metaphorically noirish weight here; any kind of job (singing, dancing, trampoline jumping) would have served.  But the ice routine itself is beautifully skated, Belita’s ballet-inflected technique possessing a thoroughbred elegance and style.  As lean and stretched-out as a racehorse, she doesn’t wham pyrotechnics at you but uses that thoroughbred body to skim the ice in hypnotically winding loops of motion.  It adds a hint of mystery to what she does; she seems not so much a physical athlete but an otherworldly presence.

I could stop here and leave you with an impression of a movie that’s, per Leonard Maltin, a “prosaic, overlong treatment.”  But then—then, near the end, at about the one hour and 14 minute mark, on comes Charles McGraw and everything—Changes.  For the next four or so minutes the film (briefly) livens up, and I take back (temporarily) all my criticism above.

Though on only for two short police interrogation scenes (and billed only as “Detective”), McGraw takes command and won’t let go of your eyes.  I dunno how he does it.  Or maybe I do; throughout his two scenes, something is always going on in McGraw’s face, eyes, gestures, his entire body.  Whether it’s a slight turn, a shift in the gaze, a slow smile, or a bit when he files his nails (a sure scene-stealer), McGraw is always viscerally present, always on.  He’s what actors call ‘in the moment,’ aware and alive, like peeled skin, to all shifts in mood, tone, tension (just watch his eyes…).  Much more than the leads, McGraw’s got that inborn performer’s instinct, of knowing who he is, what he’s doing, and why he’s there.  You see that in actors like Cagney and Garfield—always on edge, always working on nerve, guts, and raw feeling.  McGraw does likewise; all Bernhard had to do was park the camera and let McGraw do the rest.  I bet Bernhard was glad to do just that.

The irony of the two McGraw scenes (spoilers ahead) is that, while Foster is running around like a headless chicken on his dreary hunt for his on-off girlfriend, the other cops solve the murder and arrest the perp, no sweat involved.  It’s almost as if the film had again turned round to send a message to spectators:  Does What Came Before Matter?  You could argue that, no, the murder doesn’t matter, Saxon’s obsession does.  But the romance plot can’t muster the jarring energy such obsession demands; it stays glum and only gets glummer.  (If only McGraw could’ve played Saxon!)  As it was, long before the finish, the main story, for me, no longer mattered.  I’d gotten fixated on McGraw, who sent me out on a cinematic high, like a jolt of celluloid caffeine.  After him, the rest was just a cold turkey.

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Bonus Clip:  Here’s a clip from the Warner Archive DVD of The Hunted, showcasing the ending of Belita’s skating routine, followed by a confrontation with Preston Foster.  Belita’s skating does have a stylish grace all its own:

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Posted by Grand Old Movies on December 6, 2023

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