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CORRIDOR OF NOIR
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DARK CORRIDORS A DARK CORRIDORS CLASSIC |
 Dick Powell reckons with some unsavory types in 'To the Ends of the Earth' |
JOURNEY into DARKNESS: PART TWO |
Marlowe started Dick Powell's
amazing journey into noir
In 1944, the formerly insipid pretty boy movie "crooner" Dick Powell longed for a new screen image. He finally found one when he tackled the role of Raymond Chandler's quintessential tough guy private eye, Philip Marlowe, in RKO's "Murder, My Sweet." It began his long journey down the dark corridors of film noir. In the second part of his appreciation of Powell, John Stanley tells where that journey ultimately took the former boy crooner.
By JOHN STANLEY
of TheColumnists.com
For his next picture, "Cornered" (RKO, 1945), Dick
Powell re-teamed with director Edward Dmytryk to play a Canadian
flyer who seeks the French Vichy official responsible for the
murder of his young war bride. Powell ends up uncovering a ring
of Nazis who have escaped to Buenos Aires. As one critic noted,
"Powell achieves his finest delineation of the tough guy,
adept enough at quick action and cynical dialogue but romantic
enough to cry at the memory of his lost wife."
A "lost wife" was also to be found in Powell's personal belongings. In 1945 he and first wife Joan Blondell divorced and almost immediately Powell married June Allyson. It was a solid relationship that would last for the rest of his life and yield them two children.
It was during the making of "Cornered" that Powell was approached by NBC to play another extension of Marlowe--a private-eye radio hero named Richard Rogue. With a strong emphasis on humorous wisecracking and its tongue firmly implanted in its cheek, "Rogue's Gallery" debuted as a summertime substitute for "The Fitch Bandwagon." Radio was a perfect medium for Powell, who had always been comfortable before the microphone when he did radio's "Hollywood Hotel" and "Campana Serenade" durng his crooning years.
Writer Ray Buffum, who also worked on the radio mystery shows "The Casebook of Gregory Hood" and "A Man Named Jordan," brought a sparkling satire to the mysteries that made the show an instant hit. By September it had been renewed as a full-time series, with Powell sharing the mike with "top voices" Lou Merrill, Gloria Blondell, Gerald Mohr (who would play Philip Marlowe on radio just four years later), Tony Barrett and Lurene Tuttle.
What set "Rogue's Gallery" apart from other radio mysteries of 1945-1946 was Buffum's playful use of private eye cliches, which satirized the Chandler school of writing, rather than enshrined it. The best example of this became a weekly scene in which Rogue was knocked over the head. In these sequences, the sap lands on his noggin and Rogue describes "the black pool" opening up at his feet, and his feelings of falling through time and space.
In one episode a "sweet old lady" feeds him knockout drops in a cup of tea, and "my body dissolved before I hit the floor and a warm breeze wafted me upward, like a spark from a chimney. I was at peace with the world until I hit Cloud Eight."
"Cloud Eight" was where Rogue's alter-ego, a voice of conscience named Eugor ("Rogue" spelled backwards), permanently dwelled. This oddball character would cackle derisively at Rogue for being such a jerk to let someone get the better of him again. Still laughing, Eugor would discuss elements of the case, pointing out things "dumbbell" Rogue had overlooked. By the time Rogue regained consciousness, he had a fresh perspective on the case that would help him solve the caper. There is even one episode in which Rogue is not hit over the head, and he makes mention of this at story's end, apologizing for the writer's oversight and promising that next week things will return to normal.
By the end of the second season, it was
clear that this type of spoofing
of the tough-guy character wasn't quite holding the listeners
as well as it first had. As rigor mortis set in for Rogue, Powell
told NBC executives he would like to play another tough-guy role
if they could find a writer and producer to pull it off, and
he returned to his mainstay, the movies.
"Johnny O'Clock" (Columbia, 1947), the first directorial effort of Robert Rossen after a career of writing gangster thrillers and the odd noir "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers," found Powell playing the title character, a partner in a gambling casino. The film is distinctly noir-ish in its underworld settings and corrupted characters and Powell must fight off his own gang members as well as pursuing police after a double murder and a frame-up that leaves him the fall guy. Its atmosphere wasn't quite up to the standards of "Murder, My Sweet," but it was good training and a workout for Rossen, who the following year directed the classic "Body and Soul" with John Garfield.
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Five more Powell mysteries followed:
"To the Ends of the Earth" (Columbia, 1948) found Powell in a more traditional role as hero, playing a Treasury agent on the trail of an opium ring headed up by so-called "subversives," who all spoke with foreign accents. With more than a hint that maybe these villains were Communists (Vladimir Sokoloff, Ludwig Donath, Fritz Leiber and Signe Hasso played the shady ones), the film belonged more to the genre of foreign intrigue and espionage than film noir.
"Station West" (RKO, 1948) cast Powell in a Western that blended in elements of the mystery. He played an Army officer investigating gold robberies in a frontier town, but there was nothing special about his character, just a plodding investigator, and a by-the-numbers plot.
"Rogues' Regiment" (RKO, 1948) found him back in stride as a military intelligence officer on the trail of Nazi war criminals by posing as a member of the French Foreign Legion. This story had its unusual side, but once again Powell came out of it more of a hero than a tough-guy loser, the role he played best.
"Pitfall" (United Artists, 1949) was a change of pace with Powell playing an insurance agent bored with family and job. Circumstances lead him to have an affair with blonde-haired femme fatale Lizabeth Scott, who frequently played "the other woman" in the crime movies of the late '40s. Her jealous boyfriend, after getting out of jail, comes after Powell, and Powell must reveal all the sordid details of his trysts with Scott to long-suffering wife Jane Wyman. Powell's abilities to appear vulnerable and dour were put to excellent use by director Andre De Toth, and his character emerged more sympathetic than ever before.
Back at NBC, executives hadn't forgotten Powell's desire to do another radio show, and they put him into a rewrite of "The Front Page," but it was too loose an adaptation of the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur play to find favor with critics. The listening public was just as indifferent to Powell's portrayal of fast-talking newshound Hildy Johnson and the show lasted only four months.
However, NBC had another surprise waiting in the wings for Powell. The network had uncovered a young writing talent with an idea for a show that would cast Powell as another private eye, only this time he would be a former singer-turned-shamus and a one-time World War II OSS officer. He'd get to sing one of his old songs to his girlfriend in each show, and his spy training would come in handy solving the often-violent capers. The private eye also would have a comedic, adversarial battle of wits with a police inspector, and the self-effacing wisecracks and double talk would be dropping out of both sides of his mouth like never before.
Powell fell in love with the idea for "Richard Diamond, Private Detective" instantly, and struck up a friendship with the young creator-writer that would last the rest of his life. Powell's influence on this fella would later have a profound affect on television of the late '50s, on the use of jazz music for movie and TV soundtracks, and would change the way film music was packaged forever. All because Powell had a love for jazz, and he passed that love on like a good mentor should.
That young talent was Blake Edwards.
Edwards had first become an actor after graduating from Beverly Hills High School. Modest roles in "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," "A Guy Named Joe" and "They Were Expendable" had opened enough studio doors that by the end of World War II he was pursuing his real love, screenwriting. After the Rod Cameron western "Panhandle" (1947), Edwards turned out a series of B-movie scripts for Mickey Rooney. Edwards already had a professed interest in jazz when he met Powell, so the two had plenty to talk about as "Richard Diamond" was being shaped.
Powell developed his love for jazz when he was learning how to play several instruments around the time he had graduated from Little Rock College. After working with a band, he began touring with several orchestras, working as both musician and vocalist. It was to be the training ground for the movie musicals to come. (It was while he was serving as the master of ceremonies at the Enright Theaters in Pittsburgh that he was spotted and signed to a Warner Bros. contract.)
First off, Edwards and Powell agreed that the show should have a jazz theme. That became "Leave It to Love" by Henry Russell, with Powell whistling pieces of it during each opening and closing segment. Even the bridging music was pure jazz-oriented.
Edwards wanted the show to be slick and fast-paced, with Powell playing a dapper, smart-mouthed bon vivant who never seemed to take anything seriously, but who could get very tough and slap around unsavory characters when the scripts called for it.
This was one "Diamond" that would not be in the rough. Powell had learned by listening to "The Jack Benny Program" that one could sustain longer on the air if the main character was surrounded by a cast of equally interesting people, and the writers built those characters up as strongly as the lead, using a lot of continuing situations and gags that carried over week to week.
So Edwards followed the formula. He created wealthy Helen Asher, a sexy number who would be voiced by Virginia Gregg. She was a cool dame who was always calling Diamond at the office and making sultry suggestions that he should give up crime-fighting and come on up to her Park Avenue apartment for a little R & R. There was never any doubt what she really had in mind. Powell was ready to fly into her arms but inevitably someone would walk through the door or he'd get sapped in the hallway or another dame would sidetrack him with the promise of a high-paying bodyguard job. (Guarding female bodies was a chore that Diamond never denied himself.)
Diamond would finally make it to Helen's posh pad but only after the caper was solved. During the last few minutes of each program, he would sit at her grand piano and serenade her with a popular tune or a Broadway favorite or, likely as not, an old chestnut from one of his musicals. Edwards also created a nameless male neighbor who would scream in protest to Diamond's warbling, hurl a few insults and slam his apartment window during the song. (This comedy-relief character would eventually hire a rival private detective, a parody of Jack Webb's Pat Novak, to devise a way of damaging Diamond's vocal cords so he would never sing again.)
There were two regular cops on the show: Ed Begley, a popular character actor in films who eventually won an Oscar for "Sweet Bird of Youth," played Lieutenant Levinson, a homicide detective with an ulcer that was inexorably activated by Diamond's butting into his crime work. Levinson was always exploding at Diamond for aggravating his stomach pains:
"Every time I get near you, corpses start to fall out of closets. I can't walk across a room without stepping on a body. Just once I wish you'd keep your distance and let my stomach settle down."
Diamond loved to engage in double talk with Levinson, leading him down nonsensical paths that inevitably would bring the cop to the brink of frustrated collapse. But when the chips were down, they'd put aside their friendly bickering and badinage to work in harmony to nail the crooks.
The other cop was a dimwitted precinct desk sergeant named Otis, who personified the thousands of incompetent police officers depicted in movies and radio series of the '40s. It was a common stereotype but Diamond had a way of putting him down that inspired listeners to return each week. Otis was played by Wilms Herbert, who doubled as Helen Asher's butler, Francis. The pompous Francis was always unexpectedly present during the romantic interludes, which invariably included a prolonged smooching session that embarrassed him and sent him scurrying from the study.
Many of the shows opened with the phone
ringing in Diamond's office, and Diamond giving out with the
corny witticisms: "Diamond Detective Agency. Happy homicide!
We filter the choke on the way to your throat. Guard against
throat scratch, enjoy strangling more . . . . Surplus hand grenades,
black-market embalming . . . we trail em, we nail em, if they're
guilty we jail em. No charge for poetry. . . . If you have a
little corpse in your home, swap it for something useful.
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Comedy situations, which Edwards loved creating, abounded, often with Powell satirizing his past as a crooner or making fun of his current tough-guy image. In one 1950 show, June Allyson playing June Allyson shows up in Diamond's office, asking him to find her missing husband. A guy named Dick Powell. Diamond's investigation never brings him face to face with Powell (that would have been a challenge for him to do both voices) but he does find out that the actor has done a vanishing act because Allyson is pregnant (she really was in 1950) and he doesn't feel up to the task of taking care of mom and baby. Diamond, however, convinces Powell to return home and face up to his responsibilities.
In another show, Diamond is hired to protect a seal named Timothy, and actually walks the "Mean Streets" with the seal at his side, and even takes a cab ride with Timothy down to the precinct house, where a frightened Otis climbs a ladder. The sight of the seal only aggravates Levinson's ulcer to a new threshold of pain.
When it's discovered that Timothy has a fortune in diamonds implanted in his stomach, the creature is rushed to the hospital. Over the telephone, Levinson calls "Rick" at Helen's place to give him an update:
Levinson: "Timothy's very weak,
the doctor thinks he doesn't want to live. No will."
Diamond: "What's the matter? He was such a happy seal."
Levinson: "I think he misses you,
Rick. Every time someone mentions your name he honks and raises
a weak flipper."
Diamond: "I'd better come right down."
Levinson: "He's sinking fast."
Diamond: "Do you think if he heard
my voice . . . Can you get a phone near him?"
Levinson: "Hold it, I've got it next to his ear. Say something."
Diamond: "Timothy . . . ?"
Timothy: "Hooonnnkkkk."
Diamond: "Walt, ask him if he's
seen a picture called 'Mrs. Mike.'"
Timothy: "Hooonnnkkkk."
Levinson: "Said he saw it. Didn't
like the leading man. [Dick Powell no
less] Loved Evelyn Keyes. [Powell's co-star in the 1949 release]."
Diamond: "I'll sing him the theme song."
After a rendition of "Kathy,"
a weepy, sentimental Irish ballad, Diamond is encouraged to hear
that Timothy feels better and is moving his flippers wildly.
Levinson: "I guess the singing did it."
Diamond: "Whattaya mean, you guess. When I sang with the
Peter Pan 5 we played two weeks at the Coral Gables Hotel in
Florida."
Levinson: "So what?"
Diamond: "So what? Five minutes after I opened my mouth
every seal in the Biscayne Keys came in and sat ringside."
Levinson: "That sounds like a pretty good act. What'd you
give it up for?"
Diamond: "Well, I got a sore throat one night and the place
was up to its ears in alligators."
Despite all this playfulness, there were times when "Richard Diamond" got very serious dealing with assassins, hit men and serial killers. The underworld was sometimes Damon Runyonish, but it could also be extremely violent. There are several episodes in which a couple of gunsels sadistically work over Diamond, kicking him and bashing him with their fists. No other crime program from this time period dealt with cruelty as raw and frankly as "Richard Diamond." The show was definitely on the cutting edge of radio, with Powell urging Edwards to push for more with each new script.
Powell would thrive on "Richard Diamond" for four seasons. Years later when the show went to TV with David Janssen playing a completely humorless Diamond, it was clear that without the team of Edwards and Powell, it was a thin shadow of its former self.
When "Richard Diamond" left radio in 1952 Powell pretty much gave up acting, preferring to spend his time producing television shows. He had joined ranks with David Niven and Charles Boyer to create Four Star Television, which produced "Four Star Playhouse." The three actors alternated doing the weekly show.
Powell had always been sorry that "Richard
Diamond" had finally run its course, and wanted to do a
new variation. So, in the mid-50s, Powell reteamed with Edwards
to create "Dante's Inferno," which appeared sporatically
on "Four Star Playhouse." In an effort to recapture
some of the spark of "Richard Diamond," Powell played
a sassy, sometimes sardonic restaurant owner who kept a secret
gambling casino in the back. Regis Toomey was the cop always
trying to close the joint down, but who secretly liked Dante
and helped him track the really dangerous criminals. He was an
obvious
retread of Lt. Levinson, though the friendly antagonism was lost.
Dante was the same kind of flippant, self-effacing guy that Diamond had been, only he had mellowed a whole lot. Vowing never to touch the stuff again, he drank only coffee provided to him by a faithful bartender. Missing from this new mixture was a regular girlfriend to keep Dante warm. Helen Asher or her counterpart was sadly needed. The satire and magic of "Diamond" just couldn't be recaptured on the medium of television and only a handful of episodes of "Dante's Inferno" were produced.
When Powell grew weary of TV production, he turned to directing features, the best of which would be "The Enemy Below," a 1957 World War II submarine saga with Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens giving powerful performances as battling adversaries. Powell also directed a John Wayne action film in which Wayne played Genghis Khan. "The Conqueror" was shot in the desert near Kanab, Utah, not far from atomic bomb test sites.
An urban legend persists to this day that many who worked on "The Conqueror" died prematurely from exposure to radiation fallout. Powell died in 1963 at the age of 62, reportedly of lung cancer. But he was a hopeless chain smoker all of his life, so the urban legend will have to go unsubstantiated. (Ironically, the "Richard Diamond" sponsor for many years had been Camel Cigarettes, the virtues of which Powell espoused in dozens of shows, sending free cartons of the cigarettes to servicemen in hospitals all over the world.)
However, Powell's contribution to crime-related entertainment--even if it was to be an indirect one--hadn't quite come to a dead end. Edwards, after those few episodes of "Dante's Inferno," had moved on to writing and directing movies at Columbia, including "Bring Your Smile Along" and "He Laughed Last."
Then he made a fateful move to Universal-International to direct "Mister Cory" with Tony Curtis (1957) and "This Happy Feeling" (1958) with Debbie Reynolds. During this busy period he met Henry Mancini, one of the studio's collaborative staff composers who had climbed through the ranks writing music for the "Creature from the Black Lagoon" series, Ma and Pa Kettle flicks and Francis the Talking Mule programmers.
Mancini had originally been an arranger for the Glenn Miller Orchestra when it was revived in 1946 by Tex Beneke, and he had been brought to the studio solely to do the arrangements for Jimmy Stewart's "The Glenn Miller Story" in 1953. But Mancini had done such a fine job, Universal hired him to work with Hans J. Salter and others to score, on an assembly-line basis, the films that ultimately taught him the craft of movie scoring.
Edwards had an idea for a TV show, and he felt that Mancini was the perfect choice to compose the music.
The idea was to take "Richard Diamond" but plop it down in a new time and place with new characters. Instead of an office, the new Diamond would hang out around a jazz club called Mother's because that's where his sexy girl pal hung out. Only instead of being a spoiled rich gal like Helen Asher, she would be a jazz singer named Edie Hart, who belted out scorchy torch songs for a living. And all those great sounds Edwards and Powell had enjoyed listening to together now could be incorporated into the soundtrack as part of the series' night club environment. Source music as well as dramatic soundtrack stuff.
And that's where Mancini came in: Create cool background music for the joint called Mother's but also create a faster-paced theme for the private eye to be used during the main titles. Write the action scenes like you would for a big-band arrangement, and give each dramatic scene a low-key, underplayed tension. Above all, make it smooth and cool, like the way Miles Davis might zing it.
And that's how "Peter Gunn" was born, and how the packaging of movie music got changed forever, and why jazz music in the movies thrived for years afterward.
Mancini used a full orchestra in doing "Peter Gunn" soundtracks, as if he were still back at Universal doing a full-length feature. Basically he would form it as a jazz band but with plenty of strings, saying, "I like brass and saxophone ensembles, swinging jam sessions and blues sequences."
Edwards resorted to recycling a lot of the old "Richard Diamond" scripts, including one in which the private eye (now played by ruggedly handsome Craig Stevens) gets drugged and ends up in an asylum--a big steal since it was lifted directly out of Chandler's "Farewell, My Lovely." There was also the one about Timothy, though without the comedy. There were many "Peter Gunn" episodes, in fact, that had their antecedents in Powell's radio show.
The dumb cop Otis was too politically incorrect by 1958 to work, so he disappeared. The grumbling flatfoot cop was still sound, though he was now named Lt. Jacoby and was played by Herschel Bernardi.
Powell lived to see Edwards and Mancini
carry the jazz motif to grand
heights of success. Mancini's music was nominated for an Emmy
and two "Peter Gunn" record albums sold millions of
copies. The National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences
named one of them the Album of the Year. Edwards and Mancini
went on to a flurry of major motion pictures as a team.
Bad health from smoking all those cigarettes was looming, but Powell was still around to see the after-effects of the great success of the Edwards-Mancini collaboration. Record companies began to release more and more film music to cash in on the success of "Peter Gunn," "Moon River" from "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "The Pink Panther" comedy series. Eventually, the business of putting film music on records, tapes and CDs became a world-wide multimillion dollar franchise, all from the lesson the business had learned from the way that Mancini's music had been packaged in the wake of "Peter Gunn."
Maybe he was standing on the sidelines during those last years of his life, but he must have felt good to know that he had made his share of contributions. And all because he had wanted to walk Chandler's "Mean Streets" and be a tough guy, slapping a few gunsels and lowlifes around.
The Crooner of the musicals had finally found a serious place in life, and then some.
© 2000 by John Stanley
You can comment on this column or contact John Stanley with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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