Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #8: "The Man Who Cheated Himself," directed by Felix Feist

After a one-week engage­ment at The Auteurs’, this soon-to-be-concluded fea­ture returns to its home. (Now’s as good a time as any to beg, once again, any read­ers with a line on Appointment To Danger to help me out if they can.)

Farber: “A light­weight, O’Henry-type story about a cop who hoists him­self on his own petard; heavy­weight act­ing by Lee J. Cobb and Jane Wyatt; as a con­sequence, the only film this year to take a mod­er­ate, mor­ally fair stand on mod­er­ately suave and immor­al Americans, aged about forty. An effort­lessly paced story, impres­sion­ist­ic­ally coated with San Francisco’s oatmeal-gray atmo­sphere; at the end, it wanders into an aban­doned fort or pris­on and shows Hitchcock and Carol Reed how to sidestep hok­um in a corny archi­tec­tur­al mon­stros­ity. Cobb packs more psy­cho­lo­gic­al truths about joy­less American promis­cu­ity into one iron­ic stare, one drag on a cigar­ette, or one unin­ter­ested kiss more than all the Mankiewicz her­oes put together.”

Mankiewicz had by this time made enough pic­tures to have forged a par­tic­u­lar sig­na­ture, and the pri­or year saw his first real mas­ter­work, All About Eve. While Eve’s not usu­ally noted for its male char­ac­ters just a year before, and while the movie was­n’t unusu­ally not­able for its male char­ac­ters, there is some inter­est­ing con­trast to be seen between, say, Cobb’s reac­tion to being made putty in the hands of Wyatt’s not-quite-femme-fatale, and Gary Merrill’s self-loathing resig­na­tion at Bette Davis’ mach­in­a­tions in Eve. But I’m get­ting ahead of myself.

Cobb here plays Ed Cullen, a hom­icide cop who’s got­ten him­self mixed up with mar­ried rich broad Lois Frazer. After an imbroglio with her rot­ter hus­band, Frazer shoots the guy, in kinda/sorta self defense, with Cullen right there in the room. A fel­low of some expert­ise in these mat­ters, Cullen unwisely volun­teers to ditch both the body and the gun. Several prob­lems ensue, of course. The gun, tossed of the Golden Gate Bridge, does­n’t wind up in the drink where it’s sup­posed to. And worse, the case winds up in the lap of Cullen’s eager-beaver young­er broth­er Andy, who’s just been pro­moted to homicide. 

I was reminded a bit, while watch­ing this, of Phil Karlson’s 1952 Scandal Sheet (from Sam Fuller’s nov­el The Dark Page; it’s part of the excel­lent new Fuller col­lec­tion from Sony), in which slimeball tabloid edit­or Broderick Crawford murders his wife and sub­sequently manip­u­lates the young protégé who’s cov­er­ing the story for him. Both are vari­ants of the dynam­ic of the immor­tal Double Indemnity, and of course the killer-right-under-one’s-nose device goer farther back than that. But Indemnity is the most imme­di­ate point of ref­er­ence for both. Of course in Indemnity Walter Neff is a slick, ami­able amor­al clod who’s get­ting in touch with his inner scum­bag, while in Scandal Sheet Broderick’s char­ac­ter is a ruth­less, heart­less pred­at­or, at least until his very Fuller-esque quasi-redemption. Cobb’s Cullen is just a reg­u­lar schmoe who’s got­ten in way too deep. The view­er intu­its, pretty much right off the bat, that there are some lines he just won’t cross. And of course Cullen him­self thinks he’s figured things to the extent that he ought not have to cross them. The effort­less pacing, then, res­ults from a well-considered set-up (the script is by vet­er­an writer Seton I. Miller, who goes all the way back to A Girl In Every Port, and mys­tery near-great Phillip MacDonald).

Gun Crazy’s John Dall plays Cullen’s broth­er Andy with a breezy goofi­ness that does­n’t quite gel into full-fledged indig­na­tion as he grows closer to the truth; this is entirely apt, as the pic­ture, in keep­ing with its respect for Cullen’s char­ac­ter, isn’t build­ing toward an explos­ive cli­max. Andy’s new wife is played by dir­ect­or Feist’s wife at the time, Lisa Howard, who later went on to become one of tele­vi­sion’s pion­eer female journ­al­ists. She was very act­ive in cov­er­ing Cuba in the early ’60s, inter­view­ing sev­er­al of the revolu­tion’s prin­cip­al act­ors, includ­ing Ernesto “Che” Guevara. In fact, she is por­trayed in Steven Soderbergh’s film on Che, played by Julia Ormond. How crazy is that? 

The film’s final pur­suit is one of its most impress­ive scenes; the “corny archi­tec­tur­al mon­stros­ity” Farber men­tions is in fact Fort Point, built in the mid-1800s. It was to have been razed for the con­struc­tion of the Golden Gate Bridge, but was not; when this pic­ture was shot, the site was aban­doned, await­ing res­tor­a­tion into a his­tor­ic land­mark. It makes a pretty lonely and strangely majest­ic would-be hideaway…

Farber’s evoc­a­tion of Hitchcock is in a sense pres­ci­ent, as Fort Point can be seen in a pivotal bit of 1957’s Vertigo, when James Stewart res­cues Kim Novak from the bay.

The Man Who Cheated Himself ends with Cobb’s char­ac­ter leav­ing one cigar­ette unlit. Cobb could be a dread­ful scenery-chewer at times—sorry, but I cringe whenev­er he steps into a frame of On The Waterfront—but here he’s every bit as con­vin­cingly world-weary as Farber’s evoc­a­tions of him imply. (The only oth­er cita­tion of Cobb in Farber on Film is an admir­ing descrip­tion of his inter­play with Clint Eastwood in Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff.) Alas, the only extant leg­al DVD of this pic­ture is in a three-disc, nine-movie film noir col­lec­tion from Saint Clair Vision, a public-domain cheapie if you will. The above screen caps are rep­res­ent­at­ive of the over­all image qual­ity on Man; worse, late in the pic­ture there are a lot of frames miss­ing from indi­vidu­al scenes, mak­ing some­thing of a hash of said sequences. Caveat emptor.

UPDATE: The ori­gin­al of this post mis­takenly had “Jane Wyman” stand­ing in for “Jane Wyatt,” who, you know, is actu­ally IN the film. I’ve been mak­ing that mis­take since my late teens. Aaargh.