The most recent Pulp Fiction movie posts featured films produced by the House of Noir, RKO Studios. The momentum of what Eddie Muller calls the film noir movement had built up so much steam that MGM joined in the fun with this week’s noir, 1947’s High Wall.
High Wall stars one of MGM’s top leading men, Robert Taylor. He was a somewhat wooden actor with a stolid poker face. In this movie, his woodiness is like Mahogany, not a lesser kind of timber. Shorter Adrastos: Taylor is good in High Wall and less stiff than usual. He even let them muss up his hair in this interrogation scene:
Taylor’s co-star is film noir regular Audrey Totter. She plays the disturbed veteran’s shrink. Initially, she’s a bit unnerved by Taylor but eventually the rule of the two best looking people in a movie kicks in and they fall in love.
Here’s a promo still of our stars that looks great but has nothing to do with the movie.
Taylor plays a former Army Air Corps Captain who flew B-52s during the war. He’s had memory problems because of a brain tumor, which led to noir’s favorite malady, amnesia. It’s time for an anachronistic musical interlude:
Taylor has such a bad case of amnesia that he’s uncertain whether or not he murdered his harpy wife. She was cheating on him with her boss, Herbert Marshall. Marshall plays a smarmily elegant publisher who feigns concern for Taylor’s well-being.
Taylor and Totter meet at the mental hospital Taylor is confined to after his arrest. As she treats him, she becomes convinced that he didn’t kill his wife. Eventually, she helps him out both professionally and personally; resulting in the rare film noir happy ending that Eddie Muller doesn’t find cringeworthy.
The mental institution in the movie is neither a snake pit nor a fancy hospital. It’s smack dab in the middle complete with some amusing inmates including silent movie star HB Warner who plays a music lover who befriends Taylor.
That’s all the plot I’m willing to share, this feature is called pulp fiction, not pulp spoilers, after all. There is, however, a major tell in the casting: MGM did not let romantic leading man Robert Taylor play murderers. He could be falsely accused but never a killer.
Psychiatry was a hot topic after World War II. I dig movies featuring shrinks, especially when played by gorgeous Scandinavian women such as Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound and Audrey Totter in High Wall. Totter gives a splendidly restrained performance in this week’s movie. She looks so good in her business suits that I’m surprised Hitchcock never cast her as one of his cool blonde protagonists. Oh well, nobody’s perfect.
High Wall was directed by German emigree Curtis Bernhardt with cinematography by Paul Vogel. They give the movie its shadowy noir look. One could even call it Insane Asylum Noir.
The script is by Sydney Boehm and Lester Cole. Robert Taylor loved Cole’s writing until he learned he was literally a card carrying communist. Taylor was only slightly to the left of John Wayne, so he cut Cole off at the knees. It was hard being one of the Hollywood Ten.
Grading Time: I give High Wall 3 1/2 stars and an Adrastos Grade of B+ It’s a taut and well-paced thriller that runs 99 minutes.
This feature began life with lurid paperback covers and the like, so let’s get arty.
We begin with a side-by-side image of the American and Italian posters:
The quad poster has a swell tagline:
Now that we’ve contemplated life in a mental institution, let’s all go to the lobby for some analysis.
Let’s exit the movie snacks second line and check out some lobby cards.
We begin with a token black and white lobby card:
The rest, of course, are in color.
I agree with the tagline of that lobby card. I enjoyed the movie so much that I want to watch the trailer again:
The last word goes to Eddie Muller with his Noir Alley intro and outro.