Impact (1949)
Posted: June 17th, 2009, 10:28 am
A couple of nights ago, I watched this independently produced film noir, and I was really impressed. The plot involves self-made millionaire Brian Donlevy, who is married to conniving, honey-voiced Helen Walker. He is utterly besotted with her, so besotted that he doesn't realize she is planning to murder him with the aid of her 'cousin' (in reality her lover, of course). But things go awry: Donlevy escapes and the cousin dies. However, the police think Donlevy is dead, and it is the cousin who has gone on the run. Thanks to the tireless investigations of policeman Charles Coburn, Walker is arrested for her husband's murder, while he hides out in a small town in Idaho, where he takes a job at a garage run by war widow, Ella Raines.
I couldn't really believe in Coburn as a hard-boiled cop - he'll always be Piggy in Gentleman Prefer Blondes to me - and Donlevy, although very good, was a bit too old for the part as written. There was approximately twenty years difference in age between him and Walker in real life, and although this gap would have made for a very plausible dynamic in the characters' poisonous relationship had it been acknowledged, we were meant to believe that he was much younger than he really was, I think. Certainly Ella Raines's mother has a line where she calls him 'young man', which was rather absurd. The women were very good: the now forgotten Helen Walker's role was a kind of variation on her femme fatale psychiatrist in Nightmare Alley, while Ella Raines - not a performer I've noticed much before - was a very attractive, relaxed presence, effortlessly suggesting the virtues of small-town life without making a sanctimonious song and dance about it.
Amongst the supporting cast were silent icons Anna May Wong as Walker's maid and Mae Marsh as Raines's mother. I was also interested to see, playing herself, columnist Sheila Graham, whom I have previously read about in biographies of Scott Fitzgerald.
I couldn't really believe in Coburn as a hard-boiled cop - he'll always be Piggy in Gentleman Prefer Blondes to me - and Donlevy, although very good, was a bit too old for the part as written. There was approximately twenty years difference in age between him and Walker in real life, and although this gap would have made for a very plausible dynamic in the characters' poisonous relationship had it been acknowledged, we were meant to believe that he was much younger than he really was, I think. Certainly Ella Raines's mother has a line where she calls him 'young man', which was rather absurd. The women were very good: the now forgotten Helen Walker's role was a kind of variation on her femme fatale psychiatrist in Nightmare Alley, while Ella Raines - not a performer I've noticed much before - was a very attractive, relaxed presence, effortlessly suggesting the virtues of small-town life without making a sanctimonious song and dance about it.
Amongst the supporting cast were silent icons Anna May Wong as Walker's maid and Mae Marsh as Raines's mother. I was also interested to see, playing herself, columnist Sheila Graham, whom I have previously read about in biographies of Scott Fitzgerald.