This was a fun movie that popped up on TCM this evening on Glenn Ford Night.
Watching the news has been particularly depressing lately, so I decided to spend this evening watching a Glenn Ford movie instead of being bummed out by another evening of Trumpian noise. I couldn’t be happier with how that decision worked out.
This is a Fritz Lang movie. The stars are:
- Glenn Ford as Dave Bannion
- Gloria Grahame as Debby Marsh
- Jocelyn Brando as Katie Bannion
- Lee Marvin as Vince Stone
Glenn Ford is a city police homicide detective whose is married to Jocelyn Brando.
I had NOT heard of Jocelyn Brando before. She’s Marlon Brando’s sister, and she was very cute and appealing in this movie … until she got blown up.
I barely got to know her, then BOOM!, she’s gone!
The movie opens with another police officer killing himself. He had written a long letter. His wife does something with the letter. Then she calls the police but doesn’t mention the letter.
Glenn Ford investigates, and things get very complicated quickly.
Glenn Ford is having a lovely night at home with his lovely wife and their cute daughter. He and his wife drink a lot! He gets the call about the suicide. He’s gotta leave his cute wife to investigate.
The wife of the dead guy has a mysterious call with the head gangster. She wants him to know about that letter, which we come to discover is her insurance policy to stay alive, and to get paid by the bad guys.
She tells makes up some nonsense to tell Glenn Ford her husband was depressed about health problems.
Later Ford runs down the dead guy’s girfriend at the bar. She says he did not have health issues, and that he was planning to divorce his wife!
Turns out the town is corrupt through and through, even the Police Chief tells Ford to lay off. Ford won’t lay off, and he eventually pisses off the crime boss bad enough that he has his stooge wire Ford’s car with a bomb.
At the last minute, his wife hopped in the car to get the babysitter, so she got blown up instead of him. No more Jocelyn Brando!
Now Ford’s REALLY mad! He follows a lead to the bar where all the gangsters hang out, and makes Gloria Grahame kinda like him a little bit. This pisses off Lee Marvin, who scars her for life by thowing steaming hot coffee in her face.
Now Gloria Grahame is really mad too, and she decided to eff up as many bad guys as she can on her way out!
She goes to the house of the widow of the corrupt cop from the intro and shoots her dead! Recall that she had set it up so that dead husband’s incrimination letter would be released if she dies!
Grahame then goes to her old boyfreind Lee Marvin’s apartment and throws steaming hot coffee in HIS face and shoots him. She doesn’t quite kill him. Which means we get to enjoy him writhing in pain about steaming hot coffee in HIS face! We don’t get to enjoy that beautiful retribution for long before Glenn Ford comes and shoots him really dead.
Gloria Grahame dies of her gun shot wounds, tidies everything up. We all had come to quit like her, but it wouldn’t have been in the style of these movies to have her hanging around as a cripple, so she had to die.
And that’s pretty much the movie!