Pushover (1954)

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!

One of the few advantages of being nowhere near so knowledgeable as most regular posters here is that I can sometimes be pleasantly surprised by a movie of which I had never even heard previously. One such was Pushover (1954) dir: Richard Quine. Though not a first-rank Noir, it is better than many more well-known examples.

Quine had 46 directing credits on IMDb, most of them for feature films. Although clearly a competent craftsman, I cannot see another title of his that I admire. Those that are well-known, like Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and The World of Suzie Wong (1960) are just not to my taste. Having enjoyed Pushover, I tried another Quine alleged film noir, Drive a Crooked Road, also released in 1954, but gave up after a tedious first half-hour of lumbering plot development.

So I am crediting the screenplay by Roy Huggins (who created the Rockford Files and The Fugitive) and/or the original novel by Thomas Walsh and Bill S Ballinger, and certainly the excellent cast, for much of the success of Pushover.

Reading some reviews afterwards, I see that many label the movie "Double Indemnity Lite". Certainly there are similarities, but I not sure that would be anyone's first thought had Fred MacMurray not been its anti-hero. MacMurray mostly featured in comedies and family movies as a genial dad or stalwart American citizen, yet in his three outstanding movies, Double Indemnity (1944), The Caine Mutiny (1954), and The Apartment (1960), he played nasty bits of work most convincingly, as he does here in Pushover.

Here he is a classic Noir anti-hero who paints himself into a corner and makes one last hopeless foray to retrieve the situation. It reminded me more of Macbeth than of Double Indemnity. The difference between The Pushover and DI is that in the latter MacMurray has plenty of time to plot the perfect crime and only with hindsight do we realize the flaws in the scheme. In Pushover he snatches at a now or never chance and one of the delights of the film is how MacMurray and his moll are constantly thinking fast and rejigging their plans as circumstances change and their options narrow. MacMurray and his fellow cops are on a stakeout watching an apartment across the courtyard and there is so much ducking in and out of rooms and up and down stairs, together with some black humor of mistaken identities, that it resembles a French Bedroom Farce at times.

One of the reasons I label it a true noir is that right until the end we are rooting for the criminals and hoping they can pull off their murderous scheme. It is thus still socially subversive in the mid-fifties, when crime movies were increasingly extolling different branches of law enforcement, and commencing with a pompous narrator and stirring martial music.

Now about that moll. She is 21-year-old Kim Novak who shared the lead in this her first ever feature. Whoever took that chance on her was richly rewarded as she is perfect. MacMurray is, at first, an only slightly bent cop. We have heard hints that he is not above cutting corners to get the job done, but he takes things to a new level when he falls for the gorgeous Novak and the promise of a hundred grand (worth a million or more then). At first, she is only interested in the money, not him, but not in a spiteful way like some other femme fatales, and there is a telling scene at the end when MacMurray is lying in the street with two or three slugs in him and surrounded by cops. She says "We did not really need the money, did we, Paul?" They have fallen in love and this is convincingly portrayed as the movie progresses. Just the opposite from your typical Noir where the criminal lovers turn on each other like rats once cornered. A nice variation which worked for me, and I am no softie.

The supporting cast includes E G Marshall, Philip Carey (I well knew the face but not the name) and a somewhat miscast Dorothy Malone, whose character is little too goody-two-shoes for me, considering she was 30 at the time, not 15. She is often seen in her kitchen and is almost a parody of the perfect young mum seen in TV commercials of that decade.