By David in TN
friday, september 29, 2023 at 10:31:00 p.m. edt
TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 and 10 a.m. ET is Lewis Seiler’s Whiplash (1948) with Dane Clark, Alexis Smith, Zachary Scott, Jeffrey Lynn, Eve Arden and Alan Hale.
Film Noir Guide: “Clark stars as a promising young artist who takes to the boxing ring because he feels rejected by the woman he loves (Smith). Between rounds of his championship fight at Madison Square Garden, we learn via flashback that nightclub singer Smith is married to wheelchair-bound ex-boxer (Scott) who is living vicariously through Clark’s meteoric rise to the middleweight championship.”
“Lynn plays the doctor who operated on Scott, leaving him a bitter cripple. Arden provides the comic relief as Clark’s supportive and romantically interested friend; and Hale is Clark’s crusty trainer.
“The good acting, especially by Clark and Smith, doesn’t compensate for the overly dramatic, cliché-ridden script. Before turning to acting, Clark boxed a little, and it shows during the realistic fight scenes.”
David in TN: According to Eddie Muller, Dane Clark was known as the “poor man’s John Garfield,” which Muller said Clark didn’t like. In Whiplash, Dane Clark is playing a John Garfield-type role.
N.S.: This is a B-movie rip off of Jew Robert Rossen’s (a former pug) masterpiece of the previous year, Body and Soul, which was Julie Garfinkle’s (Garfield’s real name) finest hour. The odd thing about Body and Soul was that Garfield’s boxer, Charley Davis, was supposedly a Jew, though I don’t recall anyone saying so when I was saw it over 50 years ago. (Yes, it was THAT memorable!). However, Anne Revere, who played his mother, didn’t seem for one second Jewish. Meanwhile, Lilli Palmer, who played the German emigre beauty queen who becomes Charley’s on-again, off-again girlfriend and the love of his life, was a Jew, though not in the picture.
Red Eddie recently showed Dane Clark co-starring as a psycho killer who escapes from a convict work detail in a hurricane in California, and falls in love with Ida Lupino, a young woman with a terrible life, in a high-quality B-picture, Deep Valley (1947).
Clark had Julie’s intensity, but wasn’t as talented. (Who was?)
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TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 and 10 a.m. ET is Irving Rapper's Deception (1946) with Bette Davis, Claude Rains, Paul Henried, John Abbott, Benson Fong.
Film Noir Guide: "A New York pianist (Davis) runs into former lover Henried, who she thought had died in Europe during the war. The out-of-work cellist suspects that something isn't quite right when he sees the luxurious lifestyle that Davis is enjoying and grills her about it."
"Knowing that he can be violently jealous, Davis allays his suspicions, explaining that she's been teaching music to wealthy clients. She sidetracks him further by suggesting that they get married, which they do, and rather quickly, before Davis' sugar daddy (Rains) returns to town."
"Raines, a famous composer, offers Henried the opportunity to play his latest composition during a recital, and the unemployed musician enthusiastically accepts. But Davis knows her former lover, who has a mean streak a mile long, only too well and expects him to pull the rug out from under Henried at the last minute, replacing him with a stand-by cellist (Abbott)."
"But what Rains has in mind is even worse, and somebody will be killed as a result. Fong, a semi-regular on TV's Bachelor Father and Kung Fu in the 1960s and 1970s, plays Rains' butler. Rains' excellent performnce makes this slow-mover worth watching."
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