TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Dick Powell’s Split Second (1953) with Stephen McNally, Alexis Smith, Jan Sterling, Keith Andes, Paul Kelly, Robert Paige, Richard Egan and Frank de Kova

By David in TN
friday, september 20, 2024 at 11:21:00 p.m. edt

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Dick Powell’s Split Second (1953) with Stephen McNally, Alexis Smith, Jan Sterling, Keith Andes, Paul Kelly, Robert Paige, Richard Egan and Frank de Kova.

Film Noir Guide: “Sterling plays a dancer who’s hitchhiking to her next gig, and reporter Andes is the guy who gives her a lift. Lovers Smith and Paige are on their way to Las Vegas, so Smith can divorce her physician husband (Egan). The unfortunate foursome run into McNally, an escaped killer who, along with partners Kelly and de Kova, takes them hostage.

“McNally phones Egan and threatens to kill Smith if he doesn’t come to an abandoned mining town in the Nevada desert to treat Kelly, who was shot while escaping. To complicate matters, the Army has scheduled an atomic bomb test for the next day, and the ghost town is only a couple of miles from point zero. While the hostages are terrified, McNally isn’t at all worried. He figures he’ll have plenty of time to get out of there, minus the hostages, of course.

“McNally, in one of his best roles, is sensational as the trigger-happy gang leader. Sterling is just right as the cynical, street-wise dancer, and Smith is delightfully shameful as the sniveling cheat who’ll do anything, including throwing herself at the sadistic killer, to get out of her dangerous predicament. This exciting thriller marked former song-and-dance man and noir icon Powell’s directorial debut.”

N.S.: In Winchester 73, one of Borden Chase and Anthony Mann’s psychological Westerns, which starred Jimmy Stewart, Stephen McNally played a heavy so evil that he murdered his own father, just to rob him of the titular rifle. (Jimmy Stewart plays his brother, who spends the rest of the picture hunting down the brother and the rifle.)

But McNally wasn’t even the arch-heavy! That was Dan Duryea, who was such a sadistic killer that he intimidated McNally’s character, and turned Shelley Winters into his sex slave (though not depicted in such a way that the kiddies would have figured it out).

Dick Powell could do it all. He started out in pictures in early, top drawer musicals, as a song-and-dance man (42nd Street, Footlight Parade, etc.). Then he transformed himself into a tough guy private eye. Then he became a successful TV producer.

The first time I can remember seeing him was when I was about 12, in Vincente Minelli, George Bradshaw, and Charles Schnee’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), which sounds trashy, but which may have been a masterpiece. The picture, clearly influenced by Welles and Mankiewicz’ Citizen Kane (1941), opens (I believe) with the death of an intense, big-time Hollywood producer, who used his friends and drove them away. We then see a few of those friends, each of whom recalls his friendship with the dead man, presumably prompted by a journalist, as in Kane.

These flashback scenes introduced me to Powell, Gilbert Roland, and Barry Sullivan.

Note that Bad won five Oscars, was also nominated for Best Actor (Kirk Douglas), and was not even nominated for David Raksin’s brilliant score, in one of the greatest years ever. That year saw Singin’ in the Rain, High Noon, The Quiet Man, The Lavender Hill Mob, Forbidden Games and The Member of the Wedding, all of them Top 100 masterpieces.

In 1952, Dick Powell also founded Four Star Television with Ida Lupino, Charles Boyer, and David Niven. The company was successful, while Powell was alive. Unfortunately, he died at 58 of cancer in 1963.

A final note: Paul Kelly (1899-1956), who plays a cut-throat here, was a murderer in real life. As a young stage actor, he openly slept with Dorothy Mackaye, a married actress. He let the cuckolded husband, song-and-dance man Ray Raymond find out and confront him, and then beat him to death with his fists.

Kelly was sentenced to a most modest stretch in prison. The grieving widow did only two months for her conspiracy to cover up her husband’s murder, Kelly did two years, she waited for him, and married him, when he got out. She then died at 40 of undiagnosed injuries from a car accident on a foggy, nighttime road.

Meanwhile, Hollywood embraced the killer with open arms, and he took up his old career again.