Pitfall Filled with Potholes

 

 

 

Pitfall (1948)

Directed by André de Toth

United Artists, 88 minutes, Not-rated

★★

 

I really like old film noirs, but they’re not all great. Pitfall is a case in point. It has all the elements needed for a good movie minus one: a credible story. I’m not sure if it was the decision of the studio or director André de Toth, but the film’s short running time of 88 minutes served to make motives and character personality too shallow to make sense.

 

Johnny Forbes (Dick Powell) is an insurance investigator for the Olympic Mutual Insurance Company. He’s well-regarded for exposing insurance fraud, though we can tell he’s bored with his job. He is handed a case involving a jailed embezzler Bill Smiley (Byron Barr), who is suspected of channeling insurance money to his girlfriend. Forbes sends a freelance PI, ex-cop “Mac” MacDonald (Raymond Burr) to visit Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott). When he hears that she’s gorgeous, Johnny removes Mac from the case and personally investigates Stevens. Almost literally before you can say, “hot-ticket model,” Johnny has fallen for Mona, though he has a wife Sue (Jane Wyatt) and a gee-whiz son Tommy.

 

This touches off “I saw her first” animosity with Mac, who snoops on Johnny and stalks Mona. To emphasize his point, Mac beats the fedora off of Johnny. When Mac follows Johnny home and threatens to reveal his infidelity, Forbes promises to kill Mac if he ever threatens his family again. Meanwhile, Smiley gets paroled, wonders why Mona isn’t wearing the engagement ring he bought her and, thanks to Mac’s visits while he was in the tank, wants to know about both Johnny and Mac.

 

Pitfall was nearly nixed by the Hays Commission, the Hollywood censorship bureau, for not sufficiently following the code for upholding the virtues of family life. The last 15 minutes or so of Pitfall is a mess that makes me believe that whatever grit had been in the script was snipped in a hasty rewrite in which Smiley is killed, Mac’s attempt to force Mona to run away with him is melodramatically thwarted, Johnny becomes a suspect in Smiley’s demise, tells the police the real story, and gets off scot-free because Mona confirms his story. Johnny confesses his unfaithfulness to Sue, but she agrees to stay with him though she’s not sure she believes his tale of a one-off infatuation.

 

Oh yeah, there’s a backstory also about a briefcase and a boat, but you’d have to care enough to find out how they fit in. Trust me; it’s not worth watching to find out. Powell is okay as an all-American type in over his head and Burr makes for a creepy heavy, though Barr acts as if he swallowed a cliché dictionary on how to be a thug. Scott is indeed sultry, but her role is preposterous in Pitfall unless you really do believe in love at first sight. Even then, you’d have to swallow the further belief that she’d fall for a married man though her gangster boyfriend’s graft benefitted her. Who would be dumb enough to risk being fingered as part of part of the scheme?

 

From the field of architecture the phrase “less is more” has entered popular parlance as folk wisdom. That is certainly not true in Pitfall. This film needs a whole lot more getting- to-know-you character development to make sense of what we see on the screen. Sure, we see Johnny and Mona having a good time­–she’s a goodtime bad girl to his man in the gray flannel suit­–but the impression we get is that Johnny is bored in his job, not in his marriage. Likewise, if we are going to buy an ex-cop like Mac becoming a stalker and trying to abduct Mona, we need to know details of what has driven him to such desperation.

 

Jay Dratler wrote the novel upon which the movie was based. At 192 pages it’s not exactly a tome, but surely there was enough to flesh out the narrative. If I were retroactively to judge the movie version, I’d say that Karl Kamb’s screenplay is the namesake pitfall.

 

Rob Weir