The Guilty (1947, Dir. John Reinhardt):
The Film Noir Foundation, which holds the annual Film Noir Festival in San Francisco, has the noble goal of resuscitating films on 35mm: the old classics, the classics, or the just plain old. The Guilty, based on the Cornell Woolrich short story “Two Fellows in a Furnished Room” and screened in a brand-new print at this year’s festival, falls in the third category. As with most of Woolrich’s tales, it’s all about murder, complicity, and how the whims of chance ensnare us all: Mike (mustachioed Don Castle) and his shell-shocked war vet roommate Dixon (Wally Cassell) both have eyes for the sweet Linda (Bonita Granville, best known as Nancy Drew) and her not-so-sweet twin sister Estelle (Granville again). The incestuous back-and-forth in this love square gets interrupted when Linda goes missing, and then turns up dead. Forced into covering for Dixon when he becomes a suspect, and without much of an alibi himself, Mike attempts to unravel the whole affair, when he’s not locking lips with Estelle. “These streets reek of murder, senseless murder,” he growls during his persistent narration, and he’s not kidding around, what with Linda getting choked, stuffed halfway down an incineration shaft, and then jammed into a barrel. On top of all that you get the twins’ hysterical mother (Netta Packer), their slightly too solicitous lodger (John Litel), and a nosy detective (Regis Toomey), with all the principals confined to three major sets (Mike and Dixon’s flat, the twins’ apartment, and the friendly neighborhood juke joint where you can’t order two beers and a whiskey without getting the third degree from the barman). In other words, you have all the elements of a grungy B-picture from Monogram.
“You kinda love me, don’t you?”
“I’d kinda love to break your neck.”
The Guilty won’t win anyone involved any awards (it didn’t), and the film is primitive rather than primitivist — the production seams are apparent, and the constant static shots of people talking at each other can get numbing. Still, director John Reinhardt throws in some nifty touches, like a nightmare scene in Estelle’s bedroom that seems like it’s teleported in from another movie, and shadowplays on walls at crucial moments. The weak links turn out to be the two leads: Castle is too studied to convince as a world-weary tough guy, and Granville, in a bid to tart up her public persona, fails to find much nuance in her dual role. At least the script provides them with some zingers (“I trusted her about as far as I could throw a boxcar”) and allows them to work each other into a fine lather.
Woolrich springs a twist at the end of most of his stories, and The Guilty is no exception. Nothing will be revealed here, but what plays well on the page, in the hands of an author who can worm his way into his narrator’s head, plays nowhere near as well in a plodding film laboring to escape the burden of Castle’s performance. Despite these shortcomings, The Guilty at its best reminds us of what we like in our noir: the paranoia that hangs like heavy fog over the city, the suspicion that everyone’s number is up, whether they’re innocent or not. “I ought to get off this street, walk out the door and keep going,” Mike mutters to himself — sage advice that most movies of this stripe happily ignore, to our benefit.
