NORA PRENTISS
Warner Bros. / First National (1947) Dir. Vincent Sherman
101 min. / B&W / 1.37:1 / 1080p / DTS-HD MA English 2.0 Mono
There’s nothing wrong with this intense, bleak, heartbreaking film noir that pulling Kent Smith off the screen and slapping him across the face until he cries wouldn’t cure. We know that a tenet of noir is a man making bad choices and being sucked into a whirlpool of deceit, despair, and death, but has any protagonist ever put on flippers and a snorkel and jumped into the vortex of doom so energetically while yelling “WATCH ME”?
Smith is a San Francisco doctor and a good family man with a supportive wife, 2 well-adjusted children, a partner who likes to party and run around with women and thereby sets a fine example for Dr. Smith on what NOT to do, and a helpful nurse who is astounded the one time that Smith actually shows up to work a couple of minutes late for the first time in 10 years. Enter Nora Prentiss (Ann Sheridan), a nightclub singer who has been hit by a cab in a minor scrape; she decides flirting with the strait-laced doctor would be a kick, but she’s so good at it that coupled with the wife’s trip out of town, the flirtation leads to a petting party in the doctor’s dust-covered mountain hunting retreat (it’s amusing that the partner, Dr. Bruce “Don’t call me Herman Brix” Bennett, remarks that Smith isn’t rich, just comfortable, when Smith has a house the size of Penn Station and a hunting lodge that dwarfs the Ponderosa ranch home).
As the reels pass, Miss Prentiss, tired of being the other woman, flees to New York and a new nightclub gig and here’s where if they had multiplexes in 1943 much of the audience would’ve gone to look for a cheerier movie: Kent fakes his own death, steals the identity of a deceased patient, and flees to Manhattan to be with his lover, not telling her any of this and leaving her to wonder why he’s changed his appearance and his name and refuses to get a job and doesn’t leave their rented room and has become surly and started to hit the bottle. (This isn’t really a spoiler, we’re only midway through the picture, but anything else would be a spoiler, so you’re not going to get it from US.)
I love film noir and I rarely get disturbed by it, including such downers as Gun Crazy, Detour, and The Breaking Point, but this film, with Kent Smith flushing his family, his medical practice, and his family down the toilet was almost too intense even for me, not helped by Smith, one of the most wooden of our actors; it’s way beyond his range to work up any sympathy for his character. Miss Sheridan is terrific, although it’s a bit of a cheat that the film’s title and publicity are all about her when she’s a decidedly (but sexy and appealing) secondary character. She gets to sing, though, and does it perfectly well enough to convince you that she’s a second-rate singer who isn’t going to be moving up to a more swell joint. You’ll also note Rosemary DeCamp (as the wife) and Robert Alda (as the club owner) in the cast.
Great noir features great cinematography, and we could watch this movie with the sound off just to see the brilliant restoration of the camerawork of the legendary James Wong Howe. It’s impeccable. The score by Franz Waxman is also a standout; I wish we had a music-only track. Bonus material includes the trailer, a very funny Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon called The Big Snooze, and an not-so-funny Joe McDoakes one-reel short, So You Think You’re a Nervous Wreck.
Another terrific release from the Warner Archive.
“A paper? I could write a whole book.”