Nocturne (1946)

Posted by Ian W. Hill

Susan Flanders: "He was a ladykiller. But don’t get any ideas. I ain’t no lady."

The very start of Nocturne is not promising. The RKO logo is accompanied by a insipid trill that leads into an uninteresting romantic arrangement of the title song. The first credits are typeset in a way that suggests a 1930s backstage Broadway comedy, placed over footage of Los Angeles at night. However, a number of the names in the credits are reassuring: Virginia Huston, Joseph Pevney, Queenie Smith, etc., and some are more interesting: the story is co-credited to Frank Fenton, later an actor in the last NOTW, Port of New York, and uncredited co-writer of OUT OF THE PAST; the photographer is Harry Wild, of Murder, My Sweet and the non-Orson Welles-directed sections of The Magnificent Ambersons; the producer (and certainly an uncredited co-writer) is Alfred Hitchcock’s right-hand lady and story editor, Joan Harrison, during a brief attempt at striking out on her own; and the sets are co-designed by another frequent Hitchcock collaborator, Robert Boyle.

The music is by Leigh Harline, who has done good work elsewhere (Pickup on South Street), but whose work here is uneven. The title song, which features heavily in the plot, is fine, and does the job of being instantly recognizable when it needs to be, and it serves well when rearranged as background music, but the music is too often shrill and distracting. It may be my copy, but when the dialogue is turned up to a reasonable level, some of the string cues are painful on the ears.

The director is Edwin L. Marin, and this is the only film of his I’ve seen. He made about 50 films, ending his career with a few noirs and a handful of westerns before dying fairly young. His work doesn’t seem hugely distinguished here, but is more than competent. Scenes are staged efficiently and pleasantly, the camera work is well-composed, the dialogue rhythm is snappy – Marin seems to be one of the many fine RKO craftsmen who did solid, good, impersonal work on well-made movies.

However, once the camera, which has moved backwards from downtown L.A. into the hills during the credits, moves into a matte painting of a house and towards a man at a piano, the noir atmosphere begins to close in. At the piano is Keith Vincent, played by Edward Ashley, and a fine cad he is, speaking poison with a honeyed voice in the George Sanders/Tom Conway mode to a woman, “Dolores,” who sits in the shadows of this otherwise bright room. He is bidding her a curt farewell after a brief affair, placing her as one more conquest among the many women he keeps photos of on his wall. For each woman, he wrote a song, and he plays a medley of them, ending with “Dolores’s” song, “Nocturne,” talking his way through the lyrics (and, it must be said, doing an atrocious and distracting job of miming the piano playing). Before he can finish writing the song down, there is a shot, and Vincent crumples to the floor, dead.


FLASH. And the police are on the scene, taking photos and making callous remarks. Among the cops is homicide detective Joe Warne (yes, “Warne,” not “Warner,” no matter what IMBd says), played by George Raft. I’ve never been a big fan of Raft, but my opinion of him in this film changes every time I see it – sometimes he seems wonderfully casual, calm, and underplayed, sometimes he seems wooden and uncomfortable. Strange performance.

The killing of Vincent has been staged as a suicide, and the other cops, bored and boring, are more than willing to accept that and move on. Warne decides to pursue it further, getting help from Vincent’s housekeeper Susan (Myrna Dell, stealing scenes with some of the best one-liners in the film) and his houseboy (unfortunately uncredited even on IMDb, which lists EVERYONE else in the film, including actors in deleted scenes) at the scene of the crime, and from his mother at home. The scenes between Raft and Mabel Paige as his mother are the best in the film, a comfortable, relaxed portrayal of a loving relationship that also functions as a partnership, as she trades ideas with him on his cases while feeding him and, ultimately, protecting him from forces trying to stop him pursuing the case.

Warne discovers that what he considered a lead – the sheet music for "Nocturne" dedicated "to Dolores" – isn’t much of a lead at all as Vincent called all his lady friends "Dolores." So, taking the photos off Vincent’s wall, he begins to track down all of the women in the photos. How he does this isn’t explained. He just seems to walk though a montage until he finds them.

And this is where the disparity between the fine playing, dialogue, and staging in Nocturne and the rather plodding and clumsy plotting starts really happening, and it just keeps up. The plot is actually rather simple and should be easy to follow, but somehow it keeps becoming confused. I recently saw an episode of COLUMBO also written by Jonathan Latimer, credited screenwriter here, and it had much the same problem: excellent snappy dialogue, spoken well by good actors; plotting somehow seeming too complex for a fairly simple story.

Still, in Warne’s search for the other women we get some nice cameos from a number of good character actors, most notably Queenie Smith as the roommate of a girl who recently killed herself after her life was "ruined" by Vincent (though the film is, obviously, under the Code, and never steps over the line, there is a pleasantly "adult" quality to the characters and plot that is sometimes muted in other noirs – without being blatant about it, the sexual implications of Vincent’s affairs are clear).

Searching for the subject of a missing photo takes Warne first to a photographer (a neat classic “gay”-stereotype cameo from John Banner, later of Hogan's Heroes and Rocky Jones), and then to that subject herself, Frances Ransom, played by Lynn Bari. I don’t remember Bari in anything else (I saw her in Shock a long time ago), but she is certainly beautiful and charming here, with a refreshing “grown-up” quality in a leading lady. She’s been around, and knows the score, but she isn’t hardened, just aware. It is also implied that Frances, who works off-and-on as a movie extra, but lives like a princess, relies on a rotating number of bed partners for her money.

Through Frances, Warne also meets her younger sister Carol (Virginia Huston, more luminous than in Out of the Past, even if a bit "stagy"), a nightclub singer, and her piano player "Fingers" (Joseph Pevney, as sly and terrific as he will be in Thieves' Highway, here acting on the same lot where he would later direct 14 of the best original Star Trek episodes). "Fingers" also has a big dumb assistant, Torp (Bern Hoffman, a lovable, if lethal, lug) who has been shadowing Warne and is apparently working as muscle for the killer.

Warne has concluded that Frances is the killer, having checked out her extremely elaborate alibi to discover none of it is true (but providing nice period L.A. locations, including the Pantages theatre, the Brown Derby, and what I think is the same drugstore where Neville Brand buys it in D.O.A.). But he is suspended from the force for continuing his attempt to prove Vincent’s killing as anything but suicide. Doesn’t matter, he just goes on as if it hasn’t happened.

At the same time, Warne and Frances are apparently falling in love. As Raft and Bari banter well, but don’t seem to have any actual chemistry, we have to take this on trust.

Warne continues to investigate. His fellow cops begin chasing him. Susan, the housekeeper, who knew more than she was telling and attempts blackmail, is horribly beaten, and the photographer is murdered. Another murder set up as a fake suicide is attempted to place Vincent’s death on an innocent head.

Finally, with the (accidental) help of his mom, Warne figures out how exactly the fake suicide was pulled (quite elaborately, which one character even describes, as if trying to take the curse off it, "like something from a detective story"). But he still gets the identity of the real killer wrong, until that killer confesses to protect another.

The well-played and staged climax of the film is then followed by a quick, clumsy wrap-up that implies that all of Warne’s problems with his fellow police have vanished instantly, that Frances is not the loose woman she painted herself to be, and that Frances and Warne are running off to live happily ever after. Well, at least it’s quick.

Frances: "Isn’t there some kind of law about accessories after the fact?"
Warne: "That depends on whose accessory you are."

Nocturne is by no means top-drawer noir, but it is better than its reputation, or rather lack-of-reputation, would suggest. In researching a recent noir project I read almost two dozen books on noir, and apart from an occasional mention of the title (usually just in a list of Raft’s credits), only one book discussed the film at all (but got many of the plot elements completely wrong!).

Nocturne is a nice solid little movie that gets the job done, and is a pleasant way to spend 87 minutes or so. I’ve actually watched it more than a number of much better noir films that I love very much because it is a "comfortable" movie, with vivid characters that are fun to spend time with speaking some great, crackling dialogue.

In the end, Nocturne reminds me most of that opening scene, with Ashley beautifully speaking his vicious monologue while horribly bouncing his hands around randomly on the prop piano in front of him – beautiful lyrics and melody over a ham-fisted tune.