Street of Chance (1942)

Posted by Paulcito

Summertime, New York City, 1942. You're walking down the street when a load of falling beams comes tumbling down, knocking you into inky blackness, robbing you of the last year of your life but restoring your memory prior to that time -- you're on the street of chance now, baby. Welcome to the life of Frank Thompson, and welcome to the granddaddy of noir amnesia films.

Street of Chance was the first Cornell Woolrich suspenser to be adapted for film and is based on the novel The Black Curtain. This early film noir has the trademark Woolrich incoherent dread but is a film ultimately more rewarding for its devices than taken straight as a crime thriller. Silver and Ward note that the film "establishes a number of conventions that later helped to define film noir" and it is those conventions that make it a worthy NOTW and mark it as noir canon material. The poster is a beaut, too.


(* THIS REVIEW HAS SPOILERS *)

Burgess Meredith stars as accountant Frank Thompson, who recovers suddenly from an amnesiac period after a cartoon-perfect load of construction debris falls on top of him. He comes to, puzzled to find himself carrying a cigarette case and hat with the initials D.N and everything changed. Seems old Frank had this happen once before, a whole year earlier, walking out on his wife Virginia (Louise Platt) and his secure job with no word to anyone. So now Frank hunts down his wife, living in new digs, wins her back, and returns to his number-crunching job as if nothing had transpired, convincing his employer his absence was due to a nervous breakdown. (Think I'll try that one).

But fate has further plans: the first day back on his old job, he is followed by unknown toughs and realizes he must discover the truth behind his missing year. He sends the wife packing to her parents' house while he wanders New York hoping someone will recognize him. The black curtain begins to rise after he is reunited with moll Ruth Dillon (Claire Trevor) and all is slowly revealed: his alter-ego self is named Dan Nearing and has Ruthie as a financee. But whatta dowry: Nearing is wanted by Detective Joe Marucci (an extremely watchable Sheldon Leonard) for the murder of Ruth's employer, one Harry Diedrich. As Marucci closes in, Thompson ends up at the Diedrich mansion, where he realizes that bed-ridden, speechless Grandma Diedrich can save him by revealing the real killer. Grannie blinks out the truth: it was Ruthie who did the deed and set him up. Frank confesses his amnesia to her at last and his real identity. Ruth, cornered, forces a showdown at gunpoint and Frank is narrowly saved by Marucci; Ruth, who takes the bullet, confesses all before dying and Frank is free once more.

The plot device of a wounded protagonist, suffering from amnesia or other mental illness, went on in later films to become a staple of noir characterization, usually underscoring the psychoses of a wounded war veteran. Film noir is full to staggering with woozy vets: think Buzz in the The Blue Dahlia, Eddie Rice in The Crooked Way, John Hodiak's George Taylor in Somewhere in the Night, Jim Fletcher in The Clay Pigeon, Robert Taylor's Steve Kenet in The High Wall or even the doctor in Hitchcock's quasi-noir Spellbound. In the later issuances, amnesia is shorthand for all that ails American society: the uncertainty of a world revealed in its amorality, the post-war hangover that won't let up.

But in Street of Chance, as an earlier, prototype noir, we see something different. Unlike later forays into the wounded unconscious, for unlucky Frank Thompson, it is simple chance that intervenes and not wartime trauma. Fate delivers an uncertain destiny, knocking Frank for a loop at the receiving end of a load of lumber.

Street of Chance hints at more than the danger of being out of control, it hints at fate's promise as well. A closer look at Frank's actions support this reading, which the audience, if not Frank himself, can take: After his first escape from Detective Marucci, Frank doesn't share his worry with wife Virginia, and there is a furtiveness to his denials to her that belie the simpler view that he simply doesn't want to worry her, that he just suffers from a fear of the unknown. His attentions to her after the lost time are remarkably chaste. He wanders New York aloof and alone, searching for his other self. After meeting femme fatale Ruthie, she taunts him: "Aren't you going to kiss me?", and his assent, though restrained, signals an ambiguous morality that predominated later noirs. Although Thompson is clearly no murderer, and his innocence is essential to the plot, there is a perverse message that he might in part have liked his other life as Nearing and more importantly, the opportunities afforded by chance to start over, begin again. This makes his exoneration at film's end, the return to Virginia, noirishly bittersweet. We can take a vicarious thrill in the secret, second life, the duality of Thompson's good self versus bad. Burgess Meredith brings to the part an understated, everyman air that is just enough of a cipher that although we can believe he really just wants to return to his old, safe life, we admit, in whispered tones, perhaps not.

Sam Spade, in Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel the Maltese Falcon, famously tells an anecdote which is strikingly similiar to the accident Woolrich spins for Frank Thompson. Hammett recounts the story of a missing man who leaves his family in Tacoma and starts over with a new wife after narrowly avoiding some falling beams, near-death shattering his complacency. The lesson for Spade, and in Street of Chance, is the same: the randomness of life compels panic. Spade sums it up nicely: "He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling." The street of chance is one treacherous road.

The film has one other odd touch contributed by Woolrich's imagination. In the climax at the mansion, Frank's fate is determined by Grandma Diedrich (it was Grandpa in the book). As mother of the man he is supposed to have killed and a mute invalid, she makes a twisted choice of saviour. Frank's urgent efforts to get Granny to finger the real murderer by an eyeblink code demonstrate brilliantly the fragile thread on which his escape from a darker fate hangs.

Stylistically, the film is mostly lighter fare. Director Jack Hively, better known for his Saint pictures, allows for a voiceover and some occasional flashes of black humor, but there are relatively few visual cues to lend to the noirness of the film. There are moments of a darker city, such as a cabbie's offer to ferry Thompson and his wife "round the park for two bucks", mistaking the matrimony for something more lustful, but these touches are few. Cinematographer Theo Sparkuhl, responsible also for camerawork on Among the Living and The Glass Key, provides just enough expressionistic flair to serve the film. The use of enclosed space and linear framing provides some inspired moments, such as Frank's flashbacks playing out on roll-down window shades, but not enough to make this film really memorable. David Buttolf provides a jazz score that is among the first in crime films, but overall it is restrained and does little to heighten the anxiety.

I am not aware of current plans to restore this film or offer it on DVD in the near future, but Eddie Muller indicated in a 2005 interview that the UCLA Film & Television Archive has a 35mm copy in inventory, so a restored print might yet happen. As a cornerstone early noir and a Woolrich film, that would be very welcome.

For an amusing but light adaptation of The Black Curtain, I recommend a late-night listen to Cary Grant as Frank Thompson in the radio serial version from the program Suspense, freely available at OTR.NET, Suspense Episode #12.