Here Comes Trouble! Jean Kent in Good Time Girl (1948)

 

Good Time Girl (1948)

In an effort to straighten out young delinquent Lyla (Diana Dors), Miss Thorpe (Flora Robson) tells the awful story of Gwen (Jean Kent), a 16 year-old who ran away from her violent home to work as a waitress in a night club owned by Max Vine (Herbert Lom). She is framed for robbery by the jealous Johnny Rosso and is sent to an Approved School. Escaping from there, she finds that Max has moved to Brighton. She hides out at his new club there, where she falls in with cheap gangster Danny Martin (Griffith Jones) and eventually a pair of murderous GI deserters.

There was definitely something in the air in post-war British cinema. Ticket sales were at an all-time high as troops began to return home to find there wasn’t much by way of entertainment apart from the pub and the cinema. During the war, film audiences had been largely female, and studios made films to cater for that audience; with the return of a males to the audience, many of whom had gone through traumatic wartime experiences, the types of film coming out of British studios changed radically over the course of a few years.

The baroque female-centred costume fantasies of Gainsborough Studios were replaced, for a variety of reasons, by a raft of sourly-realistic thrillers such as Appointment With Crime (1946) and, in the bumper year of 1947, They Made Me a Fugitive, Brighton Rock, Dancing With Crime and It Always Rains on Sunday. There was an extent to which this trend was aping what was happening in American cinema, where the films which would later become known as Film Noir were being made. For the best example of this witness the delirious 1948 film adaptation of James Hadley Chase’s scandalous crime novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Jack La Rue was imported as a sort of poor man’s Bogart, alongside any English actor (and newly arrived South African Sid James) capable of a reasonable approximation of an American accent. In general though, it seems to have been a case of similar influences being at work in both America and Britain.

Jack La Rue and Linden Travers in No Orchids for Miss Blandish

There was a short period where the womens picture and noir influences cross-pollinated, such as in the aforementioned It Always Rains on Sunday, a vehicle for Googie Withers, one of the top British female stars of the 40’s. Like Good Time Girl, this was adapted from a novel by Arthur La Bern who may not be a well-known writer today, but in his day was very successful. As well as the two films already mentioned Paper Orchid was adapted for the screen in 1949, while Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, a project La Bern loudly disapproved of, was adapted from his 1966 novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square. La Bern was also a scriptwriter for a while in the 1960s, among his projects being scripts for the BBC’s first ever filmed detective series Fabian of Scotland Yard in 1955 and from 1962 to 1964 writing four of the legendary Edgar Wallace Mysteries, which were popular b-picture attractions before being seen for years on television on both sides of the Atlantic.

Arthur La Bern's novel on which
Good Time Girl was based

A former Newspaper crime reporter, La Bern also wrote true crime books, a subject which also bled into his fiction, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square having echoes of the infamous Hammersmith Nude Murders of 1964 and 65. His earlier work Night Darkens the Street, the source novel for Good Time Girl, is based in part on a famous murder case of the mid-40's known in the press as The Cleft Chin Murder. This involved a young waitress and sometime striptease dancer, Elizabeth Jones, who ran away from home at age thirteen and wound up in an Approved School (a sort of boarding school for youths deemed to be beyond parental control). By 3rd October 1944 Jones met Karl Hulten, a deserter from the US Army, in a tea shop. The two subsequently went on a six-day crime spree which ended when Hulten shot dead taxi driver George Edward Heath as part of a robbery attempt. Heath had no identification on his person when he was found, leading him to be known in the press as the man with the cleft chin'.

The Cleft Chin Murder case was so famous that
George Orwell wrote about it in 
The Decline of the English Murder

The fictional story of Good Time Girl sees Jones reimagined as Gwen (Jean Kent), a sassy but naïve 16-year-old (Kent was 27 at the time) who finds herself increasingly alcohol-dependent and passed among a fine array of creepy British character actors. From being sacked by her pervy boss Elwyn Brook-Jones, ostensibly for pilfering but really because she wouldn’t let him have his way with her, she is thrashed by her violent dad (played by George Carney in his last role: he died six months before Good Time Girl was released). This is a dark and disturbing scene very well-shot by director David MacDonald, who pulls off a similar scene of implied violence when creepy Spiv Johnny Rosso is the victim of a revenge attack that leaves him scarred for life.

Gwen leaves home, finding a room in a seedy boarding house and is immediately spotted by fellow lodger Johnny Rosso, played by Peter Glenville, who was so good as Stewart Granger’s despicable gigolo brother in Madonna of the Seven Moons. Here he is all slicked-back hair and carefully trimmed moustache as a malicious spiv working for nightclub owner Max Vine (Herbert Lom). For a post-war audience, Rosso’s appearance would have been loaded with meaning in ways which would not be so apparent today. Most of us in Britain only know the ‘Spiv’ characterisation, if at all, from the Private Walker character in the long-running and forever repeated sitcom Dad’s Army. In reality, during the war and the immediate post-war period the Spiv was a young, flashily-dressed type with connections to the black market who had somehow managed to avoid being drafted into the army. The Spiv might not exactly have been liked, but he was a useful chap to know for many ordinary people struggling with wartime rationing.

It’s honestly hard to imagine Johnny Rosso having access to much of anything, and he is so clearly a lecherous wrong ‘un that Gwen comes across as incredibly naïve for continually trusting him. Johnny gets Gwen a job at Vine’s nightclub, the waitress costume doing a fine job of showing off Jean Kent’s spectacular legs. Johnny seems to think that this has earned him rather more than a cheery ‘thank you’ from Gwen, who is knocked unconscious and given a black eye by Johnny during a failed rape attempt, which results in Johnny getting sacked by Vine.

Creepy Spiv Johnny Rosso gets rough with Gwen

Still Gwen takes some jewellery to the pawn shop for him. Naturally, the stuff has been stolen and Rosso has engineered the whole thing so that he can make a few quid while Gwen carries the can. It’s at times like this that we realise that, for all her bravado, Gwen is a child – a teenage girl who really doesn’t know how the world works. It says a lots for the grim nature of Good Time Girl that Rosso doesn’t get his just deserts. He does the dirty on Gwen, testifies against her at her trial when she is inevitably caught for flogging his stolen gear, then disappears from the narrative. I kept expecting him to reappear, but this isn’t Johnny’s story, it’s a tale about naïve tough-girl Gwen and her journey through the hands of various horrible men and into alcoholism and criminality.

The film at this point takes a sharp turn into Women in Prison territory, though as Gwen is (in theory at least) sixteen years old, she’s actually shipped off to Approved School for three years. There she meets up with school toughy Roberta (Jill Balcon), and after a rocky start the pair are pretty well running the place behind the backs of the overworked and easily-fooled staff. No Approved School can hold our Gwen, however, and she escapes during a fight in the school and heads back to Max’s club, only to find that he’s moved operations to Brighton.

Through all this, the one man who doesn’t want to use or control Gwen in some way is Red, piano player at Max’s London club, played by none other than Dennis Price. Price was about to have his breakthrough role in 1949’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, which itself was released only weeks after his disastrous miscasting in the title role of The Bad Lord Byron. He was terrible in the latter role of the famously ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Romantic poet because if there was one thing that wasn’t in Price’s armoury as an actor it was any sense of sexual threat. That very lack of any romantic urgency informs the part of Red, who is written and played so much as the world-weary gay best friend that one raises an eyebrow when we learn that Red is married (if separated). A second eyebrow is raised when Red and Gwen passionately kiss each other before she is sent away to Approved School, not least because Price was aged 33 at the time and looked older, while Kent was playing a 16 year old.

Dennis Price - bursting with sexual energy!

To nightclub owner Herbert Lom, Gwen was always merely a commodity – he has no interest in her sexually and only protects her from the violent advances of Johnny because it affects his profits, since she can’t work with a black eye. When she escapes from Approved School and tracks him down to Brighton he doesn’t want to know, sensing that by this time Gwen represents nothing but a lot of trouble that he doesn’t need. Instead she winds up with small-time gangster Danny Martin (Griffith Jones), who lets Gwen drive drunk, as a result of which she mows down and kills a cycling policeman. She tries to escape Martin by train but he finds and beats her unconscious in her carriage in a strange, but powerfully shot, sequence that gives the impression that it is missing some footage. Jean Kent later confirmed that the scene had been written to contain an acid attack, but this was regarded as too much by the film censors of the time.

Herbert Lom stepping out of the shadows

Finally, with around 10 minutes of screen-time left, we reach the section based most directly on Elizabeth Jones, as Gwen is picked up by a pair of on-the-run GI deserters, who find her left beaten unconscious in a train carriage by Martin. The AWOL servicemen are played by Bonar Colleano and Hugh McDermott. Of course they are played by Colleano and McDermott – these were the absolute go-to guys to play any sort of slightly dodgy American in low-budget British cinema of the 40’s and 50’s. Colleano was near the beginning of his career playing cheap but likeable American crooks or low-ranked military types. He was a well-liked figure in British movies whose career was cut cruelly short by his death in a road accident at the age of only 34.  McDermott’s career was something of an oddity: a Scottish former golf pro, he took to acting in the 1930s and spent almost his entire career, which lasted until the early 1970s, playing American characters - naturally he had been one of the leads in No Orchids for Miss Blandish. I was amazed to discover he was Edinburgh-born!. The 1950’s were his prime years as a breezy presence in British b-pictures – in fact, when a down-on-his-luck David MacDonald needed an American lead for Devil Girl from Mars, five years on from Good Time Girl, it was Hugh McDermott he called upon.  

Bonar Colleano says a cheery hello

Hugh McDermott 
Scottish king of B-picture Americana!

Finally Gwen has reached rock bottom. The two GIs are hold-up merchants living from one robbery to the next, being chased by the US Army and the British police. As the dialogue indicates, even her looks are starting to go by now, thanks to her almost constant state of intoxication. Prison awaits as a grim certainty.

Happily, unlike a lot of British films from the period, Good Time Girl is available to view in an absolutely luminous print, which highlights Stephen Dade’s lovely, shadowy photography and the art direction from Maurice Carter and George Provis. The sets are really effective; for instance in the framing sequence authority figure Flora Robson and teenage tearaway Diana Dors are dwarfed by the highly detailed surroundings – MacDonald pulls his camera away to emphasise this, showing that the two women are tiny in comparison with the vast legal machine they are both now a part of. There is also a lovely set showing the outside of Max Vine’s London club, which shows the amount of care and attention that went into the production of Good Time Girl.

Flora Robson and future bad-girl superstar Diana Dors

Stephen Dade was David MacDonald’s regular cinematographer in this period, which represents probably director’s peak, and the two expensive box office failures that saw his career begin to decline. The Brothers (1947), Snowbound and Good Time Girl (both 1948) had proven popular, but the two big Sidney Box productions he directed in 1949, The Bad Lord Byron and Christopher Columbus, did very badly. The Bad Lord Byron’s failure was not entirely the fault of MacDonald, as it was the subject of a great deal of interference by Producer Sydney Box during filming and, as mentioned above, its central miscasting killed any impact the film might have had.  

Lord Byron - Bad!

It does seem a little unfair that MacDonald carried the can, as the output of Gainsborough (which these all basically were, even if Rank had begun phasing out the name) were never regarded as director-led films.  The Gainsborough melodramas show the limits of auteur theory: one never thinks of them as being Leslie Arliss, Arthur Crabtree or David MacDonald films. Gainsborough chief Maurice Ostrer was the guiding hand in the studio’s years of peak popularity, and the feel of the films changed considerably when Sidney Box replaced him.

Despite him getting the Gainsborough job on the strength of his hugely successful 1946 production The Seventh Veil (often described as the best melodrama Gainsborough never made), Box’s instincts were more towards realism, which was completely beside the point for the successful melodramas Gainsborough made under Maurice Ostrer. They had been wish-fulfilment fantasies, and making them more expensively with realistic fashions and sets did them no favours. Good Time Girl, with its contemporary setting and gritty realism, was actually much more in line with Sidney Box’s tastes than big costume productions which were going out of fashion anyway – the reasons for this are complex and multi-faceted and I’ll cover them in a future blog.

 

Good Time Girl Jean Kent

Good Time Girl comes from around the peak of Jean Kent’s career. She was a top star for a surprisingly short time, for several years being behind the likes of Margaret Lockwood and Patricia Roc in the pecking order at Gainsborough Studios. Kent’s appeal was quite different to other British female stars of the era, though. While Anna Neagle was practically royalty and Ann Todd (often described as ‘the British Garbo’ was icily attractive, Jean Kent had an earthy sensuality that was played up in publicity photos. A former dancer at the Windmill Theatre – as we see in Good Time Girl, she was blessed with magnificent legs – Kent was game for appearing in cheesecake photographs, which went some way towards securing a strong fan-base. Her fan-club was larger than that for her contemporaries, described by Melanie Williams in the book British Womens Cinema as having as many subscribers as The Spectator magazine. Jean Kent was, in fact, the biggest sex-symbol in 1940’s British Cinema.

Jean Kent in The Smugglers: always willing to show a bit of leg 

Her career soon declined, however, as British filmmaking went into a decline in the 1950s and what films were being made were on more masculine subjects, particularly war movies, which tended not to have strong female roles. The big new British stars of the fifties were hearty masculine types Kenneth More and Jack Hawkins, who suited the war films that were creating a set of national myths about the wartime experience. Meanwhile, by as soon as 1952, Kent was reduced to appearing in The Lost Hours, a second feature for Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker’s b-picture outfit Tempean. By 1956 she was still appearing in the occasional b-picture, but wasn’t even getting top billing, a fate not uncommon for British female stars of the 1940’s.

By this point Kent’s position as Britain’s cinema sex symbol has been taken over by Diana Dors, whose aggressive, platinum blonde sexuality was very much in tune with 1950’s tastes. Good Time Girl happened to be one of 17 year-old Dors’ earliest credited screen appearances, playing Lyla, the young girl to whom Flora Robson tells the awful story of Gwen Rawlings in an attempt to get her back on the straight and narrow. Dors quickly started getting bigger roles, and the following year acted as a late replacement for Kent in another David MacDonald picture, Diamond City, third-billed behind David Farrar and Honor Blackman. By 1956 it was Diana Dors who was playing the abused bad girl, getting the best critical notices of her career in Yield to the Night, while Kent was reduced to character parts on TV. But that’s a story for another blog.

With thanks to Jade Evans for invaluable research assistance

HELL ON FRISCO BAY (1955)

Hell on Frisco Bay is one of those semi-forgotten films that doesn’t live up to its promise, but still reveals a huge amount about the times in which it was made. This late-period Noir stars Alan Ladd and Edward G. Robinson, the latter of whom (despite some career problems, which I’ll come to later) steals the film from its nominal star in an act of cinematic grand larceny.

The Ladd Himself
It’s often forgotten just what a huge star Alan Ladd was at the peak of his career. These days he’s mainly remembered for the enormous success of George Stevens’ monumental Western Shane, released in 1953, and for being sensitive about his lack of height. After he rocketed to stardom as the angel-faced, emotionally-damaged hired killer in 1942’s This Gun for Hire, Paramount Studios eventually discovered that they could basically put their new star in any old rubbish and audiences would turn out to see it.

This was a real shame, as there are some absolute gems in Ladd’s initial period of stardom such as the Noir thrillers The Glass Key (1942) and The Blue Dahlia (1946). As with This Gun for Hire, in these films he formed a particularly effective screen pairing with Veronica Lake. It helped that Lake, whose height is quoted at anything between 5ft 2 and 4ft 11, was considerably shorter than the 5ft 6 Ladd. There was more to it than that, though: the sassy, funny Lake provided an effective contrast to Ladd, who was all icy calm and internalised anger.
By the 1950’s Ladd’s career had begun to decline, but the success of Shane, which almost immediately ascended to classic status, gave his career a huge boost. Somehow, he was never able to replicate Shane’s success, partly because its prolonged post-production meant that there were even more lacklustre Alan Ladd movies waiting to be released by the time it finally came out, almost two years after filming wrapped. Just before Shane finally reached cinemas Ladd featured in one of his very worst films, Desert Legion, a French Foreign legion picture made with that particular, tatty b-movie sheen of Universal-International’s productions of the era.

On the surface, Ladd did everything right in the post-Shane era. He set up his own production company, Jaguar Productions, as did many big stars when the major studios began to divest themselves of their contract stars. Taking control of your own career like this didn’t always work out, however: Humphrey Bogart’s Santana Productions might have gotten him out of the clutches of Jack Warner, but proved to be a money pit and Bogie had by this point closed the company down.
Ladd also tried getting into television, making a pilot for his successful syndicated radio series Box 13 – he was a wonderful radio actor with a mellifluous speaking voice – but the networks didn’t bite so he persevered with his big screen career.

Red Menaces
With that in mind, Hell on Frisco Bay can be seen as an attempt to recapture former glories. Here was Ladd in a thriller with Noir-overtones, reunited with Frank Tuttle, who had directed his breakthrough film This Gun for Hire, and Lucky Jordan, one of the features Paramount rushed into production when they found they suddenly had a hot new star.
The story had a good pedigree, too, being based on The Darkest Hour, a novel by William P McGivern, whose novels had been the source material for the recent Noirs The Big Heat (1953), the lesser-known but well worth catching Shield for Murder and Rogue Cop (both from 1954). Hell on Frisco Bay is, to be honest, probably the least of this group of films. McGivern took the hint at the end of the 1950’s and took up scriptwriting with great success.

McGivern’s novel was adapted by Martin Rackin, who had previously written the terrific 1951 Humphrey Bogart Noir The Enforcer, and Sydney Boehm, who had provided the scripts for the previous McGivern movies The Big Heat and Rogue Cop.
As with almost all Hollywood films of the 1950s, the shadow of the anti-communist witch-hunts falls heavily on Hell on Frisco Bay. Frank Tuttle was a hugely experienced director whose career began in silent days and effortlessly took on the challenge of sound. It was Tuttle who directed the original 1935 film version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key as a vehicle for George Raft, which was subsequently remade by Stuart Heisler in 1942 when Paramount needed a property in a hurry for their new star Alan Ladd. By 1955 however the talented and well-established Tuttle hadn’t directed a feature film in four years. He had been a member of the Communist Party, even holding party meeting at his home. As a result, Tuttle was one of the very first targets of the House Unamerican Activities Committee. He was named under oath as a Communist by witnesses to the committee and eventually had to name others in order to save his career.

As it happened, it was Alan Ladd who rescued Frank Tuttle’s directing career, employing him multiple times for his Jaguar Productions, starting with the 1954 Box 13 TV pilot. His final picture as a director was 1959’s Island of Lost Women, another Jaguar movie, though one in which Ladd didn’t appear, that was eventually released on the bottom of a double bill with the Steve Reeves film Hercules.
Edward G. Robinson, who had never been a member of the Communist Party, had his own share of problems with HUAC. Few people really thought that Eddie Robinson was a communist; he just gave his time and money to liberal causes. To the leaders of HUAC, which included members of the Klu Klux Klan, his targeting sent a powerful message to liberal-minded Hollywood types: keep quiet and don’t get involved in politics. The likes of John Wayne, meanwhile, could shout their right wing political views from the rooftops.

Robinson appeared before HUAC four times in all, finally giving the committee what it wanted in 1952. In his testimony he actually named Frank Tuttle as being one of the ‘sinister forces’ who had ‘duped and used him’, while never actually using the word Communist. As a part of the deal to ‘clear his name’ and get his career back, Robinson wrote an article for the American Legion Magazine entitled ‘How the Reds Made a Sucker out of Me’.

Hell on the Waterfront
Former detective Steve Rollins (Alan Ladd) has just been released from San Quentin after serving five years for manslaughter. Rollins was framed and he’s angry, bitter and out for revenge. He refused to see is wife (Joanne Dru) while he was in prison and, desperately lonely, she strayed once. Now Rollins rejects her completely. Word reached Rollins in prison that a fisherman, Lou Rogani, has proof that he was innocent. Rollins soon finds out that the docks are being taken over by a vicious mobster, Vic Amato (Edward G. Robinson) and his lieutenant Joe Lye (Paul Stewart). When Rogani and ageing former boss of the docks Louis Fiaschetti wind up dead and Rollins turns down a place in Amato’s organisation it’s clear that Rollins is next on Amato’s hit list…
It has to be said that McGivern’s story is, in a lot of respects, quite similar to that of Budd Schulberg’s script for On the Waterfront, which had been released in July 1954. Hell on Frisco Bay, however, plays like a film from a totally different era; Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront might be the smaller scale film with black and white photography, but its naturalistic acting style points to the future of film. Hell on Frisco Bay, for all its gleaming Warnercolor and CinemaScope widescreen photography, is in a line of succession starting with Warner’s gangster thrillers of the thirties and the post war Film Noir genre.

Hell on Frisco Bay has much more location photography that was common in the thirties and forties, which is great up to a point, but it does make the occasional use of back-projection very obvious. The use of CinemaScope anamorphic widescreen photography also works against the film in a lot of ways. This is a very early Scope feature film, going into production only two years after the very first one, Henry Koster’s biblical epic The Robe. It took directors and film editors time to figure out how to work in this new medium, while the technicalities of the anamorphic lens technology meant that close-ups were not yet possible. In practical terms this meant that epic spectacles such as those offered by the Biblical movie genre were best able to use the wide CinemaScope frame, whereas crime thrillers such as this one suffered.
The few moments of visual splendour Hell on Frisco Bay offers, especially during location photography on Fisherman's Wharf and San Francisco Bay, look great but the lack of close-ups really hurts Alan Ladd’s performance. As ever, Ladd’s acting is very controlled and internalised, only occasionally bursting into real anger. He’s burning from the inside, Ladd’s hair even dyed red to reflect his mental state. Rollins’ anger and thirst for revenge is a constant theme of the film. When finally pushed too far he almost kills flabby ex-boxer Hammy, one of Amato’s goons (played by Stanley Adams, who was eventually to achieve immortality as Cyrano Jones in the Star Trek episode The Trouble with Tribbles). Director Tuttle pulls the film’s punches in what should be a key scene, though. The constant use of long and medium shots distances us, both literally and figuratively, from what’s happening.

The same thing happens in a later scene when a crooked cop working for Amato pushes Rollins about the state of his marriage. Ladd’s voice (that radio training coming in handy) is so chilling that the cop practically runs out of the door in fear. But once again Ladd is denied his chance to really shine on screen; not only is the scene shot from too great a distance, but Ladd isn’t even facing the camera. A mixture of poor directorial choices and the technical limitations of early CinemaScope really harms the film.
Edward G. Robinson, on the other hand, is such a big performer that he pretty much grabs the viewer by the collar and forces them to take notice him, while at the same time not seeming to try too hard. He also benefits from having a much more interesting character to play. Pretty much all there is to Ladd’s character is that he’s angry and vengeful, and that he likes children (I guess after Shane it seemed like a good idea to shoehorn in a scene where Ladd gets to interact with a small boy). His most memorable line is “I want to kill you so much I can taste it”, the rest of his dialogue being either similar macho posturing along the same general lines, or functional dialogue to gussy the plot along.

Robinson could probably have read pages from the phone directory out loud and still given a decent performance, but Vic Amato is a fascinating character. At some point before the film’s narrative begins he has got his chief lieutenant Joe Lye out of prison, where he was in the death cell, and boy, Vic never lets Joe forget it. This is despite the fact that Joe has clearly been badly affected by the experience, with a scarred face and a nervous twitch. Vic and Joe’s relationship is even more central to the script than Steve Rollins’ vengeful anger, and, it has to be said, rather more interesting. Vic also constantly needles Joe because he has a classy girlfriend, ageing former movie star Kay Stanley (a later-career role for the great Fay Wray). His attacks on Joe and Kay’s relationship are constant, with him either describing her to Joe as an old has-been or, when he’s finally in a room alone with Kay, trying to pull her himself.
As this set of relationships is the single most interesting part of Hell on Frisco Bay, it’s worthy of a little more attention. We never get to the bottom of what the hell is wrong with Vic and is making him sabotage his most important professional and personal relationship. The script gives us a few clues to fuel a bit of healthy speculation: one possibility is that the writers are, in their coy, mid-1950’s way, queercoding Vic, dropping as many hints as the fading but still-stultifying Hayes Code allowed that Vic is as jealous as hell that his number-one boy has got a girl of his own. Vic’s own marriage appears to be childless, his wife Anna ladling attention on their nephew Mario and (much to Vic’s disgust) on her Roman Catholic religion. Outside of Vic’s refuge of the kitchen, Anna has filled their house with Catholic iconography that constantly looks down on him disapprovingly.

Another explanation, which is certainly apposite as I write this on the final day of Donald Trump’s presidency, is that Vic is a malignant narcissist. Amato is steamed that Joe prayed to God while in the prison death cell, telling Joe that Vic should have been praying to him instead. Vic simply has to be central to everything in the lives of those around him, demanding total loyalty while offering little in return. Joe is kept on a short leash, as Vic keeps reminding him that he has the evidence to put Joe back on death row. Hammy the henchman is rejected with a $500 payoff when he is no longer useful – to be fair, Hammy was a terrible henchman, while Vic has his own nephew Mario killed by Joe when he suspects that he’s spilled rather too many beans to Rollins.
Remember in the James Bond film License to Kill, where Bond gets inside baddie Franz Sanchez’s organisation and hollows it out by making him distrust his most faithful lieutenants? Here Rollins doesn’t need to bother, he just has to walk around telling other characters how angry he is while Vic pushes everyone away from him. Even Joe turns on Vic eventually for his own self-preservation, an act which is suicidal for Joe and which finally means that there is nobody to insulate Amato from Rollins.

The ending to Hell on Frisco Bay is spectacular, but thematically disappointing. Vic tries to escape in a motor boat, at which point Rollins dives from a high pier and boards the boat in order to engage in a round of fisticuffs. Here we see the technological determinism of the CinemaScope format letting the film down. The entire narrative of the film has been leading inexorably to a one-on-one confrontation between Amato and Rollins, which we almost get: Rollins, grim of face and set of jaw, advances towards Amato, who has Mrs Rollins hostage (Joanne Dru has an absolutely thankless role here as a total doormat of a character). The sight of Rollins, as the film has tried to establish a couple of times earlier, is so terrifying that Vic wastes his final bullet. This could have been a scintillating ending as the two men, absorbed in their seething anger, finally confront each other in sweaty, shadowy close-quarters. Instead, as this is the fifties and audiences demanded spectacle if they were going to nip to the cinema instead of watching TV, Vic clears off in a speedboat.
Unfortunately, both Ladd and the 62 year-old Robinson were simply too old to pull the sequence off believably. At this point Alan Ladd was not only short and slight of build, but also a 42 year-old with a drink problem which was starting to eat away at his previously angelic features. It was difficult to suspend disbelief earlier in the film when he beats up on a young and stockily muscular Rod Taylor, but seeing Ladd dive from a great height into the sea and swim to a speeding motor boat really is pushing it too far.
A few other names from the supporting cast should be mentioned: William Demarest gives the film some old-school Warner Brothers heft as Rollins’ cop buddy Dan Bianco, the aforementioned Rod Taylor shows immediate star quality as an out-of-town hoodlum, while Tina Carver has a couple of good scenes as Taylor’s boozy older girlfriend. Perry Lopez is also memorable as the doomed Mario, Vic’s nephew who just wants to use the family name as a way to date women. Some welcome comic relief is provided in a scene where Rollins tails Mario to a swinging nightclub where he is on a date with an unbilled Jayne Mansfield. Rollins has a wonderful scene in which he talks to an Asian-American hepcat gal. As ever, Ladd plays the scene deadpan while the jazz-loving hipster lady gets lines like “What’s the message Daddy-O? Good for what ails ya!”.  The actress playing the part sadly went uncredited, but it’s really refreshing in a movie of this vintage to see an Asian-American turn up in a non-stereotypical role.

Rollins duly breaks up Mario’s date in order to stick his face in a bathroom sink, at which point Mansfield gets to show off her comedic chops: As soon as Mario leaves another guy immediately tries to pick her up with probably the best dialogue exchange in the film:
“Can I drive you home?”
“You have a car?”
“No, a whip!”
Mansfield gives a giggle, then realises what the guy has said and gives a perfect comedic double-take. The following year Mansfield would graduate to leading lady status in The Girl Can’t Help It.
 
Hell on Frisco Bay actually took a respectable two million dollars at the box office, but has not lingered in the collective memory – it’s an obscurity even to most movie buffs. The direction of Alan Ladd’s career was clear: by 1957 he was dismayed at having to play second fiddle to Sophia Loren in Boy on a Dolphin, and by the end of the decade he was finished as a Hollywood leading man. He was forced to find work in Italy, looking baffled as to what on Earth is going on around him in the film he made out there, the Sword and Sandal picture Duel of Champions, available prints of which are so poor that it’s impossible to judge the actual quality of the film.
Ladd got his best reviews in years when he finally made the jump to character actor status in the 1964 release The Carpetbaggers. By the time the film was released in October 1964 Ladd had been dead for nine months, the death of the often depressed actor popularly thought to be suicide.