July 30,
1954, release date
Directed
by Richard Quine
Screenplay
by Roy Huggins
Based on
the novels The Night Watch by Thomas
Walsh and Rafferty by Bill S.
Ballinger
Music by
Arthur Morton
Edited by
Jerome Thoms
Cinematography
by Lester White
Fred MacMurray as Paul Sheridan
Philip Carey as Rick McAllister
Kim Novak as Lona McLane
Dorothy Malone as Ann Stewart
E. G. Marshall as Lieutenant Carl
Eckstrom
Allen Nourse as Paddy Dolan
Phil Chambers as Briggs
Alan Dexter as Fine
Robert Stevenson as Billings
Don C. Harvey as Peters
Paul Richards as Harry Wheeler
Ann Morriss as Ellen Burnett
Distributed
by Columbia Pictures
Pushover opens with a bank heist, and the setup of the opening
sequence reminds me of the
opening sequences in The Friends of Eddie
Coyle and The Town. In Pushover, the opening credits appear
while one of the robbers sits down inside the bank with his gun ready to guard
the bank door. As the employees enter the bank to start their workday, they
become hostages. The bank manager and one other employee are forced to open the
bank’s vault for two of the thieves. The bank security guard goes for one of
the thieves who is holding the remaining employees at gunpoint, and the guard is
shot and killed by a thief coming out of the bank vault.
(This blog post about Pushover contains spoilers.)
The plot
then switches to a seemingly unrelated plot thread that viewers don’t yet
realize is related, which again is
very similar to The Friends of Eddie
Coyle and The Town. Viewers see a
woman, Lona McLane, coming out of a movie theater alone. She walks to her
parked car, which won’t start. Paul Sheridan appears to offer assistance. Lona
(and viewers) don’t know yet that Paul Sheridan is one of the detectives
assigned to stake out Lona on the assumption that her boyfriend, Harry Wheeler,
now identified as one of the bank robbers, will be back to see her—and will
have the money from the heist with him. Paul falls for Lona, and they plot to
keep the money for themselves.
I have a
lot of trouble believing there was any chemistry between Paul Sheridan (played
by Fred MacMurray) and Lona (Kim Novak). Maybe it’s just me: I can’t imagine
that someone like Lona would fall for Fred MacMurray. I can’t get past the
actor in this role. Such an obstacle is a bit of a liability in a film that bases
the detective’s downfall on the passion between the two leads. It just didn’t
work for me, but that may not be true for other viewers. It’s hardly a reason
not to recommend the film. I really enjoyed the story. The way that Pushover depicts how one police
detective slides into corruption is an interesting take on a familiar noir
story.
Another plot point
bothered me a bit. Several detectives work shifts in the stakeout of Lona’s
apartment. One of the detectives, Rick McAllister, imagines that he is falling
in love with one of Lona’s neighbors, a woman he isn’t supposed to be watching—but
he is. He does meet this neighbor in the apartment hallway one day, when she is
being harassed by a man her roommate knows. The harasser takes her purse and
won’t give it back unless she agrees to go out for a drink with him. McAllister
hears her protests and intervenes, convincing the man—with an arm twist and a
shove—to beat it. The woman, Ann Stewart, introduces herself and admires
McAllister’s technique; she wonders aloud if she could learn it herself.
McAllister tells her that it would be better to avoid that type in the first
place.
McAllister is a detective:
He should know that Stewart—that no one—has clairvoyant powers into the depths
of other people’s characters. But it’s 1954 and blaming the victim, especially
a female victim, may have been even more common in 1954 than it is today. It
turns out, however, that McAllister’s own powers of observation fail him: One
of the detectives working with him, Paul Sheridan, is scheming to steal the
bank money for himself and Lona, the bank robber’s girlfriend. Pushover doesn’t make too much of this as
a theme, but I noticed it.
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