I Walk the Line (1970)

November 18, 1970, release date

Directed by John Frankenheimer

Screenplay by Alvin Sargent

Based on the novel An Exile by Madison Jones

Music by Johnny Cash

Edited by Henry Berman

Cinematography by David M. Walsh

Gregory Peck as Sheriff Tawes

Tuesday Weld as Alma McCain

Estelle Parsons as Ellen Haney Tawes

Ralph Meeker as Carl McCain

Lonny Chapman as Bascomb

Charles Durning as Hunnicutt

Jeff Dalton as Clay McCain

Freddie McCloud as Buddy McCain

Jane Rose as Elsie

J.C. Evans as Grandpa Tawes

Margaret A. Morris as Sybil

Bill Littleton as Pollard

Leo Yates as Vogel

Nora (“Dodo”) Denney as Darlene Hunnicutt

Distributed by Columbia Pictures

Produced by John Frankenheimer Production; Edward Lewis Productions, Inc.; Halcyon Production, Inc.; Atticus Corporation

I understand that, at the time of the film’s release, Gregory Peck was criticized for giving a lackluster performance in I Walk the Line, but I think he did a good job portraying a man who is unhappy with his life and makes some poor choices as a result. Peck plays Henry Tawes, sheriff of Jenkins County. The county may be rural and poor, but don’t let the setting fool you. Jenkins County is still riddled with crime and corruption. I Walk the Line demonstrates that noir can happen anywhere.

(This blog post about I Walk the Line contains lots of spoilers.)

I saw this film for the first time on television, and even on television, when it was chopped up by commercials, I found it very unsettling. Seeing it on DVD, I found it even more unsettling. According to Wikipedia, the DVD alters the original version of the film: “the final shot was altered to show a freeze-frame of Peck’s face. In the original version, Peck’s face is never frozen, and his eyes are open. The scene showing Ralph Meeker’s character [Carl McCain] shooting Charles Durning’s deputy sheriff character from a distance with a rifle to protect his daughter is deleted in the video release.” For once, I’m glad that I saw a film on television because I recall Deputy Hunnicutt’s death, and it’s a scene that should have been left in the film.

I Walk the Line starts with a view of a river behind a dam. A staticky voice on a radio asks the sheriff again and again about his whereabouts. The camera pans to the sheriff’s back, and he is looking out over the river. Is he seeking a scenic escape? Is he thinking about jumping into the river? When he turns and decides to get into the car, he looks weary and resigned. The iconic Johnny Cash song “I Walk the Line” starts on the soundtrack. The credits start rolling as the sheriff’s patrol car crosses the dam in an aerial shot. Behind the credits are shots of the sheriff driving back into town, and these shots of him driving alternate with shots of townspeople. They seem to be watching, watching the sheriff, watching his progress into town, watching everything. They probably know more about what’s going on than he thinks they do.

Sheriff Henry Tawes meets Alma McCain when Buddy (her brother), driving illegally, drives off a county road. Buddy runs away from the accident scene and watches from a hiding place in the bushes as Sheriff Tawes talks to Alma and offers to drive the truck back onto the road. The sheriff gives Alma a verbal warning about what she and her brother have done and then drives off. When Alma recounts these events later in the day to her father and brothers, she and her father decide to ensnare the sheriff so that they can conduct their family business—making and selling moonshine liquor—without any interference from law enforcement.

Alma is apparently just a teenager, but she seems practiced in the grim job of seducing the men that can cause trouble for her family. Her father, Carl McCain, at one point tells Sheriff Tawes that they have an “arrangement.” Sheriff Tawes is drawn so far into the McCains’ affairs that he offers to hide Deputy Hunnicutt’s body because, by that point, he believes that he and Alma will be able to run off and start a new life together. He doesn’t realize how strong are the McCains’ family ties and how deeply they have pulled him into their own net.

A lot of watching goes on in this film, and the film returns to this theme again and again with shots of the residents around town, watching while doing ordinary things. The film starts with shots of the townspeople, and it ends with them, too—watching, observing seemingly without judgment. At the end of the film, shots of many of the townspeople are superimposed over an image of Sheriff Tawes, with the implication that they see right through him. Even his wife sees right through him: She suspected his affair, and when she confronts her husband, he doesn’t bother to deny it.

The county’s residents do not seem to judge, and I Walk the Line doesn’t judge its characters, no matter how far they go. None of the main characters can claim the moral high ground, which is why this story is so unsettling. Here are several examples of what I mean (almost all of them are spoilers):

• Alma lies to Sheriff Tawes about a lot of important details. She lies about her father and brothers knowing about her initial visit to him. Her father probably sent her, which viewers can infer from the eye contact between Alma and her father Carl when she returns from her first visit to the courthouse and running into the sheriff “accidentally.” She also lies to the sheriff about having a husband. It’s a lie of omission: She never mentions her husband, and the sheriff finds about him only when he overhears Deputy Hunnicutt talking about Alma’s family.

• Sheriff Tawes becomes complicit because he knows about the McCains’ illegal still and does nothing about it, even though he is an officer of the law. He’s sleeping with McCain’s teenage daughter, and he stands to lose his position if the McCains’ still becomes public knowledge.

• Deputy Hunnicutt is watching the sheriff’s every move. He notices that the sheriff is working late one night, which happens to be the night that the sheriff tears out the sheet of paper listing Carl McCain’s personal information, including previous addresses, out of a ledger book.

• Alma McCain puts a note intended for Sheriff Tawes into the wrong patrol car: Deputy Hunnicutt’s car. When the sheriff tries to retrieve it, Hunnicutt spots him from his own apartment. It’s another example of Deputy Hunnicutt keeping an eye on the sheriff, in the hope of catching him at something. It is also another example of the theme about watching.

• The McCains are portrayed as a fun-loving family who genuinely enjoy each other’s company, but they are moonshiners, and the father and daughter may be engaged in an incestuous relationship.

• Sheriff Tawes and his family are pillars of the community, but the sheriff is cheating on his wife. He is breaking the law to protect Alma and her family. He is eventually drawn into the cover-up of Hunnicutt’s murder. Carl McCain killed Hunnicutt for Hunnicutt’s attempt to rape his daughter Alma.

• Sheriff Tawes tells Alma McCain, at the beginning of their relationship, that he will never hurt her. But this promise is broken when he discovers that Alma has never mentioned her husband, who is in prison, and he slaps her. In addition to the physical abuse, the film hints at emotional abuse: He doesn’t care that she doesn’t want to go to California with him; he insists that she pack her things and leave with him.

I Walk the Line doesn’t offer any answers about what the characters have done or why they do what they do. I find myself thinking about it still because the story is haunting. And I wonder how (if) Sheriff Tawes can pull his life back together after the hurtful decisions that he has made.

City of Fear (1959)

February 1959 release date (1958 copyright date)

Directed by Irving Lerner

Screenplay by Robert Dillon, Steven Ritch

Music by Jerry Goldsmith

Edited by Robert Lawrence

Cinematography by Lucien Ballard

Vince Edwards as Vince Ryker

Lyle Talbot as Chief Jensen

John Archer as Lt. Mark Richards

Steven Ritch as Dr. John Wallace

Patricia Blair as June Marlowe

Kelly Thordsen as Detective Sgt. Hank Johnson

Joseph Mell as Eddie Crown

Sherwood Price as Pete Hallon

Kathie (“Cathy”) Browne as Jeannie

Tony Lawrence as the sailor

Jean Harvey as the motel operator

Michael Mark as the restaurant proprietor

Distributed by Columbia Pictures Corporation

It has happened again. I have seen another film noir with a contemporary theme: fear of nuclear radiation and radiation poisoning. The current buildup of tensions with North Korea—and perhaps now Russia—have many in the United States worried about the possibility of nuclear attack and looking forward to the planned summit between North Korea and the United States. City of Fear plays on a similar theme in 1959 in the post–World War II world, when the United States was locked in a cold war and U.S. citizens feared nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. (If you are an ex-Russian spy today, you might also be worried about nerve agent attacks.)

The other two films noir with contemporary themes that I have seen recently are The Glass Wall (immigration and refugees) and The Killer That Stalked New York (disease epidemic). Click on each film title to see my separate posts on each film.

City of Fear starts with progressive, frenetic music, complete with (dare I say it!) beatnik-style bongos. An ambulance travels down a country road, with day-for-night photography. Two men are in the front seat. The man in the passenger seat complains of being sick. Vince Ryker (played by Vince Edwards) is the driver. The two men are escaping from prison, which becomes clear a bit later. Viewers learn that Vince has killed someone with a knife. The two men in the ambulance argue because the man in the passenger is getting sicker and sicker. During the course of their argument, the man in the passenger seat is killed accidently by Vince. Vince decides to pull over another car using the ambulance’s siren. The last shot before the film cuts to the credits is of Vince leaning into the driver’s side window.

After the credits, Vince Ryker is driving the car that he pulled over and he has assumed the car owner’s identity. He has no trouble answering all the police officer’s questions when he is stopped at a police roadblock. Vince is desperate to get away for several reasons: murder, prison escape, and the metal canister in his possession. He believes that it contains heroin and is thus his ticket to freedom. (How he managed to obtain a canister of heroin is a detail that I cannot remember right now, but I’ll just have to see City of Fear again.)

The film cuts to a scene in a police department with men talking about another man having the lives of 3 million people in his hands. The three men are Lieutenant Mark Richards, Chief Jensen, and Detective Sargent Hank Johnson. A fourth man, Dr. John Wallace, comes to see Lieutenant Mark Richards. The doctor explains to the lieutenant that Vince doesn’t have a container of heroin, as Vince believes. He has a container of cobalt-60 in granular form. It is a radioactive substance. Within eighty-four hours of contamination via contact with such a substance, a person is dead. The container is not made of lead, which would have provided protection; it is made of steel, which is porous for cobalt-60. The symptoms described by Dr. Wallace in City of Fear match pretty closely the symptoms described by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although the script emphasizes the visual symptoms that are easiest for an actor to portray on film.

For more information about cobalt-60, click on each of the following list items:

◊ Wikipedia

◊ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States

(This blog post about City of Fear contains spoilers.)

The film juxtaposes the desperate hunt for Vince and Vince’s attempts to profit from what he thinks is valuable heroin. June Marlowe, Vince’s girlfriend, meets him at the motel where he is staying after his prison escape. It’s not clear why June is attracted to Vince. She doesn’t seem to have any clear goals of her own, except to be with Vince (and it was probably perfectly acceptable to have only this one goal in 1959). Here is part of their conversation:

• Vince: “What do you think I am, some kind of animal or something? Don’t you think I know what’s good in life and what’s bad? I know what’s good. So do you, and you want it as bad as I do.”

• June: “Whatever you say, Vince.”

• Vince: “I’m not an animal. I’m a person. I want things, especially you.”

Viewers know that Vince is a killer, that he probably defines good and bad differently than a lot of people, and that he defines them both in terms of money and wealth. His girlfriend June is also a “thing” that he wants. But none of these details seem to bother June in the least. She remains loyal to Vince until radiation sickness, contracted through her own exposure to the canister that Vince carries around with him and to Vince himself, finally convinces her that her own life is now at stake.

The ending is very much of its period and makes the film seem a bit more dated than it would ordinarily. Today, Ryker’s body and the canister would be cordoned off, and no one without a hazmat suit would be able to get close to him! But the desperation for financial freedom and for a life without fear will always be relevant, I believe, and that relevancy is what fascinates me about City of Fear and film noir in general.