Impact is in the public domain. Click here to see it online at the Internet Archive.
Walter (Walt) Williams, played by Brian Donlevy, is the strong lead character in Impact, and this is evident from the start of the narrative. He marches into a board meeting of an automobile production company and asks to know the decision of all those present. No one is interested in buying more factories, but he threatens to resign if the factories he wants aren’t purchased. Nobody wants his resignation, so the board members vote unanimously for the purchases. Williams then mentions that he can guarantee the prices because he bought the factories earlier that day.
(This article about Impact contains spoilers.)
Viewers learn that Williams is a darn good mechanic and worked his way up in the company. He is good with his hands, and he has a good head for business. But Williams doesn’t know his wife Irene very well. Williams is obviously in love with his wife. His nickname for her is Duchess, and after his success in the company boardroom, he arrives home with a gift, an expensive brooch, for her. They live in a gorgeous apartment, and she seems to be living the life of leisure.
But Irene Williams and her lover Jim Torrence are plotting to kill Walt. She invents a phony story about Torrence: He is her cousin and the favorite nephew of her Aunt Margaret Hubbard in Evanston, Illinois. Torrance is supposed to go to Evanston to see Aunt Margaret, and Irene wants her husband to drive him as far as Denver.
Impact was shot in California and features many on-location scenes, including the Rexall drugstore in Sausalito where Walt Williams and Jim Torrence meet. Click here to visit “REEL SF: San Francisco movie locations from classic films” for comparisons (then and now) of various location shots for Impact. The REEL SF website offers “then and now” shots of locations from several films noir. Walter and Irene Williams in Impact live at Bayview Apartments, 1000 Mason Street, and according to REEL SF, this is the same address as that used in Vertigo: “The building kitty-corner across Mason Street is the Pacific Union Club, also featured in Vertigo as Madeleine’s husband’s club.”
When Walt Williams meets Jim Torrence in front of a Rexall drugstore, as arranged by Irene, he is meeting Torrence for the first time. Before they leave, Jim Torrence punctures the right rear tire of Walt’s car so that they will have to stop on the way to Denver. At a prearranged spot on the road, Torrence, who is now driving, stops the car, helps Walt with the flat, then hits Walt with a tire iron.
With that description, it might be hard to believe that the film has any humorous elements, but it does. After hitting Walt with the tire iron, Jim Torrence has to contend with one mishap after another. He’s about to hit Walt again when a train goes by, close enough that Torrence is caught in its flashing lights. After the train is gone, another motorist stops and offers to help, but the tire is already changed and—even more important—Torrence doesn’t want the motorist to see that Walt is lying between the side of the road and his own car. After the motorist leaves, Torrence rolls Walt’s body down the steep embankment at the side of the road. The job should be done, but Torrence has to go down the embankment to retrieve the keys to Walt’s car. When he gets back up the embankment to the car, a Bekins company truck stops, and the mover in the passenger seat asks if he needs help. Instead of replying, Torrence jumps into Walt’s car and drives off. The film switches back to a serious tone: Torrence is so nervous that he drives Walt’s car over the center line and dies in a spectacular, fiery head-on collision with a gasoline truck.
I have already mentioned the Rexall and Bekins trade names, but I really didn’t notice brand names or products the first time that I first saw Impact. I did a little bit of online research and learned some interesting facts about product placement in Impact from Wikipedia:
In the 1940s, it was still uncommon for brand-name products to be seen in movies, but this was a notable exception. A Bekins moving van is prominent in several scenes. The movie trade paper Harrison’s Reports typically called attention to cases in which such products appeared on-screen, and always took a stand against that practice. Although its review did not mention Bekins, the Harrison’s Reports review noted “advertising plugs worked in for such products as Pabst Blue Ribbon beer; Raleigh cigarettes; Coca-Cola; Mission Orange soda pop; Mobil gasoline, oil, and tires; Gruen watches; and the trade name Rexall.”
In addition, Laykin et Cie (of I. Magnin & Co) is featured in the opening credits. Laykin et Cie was a leading West Coast jeweler during the period with an important salon in San Francisco during the time the movie was shot in 1948. In the opening scenes, Donlevy’s character Walter Williams presents his wife with a custom Laykin et Cie intertwined diamond double heart brooch with the initials IW (for Irene Williams), which was produced for the film. Throughout the film, Irene Williams continues to wear various Laykin et Cie jewels of the period.
◊ For more at Wikipedia about the film, including the information about product placement above, click here.
◊ For more about product placement in films generally, click here.
Walt Williams didn’t die when Jim Torrence attacked him. He was only knocked unconscious, but he is not particularly anxious to return home. Williams recovers enough to climb the embankment and hop a ride in the back of the Bekins moving truck, which he rides as far as Nevada. He calls Irene’s Aunt Margaret in Evanston and asks to speak to Jim Torrence, but Aunt Margaret says that she doesn’t have a nephew by that name. Walt is beginning to realize that Torrence’s attack was part of a plot hatched by Torrence and his wife Irene. He refuses to return to San Francisco and continues traveling until he lands in Larkspur, Idaho. In Larkspur, Walt Williams meets Marsha Peters, who is running a gas station in town. She hires Walt as a mechanic. Walt learns that Marsha’s husband was killed in Okinawa during World War II and that she took over the service station business and runs it herself. She also complicates Walt’s life romantically, and the second half of the film belongs to her part in Walt’s story.
After the initial police investigation into the automobile accident, it is believed that Walter Williams died in the fiery crash that actually killed Jim Torrence. Lieutenant Tom Quincy is the one to deliver the news to his wife Irene. She is confused because the original plan was that Jim Torrence would be a hitchhiker that Walt picked up, but she does believe that her husband is the one who died in the head-on collision with the gasoline truck. That is enough for her.
It’s easy to dislike Walt’s wife Irene, which makes it hard to figure out what Walt saw in her in the first place. It’s also unclear why a woman living in wealth and leisure would pick a man like Jim Torrence, who is living like a pauper in a boardinghouse, over Walt Williams. Nothing in the story mentions anything about the attraction between Torrence and Irene Williams or explains how they met. The two characters don’t even appear on-screen together, so it is impossible to sense any chemistry between them. It’s also hard to figure out why Irene Williams would consider murdering her husband if viewers don’t know anything about her relationship with Jim Torrence.
Another minor complaint is that the film is bookended (pun alert!) by a rather weak opening and closing. The film starts with a shot of a hardcover dictionary and voice-over narration defining the word impact according to the screenwriters. The narrator refers again to the definition at the end of the film. Both of these sequences seemed unnecessary to me. The film could have been shorter and the story more concise just by lopping off the opening and closing voice-over sequences. A spectacular and fiery head-on collision in the middle of the film was enough to tie the film’s title to the story.
But these are minor complaints. The film is fun, whether it’s called film noir or a crime drama. Brian Donlevy is another in my long list of noir favorites, and he’s great in Impact. So is Ella Raines as Marsha Peters and Helen Walker as Irene Williams. I’m adding Raines and Walker to my growing list of noir favorites.
March 19, 1949 (New York City), April 1, 1949 (United States) • Directed by Arthur Lubin • Screenplay by Jay Dratler, Dorothy Davenport • Based on a story by Jay Dratler • Music by Michel Michelet • Edited by Arthur H. Nadel • Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo
Brian Donlevy as Walter (Walt) Williams • Ella Raines as Marsha Peters • Charles Coburn as Lieutenant Tom Quincy • Helen Walker as Irene Williams • Anna May Wong as Su Lin Chung • Robert Warwick as Captain Callahan • Clarence Kolb as Darcy • Art Baker as Defense Attorney Eldredge • William Wright as the prosecutor • Mae Marsh as Mrs. King, Marsha Peters’s mother (she is listed as Mrs. Peters in the film’s closing credits) • Sheilah Graham as herself, a gossip columnist • Tony Barrett as Jim Torrence • Philip Ahn as Ah Sing • Glen Vernon as Ed, the new father • Linda Johnson (aka Leighton) as Ms. Revere, the telephone operator • Jason Robards Sr. as the judge • Erskine Sanford as Dr. Henry Bender • Ruth Robinson as the apartment manager at Jim Torrence’s residence • Lucius Cooke as Burke • Tom Greenway as the moving van driver • Ben Welden as the moving company employee • Joel Friedkin as Marsha’s Uncle Ben • Joe Kirk as the Airport Hotel clerk • William Ruhl as the fingerprint expert • Mary Landa as Della, Walter Williams’s secretary • Harry Cheshire as Irene Williams’s attorney • Hans Herbert as the station master
Distributed by United Artists • Produced by Harry Popkin Productions, Cardinal Pictures
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