Blackout (1954)

Blackout (which also goes by the title Murder by Proxy in Great Britain) was one of many films noir produced by Hammer Film Productions in Great Britain. Some U.S. film noir stars, such as Dane Clark, Dan Duryea, Lizabeth Scott, and Zachary Scott, played the lead in several such Hammer films. Dane Clark, who plays Casey Morrow, the lead in Blackout, is one of my film noir favorites, but apparently he wasn’t always so much fun to work with on the film (more on this later).

The first shot in the film is a close-up of a woman, Cleo Laine, singing jazz in the Cloud Room, where Casey Morrow first meets Phyllis Brunner. The Cloud Room is located on the first floor of the hotel where Morrow is staying while he searched for a job in London. His job hunt has been unsuccessful so far, and this makes him open to the prospect of earning some money offered by a stranger, Phyllis Brunner. The fact that he finds her beautiful doesn’t hurt either! The opening credits appear over a long shot of Cleo Laine singing her jazz number in the nightclub.

When the credits end and the film cuts to Casey, he is sitting at a table by himself, drowning his sorrows and already very drunk. Phyllis Brunner, seeming to appear out of nowhere, asks Casey if she can join him. He is thrilled to be joined by a beautiful woman. He tells her, however, that he has no money. He has lost everything coming to London on the promise of a job. Phyllis offers him a job of sorts: a marriage proposal and a job acting as her husband, all for £500. Casey agrees.

Phyllis tries to lead Casey out of the hotel, but he blacks out before he leaves the lobby. He comes to in an artist’s loft, lying in bed in front of a portrait of Phyllis Brunner. At first, he thinks Phyllis is the person in the kitchen cleaning up, but it’s Maggie Doone, a woman he doesn’t know. Casey now believes that he dreamed the marriage proposal, except there is no other way to explain all the money he now finds in his pockets.

(This article about Blackout contains spoilers.)

Casey leaves Maggie’s apartment and buys a newspaper at a newspaper stand. The day’s headlines on the front page of the Daily Mirror read, “Darius Brunner Is Murdered: Heiress Daughter Missing,” which are accompanied by a photo of Phyllis Brunner. Casey arrives at his hotel already in a panic, which is made worse when he sees that the police are arriving at the front door of the hotel at the same time. Instead, he goes back to Maggie Doone’s apartment in Chelsea.

At first, Casey thinks Maggie is in on a scheme to frame him for the murder of Phyllis’s father, but she insists that she knows nothing about Phyllis currently or her whereabouts. She did paint the portrait that Casey saw when he first came to, but that was a while ago, and she hasn’t been in touch with Phyllis since. Maggie encourages Casey to find out what he can, to do some detective work. She agrees to buy Casey a new coat with the money he accepted from Phyllis because the description of his coat is already in the hands of the police.

What follows is a story of betrayal and murder, which one should expect from a film noir, and the plot is convoluted. It’s important to keep track of names and details, which is also true of many films noir. First, Casey and Maggie are working together, then Maggie seemingly disappears form the story. Casey finds Phyllis again and they are working together. They even continue the charade of their marriage so that they can go on the run when their lives are threatened. Then Maggie reappears and is willing to rent a car for Casey when he needs one to interview Phyllis’s mother.

As much as I like Dane Clark and his films, I have to confess that I wasn’t very convinced that Phyllis Brunner would really fall for his character, Casey Morrow. Casey has no money at all, and she comes from a wealthy family. She doesn’t really need him once the mystery is solved. Maybe I’m cynical, but I would have found the ending much more believable if Phyllis had said goodbye to Casey after divorcing him and giving him enough money to go back to his mother (who is living in Great Britain; viewers meet her and her current husband when Casey and Phyllis go on the run) or to the United States, whichever he wanted.

And what happens to Maggie Doone, the artist who helped Casey Morrow during his amateur investigation into Darius Brunner’s murder? I would have found it much more believable if Casey and Maggie had fallen in love and decided to make a go of it. She cared about him enough to help him; Phyllis was much more unreliable throughout. And for some reason, I also wanted to know what happened to the car that Maggie Doone rented for him! She was a struggling artist in postwar London, not exactly a prosperous time for artists—or for much of the general public, for that matter. How did she have enough money to rent a car and then let Casey disappear with it?

As I said, Dane Clark is one of my film noir favorites, and apparently he wasn’t so great to work with on Blackout. Wikipedia includes some information from the Internet Archive about how he terrorized the script supervisor, Renee Glynne, on the set because he was infatuated with Belinda Lee. Glynne reported that Clark resented any interference from her, even when she was doing her job. There is no hint of this antagonism in the film, however, but I was surprised to read this information because I had never heard anything about it when reading other materials about Clark and the film.

In spite of my misgivings about some plot details and learning about Dane Clark’s disappointingly poor behavior on the set of the film, Blackout is still a fun story. The identity of the murderer was a complete surprise the first time I saw the film, and I always count that as a plus. And in its short runtime (Blackout is less than an hour and a half long), Casey has to figure out who killed Darius Brunner and who he can trust, including his wife Phyllis because they are legally married after all, even if they were nearly complete strangers and he was barely conscious when they tied the knot!

March 19, 1954 (United States), March 28, 1955 (United Kingdom), release dates  •  Directed by Terence Fisher  •  Screenplay by Richard Landau  •  Based on the novel Murder by Proxy by Helen Nielsen  •  Music by Ivor Slaney  •  Edited by Maurice Rootes  •  Cinematography by Walter J. Harvey

Dane Clark as Casey Morrow  •  Belinda Lee as Phyllis Brunner  •  Betty Ann Davies as Mrs. Alicia Brunner  •  Eleanor Summerfield as Maggie Doone  •  Andrew Osborn as Lance Gordon  •  Harold Lang as Travis/Victor Vanno  •  Jill Melford as Ms. Nardis  •  Alvys Maben as Lita Huntley  •  Michael Golden as Inspector Johnson  •  Nora Gordon as Casey Morrow’s mother  •  Alfie Bass as Ernie  •  Delphi Lawrence as Linda  •  Arnold Diamong as Mrs. Brunner’s butler  •  Cleo Laine as the singer in the Cloud Room  •  Olive Sloane as the landlady

Distributed by Exclusive Films (United Kingdom), Lippert Pictures (United States)  •  Produced by Hammer Film Productions