Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)

July 18, 1952, release date

Directed by Roy Ward Baker

Screenplay by Daniel Taradash

Based on the novel Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong

Music by Lionel Newman

Edited by George A. Gittens

Cinematography by Lucien Ballard

Richard Widmark as Jed Towers

Marilyn Monroe as Nell Forbes

Anne Bancroft as Lyn Lesley

Donna Corcoran as Bunny Jones

Jeanne Cagney as Rochelle

Lurene Tuttle as Ruth Jones

Elisha Cook Jr. as Eddie Forbes

Jim Backus as Peter Jones

Verna Felton as Emma Ballew

Willis B. Bouchey as Joe, the bartender

Don Beddoe as Mr. Ballew

Distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Produced by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

This blog post about Don’t Bother to Knock is my entry for the Classic Movie Blog Association’s 2019 Spring Blogathon: Femmes/Hommes Fatale of Film Noir. Click here for the complete list of participants and links to their entries.

Marilyn Monroe might seem like an easy choice for a femme fatale. After all, Monroe’s public image is based almost entirely on sex appeal. But her performance as Nell Forbes in Don’t Bother to Knock is more nuanced, which is exactly what makes it so interesting. Nell Forbes wants to be the femme fatale, but she is a much more than an ordinary femme fatale.

Monroe’s entrance in Don’t Bother to Knock is inauspicious, even as a main character. Richard Widmark gets top billing and Monroe’s name appears under his, but neither one of them opens the film. That job is left to Anne Bancroft, who plays Richard Widmark’s girlfriend Lyn Lesley. Lyn is the McKinley Hotel’s nightclub singer, and the film opens with her talking to Joe, the bartender in the nightclub. Lyn tells Joe that she has broken it off with her boyfriend, even though he seemed to be the one. The film then cuts to Richard Widmark’s character, Jed Towers, in a sequence that reveals he is the jilted boyfriend. In his room at the McKinley Hotel, he reads Lyn’s breakup letter, and viewers see the first few lines, so they know that he is the one Lyn discussed with the bartender. When he rips the letter and drops the pieces out his window, viewers can see a woman putting the finishing touches on her evening outfit in the background, in the window across the courtyard. This is a clever shot because it is Mrs. Ruth Jones that viewers see, not Marilyn Monroe. Not yet.

Eddie Forbes works as a bellhop in the McKinley Hotel, and viewers meet him next. He brings hotel guests down to the lobby in the elevator, and he spots someone he knows there: Only then does the film cut to Marilyn Monroe, playing Nell Forbes, Eddie’s niece, entering the hotel through its revolving front doors. Her entrance is about four and half minutes into the film. She looks around uncertainly, getting her bearings. Eddie arranged this meeting because he sees a chance to help Nell by getting her a job working as a babysitter for the hotel’s guests. Her first job is babysitting Bunny Jones while her parents attend a formal dinner in the hotel. Nell wants the job, but children do not interest her much.

After Bunny Jones goes to bed, Nell is on her own. She eats a couple of chocolate candies out of a candy box, even though Bunny offered some to her and she insisted that she doesn’t eat chocolate. She is much more interested in perusing Ruth Jones’s possessions once she is left alone in the Jones’s suite. Nell tries her perfume, then goes through her jewelry box and tries on a bracelet and a pair of earrings. Nell then goes through Ruth Jones’s closet and changes into a kimono and a pair of slippers.

Jed Towers is on the rebound after having just been rebuffed by Lyn Lesley. He wants company, and back in his hotel room, he notices Nell across the courtyard. By this time, Nell has transformed herself, forsaking her plain cloth dress for some of Ruth Jones’s finery. He attracts Nell’s attention from the window of his hotel room across the courtyard. When Nell has second thoughts about continuing their interaction, he figures out her room number from a floor plan of the hotel and calls her. Nell isn’t interested at first, but she decides that maybe Jed is worth a second chance, and she entices him from her window by signaling via the venetian blinds. Jed goes to Nell’s room looking for the promise of a good time.

Jed Towers is a World War II veteran, and both historical and film noir convention would make him the one suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but it is really Nell herself who is suffering most acutely from PTSD. It is implied that her boyfriend Philip died at least three years before the events in the film, and Nell is having trouble moving on. Jed is a veteran pilot who seems to have survived the war unscathed, although his girlfriend Lyn complains that he is perennially cynical and doesn’t want to become attached to people in general and to her in particular. It is the reason Lyn gives Jed for refusing to see him anymore. Lyn is describing someone who may be experiencing some residual effects of trauma, in her boyfriend Jed’s case, the trauma of war.

One of the hallmarks of film noir is the overwhelming feeling of angst, which can include PTSD, alienation, loneliness, grief, and so on. The narrative in Don’t Bother to Knock takes the usual storyline a step further: Jed, the wartime fighter pilot, may have a relatively mild case of PTSD, and Nell, whose boyfriend died in a plane crash in the Pacific, suffers from so much grief, depression, and alienation from her family that she has been hospitalized in the past. She reveals her state of mind in brief non sequiturs. A conversation with Jed triggers her symptoms because he is, like her boyfriend Philip was, a pilot. The memories that come flooding back during this conversation overwhelm her, as viewers see in the following conversation between Nell and Jed:

• Nell: “You’re a pilot.”

• Jed: “That’s right. Anything strange about that?”

• Nell: “Yes. That’s strange. Did you fly a bomber during the war?”

• Jed: “Who didn’t?”

• Nell: “You came home and you’d lost step. You didn’t have any plans.”

• Jed: “Well, I thought of becoming a financier. See, I was broke, so that made it a little tough—”

• Nell: “You didn’t have any profession. You said, ‘Why not do what I’ve been doing—flying?’”

• Jed: “Yeah, Something like that.”

• Nell: “‘There’s money in cargo from the States to the islands.’ You crashed . . . in the water.”

• Jed: “I’ve cracked up a couple of times, water and land—”

• Nell: “In the ocean in ’46, on the way to Hawaii. But you weren’t killed! You were only lost!”

• Jed: “Hey, wait a minute. It was in Lake Michigan. My number one caught fire and I had to—”

• Nell: “You were rescued! You came back!”

• Jed: “Well, why get so excited about it?”

Nell and Jed flirt with one another at first. But Nell starts telling lies to hide the fact that she is really working, babysitting for a child who is supposed to be asleep in the next room, and her conversation with Jed only adds to his confusion. He wants to leave, and Nell begs him to stay. He tells her, “You bother me. I can’t figure you out. You’re silk on one side and sandpaper on the other.” When he tries to open the door to the hotel room, Jed notices the scars on Nell’s wrists. Nell describes her symptoms to Jed:

• Nell: “I did it with a razor. My father’s.”

• Jed: “You did that to yourself?”

• Nell: “When Philip was given up for lost.”

• Jed: “Your husband?”

• Nell: [shakes her head no] “I was in another hotel room, once. The night before he flew out over the ocean—the last time—he said we’d be married when he came back. I’d phone him once in a while. So you see why I want to stay. It’s so pretty here.”

Jed is in a bind. He wants to leave so he can catch Lyn at the end of her set in the hotel’s nightclub, but Nell can’t bear to part with him again: again because she is confusing Jed with her dead boyfriend Philip. When he does leave, Nell is despondent, and this is the point in the film when her problems become more serious and more evident to others, including strangers. She’s not just a liar and a thief. She is angry with Bunny for what she thinks is the child’s deliberate attempts to interfere with her pursuit of love, so she ties her up and leaves her alone on the bed. When Ruth Jones returns to the hotel suite to check on her daughter, she starts a physical fight with Nell. Nell fights back, so she’s guilty of assault and battery, too.

Jed is the one who comes to Nell’s aid. It seems that, from his own experiences and observations and from his brief time with Nell, he would rather give her the benefit of the doubt. He knows that she has suffered and isn’t always rational. He realizes that she finds it difficult to face the truth some of the time and that these fluctuations between reality and wishful distortion can make her unpredictable and difficult. It’s a marked change for him. With all the evidence of Nell’s wrongdoing, he is still willing to give her a chance.

This twist makes the film’s narrative rather unique and adds the element of surprise, which is something that I always enjoy in any story, in print or on film. If I have any complaint all about the film, it is about the ending. It is a little quick, a little too tidy, but that seems to be more the fault of the screenwriting than of Richard Widmark’s, Anne Bancroft’s, and, of course, Marilyn Monroe’s talents. But it is minor complaint: The screenplay was adapted from Charlotte Armstrong’s novel Mischief, which I have read. This is one instance where the changes made to the plot make the film the superior version—by far.

Marilyn Monroe plays a very complicated femme fatale in Don’t Bother to Knock. She understands that Jed Towers is attracted to her, and she uses that understanding to invite him to her hotel room. But it becomes obvious that Nell is a damaged soul who cannot find a place for herself in life and who carries despair and regret wherever she goes. Nell has many layers, and Marilyn Monroe is up to the task of showing all of those many layers and Nell’s many complications.

Panic in the Streets (1950)

June 12, 1950, release date

Directed by Elia Kazan

Screenplay by Richard Murphy, Daniel Fuchs

Based on a story by Edna Anhalt, Edward Anhalt

Music by Alfred Newman

Edited by Harmon Jones

Cinematography by Joseph MacDonald

Richard Widmark as Lieutenant Commander Clinton “Clint” Reed, M.D.

Paul Douglas as Captain Tom Warren

Barbara Bel Geddes as Nancy Reed

(Walter) Jack Palance as Blackie

Zero Mostel as Raymond Fitch

Mary Liswood as Angie Fitch

Lewis Charles as Kochak

Alexis Minotis as John Mefaris, the Greek restaurant owner

Aline Stevens as Rita Minotis

Dan Riss as Neff, the newspaper reporter

Tommy Cook as Vince Poldi

Pat Walshe as himself

Tommy Rettig as Tommy, the Reeds’ son

Beverly Brown as Doctor Mackie, Clint’s boss

Distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Produced by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Panic in the Streets starts with a car ride down a city street in nighttime New Orleans. This car ride continues while the credits roll and jazz music plays, with lots of horns and frenetic pacing.

It’s the same opening music used in Don’t Bother to Knock, another great film noir also starring Richard Widmark. His costars in that film are Marilyn Monroe and Anne Bancroft. I’ll be posting about Don’t Bother to Knock for the Classic Movie Blog Association’s 2019 Spring Blogathon: Femmes/Hommes Fatale of Film Noir later this month (April 2019).

When the credits end, the film cuts to a car as it stops in front of a building. The camera pans up to a man (Kochak) in the second-floor window. On the second floor inside, men are gambling at cards. Kochak is sick and doesn’t want to continue gambling, but the other men don’t want him to leave because he has won too much money. Blackie, one of the gamblers and the leader of the group, wants his money back. He, Poldi, and Fitch follow Kochak to get it back when he leaves the game and heads home. Kochak goes to the docks, where Poldi and Fitch trap him between warehouses, and Blackie shoots Kochak dead.

I wonder if Blackie in particular is modeled on Huey Long, one-time governor of Louisiana and U.S. senator from the state when he was assassinated in Baton Rouge, the Louisiana state capitol, in 1935. Blackie is always smiling, always handing out cash, always doing favors for strangers, all while killing his friends and acquaintances when they have crossed him or when he thinks they have (Long used bribes and other forms of corruption to beat his political opponents). Or maybe corruption on the screen is similar from one film noir to the next and from the screen to real life!

The film cuts to daytime and a boy running down a dock. He is followed by two police officers. They all arrive to find two more police officers who have found a dead body. A crowd has gathered and watches the proceedings before one of the police officers orders them to disperse. The body is taken to the coroner’s office, where an employee named Kleber performs the autopsy.

Panic in the Streets was filmed on location in New Orleans, Louisiana, and many of the city’s local citizens were used as extras and in supporting roles. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) provides a lot of information about Panic in the Streets, including the credits. Click here to see the full cast and crew list. The location filming also gives viewers a look at New Orleans in 1950, a city whose backstreets didn’t look pretty just after World War II.

After this bleak opening, the film cuts to Doctor Clint Reed painting a piece of furniture with his son Tommy. This family interaction is cut short, however: Doctor Reed is called into work on his day off because of what Kleber discovers during the autopsy. The dead man, Kochak, was suffering from pneumonic plague, a pulmonary form of bubonic plague, also known as the black death of the Middle Ages.

Clint Reed, an officer with the United States Public Health Service, joins forces with Captain Tom Warren of the New Orleans Police Department to find the person or persons who killed Kochak because some if not all of them were exposed to pneumonic plague and are likely carriers. The effort to contain the spread of the disease is intercut with the story of Kochak and his unsavory friends Blackie, Poldi, and Fitch. They are unaware of the danger that they face. Their only concerns are to avoid the police and make sure that Kolchak wasn’t trying to cheat them before Blackie killed him.

An alert newspaper reporter named Neff suspects that Kochak’s death involves something more than simple murder. When he learns the truth, Doctor Reed wants to avoid a citywide panic by keeping the story about pneumonic plague out of the papers. At first, Captain Warren thinks Doctor Reed is exaggerating the danger, but he changes his mind as the investigation progresses and he sees some of the disease’s effects. He starts to agree with Doctor Reed that the city would be better served if the story is kept confidential. He goes a bit too far, however: He crosses the line when he has the newspaper reporter arrested, even though he has no grounds for such an arrest and is in fact violating the reporter’s constitutional rights (freedom of the press, freedom of speech). Captain Warren listens to Doctor Reed, who believes that publishing the story, as Neff wants, would alarm the public at large and not just the residents of New Orleans. Doctor Reed is afraid that the men who knew Kochak and are probably responsible for his death—and are likely carriers of the plague—would leave the city if they knew the police were looking for them.

The mayor of New Orleans is appalled that Captain Warren would arrest the reporter without cause and orders the reporter released. The mayor, Doctor Reed, and others explain their positions in the following conversation:

• Mayor of New Orleans: “. . . I had Mackie make up a statement, a complete explanation of the facts as they stand. Before I give it to Neff [the newspaper reporter] here, I want a confirmation from you that the disease can be contained and there’s no reason for panic.”

• Doctor Mackie: “Our only chance, Clint, is to inform the public.”

• Mayor: [to Reed] “You agree?”

• Doctor Reed: “No. The minute he [Neff] prints it [the statement], the men we’re looking for will leave the city. Now I’ve told you once, and I’ll tell you again, anyone leaving here with . . . with plague endangers the entire country.”

• Bob, the mayor’s assistant: “The entire country hasn’t got it. We have. A woman died here last night. This problem lies right here in our own community.”

• Doctor Reed: “Community? What community? Do you think you’re living in the Middle Ages?”

• Bob: “Oh, come now, Doctor.”

• Doctor Reed: “Anybody that leaves here can be in any city in the country within ten hours. I could leave here today and I can be in Africa tomorrow. And whatever disease I had would go right with me.”

• Bob: “I know that.”

• Doctor Reed: “Then think of it when you’re talking about communities. We’re all in a community. The same one!”

The arguments that Clint Reed makes about the spread of disease are reminiscent of modern-day epidemics. Fears about the spread of pneumonic plague in Panic in the Streets are very similar to the following real-life incidents, among many, many others:

◊ Flu pandemic in 1918

◊ HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s

◊ Ebola fever, Zika virus, and measles outbreaks in the 2000s

◊ Flu season of 2017–2018

And some obstacles to public safety and disease prevention remain the same: ease of travel, close proximity to others in large urban areas, difficulty of finding the source of the infection, thinking locally instead of globally.

The film reminds me of other films noir with similar themes of fear about the spread of deadly disease or radioactivity (click on each film title to see my blog post about that film):

◊ The Killer That Stalked New York, a 1950 film about the spread of a smallpox epidemic in New York City.

◊ City of Fear, a 1959 film about an escaped convict who has a canister of cobalt-60, a substance dangerous enough to kill everyone in Los Angeles. The handling of contaminated materials in Panic in the Streets is dated compared to the techniques in use today when such materials are encountered. The same was true of the handling of radioactive materials in City of Fear.

The DVD commentary by Alain Silver and James Ursini gives a lot of background information about the film and the director Elia Kazan. In particular, Silver and Ursini make an interesting point about Kazan: He does not take sides between Neff the reporter and Clint Reed, and between Clint Reed and Bob, the mayor’s assistant. Kazan seems to value liberal ideals, which are the subjects of many of his films, but he did name names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and destroyed the careers of many associates in the process.

I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy Panic in the Streets. I knew already about Elia Kazan’s testimony before HUAC. And before I saw the film, I kept thinking of it as a disaster film. But the disaster, the threat of an epidemic, is just one piece of the whole story. The relationships between Clint Reed and his wife and between Clint and Captain Warren are allowed to develop and thus draw viewers in. The ability to balance competing needs—the need to respect civil liberties (freedom of the press and the right to free speech) and the need to protect the public—is also explored at the personal level for several of the characters.

The film’s themes are relevant today. Like many ethical dilemmas—and many films noir—there is no right answer, and the film doesn’t offer a neat solution. It is one of those films that presents different sides to the issues and lets viewers ponder the alternatives. I find myself doing just that after seeing the film and listening to the DVD commentary.