PUSHOVER (1954)

We watch a methodically planned bank robbery carried out by Paul Richards and his partner, though at its end, they shoot and kill a security guard. That evening, in a seemingly unrelated scene, we see young and beautiful Kim Novak leave a theater and have trouble getting her car started. Kindly bystander Fred MacMurray helps her out, they hit it off, and end up spending the night together. Soon we discover Novak is the mistress of the bank robber and MacMurray is actually a cop assigned to watch her. But in the tradition of film noir, he falls for her which complicates matters. When he comes clean to her, she suggests that, when Richards eventually shows up with the bank money, the two of them take off with it. But MacMurray is part of a three-man stakeout taking place across the street from her apartment; she is under visual surveillance and her phone is tapped, making things dicey for the couple. For a while, MacMurray pulls it off, playing it cool with his partner (Phil Carey) and his boss (E.G. Marshall), but soon Carey gets mildly involved with Dorothy Malone, a neighbor of Novak's, and when Malone sees MacMurray where he shouldn't be, the screws tighten for everyone.

If you've seen DOUBLE INDEMNITY, you can't help imagining MacMurray’s character, Paul Sheridan, as an older version of Walter Neff, gray and ashen and worn down by life but still letting lust lead him into trouble. Neff is a more rounded character than Sheridan, who remains something of a blank here, and this movie is nowhere near the classic that INDEMNITY was, but it's still a fairly compelling film noir. The clever script limits itself to basically three locations: Novak's apartment, Malone's apartment, and the stakeout room across the street. That sounds like a potentially dull set-up more appropriate for a live 1950s TV drama, but it rarely feels static, and in fact helps to ratchet up the tension. MacMurray is good, as is Novak—this was her first featured role and the critics were not kind to her, but I think she's just right. Her character isn’t as devious as Barbara Stanwyck's in INDEMNITY—she seems to want to escape from Richards and genuinely has feelings for MacMurray—so she's not really a classic noir femme fatale, and that could be what some viewers react to rather than to her performance. Carey is excellent—I wanted to know about his character, and was rooting for him and Malone to work something out, even though the relationship begins in a creepy voyeuristic way (he watches her from across the street when nothing's happening in Novak's place). Allen Nourse is fine in the small but key role of an older policeman eager for retirement—he's got "poor bastard" written all over him from the start. A solid noir. Pictured are Malone, MacMurray and Novak. [Criterion Channel]