LIGHTHOUSE (1947)

After a brief text crawl about the lonely life of lighthouse keepers, we meet one such keeper, Hank (John Litel), who has just given his younger assistant Sam (Don Castle, at right) the day off to go to the mainland to take care of a toothache. But Sam is actually trying to cure a different ache—he's having an affair with Connie (June Lang), who has been led to believe that Sam is the boss at the lighthouse. When Hank visits, Connie tells him that she was just fired for slapping her boss when he tried to come on to her, and she wants to get married. Sam wants to wait until he gets a better job, but what he really needs to do, unbeknownst to Connie, is get untangled from his current wife. When Connie visits the lighthouse island, she discovers that Hank is the boss and finds that Sam is off visiting his wife. For revenge, she sets out to woo Hank. They quickly marry, but when Sam returns, she finds out that Sam was actually trying to divorce his wife. Hank is unaware of the festering passion and jealousy that is being enacted behind his back, and soon Connie's friend JoJo tells her that Sam is back to catting around when he makes it to the mainland. Meanwhile, Hank has proven to be a good man so Connie commits to him, angering Sam who sets a trap in hopes that Hank will fall to his death on the rocks of the shore. Things don't go quite as planned. This B-film has a noir atmosphere, and its plot resembles movies like DOUBLE INDEMNITY or THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, but this is ultimately more interested in character than in violence (though tension and the threat of violence are always present). The low-budget sets are acceptable, given that most of the movie takes place in a couple of rooms in the lighthouse, with an occasional foray outside. The acting is on the lightweight side. June Lang is fine as the femme fatale, but John Litel is too old and stodgy for his part, and Don Castle, who was clearly being groomed as a kind of second-string Clark Gable, is OK but doesn’t have the heat or menace needed for his role. Still, the ending was a little unexpected and generally I enjoyed the film as a nice discovery during TCM’s B-movie festival from earlier this year. [TCM]