BLACKOUT (1954)

At a jazz club in London, American Casey Morrow (Dane Clark) is drowning his sorrows, broke and drunk because a promised job failed to materialize. An attractive blonde approaches him and offers him a job: marriage. She gives him a wad of cash and asks him to marry her that night. The next thing he knows, it's morning: he has a mighty hangover, a spot of blood on his coat, and he's in the Chelsea apartment of artist Maggie Doone who let him in at 2 a.m. when he was pounding on her door. Maggie is wary but offers to help, and Casey notices a painting of his apparent wife in her apartment. Casey leaves and immediately sees a newspaper headline noting that the wealthy Darius Brunner was found murdered, and Casey recognizes his missing daughter Phyllis as the woman he apparently married the night before (and whose cash he still has in his coat pocket). Back at Maggie's, she says that Phyllis had modeled for her, and that Phyllis is supposed to marry the Brunner family lawyer Lance Gordon. Thinking that Phyllis may be trying to frame Casey for her father's murder, Maggie agrees to help Casey figure out what's going on. Soon Phyllis shows up, insisting the murderer is Lance; she pulled off her drunken midnight marriage to Casey in order to get out of marrying Lance, whom she is sure just wants her money, especially now with Darius dead. From here, plot twists build. Lance is responsible for investing Mrs. Brunner's money in charities that may be bogus; there may be a blackmailer involved; Casey is almost hit by a suspicious car in the street. Then when Phyllis goes missing, Casey finds her in a cozy living room scene with her mother and Lance, and the marriage is still on for Christmas Eve. Who, if anyone, can Casey trust?

This is noir in a fairly light tone. I never really feared for Casey's outcome, though I must give a bit of a Spoiler here to note that I was disappointed that Casey doesn't wind up with Maggie at the end, when it seems that's what we are being primed for. He has much more chemistry with Maggie (Eleanor Summerfield) than with Phyllis (Belinda Lee, pictured with Clark), and Maggie treats him with more respect than Phyllis ever does. So even though it doesn't end that way, I choose to imagine Casey and Maggie walking into the sunset at the end. Dane Clark is like a more innocent and likable John Garfield, and Clark never hits a truly dark low point like Garfield (or other noir leading men) might. In fact, a family reunion scene with Clark and his estranged mom and brother, who own a pub, starts out badly but their problems are resolved quickly. There are plenty of traditional noir elements: the smoky bar, the drunken amnesia, the question of who can be trusted, some betrayals (perceived and real), and though Clark may not be as rough and tough as Garfield or Bogart or Alan Ladd, he does a nice job here. Lee looks the femme fatale part but comes off a bit blandly especially compared to the more interesting and complex Summerfield (who I just saw in her last acting role, a 1998 episode of Midsomer Murders). Favorite line: when Clark asks Summerfield why she has stuck by him, she replies, "I lead a dull life—I want something to put in my diary." [TCM]