ThiefHott Too much of everything

Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

PamelaShort At this point in Humphrey Bogart's career, he was now a well enough established actor to be given free rein of his choice of director while on loan to Columbia Studios. He came up with John Cromwell who had given him his first break in the play Swifty, back in the 1920s. Cromwell decided to work with him again, but there was a problem, they had no story. According to Cromwell; they finally got this one , a noxious sort of thing , but I felt perhaps we could make something of it.' The 'noxious sort of thing' in question was Dead Reckoning, which turned out- unintentionally, it seems- to be almost a parody of The Maltese Falcon. Just like Sam Spade, Rip Murdock ( Bogart ) is trying to avenge the death of his partner; in this instance they were formerly paratrooper pals. It also borrows shamelessly from the film Double Indemnity, the same idea of a narrative voice-over commentary by Bogart. Even to the point of Fred MacMurray's repeated references to the smell of honeysuckle, in Double Indemnity, while Bogart harps on the smell of jasmine in the hair of co-star Lizabeth Scott. Sadly there is not the same friction and chemistry between Bogart/Scott as with MacMurray/Stanwyck. Bogart in this movie does not really seem interested in his sexy leading lady Scott, and it shows on film. Sadly for Lizabeth Scott, as an actress she was not lucky enough to have been taken under the wing of a brilliant Svengali-like director, which had been the main factor in setting Lauren Bacall on the road to success. But I still found her performance is exceptional under the circumstances and more interesting than Bogart's. While not near one of his best films, it is still a curiosity to see for Bogart fans and Scott fans alike. Either you'll like it or you won't, I'll let the reader decide for themselves.

jc-osms Don't you just love those film noir titles that just reach out and grab your interest, despite having no direct relevance to the movie content...? Obviously, like the pulp fiction book-source, it's a device to attract casual interest from passers-by looking at cinema-hoardings or book displays. This is definitely one of those and moreover director John Cromwell, not one I'd regard as being in the Hollywood pantheon, somehow manages to get his name above the title too.Good for him, because this is a cracking and mostly pulsating film noir, led by the inimitable Bogart again immersing himself in a meaty role, ostensibly a demobbed army captain but evidentially a sub-Sam Spade type adventurer who gets up to his neck in danger as he attempts to track down his army-buddy-with-a-secret Johnny and taking in encounters with a gambling-den boss, his hired muscle who gets up close and personal in a far from pleasant way with Bogart's face and Lizabeth Scott as the femme fatale playing both ends as you would expect.The movie starts with a straight-away drop-in to the action leading up, you just know it, to a lengthy flashback from Bogie, involving a fairly contrived unburdening of not quite his soul to an ex-forces padre. The background story is raw and pacy enough to hold your interest pretty much all the way through with taut and edgy dialogue, natch, only lapsing a little when Scott & Bogart apparently hitch their wagons together and get all starry-eyed. Not to worry, a quick look at your watch tells you there are still 20 minutes or so to go and you know you're in for an exciting guns (and fires) - blazing finish.Bogart's great as per...and Scott is just fine for the most part in her Bacall-clone part, all smoky eyes and voice, even getting into a noir-trademark white outfit (a la Stanwyck & Turner) for the second half, although she acts a pretty poor deathbed scene in the final reel and can't lip-synch her early-on torch song for toffee. The villains don't exactly come across as villainous however, which lightens the tension a tad, the henchman in particular wimping out when Bogart sets fire to the boss's apartment - you'll laugh out loud (as I did) at his pathetic scream as he exits through a window.Nevertheless, the movie crackles along satisfactorily until its downbeat er... reckoning and employs and respects enough noir conventions to keep aficionados happy...including me.

calvinnme Humphrey Bogart's performance in this film is what makes it rise above a 5 or 6. Columbia is obviously trying to replicate the elements of the types of films that Bogart did so well in the 1940's over at Warner Brothers. The oddest thing about this film is Bogart's dialogue, especially during his voice-overs. At times it comes on so strong as to approach a parody of Bogart as Bogart. If any other actor were speaking this dialogue it might evoke laughter if not confusion, yet Humphrey Bogart makes it work.Here Bogart is paratrooper Rip Murdock, just recently home from the war with Sergeant Johnny Drake, who is to receive the Congressional medal of honor. However, when Drake disappears right before the ceremony, Murdock gets permission from his superiors to find out what happened to his usually reliable friend and fellow soldier. Murdock follows his buddy's trail to Gulf City, a bar and gambling joint there that is run by a mobster, the girl that stole Johnny's heart - young and beautiful - and wealthy - widow Dusty Chandler (Lizabeth Scott), and a trail of clues fraught with mystery and murder. It's rather obvious that Lizabeth Scott is Columbia's answer to Lauren Bacall in this one, and that gangster Martinelli and henchman Krauss are attempting to duplicate the types of roles played by Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in Bogart's successful Warner pictures. Although these three can't begin to match their Warner counterparts, and at times Scott painfully overacts, they do lend enough credible support to give Bogey a framework in which to play an interesting character in a rather intriguing mystery that has plenty of atmosphere.

seymourblack-1 "Dead Reckoning" is an entertaining movie which contains many film noir characteristics. The urban setting, dark rainy streets, a flashback narrated by the main protagonist, interesting use of shadows, a femme fatale and a twisting storyline are just some. Humphrey Bogart's performance as a guy who's both tough and worldly but also gullible is impeccable and compelling to watch.After returning from military service in France, Captain Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart) and Sergeant Johnny Drake (William Prince) are summoned to Washington DC to be awarded medals, but when Johnny realises that the ceremony is likely to be featured in the newsreels, he becomes agitated and when their train stops at Philadelphia and newspaper photographers want to take the men's pictures, he suddenly disappears. Rip is naturally shocked and decides to go after him.Rip goes to Johnny's home town, Gulf City, where he discovers that his friend had enlisted under an assumed name and is still wanted for the murder of Stuart Chandler, a wealthy local resident who was married to a cabaret singer called Coral (Lizabeth Scott). Johnny is subsequently killed in a car crash and Rip decides to do all he can to clear Johnny's name.At the "Sanctuary Club" Rip traces Louis Ord (George Chandler), who'd been a witness in the murder trial and he tells Rip that he has a letter for him from Johnny. Rip also meets Coral (the woman who Johnny had been in love with), club owner Martinelli (Morris Carnovsky) and also his sadistic henchman Krause (Marvin Miller). That night, Rip is drugged and framed for the murder of Louis Ord and this leads him into a determined pursuit of the missing letter and Chandler's murderer."Dead Reckoning" was made in an era which predated political correctness and as a result some of Bogart's utterances now seem rather anachronistic. He tells Johnny that "all females are the same with their faces washed" and also tells Coral the "women ought to come capsule size, about 4" high and when a man goes out of an evening he just puts her in his pocket........and that way he knows exactly where she is". He is then free to "swap a few lies with his pals without danger of interruption and when it comes to that time of the evening when he wants her full sized and beautiful, he just waves his hand and there she is........and if she starts to interrupt, he just shrinks her back to pocket size and puts her away". Coral's eventual positive take on these remarks would normally be regarded as astonishing but she is so duplicitous a character that nothing she says is genuinely surprising. She's cold, mysterious and remote and full of contradictions and although Rip is wary of her, he still finds her irresistible. Martinelli is also a puzzling character with his own contradictions as he's a brutal gangster who claims that "by nature I'm a gentleman, truly gentle". He also says that "brutality has always revolted me as the weapon of the witless" and seems to genuinely find seeing any violence deeply distasteful."Dead Reckoning" doesn't enjoy the status of some of Bogart's classics and is a bit narration-heavy, however, the strange complexities of its story and its characters are intriguing and make it thoroughly absorbing and enjoyable.