erik lundegaard

Saturday September 17, 2022

Movie Review: Knock on Any Door (1949)

WARNING: SPOILERS

The main tension in “Knock on Any Door” is between its social-reform message—Nick “Pretty Boy” Romano (John Derek) got a series of bad breaks, and we as a society are as much to blame as him—and the fact that Nick is an unlikeable little shit.

Maybe it’s the character as written but I think it’s John Derek. Some actors (Cagney, Brando) can make bad men likeable. It probably has something to do with an honesty in their performance, which is exactly what we don’t get here. Nick feels false throughout. He pouts, he cries, he combs his hair. At least that last part was historically interesting. We have several scenes where Nick whips out his comb and spends 15, 20 seconds of screentime making it just so. In one, he’s wearing a kind of leather jacket, so even though the movie was released in 1949 it feels classically 1950s to me. It’s ur-Fonzie.

We almost did get Brando in the role, by the way. This the first film by Humphrey Bogart’s production company, Santana Pictures, so Bogie got to handpick his coworkers. To direct, he tapped relative newbie Nicholas Ray, whose debut production, “They Live By Night,” Bogart had seen and admired; and he also visited Marlon Brando during his “A Streetcar Named Desire” run on Broadway to pitch the role of Nick. Imagine that. Would’ve been a whole other movie if that happened. Instead, this.

What a loveable character
It begins well. There’s a robbery, a cop is killed, and in the aftermath we get a “Round up the usual suspects” moment as the cops nab anyone with a police record—including Nick. When Bogart, playing Andrew Morton, Nick’s lawyer, gets the phone call that Nick has been arrested, he initially begs off, because he’s sick of the kid. At home playing chess with his wife—we later find out she’s a social worker—she gives him a look. He defends himself, she gives him another look, and he keeps defending himself while admitting sure, maybe, OK. Finally, without a word from her, he gives in and agrees to talk to Nick: “Anything to keep you quiet.” Great bit. 

For a time, he investigates. He visits the old neighborhood and sees a character named Junior, old, stooped, selling newspapers.

Bogie: How is it, Junior? Ah, you look just about the same.
Junior: A little older, a little more tired, a little more confused.

I could’ve spent another 20 minutes with just them talking.

Instead the trial begins. And during his opening statement, Morton decides to tell the jury Nick’s story—so the prosecution can’t use it against him, and because he hopes to engender sympathy for the kid. Immediately I had a bad feeling: “Oh shit, this isn’t the movie, is it? This flashback?” No, but half of it.

Why is Nick a shitty kid? Well, his dad was a hard-working grocer who was railroaded into jail for defending himself against a customer coming at him with a knife. Morton was the guy who was supposed to defend him, but, busy, he passed the case to an associate who didn’t do due diligence. Dad got a year, and him with a bum ticker. Morton finds out four months into the stretch, and just as he’s visiting the family in their home, promising to get the old man out, they find out he died of a heart attack. And Nick gives Morton a searing look. Well, “searing.” Searing and pouty. 

The move to the “bad neighborhood” actually made me flash on Donald Trump, believe it or not. One day Nick’s bringing home groceries and two kids—one looking about 40—attack him. The blonde kid starts it. In the middle of a handshake, he yanks Nick toward him and they start pummeling. Trump used to do that yanking thing. Remember that? Even as president. Even greeting foreign dignitaries or SCOTUS justices. God, what an ass. I’d almost forgotten that part of what an ass he is. There are just so many parts.

For some reason, being attacked by juvenile delinquents turns Nick into a juvenile delinquent. While his family struggles, Nick combs his hair and hangs out with his jerkoff friends. They steal watches and hock them. (Cf., “The Public Enemy.”) But they’re soon nabbed and sent to reform school, where they’re forced to participate in something called a “burlap party.” I guess it was a thing back then? A basement is flooded and the boys are forced to dry it with burlap material that they constantly have to ring out. In the midst, the blonde kid starts coughing and you know he ain’t long for the world. Then Morton visits. It’s after the war, he lets Nick know his family is doing fine in Seattle, but Nick’s got a chip on his shoulder larger than the Pacific Northwest. Among the barbs he directs at a guy just trying to help him:

  • Don’t sing me lullabies, mister!
  • Oh sure, maybe you can get me a job. Winding an eight-day clock!
  • You wanna do something for me? Remember me in your prayers!

To which Bogart has the line of the movie: “Boy oh boy, what a loveable character they made out of you.” Yep. Nick’s the kid gone wrong you don’t care about at all. The problem is he doesn’t seem deprived, he seems spoiled.

When he gets out, he has a bunch of hangers-on while he gets a haircut—as if he’s already a gangster. He’s not. He makes dough knocking over candy stores. And he can’t even do that right because he falls in love with the girl running the store, Emma (Allene Roberts), who’s innocent and talks in an annoying whisper. For her, he tries to go straight. But then he overhears one of Bogie’s law partners expressing doubts about him, and he gets pouty-angry again, throws a bottle against a wall, and steals cash from Bogie’s wallet. In an alleyway, Bogie takes it back, and the kid tries to go straight again. He doesn’t, and he’s going to leave Emma (because she’s too good for him), even after finding out she’s pregnant; so, per mid-century melodramas, she turns on the gas oven.

Anyway, that's why he is the way he is.

In the present, in court, Bogie makes mincemeat out of the prosecution’s case. The DA with the scar down his cheek (George Macready), like he's central-casting Getapo, can’t get Nick’s friends to shake their story that he was with them at the time of the killing, but Morton gets a government eyewitness to admit he only IDed Nick because the cops told him to. Bogie’s got the case won … until Nick agrees to testify in his own defense. And because the DA badgers him, histrionically, and because Nick remembers Emma and all her goodness, Nick breaks down on the stand  and confesses—yes, yes, he did kill the cop! During the sentencing phase, Bogie lets us all know the movie’s theme (“Yes, Nick Romano is guilty, but so are we!!”) before filling us in on the meaning of the movie’s title: “Knock on any door, and you may find … Nick Romano.” At which point, in the gallery, we cut to a greasy kid in a T-shirt combing his hair. I had to laugh out loud at that one.

Despite Bogie's shared-blame strategy, the judge still sentences Nick to death. And when Nick’s doing the dead man’s walk away from the camera, with THE END prominently placed, we can see that he’s still combing his hair. Now that’s commitment to the bit. Even Fonzie didn’t go that far.

“Knock on any door and you may find ... Nick Romano.” 

Fast, young, good-looking
They must’ve known, right? That Derek wasn’t working? So why did Ray use him five years later in almost the exact same role (whiny little shit), and opposite another classic Warner Bros. gangster (James Cagney)? Derek helped ruin that one, too. Oddly, it was in Ray’s very next picture that he found the right actor for all these roles: James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.” He made the screwed-up kid sympathetic.

Dean is also much more associated with a line that Derek repeats several times in this movie: “Live fast, die young, have a good-looking corpse.” I’ve heard that all my life, but apparently it originated here—or in Willard Motley’s 1947 novel, on which this is based.

Another historical tidbit. There’s a scene with Bogart in a nightclub, and there’s a piano player in the background. It’s Dooley Wilson, Sam from “Casablanca.” Nice to see Bogie the producer getting Dooley Wilson work. Nice to see Rick and Sam reunited in postwar America. 

Rick, Sam, play it again.

Posted at 08:43 AM on Saturday September 17, 2022 in category Movie Reviews - 1940s  
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