Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake and William Bendix make up a trio that put its peculiar stamp on movies in the 1940s. Ladd and Lake starred in seven films together; Ladd and Bendix in 10. All three showed up (apart from a couple of those `as themselves' jamborees) for The Blue Dahlia and The Glass Key. And though they were key players in the formation of the noir cycle, their distinctive styles have dated badly; we watch them now with clinical detachment, wondering what their appeal might have been to audiences back then.
Ladd struck attitudes as the toughest of the tough guys; since at full stature he rose to five-feet-four, he brings to mind the Texas expression `All hat and no cattle.' When, in The Glass Key, his upper lip creeps halfway up over his teeth, it's a death's-head rictus; his perfect hair and perfect features crown a perfect absence of charm. In cold charmlessness he's almost matched by Lake, who, in scenes where she's bedecked in veils and snoods and thus deprived of the peek-a-boo locks that grabbed a nation's attention, suggests a grinning skull, too. And Bendix came to co-stardom as Hollywood's homage to the average Joe off fighting the war; whether in low comedy or, as here, high melodrama, he inevitably devolved into dim-witted lout.
So, by comparison, Brian Donlevy and even Bonita Granville glow with warmth and humanity. Donlevy (who cops top billing in The Glass Key) stayed with the noir cycle almost to its end, bowing out with a fine flourish in The Big Combo of 1955. Granville is best remembered for her series of late-30s programmers as Nancy Drew, but she showed up for small parts in a few noirs, like Suspense and The Guilty.
So much for the cast; what about the movie? It starts out from one of Dashiell Hammett's more intractable novels, in which he abandoned reader-friendly narrative and left his plot in pieces to be reassembled. The movie tries to simplify (and of course happify) the plot, but it's still not crystal-clear.
Donlevy runs the graft-and-patronage machine in a mid-sized city; Ladd is his best friend and chief operative. Several notches below them in human evolution, and trying to seize power, are mob boss Joseph Calleia and his goons, nastiest among whom is Bendix. A prominent judge needs Donlevy's backing, which he withholds until he falls for the judge's daughter (Lake). On the sly, meanwhile, Donlevy's kid sister (Granville) steps out with Lake's wastrel of a brother (Richard Denning, in so brief a role it barely registers). When Denning's found dead in a gutter, everybody finds reasons to pin the murder on Donlevy. This is the complex geometry within which the plot's permutations and combinations take place: principally, Bendix's sadistic obsession with Ladd, and Ladd's secret obsession with Lake.
The Glass Key leaves Hammett's compromised moral universe largely undisturbed; it stays as a given that there are only two choices, between corruption and worse corruption. Director Stuart Heisler goes a long way to meet the author's uncamouflaged treatment of violence, too. A prolonged episode where Bendix has Ladd under his full control must count as one of the most disturbing such scenes filmed up to that time (outside of war movies); it's not so easy to watch now, inured though we've grown to screen violence.
The chief literary progenitors of film noir were Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. All their work thrived on corruption and duplicity, but Chandler at least hoped for the possibility of decency and honor (in the person of Philip Marlowe). Cain was more hard-boiled, while Hammett may the most cynical of the lot. His human beings weren't just conflicted - they were sworn to self-interest. Maybe, in fidelity to the dark vision of The Glass Key, casting Bendix, Lake and Ladd wasn't such a bad idea after all.
Ladd struck attitudes as the toughest of the tough guys; since at full stature he rose to five-feet-four, he brings to mind the Texas expression `All hat and no cattle.' When, in The Glass Key, his upper lip creeps halfway up over his teeth, it's a death's-head rictus; his perfect hair and perfect features crown a perfect absence of charm. In cold charmlessness he's almost matched by Lake, who, in scenes where she's bedecked in veils and snoods and thus deprived of the peek-a-boo locks that grabbed a nation's attention, suggests a grinning skull, too. And Bendix came to co-stardom as Hollywood's homage to the average Joe off fighting the war; whether in low comedy or, as here, high melodrama, he inevitably devolved into dim-witted lout.
So, by comparison, Brian Donlevy and even Bonita Granville glow with warmth and humanity. Donlevy (who cops top billing in The Glass Key) stayed with the noir cycle almost to its end, bowing out with a fine flourish in The Big Combo of 1955. Granville is best remembered for her series of late-30s programmers as Nancy Drew, but she showed up for small parts in a few noirs, like Suspense and The Guilty.
So much for the cast; what about the movie? It starts out from one of Dashiell Hammett's more intractable novels, in which he abandoned reader-friendly narrative and left his plot in pieces to be reassembled. The movie tries to simplify (and of course happify) the plot, but it's still not crystal-clear.
Donlevy runs the graft-and-patronage machine in a mid-sized city; Ladd is his best friend and chief operative. Several notches below them in human evolution, and trying to seize power, are mob boss Joseph Calleia and his goons, nastiest among whom is Bendix. A prominent judge needs Donlevy's backing, which he withholds until he falls for the judge's daughter (Lake). On the sly, meanwhile, Donlevy's kid sister (Granville) steps out with Lake's wastrel of a brother (Richard Denning, in so brief a role it barely registers). When Denning's found dead in a gutter, everybody finds reasons to pin the murder on Donlevy. This is the complex geometry within which the plot's permutations and combinations take place: principally, Bendix's sadistic obsession with Ladd, and Ladd's secret obsession with Lake.
The Glass Key leaves Hammett's compromised moral universe largely undisturbed; it stays as a given that there are only two choices, between corruption and worse corruption. Director Stuart Heisler goes a long way to meet the author's uncamouflaged treatment of violence, too. A prolonged episode where Bendix has Ladd under his full control must count as one of the most disturbing such scenes filmed up to that time (outside of war movies); it's not so easy to watch now, inured though we've grown to screen violence.
The chief literary progenitors of film noir were Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. All their work thrived on corruption and duplicity, but Chandler at least hoped for the possibility of decency and honor (in the person of Philip Marlowe). Cain was more hard-boiled, while Hammett may the most cynical of the lot. His human beings weren't just conflicted - they were sworn to self-interest. Maybe, in fidelity to the dark vision of The Glass Key, casting Bendix, Lake and Ladd wasn't such a bad idea after all.