The Glass Key

 The Glass Key (1942) is a proto-film noir that reminds us how strange and perverse movies of this sort could be.  The movie is not particularly impressive but contains some very weird scenes, particularly in its second half.  Some of these scenes are so bizarre and, indeed, disturbing that they provide some rationale for me to cautiously recommend the film to viewers who like classic crime films.

In the thirties, Dashiell Hammett wrote a number of highly regarded crime novels.  Hammett had been a private dick himself and he composed his books in a distinctly hard-boiled style that was highly influential in the genre.  Like other practitioners of this kind of fiction, Hammett's books are full of colorful underworld figures and lots of violent action.  The books also have fantastically complex plots that don't necessarily translate well to cinema.  I understand that movie scenarios adapting most of Hammett's books eliminate characters and prune the labyrinthine branching forks upon forks of subplots into something manageable as a ninety minute movie.  Hammett's novels were bestsellers and so, frequently, made into films.  The Glass Key was first produced as a movie in 1935, a film that is reputed to be pretty good.  Universal had a big box-office success with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire, released the year before, and so those performers were recruited for the 1942 remake of the The Glass Key.  These properties were "hot" in the early forties -- John Huston had just scored a big box-office hit with his adaptation of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, also, as it happens, a remake of an earlier version of the story.  

Hammett had a misogynistic edge -- his books feature wicked women who seduce men into violent enterprises for their own mercenary motives and, then, are punished by the end of the film  Veronica Lake has a role of this kind in The Glass Key.  Hammett also tends toward Gothic plots involving cruelty and betrayal within families -- some of his novels develop themes that Roman Polanski would exploit in his neo-Noir Chinatown with its monstrous and cruel pater-familias.  He also seems to have had a curious and perverse interest in homosexual villains.  There is some outrageously gay material in The Glass Key that has to be seen to be believed.  The story in The Glass Key is to complex to reprise and any attempt at reconstructing the narrative would be, I think, prone to error -- I'm not at all sure I understood the motivations of the characters in some scenes (and the motives of some of the characters are also irrational, sadistic, or insane in a number of sequences in the movie).  It suffices to understand that the film centers on a corrupt gangster who manages a league of voters; this is Paul Matvig.  Matvig comes equipped with a sister, Opal, whom he bullies; she's in love with a foppish gambler and libertine, Taylor Hunter.  Hunter, in turn, is the son of a reforming politician who is seeking a second term as governor of some unnamed and highly corrupt State.  Hunter, a respectable-looking middle-aged gent, has a daughter named Janet (Veronica Lake).  There is a cowardly and crooked DA and a newspaper publisher, also cowardly and corrupt, named Matthews.  These people are in the pocket of another gangster named Varner.  Varner is the sworn enemy of Paul Matvig -- this is because Matvig is in love with Janet Hunter and wants to impress her by attacking the criminal enterprises of Varner (which will inure to the benefit of the reform candidate for governor, Janet Hunter's father.  When the poor abused Opal Matvig spends time with her lover, the callous and perverse Taylor Hunter, Paul Matvig opposes their liaison.  Taylor Hunter ends up beaten to death and all eyes are on Paul Matvig for committing what is, in effect, an honor slaying of Opal's paramour.  The vicious gangster, Varner, wants to implicate Matvig in the murder of Taylor Hunter and has Matvig's factotum and tough-guy buddy, Ed Beaumont (played by Alan Ladd) kidnapped.  A couple of thugs beat Beaumont to a pulp in a scene with odd homo-erotic andsado-masochistic undertones.  (One of the thugs played by William Bendix seems to have developed an unhealthy obsession with Beaumont and is constantly cuddling him and whispering endearments.) There are more complications and inscrutable plot developments.  The movie manages to be fast-moving and strangely dull at the same time.  Janet Hunter tries to seduce Ed Beaumont.  Beaumont, meanwhile, who is posited as irresistable catnip to all the females in the movie cuts a wide swath through the other women who cross his path -- including a very lusty and appealing nurse who cares for him after the beating administered by the seemingly gay thug played by Bendixen.  Recovered enough to be mobile, Beaumont confronts Varner at some sort of manor house (and gets slugged again by his boyfriend).  Beaumont cuckolds the crooked newspaperman with his sluttish wife, canoodliing with her on couch as the poor middle-aged publisher watches.  The publisher kills himself and, then, there's some kind of narrative maneuvers involving the dead man's will and a confession or something on that order.  (It makes sense in the moment but is so convoluted as a plot point that you can't keep it in your mind five minutes after the scene is over.) There are some more betrayals and, then, a scene in which Ed Beaumont declines Janet Taylor's sexual overtures with poor Paul Matvig watching -- Matvig sees that Beaumont, his loyal gangster buddy, is smitten with Janet Taylor (whom he loves as well) and so nobly steps aside so that Beaumont can enjoy the lady's favors.  There's an intervening homosexual theme with Bendixen again stroking and caressing Beaumont preparatory to "knocking all of his teeth out."  Bendixen gets betrayed by his boss, Varner, for reasons that are not too clear and he exits the film in handcuffs.  This is too bad because Bendixen is, by far, the best thing in the movie and his scenes with Alan Ladd are astonishing.  (Bendixen has an unruly mop of hair and whines that no one really loves him.)  In the end, the true killer of Opal's dissolute boyfriend is revealed but by this time no one really cares about the resolution of this plot point which has become more and more remote as the film proceeds.  Beaumont woos Janet Taylor by framing her for a killing, a stratagem that forces the real murderer to reveal himself.  Beaumont, like all of Hammett's heroes expresses a sour strain of misogyny -- "I was worried we were gonna have to hang the gal to make him (the true murderer) crack", a romantic statement that strangely enough endears Beaumont to the gal (Janet Taylor).

It's all hokum, of course, and the film is directed in an exceedingly pedestrian style by Stuart Heisler.  Hammett's pathological sexuality is everywhere on display -- the cuckolding scenes are very vivid and the outrageous homosexual banter between Bendixen and the fey Alan Ladd is memorably perverse.  Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake are grotesque.  Ladd has a girlish face, the mask of a Kabuki-theater maiden.  He has no whiskers to speak off and the lower half of his visage is completely immobile -- he always speaks through clenched lips without moving his mouth.  The upper half of his face is equipped with slit eyes and very expressively mobile eyebrows that are always arching upward.  He's mostly inexpressive, has no emotional range, and seems to be very, very small -- when Bendixen (who is a bit like Ernest Borgnine) gives him a love-tap he falls over immediately.  Veronica Lake is hideous.  Her face is totally impassive and seems always out of focus.  Her emotions are a weird blur.  She's six inches shorter than Alan Ladd so must be some kind of pygmy.  Her big disproportionate white head is half the size of her scrawny body that has no shoulders and no hips but a big pair of breasts like grapefruits suspended from the bony front her body.  She looks awful and can't act either.  There is no chemistry between her and Alan Ladd; in fact, the two of them seem to despise one another.  Brian Donleavy is good as the avuncular and cheerfully corrupt Matvig.  Varner and the other assorted thugs are all effectively menacing.  It's not much of a movie but, it certainly, has its moments.