Johnny O'Clock (1947)

Johnny O'Clock (1947) is a sinister snappy-dialogue murder and finally it has to be said classic film noir which is a lot of fun and is surely one of the hidden gems of the who noir effort of the 1940s.

Complex in approach and yet diverting in its charm and snazz, Johnny O'Clock is a waltz through the film noir style, able to copy with mystery, murder, deception and some vile violence, before it wraps up and paces stylishly through its conclusion.

New York gambling house operator Johnny O'Clock played by Dick Powell, is junior partner in a smart  casino with Guido Marchettis (Thomas Gomez) and Chuck Blayden (Jim Bannon), the latter being a crooked cop. 

Of the three criminals Blayden is the most nasty, and is trying to cut into the casino's profits and threatens Johnny not to interfere with his plans of becoming Marchettis' full partner. Johnny is the least threatening of the three and very much the amiable criminal — part man of mystery and part good guy to hang around with, he is popular with the women and an enigma in the hotel in which he lives, where he goes by many different names.

Blayden ends his relationship with coat check girl Harriet Hobson, played by Nina Foch, and then he disappears. Later, Harriet is found dead in her apartment, apparently from suicide. Police Inspector Koch (Lee J. Cobb) begins an investigation and questions Johnny, as well as Harriet's sister Nancy, who arrives in town to mourn her sister and solve the crime, as well as and Johnny's associate, Charlie (played by John Kellogg).

Already it's a sizeable and enjoyable film noir cast, with enough room for some fancy manoeuvre as they run rings around each other. The main setting of the casino is also enjoyable, although the best set in the movie is Marchettis' luxury apartment, where the hoods hang out, and his drunken lush of a lady wife Nelle, performed by the show-stealing Ellen Drew lounges and creates some sexual tension, knocks about and finally pays a violent price for her habits.

Two of these women, Nelle (Ellen Drew) and Nancy (Evelyn Keyes) are infatuated with the suave, urbane, affable and ingratiating Johnny O'Clock. Indeed when she first sees him, Evelyn Keyes' gob-smacked face is a soft-focus picture of amazement, as she gazes longingly on him, more stunned than anything else by the vision he represents to her.

That said, Evelyn Keyes gives by far the finest and multi-facetted performance of the film. She's is funny and urgent, but also tragically upset and determined, while resorting to intelligent interest and an impressive sympathy for her character's dead sister when the action slows and reflection is called for.

These excesses of acting are one of the gifts of the classic film noir period, the time of high noir, the fantastic forties, when mis en scene and stories were geared towards flights of imagination rather than realism, and each noir seemed to live within its own bubble of fancy rather than attempting to present a genuine situation.

This made of film noir a paradise of imagination, each film aspiring to its own hallucination of originality rather than trying to present the actual criminal stories of the actual world outside the cinema doors. This was a world of types where characters fill representative roles before they inhabit any sense of substance, and whereas perceptibility became more of a fashion as the 1950s began, this classic film noir was still anchored in an exciting period where the end results were more fun and fantastic than they were substantive of any social comment.

It was in this world of vagary where women actors achieved parity with men insofar as the clear roles allotted to both afforded an equality that has not exactly been found since. This dichotomy is one of the greater questions of film noir in toto. When men and women's roles were restricted to a variety of objectifying types, it was this objectification that ironically allowed for creativity.

This is why Evelyn Keyes can give the best performance in Johnny O'Clock, as she has explored every emotion afforded to the limitations of her role in a world where men are men and women are women. This is an uncomfortable world in general, because while it works much of the time, it brings to light many problematics when for example, women are the victims of male violence.

In such fantasies as film noir presents, these realities are the cold truth. The weapons men use against women are their strength and where they can, their social power — generally through wealth. The statement of these forces in Johnny O'Clock is exampled in the relationship between Thomas Gomez as Marchettis, and his wife Nelle, played by Ellen Drew.

Her weapons against him are the noir constants of sex and humiliation. As a wife she is doubtless a heavy drinker and used to dealing with her husband by means of scorn and sarcasm because she probably only loves him for his money. In a room of good looking men, it becomes apparent at one stage that her assertion that she only has eyes for him and that she loves him deeply, just cannot be true.

He on the other hand has the weapon that is generally available to most men of film noir — violence. When her behaviour and her taunting, and her infidelity becomes too much — this is when he resorts to violence and takes it out on her in a chilling, sinister scene of inter-spousal strangulation on a luxurious bed. 

These steps into characterful fantasy are what give Johnny O'Clock its doomful edge over many a similar production. The marriage between Ellen Drew and Thomas Gomez is probably also the most interesting pairing in the film, between two destructive and false individuals, who likely deserve sympathy, although it is hard to find any for them.

In many other film noirs of the 1940s, the same unpropitious behaviour is a secondary part of the drama and although these characters are supporting the supposed story of Johnny O'Clock and his behind-the-scenes casino machinations, they become the main event.  Their relationship comes to the most cynical head in the entirety of the noir cycle when the couple have an argument, and Gomez complains that his wife's boozing makes him look bad in front of people.

This concludes by her seducing him once again, and winning him back with the cynical request: Give me a kiss. It'll make you look good — in front of people.

The tropes on display may be basic but they act powerfully on emotions tuned in to the fantasies of power relations they represent. Whether it is true to life or not, the tropes of the violent and powerful man and the manipulative and sexualised woman walk the walk and talk the talk in film noir, and it is in film noir that they belong.

Johnny O'Clock himself — in the original trailer to the movie — is described as hard, fast and dangerous — but this is closer to a description of the film itself, which is black hearted and perverse in a way that the 1950s just seemed to drive out of town, This malign nature which swims like a river of ill-boding odium beneath everything that happens in Johnny O'Clock can only be there by dint of the fantasy which supports this cast of characters.

As well as this, Johnny O'Clock behaves much more like an ensemble cast, which may not be its intention. While Johnny O'Clock may be trying to argue that Dick Powell is its star, it does not function quite like that, and with its various cops, sidekicks, love affairs and supporting actors, hoods and casino-dwellers it beautifully presents a threatening but completely unreal world.

The framing of Johnny O'Clock is handled by the police character of Inspector Koch, played by the cigar-chewing ash-tapping Lee J. Cobb. His lackadaisical approach to crime is perfect for the fabrication of the one-off universe that this movie presents — there when needed and presenting a dry sense of authority — but actually not too hot on the case, as much as a device to bring the audience to within what must be called a safe distance of the rest of the cast and their actions.

Dick Powell as the title character never quite gets involved in the dirty end of the business leaving that to Gomez. Bannon's girl friend is Nina Foch, a nice young woman who runs the cigarette and candy counter at Powell's swank hotel, but also seems to have a thing for Johnny — the third woman in the picture to suffer this. When Foch turns up as a very suspicious suicide and Bannon goes missing, Powell goes into action, and one of the other redeeming features of this film noir, is this further complexity, as the solution is not obvious and the drama benefits from it.

Moody and trenchant the results are epic noir, and this is not in the least because of the excellent dialogue which is so constant in the picture as to be positively exhausting.

Inspector Koch: In return for certain information...

Johnny O'Clock: You'll do what?

Inspector Koch: I'll give you a break.

Johnny O'Clock: My arms or my legs?

It's a mile a minute screenplay using every noir trick known to the business and includes wisecracks, sexual innuendo, feisty metaphors and crackling put downs with the women being just as sarcastic as the men. 

Johnny O'Clock: Anything else you wanna know?

Nancy Hobbs: Anything else I ought to know?

Johnny O'Clock: Close the book. She was a nice kid. Let it go at that.

Nancy Hobbs: The words don't go with the music!

While still grabbing the viewer by the throat Johnny O'Clock is not a film that threatens nor frightens but is removed enough to be its own mirage, with its own logic. Nobody speaks like this in the real world, and this is one of the constant joys and reminders of the pure escapism of film noir.

Inspector Koch: It says in my book that any confession obtained by so-called 'third degree' methods is not admissable in court.

Johnny O'Clock: It's nice to know you can read.

and 

Nancy Hobbs: If it's just for laughs, then I want to be in on the joke from the start.

Johnny also has an interesting side-kick called Charlie (John Kellogg) who is something of a pal and something of an attendant. At the start of the film we learn that Charlie wakes Johnny up at 9 o’clock, although it’s only later we learn that Johnny sleeps all day and wakes at 9 o’clock at night to work in the casino. It's likely this is the origin of his strange name, although it's never stated.

There is a modicum of homosexual coding in this relationship, which can be as simple as the unexplained nature of it. For a film noir that pretty much has everything, it is just as well that there is a little queer mystery in the mix as well. It's stated that Johnny helped Charlie when Charlie came out of prison, and that seems straight enough — which is not that straight to be honest.

Charlie however is another fascinating character in a film which is absolutely endowed with them. This is without doubt thanks to Robert Rossen whose contribution to film noir is more sizable than one might imagine — although mega-props are delivered for one of the very earliest neo-noirs The Hustler (1961) — an immortal portal to noir detail if ever there was one, and one of the finest crime films of the 1960s. 

Rossen however has writing credits galore, and for noir alone he contributed to many smart whodunnits, noirish romps and dark fables such as 

• They Won't Forget (1937)
• The Roaring Twenties (1940)
• Blues in the Night (1941)
• Edge of Darkness (1943)
• The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
• Desert Fury (1947)
• The Undercover Man (1949)

An assertive and solid film noir, there is a lot of fun to be had with Johnny O'Clock (1947), a fortunate product of its decade if there ever was one.

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