Raymond Burr as Lars Thorwald in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window
The Heaviest of Them All The Film Noir Legacy of Raymond Burr Carl Steward www.filmnoirfoundation.org I SPRING 2011 I NOIR CITY
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t the Raymond Burr Vineyards in the Sonoma County’s pastoral Dry Creek Valley, the winery’s tasting room doubles as a mini-monument to Burr’s long and successful acting career. On one wall there are more than a dozen TV Guide covers featuring the actor, either as dashing defense attorney extraordinaire Perry Mason or wheelchair-bound chief of detectives Robert T. Ironside. There are two Emmy Awards gleaming on a shelf behind the bar, along with a selection of plaques and honors stretching across the wall. Photos of Burr are everywhere, either alone or with the casts of his hit TV shows, and there’s even a nod to his earlier days as a costume drama stage actor. Lovingly assembled by his business and life partner Robert Benevides, who still owns and operates the Northern California winery, the room is a small shrine to one of Hollywood’s most distinguished and popular actors. But there is definitely something missing among all this Hollywood memorabilia—namely, any trace of Burr’s seemingly endless gallery of villains, conjured between 1947–57, when film noir’s dark heart was fibrillating at a breakneck pace. So,—where’s the badness? Where are the creeps, the cads, the con men; the degenerates, the connivers, the kooks? Where are the calculating, cold-blooded killers who populated the first decade of Burr’s screen career? Where is Rick Coyle? Nick Ferraro? Harry Prebble? Nick Driscoll? J. B. MacDonald? There isn’t even a hatboxsized space reserved for Burr’s most famous and familiar heavy—the frosty-haired, blade-wielding wonder of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Lars Thorwald. All of these malevolent characters were brilliant Burr variations on the bad-guy stereotype. He not only played more villains than any other actor of the late 1940s and early ’50s, he gave them more depth and dimension. And he didn’t play scoundrels and toughs only in film noir: he elicited his evil in Westerns, horror and adventure flicks, period pieces—he even played a henchman with the unlikely monicker
Alphonse Zoto in the Marx Brothers’ 1949 comedy Love Happy. It’s no secret that Burr grew weary of being always cast as a heavy, despite his constantly fluctuating weight. But he didn’t dismiss the period of his career in which he demonstrated his greatest range, and surely he would not have wanted it ignored. In a revealing 1963 interview on Canadian television, the actor admitted that a good number of his Hollywood efforts were forgettable, but he lauded such films as Pitfall, Raw Deal, and Rear Window as as worthy productions. In the same interview, he maintained that it wasn’t being typecast as a villain that troubled him, as much as finding fresh ways to interpret villainy. This is, after all, a guy who played creeps named Nick in three separate movies. “I began to run out of ways of being bad,” he said with a wry grin. Indeed, in movies that could be classified as noir, Burr played more than 25 bad-guy roles. On a few occasions, he got to play a cop, and in two memorable performances—A Place In The Sun (1951) and Please Murder Me (1956)—was cast as an attorney (a portent of his stardom as CBS’s courtroom icon.) But Burr’s bad guys deserve their own Wall of Fame, even if it’s the wall of a post office or an alley somewhere in the meanest district of Dark City. Here’s a Most Wanted list of the heaviest heavies, both well known and obscure, for the Raymond Burr Museum of Mayhem.
DESPERATE (1947) Walt Radak, ravenous gangster From the moment Mann and cinematographer George Diskant captured his large, stony eyes in the swinging lamp of a dark hideout, Burr’s film identity for the next decade was assured. Burr’s Radak is a fairly typical tough of the period, plotting against Steve Randall (Steve Brodie) to avenge his brother Al being captured in an botched warehouse robbery, convicted, and sent to death row. Burr hadn’t yet perfected his menace in his initial noir, but he was still highly effective out of the gate. First, there’s the swinging lamp scene, an early yet definitive noir sequence. Then, when he waves a broken bottle in front of Steve and threatens to cut up his wife’s face, he delivers his lines with the convincingly cold
In his first noir, Burr leads a Desperate gang
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whimsy of a ruthless killer. Later he terrorizes the wife’s elderly aunt and uncle by using a large knife from a farmhouse table to cut and eat pieces of a turkey as he demands information. It’s a wonderful little touch that shows Burr’s knack for giving villainy an extra dimension. Radak decides he’s going to kill Steve at the very moment his own brother is executed, and he orders a henchmen to prepare his captive a last meal. Steve won’t eat, so Burr grabs his glass of milk and slowly drinks it, holding a gun on Steve and watching the seconds tick away on a clock. More nice garnish to an otherwise perfunctory hostage scene. The final stairwell shootout is another shocking moment in Burr’s noir debut, the first of his many dynamic onscreen deaths. Plugged in the chest, Radak tumbles over a bannister, falling several flights to a grisly death. But it wasn’t really a death at all—for Burr, it was the birth of a whole collection of bad guys.
The actor’s heaviest role, as Rick Coyle in Raw Deal
RAW DEAL (1948) Rick Coyle, pyromaniacal hoodlum A year after appearing in Desperate, Burr would again be teamed with director Anthony Mann (with cinematographer John Alton replacing Diskant) for this noir classic, the one that forever forged Burr’s greatness for embodying pure villainy. Rick Coyle is one of Burr’s signature characters, a ruthless, hulking gangster with a fatal fascination with fire. He’s rotten enough to have set up the double-cross that lands his cohort Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe) in prison, but when Sullivan escapes from the joint, Coyle puts out a contract on him. But that’s only one aspect of his dastardly persona. What distinguishes Coyle is his penchant for pyromania, whether it’s lighting matches and holding the flicker under a cohort’s ear or throwing flaming cherries jubilee onto a tipsy dame who accidentally bumps him in a nightclub. The latter is one of the most shocking and violent scenes in noir, and Burr plays up the fire angle to the hilt, showing absolutely no remorse as he listens to the scalded woman shriek. As the vengeful O’Keefe closes in on him, Burr adds yet another dimension to Coyle—a surprising spinelessness under the seemingly ruthless, psychotic exterior. Of course, he meets his fate in a predictable way, but Coyle has set the stage for it with all that’s come
before. Raw Deal has many facets that make it one of the greatest examples of film noir, but Burr’s brew of unstable brutality, tinged with a craven cowardice at the climax, is one of the main reasons the film is an undisputed classic.
PITFALL (1948) J. B. McDonald, loathsome Lothario In Andre De Toth’s taut, compelling look at mid-life crisis and suburban malaise, Burr is cast in one of his meatiest scumball roles. Private eye J.B. McDonald—or Mac, as everyone calls him—is a former cop bounced from the force, now performing scurrilous freelance investigations for insurance executive and bored suburbanite John Forbes (Dick Powell). While delivering to Forbes some incriminating evidence in an embezzlement case, Mac reveals that he’s become obsessed with the girlfriend of Bill Smiley, the man serving time for the crime. Forbes takes over the case from the brooding PI, but Mac won’t be dismissed that easily, particularly after Forbes himself falls under the seductive spell of Smiley’s girl, Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott). Burr plays Mac as a breathy, oily creep who sports tacky ties and exudes overconfidence, both in his abilities as an investigator and as a lover. Despite Mona’s protests, Mac stalks her everywhere, and when he realizes Forbes is moving in on her, he beats his employer to a bloody pulp. Mac keeps stalking Mona, trying to force a relationship, even going to the dress shop where she works and ordering her to model for him. Forbes intercedes on Mona’s behalf, getting the jump on Mac and beating him to a pulp. Trying to kill off two rivals with one stone, and perhaps land Mona in the bargain, Mac visits Smiley in prison only days before his parole and tips him to Forbes’s liaison with Mona, setting up a climactic confrontation between the two men. Believing that his ploy has worked, Mac shows up at Mona’s apartment to elope with her, claiming that she’ll “get used to me in time.” As he blissfully packs her clothes, Mona pulls a gun from a drawer and shoots him. Burr gets plenty of room to stretch out in this role (he’s given almost as much screen time as Powell and Scott) and he responds by creating his strongest, albeit most repulsive, portrayal. With Rick Coyle already under his belt that same year, he quickly became the go-to creep of choice in Hollywood’s rising tide of dark crime films.
ABANDONED (1949) Kerric, baby-market racketeer In addition to Raw Deal, Burr made a few other films with Dennis O’Keefe, including this intriguing little oddity in which he once again plays a seedy private dick who has become part of an illegal baby brokerage. As the unscrupulous, self-serving Kerric, Burr runs interference for the outfit, but when reporter Mark Sitko (O’Keefe) helps naïve Midwesterner Paula Considine (Gale Storm) search for her missing sister and baby, Kerric gets cold feet about the operation, especially as O’Keefe gets closer to the truth. Kerric double-crosses his boss, matronly Mrs. Donner (Marjorie Rambeau), by kidnapping the baby of Paula’s dead sister from its adoptive parents and extorting $1,500 in the process. Mrs. Donner and her henchmen (led by the brutish Mike Mazurki) are on to Kerric, however, and he’s taken back to the their hideout to be tortured. In what might have been a nod to Burr’s role in Raw Deal, he is burned with a book of matches by sadistic hood Little
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Burr brokers black-market babies in Abandoned, also starring Gale Storm
Guy DeCola (Will Kuluva), then in a desperate struggle to break free, gets his neck snapped by Mazurki. Burr is very strong throughout, playing both sides against the middle in an effort to save himself. O’Keefe’s reporter colorfully sums up Burr’s character in their first confrontation, as Kerric claims he’s taken on a legitimate missing person’s case: “Kerric, you going legitimate is like a vulture going vegetarian.” Undoubtedly a line from dialogue consultant William Bowers, this definitely defines Burr’s character in this unusual but superior role.
UNMASKED (1950) Roger Lewis, murderous publisher Good luck tracking down this hard-to-find Republic cheapie, but it’s worth the search if only for the fact that Burr received a rare leading role (still as a heavy) sharing top billing with three other actors now largely forgotten. And, oh boy, is Burr unsavory here, playing the editor and publisher of The Periscope, a scandal sheet that’s financed through loans from the wife (Hillary Brooke) of an showbiz tycoon with whom Lewis is having an affair. Even though he is only consorting with the woman for her money—he’s in love with his own secretary—he agrees to an afternoon rendezvous at her suite because she has some promissory notes for him to sign. But when he arrives at her apart-
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ment building, he encounters his lover’s departing husband, Harry Jackson (Paul Harvey), who has learned of the illicit relationship and just had it out with his wife. Lewis seizes the opportunity: he sneaks into the apartment, strangles his lover, burns the promissory notes, and concocts a scheme in which her husband will be blamed for the murder. Jackson goes on the lam, and Lewis goes to extreme lengths to track him down and have him executed. When Jackson’s daughter arrives in town to get to the bottom of what happened, she ultimately “unmasks” Burr’s character as the real murderer. The film is a fairly weak entry in the noir canon, but with Burr relishing such a large and loathsome role, it certainly has its moments.
THE WHIP HAND (1951) Steve Loomis, calculating communist This may be the kookiest film noir to ever come out of Hollywood. A big-city magazine writer is on a fishing holiday in the wilds of Minnesota when he stumbles upon a nest of commies utilizing old Nazi scientists to conduct bizarre germ-warfare experiments on humans. The movie is a total hoot (as it probably was even during the height of the Red Scare), mainly because it features one of Burr’s
The climax plays out in an empty baseball park (LA’s long-gone Wrigley Field) and Nick finally gets his payoff … in lead. While the movie has issues—Sinatra plays Wilson as a rather unlikeable punk—Burr gives a formidable performance, although he isn’t on screen nearly enough. It moves to our “A” list just for the scene in which he pistol-whips Ol’ Blue Eyes and uses his necktie as a noose.
HIS KIND OF WOMAN (1951)
Mitchum gets a working over from Burr in His Kind of Woman
most memorable baddies. He’s the commie ringleader who also serves as the experimental lab’s first line of defense. The beauty of the role is that Burr doubles as a cackling country bumpkin in charge of the backwoods lodge. While everyone else at the lodge looks wholly suspicious, Burr’s corpulent Steve plays the convincing hick in the presence of writer Matt Corbin (Elliott Reed). He grins and cackles as he tries to persuade the writer to try his luck elsewhere, as all the fish in the lake have mysteriously died. When Corbin decides that the lodge’s history might make an interesting story, the familiar Burr is revealed—the sinister, sneering henchman who drops his cornball shtick to eliminate Corbin. What’s remarkable about Burr’s performance is that he switches from the jocular innkeeper to the cold, calculating Red on numerous occasions, and his chameleon-like quick changes are mesmerizing, despite the inanity of the story and script. It’s no doubt a film Burr would want us to forget, but he’s masterful in it; a performance to good to be forgotten.
Nick Ferraro, sociopathic crime boss Burr had to have serious stature as a character actor to pummel Dick Powell in Pitfall and manhandle Frank Sinatra in Meet Danny Wilson. But he really pulled out all the stops in this strange, overlong, and confounding Howard Hughes production: he not only knees Robert Mitchum in the groin, he slams the star’s head into a wall not once, but twice. After cooling his heels in Italy for four years following deportation, gambling kingpin Ferraro is ready to return to the US, through a Mexican resort, by assuming the identity of Dan Milner (Mitchum), who is promised $50,000 to hang out at the resort, not suspecting why he’s been summoned there. Long story short—and it’s a long, laborious story—once Milner wises up to what’s happening and hot-headed Ferraro believes he’s backing out on the deal, the two men confront each other in a protracted climax on Ferraro’s yacht. Burr plays it ultra-intense, spitting vitriolic dialogue, bulging out his piercing eyes in virtually every scene. He presides over Milner’s brutal beating, attempts to inject him with a debilitating drug, and finally has a shootout with Mitchum. Naturally, Burr’s Nick Ferraro gets it in the end, but not before a searing performance in which he pretty much steals the film from an impressive ensemble. While all the cast members have their moments in this bizarre noir gumbo, Burr’s are the most riveting, because he brings focus and intensity to an otherwise meandering script that’s short on action. He saves the movie in the process.
MEET DANNY WILSON (1951) Nick Driscoll, shyster racketeer This Joe Pevney-directed film doesn’t quite know what it wants to be–a musical, buddy picture, comedy, or drama. But when Burr is on screen, it shifts solidly into noir mode. Nightclub operator Nick Driscoll is a slick, humorless opportunist who gives a break to aspiring singer Danny Wilson (Frank Sinatra) and his piano-playing partnerbodyguard Mike Ryan (Alex Nicol). But there’s a catch— Driscoll gets 50 percent of their earnings, even if they make it big. Broke and without prospects, they agree. Trouble brews right away, as Burr becomes part of a love quadrangle: Both Danny and Nick have designs on Joy Carroll (Shelley Winters) who has her sights on Big Mike. When Danny and Mike become a smashing success, they want out of their arrangement with Driscoll, who soon comes calling for his whopping $267,000 cut. “Sue me, chiseler,” taunts Danny. Nick smoothly pulls a gun from his suitcoat and replies, “Meet my lawyer.” Getting in shape by smacking around Audrey Totter in FBI Girl
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As sleazy Harry Prebble, Burr tried to date-rape Anne Baxter in The Blue Gardenia
FBI GIRL (1951) Blake, suave political fixer And now for something completely different: a low-budget Robert Lippert-produced flag-waver that might be aptly framed as Perry Mason in an alternate universe. Burr plays a suave, shrewd, articulate sharp dresser who uses a cigarette holder and never loses his cool. But instead of an indomitable defense attorney he’s a backroom lobbyist, the power behind a corrupt governor hiding a murderous past. Blake has a plan to erase evidence implicating venerable Gov. Owen Grisby of a murder he committed under a former name, John Williams, so he can push him toward possible senate and White House runs. He engineers a scheme to have Williams’ fingerprint card lifted from FBI files, and the reluctant but desperate governor plays along. A first attempt goes awry when Blake’s agency insider, a female clerk, has to be killed after she gets cold feet. Blake tries again, enlisting fellow lobbyist Carl Chercourt (Tom Drake) to get his girlfriend Shirley (Audrey Totter), who also works in the FBI file office, to steal the card. Totter’s got a stronger moral code, though, and she goes straight
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to federal agents played by Cesar Romero and George Brent, who set up a phony transfer of the fingerprint card and film Blake showing up at her apartment to retrieve it. Blake is too smart not to check the file against the governor’s prints, and he quickly realizes it’s a phony. Burr finally flips into thug mode, tracks down Totter, slaps her around, and orders her to get the real card or else. The film quickly devolves into routine cops-and-robbers shootout stuff. It’s the first three-quarters of the film where Burr struts his stuff as a white-collar criminal mastermind, quite different from most of the crooks he played. It’s well worth a look just for his performance, a glimpse of Perry Mason operating on the other side of the law.
THE BLUE GARDENIA (1953) Harry Prebble, date rapist Burr’s performance here could be described as villainy-light, but it’s no less impressive in an otherwise so-so film. Prebble isn’t such a nasty guy, and even his character name suggests that he’s not patently evil. He’s simply a skirt-hound that can be found in virtually every white-collar setting, a charming rogue and an ad agency artist who lures women from the switchboard pool to his man-cave by drawing their portraits.
Burr’s most famous, and quietest, villain: Lars Thorwald
He seems to have the perfect prey in Anne Baxter, who has received a Dear John letter from her soldier beau. She sits alone in her apartment most nights, crushed, but Prebble catches her by phone at just the right rebounding moment. Enticing her to a restaurant, he fills her full of booze before taking her back to his bachelor pad. Once he senses she’s sloshed and defenseless, he makes his move. But Baxter comes to her senses as she’s being “Prebbled,” grabs a fireplace iron, and conks him. She runs from the apartment. Of course, Prebble is found dead. Baxter thinks she’s the murderer, and the movie plays out with newspaper columnist Richard Conte ferreting out what really happened. The audience gets tipped off to the real culprit when Prebble gets a call from a mousey little thing whom he clearly has knocked up. She’s “in trouble,” she says. It’s during this call that Burr demonstrates his deftness, instantly transforming from charming wolf to insensitive beast as he tells the woman it’s her problem and not to call him anymore. Great stuff from a man who’d hit his dark stride.
REAR WINDOW (1954) Lars Thorwald, uxoricidal loser It can be debated whether Hitchcock’s masterpiece of voyeurism qualifies as film noir, but there is little doubt Rear Window has numerous noir elements. And if you’re compiling any kind of list of Burr’s greatest villains, Lars has to be on it. The brilliance of Burr’s performance is that he manages, silently, to conjure up sympathy for a man who has cut up his wife and distributed her body parts all across town. He doesn’t seem to be such a horrible guy; he’s just a man at the end of his emotional rope—broke, stuck in a noisy apartment complex with a bedridden, shrewish woman. His wardrobe—rumpled coat, frumpy white hat—suggests he’s a beaten-down soul as opposed to some calculating killer. And then there’s his gait. It’s subtle, but Burr’s trudge tells you everything you need to know about this reluctant murderer. Even after he does the deed and discovers that Stewart and Grace Kelly are on to his crime, he remains in character. When he comes to Stewart’s apartment (listen for the trudge), he confronts his neighbor by asking, “What do you want from me? Do you want money? I don’t have any money.” His menace is in his bewilderment, his simpleton clumsiness, and his desperation. Obviously Burr was following the script, but he extracts every last
bloody drop of character intention. It’s a landmark performance, delivered almost completely without dialogue. Amazingly, Burr wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award. On the Waterfront players swallowed up three of the five supporting actor nominations that year, and Edmond O’Brien won for The Barefoot Contessa. Go figure.
A CRY IN THE NIGHT (1956) Harold Loftus, psychotic kidnapper In one of his final feature film roles before taking on Perry Mason, Burr portrayed a demented simpleton named Harold Loftus, who totes a lunch-pail and hides in the bushes of Lovers’ Lane spying on couples in their cars. He’s spotted by Owen Clark (Richard Anderson), who confronts Harold while his date, Elizabeth (played by an 18-year-old Natalie Wood), waits in the car. Harold knocks Clark unconscious with his lunchbox, hops in the car, and kidnaps the girl, taking her to his ramshackle hideout in an abandoned brickyard. There, he tells her horror stories of his controlling mother (shades of Psycho four years later) and how she ruined his life. He tries to reassure the terrified girl with gifts of sequined gowns and apricot pie, while her hot-headed police chief father
As a sympathetic heavy, holding Natalie Wood hostage
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They Were So Young (1954)—white slave trader, young girl division Affair in Havana (1957)—bitter, jealous para plegic with blond (!!) hair Burr also played rare cop roles in noirs such as Sleep, My Love (1948) and Crime of Passion (1957), in which he has a tawdry affair with Barbara Stanwyck. His standout performance in A Place in the Sun (1951), as penetrating prosecutor R. Frank Marlowe, demonstrated that he could play the other side of the bench as well, and he is particularly fine as a spineless attorney in the excellent noir western Station West (1948), where he’s reunited, ever so briefly, with Dick Powell. Somehow, Burr even managed to weave in a few small-screen baddies, including a memorable performance in a 1956 Ford Television Theater production alongside Joseph Cotten called “Man Without A Fear.’’ Burr plays a prison escapee who is out to murder Cotten, who double-crossed him, only to learn that Cotten is dying of a fatal illness and welcomes the killing. When Perry Mason came along in 1957, the heaviness was over. Burr not only was done with bad guys, he was done with the big screen. He appeared in only a handful of feature films during the next 35 years, until his death in 1993. None of the roles were even close to film noir. But between 1947 and 1957, Burr created an impossibly rich cornucopia of criminals and creeps, each one with a different twist to make the roles distinctive and unforgettable. Even though he rarely played a lead, Burr was a significant figure in film noir genre: the seminal bad guy. While such a nefarious legacy may be out of place in the bucolic wine country of Sonoma, it surely deserves a wall of its own somewhere, and a large one at that. ■
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Burr cuckolded Hayden with Stanwyck in Crime of Passion ...
(Edmond O’Brien) orchestrates a frantic manhunt. Burr’s pathetic feeb is done-in by his own mother, who calls the police to report her overgrown son missing. A Cry In The Dark is a pretty shabby film, somewhat redeemed by Burr’s portrayal of a man held psychological prisoner by an overbearing parent. It was a curious choice of parts for an actor soon to be one of America’s most familiar and popular faces, and another striking example of his acting range. The above films would constitute a hefty career for any character actor operating almost exclusively on the wrong side of the law. But Burr is eminently watchable in a number of other films that at are either wholly film noir or on its fringes. Here are some more selections from what seems to be an endless array: • Walk A Crooked Mile (1948)—a Lenin look-a-like Commie • Red Light (1949)—yet another Nick, this one a particularly nasty thug • Borderline (1950)—drug smuggler • M (1951)—Pottsy, “king of the pickpockets”
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... and interrogated Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun
