Cover Up

Here’s an oddment.  Cover Up, released in 1949.  William Bendix, Dennis O’Keefe, Barbara Britton, Art Baker.  Directed by Alfred E. Green, whose career goes back to the silents; first picture of note is the pre-Code Stanwyck, Baby Face; did biopics of Jolson, Jackie Robinson, and Eddie Cantor.  Original screen story by O’Keefe, under a pseudonym.  Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo, who also shot D.O.A., Stalag 17, and Kiss Me Deadly, before going on to Judgment at Nuremberg, and an Oscar for Ship of Fools.  The razor-sharp black-and-white in Cover Up is the best thing about it.  The picture is less than the sum of its parts – not incoherent, but lukewarm – and you can wonder why I was curious about it in the first place.

For openers, Bendix.  He gets top billing, although he plays second banana to O’Keefe.  Bendix did a lot of lovable saps, the best-known being The Life of Riley, but he did solid work for Hitchcock, in Lifeboat, with Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, and as Babe Ruth.  You could do worse, though, than to check him out in The Dark Corner, a nifty little noir where he plays very much against type.  Dark Corner has two serious weaknesses, Clifton Webb doing the same character he did in Laura, a year or so before, and Mark Stevens, who’s a Godawful stiff, as the hero.  It has two serious strengths, Lucille Ball, as the private eye’s Girl Friday, who gets him out of the frame, and Bendix, who has the part that used to go to Raymond Burr, before Perry Mason.  Bendix plays the muscle with alarming menace, thick-tongued, and his eyelids shuttered.  His body English is top-heavy, but he has a predator’s grace.  He’s sly, like many stupid people, and gets what he deserves, in the end, spoiler alert. 

Secondly, we’ve got Dennis O’Keefe.  You either know or you don’t.  O’Keefe did a lot of amiable and undemanding B’s, but in 1947 and ‘48 he made two pictures back-to-back with Anthony Mann, T-Men and Raw Deal.  Raw Deal is probably the best part O’Keefe ever got, and it features Claire Trevor, along with both John Ireland and Raymond Burr as the bad guys.  T-Men, though, is the one that really holds your attention.  Undercover cops, infiltrating the mob.  Alfred Ryder, almost invariably a yellowbelly and a slime, in over a hundred features and TV episodes, here gets to play the stand-up guy, who goes down without ratting out his partner to the mob torpedoes.  Charles McGraw, who once in a blue moon got to crack a smile or even be the hero (in Narrow Margin), is the torpedo in this picture, and one of the chilliest psychopaths in the Anthony Mann stable, which is going some.  O’Keefe, at the end, coming after McGraw, is past the point of no return, and clearly off the leash.  He heaves himself up the gangplank, in a fury, and you can feel his physical force.  It isn’t a shock cut, or a sudden scare, or some camera trick.  The camera’s steady.  He’s coming at you, and you shrink back.  His forward movement is that implacable.  You can’t help it.  Raw Deal and T-Men were both shot by the great cinematographer John Alton.

So, what is it with Cover Up?  It just doesn’t have any tension.  You keep wanting it to go somewhere, like it’s the Little Picture That Could, and the air keeps going out of its tires.  O’Keefe comes to town, he’s an insurance investigator, he’s going to file a report on a suicide.  He meets cute with Barbara Britton.  They’re a little old for their characters, but believable, and kinda sweet.  He checks in with the local sheriff, Bendix, and begins to smell a rat.  The guy shot himself, but the gun’s gone missing.  Bendix affects unconcern.  O’Keefe pokes around.  The town clams up.  It doesn’t take long for O’Keefe to figure out it’s murder, staged as a suicide.  Bendix, no fool he, already knows.  The question is, why is Bendix covering it up, or is he in fact the killer?  But mostly, O’Keefe is sticking around because he’s moony over Barbara.  Her dad, the local banker, turns out to be a suspect.  O’Keefe, however, is half-hearted about all this.  Oh, and it’s Christmas.  You can tell because they keep playing the opening bars of carols on the soundtrack.  Then, the only real suspect, the saintly retired doctor you never actually get to see, dies off-screen of a convenient heart attack.  The best moment in the movie, coming up.  Barbara finds the missing gun, at her dad’s, and goes to plant it, at the doctor’s.  O’Keefe shows up.  She hides.  He finds the gun.  Over his shoulder, you can see her reflection in a framed picture on the wall.  He sits at the dead doctor’s desk, and you realize at the same time he does, that the dead doc was left-handed.  Of course, so was the murderer.

Yadda-yadda-yadda. It isn’t Bendix, and it isn’t the dad.  O’Keefe and Barb realize the only obstacles to their happiness are their own cold feet, the stage door closes as Dancer and Prancer lift off.  Inoffensive.  It’s a pretty poem, but you can’t call it Homer.  In other words, it’s not noir enough.  O’Keefe pretends to be hard-boiled, but come on, he’s soft on the girl.  Bendix tries on some ambiguity, but too much Dutch uncle, not enough sinister.  The dad, with his rosy cheeks and white hair, is he cooking the books at the bank?  Not.  You want the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden.  I expected a little less sugar, and a little more bite.  The snake never shows up.