Rent The Chase (1946)

Cuban Heels - The Chase review by CH

Many authors would relish having as many films made from their work as Cornell Woolrich did. Subsequent life in a hillside mansion could be alleviated by retreats to the Riviera. Not that Woolrich favoured anything like this. He continued to live with his mother, as well as in a series of flop 'n' slops from which he emerged after a day at the typewriter to ply the harbourside in quest of dangerous trade. Had he favoured a life of ease and luxury, he would have lost the very stuff of his fiction which, the embodiment of noir, embraces a black panther on the loose and the view of a murder in an apartment across the way.

One of the most surprising films made from his work is The Chase (1946). Directed by Arthur Ripley from a screenplay by Philip Yordan, it opens with an amnesiac veteran Robert Cummings who finds a wallet with some money in it on the pavement. He uses a little of this to treat himself to much-needed food, after which he elects to return the rest to its owner, a smoothly evil Steve Cochran whose address inside the wallet proves to be a swanky Miami house, all curved staircase and random statues, complete with a portly manservant as well as a sidekick played by Peter Lorre, whose very looks always denote duplicity.

Not to mention an elegant wife, Michele Morgan, esteemed all her long life in her native France.

Cummings soon realises that she is a virtual prisoner in the place when he takes up the bemused Cochran's offer as a job there as chauffeur. He does not even appear to rue the fact that he should have kept the eighty-one dollars, for it is chump change to a man who, obviously and viciously enough, uses that palatial home, with real Napoleon brandy in the cellar, as the front for a trade well the other side of the Law.

After all, he tests Cummings's driving skills by means of a throttle by the back seat which he himself operates, letting it hit a hundred while the driver is left with only the steering wheel to avert disaster.

So far, the stuff of many a noir, one firing on all cylinders, no gaskets blown. And it does not falter when moving into another dimension but has all the logic of the subconscious. To say any more would be unfair. All is carried aloft, and below, by the cinematography which enhances a tale mostly related after dark, the lights of Havana glimpsed across the ocean as waves break on the shore: the work of Frank Planer who did the same for dozens of esteemed movies.

Whether running a bar or commanding a horse-and-carriage, here is an array of people as possessed as Woolrich himself. They are stuck with their demons; we can relish them for these eighty minutes.