Found unconscious behind the wheel of his wrecked car, his strangled wife beside him, Steve Kenet (Robert Taylor) quickly confesses to murdering his two-timing spouse. Then the seemingly simple case crumbles: Steve, a highly decorated WWII pilot, has had brain surgery that causes blackouts. Is he hiding behind his hematoma? Or is he the genuine damaged goods? A short sojourn at the Hamelin County Psychiatric Hospital should reveal the secret of his psyche. High Wall has all the symptoms of a neurotic noir, especially Taylor’s vulnerable vet, dogged by his own desire for redemption and smothered by the taunting shadows of the psychiatric hospital.
Written by Sydney Boehm, Lester Cole, based on the novel by Alan R. Clark. Photographed by Paul Vogel. With Robert Taylor, Audrey Totter, Herbert Marshall, Dorothy Patrick. (98 mins, B&W, 35mm, From UCLA Film and Television Archive, permission Warner Bros. New 35mm print funded by The Film Noir Foundation.)
(In conjunction with) Dark Past: Film Noir by German Emigrés
As Hitler’s influence grew in 1930s Germany, artists and intellectuals fled the country; whether because they were Jewish or held contrary political views, they saw their lives or livelihoods threatened by the emerging fascist reign. The German film industry was not immune to this flight and the decade witnessed the exodus of a host of important filmmakers—directors, cinematographers, screenwriters, and others. Hollywood became a haven for these hasty émigrés—by the early forties tinsel town had a thriving contingent of German-speaking filmmakers, including Otto Preminger, Max Ophuls, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Edgar G. Ulmer, and many others. Grateful for any assignment, these veteran directors took on low-budget B-movies, turning them into highly effective, emotionally resonant, darkly dramatized mysteries and crime stories, later to be known as noirs. It’s said that the greatest contribution of this group of directors was the shadow-laden mise-en-scène with its brooding urban cityscapes distilled from German Expressionism. But as you shall see from these eight noirs by eight directors, much more than rain-spattered streets and crepuscular lighting links them. Many of these bristling features, from Max Ophuls’s Caught to Curtis Bernhardt’s High Wall, from William Dieterle’s Dark City to Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, share a belief that authority is necessarily corrupt, that institutions are to be mistrusted, that what is worst in us will come to light, and, finally, that no one can shake their dark past.
