Bogart and Prince are war heroes going to Washington to receive citations. Prince leaves the train, hopping another to points unknown, and Bogart trails him to his hometown in the South, finding Prince's burnt corpse in the morgue. When Bogart looks into the hero's past, he pieces
together the strange conspiracy that has led to Prince's murder. While visiting Carnovsky's nightclub to get information from bartender Chandler, Bogart meets Scott, a one-time singer and Prince's old girl friend. Bogart instantly dislikes the arrogant Carnovsky and, to show him up, takes him for
a fortune at the crap table. Although Bogart falls in love with Scott, his investigation goes haywire.
This tricky film noir entry would have been routine had it not been for Bogart's magic. Carnovsky is much too expansive and intellectual to be believed in the role of the sleazy nightclub owner, and the throaty Scott, with her black eyebrows and blonde hair, plays her part so broadly that she is
ridiculous. She also vamps out a song in the nightclub, "Either It's Love or It Isn't" (Allan Roberts, Doris Fisher), which reportedly made her the rage in Dixie years earlier. Bogart is not in his usual commanding role here; instead he plays a man tangled in a thick web of circumstances and
intrigue, which makes his character all the more appealing and ameliorates the brutality and violence of the film. Miller's sadistic, face-kicking role is wholly repugnant but becomes the epitome of the remorseless modern heavy.
DEAD RECKONING is a prime example of post-WW II film noir, in which the issues are hazy, the hero gropes, and the characters are even more unsavory than the gangsters of the 1930s--as if they were the debris of a war that had claimed the best of humanity. In this case the innocent victim is
Prince, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, a noble youth murdered in the polluted backwaters of America. leave a comment
