Crappy film

Absolutely Brilliant!

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

As a director Arthur Ripley only made six feature films but nothing in that short career quite prepares you for the gem that was "The Chase", which he made in 1946 and which Philip Yordan adapted from a Cornell Woolrich story. It's certainly bizarre, as down-on-his-luck Robert Cummings, (why Robert Cummings I keep asking myself), finds a wallet belonging to gangster Steve Cochran who, when he returns it, hires him as a chauffeur and that's when his troubles really begin, particularly when Cochran's frightened wife, Michele Morgan, asks him to help her get away from her husband.Everything about this film is surprising and I just don't mean the plot. Cochran's a thug but he lives in a kitsch mansion filled with marble statues and he likes to listen to classical music while Cumming's a veteran who is also a dab hand on the piano. Perhaps the biggest surprise is just how good both these actors are. Being a gangster Cochran naturally has to have a henchman and as always Peter Lorre is superb in the part. About midway through you might start to get an idea in which direction this very strange movie is going and you may even be right...but on the other hand. Needless to say, "The Chase" has all but disappeared but if any film deserves cult status this is it. Unmissable.

The Plot.Returning a lost wallet gains unemployed veteran Chuck Scott a job as chauffeur to Eddie Roman, a seeming gangster whose enemies have a way of meeting violent ends. The job proves nerve-wracking, and soon Chuck finds himself pledged to help Eddie's lovely, fearful, prisoner-wife Lorna to escape. The result leaves Chuck caught like a rat in a trap, vainly seeking a way out through dark streets. But the real chase begins when the strange plot virtually starts all over again.This seems to be a very intriguing film however my experience was marred by a really bad print that rendered the sound all garbled in spots.Even so, i got into the plot.Not sure why Peter Lorre is billed down the pike when he's pretty important to the film.In all, it's a pretty good semi-film noir.

For those in the need to know - FILM NOIR is not plot specific. It is not a reality, it is an atmosphere, a mood contingent on two key attitudes. None of this can be adequately understood without comparative examples. Ulmer's DETOUR (1946) is classic noir; at one time this was the ultimate "maudit" masterpiece, however, it is now a title protected by the Library of Congress. Thus, it has lost a portion of disreputable lustre essential to a genre that wears its lousiness with pride. Arthur D. Ripley's THE CHASE has this quality to such an extravagant degree that, believe or not, chances of it ever being included in the National Registry are slim and none.Adapted from Cornell Woolrich by the reliably untrustworthy Philip Yordan (a man who, on occasion, "ghosted" his own work), he, along with Ripley and cameraman, Franz Planer, create a midnight milieu of such troubling uncertainty that the combined talents of Bunuel, Borges and David Lynch, with all their superior intelligence and skill, could not hope to approximate it. The other key attitude determining film noir is toward women. The movie, CAUGHT (1949), by the great Max Ophuls and photographed in gorgeously gloomy b/w by Lee Garmes has a character played in it by Robert Ryan (at his most horrific). He is clearly impersonating a demonic version of Howard Hughes, a man attempting to keep his young beautiful wife played by Barbara Bel Geddes under lock and key. CAUGHT has film noir elements but is not noir because the story is told largely from the woman's vantage point. In authentic noir, women are totally objectified as either femme fatales or caged angels in gilded cages, strict personifications of male dread or fervent desire. Michele Morgan falls into the second category in THE CHASE. Steve Cochran, who plays her well-heeled gangster husband, Eddie Roman, is probably based on Howard Hughes too but because THE CHASE IS film noir at its rattiest, he dominates the proceedings far more thoroughly than the better actor of the two, Ryan does in CAUGHT. THE CHASE contains a notorious knife-throwing dream sequence in Havana, shot in almost pitch darkness by Planer, that is pure blotto. But is it possible that the dreamer of the dream himself, "Love That Bob"'s, Robert Cummings is blotto too? Who knows in a movie as seriously deranged as this one? Perhaps Cochran's megalomaniacal Roman (who controls the speed of the film from the backseat of his car) WILLS Cummings' Chuck Scott into being in order to vicariously act out the personal "fear is a wish" fantasy of rescuing his bride from the clutches of his own overtly cruel nature? Scott is a MALE fantasy, as much as Robert Mitchum, in real (not reel) life was, for Hughes, a he-man projection of making happy all the beautiful women Hughes unsuccessfully bedded and sought to control. You see nothing really exists in THE CHASE. Only Peter Lorre's attitude as the henchman, Gino, MIGHT exist. He doesn't really die in the film's climactic crash because he never actually lived in the first place.Only his spirit lives, for Lorre embodied the spirit of noir at the very beginning in M (produced by the same man, Nebenzal, who spawned THE CHASE) and, in the context of wet dreams as sinister and romantically sleazy as this one, bears witness to FILM NOIR's one abiding truth - that Satan never sleeps.Grades. Execution: 6Dream Quotient: 10Bonus Points: Michel Michelet's abominably marvelous film score:.5Grand composite rating: 8.5Was this review useful to you?

In Hollywood, directors get the credit. With The Chase, a strange, fascinating, neurotic noir, the credit should go to one of the masters of noir pulp fiction, the writer Cornell Woolrich. Like Phantom Lady, another Woolrich creation, the story centers around what might be struggling to get out of a person's head. Woolrich wrote masterful pulp using his own name or the pseudonyms William Irish or George Hopley. He was a homosexual who loathed himself. He married a girl he idolized and saw the marriage annulled. Despite the money he made, he lived most of his life with his mother in decaying New York apartment buildings where his neighbors were lushes, prostitutes and drug addicts. At night, he'd troll the waterfront for anonymous sex partners. He became a deep alcoholic. And he turned out a stream of mystery novels and short stories that still are worth reading nearly 40 years after his death. Much of his material has been made into movies. If you like Hitchcock's Rear Window, you're watching a Cornell Woolrich short story. More often than not, the stories revolve around the black struggles that can happen inside a person's head. The Chase, based on Woolrich's The Black Path of Fear, is a noir worth watching. One morning a down-and-out young man, Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings), finds a wallet on a Miami sidewalk. He finds the owner's name and address and delivers it to him. The owner, Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran), is a soft-spoken gangster with a penchant for hitting women, eliminating business competitors and for always being the man in control. His partner, Gino (Peter Lorre), who grew up with him, is just as ruthless and amoral, but not as psychopathic. Roman has been married three years to Lorna (Michelle Morgan), a beautiful, frightened woman who wants only to escape from him. Eddie Roman is amused by Chuck Scott's honesty and hires him as a chauffeur. Scott quickly learns two things. First, Roman has a car that is built so that from the back seat Roman can take over the accelerator. When he flips a switch he can move the car up to over 100 miles an hour. The driver can only steer and pray. The second thing Scott learns is that he is drawn to Lorna Roman. It all comes together when Scott agrees to flee with Lorna to Havana. And then we descend into a dark swirl of murder, pay back, amnesia and fear. Half way through the movie we find ourselves in a paranoid dream of night-time Havana, of a horse-drawn carriage that rides off into a busy street, of a man glimpsed throwing a knife in a crowded bar, of a Cuban detective who casually uses a murder knife to spear a piece of melon from the table of a sobbing prostitute. Only later do we learn what is dream and what is real. If what was dream is frightening, what is real may turn out to be worse. This really is an excellently developed story, and photographed with all the poorly lit streets and shadowy rooms a good noir needs. Cummings does a credible job as the uncertain but determined hero. Steve Cochran is first-rate as the menace. He's quiet, even thoughtful, but ready to do violent and unpredictable things in an instant. He has no intention of letting Lorna go. Lloyd Corrigan, a long time character actor, makes a memorable appearance as a businessman who won't sell his ships to Roman. He spends the rest of his life, which is brief, in Roman's wine cellar with a large dog. The music score is a strange dreamy underlay that suits the movie just fine.