Pitfall (1948)

Director:

André De Toth

Writers:

Jay Dratler (novel)
Karl Kamb (writer)

Release Date:

24 August 1948 (USA)

Genre:

Film-Noir

Tagline:

A man can be as strong as steel...but somewhere there's a woman who'll break him!

Plot:

John Forbes is a family man who's tired of the 9 to 5 humdrum of his job an insurance company executive...

Plot Keywords:

Insurance | Ménage À Trois | Based On Novel

Cast

Dick Powell	...	John Forbes
Lizabeth Scott	...	Mona Stevens
Jane Wyatt	...	Sue Forbes
Raymond Burr	...	MacDonald
John Litel	...	District Attorney
Byron Barr	...	Bill Smiley
Jimmy Hunt	...	Tommy Forbes
Ann Doran	...	Maggie
Selmer Jackson	...	Ed Brawley
Margaret Wells	...	Terry
Dick Wessel	...	Desk Sergeant

Runtime:

86 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15

Company:

Regal Films

Noir drama, but not a thriller

This is a curiously static film. As it is not a thriller, no one has to bother with 'whodunnit' and the film thus ambles along as a noirish 'human drama'. The script is not particularly well done, and director Andre de Toth has abandoned pace altogether and assumed we would all find the tale as compelling as he did. Some of the concerns in the story are severely dated now, in particular the central plot element of a husband's one night stand meaning the end of the world for all concerned. Dick Powell is allowed to be far too sour, selfish, and grumpy, and treats people far too callously, to arouse much sympathy from the viewer as the lead player. Raymond Burr is more sinister, evil, spiteful, and malicious than usual in his role as persecutor of Powell and as obsessed with Lizabeth Scott to the point of insanity. Lizabeth Scott tries to prop up the film by compensating for Powell's inadequacies. We have never seen her smile so much and so eagerly and charmingly, with the same naive little girl's expression on her face which Elina Lowensohn had in 'The Wisdom of Crocodiles' (aka 'Immortality'). This is a most unexpected girly side of Lizabeth Scott, as she never smiled shyly like that at Humphrey Bogart the previous year in 'Dead Reckoning'. This film is highly watchable, but drags, and, as I said, is not exactly current in its Calvinist attitudes towards marital behaviour. It could so easily have been so much better, if the director had made Powell behave more sympathetically, had found a less sternly poe-faced wife for him (she also has one of those annoying, patronising, treacly wife voices of forties and fifties Hollywood), and had a better constructed script, so that Burr's menacing eruptions into the plot were more effectively managed. Instead, de Toth allows Burr just to pick the lock and wander into Lizabeth Scott's apartment whenever he likes, as if he were a tourist visiting Niagara Falls, make sarcastic and threatening remarks to her, while she has to stand there paralyzed because the script does not allow her to take effective action to throw him out. It is a pity this film didn't come together a bit more.