Release Date: January 15, 1947
Running Time: 101 Minutes
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Lizabeth Scott
Directed By: John Cromwell
Dead Reckoning is an odd film that hearkens back to earlier Bogart Noir films such as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. What it doesn’t have is the fun and excitement those films have in watching the mystery unravel on the big screen. Instead, it substitutes that sense of mystery with twist after twist until all you want is for it to come to an end so that you can stop getting pulled back and forth in a mystery that really isn’t all that interesting in the first place.
The film opens with Captain ‘Rip’ Murdock (Humphrey Bogart) approaching a priest, Father Logan, who was a well known paratrooper in the war. Murdock needs to tell someone about the past few days in case his enemies catch up to him. A good chunk of the remainder of this film is told in flashback. His story begins just after WWII when two paratroopers, close friends Murdock and Sergeant Johnny Drake (William Prince) are traveling from Paris to Washington D.C.
Drake finds out en route to D.C. that he is to be awarded the Medal of Honor and flees the train before photographers can snap any pictures of him. Murdock goes AWOL, tracking his friend to Gulf City in the south only to find out Drake is dead, burned in a car crash. As it turns out, Drake had joined the army under an assumed name and was afraid the publicity of the Medal of Honor would bring this to light. Drake, before joining the war effort, was accused of killing a rich man because he was in love with the man’s much younger wife, Coral (Lizabeth Scott). From the moment Murdock meets Carol things start to get complicated and bogged down. The remainder of the film is filled to the brim with gangsters, gambling and double crossings. The ultimate reveal of the true killer becomes obvious well before the finale yet the film wants to try, unsuccessfully, to obfuscate it.
The film plays up heavily the relationship that developed between Murdock and Carol. Carol was originally intended for Rita Hayworth as a follow-up to Gilda yet it doesn’t play like a typical Hayworth character. In fact, Carol as a character is more in line with the on screen personal of Lauren Bacall, then Bogart’s wife. Bacall could have added an interesting degree of heat to this role that just isn’t here. Lizabeth Scott was fairly new to the scene when cast in this film and her inexperience is a bit of a hinderance to it. She appears to be channeling Bacall in both her mannerisms and vocal performance, invoking a smoky, sultry tone whenever she speaks. It is mostly effective but sometimes it rings flat and is at odds with the scene in play.
Bogart is in fine form here even though he was unhappy to be here, disliking being loaned out to Columbia Pictures for this. He didn’t let this effect his performance though and remains perfectly cast in a role he could do in his sleep. It is as close as audiences would get to him returning to Sam Spade or Phillip Marlow and could have easily been reimagined as a sequel for either character.
The mystery is what ultimately sinks this ship, though. It is overly complicated by unnecessary twists that only serve to muddy up waters in an attempt to keep audiences from guessing the true killer. It doesn’t work though and when the reveal is made we already know it and are not surprised in the least. The mystery isn’t much of one and consequently fails to liven up an already overlong film. Staging much of the drama in flashback with a framing story only serves to drag it out even more. It needed to lose the framework and trim down some of the double crosses and twists and it would have been a stronger film for it.
As a mystery it struggles to be compelling for it’s bloated runtime. As a drama it isn’t particularly interesting, either. It had a lot of potential and only managed to land a fraction of it all. It can be compared to detective noir films like The Big Sleep but that comparison will only make it appear lesser in every way. It is not a bad film by a long shot but, once the story gets going, a real sense of what could have been permeates nearly every scene. It misses the bullseye, but not by much.
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