Beaumont didn’t always play a homicidal, narcissistic maniac in his noir career. In two low-budget series he actually played a detective. Still, even in this role, he wasn’t exactly on the side of the angels. When PRC took over the Michael Shane series from Twentieth-Century Fox, Beaumont replaced Lloyd Nolan in the title role. Nolan’s Shayne, though nobody’s fool, was something of a lovable lug. Beaumont’s Shayne was much too acerbic to be lovable, much less a lug of any kind, tossing off such gems as, “C’mon, look at the girl. Don’t be afraid of waking her up. She’s dead.” He tackles two spoiled children of a recently murdered father by telling the girl to “shut up” her lip, shoving around the son, then turning back to the daughter and calling her a “spoiled, brainless brat.” Not exactly the reasoned chats with Wally or the Beaver in the study (Murder Is My Business, 1946).
This Mike Shayne certainly isn’t as lawless as the Steves, Kennys, and Scots in Beaumont’s psychotic repertoire, but he’s not exactly playing according to Hoyle when it comes to dealing with the law. His Shayne enlists his newspaperman pal to help him move the body of a murdered girl left in his apartment on a frame job so the police will find the body elsewhere and include him out of any pesky investigations (Murder Is My Business). This guy just doesn’t want to be bothered and certainly has no respect for the cops. For example he warns the lead detective to “back your monkeys off me,” then warns those monkeys, “Don’t stick you nose outside the door unless you want to get it shot off” (Larceny in Her Heart, 1946).
In Hugh Beaumont’s other PRC detective series, about the only thing Dennis O’Brien has in commonwith Ward Cleaver is that they both smoke a pipe. That said, Denny would rather snuggle up to a bottle of bourbon in a seedy bar with his souse helper, The Professor (more on him later). If Beaumont’s Mike Shayne was somewhat left of the law, this character barely peeks in as he passes its room. Even a seedy guy says to O’Brien, “Anybody’s a bum at the right price. I hear yours is $200” (Roaring City, 1951). O’Brien confirms this assessment at the beginning of each of the three films in the series when he says while lounging in front of the run-down, two-room shack he shares with The Professor on Pier 23 (aka a “crummy layout,” Danger Zone, 1951), “[A]s long as I get paid, I can’t be responsible for the guys who hire me” (Roaring City).
O’Brien’s cases bear out his less than sterling self-appraisal as he repeatedly gets himself into hot water by agreeing to front a crooked manager’s bets against his own fighter; playing escort for a young woman under the pay of an unsavory lawyer he knows is up to no good; and taking money from a priest to help an escape convict elude capture after blowing Alcatraz, amongst other unsavory cases (Roaring City, Danger Zone, and Pier 23 (1951), respectively.
Additionally, where Beaumont’s Shayne might have done some looking but was basically loyal to secretary/girlfriend Phyllis, O’Brien pretty much tom-catted his way through three films, containing two stories each. Eyeing some chicks in bullet-bras, he comments, “Yes, sir, the town [San Francisco] has some good points” (Danger Zone). In every film, he’s sucking face with at least one gal per story – that’s at least six gals per series. His lips must be mighty tired of puckering! June would not approve. Watch out Gwen Rutherford!
Denny has two regulars in the film. There’s side man, The Professor, who as O’Brien puts it, “prefers glasses to classes,” and the former filled with bourbon, scotch, or whiskey. Then there’s Inspector Breugger, his nemesis on the police force, who’s always suspecting O’Brien of murder – mostly because he’s always finding Denny unconscious in the near vicinity of a corpse –whom he never turns out to have killed. You’d think the inspector would have learned before he got through six stories in three films.
You’d also think Dennis would learn, too. Every time he turns his back – often while he’s smooching some deceptive dame – he gets cracked on the noggin and sent to la-la land, only to wake up next to a corpse and a freshly arriving Inspector Breugger. This photo is just a day in the life of O’Brien, Breugger, and the corpse du jour.
Now, our detective still isn’t a complete dope. He always gets his man – or dame, as the case may be. He even is quick with a quip. When Breugger asserts, “I got an idea,” Denny cracks, “Did it hurt?” Or there’s his cynical assessment of his part of San Francisco where “[a] set of morals won’t cause any more stir than Mother’s Day in an orphanage.” Beaumont gives us a private dick who may be on the seedy side, but his trenchant cynicism establishes that he knows he lives in a world that’s amoral to the core.
So, low-brow, psychotic, or somewhere in between, Hugh Beaumont is a champ at playing the noir anti-hero deeply engrained in the world he inhabits.
What noir performances by Beaumont would you add to this list?
– Images 1 & 2 of the Mike Shayne films from the Classic Flix dvd covers, copyright 2019, ClassicFlix.com
– Screen Shots from Danger Zone, Pier 23, and Roaring City from the Kit Parker Collection of Film Noir, vols. 7-9., Copyright VCI Entertainment, 2008. author’s Collection
People argue over who’s the toughest, grittiest, most acerbic, maybe even most psychologically damaged, of film noir anti-heroes. Is it Alan Ladd of the tight jaw and cold eyes? The coolly sarcastic and sharply violent Humphrey Bogart? Robert Mitchum, sleepy-eyed, drawling voiced, and deadly? Maybe Robert Ryan with his violent psychosis seething beneath a tautly charming exterior? How about Dick Powell and John Payne, who exchanged careers as fading singing romantic leads for playing opportunistic, quick-fisted, and switchblade-tongued types? Naaugh – The most sardonic, amoral, dark, or even psychotic of them all was, yeah, you guessed it – Hugh Beaumont!
Hugh Beaumont?!
“What?!!!” you say. Wally and the Beave’s staid, gentle-humored, reasonable dad? You bet your blackjack, Baby. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, Beaumont turned in a rogues gallery of noir baddies that would have sent June Cleaver running for the hills – if Hugh let her live that long!
A busy supporting player through the 1940s and ’50s, Beaumont did play his share of good guys. However, even some of them were a bit left of center. Consider the justifiably nerved up pal of John Garfield, afeard of fifth columnists in The Fallen Sparrow; The Seventh Victim’s staid and steady (ironically last-named Ward) husband of the tortured Jacqueline whose “normal” qualities made him useless to face her demons; or Army Air Force buddy of William Bendix and Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, whose cool skepticism betrays a healthy dose of contempt for the Law.
Still, it was the films that Beaumont made at Sig Neufeld’s Poverty Row studio PRC that were one of the best showcases of his ability to shine, or more accurately glower, as characters on the dark, even monstrous, side. Apology for Murder (1948), directed by Sam Neufield (né Neufeld, Sig’s brother), is particularly interesting. Beaumont’s amoral Kenny Blake is a smart-talking reporter whose editor chides that he would make a great writer except all he “could write about was a good lookin’ pair of gams.” Case in point, the slick chick whose strategic flipping down the hem of her skirt draws his attention to her shapely pins and away from the wealthy business man in the room he’s supposed to be interviewing. In no time flat, Kenny and this babe are running around in her fast car, locked in passionate clinches, and sucking face – until her revelation that she’s not the businessman’s daughter but his wife puts the skids on things, but only momentarily. Before you can say “double indemnity,” the femme fatale (Anne Savage of Detour fame) has played on Kenny’s libido and greed to plot and carry out the husband’s murder and let an innocent guy take the rap – while later making a sucker out of Kenny when she no longer needs him by playing footsie with a lawyer she’s using to break her husband’s will. Needless to say, it does not end well for the three in the hail of bullets in the penultimate scene.
Do the misadventures of the amoral, weak Kenny and his seductive paramour sound familiar? They should. Apology is a blatant rip-off of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity: from the tempting via sexy gams early on to the adulterers’ secret meetings and murder plans, to murder by wrench to the noggin while the camera focuses on the wife’s face to the avuncular/adversarial relationship between mentor (editor/insurance investigator) and mentee (writer/insurance salesman) to the near finale shootout and finally to mentor/mentee discovery of the crimes’ recorded history at the very
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end. But the choices that Neufield and his writer Fred Myton make don’t innovate on, often only weaken, the original. Kenny make crack wise, but there is no dialogue between him and his leading lady or his mentor that comes close to the crackle of Walter Neff with Phyllis or with Barton Keyes. The tension when Phyllis gently pulls on the door that hides her to signal to Walter that he mustn’t give away her presence to Keyes standing before him dissipates into Steve hopping into the bushes by the femme’s front door when she lets out an important character. Notable switch up in this film from the original? Neufield and Myton reverse who can light a cigarette and who can’t from mentee to mentot– oh, and we move from matched to lighters.
Apology for Murder isn’t a bad movie. It would just look better if there weren’t an original with which to make a comparison. Then again, without the original, there’d be no Apology, or a need for one. Still, we can clearly see why Neufield was working at PRC and Wilder was at Paramount.
Two other PRC gems in Beaumont’s noir resumé reveal him as a player of not only the louche but the downright monstrous. In The Lady Confesses (1945), he’s Scot, a personable fellow happily engaged to Vicki, until his first wife shows up after having disappeared almost seven years ago. Next thing you know, the ex is found strangled with wire, Steve’s alibi of sleeping one off in a nightclub singer friend’s dressing room doesn’t convince the investigating detective, and Vicki has signed on undercover at the night club to find evidence to clear him. Genial and protective of his fianceé, Steve comes off as the typical beleaguered and framed noir hero (The Dark Corner, I Wake Up Screaming, TheBlue Dahlia) – until about three-quarters into the movie: he emerges from the shadows of the nightclub singer’s apartment to finish her off when she tries to blow town and leave a confession busting his alibi. The cinematographer’s use of shadows and Beaumont’s coolly menacing voice in concert with his determinedly pitiless expression are a shocking transformation from the regular guy we’d come to believe in.
Vicki is no safer when Steve starts to think that she may know about the letter revealing his culpability. The tender, protective fiancé drops his mask – again beautifully, horribly revealed by lighting paired with Beaumont’s eyes and facial expression The horror of such villainy in a trusted ally crushes both Vicki’s and our own faith in any capability of recognizes what lurks beneath the disguise of feigned virtue.
Money Madness must be Beaumont’s most unnerving performance. The writing and the player enacting it keep us as off-kilter as the female lead, Julie, in understanding who the real Fred Howard (aka Steve Clarke) really is. We first see Beaumont’s Howard/Clarke get off a bus a stop before he was originally ticketed, deposit some dough in a bank strong box, and grab an advertised job as a cab driver – all with the arrogant attitude of someone with a mission, but with something to hide. However, next thing we know, he’s saving Julie from a masher, wooing her with kindness and humor, and charming the possessive harridan of an aunt with whom she lives. Ah, so he’s not a bad guy after all. Maybe he’s just been misunderstood or framed for something. He marries Julie in a whirlwind courtship. How romantic – except we see Steve carefully set up Julie’s deception that he’s the victim of an invalid divorce so they can’t tell the old girl that they’re married just yet. Oh, and he starts to poison the aunt secretly, after he’s withdrawn his money from the safety deposit box to hide it in the old gal’s attic so everyone will think the money is hers, which Julie will then “inherit” to share with her hubby. Julie only finds out about the murder when she can’t do anything about it; next thing you know, he’s bound her up as his unwilling conspirator after the fact – revealing they are married after all and warning her, “What I have, I keep.” That Steve repeats this threat while promising to kill Julie when the police have him cornered in her house marks him as a text-book psychotic abuser for sure! The body of the movie repeatedly asserts his inescapable abusive control. Steve alternately slaps and threatens Julie, then offers tenderness and pleas for her love to save him.
One shot where Julie talks to a supportive lawyer in a restaurant sums up Steve’s sadistic, overwhelming power over her. Steve has made a phone call to Julie at this table, while he is hidden in a nearby phone booth. An unnerved Julie has not properly replaced the receiver in the cradle, so he can hear every worry she grudgingly shares with the lawyer. The set up of the shot powerfully over-inscribes his inescapable predominance. In these two photograph, you can see that the scene is shot over his shoulder, rendering Steve’s head enormous and overpowering he while listens in on Julie and the lawyer. In contrast, those two are seen at a distance, small, insignificant figures in comparison beneath his gaze. This image and Julie’s accidentally leaving the phone off the hook establish that no matter how careful she tries to be, she is under Steve’s vicious power, as well as how ineffective the Law(yer) and friendship are to save her. This film is Beaumont at his most horrific.
To read “King of the Noir Anti-Heroes, Part 2,” click here for Beaumont’s left-side of the law detective series.
-Hugh Beaumont Image from The Lady Confesses screen shot, Alpha Video public domain video (author’s collection)
-Image from Apology for Murder screen shot, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY7q2fbEbuo&t=29s
– Lighter image: Photo by alexsandro on Freeimages.com
-Images from The Lady Confesses same as above
-Images from Money Madness, screen shots from Alpha Video’s public domain video (author’s collection)
Beaumont didn’t always play a homicidal, narcissistic maniac in his noir career. In two low-budget series he actually played a detective. Still, even in this role, he wasn’t exactly on the side of the angels. When PRC took over the Michael Shane series from Twentieth-Century Fox, Beaumont replaced Lloyd Nolan in the title role. Nolan’s Shayne, though nobody’s fool, was something of a lovable lug. Beaumont’s Shayne was much too acerbic to be lovable, much less a lug of any kind, tossing off such gems as, “C’mon, look at the girl. Don’t be afraid of waking her up. She’s dead.” He tackles two spoiled children of a recently murdered father by telling the girl to “shut up” her lip, shoving around the son, then turning back to the daughter and calling her a “spoiled, brainless brat.” Not exactly the reasoned chats with Wally or the Beaver in the study (Murder Is My Business, 1946).
Sharon Healy-Yang 