Knock On Any Door (1949)
The beauty of a Nicholas Ray film is that you want to watch it alone and you want to be alone afterwards too, so that none of the feelings that were stirred within you during the film have their chance to escape. A melodrama as effortlessly good as "Knock On Any Door" (1949), set in 1930s Chicago, should especially make you want to be alone - the more private the experience, the more you can savor its effect upon your mind. Any words shared about the film, or the added distraction of hearing your company react with laughter at the wrong moments of the film, will just feel as though your experience is floating past you, leaking out of your brain somehow, and after you have invested in the film emotionally and intellectually that is the last thing you want to have happen. One good cigarette on an empty stomach after the film. That'll do. So when I go to the theatre to see a Nicholas Ray film, particularly a Nick Ray melodrama, with very few exceptions I prepare to see it alone and to be by myself afterwards. That's just how it's done. And if you understand what I mean by that, keep reading.
"Knock On Any Door" also has the benefit of, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant performances of Humphrey Bogart's career
[i]. You are getting two gods for the price of one. In this film Bogart plays Andrew Morton, a first-rate defense lawyer at the top of his game with a street-smart background (only gently alluded to) who navigates the challenging moral ambiguities thrown in his face by the court system, the society he is confronting when he looks into the jury's clueless eyes, and the individual complexities of Pretty Boy Romano (as played by John Derek). The film is not a whodunnit; you are aware of Romano's guilt throughout the film and you wait patiently for the betrayal to be confirmed; the betrayal of the hidden trust that Andrew Morton has over time (with his social worker girlfriend's urgings) developed for the good kid buried inside Romano. The film has the dustings of a noir, but it ain't that either. There are no femme fatales; only one beautiful, unfathomably sweet (almost maudlin) creature whose love for her husband, while effective and disarming for awhile, is finally tragically mishandled. There are many bit-part performances and minor characters who are played in great style, a wealth of miniature scenes that are given the same concentrated clean shave like the major ones. The prosecuting lawyer/District Attorney knows what buttons to push to get people talking on the stand, but his frustrated inferior energy and the scar that twists across his face like a man trying to get out of his necktie reminds you that though he is technically on the side of the truth in this court case, it must have been an accident. At the end of the case when Romano finally breaks down with a full confession, largely due to the DA's mention of Romano's wife's suicide, the DA takes credit for the emergence of the truth, apologizing for having had to do things "the hard way".
But there is something disfigured about fact and truth. Truth isn't proper. It isn't humane. It is not the whole story, or even the important story. This is evidenced by the way the film is shot. The "flashbacks" become the focus while the courtroom scenes take on secondary importance only until the end, where the deeper truths revealed in the flashbacks are given their final meaning and dramatic resolution
[ii]. Although it seemed obvious to me that Romano was bound to be guilty, I think it is possible and justified to be swept up in the trust (I say trust, not optimism, because Bogart's character is a cynic) embodied by Bogart's character, Andrew Morton, such that you would want to hang on to Pretty Boy Romano's innocence for as long as possible; only relenting when the tiniest cracks start to show, such as when Butch and Sunshine each get too specific and thereby conflict about the type of beer they were drinking the night they were with Pretty Boy. Bogart as Morton gives an incredible speech after Pretty Boy's guilt has been confirmed, telling the jury and the courtroom circus that they should think twice about the meaning of Pretty Boy's sentence, that they should know better than to believe their guilt has been absolved by shifting it to someone who was placed in the hardest of circumstances. It is quite a bit like a Luke the Drifter song being played out as a courtroom scene. Sentencing Pretty Boy Romano would instead, Morton argues, convict everyone in that courtroom for creating and sustaining the environment that raised Romano up to be a cold-blooded cop-killer. This is just the problem, however; no one in the courtroom has the imagination to understand Pretty Boy's upbringing, though they are gullible enough to be told what to think about it and change their minds for a few seconds. Still, their isolation from the harder walks of life makes it easier for them to affirm their need to protect what is familiar to them. It is not about the truth, after all is said and done, but about protecting one way of life from another. The truth is what Morton reveals in his recounting of Pretty Boy's life.
While the courtroom message is moving, stylized and skillful, with Bogart delivering only the finest, there are other scenes that move me, not to a much greater extent than the best parts of the courtroom scenes, but in that new sort of way where I feel that I’ve been somehow taken off guard and, if not necessarily given an atypical insight, am suddenly required to dig a little deeper in my own bank of experiences and catalogue of miserable feelings. I appreciate this opportunity immensely. Pretty Boy Romano’s wife looks lovely, sedated and surreal as she quietly makes up her mind to take her own life, making her suicide blend in with the domesticated setting. You wonder for a second if she is going to pull a Sylvia Plath when you see the meal that has been left in the oven and watch her delicately turn the gas knobs up to full blast. When Romano renounces everything that their marriage is built upon, in particular his job, amounting to a suffocating narrow-minded decency that threatens to humiliate and blackball him, he goes out to rob a bank, watches one of his cohorts lose his life in the robbery, and comes back to find that his wife is dead. He kneels by the bed and weeps into her body, tears glittering and pooling at the base of his eyes, “Please forgive me.” This builds up to the funeral scene. Romano, who is on the run, hides and watches his wife’s funeral procession from the top of a nearby building, the bundles of funeral wreaths moving solemnly and steadily below. As her coffin is guided along, Romano, in a fit of anguish, leans against the ladder that is propped up against the wall, his hands wrapped around the rungs of the ladder tightly at first, then there is a close-up on just his hands loosening their grip as he slides into emotional oblivion. This is one of the most beautiful, simple scenes I have seen in a long time, where cinematography, narrative and feeling meet with perfect, unstrained focus.
Pretty Boy Romano’s guilt for the crime he has committed is undeniable, but what the film succeeds in showing is that for every murder a kid like Pretty Boy commits that the public and the court expose in huge letters of scandal, there were a hundred sickening backstabbing disgraces he had to privately suffer without recourse leading up to it. This is what is important – not the message against capital punishment – and what we can empathize with because most lives contain a bit of private suffering that has never seen the light of justice. Some lives contain a lot more. The question is: why should there be an outlet for some and not for others? The asymmetry between justice on the side of enforcement and justice on the side of prevention is all too clear. To deny the force of this message is foolish because it is possible to stay neutral on whether capital punishment is an effective (or a barbaric) method of meting out justice, and it is also possible to resist the humanizing of criminals who are not meant to be humanized. I think the film leaves it open that there could be criminals who are not worth saving or redeeming, lives that are not touched by the irritatingly simplistic nature/nurture argument. It leaves it open in the sense that it isn’t about them. It is about the specific kind of “criminal” that is Pretty Boy Romano. Does a kid like Pinkie in “Brighton Rock” (the original, please) – a psychopath obsessed with control over events beyond those pertaining to his personal story and with no wounded vulnerability or crippling need for love to speak of – have to actually be
in the film for us to feel safe enough that the film is avoiding such a simplistic argument and to view Bogart’s Morton as something more impressive and complex than a sermonizer?
[iii] "Knock on Any Door" is concerned with the kind of kid who is mixed up, who is more heart than head (Morton had a similar background but escaped from the slums because, we imagine, of his cool collected smarts), who has been treated raw and cruel, and – since his father died in prison from the negligence of the authorities who imprisoned him for too long on a weak ticker for a killing committed in self-defense – who has been afraid of abandonment his whole life. So afraid that he is willing to provoke its occurrence because at least that way he will have some control over his goddamn destiny. There
is some ‘nature’ involved here. Nature in the sense that some kids never get on the wrong side of authority or see what authority usually amounts to. But there are other kids whom authority singles out to bring down to their knees; their spirit means something, so it has to be crushed. Romano doesn’t feel guilty for killing the cop, but what you do see is that he feels terrorized by his own guilt for his wife Emma’s suicide. When he walks to the electric chair, his calm demeanor indicates that he is willing to receive his punishment, but not for the crime as detailed in his legal sentence. Ultimately, I think this film is exactly what it should be. Its flaws are not what it has typically been charged with. It is not primarily about crime and punishment. It is a coming-of-age story – where ‘coming of age’ means an accelerated process by which you see most of what is bad in the world and can’t manage to figure out how to hold on to the little that is good – ending in loss and despair.
I love this film, dearly.
[i] Bogart’s character is extremely interesting, and I want to say more about it but will just touch on the subject for now.
[ii] As Geoff Andrew writes: “Romano’s guilt having been established, Ray makes his point about the responsibility of society and the state through verbal and visual means. As spoken by Bogart, Morton’s speech, eloquent and rhetorical in its denunciation of poverty, prejudice, neglect and inequality, is indeed moving, with the actor angrily spitting out his lines and bringing into play the full moral weight of his heroic screen persona. At the same time, Ray, who until this final plea for mercy has filled the courtroom with a plethora of colourful characters, suddenly adopts a far more abstract visual style to implicate us, the audience, and the unfeeling mechanism known as the state, in Romano’s crimes.”
Something I’ve also been thinking about: why is it possible with Capra and Ray films, both of whom I love so much more than Welles, to look past whatever obvious markings are created by genre parameters to find the real message? I think the real message is there because of the style choices, so that is where to go looking for it, as opposed to just the top layer of the prosaic details of ‘the telling of the story’ and how they add up. In other words, why is it possible with Capra and Ray films, and not with a film like “Blue Valentine”, to find the message by looking past those narrative/genre restrictions? I am supposing that it has to do with the finer elements of the way the story has been told. The film “Blue Valentine” (2010): I enjoyed the story that unfolded, and it rung true … the prosaic details did add up … but not the way in which it was told. Incidentally, I think this film has come to mind as an example because (1) it is one of the few recently (and decently!) made films I have seen in the theatres, and (2) due to the flashback narration – "Knock on Any Door" is told in flashback, as is Capra’s "It’s a Wonderful Life", even if the flashback sequencing there is more fantastical in nature, to which I think the Ray film is a kind of tragic sibling.
