The Bribe (1949)

Director: Robert Z. Leonard
Writer: Marguerite Roberts, based on the short story by Frederick Nebel
Stars: Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price and John Hodiak

Index: The First Thirty.

Here’s another Vincent Price movie that I’d never even heard of, though it turns out that I have seen parts of it, in Steve Martin’s comedy nod to film noir, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. He takes his name of Rigby from this film and the whole Friends and Enemies of Carlotta angle is taken from its location, Carlotta being a town on the Central American island of Los Trancos.

Of course, this is the original and it wants to be taken seriously, a little too much if Rigby’s got anything to say about it. That’s Rigby the American cop, in the form of Robert Taylor, who’s sent to Carlotta to find out who’s behind a war surplus racket.

Apparently someone’s buying lots of scrap, but someone’s including good airplane motors in the shipments, which are then shipped out of the country, where they’re conditioned and sold. That’s millions of dollars in profit, none of it taxed, and if there’s anything that’s more un-American than taking money from Uncle Sam, I don’t know what it is.

There are only two suspects, so Rigby looks at them first when he gets to Carlotta in the guise of a fisherman. Apparently, nobody goes to Carlotta except to fish. Or to steal airplane engines, of course. They’re a married couple, Tugwell and Elizabeth Hintten. Tug flew down with the airline, but lost his job so now tends bar at Pedro’s and drinks himself into a stupor on his day off. Liz sings there and well too, but we only get a couple of songs. Tug is played by John Hodiak, Liz by Ava Gardner.

Three things become immediately obvious about Carlotta.

One is that it’s insanely hot there, so much so that everyone sweats all the time. I’m glad this didn’t have a Smell-o-Vision scratch card to deepen the experience. Oh, except Liz, who magically seems to be immune when singing.

The second is that Rigby falls for her quickly and hard. It doesn’t help that the Hinttens are digging into him as much as he’s digging into them, expanding his time with Liz without his even trying.

And the final one is that Charles Laughton is everywhere, as a small time grifter named J. J. Bealer but described as “the pie-shaped man” by Rigby. He hardly engages with the story in the early part of the film but he’s rarely out of sight, his aching feet detailing just how much mileage he must have put in to become part of the background in so many scenes. Of course, Laughton never saw a scene he couldn’t steal and he does exactly that here. Whatever the foreground has to offer at any point in time, I was watching him in the background.

Laughton is one of two villains in the movie, the other being Vincent Price’s Carwood. They kinda sorta work together and Carwood takes charge when he can, but neither of them is the boss and they both have their own agendas, so are quite happy to work against each other. In a movie where so much falls flat, this doesn’t. One of the best aspects of the film for me was the realisation that they’d both happily betray the other in a heartbeat and that generated an awful lot of possibilities as to where the movie was going to go.

Frankly, they’re the biggest success the film has to offer, though it takes a while for them to warm up as a double act. Price appears first, on the same flight down to Carlotta as Rigby, but he’s on the way to Peru so vanishes again immediately. Laughton shows up next and has no intention of leaving the background, so we see a heck of a lot more of him than Price. As the story progresses, though, Price returns to claim his part in proceedings and he gets lots to do in the third act, especially as Carwell is happy to go a lot further than Bealer.

Taylor does his job, but so drily that he gets lost in the film. Perhaps that’s appropriate, as he certainly gets lost in Liz, but I never bought into his moral self-examination. Gardner does her job as well, but she’s so light and innocent that she never quite feels like a femme fatale. Everyone else is in a sordid film noir, but she’s in a straight drama, even if she sings lines like “I’m not a saint nor sinner. I walk the middle ground.” I never bought into her complexity.

Much of this falls flat. I didn’t care about the story, whether we’re talking airplane motors or Rigby falling for Liz. There’s no mystery in a film with only two suspects, so we’re supposed to care about what the characters care about and I never did. There’s very little action, even given the illustrations on the poster, the “man against sea terror” bit being Rigby fishing for rear projection marlin, so it’s talky and dry.

Instead, what did get to me was the mood of the film. Part of it’s the location, because the humidity of Carlotta was palpable and it wore me down, but part of it’s the feeling that it’s a dead end town. Outside the fishing, whatever reason anyone has to go there never pans out and they get stuck there forever. Tug is clearly lost in Carlotta as much as in the bottle, but it isn’t fundamentally different for anyone else: Rigby, Liz, Bealer, even Carwood, though he’s able to fly in and out. I think the place has still got to him and corrupted his dreams though.

And then there’s the finalé, the “fight at the carnival” promised by the poster. Everything up until now, mood aside, is underwhelming, but that finalé is magnificent filmmaking. It’s a delight almost out of nowhere, three and a half minutes of near Wellesian grandeur.

It’s the final showdown between Rigby and Carwell and it starts with a gunfight in a dark room. Then it shifts to a chase scene through the Fiesta de Carlotta celebrations that are so crowded with people that they’re powerfully claustrophobic, human walls closing in so that the characters can hardly move or breathe. In the end, it becomes a gun battle in the middle of a fireworks display and, given how obvious some of the rear projection work in this film was, it feels just as immersive and dangerous as the crowd scenes.

Of course, given that this was 1948 and the Production Code required certain outcomes, it can’t surprise which of them perishes, but that doesn’t diminish the power of this section. I’m not sure whether I should praise the director, the cinematographer or the composer, but it’s probably the trio, so Robert Z. Leonard, Joseph Ruttenberg and Miklós Rózsa.

Ruttenberg had already won two Oscars out of six nominations and he had two more wins to come. Rózsa had also won two, from eleven. Their work here is excellent, but it all comes to a head in these three and a half wonderful minutes with Taylor and Price.