Back Door to Hell (1964)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writers: Richard A. Guttman and John Hackett, based on a story by Richard A. Guttman
Stars: Jimmie Rodgers, Jack Nicholson, John Hackett, Annabelle Huggins and Conrad Maga

Index: The First Thirty.

This is the second of four pictures in a row that Nicholson made with Monte Hellman and there’s some powerful irony in play this time.

Flight to Fury was his tenth picture and none of the ones before it had established him as an actor, so he began to diversify his roles off the screen. He wrote that one, he co-produced this one and he did both for Ride in the Whirlwind, two films on. He got the opportunity because producer Robert Lippert had been impressed by his writing for Thunder Island a year earlier.

After all, if he wasn’t going to make it as an actor, then maybe he’d make it as a writer or a producer. Those jobs paid well. Given all that, it’s acutely ironic that this be his first film in which he is without a doubt the best actor.

The star this time is Jimmie Rodgers, not the Singing Brakeman but the rock ’n’ roll star of the fifties and sixties. This is a war movie not a musical but he plays it like Elvis Presley might have done. He’s decent as an everyman and he delivers serious lines well, but he doesn’t have the charisma to be a movie star.

Rodgers plays Lt. Gary Craig, of U.S. Military Intelligence. He’s on a Filipino island in World War II to lead a three man team behind enemy lines to gather crucial information. The other two men are Burnett, which is Nicholson, and Jersey, played by John Hackett who apparently wrote the script on the boat to the Philippines while Nicholson was writing Flight to Fury.

Hackett gets some good scenes, but he must have recognised Nicholson’s potential because he gives him all the best lines, especially in the scenes featuring the two of them. In fact, most of these scenes play like duets, with Hackett’s deep and dry voice serving as bedrock for the character that Nicholson constantly brings to bear. He continues to improve and I couldn’t help but hear how natural his delivery is here. These lines just wouldn’t have been as smooth even four films earlier in The Raven.

Incidentally, Hackett would be back for Ride in the Whirlwind, but he only made one more picture before The Two Jakes and Hoffa in the nineties. As both were Nicholson films, I have to assume that his co-star here got him work.

Their mission stumbles almost immediately because their contact, Miguel, is dead. They’re met by Paco instead, leading an armed gang of guerrillas, and soon learn that it was Paco who killed Miguel, after torture. Burnett’s first line of quality is this: “Point of curiosity: are they our friends or are we our prisoners?”

If Paco isn’t necessarily on their side—and I did enjoy the irony of a Filipino who doesn’t take orders from Gen. MacArthur being played by an actor named Conrad Maga—he certainly isn’t on the side of the Japanese. Figuring that the enemy of their enemy is their friend, Craig and Paco work together increasingly closely to fulfil the needs of the mission.

There are positives here.

There’s some good use of Filipino scenery and some good camerawork, both courtesy of local cinematographer Mars Rasca, at the start of a thirty year career shooting local features and American films in the Philippines.

I appreciated that the Filipinos were played by Filipinos and the Japanese by Japanese who presumably lived in the Philippines. Of course, this was done for budgetary reasons, but it has the effect of adding authenticity, especially in the scenes where they speak to themselves in unsubtitled Tagalog or Japanese and in English language scenes where their accents are overt. A character might translate if a scene requires it, but mostly we’re left to assume and that’s a positive. It mimics the soldiers’ experience.

Talking of language, Burnett is there to be the radio operator, a throwback for Nicholson to Ensign Pulver, but he turns out to be pretty fluent in Japanese too, which is needed for an interrogation scene, with the camera looking up from the kneeling Japanese to the standing Americans, backed only by clouds as if they’re gods looking down from heaven.

I liked how what plans Craig and Paco have are subject to change because of outside forces which prompt them to think on their feet. It’s realistic again, even if it doesn’t follow a neat structure out of the textbook on beats.

However, it doesn’t have the charm of Flight to Fear, which wasn’t a great film either but did feel a lot better than it was because of its sheer quirkiness and grounding in surreality rather than reality. This is grim reality all the way, as signposted by Rodgers’s deadpan delivery.

It also doesn’t have the tension. Flight to Fear may not have had the sort of tension that has our muscles clench as we watch, but it had me hooked from the start and I always wanted to know what the next reveal would be. I didn’t feel that here and was content for the script to take me wherever it would.

There are a couple of scenes that do feature a sense of traditional tension, but they’re not what they would have liked to be.

One is a showdown between Paco’s Filipino guerrillas and the Japanese occupying force, as the latter have heard that the Americans are there and demand that they be handed over. Word is that they’ll execute a child in a nearby village every hour until they’re turned in. The resulting scene, a parlay, assault and rescue in one, feels like a spaghetti western.

The other is the final action scene, in which the Americans have to break into an occupied Japanese base in order for Burnett to use their radio, their own now beyond repair. I refuse to spoil how that plays out but it’s another good scene for Nicholson in a film full of them, with Hackett benefitting this time as well.

In many ways, this is Nicholson’s film, even though he’s hardly playing the lead character. Rodgers is absolutely the star but he seems to be happy tackling Lt. Craig like a background character, there to add gravitas not charisma. Hackett doesn’t want the spotlight either and uses most of his scenes to set up Nicholson, so he doesn’t have ot steal scenes in the typical sense; they’re his by default and he’s happy to make the most of them.

While his colleagues don’t even want to own big scenes—his closest rival is Conrad Maga as Paco—he happily takes them and smaller ones too. There’s a scene in which a guerrilla swims across rapids with a rope to tie up so everyone else can climb across. Nicholson owns it with a funambulist joke. He owns a bar scene with a welcome outpouring of cynicism.

Back Door to Hell is not a good film, for many reasons. However, it’s a gift for Nicholson and he seizes the opportunity with both hands.