CAUSE FOR ALARM! (1951)

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 74m 45s

Behind the white picket fence of suburban tranquility lies a fractured marriage in CAUSE FOR ALARM!, a longtime favorite programmer-length film noir of mine. Led by director Tay Garnett, the creative team synthesizes the woman's picture with film noir mechanics, in particular the "downward spiral" theme so prevalent in noir formulas. Our lead protagonist falls deeper and deeper into trouble through no apparent fault of her own, other than perhaps having fallen in love too quickly. But other than her disastrous selection of a husband, there is no evidence offered the good-natured lead protagonist deserves to endure such a veritable noir shitstorm.

The grasp of film noir sometimes reaches beyond its traditional urban environment to wreak havoc on the heart of suburbia, in this case at a home located in a seemingly idyllic Los Angeles neighborhood. As the film noir fan has been calibrated to expect, the misaligned couple that resides there is out of step with the stable sense of community suggested by the handsome homes and well-manicured front yards. Routinized housewife Ellen Jones (Loretta Young, top-billed) is an upbeat but somewhat frustrated woman trapped in a dispiriting marriage to George Z. Jones (Barry Sullivan), a bedridden man with a heart condition. For reasons never made entirely clear, George has slipped into a deep state of despondency. He wrongly believes his wife is planning to run off with Dr. Ranney Grahame (Bruce Cowling), his old friend and family physician, after the two get rid of him. George expresses his misguided thoughts in writing to the local district attorney and tricks his wife into mailing the letter. Ellen learns of the letter's content just before her husband drops dead. Faced with a probable prison sentence, Ellen is determined to retrieve the letter by any means necessary.

This means not welcome

Diary of a madman

Recollections of a better time

As the narrative unfolds, the hot July temperature has its impact on the townspeople, who make reference to the devastating heat from time to time. It is safe to assume the heat affects nobody more than George, who embodies the antithesis of healthy male vitality. His relationship with his wife has eroded thanks to his excessive jealousy and wrongheaded suspicions. Film noirs that revolve around jealousy are numerous:  consider LAURA (1944), LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945), GILDA (1946), THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946), POSSESSED (1947) and SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), just to name a few. Locked inside an irredeemable marriage with no breathing room, Ellen inhabits a household torn asunder by endless conflict instigated by George.

"...a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package."
—Aunt Clara Edwards (Margalo Gillmore)

The burden of masculinity is a heavy weight on the narrow shoulders of George, whose porcelain state of mind exacerbates his heart condition. He embodies the archetypal fallen veteran displaced since the conclusion of World War II. That character type is well traveled within the framework of the film noir, on record in THE BLUE DAHLIA (1946), CROSSFIRE (1947), RIDE THE PINK HORSE (1947), ACT OF VIOLENCE (1948), THE CLAY PIGEON (1949), THE CROOKED WAY (1949), SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT (1946), THE SNIPER (1952) and THE KILLER IS LOOSE (1956). Certainly the embittered George is a lesser man than he was at wartime, when he served as a Navy pilot. Now he is psychologically defeated and socially incapacitated, an irritable portrait of stubborn male attitudes. Aunt Clara even comments that George had issues before he met Ellen, which seems to absolve Ellen from any blame for her husband's disturbing decline. Dr. Grahame believes George would benefit from a session or two with a psychiatrist. Given George's endlessly brooding frame of mind, it is tough to argue with that contention. He is persistently callous in all communication toward his wife and downright creepy when he tells her a story about beating another kid when he was a boy. George makes it all too apparent she might be in for the identical treatment; he would rather destroy his wife than cede her to Dr. Grahame. In an unnerving punctuation of his dark memories, George threatens Ellen while he touches her throat! Later he declares he will kill the wife he has (erroneously) determined to be faithless. George's paranoid jealousy even extends to the neighborhood kid Billy, AKA "Hoppy" (Brad Morrow). Mostly confined to his bed (though he can move around when it suits him), the irascible, worthless husband George does not trust anyone.

In terms of the unlikable invalid noir personality, George shares an obvious kinship with Barbara Stanwyck's detestable Leona Stevenson from SORRY, WRONG NUMBER (1948). But there are many instances of male film noir characters who are in some way rendered immobile, i.e. THE GLASS KEY (1942), DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944), THE BIG SLEEP (1946), KEY LARGO (1948), ACT OF VIOLENCE, CRISS CROSS (1949), HOUSE BY THE RIVER (1950), THE BIG COMBO (1955), TOUCH OF EVIL (1958). Such characters obviously reflect historical realities. Many of our veterans returned from combat with irreversible physical damage. With his frequently hostile outbursts, George reminds us that psychological issues were part of the equation as well and might in fact have been worse than anything physical our soldiers experienced. An unpleasant side effect of this sort of drama causes the viewer to wonder what the filmmakers think of our veterans in general. George debases himself whenever he opens his mouth, so much so that when his heart finally gives up on him, one feels a sense of relief, not sympathy. His inability to muster up the strength to gun down his wife before he expires is kind of pathetic, a gutless account of an ex-soldier with nothing left to offer humanity. I suppose the limitations of the B film are at least in part responsible for this treatment; perhaps a 90-minute film might have offered a more layered version of George, whose death might have had some tragic implications.

I'd wanna marry her too

Awww, how cute

A bewildered Ellen in front of a paranoiac

Other male characters who populate CAUSE FOR ALARM! reinforce various masculine stereotypes as required to confirm our allegiance to Ellen. The postal carrier Joe Carston (Irving Bacon) is the dutiful public servant who will talk at length to anyone whose ear he can bend. He also constitutes male fragility as he complains at length about his tough lot in life. Joe also stands for the rigidity of bureaucratic systems such as the United States Postal Service. The USPS superintendent (Art Baker) validates the importance of the system over sympathetic individuals like Ellen, who deserve more flexibility under the circumstances than the system can offer. The local druggist Mr. Phillips (Louis Merrill, uncredited) is suspicious of Ellen (George accidentally spilled his last prescription; Ellen had nothing to do with the sudden need for more drugs), and so is Mr. Russell (Don Haggerty), a notary whose afternoon visit catches Ellen off guard. Then we have the distinctly male conviction of the handgun as universal problem solver.

If the unstable, displaced veteran George personifies an archetypal noir character, Ellen also represents a signature noir staple:  the woman in distress. A persona that emerges in different forms, such a woman might be a simple character of limited texture or a more complex figure. With varying degrees of anxiousness, vulnerability and culpability, variations of this female archetype can be witnessed in DANGER SIGNAL (1945), MILDRED PIERCE (1945), NOTORIOUS (1946), SORRY, WRONG NUMBER, THE ACCUSED (1949, also starring Loretta Young), MANHANDLED (1949), THE RECKLESS MOMENT (1949), WHIRLPOOL (1949), IN A LONELY PLACE (1950), WOMAN IN HIDING (1950), THE HOUSE ON TELEGRAPH HILL (1951), SUDDEN FEAR (1952), THE BIG HEAT (1953), THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955) and TOUCH OF EVIL. Stuck with a husband with whom it is impossible to reason or even converse, Ellen earns a special place among these imperiled noir women. When she is introduced during the film's opening sequence, the Midwest gal Ellen appears as devoted to her troubled marriage as one could wish, despite her mild disappointment children are not yet part of the equation. The plot mechanics lunge forward mostly through husband-induced traumas experienced by Ellen. Despite the presence of an increasingly irrational George, Ellen maintains a sense of loyalty to her abrasive husband. Other women on the scene exist largely to strengthen our sympathies for Ellen. There is the buttinsky neighbor Mrs. Warren (Georgia Backus), her eyes always wide open to anything unusual, along with Aunt Clara, an endless talker who neither Ellen nor George are excited to welcome.

Full-on breakdown mode

Somebody somewhere is out to get me

Please stop

Ellen questions her circumstances via narration, a customary storytelling device utilized frequently in film noir exercises. Her narration dovetails nicely with a flashback that helps explain her present-day existence in which she questions her union to George while she tries to cling to optimistic thoughts. From a practical point of view, especially for a B film of limited runtime, the flashback allows filmmakers to cover a lot of ground quickly, in this case why a nice woman like Ellen got hooked up with a headcase like George. During WWII, Ellen worked as a nurse at a naval hospital, where she first encountered George, a friend of Dr. Grahame's. Before the couple-to-be even met, a warning shot was fired when George commented that women derive pleasure from "...shoving a man around." Even more tellingly, the relationship between Ellen and George got started via deception as George played the role of patient in need of a nurse's care. After a problematically brief courtship, Ellen ended up married to George. This is where the flashback becomes something beyond a way to expedite the plot in this film noir and many others:  it is impressed upon the viewer that Ellen's marital difficulties are grounded in the past, a notion that informs many of the most significant noirs. The assumption that unsolvable problems are rooted in past events that cannot be undone makes the film noir the most pessimistic of Hollywood genres. What makes the genre darker still is the strong sense of fatalism that energizes the majority of noir narratives. Given the structure of CAUSE FOR ALARM!, one is left with the impression it was fate that led Ellen to George, not bad luck. That explanation is given credence during the flashback segment, when Ellen admitted to Dr. Grahame she had no way of knowing for certain if George was the right man for her. She described her attraction to George in emotional terms beyond her control:  "...it's just something you feel...you can't do anything about it."

If the random nature of the noir universe brings Ellen and George together, an atmosphere rich in irony emphasizes their fatalistic connection. In perhaps the best example, years after George playfully pretended to be in need of Ellen's nursing, she eventually does have to care for George the sickly husband. Interestingly, George's concerns about his wife's loyalty are not completely without merit. Before he laid eyes on Ellen, Dr. Grahame expressed hopes of developing a relationship with her, though he seemed to agree with her assumption that his attentiveness to countless war-related injuries prohibited a courtship of any kind (that scenario indeed played out in a scene at the beach). That point notwithstanding, Ellen seemed unaware of how disappointed Ranney was in her long-term choice of his friend George. With the film's restorative conclusion comes the ultimate irony that cruelly mocks George:  his letter of condemnation is returned for insufficient postage! So much for the power of the patriarchal system.

An ill-fated marriage about to go up in smoke

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust

CAUSE FOR ALARM! was shot in two weeks. Location footage was captured on residential side streets near Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. US and Canadian box office receipts totaled $518,000, along with $250,000 in other territories. The end result was a loss for MGM, a shame considering how well the film holds up after so many years. Director Tay Garnett (THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, THE RACKET [1951]) brings nothing stylish to the production, which always is stated with economy, but he does imbue the narrative with palpable tension and a punchy sense of rhythm ideal for a film of this length. As one might expect, it appears most of the setups were conceived with the goal of making the production's female star look attractive. The unadorned cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg (GASLIGHT [1944], KILLER MCCOY [1947], SIDE STREET [1949]) reflects the filmmaking industry's transition to authenticity and realism that would distinguish the 1950s noir movement from the more expressionistic look that characterized the noir film of the 1940s. Co-screenwriter Mel Dinelli was something of a specialist when it came to women and children in jeopardy; the first three films to his credit were THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1946), THE WINDOW (1949) and THE RECKLESS MOMENT. Co-screenwriter and producer Tom Lewis was married to Loretta Young at the time of production. The source material was the radio play by Lawrence B. Marcus. Warner Bros. spoofed the title with "Claws for Alarm" (1954), one of the very best Merrie Melodies cartoon shorts.

Released earlier this year by ClassicFlix, CAUSE FOR ALARM! finally made its Blu-ray debut in a newly restored edition worthy of the film noir fan's investment. The presentation begins with this note about the restoration:

The difference in source material is evident at times but not overly distracting. Minor scratches are minimally invasive and the level of film grain looks appropriate to my eye. Contrast is solid.

An original theatrical trailer (2m 1s) is selectable, along with trailers for five other titles available from ClassicFlix.