Recently watched: Private Hell 36 (1954). Tagline: “These are night faces... Living on the edge of evil and violence!” I’m using this period of enforced social isolation to explore the weirder corners of YouTube for long forgotten and obscure movies. (My boyfriend Pal is accompanying me only semi-willingly).
No false promises or great claims: this fatalistic low-budget noir crime melodrama is unremarkable in the grand scheme of things and Don Siegal’s direction is efficient rather than inspired. But Private Hell 36 is sturdy and suspenseful, less than 90-minutes long and I’m a sucker for any old movie where hard-boiled types chain smoke and growl at each other in seedy locales like racetracks and cocktail lounges. And the cast is genuinely exceptional. Howard Duff and Steve Cochran are two LAPD cops who find themselves deeply compromised when they impulsively split thousands of dollars pilfered from a dead robber - and soon find their loyalty to each other unraveling.
Jack Farnham (Duff) is the honest cop with a conscience. His partner Cal Bruner (swarthy, impossibly handsome charmer Cochran) is the crooked bad influence. Implicated in all this is hard-as-nails, bruised-by-life nightclub chanteuse Lily Marlowe (gravel-voiced Ida Lupino). Even in a relatively small thankless role, Dorothy Malone (two years before she won her Oscar as the nymphomaniac sister in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind) brings her full eye-popping, lip-twisting intensity as Duff’s fretful wife.
Mainly, though, Private Hell 36 succeeds as a showcase for Cochran’s moody, amoral and flawed anti-hero. He excelled at playing noir tough guys, but Cochran invests them with unexpectedly complicated, nuanced and melancholic interior lives. Cochran (currently my favourite actor: Robert Mitchum has slipped to second place) never hits a false note and never ceases to surprise. The womanizing, hard-living Cochran’s bad boy persona wasn’t contrived for the screen: Siegel would later recall that “Cochran was a good actor, but not when he was loaded, and I had a hard time catching him even slightly sober”. He died aged 48 under sordid circumstances (Google the story for yourself!). The film’s greatest pleasures are in the tough-but-tender love scenes between Cochran and Lupino expertly depicting two been-around-the-block cynics with no illusions. As Imogene Sara Smith of The Chiseler notes better than I could: “Cochran and Lupino have serious chemistry (the scene where he unties the halter neck of her dress and massages her naked shoulders is a classic of Code-era steaminess), but Cal and Lily also connect on some deeper level, making us believe these two what’s-in-it-for-me types surprise themselves with genuine feeling.” Trust me: if you didn’t already, you will have a crush on Steve Cochran by the conclusion of Private Hell 36.
Sadly, this eye-poppingly homoerotic image with a shirtless Cochran and Duff never actually happens in Private Hell 36. But it does stir the imagination! Watch the film on YouTube here.
