1955 noir Crashout opens with a prison escape, a staple of the genre.  The first shot is of prisoners stampeding towards the camera.  Then we cut to a shot over the fortification in the other direction, where prisoners have somehow gone through the wall and are now outside the facility.  We are not shown how people went from one side of the mammoth barrier to the other.  This may be the first time such an escape was achieved through the power of editing.

Many of the escapees are killed, but those who aren’t gather together in an underground cavern.  Breakout organizer William Bendix chose this location, though he’s late to arrive, as he was wounded by a police bullet.  When that happened, he only pretended to be dead and the officer does only the most cursory inspection to see if he’s dead.  That suggests at least one officer in their ranks is deeply stupid.  Even weirder is the police never seem to come anywhere near this cave, despite it apparently being close enough to the prison, and easy enough to find, for so many escapees to congregate there so quickly.

In the cave, the other convicts tend to Bendix’s wounds.  Realizing more serious medical intervention is necessary, a doctor (played by noir staple Percy Helton) is kidnapped and forced to perform surgery.  Afterwards, the doctor is dispatched off-screen in an especially chilling moment.  This scene reminded me of the Flannery O’Connor story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, where the members of a family are dispatched in moments with a similar vibe.  I even feel Bendix’s assessment of the moment is similar to that story: “Takes all kinds to make a world, especially suckers.”

Bendix realizes he needs his fellow fugitives to survive while he is recovering, and so cuts them in on a deal.  If they can help him get to a large cache of stolen loot, he’s split the pot among them.  What the others don’t seem to grasp is this is a ruthless killer only interested in self-perseverance.  Also, he will need fewer of them as he recovers, and he can only benefit if there aren’t as many to share the wealth.  It is interesting to watch him dispassionately observe the various, and potentially deadly, conflicts which flare up frequently between the men.  He’ll gladly let them eliminate each other.

And the mix of personalities in the group is a powder key waiting to ignite.  William Talman is nervous, bug-eyed, twitchy and an expert at knife throwing.  Luther Adler is always performing card tricks, to the annoyance of Gene Evans, and is even more obsessed with the ladies.  Evans, on the other hand, seems to be defined only by his obsession with food.  Arthur Kennedy is the odd man out and hard to get a read on initially.  Really, all we know about him is he wasn’t part of Bendix’s circle back in the joint.  Then there’s Marshall Thompson as the youngest of the fugitives, who apparently made a mistake which landed him in prison, and who is the most likely of the bunch to be find redemption—if he can live long enough. 

I swear there were even more in the cave, but they didn’t have any lines.  This wouldn’t be the first movie to have a cast that magically expands and contracts as needed, but there are too many characters we are expected to follow and the film doesn’t manage them well.

Take Thompson as an example.  I didn’t even know this guy was even part of the gang until he’s singled out when he starts a conversation on a train with passenger Gloria Talbott.  Seeing an opportunity to separate from the group, he gets off the train with her at the next stop, only to receive an unfortunate demonstration of Talman’s knife-throwing act.

And that scene was sending me cues the film was coming to a conclusion.  I was shocked to learn we were only at roughly the half-way point.  That is partly a credit to the movie, as so much had transpired that I thought we had to be near the end.  On the other hand, this is just one of the many times it signals we’re about to wrap things up, only or the film to keep going.  That gets very tiring.  When the end credits finally roll, one is so accustomed to being jerked around that you’d be excused for thinking there might be a coda after those.

There are many aspects for which a picture might be labelled noir, and one of those is a brutality and bluntness one might not otherwise encounter in cinema during the Production Code years.  Especially notable here is a scene where the gang takes hostages in a bar, holding broken bottles to the throats and eyes of the male patrons whose clothes they have stolen.  Even more disturbing is Adler forcing a kiss on a woman and encouraging Talman to do the same.  I think I can hazard a guess as to why Adler was in prison.

The film takes a weirdly abrupt turn in the third act, as Kennedy is further distinguished from the others as a potential hero.  His potential path to a better life is when the group encounters young, widowed mother Beverly Michaels and he sees an opportunity for a better future with her.  Alas, he is still on the run, and the Production Code is not going to allow these two that life.  I think that’s just as well, as I wasn’t convinced by Kennedy’s rather unmotivated transformation into the hero of the picture.

Crashout is not great noir.  It isn’t even the best prison break noir I have seen.  If it has one fatal flaw, it was biting off more than it can chew, with too many characters.  But it is one of the bleakest films I have seen of its kind, and recommended for genre fans.

Dir: Lewis R. Foster

Starring William Bendix, Arthur Kennedy and too many other speaking roles

Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray box set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XVIII