Only in noir would a pet store be open as late as the one in 1953 noir 99 River Street. I couldn’t help but recall the Simpsons episode about prohibition, where Moe’s continues operating as a bar under the ruse it is now a pet shop. When the law raids it, the agent leading the operation asks what kind of pet shop is open at one in the morning. Thinking fast, Moe says, “The best damn pet shop in town!”
The pet store in this movie is owned by Jay Adler, who appears to run it at least partly as a legitimate enterprise. When we first see him, he’s bottle-feeding puppies. In the back room, noir’s go-to thug Jack Lambert is gently brushing a dog. It is out of that room the truly financially lucrative business occurs, such as fencing diamonds stolen by Brad Dexter. Except Dexter struck the victim too hard, and Adler won’t touch the merchandise now that the police are investigating a homicide.
Dexter is so sleazy that he had even used girlfriend Peggie Castle to seduce the victim. And that former showgirl is so cold-hearted that she has done this so she can leave husband John Payne and run away with Dexter. Payne’s first sign something is amiss should have been the diamond watch she’s suddenly wearing earlier that evening, though she claims the stones are fake. Still, according to her, “They could have been real if I hadn’t married a punk.”
Her husband was a prize fighter who could have been a contender (aren’t they all in noir?) until he nearly lost an eye in a fight. Now that he is not allowed to fight, he has a dream of owning a service station, which is a sad objective I’ve noticed is shared by similar characters in a couple of other noirs. Until then, he is making a living as a cabbie. He drives her to work in her cab, and she rides in the front seat, still making such digs as, “Has it ever occurred to you that, when I ride in a cab, I would rather ride in the back seat?”
Payne’s former trainer and now boss at the cab company (Frank Faylen) tries giving him advice on saving his marriage, and his brilliant idea is they should have kids. Why anybody thinks that putting the additional stress of offspring on a relationship will help keep it together is beyond me. Faylen tells Payne to buy Castle the biggest box of chocolate he can find and whisper in her ear when he gives it to her. We don’t know what words he has in mind, but I imagine it is something classy like “the chocolates are filled with crème, but nowhere near as much as I plan on pumping into your vajayjay.”
Parallel to these plotlines is Payne’s friend Evelyn Keyes finally landing a plum role in a play by a hit Broadway producer. I’m not sure how she came to be friends with a cabbie. Something that instantly made me suspicious is her audition was at nine that night, and I wasn’t surprised when she later tells Payne she needs his help, that she has killed a man. They go to the deserted theatre where a man’s body is immobile on the stage while she tells Payne what led up to her killing him. If Payne hadn’t noticed the poster outside advertising the play as They Called It Murder, that would be some astonishing irony. Payne goes so far as to tell her they can put the body in his cab and he will dump it in a gravel pit near the Hudson.
Then the house lights come up and it turns out this was all a ruse that is her actual audition. The cabbie is rightly outraged, and insulted by the condescending offer of $20 as “a small honorarium” from an old guy who looks like Montgomery Burns in human form. Soon, Payne is throwing punches left and right, though I noticed he missed throwing one at Monty Burns. As the cabbie goes out the door, one of those guys is on the phone to the police.
Now Payne is wanted by the police, but he doesn’t realize it is for the multiple assaults backstage at that theatre. Instead, he thinks he’s wanted for murder, as he has found the corpse of Castle, placed in the back of his cab by Dexter.
From there, the film keeps piling one ridiculous contrivance and coincidence on top of the other, with these various characters running into each other way too often—so much so that Adler and Lambert believe Payne was involved in the theft of the diamonds simply because he seems to be where they are all the time.
The filming is largely better than one might expect from a poverty row studio, though there are some telling signs of the budget limitations. A great deal more closeups than usual suggests very small sets. Some shoots was done in real environments, and the production would have benefited from more of those. What is strange are matte shots done with either an unstable camera or an unstable matte. Regardless, the movement in just part of the screen is jarring and ruins the effect.
Fortunately, where the picture really shines is the dialogue. When Payne tries to comfort Keyes after he thinks she has committed homicide, he says to her, “There are worse things than murder. You can kill somebody one inch at a time.” This is after Keyes has been lamenting how badly her acting career has been going: “Three years in New York and not even cast in a failure.”
The performances are largely solid, especially from the dependable Payne, Adler and Lambert. Payne is especially complex, as he is actually a pretty bad person who is quick to lash out at friends like Faylen. Castle is very good as a deeply bitter woman and one can understand why she is that way. I wish she was in the movie more, but her death is one of the primary cogs which drives the plot. Unfortunately, this is representative of her film career overall, as she never managed to break through beyond such minor roles. Keyes, however, is terrible in this, both when playing as an actress who obviously isn’t mean to be good and when she is just supposed to be a normal human being. In some scenes, we watch in close-up as she keeps cycling through what seem to be a random combination of shifting eyes and the raising of a single eyebrow.
Instead, like so many of these poverty row noirs, 99 River Street shines best in the moments with the most minor of characters. Frank Scannell gets a great bit in his very short time on the screen, where his lonely bartender says of the beer rejected by Payne, “I can’t even give the stuff away.” Then he takes a swig, and what he does after getting a face full of foam is pretty funny. Weirder is Eddy Waller as Payne’s former boxing manager. The guy looks remarkably like Robert Stack, and I couldn’t help but recall that actor as he was in Airplane!, so I kept thinking he was going to say something funny. He doesn’t say anything humorous, though he did says something which stuck with me, and that is how he used to get 33 1/3 of Payne’s pay. That seems a bit high, but is it the record?
Dir: Phil Karlson
Starring John Payne, Evelyn Keyes, Brad Dexter, Frank Faylen
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray