With Ginger Rogers being best known for her musicals she did with Fred Astaire, it is odd to see her as a brassy, rough-edged convict in 1955 noir Tight Spot. She may not be fully convincing in the role, but damned if she doesn’t give it her all.
We first see her in a prison laundry, where she is explaining the rules to newbie Lucy Marlow. Chief among these rules is never to volunteer “and don’t ever do even one bit more than what you’re told to do.” I’ve never had to do time, yet this reminded me of my very short time spent working in a post office distribution center, where some employees laid out similar terms for me, along with unspoken threats of how my health my be endangered if I did not adhere to these guidelines.
While Rogers may have hard edges, she doesn’t seem to be cruel person. But there is only so far she is willing to extend herself for others, which is why Edward G. Robinson will have difficulty convincing her to testify in court against mob boss Lorne Greene. He may put her up in a hotel room surrounded by police, but she has good reason to be concerned. When Robinson asks her if she doesn’t think they’re capable of protecting her, she says, “I wouldn’t want to put you to the test, knowing how embarrassed you’d be if you failed.” And she doesn’t even know about Alfred Linder, the last person who was going to testify and who was taken out by a sniper while ascending the steps of the courthouse. Funny how the police didn’t walk that guy in through a more concealed entrance or at least walk in a closer formation around him.
It is interesting to see Rogers’s prisoner as she takes in her first glimpses of the outside world in a long time. As she’s being driving past shop windows, she marvels over how much fashions have changed. She enjoys just watching people on the sidewalks go about their mundane lives. She is also food-obsessed, and there is a joy in watching her order as much gourmet food from room service as she can put away. There is a telethon on the TV every time it is turned on, as she is glued to even that.
Her handlers are police officers Brian Keith and Katherine Anderson. Anderson has a good role, nothing too detailed, but she has the bearing of a cop while also speaking lovingly of her daughter. She doesn’t get many opportunities to display any nuance, but I really liked her mock appall over how female characters are described in the pulp detective novel she’s reading: “The girls in these things…don’t they ever get cold?” Keith, on the other hand, is given a nasty disposition, and the resulting conflicts with Rogers make for a very talky and shouty film. Still, this provides the prompts for her to shoot back with such line as: “Why haven’t built a statue dedicated to the first cop to call a girl ‘Sister’?”
It is no surprise this began life as a play, as the picture rarely leaves the confines of that hotel room. The snapper banter and mercurial personalities keep this moving along, but I was still aware at times that very little seems to move the story forward. It isn’t Sartre’s No Exit, but it does have an odd quality of inertia through most of the second half. Then again, that does effectively convey the listless feeling of being stuck in such a place and a dreadful “aw shucks” cowboy begging for money each time the television is turned on.
Doye O’Dell is “Mississippi Mac” in those segments, and I like how nothing he does is laugh-out-loud funny, yet everything we see him do scans as a tad peculiar, such as a ballad about his dead wife had wanted another woman to have her shoes. Another minor character I liked is Peter Leeds as one of the detectives. For such a brief amount of time, he gets a disproportionate share of the solid lines. In one of the picture’s best bits, a one-two punch has Keith telling a bystander the blood on him was two bullets through the chest, and that’s just routine, only for Leeds to add, “It was actually three bullets. We just haven’t told him yet.”
Tight Spot is not a complete success, it is good enough to barely nudge its way into the win column. This is truly a showcase for Rogers to show some range and, while she does well by this role, I felt the actor never disappeared behind the artifice of the performance. Perhaps the film would have been more believable if it had opened up beyond what were obvious constraints of the stage play upon which it was based. I feel one of the final images we see is an apt metaphor, and that is somebody’s chest rising and falling, though they just got shot to death. That dead guy sure is breathing heavily.
Dir: Phil Karlson
Starring Ginger Rogers, Edward G. Robinson, Brian Keith
Watched as part on the Powerhouse/Indicator UK (region B) blu-ray box set Columbia Noir #2