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Monday, January 15, 2018

WHIPLASH (1948)

Warners went with their ‘C’ team on this one. (A likely follow up to the Joan Crawford/John Garfield/Jean Negulesco directed HUMORESQUE/’46.) Height-challenged Dane Clark, in the Garfield spot, is a free-spirited West Coast artist who doesn’t want to sell his seascape to rich, tall & masochistically miserable Alexis Smith. But they meet and click. She runs away to NYC, he follows and, by happenstance, knocks out an up-and-coming boxer who tries to stop him. ‘This boy should be in the ring!,’ says Smith’s wheelchair-bound hubby Zachary Scott, a former boxer now running a stable of fighters. You’ll guess the rest. Eve Arden gets thrown in the mix to crack wise about lousy dates (she’s taken from MILDRED PIERCE rather than HUMORESQUE, but close enough). And if all the characters seem borrowed from recent/superior pics, that’d be less a problem if they’d only thought to bring over some motivation as well. Why does Clark have such a chip on his shoulder? Trying for dynamic, he’s just overwrought. Smith does look pretty gorgeous and Scott is always fascinating on screen, but journeyman hack megger Lewis Seiler, in the first of a half dozen pics @ Warners, can’t make heads-or-tails out of things.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: An early credit for Harriet Frank Jr. who went on to better things collaborating with husband Irving Ravetch on films like HUD, NORMA RAE, LONG HOT SUMMER, many more.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Dane Clark is said to be at his very best in Frank Borzage’s MOONRISE/’48 (not seen here, but trying!) made directly before this.

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