WOMAN ON PIER 13 (I Married a Communist)(director: Robert Stevenson; screenwiter Charles Grayson/Robert Hardy Andrews/from a story by George W George & George Slavin; cinematographer: Nick Musuraca; editor Roland Gross; cast: Laraine Day (Nan Collins), Robert Ryan (Brad Collins), Thomas Gomez (Vanning), John Agar (Don Lowry), Janis Carter (Christine Norman), Paul E. Burns (Mr. Arnold), William Talman (Bailey), Richard Rober (Jim Travis), Paul Guilfoyle (Ralston, stoolie), Harry V. Cheshire (Mr. Cornwall, shipping owner), 1949)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
This Howard Hughes RKO film first previewed with the title "I Married A Communist," but this title did not strike a chord with the audience, so the title was changed and the story reworked so as to make it more of a palatable melodrama than just a vituperative attack on the Communists. But it still remains to be seen as mostly a propaganda movie.
The film opens with Brad Collins (Ryan) just married to the perfect wife, Nan (Day), after a whirlwind romance where she had little time to learn much about him. He stole her away from her former boyfriend, the union leader, Jim Travis (Rober). Brad was a stevedore who worked his way up in the San Francisco waterfront, to become a vice president for a large shipping company. What he didn't tell his wife or anyone else, was that as a young man named Frank Johnson he had joined the Communist party.
When he was a Commie because he was an embittered young man, he was romancing the sexy and treacherous blonde, Christine Norman (Janis). She is upset that he dumped her to marry Nan and plans to get even with him by exposing his Communist past. But her boss, the Commie party cell head, Vanning (Gomez), has better uses for Brad. He brings Brad to the party headquarters and forces him to go along with the party's political agenda, and he also confiscates a big chunk of his salary. He tells Brad that if he doesn't go along with it, he will expose him as a Commie and implicate him as the murderer of a shop steward.
To spite Brad, Christine tracks down the non-thinking Don (Agar), the handsome brother of Nan, who has just been given a stevedore's job by Brad to curtail his aimless life, and she begins to romance him. He seems to have turned over a new leaf with this work experience -- as the film makes a concerted effort to show that work is good for you, that the bosses are benign, that the union can only succeed if it roots out the few Commie operators in it who are trying to subvert its legitimate aims, that the Communist party is the Devil, and that you can't hide from your past mistakes -- so you better think about what you are doing before you sign up for a Communist membership, because you can never get out of it once you join.
Christine, who works as a high paid photographer as a cover for her party membership, indoctrinates the emotionally weak-minded Don into siding with the party's positions and voicing the dogmatic Marxist opinions against the labor bosses. Meanwhile, Brad and Jim are locked in negotiations to prevent a strike that will shut-down the waterfront, and Vanning sees this as an opportunity to get a foothold in the union by forcing a waterfront shutdown. He orders Brad to stall negotiations and sabotage any attempt for the two sides to get together.
When Christine doesn't listen to Vanning and refuses to dump Don after she got all the use out of him that she could, he has her followed. When he goes to her apartment and he finds that she told Don that she loves him and that she is a Communist agent and, that she couldn't resist telling him about Brad's Communist past and how he is still working for the party, Vanning decides to take action against her. Don, meanwhile, storms out of her place. But Vanning figures correctly that he is going to Brad's house to confront him with the accusations and has him followed.
Vanning hires a contract killer, Bailey (Talman), to kill Don. When Christine calls to warn Nan that Don is in danger, it is too late, as Don is killed by a hit and run driver as he is about to enter Brad's house. When Nan confronts her husband about what he knows, he clams up. Nan is finally fed-up with all his strange behavior of late and suspects something is very wrong, and she decides to take action on her own by going to see Christine. While there, she accidently learns that Bailey did the hit, and she obtains the address where he runs a shooting gallery.
With Nan pursuing Bailey, and with Vanning aware that Christine didn't follow orders, Christine is killed, but it is made to look like a suicide. Brad realizing his wife is now also in danger, eventually tracks her down and finds her in Vanning's hideout, where Vanning plans to kill her. There is a shootout, where Brad gives his life to save his wife and get Vanning, but not before he apologizes to his wife for the mistake he made as a young man and telling her he just couldn't tell her what a fool he was to have ever joined such an evil organization, one where they don't let you leave. She tells him that she loves him, as Brad tells her, she should now marry Jim.
The story was a lot of hokum and misinformation: it distorted the Communist influence in the country and how big business and unions act. It attempted to make a propaganda film that reaffirms the American way of life and familial love, but at the expense of reality. What the film fails to say, since it was made during a period of the shameful American witch hunts in congress, is that you can leave the party but the government still wants you to confess that you joined and makes you rat out all other party members, which is in violation of Fifth Amendment rights.
If you can somehow get by the polemics and the cheesy script and view this melodrama as typical Hollywood, the film is quite entertaining, as it is shot in a dramatic noir style by Musuraca and the leads all give able performances, swallowing some of the most tasteless lines ever with a great deal of bravado. Its moral tone is reaffirmed by Ryan, who must repent from his past guilt by defending his wife, which comes in the climactic scene.
REVIEWED ON 5/26/2000 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
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