Continuing my exploration of the Criterion Channel’s hosting of a number of noirs from Columbia studios I watched Pushover from 1954. The movie stars Fred McMurray, a decade after his turn as Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, E.G. Marshall, Phil Carey, and introducing Kim Novak. Directed by Richard Quine and with a screenplay by Roy Huggins based upon two different stories. This is not the only time two source materials have been combined into a single screenplay though the best-known example of that process is probably The Towering Infernowhich was adapted from the novels The Glass Inferno and The Tower, this movie is a serviceable noir, better that Drive a Crooked Road but not quite on target.

McMurray plays police detective Paul Sheridan, who along with his partner Rick (Carey) is staking out Lona (Novak) the girlfriend of a man wanted for bank robbery and murder. Paul’s boss stresses that after Lona leads them to their suspect, he is to be taken alive so that he can disclose where hundreds of thousands stolen from the bank has been hidden. Paul become at first infatuated and then emotionally entangled with Lona and eventually hatches a scheme to, using his duty as an excuse, kill her boyfriend, and then take off with her and the stolen loot. Getting to this point in the film takes about half of the 88-minute running time and felt like a tire re-tread of Double Indemnity. Once Paul’s less than brilliant plan goes astray complication upon complication pile on his haphazard improvisations with escape becoming less and less likely.

During the set-up of this movie I was scarcely engaged with this cruder version of Wilder’s far superior film but once Paul’s plan derailed I became more invested. The nature of the plan’s failure was nicely established but without blaring klaxons announcing that establishment and I found it very credible that a person once they crossed the line discovers that were never the nice and good person that they had imagined themselves to have been. Still that didn’t justify the tedious and well-trod first half and aside from Novak most of the cast seemed to be sleepwalking through the establishment. Perhaps what makes Pushover unique as a noir is that Novak’s character is not a femme fatale and generates considerable sympathy because she is not the murderous schemer.