The Glass Key (1942 Stuart Heisler)

Jonathan Latimer adapted Dashiel Hammett's 1931 novel. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake are reteamed after the same year's This Gun For Hire (April, the follow-up released in October), with Brian Donlevy (not perhaps the best actor, but has a certain presence) in the lead role. With Bonita Granville, Richard Denning, Joseph Calleia, William Bendix, Frances Gifford (nurse), Donald MacBride (shady DA), Margaret Hayes (disloyal wife), Lillian Randolph (uncredited singer) and that guy from It's a Wonderful Life who swallows his chewing tobacco (Tom Fadden).

Photography Theodor Sparkhul, music Victor Young.

Has great moments, especially Ladd's escape - he's barely conscious - so good we had to watch it twice - but is perhaps most memorable for the scenes between Ladd and Bendix (real life buddies). Bendix's character has an intimation of homosexuality? He keeps calling his crime partner (and later Ladd) 'sweetie' and has a creepy sadism about him, and when he's talking about 'bouncing him off the walls' there's a sort of tender protective quality at the same time. Ladd takes a particularly nasty beating (even today) and the fact that he walks back in to the clutches of Bendix twice, unarmed, shows what a cool customer he is.

Even the DA's corrupt in this one. Considering it was the early days of WWII in America, to feature such corruption in politics must have been quite a risk for Paramount, though the reteaming of Ladd and Lake made it a big hit.

Ladd after one of film noir's most savage beatings