Audience Member
A stranger with mysterious powers corrupts an honest politician. Milland at most smooth 40s best, debonair and diabolical as the devil himself… maybe. Film Noir meets the supernatural, but never tips over into outright horror. Tight, well-made and there isn't a mis- step anywhere in the film. Audery Totter as the temptation is sleazy and manipulative but it's Milland's show from start to finish - and I love the Rembrandt comment!
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
01/26/23
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Ken R
This strange story of an honest crime-fighting district attorney certainly has several haunting moments. They involve a dark stranger who has the uncanny ability to appear and disappear at precisely the right moments. This suave, eerie gentleman offers vital evidence to our honest DA against a highly corrupt criminal - that would allow him to be put away forever. No self-respecting DA could pass this up at any cost – but what is the cost? With fog bound meetings on a lonely pier at the wrong end of town, the too good to be true deal is struck. - Now to cover the unrevealed cost.
Wonderful direction and shadowy cinematography combined with superb performances make this a must-see rarity. Most unfortunately, it's been locked away in the MCA vaults since Paramount sold it in a package in the 50s. TCM HD is your only hope to see the newly re-printed copy - struck off for one of their Noir festivals. Let's hope they may offer it for sale on DVD sometime in future!
Some Public Domain copy houses are offering M.0.D. Off-Air copies, some of which are poor but one from the UK has a reasonably good/OK transfer on offer.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
07/27/20
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Audience Member
Interesting plot with judge unknowingly collaborating with the Devil in human form.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/19/23
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Audience Member
A beautifully shot Faustian tale which relies rather heavy-handedly on the power of a prop at the conclusion but has a lot to enjoy along the way. Ray Milland as Nick Beal looks an awful lot like he might have been an inspiration for the look of Robert Mitchum's Harry Powell in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/12/23
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Audience Member
A murder taking place after following the killer and the unsuspecting victim into the dark, then seamlessly transitioning to the next scene starting on the back of a character's coat, which is an identical black to the darkness. Some time later, another character passes through the dark just long enough for us to think something sinister is going to happen like before, until the character unassumingly comes back into the light. A character materializes and disappears inexplicably, aided significantly by the seaside fog. This is the quintessence of noir, a genre where an allegorical modern take on Faust is right at home, especially with the presence of an ace trifecta of lead actors. I mean, Milland was born to play the devil.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/19/23
Full Review
Audience Member
<b>Alias Nick Beal</b> (John Farrow, 1949)
While Aussie director John Farrow was nominated for Best Director for is 1942 war picture <i>Wake Island</i>, and worked steadily in Hollywood from the mid-thirties until his death in 1963, his career didn't really send him into the A-list until the mid-fifties, when he started directing a trail of hits that began with the John Wayne vehicle <i>Hondo</i>. (He picked up his only Oscar win during the salad days-for co-writing the 1957 script for <i>Around the World in Eighty Days</i>.) Many of the films he made before that time are, to be charitable, obscure. I've been trying to track down a copy of <i>Little Miss Thoroughbred</i> for years without success. I've managed to come up with a few of the others, though, and one of them is <i>Alias Nick Beal</i>, an interesting, if smarmy, post-war <i>Faust</i>.
The good doctor, in this case, is actually a district attorney, Joseph Foster (the great Thomas Mitchell, from such classics as <i>High Noon</i> and <i>It's a Wonderful Life</i>), with ambitions towards less, shall we say, hands-on political roles. Mephistopheles takes the form of one Nick Beal (<i>The Lost Weekend</I>'s Ray Milland, who'd teamed with Farrow the year before in <i>The Big Clock</i>). Beal offers Mitchell the documents he needs to put a criminal behind bars forever, with one small caveat: there's no way they can be gotten at legally. He'll have to sacrifice some of that moral uprightness for the cause. Mitchell, who believes the ends justify the means, agrees, and we begin down the road we expect: Beal gets Mitchell farther and farther into dutch, until Mitchell finally realizes what (or whom) he's dealing with and has to decide: power or his soul?
That the ending of this film is pretty much sewn up before the first frame is no reason not to watch it. The journey is often more interesting than the destination, when it comes to movies. But what makes variations on this theme such as <i>The Devil and Daniel Webster</i> interesting is that they <i>are</i> variations. <i>Alias Nick Beal</i> plays it as straight as the line between Thomas Mitchell's eyes and Audrey Totter's splendid cleavage. Farrow had the right idea-take <i>Faust</I> and make it into a piece of <i>noir</i>-but he neglected to note a couple of the defining features of <i>noir</i>, which are decidedly incompatible with the story as written (and as presented here). For example, what was the last <i>noir</i> film you saw that had a completely happy ending? Go on, I'll wait.
Still thinking? Of course you are, because that movie doesn't exist. The downbeat ending is one of the defining features of <i>noir</i>, as much as the sultry, low-voiced dame (Totter, in fact, in quite a few cases) and the square-jawed sap who suddenly realizes the jaws of life's trap are about to close on him through no real agency of his own. Here's the problem: it <i>is</i> Joseph Foster who brings about his own downfall, as well as being the agent who almost singlehandedly engineers the ending of the film. Foster is an empowered hero, not a <i>noir</i> type at all.
Not to say this is a bad film. In fact, there is much to like about it, and the majority of that comes from the acting. Mitchell, Milland, Totter (as the woman Beal sets up to try and lure Foster away from his wife, played by the indomitable Geraldine Wall), George MacReady, that's a principal cast you can't argue with, and they all do a very good job. If only they'd had better source material to do it with, Farrow's salad days may have come four years sooner than they actually did. ** 1/2
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
Full Review
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