99 River Street: John Payne's Cab-Driver Noir

99 River Street opens on a fight. Two heavyweights in a ring, a title on the line, one of them taking a beating around the eye that is clearly going to end something. It is staged close and shot hard, and it runs long enough that you settle into it as the film’s present tense.

Then the camera pulls back and it is a television set, in a bar, and the man watching it is the man losing the fight.

That is the first three minutes, and it is one of the most efficient statements of purpose in American crime cinema. Phil Karlson has told you the premise, the psychology and the whole tragic mechanism of his picture before the plot has laid a finger on anyone: this is a film about a man who cannot stop watching his own worst moment, in public, on a loop, while strangers who do not recognise him drink around him.

The cab

Ernie Driscoll, played by John Payne, was a heavyweight contender. An eye injury sustained in that televised fight finished him — no comeback, no rematch, no negotiation. He now drives a New York cab, which the film understands as the most humiliating job it could have given him. A boxer is a man who is looked at. A cab driver is furniture with a meter on it.

Karlson and his screenwriter, Robert Smith, working from a story by George Zuckerman, build the whole first act out of that indignity rather than out of incident. Ernie drives. Fares talk past him. His dispatcher and only friend, Stan Hogan, played by Frank Faylen, tries to interest him in the future — a service station, a partnership, a plan. Ernie will not have it, because taking the plan means agreeing that the fight is over.

And at home there is Pauline, played by Peggie Castle, who married a contender and got a cab driver, and who has arrived at contempt via a route the film sketches with real economy. She is having an affair with Victor Rawlins, a jewel thief played by Brad Dexter, and she is not being especially careful about it, because part of what she wants is for Ernie to notice.

The film is 83 minutes long. Edward Small produced, United Artists distributed, and it was made as second-feature product for a market that expected nothing from it. Karlson had made Kansas City Confidential the previous year with the same star and the same producer, and this is the film where he stops being interesting and starts being good.

Why it works: Karlson shoots the body

There is a specific thing Karlson does that separates this from the fifty other cheap crime pictures of 1953, and it is physical.

Most noir violence is an event: it arrives, it resolves, the plot moves. Karlson’s violence is labour. When men fight in this film they get tired. They breathe badly. They hold on to each other because standing has become difficult. They break furniture in ways that suggest the furniture was in the way rather than that a stunt was scheduled. Karlson had a career-long interest in what a beating actually costs — he would spend the anger properly two years later in The Phenix City Story — and here he has a leading man who can carry it.

Because the other half of the trick is Payne’s build. He is heavy through the shoulders and he moves like a man who has been trained, and Karlson keeps putting him in doorways and cab interiors and back rooms that are visibly too small for him. Ernie Driscoll is a large violent instrument that has been folded into a taxi, and every frame he is in is slightly under-sized for him. When he finally comes out of the box, the release is architectural.

Franz Planer photographed it, and the collector’s note here is worth having: Planer had shot Criss Cross for Robert Siodmak in 1949, and he brings the same instinct for a city made of wet surfaces and hard verticals. He would go on to shoot Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which tells you something about how deep the bench was on a picture nobody was watching. The waterfront material in the last reel — the New Jersey dockside address that gives the film its title — is lit with a precision the budget did not require.

Karlson’s other bet is on withholding. He shoots long stretches of Ernie simply driving, and the cab windscreen becomes the film’s real screen: a man looking out at a city through glass, unable to touch it. It rhymes with the television set in the first scene without underlining anything.

The face that used to sing

John Payne’s career is the strangest fact about this film.

He had been a leading man at Twentieth Century-Fox — musicals, light comedies, the handsome and inoffensive baritone opposite Betty Grable and Alice Faye. He is the lawyer in Miracle on 34th Street. Nothing in that work suggests the man in 99 River Street, and Payne spent the early 1950s deliberately dismantling it, taking the roughest scripts he could find at the cheapest studios that would have him.

What he brings is a quality that better actors often cannot fake: the sense of a decent man who has recently discovered he is capable of something ugly and has not decided what to do about it. Payne is stiff in places. He has one or two line readings that land flat. He is also, whenever the film requires him to be frightening, genuinely frightening, because you can see the pleasant Fox contract player still in there being appalled.

Evelyn Keyes plays Linda James, an actress, and she gives the film its second engine. Keyes had been Suellen O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and had spent a decade being wasted; here Karlson hands her the picture’s most demanding sequence — a mid-film set piece that is the most discussed thing in the film and which this review will not spoil — and she takes it apart. Brad Dexter, seven years before The Magnificent Seven, plays Rawlins as a man whose confidence is running about ten per cent ahead of his competence, which turns out to matter.

The case against

The plot is machinery. Once the frame-up engages, 99 River Street becomes a chase built from coincidences that arrive precisely when the runtime needs them, and Karlson’s answer to every credibility problem is to accelerate. It works at 83 minutes. It would collapse at 100.

Pauline is the real cost. Peggie Castle is doing something interesting — a woman punishing a man for a failure that was not his fault, aware that it is unfair, doing it anyway — and the film has no patience for it. She is written as an appetite and disposed of as a plot device, and the picture’s sympathies are so entirely with Ernie that her side of a genuinely tragic marriage never gets stated. The 1953 second feature was not built to carry that weight, which is an explanation rather than a defence.

And the ending sentimentalises. Karlson spends 80 minutes establishing that this man’s life has been destroyed by an eye injury and the indifference of everyone around him, then hands him a resolution warm enough to send the audience home. Detour would not have blinked.

The ancestors

The boxing side descends from The Set-Up, Robert Wise’s 1949 film, which established the ruined-fighter noir and did it in real time with more formal nerve than Karlson attempts. Wise’s fighter is destroyed inside the ring; Karlson’s has already been destroyed and has to live in the aftermath, which is the harder and less cinematic problem.

The framing device — ordinary man, false accusation, no help from the law — is the engine of He Walked by Night and its whole docu-noir cycle, though those films side with the police and this one has no time for them at all. And the real descendant is easy to name: any film where a large quiet man with a grievance drives around a city at night getting steadily more dangerous. Taxi Driver has a different diagnosis and the same vehicle.

Sitting closest, though, is Murder by Contract — another film that discovered you can build a crime picture out of an occupation, a temperament and about four locations, and let the plot come to you.

The verdict

99 River Street is the best film Phil Karlson made about a man, and the best film John Payne ever appeared in, and it exists because a director and a star both had something to prove at a studio that was not paying enough attention to stop them. It has a plot made of convenience and a wife it does not deserve. It also has the finest use of a cheap star’s expensive baggage in 1950s noir: Karlson took a man the audience had watched sing, wrecked him, put him behind a wheel, and shot the result like a documentary about weight.

Watch it after Kansas City Confidential, which is the rehearsal. Then notice that the whole film is contained in its first three minutes, and that Karlson never once mentions it again.

Spoilers below

The mid-film sequence is Linda’s, and it is the reason people press this film on each other.

Linda finds Ernie at his lowest and tells him she has killed a man. She takes him to a theatre, shows him the body, breaks down, begs him for help — and Ernie, being who he is, starts to help. Then the lights come up. It is an audition. The body stands. There are producers in the seats. Linda has used a man’s actual desperation as material for a scene, in front of an audience, without telling him, and Karlson holds on Payne’s face while the room applauds her.

Keyes plays the reversal without a wink, which is what makes it land — the performance has to be good enough that we are taken too, and it is. And the sequence is doing structural work rather than showing off. It rhymes exactly with the opening: Ernie’s private catastrophe, staged for spectators, watched by people who are entertained. The television set in the bar and the theatre stalls are the same joke told twice.

The plot proper: Rawlins murders Pauline and leaves her in Ernie’s cab, which is the frame. Rawlins’s own scheme has already failed — he has stolen diamonds and the fence, Christopher, played by Jay Adler, will not touch them once a murder is attached, because a fence buys stones and not problems. That refusal is the most convincingly professional moment in the film, and it strands Rawlins with a fortune he cannot convert and a corpse he cannot explain.

The last act goes to the waterfront and the address of the title, and Karlson finally lets Ernie fight. It is not a boxing match. It is a man who was trained to hit people being given permission, in a room with no referee, and Karlson shoots it as exhaustion — Payne staggering, holding on, hitting because stopping is not available. The film has been building this pressure since the television set, and the release is genuinely cathartic and slightly frightening.

Then Ernie is cleared, and Linda is waiting, and the service station Stan kept offering is suddenly a future rather than a surrender. It is the softest possible landing and Karlson takes it. The consolation is that he has already shown you the cost: a man got his life back by finding someone to hit, and the film is honest enough that the final scene has a chill on it the closing music cannot quite cover.