Dead Reckoning

In John Cromwell’s Dead Reckoning, Humphrey Bogart plays Warren “Rip” Murdock, a soldier just returned home from WWII, who travels with his best friend and fellow paratrooper Johnny Drake (William Prince) to collect Drake’s Congressional Medal of Honor; before reaching Washington, DC, however, Johnny flees without explanation, only to show up dead (burnt “like charcoal” at the morgue) a couple days later. Compelled to conduct his own investigation into his best pal’s disappearance, Rip eventually lands at a nightclub where Johnny’s girlfriend Coral Chandler (Lizabeth Scott) sings “Either It’s Love Or It Isn’t” as a sort of mating call to Rip which composer Marlin Skiles brings back frequently as a theme. (Trivia: Coral also goes by the masculine “Mike” just like Anne Baxter’s “Mike” character in Yellow Sky the following year). Cromwell lets the hard-boiled voice-over and dialogue set the tone, and Bogart’s chemistry with Scott may not reach Bacall levels, but it’s quite convincing. The fire setting scene toward the end is a bit silly, but other scenes and elements have become classics of the noir canon, especially the “smell of jasmine” when Rip first meets Coral (“I was walking into something alright”) which he smells again right before getting knocked out.