Still from The Chase

1946 / 86 min / b/w
Dir. Arthur Ripley / Scr. Philip Yordan
Cast: Robert Cummings, Michele Morgan, Peter Lorre
Adapted from The Black Path of Fear (1944)
35mm print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Franco-American Cultural Fund.

This screening was part of The Second Annual Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival
Into the Night: Cornell Woolrich and Film Noir

In 1946, film critics didn’t quite know what to make of The Chase. “Its highly improbable plot has the eerie sensation of a bad dream,” wrote Life magazine. It is a work “more confusing than suspenseful,” wrote the New York Times. It reveals how far “narrative innovation could go in the 1940s,” observes David Bordwell in a more recent reassessment. All of which is true: The film’s dream-logic structure recalls not its peers, but the surrealist noir of Mulholland Drive (2001) made more than 50 years later. To date, the film is loved by those committed to the avant-garde. Experimental director Guy Maddin recorded a commentary track for The Chase’s Blu-ray, where he likened the film to the works of David Lynch.

Several of the most striking elements of this Havana-set noir stem not from the Woolrich novel but from the minds of Ripley, Yordan, and producer Seymour Nebenzal (M, 1931; The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933). Nebenzal shot three different endings for the film, and he found its bizarre structure at least partially in post-production. The Chase’s signature plot device – the villain’s modified car – was also an invention of Ripley and Yordan.

Still, it would be unfair to say that Woolrich’s source novel lacked avant-garde instincts. As Thomas Renzi has argued, The Black Path of Fear is a novel where “tonal considerations supersede strict narrative logic.” The same, of course, could be said of The Chase.