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Never Trust a Gambler (1951) is a film noir thriller. Vladimir Nabokov has observed: “In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl.” Let’s see how closely this movie cleaves to Nabokov’s rule-of-thumb.

Opening with a night-time shot of cars streaming across the Bay Bridge, the action cuts to a couple of Sheriff’s deputies speeding to an apartment building wherein resides their quarry Steve Garry (Dane Clark) who is, at that moment, attired in a natty dressing gown, looking at the front page of the San Francisco Post.

In large type, the lead story blares the unwelcome news: “Key Witness Missing / Steve Garry Fails to Appear in Gould Wife Murder Trial.” Obviously, the lawmen are on their way to pick up Garry so that he might be forced to take the witness stand. For some reason, Garry wants to avoid that.

Garry springs into action. As he is quickly shoving neatly-folded clothing into a valise, he hears a car pull up in front of the apartment building. He peeks out the window of his second-story studio apartment and bolts down the fire escape as the deputies enter the room.

What does Garry’s precipitously-vacated room tell us? It is well-furnished: we see a fine Biedermeyer chest of drawers and a number of bronze statuettes. Garry has a discerning eye and has surrounded himself with nice things.

Back at HQ, the Sheriff puts out the alert: “To all western cities – make it strong!” The Sheriff pounds his desk – “Steve Garry has got to be found!”

Just as the iconic Bay Bridge anchors the opening scenes in the Bay Area, so the iconic art deco City Hall of Los Angeles locates Garry’s subsequent misadventures.

In the Los Angeles Homicide Department, officers are instructed to help out their brothers in San Francisco by keeping an eye out for Steve Garry.

Scene switches to Virginia Merrill (Cathy O’Donnell) walking down a residential street on her way home from her teaching job. Virginia is wearing a modest two-piece suit. She looks exactly what she is: “a nice girl.” She is affectionately greeted by a neighbor seated on his porch, and another woman who is also out walking.

Note again these mundane details: Virginia is on her way home from her teaching job: she is walking down the street, not driving up to her front door. Does she teach at a neighborhood school, within walking distance? Or, did she take take a City bus to work?

In 1951, pink-collar working women like Virginia wore sensible shoes to the office or the classroom: oxfords with kitten heels, comfortable for standing in all day and for walking home in. To work, Virginia certainly would not have worn sexy stiletto-heeled pumps nor tall chunky ankle-strap shoes; she would not have worn casual wedgies, nor sandals, nor espadrilles, nor mocs.

Later, we find that Virginia does indeed own a car.

Thanks to FDR’s War Production Board edicts, civilian car production in America ceased in February1942 and resumed in the Summer of 1945. The 1946 cars were simply 1942 models with cosmetic changes.

Virginia’s car appears to be a 1946 Ford Fordor. If she purchased it second-hand in 1950, this used car would have set her back about $500 – about ten thousand dollars in today’s currency.

As a public school teacher in Los Angeles, Virginia’s annual income would have been around four thousand dollars (today’s equivalent: eighty thousand). Virginia’s monthly pay (before taxes) would have been less than $330 per month, but she could easily have saved the money $500 needed to pay cash for a good used car, one of a glut of new models had which rolled out of Detroit shortly after the war ended … one which a more affluent purchaser snapped up in 1946 and then traded in a few years later for a newer model.

Virginia’s trim white house is rendered vaguely Colonial Revival in style (not Spanish Colonial Revival, a more common Los Angeles architectural look) simply by the addition of classical columns on the porch. The house was probably built in the 1920s for around one thousand dollars, today’s equivalent of twenty thousand dollars. Similar neighboring houses indicate that it is situated in a subdivision, probably constructed for aspiring middle-class workers who put their Roaring Twenties paychecks into the American Dream — to own a private single-family house.

It is unknown whether Virginia owns or rents her home, which would sell for around ten thousand dollars in 1950, today’s equivalent of two hundred thousand dollars. Note that, in actuality, today this house in Los Angeles would go on the bubblicious West Coast real estate market for much more that a quarter-million dollars; rent today would run a tenant close to three thousand dollars a month (an amount up a whopping 65% since 2010).

As a public school teacher, in 1951, Virginia’s annual pay topped around four thousand dollars (today’s equivalent of eighty thousand dollars), making her monthly pre-tax paycheck less than $330 (six thousand, six hundred dollars today).

Never Trust a Gambler is set in 1951. A year or two if Virginia had wanted to, she might have been able to purchase a tract house in the vast new planned community of Lakewood City, near Long Beach.

The “instant city” of Lakewood, near Long Beach, was quickly populated by young GI families, who were able to attain the American Dream (home ownership) thanks to the GI Bill and low mortgage payments. A GI Bill family could move into a new house in Lakewood for $44 (less than nine hundred dollars in today’s currency).

Both Virginia’s Colonial Revival home, built sometime in the decade after WWI somewhere in the City of Los Angeles, and the burgeoning “instant city” called Lakewood, built in the decade after WWII, point up the attractiveness of the West Coast throughout the Twentieth Century: the climate salubrious and the economy strong, it was a good place to live and easy to make a living.

Later in the story, Garry shows Virginia his bankbook, pointing out to her that he has been depositing a steady six hundred dollars per month.

Virginia is impressed with this documentary proof that her ex-husband is banking $600/month (twelve thousand in today’s dollars). Virginia believes that perhaps her wastrel ex-husband has changed …

Have you ever had a bankbook?

Have you ever even seen a bankbook?

Mid-century: bankbook coexists with plastic.

In my last post (D.O.A. – 1949), we learn that the first credit card, Diner’s Club, was introduced in 1950. In Never Trust a Gambler (released in 1951), we see that Virginia – somewhat out of character perhaps, owns a credit card.

There is much more to be said about the material culture evinced in Never Trust a Gambler (1951), but we will touch on those topics in analyzing other mid-century films.

Before closing, we will look at one more aspect of this film noir 1951 gem: Virginia and the one other important actress, her friend Dolores (Myrna Dell). Virginia is a stereotypical “good girl” while Dolores is a stereotypical “good-time girl,” The heavy-handed symbolic import of the names Virginia and Dolores is unmistakable: “virginal” and “sorrows.” Although Virginia was amongst the top-ten most-prevalent girls’ names in the early 1920s. Dolores was merely amongst the top-hundred. It is inconceivable that the names of the “good girl” character and the “good-time girl” character could have been been switched: that would have been jarringly unacceptable to mid-century mores.

Please bookmark this site and check back soon for the next look at a mid-century movie.

Seen from behind, Frank Bigelow walks down seemingly endless, shadowy, tunnel-like corridors.

He enters the Homicide Department of the Los Angeles Police, where he reports a murder – his own murder. Bigelow’s story is told in continuous flashback, ending in his collapse and death surrounded by detectives. The Homicide Chief instructs his clerk to note Frank Bigelow as “Dead on Arrival.”

His story opens on a scorching July morning in Banning, California. Bigelow, an accountant, is meeting with one of his clients, a hottie who comes close to draping herself over him. Bigelow’s jealously possessive secretary Paula Gibson (Pamela Britton) is visibly annoyed – a state of mind shared by Bigelow, the object of Paula’s fervid affections, as she threatens to quit her job and leave her boss to his own devices, in protest of his insistence on embarking on a weeklong vacation in San Francisco – without her. However, Bigelow (who, it turns out, is a real horndog) feels that Paula’s secretarial and sexual services out-weigh her irritating passive-aggressive behavior and he employs Irish charm to keep her from quitting.

Succumbing to Bigelow’s over-the-top blandishments, Paula gives him a melting, besotted gaze (the likes of which we don’t see again until the brief reconciliation of John Belushi and the mad Carrie Fisher in the Chicago sewers). Paula agrees to not quit her job. Attempting to further mollify his useful secretary/sex-partner, Bigelow invites Paula to Eddie’s, the local tavern, to cool off while he awaits the train that will take him to San Francisco … and where, like a broken record, Paula again begins haranguing Bigelow to take her along on his get-away. He refuses.

In July, Banning experiences temperatures approaching the high 90s, and Paula exults in the refreshing chill of Eddie’s tavern, expressing the wish that that Bigelow’s office could be refrigerated.

Not “air conditioned” but “refrigerated.” When I was a youngster, “refrigerated” was the term commonly used to describe artificially chilled public spaces. I recall seeing signs on commercial buildings (banks, movie houses, department stores), boasting that their rooms were “refrigerated.” Private spaces (residences) depended on swamp coolers.

In the bar, we get the first glimpse of an important motif: drinking a glass of alcohol. Paula sips her glass of beer and exchanges her nearly-full glass for Bigelow’s empty glass. This inconsequential act foreshadows the fateful switch of liquor glasses in the San Francisco bar, in which Bigelow is given the fatal dose of “luminous toxin” (some un-named radioactive substance).

Not depicted in the film is Bigelow’s journey between Banning and San Francisco, with a brief stop to take on passengers at Los Angeles Union station, here shown from its parking lot, circa 1940s.

Bigelow would have spent the train ride (from Banning to the Bay Area) in a comfortable car, in the company of well-dressed travelers, men and women both wearing suits. They were not “dressed up” for “a special occasion.”

During this period in America’s history, ordinary travelers (whether by airplane, by rail car, even by Greyhound bus) un-selfconsciously wore suits. It was normal and expected: to do otherwise would be considered indecorous.

In San Francisco, Bigelow arrives via taxi at the St. Francis, a swank hotel. Money is not a problem for Bigelow: he is a successful and affluent businessman.

Note another mode of available San Francisco City transportation, the streetcar, which shares the city streets with new-model automobiles. Later in the movie, in the Los Angeles City scenes, we see city busses. In 1945, National City Lines, a front group for GM, acquired the Los Angeles City streetcar system and converted many of its lines into bus routes, with the long-term goal of reducing public transportation and getting everybody behind the wheel of their own personal automobile. For various reasons, this plan to increase ownership of private automobiles did not proceed as rapidly in San Francisco.

Again, note the dress of the people on the sidewalk: unless it is a workman in his work uniform, everyone is wearing what used to be called “street clothes” (now called “office wear”). At that time, it would have been extraordinary, a sign of madness, for even a poor person to walk down the street dressed like a scarecrow, with hair like straw blowing in the wind.

The well-heeled Bigelow checks into the St. Francis Hotel suite he has reserved. One hundred dollars in 1949 would purchase what would take two thousand dollars in 2022. Bigelow’s suite at the St. Francis probably set him back about $100 for the week of his planned vacation. (Today, you can reserve a similar suite at the St. Francis for about two thousand dollars a week.) Bigelow made liberal use of room service and long-distance calls through the hotel switchboard, tipped generously, took cabs, and – in the course of this misadventures – flew from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where he rented a new Buick to pursue his killer. Bigelow pays cash for everything.

Q: Why doesn’t he flash his plastic instead of his cash?

A: D.O.A. was released in late December, 1949, and the first credit card (Diner’s Club) was introduced in 1950. The world of D.O.A. was a pay-as-you-go world.

Toward the end of the movie, Bigelow asks Paula how much money the business has in the bank. She answers: twenty-two hundred dollars, today’s equivalent of nearly a half-million dollars. (This might make you wonder why Bigelow’s office is equipped with a fan, not refrigeration – has he decided to not make improvements because he is planning a flit?) Apparently, Paula is a signer on the checkbook or on the safety-deposit box: Bigelow instructs Paula to withdraw all the money. She asks if they are going to just not pay the bills; Bigelow tells to not worry about that, but to buy herself a mink coat. Paula reasonably asks Bigelow if he is drunk!

Seventy-five years ago (before emerging nations flooded American markets with shoddy clothing made by slave-labor), store-bought clothing was made by union-labor and was relatively expensive. Using commercially-made patterns (manufactured by Vogue, McCall’s, Butterick’s, and Simplicity), many women stitched their own clothing or employed the local dress-maker. Today, it is common for Americans to have dozens of articles of clothing: closets bulge with cheap clothing. But 75 years ago, wardrobes were carefully edited, and clothing was constructed of natural fibers, made to last for years.

Today, the lifespan of a typical woman’s top (shoddily constructed of cheap and flimsy synthetic material) is very short indeed: the second-hand stores and the landfills are full of these sagging rags. But, in 1949, American consumers had not yet entered the Throw-Away Era, and well-made, natural-fiber clothing was the norm.

Although in 1949, there were thirty million telephones in America, direct dial long distance was not available: the first direct-dial long distance call took place in late 1951. Bigelow’s long distance phone call (San Francisco to Banning) had to go through a number of long-distance operators stationed in separate buildings at various geographic locations.

The flurry of phone calls placed between Paula and Bigelow are expensive – but (in the age before cellphones, texting, instant messaging, and emailing) the telephone offers the only way they have to quickly share information.

Ensconced in his hotel suite, Bigelow takes the first of many long-distance calls from Paula while quaffing a scotch. Throughout the movie, Bigelow is seen frequently drinking … but never eating.

Bigelow finds that his swank hotel is rife with gorgeous, very well-dressed and attractive women. It’s “Market Week,” a San Francisco tradition: the annual week during which representatives (traveling salesmen) from important fashion manufacturers meet with department store buyers (all highly-fashionable women). Bigelow is thrilled. He is invited to join a party in the room across the hall. There, booze is flowing and women are dancing, wiggling their hips suggestively. Bigelow is delighted; he is drawn into a rumba, and then dragooned into accompanying the group of merrymakers to a jazz bar at Fisherman’s Wharf.

It is a wild scene: the musicians and the flailing clientele obviously on amphetamines. Montaged close-ups of their faces look demonic. Their speech and their clothing mark them as members of the contemporary counter-culture: “beatniks.”

Hot jazz was the preferred music of the beatniks who, in poetry and novels, scornfully expressed their contempt for “squares”: law-abiding, work-a-day citizens.

Ironically, albeit respectable and affluent, the hard-drinking horndog Bigelow is essentially akin to the anti-establishment beatniks in that his outlook is nihilistic, as is theirs. This points up the invisible rot in post-war American culture.

The clientele of the jazz bar are obviously under the influence of amphetamines. Stimulants had been routinely given to military men during WWII and, after the war, were marketed as “diet pills” and “mood elevators.”

Bigelow takes a drink, grimaces, complains that it’s not his. The bartender insists that it is Bigelow’s drink: “You saw me pour it.” Bigelow takes another swallow and then rejects it, ordering a fresh drink. Two swallows of the luminous toxin is all it takes: Bigelow is a walking dead man.

Even before Bigelow unknowingly drinks the luminous toxin, he is on a suicidal course: a heavy drinker, a womanizer stuck with an annoying mistress whom he does not love and who desperately wants him to marry her and give her children, an affluent man whose life seems to be rudderless and without purpose, Bigelow is an empty husk of a man. Even before his death sentence, he is essentially dead, a traveler trekking through a nihilistic wasteland.

Bigelow returns to his hotel and goes to bed. In the morning, he orders a Corpse-Reviver (hair of the dog that bit him), but cannot bring himself to taste it when it arrives. He leaves and makes his way to a Medical Building.

The doomed man walks into a doctor’s office and is immediately examined. No appointment, no wait for insurance authorizations: simply show up and pay cash up front.

These details point up the fact that mid-century America was an era of personal freedom which is today almost unimaginable: Americans today are little better off than Chinese slaves under constant surveillance. And where is the outrage? We see only simmering discontent in the Right and blind acquiescence in the Left.

At the Medical Building, the doctor takes x-rays and examines him. A specialist enters with the results of his lab-work. Bigelow’s prognosis: he is doomed. He has only a few days to live.

Bigelow hysterically rejects the doctors’ judgement and runs wildly out of the office and down busy Market Street. This scene was not okayed in advance with city authorities, hence the authentically surprised reactions of many of the pedestrians as Bigelow rushes past them.

Bigelow frenetically pushes his way into another medical office and wrestles with an orderly. When Bigelow says “luminous toxic,” the doctor takes him seriously and immediately conducts lab-work. The diagnosis of the first doctors is borne out by the glowing fluid in the test-tube: it is Bigelow’s blood, irredeemably contaminated with luminous toxin. Bigelow is a walking dead man.

In case you have not yet seen this movie, I do not want to spoil it for you by revealing further plot. As you watch this movie, I urge you to enjoy it on several levels: as an entertaining thriller (fiction) and as a window into a vanished America (fact).

Thank you, and check back soon for more movies and analyses.