Reflections on ... Pitfall (1948)

/ A girl and a gun ... Lizabeth Scott and Raymond Burr in Pitfall (1948). Interestingly, this publicity still bears no relation to anything that happens in the film itself! /

A Lobotomy Room film recommendation: tense and compelling 1948 film noir Pitfall, directed by Andre de Toth. Thematically and stylistically it may remind you of two movies we’ve already screened at the monthly Lobotomy Room film club (currently on hiatus due to coronavirus pandemic!). Like Too Late for Tears (1949) – also starring the luscious croaky-voiced Lizabeth Scott – Pitfall is a film noir rooted in a degree of relative plausibility and set in the milieu of comfortably affluent sun-lit middle-class suburbia (suburban Los Angeles in this case). And married middle-aged protagonist John Forbes (the Olympic Insurance Company employee played by Dick Powell) finds himself in the same dilemma as Fred MacMurray’s character in the 1956 Douglas Sirk melodrama There’s Always Tomorrow (1956): he’s ostensibly achieved the American dream (good “white collar” salary, a beautiful house in the ‘burbs, dutiful wife, a cute child) but is consumed with a gnawing dissatisfaction with the ordered routine of his life and a yearning for excitement. Investigating what appears to be a standard embezzlement case, Forbes becomes entangled with alluring fashion model Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) and soon finds himself unwittingly caught-up in adultery, crime – and murder! To considerably complicate proceedings, corrupt private eye Raymond Burr - erotically fixated on Mona (this was before the concept of “stalking”) - is lurking on the sidelines. (Burr makes for a genuinely ominous villain not just due to his menacing physical bulk, but his eerily calm, unblinking demeanor).

/ Dick Powell and Lizabeth Scott in Pitfall (1948) /

What's also noteworthy: for a Production Code-era film, Pitfall takes a remarkably non-judgmental and adult perspective on Forbes' extramarital affair. 

The whole cast is exemplary (including Jane Wyatt as Forbes’ unsuspecting wife) but Scott is heart-wrenching as Mona. In contrast to Too Late for Tears, here she’s a good girl – well, a complicated, sinned-against and down-on-her-luck girl striving to be good. (At every turn, Mona strives to do the honorable thing - which never does her any favours). It’s astonishing to reflect that years ago Scott was routinely dismissed as an ersatz Lauren Bacall. An all-too typical assessment is writer Penny Stalling’s: “Scott ... churned out twenty-two films between 1945 and 1953, but few are memorable.” How could a filmography studded with gems likes Pitfall, Too Late for Tears and Desert Fury be “unmemorable”? Even Scott’s lesser films (like The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers and Dead Reckoning) are at least interesting! In Pitfall, Scott is particularly seductive when extolling the virtues of day-time drinking: “Have you ever noticed if for some reason you want to feel completely out of step with the rest of the world, the only thing to do is sit around a cocktail lounge in the afternoon?”

High quality version of Pitfall on YouTube here. 

Further reading.