THE CLAY PIGEON (1949) is a nifty little suspense thriller just released on DVD in the Warner Archive Film Noir Collection.
I first saw this film three years ago and enjoyed returning to it tonight. It's a lightning-fast tale which manages to pack a lot of plot and characterization into a scant 63 minutes.
The Clay Pigeon is a 1949 American film noir directed by Richard Fleischer and written by Carl Foreman, based on a true story.The drama features Bill Williams and Barbara Hale, real-life husband and wife. The Clay Pigeon is a good candidate for noir fans seeking more of the RKO crime vibe. The Warner Archive Collection DVD-R of The Clay Pigeon is a very good encoding of this minor 1949 show, from a time when RKO mogul Howard Hughes was running his studio into the ground, yet also releasing modest little program pictures.
Clay pigeon may refer to:. The target of the sport of clay pigeon shooting; Clay pigeon floor procedure, a strategy used in the U.S. Senate; The Clay Pigeon, a 1949 film noir; Clay Pigeons, a 1998 film; Clay Pigeon, a 1971 American action film. Title details and video sharing options. Now playing Clay Pigeon, The (1949) (Movie Clip) A Shock Of Some Sort Two goons have just run fugitive amnesiac sailor Jim (Bill Williams) and Martha (Barbara Hale), his hostage, and the widow of the fellow POW who s death he s suspected of causing, off the road, and ensuing events incline her to reconsider his story, in The Clay Pigeon, 1949. Clay shooting the clay pigeon hunt free free download - Skeet Shooting Game - The Clay Pigeon Hunt, Stickman Skeet Shooting - The Clay Pigeon Hunt FREE, Clay Pigeon Hunt, and many more programs. The clay pigeon Air Date: ( August 7, 1949) Plot: +Program #51. Mutual net origination, Mayfair syndication. 'The Clay Pigeon'. A mysterious man has Dan Holiday mention a name to an occult doctor, which nearly scares him to death. TO raise funds for the Sorell War Memorial Community Centre, a clay pigeon shoot will be conducted on the Sorell racecourse on Saturday. THE function has been organised.
Bill Williams plays Jim Fletcher, who comes out of a coma at the Long Beach Naval Hospital only to learn that he's going to be court-martialed for an act of treason committed while he was imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp.
Jim's prison memories have been completely wiped out; terrified at being accused of something horrible he doesn't remember, he escapes from the hospital. Jim hopes his old war buddy, Mark, can help him out and meets Mark's wife Martha (Barbara Hale). Jim has another ugly shock coming when he learns Mark is dead and he's responsible.
Jim and the initially unwilling Martha go on the road looking for answers, which might be found with another old war buddy, Ted (Richard Quine). It's quite a challenge, with both the navy and strange men with guns following Jim around Los Angeles. And Jim has an even bigger shock coming when he's sitting in a Chinese restaurant and suddenly spots the Japanese guard who beat him!
The theme of a couple on the run is something I seem to have been watching a lot of in the last few weeks, including PACIFIC BLACKOUT (1941) and another Warner Archive release, TWO O'CLOCK COURAGE (1945). It's fun to watch the real life Mr. and Mrs. Williams on screen together; married in 1946, they have a comfortable, appealing rapport costarring in this film. They previously appeared together in WEST OF THE PECOS (1945) and A LIKELY STORY (1947).
The movie has another familiar film noir theme, a veteran with a big problem. Veterans seem to have had an especially rough time in film noir land! I could doubtless make a very long list of film noir veterans who find life back in the States perhaps more dangerous than what they experienced in the war.
THE CLAY PIGEON has some great atmosphere, with settings including a coastal trailer park and L.A.'s Chinatown, filmed in black and white by Robert de Grasse.
There's an especially nice scene where Jim hides in the apartment of a war widow. She's played by Mary Marco, who (billed as Maria San Marco) played Keye Luke's bride Jeannie in SLEEP, MY LOVE (1948). It's an interesting thematic touch that while Jim has been tormented by a Japanese man, both during the war and after, his life is saved by a Japanese-American woman.
The cast of THE CLAY PIGEON also includes Martha Hyer as a receptionist who gives Jim a key piece of information and Ann Doran as a bitter nurse.
THE CLAY PIGEON has excellent behind the scenes talent, written by Carl Foreman and directed Richard Fleischer. Fleischer seems to be warming up for his noir classic THE NARROW MARGIN (1952), which was set almost entirely on a train headed for Los Angeles; the climax of THE CLAY PIGEON also takes place on a train, this time headed out of L.A.
The Warner Archive DVD is a fine print of this RKO film. There are no extras.
Thanks to the Warner Archive for providing a review copy of this DVD. Warner Archive releases are MOD (manufactured on demand) and may be ordered from the Warner Archive Collection at the WBShop.by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Clay Pigeon, a surprisingly good 1949 quasi-noir “B” from RKO billed as the story of an amnesiac who comes to and suddenly finds he’s being charged with treason. I had dreaded the prospect that this might be one of Howard Hughes’ paranoid propaganda-fests, but it turned out to be a quite watchable 63-minute movie, expertly directed by the young Richard Fleischer from a script by later blacklistee Carl Foreman. The film starts at the U.S. Navy hospital in Long Beach, where Jim Fletcher (Bill Williams) is coming to after a two-year coma. It starts with a silent sequence in which a blind man is shown putting his hands around his neck — apparently attempting to strangle him, though we’re not sure why — and his doctor (Frank Wilcox) and nurse (Ann Doran) comes in and stops him. Fletcher regains consciousness just in time to hear the doctor and other members of the hospital staff say that they’ve been awaiting his return to consciousness to put him before a court-martial on charges of treason, and that now that he’s come to he’ll be transferred to the prison ward awaiting trial. He sneaks out of the hospital room, steals some clothes from a supply closet, and escapes.
His plan is to seek out his two best friends in the Navy, Mark Gregory (who’s already dead and isn’t seen in the film, not even in flashback) and Ted Niles (future director Richard Quine), to find out what they know about his life and what he might have done to make anyone think he was a traitor. He goes to Los Angeles and then to San Diego, invading the apartment of Mark’s widow, Martha Gregory (played by Williams’ real-life wife, Barbara Hale) and holding her hostage when she tries to call the police on him. Determined to get in touch with Ted Niles, whom he thinks is the only person who can establish his innocence of whatever the charge against him is — he still doesn’t know that — he commandeers Martha’s car and forces her to drive him north in a sequence surprisingly reminiscent of Hitchcock’s films
The Clay Pigeon 1949
The 39 Steps and Saboteur (also about an innocent hero forced into association with a woman who, at least at first, considers him guilty).She turns around and realizes his innocence when they’re followed by a car with two men inside whom she (and we) at first think are cops, but instead of pulling them over and arresting him they try to run him off the road and kill him. They survive the attempt on their lives but the shock causes him to black out and relive some of his wartime experiences — and, in a flashback depicted with an early and quite effective solarization effect, we see that he, Mark Gregory and Ted Niles were all inmates in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp run by a sadistic Japanese officer, Ken Tokoyama (Richard Loo — who when he got the role must have groaned and wondered why he was still being offered the parts of sadistic Japanese officers four years after the war had ended!), and Jim remembers that Mark was the head of a group of prisoners who supplemented their atrocious food rations by stealing from the Japanese storehouse, and that the charge against him is that he allegedly reported Mark to the Japanese and got Mark killed.
Jim and Martha spend a week in a trailer park in Oceanside, with him recuperating from the shock, and when they finally get to L.A. they discover Tokoyama is living there — they spot him in a Chinese restaurant called “The White Lotus” that is abruptly closed down the day after, Jim traces the property agent that controls the location, and eventually it turns out that Niles was the real villain (something we guessed about three reels before the filmmakers finally told us); not only did he report the food thieves to Tokoyama, but he, Tokoyama and Wheeler, the property agent, are involved in an elaborate criminal scheme to pass some of the counterfeit U.S. currency the Japanese printed up just after Pearl Harbor for their agents and invading forces to use once they conquered L.A. There’s a suspenseful climax on board a train (with Fleischer seemingly warming up for an even more stylish thriller, The Narrow Margin, which he made at RKO three years later) in which the bad guys take Jim hostage and make their escape, but agents of Naval Intelligence finally track down Martha Gregory (there’s a neat little mini-reversal in which they enter the hotel room where she and Jim have been staying and at first she thinks they’re the thugs who’ve been trying to kill her and Jim, and when they turn out to be genuine law-enforcement agents she heaves a sigh of relief and, in a way too chipper tone of voice, goes, “Naval Intelligence? Why didn’t you say so?”) and she leads them to the train station, too late to catch the train before it leaves, but they’re able to get to it anyway after Fletcher pulls the emergency stop cord just before the baddies are going to kill him.
The Clay Pigeon (which seems to be the only movie on imdb.com’s list that’s called that, though I’d have thought it would be a really obvious and fairly common thriller title) is a neatly done thriller, maintaining audience interest and suspense throughout, and Carl Foreman’s script is an object lesson in the art (and the limits) of the “reversal” modern-day writer-directors like Tony (Duplicity) Gilroy would do well to heed — as well as containing a beautiful scene between Jim and a Chinese widow (Mary Marco) who helps hide him from the bad guys as they chase him through Chinatown whose defiance of all the typical racist stereotypes gives away Foreman’s Leftist politics. The movie is so good one can forgive the flawed casting — Bill Williams is annoyingly nerdy, especially at first (he gathers strength as the film progresses), just as he was in his best-known film, Deadline at Dawn