"The Good Die Young" Review

 

by Daniel White

There is a scene in The Good Die Young (1954) that sums up all that is wrong with this capable but infuriatingly tame film. Cuckolded American military man, Eddie Blaine (John Ireland), finally reaches his breaking point with unfaithful wife, Denise (Gloria Grahame). Picking her up, he carries her into the bathroom, holding her over a tub of water. Suddenly, the music turns playful as the disgusted airman dumps her in! What? He doesn't drown the two-timing bitch (and Miss Grahame IS a grade-A bitch in this one)? Nope, he just dunks her and leaves. Pitiful. Leave it to the English to make a genteel, polite film noir.

Directed by Lewis Gilbert for Remus Films, the flick is actually more of a crime caper than a noir. It stars Laurence Harvey as an amoral bon vivant who plots to rob a post office with three strangers he meets in a bar. Harvey is good as the scheming, slithery Miles "Rave" Ravenscourt. Completely void of any moral compass, he sponges off his exasperated wife, Eve (the lovely Margaret Leighton), cheating on her and gambling away her money. Perhaps if the movie had concentrated on their complex, codependent relationship (it's obvious that Eve is controlled by her sexual need for Rave), the movie would have been more satisfying. Instead, it dutifully examines the lives of the three men he corrals into knocking off the post office.

Eddie (Ireland), fellow American Joe Halsey (Richard Basehart), and British boxer Mike Morgan (Stanley Baker), are the stooges Rave manipulates. And while all three stories are relatively compelling, they don't set the screen on fire. What this film desperately needs is less yack, yack back story and more ratatat action. Of course, the heist goes hideously wrong, and I don't think I need to post a spoiler alert when I tell you the trite title of this underwhelming tale proves true.

Let's hear it for the Brits. Who else can take a potentially exciting story and drain it of any pulp, punch and pizzaz? With the gorgeous Joan Collins as a wife caught between a harried husband and a harridan of a mother and an effective cameo by Robert Morley as Rave's disgusted father, The Good Die Young is available on YouTube.