The Rat Race (1960) Romantic Drama on The Cusp of Noir

Directed by Robert Mulligan (The Nickel Ride, The Great Impostor, To Kill A Mocking Bird).

 Written by Garson Kanin originally based on his eponymous 1940's play and expanded upon with an uncredited John Michael Hayes adding additional input. Cinematography was by Robert Burks (Beyond the Forest, Tomorrow Is Another Day, Strangers on a Train, The Enforcer, Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, Vertigo, Music by Elmer Bernstein.

I first saw this years ago well before my interest in Noir was piqued, which is why I wanted to revisit it. I remembered it being more intense than your usual Romantic Drama and that intensity was driven by the story line and by Don Rickles performance, which was an eye opener. 

The Rat Race stars Tony Curtis (The Boston Strangler) as Pete Hammond Jr., Debbie Reynolds as Peggy Brown, Jack Oakie (Thieves' Highway) as Mac, Kay Medford (Guilty Bystander, A Face in the Crowd, Girl of the Night) as Mrs. 'Sodapop' Gallo, Don Rickles (Kelly's Heroes) as Nelly Miller, Marjorie Bennett as Mrs. Edie Kerry, Hal K. Dawson as Bo Kerry, Norman Fell (The Killers, The Graduate, Bullitt, Charlie Varick) as Telephone Repairman, Sam Butera as Carl 'Tip', Joe Bushkin as Frankie Jay, the pianist. Gerry Mulligan as Gerry, Elmer Bernstein as a member of The Red Peppers. 

Tony Curtis as Pete Hammond Jr.

Debbie Reynolds as Peggy Brown

Kay Medford as Mrs. Gallo and Jack Oakie as Mac

Don Rickles as Nelly Miller

Norman Fell as telephone repairman

Filming took place in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Illinois, Times Square, Manhattan, New York City, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.

The Story

Pete Hammond. Jazz Musician. Sax player. Leaves the Milwaukee beerhalls to follow his dream to try and make the "big time" in New York City. His goal is it's Harlem and 52nd Street Jazz Meccas. His dad gives him a stake to add to the money he saved and then sends him off on a Greyhound headed East. Its about 100 miles to Chicago and then roughly 900 to New York. A day a half.

"It's midnight at the depot

And I drag my bags in line.

Travelin' light, I got to go

But the bus won't be on time.

Everybody's looking half alive.

Later on the bus arrives.

They punch my ticket

I find a seat

And we move out past the lights.

Come on Driver, where's the heat?

It's cold out in the night.

I keep telling to myself that I don't care.

Come tomorrow, I'll be there.

Take the Greyhound.

It's a dog of a way to get around.

Take the Greyhound.

It's a dog gone easy way to get you down." (Harry Chapin)

Pete bus pulls into the Greyhound Bus Terminal, between 33rd and 34th Streets Manhattan, but he's not down. He is up. His excitement has been building. 

He checks into the Dixie Hotel somewhere around Times Square, then the next day with his bag and instruments in hand goes looking for an apartment to rent. 

Pete looking for an apartment

Needing a drink after some kids squirt water from a hydrant on him, Pete drops into Mac's Bar. There at the bar he meets Mac and a landlady known as Mrs "Sodapop" Gallo a landlady from across the street. She's known as Sodapop because she always orders a soda and nothing else at Mac's. 

Mac's is sort of the neighborhood watering hole. A Mecca. The "local." Apparently Mac is a sort of five & ten cents store psychiatrist. A good listener who you can tell all your troubles to and in turn he is the one who is in the know.  When Pete mentions that he's looking for an apartment Sodapop tells him she's going to have an opening across the street at her place.

Pete uses part of his stake to rent the newly vacated apartment from Mrs. Gallo who has just evicted a "pig" a Mrs. Peggy Brown. 

Need a room? I just evicted a pig.

Peggy Brown the "pig" is a divorcee who wanted to be a model. She gets part time model work, (let your subtext "filler inner" roll) so, what kind of model work is never detailed (but it's near Times Square and not Park Avenue, hint, hint), but she has been a full time taxi dancer (and all extra curricular possibilities that that "position' entails) at the Crystal Palace Ballroom.

(In the film the Crystal Palace is set in Times Square's Majestic Ballroom disguised for the film as the Crystal Palace. The Majestic had two entrances one on Broadway and one on 7th Ave., and was situated in the trapezoidal shaped block between 46th Street and 47th Street. The same block also housed the famous Latin Quarter nightclub and had the largest Playland Arcade in Times Square which in my youth was one of my high school hangouts. Playland also had two entrances and like The Majestic stretched from Broadway to 7th Avenue.)

(Filming took place in 1959 the Motion Picture Production Code was still enforced. Garson Kanin adapted his 1940s play for the screenplay. Kanin expanded the original story about Pete Hammond's adventures in New York City to hint a bit more that Peggy was sort of a loose woman, a whore or quasi pro hooker who also models. The first hint is also in the original stage play, when Mrs. Gallo refers to Peggy as a "pig," and it doesn't mean that she is a slob.

The first time I personally recall a woman referred to as a "pig" in a film was when Dean Martin calls Shirley MacLaine's character Ginnie  a "pig" in Some Came Running (1958). It that film the meaning is implied that she is an easy lay, a whore, and when her "ex-boyfriend" shows up trying to get her back it's obvious subtext to me is that he is actually her pimp and he's wants to return her to his stable (this is BTW all quite different from the James Jones novel the film is based on). In the novel Ginne works at the local brassiere company and has an ex-husband but she still has a reputation as an easy lay of the two other girls she hangs with. 

The second hint in The Rat Race about Peggy is when the telephone repairman shows up to yank out her phone and she promises him a "date" with benefits if he leaves it connected. She uses it, she tells him for her so called "modeling" jobs. 

The third hint is that her boss Millie at the Ballroom expects her to go the extra mile and "entertain" their regular clients if she wants to pay off the money she has borrowed.)

Back to the story.

So Peggy coincidentally at the moment drops into Mac's meeting Pete and being informed by Sodapop that Pete has rented the apartment and to get all her stuff out ASAP. 

Peggy's Apartment

Peggy heads up to her flop. While sitting around trying to figure out what she is going to do, the telephone company man knocks on her door.  

He's there to remove her phone for failure to pay her bill. 

How about a date with benefits for leaving the phone hooked up?

Sounds good to me baby, wink, wink.

After the phone man leaves without the phone Mrs Gallo confronts Peggy. What she suspects happened and her intuition about Peggy's means of support are crystalized (or at least crystallized as much as can be hinted at and get passed by the MPPC)

So Pete  heads up the apartment and being a nice guy, and feeling responsible and sorry for Peggy's eviction offers innocently to share the flop with her. 

At first Peggy thinks that Pete expects extra benefits but he's a good natured joe who is very intense about his music career and appears sexually harmless. Pete assigns Peggy the small alcove with the bed while he takes the sofa. 

Peggy whose dreams were extinguished long ago by the realities of living in New York City, tries to wise up Pete. She tells him to not be such a rube. She tells Pete not to trust anybody. Pete however still has stars in his eyes sees a classified ad and goes to Byron's, a rented studio in Times Square to audition for a Greenwich Village band looking for a sax player.

Pete brings all his instruments and plays in a jam session. He meets the band and the band leaders girlfriend and they run through a bunch of numbers and Pete is really feeling good about it. He thinks he's in. The band leader asks Pete if he'll be the gopher and run down to Dempsey's on the corner and get beer for everybody. Pete says sure. 

As soon as he heads out the door and down the stairs and they see cross the street they pack up all their instruments and Pete's also open a window and take everything out on a firescape and split for the roof. When Pete gets back to the studio everything is cleaned out.  He's screwed. 

Screwed

Pete goes down to the musicians union hall and gets a lead about a cruise ship gig as an alto sax player but he has no instruments. Pete goes back to the apartment and tells Peggy his woes. Peggy feels sorry for the poor schmuck. He didn't even last a day in New York City. 

Peggy decides to get money for new instruments for Pete by agreeing to prostitute herself (again?) for Millie. She already owed him a quantity of money for other things. Let your subtext ponder that.  

Giving Pete the money she "borrowed" from Millie, she tells the suspicious Pete she got the money with no strings attached. It goes Noirsville when Pete goes off on his cruise while Peggy tries to renege  on her deal with Nellie.

Noirsville

The Broadway entrance to the Crystal Palace (The Playland nextdoor (I used to hang out there BTY) pretty much gives it away that it's actually the Majestic Ballroom with a false front sign masking the true name)

In 1960 hardly anyone was aware of what Films Noir were, there was no incentive for trying to create one when the concept itself was quite vague and their origins mis diagnosed. It was a matter of pure luck if your film achieved the status of a Film Noir. 

Again to restate, the term Films Noir was coined in the mid 1930s by French right wing and religious publications. The tern Films Noir was used to condemn those films they deemed undesirable or obscene. Films that depicted favorable stories about un redeemed individuals who broke the laws of the state (whose characters did not suffer condemnation and "justice") or those about taboo subject matter, i.e., drugs and sex. The two extreme poles of Films Noir (as originally coined) of course would be "Snuff" Films and Pornography. 

Along with having dark subject matter most (but not all) Films Noir were also quite Visually Stylistic. And it's worth mentioning that Noir has a Yin & a Yang. Most (but not all) of the original Hollywood Noirs were Yin Noir, the Dark city set Noir where everything you can't see can kill you. A Yang Noir are those light filled, sunbaked, desert and tropical set where everything you see can kill you. The French called thee Yang Noir - Films Soleil (films of the sun).

In The Rat Race the film's heart is of course a love story about to losers, but you had the dark story elements and you had some of the style. To tip Noir in 1960 it just needed a tad more of each upped a few notches. If it could have been made between 1965-69 when the restraints of the production code were crumbling and without stars who may have been concerned about their "commercial" image, a more graphic version of the story could have been a Classic Transitional Noir. As is, it's right there occupying for me that Cusp of Noir. To deem it as a Noir it would have (in my opinion) needed to be a little more risque and explicit, exploiting the new found freedoms with the demise of the MPPC and the evolving obscenity laws. It pussyfoots around the obvious which by then the American audience was already hip to. 

Hollywood was still trying to depict a more conservative America. The play this film was based on was set in the 1940s. It emphasized more the Pete characters jazz interests rather than Peggy's chosen profession or her promiscuity. Too bad Garson Kanin was still constrained by the just beginning to crumble MPPC.

For a visual example of this prevailing conservative depiction watch the stripper Sugar Torch sequences in Sam Fuller's The Crimson Kimono (1959) her routine and her costume are 1940s vaudevillian / burlesque, she's still wearing granny panties for chrissakes. Then take a look at the real Los Angeles strippers candidly depicted at the Near & Far Club circa 1960 in The Savage Eye a Docu Noir. The real strippers are fully topless with bikini bottoms by 1960. No wonder Hollywood film viewership began a decline, being out in actual reality was more exciting, more sleazy, and more explicit than what the dream factories were dishing out for escapism. 

Anyway again the most surprising performance in The Rat Race was by Don Rickles as Milly the sleazeball Taxi Dance Ballroom / Clip joint / Hook shop "operator / pimp." He is genuinely threatening. Tony Curtis and Reynolds are good enough, though like I mentioned a couple of  unknowns with nothing to lose playing it gritier and more explicit would have made it a bit more memorably sensational. Watch for the sequence where an intense sadistic Millie makes Peggy strip off all the clothing he's bought her and you'll see what I'm getting at. As is, the film has Reynolds stopping conservatively at her knee length slip. Too bad, lol. 

Jack Oakie and Kay Medford are a bit cliche in their performances but adequate enough. You can see say Jesse White and Shelly Winters playing them exactly the same way. The film is roughly a 7/10.

Watch it and see what you think, it's worth a look and seeing what might have been if you could have turned up both the "Sleaze" and  "Noir" factors. You can group it in with say Anatomy Of a Murder, another great film that could have upped it's noir-ness easily.