Knock on Any Door: Nicholas Ray

Of the vast number of roles that Humphrey Bogart has made famous (gangster, private eye, steamboat captain), you wouldn't expect to see 'lawyer' listed among them. After all, Bogart was a man of action! You wouldn't restrict the likes of Philip Marlowe to a courtroom! But one of Bogart's most fascinating performances was indeed that of a lawyer in Nicholas Ray's Knock on Any Door. After a young hoodlum named Nick Romano is arrested and accused of the vicious murder of a policeman, Andrew Morton (Bogart) takes on the case. Told largely in flashbacks during the court hearing, Morton argues that Romano's actions are the fault of society failing him. Morton reconstructs Romano's unfortunate upbringing and life: his family was forced to move to one of the city's worst slums, he was forced into crime at a young age, and his young, pregnant wife killed herself after Romano became negligent due to his inability to keep a steady, legitimate job. Of course, while the film is ostensibly a court-room pot-boiler, it is more of a throw-back to the socially-conscious dramas of the Thirties like Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). Yet it also bares many of the trappings of film noir: an obsession with the past, an amoral world, and a kind of doomed predestination of failure for its characters. Director Nicholas Ray demonstrates his trademark distrust of authority figures and his love for characters who don't mesh well with their communities in the character of young Nick Romano. Knock on Any Door was only Ray's second film, yet it speaks to his creative genius that would lead to his designation as one of the Hollywood Studio System's greatest talents and iconoclasts.

9/10