Directed by John Reinhardt
"I can smell death when it's close. I can smell it now."
Dusk at Malibu. A sedan, flung from the Pacific Coast Highway, sits wrecked at the waterline. The man in the front seat has a broken back. His companion is wedged under the vehicle. The evening tide is rolling in, fast. "I never did want to die alone. Glad you're with me, pal."
No film noir curtain raiser telegraphs its fatalism with such concision. As the story unfolds in flashback we learn that Fresney (Lee Tracy) is a cynical newspaper editor. Slade (Don Castle) is an ex- reporter turned private dick. Both are caught in a maze of corruption and graft.
High Tide is anchored by Lee Tracy as Fresney. It's as if Tracy's rancid reporters from Blessed Event (1932) and The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932) were bodily lifted from 1932 and plunked down in post-World War II Los Angeles. He's worked up to the city desk, but middle age has conferred not wisdom but a thicker skin of callous indifference. He's still buying headlines with the coin of human suffering. "Let's have a picture of the widow!", he cries, as flashbulbs singe the bereaved woman whose husband has been wrongly executed to satisfy his paper's thirst for circulation.
High Tide was the second of two independent crime thrillers produced in 1947 by Texas oil tycoon Jack Wrather. It carries over from The Guilty the same cameraman and screenwriter, the same protagonist in actor Don Castle (later Wrather's line producer for the Lassie TV series), and the same director, Austrian-born John Reinhardt. Reinhardt learned his trade directing Spanish-language features in the thirites and would make a half-dozen post-War crime thrillers.
Like a drug store dime novel, High Tide features the standard attributes of its genre: the naive PI soiled by his job, the confluence of high and low society, the Los Angeles milieu of dirty alleys and Malibu beach houses, the sexually frustrated and drunken femme fatale, and, above all, the genre's signature whimsical fatalism. As he and Slade wait for the Pacific Ocean to engulf them, Fresney muses: "Think of all the trouble you'd have saved yourself if you hadn't answered that telegram.
Scott MacQueen
Wrather Productions Inc./Monogram Pictures Corporation. Producer: Jack Wrather. Screenwriter: Robert Presnell, Sr. Based on a story by: Raoul Whitfield. Cinematographer: Henry Sharp. Editor: William Ziegler. With: Lee Tracy, Don Castle, Julie Bishop, Anabel Shaw, Douglas Walton.
35mm, b/w, 72 min.
Preserved from a 35mm nitrate dupe picture negative and a 35mm nitrate dupe track negative. Laboratory services by The Stanford Theatre Film Laboratory, Audio Mechanics, DJ Audio, Simon Daniel Sound. Special thanks to The British Film Institute, Nigel Algar, Katrina Stokes.
