Being a noir fan, I’ll watch almost any movie in this category. Eddie Muller, the foremost promoter of film noir, said that there are no unwatchable noir movies. Well, Eddie, I’ve discovered one. It’s called Whistle Stop from 1946 starring George Raft, already eclipsed in popularity by Bogart, and an impossibly beautiful Ava Gardner in her first starring role before skyrocketing to fame in The Killers. This is a gangster movie with a story that looks as if it was written at midnight by a hack on a deadline to pay his rent.
But, it’s the music that kills it completely. Dimitri Tiomkin whose score credits are immense (High Noon, Stranger on a Train, The Thing from Another World, and dozens more), somehow ended up with this dog. His assignment, evidently, was to provide a drone of stock, background music and write a romantic song a la mode of a popular standard. The result, that permeates the soundtrack, is the awful “Once Again,” a mess that never reached an audience beyond the movie and probably didn’t even reach them. Sample line: “We almost parted, and then we started once again.” Clever internal rhyme, huh?
The clip shows a decent jazz piano player rendering some good sounds, but this segues into “Once Again,” cutting to George Raft and his morosely unrequited lover and then cutting back to the musician. I don’t know if this is a voice-over, but the contrast between his singing rendition and the jazz that preceded is ridiculous. His vibrato singing makes one long for earplugs. This must have been an embarrassment for poor Dimitri Tiomkin.
