Best movie ever!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Pushover is only 88 minutes long but it isn't very tightly paced. On the other hand, there are some nice touches. The claustrophobic feel of the picture (no doubt, partly due to the low budget), and the way the protagonist, a police detective (well played by Fred MacMurray) becomes more and more involved in the life of a woman he's observing on a stakeout, are highlights. Kim Novak plays the woman; she's inexperienced but has her usual intensity and sincerity, and of course, she's gorgeous. A small film that has a too-deliberate pace, but some intelligence and that sense of inexorable fate that the best noirs have.

Pushover is directed by Richard Quine and adapted to screenplay by Roy Huggins from stories written by Bill S. Ballinger and Thomas Walsh. It stars Fred MacMurray, Phillip Carey, Kim Novak, Dorothy Malone and E. G. Marshall. Music is scored by Arthur Morton and cinematography by Lester White.Straight cop Paul Sheridan (MacMurray) is on the trail of the loot stolen in a bank robbery where a guard was shot and killed. He is tasked with getting to know Lona McLane (Novak), the girlfriend of the chief suspect in the robbery. But once contact is made, and surveillance set up over the road from her apartment complex, Sheridan begins to fall in love and lust with the sultry femme.Comparisons with the superior Double Indemnity are fair enough, but really there is enough here, and considerable differences too, for the film to rightfully be judged on its own merits. Also of note to point out is that one or two critics have questioned if Pushover is actually a film noir piece? Bizarre! Given that character motives, destinies and thematics of plot are quintessential film noir.A good but weary guy is emotionally vulnerable and finds his life spun into a vortex of lust, greed and murder. Yet the femme fatale responsible, is not a rank and file manipulator, she too has big issues to deal with, a trophy girlfriend to a crook, she coarsely resents this fact. The cop who never smiles and the girl who has forgotten how too, is there hope there? Do they need the money that has weaved them together? What does that old devil called fate have in store for them? Classic noir traits do pulse from the plot. True, the trajectory the pic takes had been a well trodden formula in noir by the mid fifties, where noir as a strong force was on the wane, but this holds up very well.It isn't just a piece solely relying on two characters either, there's the concurrent tale of Sheridan's voyeuristic partner Rik McAllister (Carey), who has caught the eye of Lona's next door neighbour, Ann Stewart (Malone). Both these characters operate in a different world to the other two, yet the question remains if a relationship can be born out from such shady beginnings? The presentation of relationships here is delightfully perverse. The visual style wrung out by Quine (Drive a Crooked Road) and White (5 Against the House) is most assuredly noir, with 99% of the film set at night, with prominent shadows, damp streets lit by bulbous lamps and roof top scenes decorated sparsely by jutting aerials. The L.A. backdrop a moody observer to the unwrapping of damaged human goods.Cast are very good, all working well for their reliable director. Novak sizzles in what was her first credited starring role, she perfectly embodies a gal that someone like Paul Sheridan could lose his soul for. MacMurray is suitably weary, his lived in face telling of a life lacking in genuine moments of pleasure. Carey, square jawed, tall and handsome, he is the perfect foil to MacMurray's woe. Malone offers the potential ray of light trying to break out in this dark part of America, while Marshall as tough Lieutenant Eckstrom and Allen Nourse as a copper riding the noir train to sadness, score favourably too.It opens with a daylight bank robbery and closes in true noir style on a cold and wet night time street. Pushover, deserving to be viewed as one of the more interesting 1950s film noirs. 8/10

Fred MacMurray knocked it out of the park in Billy Wilder's DOUBLE INDEMNITY as the street smart insurance salesman who gets out-smarted by Barbara Stanwyck's femme fatale in the classic Film Noir (some even say it's the first true film noir). This time around we get to see what a similar plot looks like in the hands of lesser creators.The musical score and the cinematography are pedestrian by comparison, and although this marks the debut of Kim Novak her character is nowhere near as interesting as the multi- dimensional scheming Phyllis of DOUBLE fame. While Wilder mined the chemistry between MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson as his boss in the earlier film-- so much so that MacMurray was able to stay out of the radar of the otherwise sharp Robinson, E.G. Marshall is cardboard as the boss in this entry.A big disappointment at a time when KISS ME DEADLY and THE KILLING were getting film noir right. Something to watch if you come across it but I wouldn't go out of my way to find it.

But it's not as effective as either noir, despite the presence of the former's Fred MacMurray in a similar role, and the voyeuristic titillation of the latter (much peering through binoculars at apartments across the courtyard, and nobody ever draws the blinds). He's a good-cop-turned-bad, seducing a bank robber's girlfriend (Kim Novak in her film debut, voluptuous as all getout but not trying very hard) and falling hard for her. The initial seduction is fun, much like Walter Neff squaring off with Babe Diedrickson (sp?) in "Double Indemnity." But the pair aren't ideally matched--by this time, MacMurray looks paunchy and less than leading-man suave, and his underplaying and her nonplaying leave us not caring that much whether the pair can pull their caper off. Maybe if he and the more vital Philip Carey, as his partner, had switched roles, there would be more heat. Some sharper dialog would help, too. Director Richard Quine shows a fondness for close-up shots of meaningless details, presumably just to throw the audience off. The noir mechanics include harsh black-and-white photography with an emphasis on the black, a pileup of bodies, and, most curiously, constant rain in what should be a sunny Los Angeles setting. A good enough time-waster, and it makes the most of its low budget, but more care could have produced something much better.