450 Obsession (1949)

[Mr Sausage]

Weirdly, tho’ Canadian English tends to use British spellings (labour, humour, metre), we use the American ‘meow’.

[therewillbeblus]

What I admired most is that every character is smart in their own fashion (some arrogantly so), and anything that succeeds or fails is not because anyone did one of those typical movie blunders but because sometimes being smart and thinking of everything isn’t enough.

Spoiler

I enjoyed how the element of routine played a role in the eventual undoing of Robert Newton's lead. He thrives on invention, getting off on manipulating new aspects of his plan, but he falls into a rhythm that leads to his failing: Adopting an American catchphrase; forgetting to check on the tub before he poisons Brown. Meanwhile, it's the acute invention of the other characters that lead them to succeed. I guess that's a pretty typical trajectory for these kinds of films, but here it's less pronounced. Naunton Wayne even just sits around in the last act for a while, recognizing his powerlessness in that very moment, until he isn't anymore. Newton has covered a lot of bases, and I'd argue that him 'falling into a rhythm' isn't synonymous with a traditional 'laziness' in most films of its ilk. Rather, it's a matter of a slower or stopped object contending with agile and quick ones. As his perfect plan continues to tie together at a steady pace, he becomes out-paced. In a sense, he did everything 'right', he just wasn't scared enough to think about others' prowess - but then, if he had allowed a healthy dose of fear to seep in, would it have helped him in the end, or disrupted the rhythm at earlier stages - that worked so well until it didn't? Maybe he would have been caught sooner. A fun catch-22 noir.

[Aunt Peg]

Just watched this on TUBI and then instantly purchased the Blu Ray.

What a nifty compulsive film. Robert Newton was superb.