KNOCK ON ANY DOOR, dated but still effective and compelling social issue drama from 1949, served multiple purposes beyond telling its society-indicting crime & punishment story, adapted from Willard Motley’s novel. For star Humphrey Bogart, it was the bold maiden effort from Santana, his production company. It announced a new acting ‘discovery’ in handsome 22-year-old John Derek. Along with They Live By Night—shot earlier but released nine months after this—it introduced Nicholas Ray as a director to reckon with. And it added a killer line of dialogue that didn’t just join classic movie-talk favorites but carried a defiant defeatism fostered by atom age anomie and a punk’s code, surly despair posing as ‘cool’: “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.”

Chicago lawyer ‘Andrew Morton’ (Bogart, 48) takes on the cop-killing case of local punk and repeat offender ‘Nick Romano’ (Derek), partly because his firm had botched a case involving Nick’s father and also because Morton, who came from the same sort of slums that ‘educated’ Nick, has a liberal reformer’s attitude about correcting conditions that may breed crime. And he believes serial petty thief Romano is innocent of the murder rap. Flashbacks reveal Nick’s background: youth gangs, reform school, his brief hopeful escape from “the life” with ‘Emma’ (the warm Allene Roberts), his sweet, vulnerable and trusting wife.

“Until we do away with the type of neighborhood that produced this boy, ten will spring up to take his place, a hundred, a thousand. Until we wipe out the slums and rebuild them, knock on any door and you may find Nick Romano.”

Beneath his well-honed and much practiced cynicism, Bogart had a wounded romantic’s sensibilities, which dovetailed with his ardent liberal politics and in new-to-the-whirlpool Ray, he saw a director whose sympathy for loners, losers and underdogs of one sort of another could give vibrant cinematic life to the gnawing social concerns manifested in Motley’s novel. Daniel Taradash and John Monks Jr. adapted their script to suit, tailoring some challenge-the-crowd speeches to the star’s strengths, providing color and depth to the large gallery of supporting players and giving “he’s-guilty-because-we-are” Romano if not a get-out-of-jail (or the chair) pass then at least a reduced sentence in the court of public perception, with Derek’s lover-next-door looks a physical-material witness for the defense. It all naturally hit harder back when it came out: decades of recoiling from increased levels of violence make at least some of the sentiment seem quaint. Next to the armed-for-war mindless viciousness that’s a given today, the youth gangs of the postwar blues and those causeless 50s rebels seem as dangerous as door-knocking 7th-Day Adventists. Maybe not as irritating.

‘Society is you and I and all of us. We – Society – are hard and weak and stupid and selfish. We are full of brutality and hate. We reproach environment and call it crime. We reproach crime – or what we choose to label crime – without taking personal responsibility. We reproach the victims of our own making and whether they are innocent or not once we bring them before the court, the law, Society – once we try them, we try them without intelligence, without sympathy, without understanding!

True, true and true. Unfortunately it’s also bitterly true that among them— us, if it makes you feel better— there are those who do not wish to be reached, who laugh at attempts to reach them like they giggle at their victim’s pleas for mercy and if they can ever be reached it’s best done thru bars and barbed wire or if all else fails, applied surges of electricity. Ooh, that just brings you down to their level! The hell it does. Ask the crushed relatives of murder victims.

Ray’s pacing, Bogart’s vitality, Derek’s freshness, the impassioned script (granted, firmly on the bleeding heart side of the divide) and a vivid array of secondary characters made a win for all involved, the $5,800,000 gross a comfortable 41st place in ’49’s lineup.

With committed supporting work from George Macready, Barry Kelley, Mickey Knox, Sid Melton, Jimmy Conlin, Pepe Hern, Cara Williams, Davis Roberts, Susan Perry, Vince Barnett, Dewey Martin (debut), Argentina Brunetti, Helen Mowery, George Chandler, Dooley Wilson, Myron Healey and John Mitchum.

* characters and character—–Willard Motley (1909-1965) was an African-American from Chicago. “Knock On Any Door” was his first novel. His third, “Let No Man Write My Epitaph”, a sequel to the Nick Romano story, was also made into a movie in 1960. From the citation statement for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame awards: “Motley was criticized in his life for being a black man writing about white characters, a middle-class man writing about the lower class, and a closeted homosexual writing about heterosexual urges. But those more kindly disposed to his work, and there were plenty, admired his grit and heart….Chicago was more complicated than just its racial or sexual tensions, and as a writer his exploration was expansive….”     Motley: “My race is the human race.”

Allene Roberts, 1928-2019

Allene Roberts, 20 when doing Knock On Any Door, only made a few movies (notably this one and The Red House) and TV episodes. The one-time winner of “America’s Most Charming Child” (out of 85,000 entrants!) and the Washington State Apple Commission’s  “Miss Delicious of 1950” called it quits with married life and a family: “I wanted a Christian man who dearly loved me and I wanted to have children and a lovely home…I wouldn’t trade that for anything in this world.”

John Derek, 1926-1998—he’d done three bit parts (Since You Went Away, I’ll Be Seeing You, A Double Life) before being “introduced” as electric chair candidate Nick Romano. Thirty feature films followed, including biggies like All The King’s Men, The Ten Commandments and Exodus. Not a bad actor (he was & is continually underrated by critics), he was notably terrible as a director, witness Once Before I Die, Tarzan The Ape Man and Bolero. As to his Svengali side—bedding & wedding Ursula Andress, Linda Evans and Bo Derek—well, “Live fast, die young and —(fill in the blanks)”.