SLATTERY’S HURRICANE, like its flip-flopping heel-hero played by Richard Widmark, can’t decide what game it wants to run: a noir-inflected crime meller, an aerial adventure, a salute to the services or an ill-fated romance triangle.  Widmark: “Oh, God! Slattery’s Hurricane – that’s one we made three times. We were constantly doing retakes. It was so bad that [Darryl F. Zanuck] couldn’t figure out what to do with it. He finally decided to flip it. He did a very complicated cutting thing. He started at the end and we wound up at the beginning.”

“You crawled inside me and stayed there.”

Ex-Navy pilot & Pacific War vet ‘Will Slattery’ (Widmark, 34) has a cush job in Miami as a private seaplane pilot for a candy company. Chance has him bump into service comrade ‘Hobby Hobson’ (John Russell), who’s still flying for Uncle Sam, tracking storms for the weather reconnaissance wing. Bad break: Hobby’s married to Slattery’s former flame ‘Aggie’ (Linda Darnell), she of the above feverish quote. Carelessly relighting the flame, out-for-himself Will wounds his current adoring amour ‘Dolores’ (Veronica Lake), who landed him his job with the outfit that we soon find is in a “candy business” of a less-sweet variety. Trouble on every horizon, mortals weakness vs. Mother’s Nature.

Researching what would become his Pulitzer-winning “The Caine Mutiny”, author Herman Wouk came up with the story germ for Slattery, turned it into a book, then a screenplay for 20th Century Fox. He shared credit with Richard Murphy (Boomerang!, Panic In The Streets, The Desert Rats), with added pitching in from studio guns William Perlberg (who produced it), A. I. Bezzerides (Thieves Highway, Kiss Me Deadly) and John Monks Jr. (13 Rue Madeleine, Knock On Any Door). Andre de Toth (Pitfall, House Of Wax) directed, with an eye on revitalizing wife Veronica Lake’s waning career. As the above quote from Widmark indicates, there were just too many cooks tossing ingredients into the stew.

Along with his many hard-bitten heroes, Widmark played numerous bad (quite bad) guys, but Slattery is one of the least engaging characters he had to try and flesh out, and whoever gave him that business of an endless drunken donkey-refrain of “Home On The Range” needed to be airlifted over the Gulf and kicked out sans parachute. Darnell, 25, has a cipher part, and Lake, 25, shorn of her peekaboo locks and laden with something like Jane Wyman would sport (not a compliment) is too little, too late: the role did nothing for her career; mounting personal troubles swamped her. Ruggedly handsome Russell, 27, for whatever reasons, didn’t strike paydirt on the big screen, eventually winning a local fan base on TV with 156 episodes of Lawman.

A gross of $4,600,000 placed 65th in 1949, which hosted another, much better Widmark adventure, Down To The Sea In Ships. It did somewhat keener business, and gave the actor his most likable and sympathetic character yet.  While Slattery isn’t an out & out bad guy like the one’s he’d been stuck with since Kiss Of Death (The Street With No Name, Road House, Yellow Sky) and may end up redeeming himself, for 90% of the 83 minute story he’s pretty much a rat. At least the Fox wind machines and sound effects crews get a workout.

The storm sequences are okay; the picture, with some location work done in Miami, would have benefited from color. With Gary Merrill, Raymond Greenleaf, Joe De Santis, Morris Ankrum and Harry Lauter.

On the set, either talking about the lousy script or which one likes Darryl F. Zanuck the least