‘The Glass Key’ or — Splinters, Sparkhuls and Sonic Shatterings?

With a film called ‘The Glass Key’ (1942) you wouldn’t be surprised to discover glass, shards and glittering splinters as a recurring theme and motif running heavily throughout the film (hell, even the cinematographer’s last name is Sparkhuls!), and you’d be right. Yet there is one extraordinary moment, and one that follows an extraordinary scene, that might be the greatest “escaping through a window” moment I’ve ever witnessed. But let’s get the rest of the movie out of the way first.

‘The Glass Key’ is a tale of political corruption, media manipulation, murder, lust, election-rigging, violence, twisted loyalties, savage beatings, suicide and lethal cuckolding (I don’t know how on earth they got away with this in ’42 but I’m delighted they did). So, in essence, it’s your typical film noir and this one seethes with all the above whilst in possession of dialogue so scrumptious it induces salivation — “My first wife was a second grade cook in a third place joint on fourth street”.

Brian Donlevy does what he does best by effortlessly combining potential thuggish brutality with a bizarre cuddliness that conceals a shark’s smile that unexpectedly flashes on and off like a malfunctioning neon sign; Lake oozes eroticism purely by the way she talks and moves whilst Ladd simply beams it directly from his face as stoically as a sexually aroused lighthouse.

And the film’s a riveting blast with press and politicians totally under mob control leaving us to decode loyalties, friendships and various sexual dynamics. Is Lake naive or lethal? Is Ladd devoted or a moron? Is Donlevy a killer or a teddy bear? Or both?!

And talking of killer teddy bears, let’s talk about that previously mentioned scene and spectacular glass moment, although it does mean spoiling it to bits. It goes something like this and if you’ve seen the film before then feel free to sing along –

Ladd has been captured by nasty mob boss Nick Varna who leaves him with his looming henchman, Jeff (William Bendix), to set about beating Ladd to a pulp in order to extract vital information. Except it’s less a scene of torture and, instead, one of intense, and violent, flirtation between Ladd and Bendix and is, quite possibly, the only genuinely “romantic” (and certainly the most erotic) relationship in the movie.

And Bendix’s Jeff is one of the most unsettling henchmen in all cinema, looking as though he could kill you with a smothering hug as though ‘Goldfinger’s Oddjob had made a baby with Steinbeck’s Lennie Small. “I’m just a big, good-natured slob”, sez the man the size of a murderous wardrobe.

A broken Ladd knows he has to escape from his top-floor prison. He starts a fire and, in the confusion, breaks a window with a chair and tumbles out onto a roof below. Only this roof is also the glass ceiling of a packed dining room meaning Ladd’s fall is not broken but continued, INCREASED!, as he goes smashing through the shattering barrier and crashing onto the distant dinner table beneath. So that’s BASH! SMASH! CRASH! all in one furious go meaning we’re hit with THREE sonic punctuation marks in a single fall… and it’s extraordinarily exhilarating!

There’s another fantastic moment when two men go flying through a window and straight into an adjacent swimming pool — CRASH! SMASH! SPLASH! — as glass, water and onomatopoeias go flying all over the place.

This film is absolutely fantastic and I can understand why the Coen’s used it as the inspiration for their ‘Miller’s Crossing’ (1990) as despite the fragility of the title ‘The Glass Key’, like Lake herself, is incredibly “well built”.