Look at the box and you'll see a garishly colored shot of a bare-chested man holding a half-swooning woman in his arms, gazing rapturously into her face as she looks away with an undefined emotion-longing? temptation? fear?-in her sparkling blue eyes. If you like passionate romances, this is clearly the movie for you.
Not! If ever a Hollywood drama steered totally away from passion and romance, The Well is that picture. The things it's actually about are a lot more somber: the evils of racial bigotry, the dangers of police power, the dark side of small-town innocence, and the ability of ordinary people to band together for both constructive and destructive purposes. The hero never takes off his shirt. And those sparkling blue eyes--who knows? The movie is in black and white.
All this aside, The Well, originally released in 1951, is an engrossing picture that deserves to be better known. While the acting and dialogue are shaky at times, the issues it raises are as relevant today as when the film was new.
The story starts quietly. A little African-American girl is walking through a field, and in an eyeblink she drops abruptly out of sight. The camera moves in and we see that she's fallen into a hole half-hidden by grass and brush. We have no way of knowing how deep the hole is, whether the girl survived her plunge, or how anyone could ever find her.
Back home, her parents are less worried than angry, because this isn't the first time she's wandered away without telling anyone. They grow increasingly concerned as the hours pass, though, finally contacting the police to search for her. Questioning people in the town, the sheriff and his deputies learn she was last seen in the company of a white stranger who held her hand and bought her flowers.
The cops eventually find the stranger, who's the visiting nephew of a local businessman. He claims he bought the flowers on a kindly whim, held the girl's hand to help her cross the street, and knows nothing of her whereabouts after that. None of this convinces the lawmen, who keep up a relentless interrogation in hopes of wrenching a confession out of him.
And still the tale is just beginning. Rumors circulate: a black girl has been kidnapped, or molested, or even killed by a white man. Tempers rise, along with a strange sort of confusion, since the racially mixed town hasn't experienced serious tensions in the past and people aren't quite sure how to react. Soon black folks are wondering if a cover-up is taking place-if the "culprit" has been caught, why hasn't the missing girl been found?-and white folks are all too eager to "protect themselves" from hostile blacks. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to mob hysteria and vigilante violence.
You'll have to see the movie to learn the outcome of this, but the plot still has a long way to go. The missing girl is finally found-alive or dead, we still can't tell-and the town rallies around in sympathy, or at least curiosity, as rescuers try to reach her in the well. This makes for harrowing suspense and surprisingly visceral cinema. (It's not very true to the real-life 1949 case of little Kathy Fiscus, though, which inspired this portion of the film; the same incident plays a part in Woody Allen's nostalgic 1987 comedy-drama Radio Days.)
The Well was codirected by Leo C. Popkin and Russell Rouse, who made a good team. It was the first directorial effort for Rouse, who was primarily a screenwriter and penned The Well with Clarence Greene, his frequent partner. It was the last directorial effort for Popkin, who had produced a handful of films with African-American subjects in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Popkin is best known for producing D.O.A., the respected Rudolph Maté noir of 1950; it's an interesting footnote that Rouse and Greene got story credit (with a third writer) for that movie's 1988 remake.
The Well is efficiently directed almost all the way through--in terms of action and suspense, if not casting and acting-but it really comes alive in the last half hour, as experts work to retrieve the trapped little girl. We see this entirely from above the ground, watching a hard-working crew punch a new hole deep into the earth, send rescuers to its depths through a narrow pipe, and hear their agonizingly slow progress reports on a hastily assembled sound system.
While the decision not to show any of the below-ground activity was surely dictated by budget and logistics, it pays terrific dividends by forcing the viewer's imagination to work overtime. At its best, this lengthy scene recalls Jacques Becker's excellent 1960 prison-break picture Le Trou, which also finds enormous drama in people digging a hole. Like that picture, it's first-rate filmmaking.
The strongest performance in The Well comes from Henry Morgan, aka Harry Morgan, best known for MASH on television but a hugely prolific movie actor from the early 1940s through the late 1990s. He plays the little girl's alleged kidnapper/abuser/killer, and his outrage at the cops is almost palpable. Everyone else in the cast-well, almost everyone else-is adequate. Ditto for Dimitri Tiomkin's music. The movie received two Academy Award nominations, well deserved, for film editing and screenwriting.
In its racial-tension scenes, The Well is a respectable entry in the cycle of "problem pictures" made by Hollywood in the post-World War II years; in its rescue scenes, it's genuinely gripping. Its appearance on DVD is a welcome event. And the box is fun to look at, even if it doesn't tell you a single thing about the movie inside.
For more information about The Well, visit Image Entertainment. To order The Well, go to TCM Shopping.
by Mikita Brottman and David Sterritt
