Framed | Through the Shattered Lens

Revenge can be brutal, especially when you’ve been framed.

Joe Don Baker plays Ron Lewis, a surly nightclub owner and gambler who wins a small fortune, witnesses a crime, and nearly gets shot all in the same night. When he reaches his house, he’s planning on calling the police but he’s confronted in his own garage by a sheriff’s deputy who tries to kill him! In a lengthy and brutal scene, Ron beats the deputy to death and gouges out his eyes. Even though Ron was only acting in self-defense, he’s charged with murder. Told that there is no way that he’ll be able to win an acquittal, Ron pleads guilty to a lesser charge and is sent to prison for four years.

While he’s in prison, Ron befriends a mob boss (John Marley, who famously woke up with a horse’s head in his bed in The Godfather) and the boss’s number one hitman, Vince (Gabriel Dell). While Ron is in prison, a group of men assault his girlfriend (country singer Conny Van Dyke) and tell her not to ask any questions about the events that led to Ron being framed.

After serving his sentence and getting into numerous fights with the guards, Ron is finally released. When Vince shows up and tells Ron that he’s been hired to kill him, the two of them team up with an honest deputy (Brock Peters) and set out to find out why Ron was set up and to get revenge.

Framed is a brutal movie, Ron and his friends hold nothing back in their quest to get revenge. Whether he’s shooting a man in cold blood or hooking someone up to a car battery in order to get information out of him, there’s little that Ron won’t do and the movie lingers over every act of violence. Several pounds overweight and snarling out of his lines, Joe Don Baker may not be a conventional action hero but he’s believable in his rage. He’s the ultimate country boy who has been pushed too far and now he doesn’t care how much blood he has to get on his hands. However, because Baker does seem more like an ordinary person than a Clint Eastwood or a Charles Bronson-type, he retains the audience’s sympathy even as he splashes blood all over the screen. As violent as his action may be, they always feel justified.

Baker’s performance and the believable violence are the film’s biggest strengths. It’s biggest weakness is a plot that revolves around an elaborate conspiracy that doesn’t always make sense and some notably weak supporting performances. Ron’s revenge may be brutal but it takes a while to get there and the first hour gets bogged down with Ron’s struggle to adjust to life in prison. John Marley does a good job as Ron’s prison mentor but then he abruptly disappears from the movie.

Before making Framed, Baker and director Phil Karlson previously collaborated on Walking Tall. Framed is far more violent than that film was but its plot doesn’t hold together as well. However, if you’re just looking for a violent action film that features Joe Don Baker doing what he does best, Framed delivers.

The 1947 film noir, Framed, is the story of a loser.

That, in itself, is not a surprise. The loser who finds himself stranded in a strange place where he’s manipulated by nearly everyone he meets is a film noir archetype. This is especially true when it comes to movies about men who end up getting manipulated by another film noir archetype, the femme fatale. I mean, let’s be honest. Most film noir “heroes” fall victim to their own desperation. If they weren’t so obviously desperate to find money or sex, they probably wouldn’t end up in the trouble that always seems to follow them around.

Framed tells the story of Mike Lambert (Glenn Ford). When we first meet Mike, he’s sitting behind the wheel of an out-of-control truck. While the truck recklessly speeds down a steep hill, Mike desperately tries to keep from crashing. It’s not until Mike pulls into a small town that he finally gets the truck to stop. Of course, in the process of stopping, he also dings the back of someone else’s pickup truck.

It turns out that, until recently, Mike was a mining engineer. After he lost his job, he found temporary employment as a truck driver. He needed the money so he didn’t bother to find out what he was hauling or even if the truck had working brakes. When Mike calls up the man who hired him and tells him that the owner of the pickup is demanding that Mike’s employer pay for the damage, the man hangs up on him. To recap, before we’re even 10 minutes into the movie, we’ve seen that Mike can be tricked into driving a truck with no brakes and that he can’t even convince his employer to help pay for the damage caused by those faulty brakes. In other words: Loser!

Anyway, the local cops are planning on tossing Mike in jail for reckless driving but fortunately, a local waitress, Paula Craig (Janis Carter), is willing to pay Mike’s fine. She even helps a drunken Mike find a hotel room. Is Paula doing all of this out of the goodness of her heart or is it all just a part of an elaborate scheme? While Mike is getting a job with a local prospector (Edgar Buchanan), Paula is meeting with her married boyfriend, Steve Price (Barry Sullivan), and bragging about how she’s finally found the perfect patsy.

Yes, to no one’s surprise, Paula and Steve have hatched a nefarious scheme and Mike is about to find himself stuck right in the middle of it. Of course, since this is a film noir, it should come as no surprise to learn that Paula and Steve are just as willing to double cross each other as they are Mike….

Framed is an entertaining if slightly predictable noir. From the minute that Paula first appears, we know that she’s not to be trusted but part of the fun of the film is that those of us in the audience are always a step or two ahead of poor Mike. You watch Mike in amazement that someone could be so dense but, at the same time, Glenn Ford is likable enough that you do hope that everything will turn out okay for him. As for the film’s main villains, Barry Sullivan is perfectly slick and sleazy as Steve Price but the film is really stolen by Janis Carter, who plays Paula as if she were a panther waiting to pounce on her prey.

Framed is a film that will definitely be enjoyed by those who appreciate the shadowy landscape of an old school film noir. It may not rewrite the rules of genre but it’s still an undeniably entertaining film about a loser and the people who use him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-INr2cINnt4