High Tide (1947)

Directed by John Reinhardt; produced by Jack Wrather

Hugh Fresney (Lee Tracy), a newspaper editor, and Tim Slade (Don Castle), a reporter turned private investigator, are old friends, and they reminisce about the events that took place after Slade came to Los Angeles a couple of weeks before in answer to Fresney’s telegram. That telegram led to murder, robbery and corruption - and to the men’s current predicament: on the beach, with Fresney paralyzed from the waist down in a wrecked car, and Slade trapped underneath it. And the tide is coming in.

Though Tracy had dozens of movie credits by this time, and Castle too was an experienced actor, the only face that most viewers will recognise in the movie is Regis Toomey’s: he plays a police detective. Everyone else is an habitué of Hollywood’s ‘Poverty Row’, the collection of small studios that produced cheap films. High Tide is one of them.

Low production values doesn’t necessarily mean a poor movie, and High Tide provides decent entertainment. This is due principally to the two leads and to a well-written script. Tracy’s character is almost all about the newspaper, even having a photographer take a picture when the widow of a man Fresney’s newspaper helped railroad to the electric chair confronts him. But, interestingly, he shows some twinges of conscience. Tracy works well with Castle. The other actors give adequate performances.

The story is pretty straightforward, though it throws in a surprise ending. The solution to the story’s mystery is sensible, though the plot doesn’t provide any real clues to the identity of the villain. The script is better; it plays with metaphor in an entertaining fashion. For instance, Slade is fending off the advances of an old girlfriend while playing darts and mentions that he “hasn’t played this game in a long time”.

The direction is ordinary and the editing appears choppy in places. The amount of money put into the film doesn’t allow for such things as shooting on location, even a setting as local (to those in Los Angeles) as Union Station. There are some good scenes that make use of a Malibu beach-house (no doubt surrounded by hundreds of similar structures now.)

While nothing very good, High Tide is just what it should be: a pleasantly entertaining movie with few pretensions.