Knock on Any Door

An attorney (Humphrey Bogart) builds a sob-story defense for a young man (John Derek) accused of murder.

Knock on Any Door is a preachy melodrama from director Nicholas Ray.

Ray, who’s probably best known for directing James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, takes something of a warm-up lap here, treading into the same teen angst and disaffected youth pool that defined the James Dean film.

Unfortunately, like most pre-Graduate films meant to portray the angst of an emerging generation, Knock on Any Door doesn’t age well at all. What might have been edgy in 1949 just seems corny now, likely, because the motion picture code wouldn’t allow the filmmakers to be honest. Kids couldn’t curse, nobody could get away with murder, and topics like abortion were completely off-limits.

What’s left comes across as preachy and disingenuous. The contrived plotting and heavy-handed approach don’t help. From the opening zooming closeup of a policeman blowing a whistle, to Bogart’s closing oratory directly to the camera, this is an in-your-face film, and that’s a large part of what sinks it.

Buried in all the heavy-handed messaging is a solid performance by Humphrey Bogart, who manages the impossible task of pulling off the film’s big finale speech. Like so much of the film’s dialog, Bogart’s monologue feels trite and self satsifying on paper, but Bogart pulls it off; a testament to his strength as an actor.

For his part, lead John Derek does the best he can with the material. While he certainly looks the part, he overacts badly in almost every scene. That said, with the script’s poor dialog, if Derek had really overdone it, Knock on Any Door would actually work as a satire.