Whose Spine is It Anyway?

A young man is stuck in the hospital with a spinal injury. Meanwhile, his best friend is getting lost in the criminal underworld in 1950's Backfire (though the film was shot in 1948, it was shelved for two years). This is one of those peculiar, dreamlike noirs, somewhat in the vein of Detour, that may be viewed as much more surreal than it was intended to be. That's really the only way it's effective.

Bob (Gordon MacRae) is bedridden, recovering from a series of spinal surgeries. His best friend and war buddy, Steve (Edmond O'Brien), confers with the doctor who informs him Bob shouldn't be doing anything more strenuous than lifting a pencil for a long time. That puts a damper on Bob and Steve's dream to start a ranch together. However, Steve just can't bring himself to break the news to Bob. So he goes off alone, presumably to make the ranch happen without Bob's help.

One night, when Bob is heavily sedated, a mysterious woman with a European accent (Viveca Lindfors) appears and informs him Steve also has a spinal injury now and wants to die. She asks Bob if she should help Steve die or if she should insist that he live. Bob struggles to wakefulness and pleads for the latter. Afterwards, everyone tells him this was a hallucination, that there was no record of a mysterious European woman visiting the hospital.

Finally, Bob gets the okay to leave, but he's still perturbed by Steve's disappearance. It turns out, the police are looking for Steve too; he's wanted for murder. Bob won't believe it for a second so he and his girlfriend, Julie (Virginia Mayo), conduct their own investigation which mostly involves interviews.

And these interviews mostly involve extensive flashbacks. In fact, an extraordinary amount of the film consists of flashbacks of Steve, which is one of the chief complaints about the film from critics and even from the film's own director, who only took the job reluctantly. However, the flashbacks are so strangely pervasive, it adds to the dreamlike quality of the film. The linking of Bob and Steve--both have the same goal (a ranch), both suffer spinal injuries--suggests the men may be two sides of one personality, or two personalities in one mind. Is Steve the repository for all of the guilty deeds Bob's unwilling to own up to?

Backfire is available on The Criterion Channel as part of their Holiday Noir collection (there are some scenes set during Christmas).