cult film freak: STEVE COCHRAN DRIVING ROBERT CUMMINGS IN 'THE CHASE'

Robert Cummings and Michèle Morgan in THE CHASE Year: 1946 Rating: ***

Since some 1940's film noirs are very surreal, it's not strange that one-third of THE CHASE is actually a dream by penniless war veteran turned mobster's chauffeur Robert Cummings suffering PTSD...

The irony is how much weirder the real stuff is, and, literally driven by Steve Cochran with an accelerator in his limo's backseat while Cummings steers (after racing alongside) a moving train, both Cochan and henchman Peter Lorre get their kicks by cheating death...

Peter Lorre and Steve Cochran in THE CHASE

Meanwhile the romantic element involves Cummings involved with Cochran's abused wife in French actress Michèle Morgan, taking her to Havana where a murder turns Cummings into the kind of wrong-man he had most famously played in Alfred Hitchcock's SABOTEUR...

A road movie that THE CHASE title would fit over what feels like an incomplete blueprint of a dreamy programmer ruined by that literal dream aspect — the only part where the quietly brooding yet tortuously sociopathic Cochran (effectively keeping both the male and female leads on edge) isn't around.