Film Noir of the Week: reviews, commentary and articles related to film noir

High Wall (1947)

2009-07-03T09:41:00.012-05:00

High Wall (1947), starring Robert Taylor and Audrey Totter is a little known Noir melodrama currently unavailable on DVD which has received scant and mixed reviews in print. This is too bad because the film is a real treat and in my opinion a fine quality Noir that is definitely worth seeing.

The movie features many of the typical Noir themes; the returning World War 2 veteran having difficulty adjusting to postwar civilian life, the unfaithful wife, mental illness, a murder and the police procedural details in solving the crime as well as the hypocrisy of respected members of society who seem like fine upstanding citizens but who are in reality corrupt and evil.

High Wall is an MGM production which seems a little odd as the film looks like pure RKO to me, although MGM did make many excellent Noirs including two of my favorites The Postman Always Rings Twice and Asphalt Jungle. The movie is competently directed by Curtis Bernhardt, yet another German director who fled Nazi persecution only to enrich the Hollywood Film Noir Canon with Germanic filmcraft. His other Noir credits include Possessed with Joan Crawford and two films with Humphrey Bogart; Conflict and Sirocco. The screenplay was written by Sydney Boehm and Lester Cole. Boehm is perhaps best known for penning The Big Heat as well as many other Noirs including Side Street, Mystery Street and Union Station. Cole is credited with writing the screenplay for movies like Blood On The Sun (with Jimmy Cagney), Objective Burma (with Errol Flynn) and The House of the Seven Gables (with George Sanders and Vincent Price). Cole is probably more famous as one of the Hollywood Ten and was blacklisted shortly after High Wall by The House Un American Activities Committee. Subsequently he was unemployed for most of the 1950’s, although he later wrote the script (under a pseudonym) for the hugely successful family film Born Free. The film score, composed by Bronisław Kaper is surprisingly subdued for the era and provides the right moody atmosphere. To me the real reason to watch the film is the deep, rich blackness of the cinematography. Each mise en scene appears to have been carefully constructed and lovingly photographed by Paul Vogel, who was credited as the cinematographer in that same year, 1947 for the movie Lady in the Lake, which I personally dislike but nevertheless was an original idea for making a movie. Some of Vogel’s other Noir cinematography credits included Scene of the Crime, Black Hand and Dial 1119.

Robert Taylor, once considered one of Hollywood’s most handsome men was mainly known for action type roles in Westerns and War movies but he had just made another Noir with Robert Mitchum named Undercurrent which itself was unique for a Noir in that it was directed by Vincente Minelli and featured Katherine Hepburn, neither of whom are names usually associated with the genre. Audrey Totter needs no real intro to Noir fans and this is one of the few roles I actually feel some sympathy for. Personally I dislike her and find her coarse and unattractive but here, in High Wall she gets an opportunity to ditch the tough talking dame act to play a classy woman with a heart of gold. Herbert Marshall is excellent as the oily and hypocritical villain. Marshall was a workhorse English character actor of stage and screen, among whose many other acting credits include The Letter directed by William Wyler and starring Bette Davis and Otto Preminger’s Angel Face as the father of the truly disturbed daughter character played by Jean Simmons.

The movie starts in a nightclub, swathed in shadows, with a jazz orchestra playing quiet nocturnal music. The camera moves past a Dark City skyline to alight on a pensive Willard Whitcombe (Herbert Marshall) sitting at the bar. This opening shot perfectly sets the mood. Whitcombe leaves and returns to his office, where he pauses at the office door long enough for us to discover that he works at a Liturgical Publishing House. This dichotomy of a loner at a bar working as a manager for a Religion based business immediately tells us that this man is not exactly what he seems. He asks his dutiful secretary if one of his assistants- Mrs Kenet has returned and is told that her husband had come to the office looking for her and that she was not likely to return that evening.

Next the scene cuts to a car moving at breakneck speed, literally. We now get out first glimpse of the protagonist, Steven Kenet (Robert Taylor) through the windshield of an automobile moving at full throttle. The camera focuses at medium range on the driver, a despondent, distraught and disheveled man with eyes full of fury. In the seat next to him is the limp, lifeless form of a woman. We hear the distant cry of police sirens. Suddenly the car veers off the road and flips over into a river bed.

Next we are at the police station where we discover that the lifeless woman is Kenet’s wife and he confesses to strangling her. Unfortunately Kenet is not in his right frame of mind. He is suffering from brain damage and cannot be charged while he is mentally unstable, so he is sent to a Mental Hospital. Enter Dr Lorrison (Audrey Totter), a single, blonde and attractive female physician. The film next develops the characters. We find out that Kenet has a wife and son living with his mother, that he has been in Burma for two years and that the DA is itching for Kenet to have surgery so they can prosecute Kenet for murdering his wife.

We quickly find that Kenet’s mother has died and Dr Lorrison uses the threat of Kenet’s son becoming an orphan to coerce him into the surgery. We also find out the Doctor has taken temporary custody of Kenet’s child without Kenet knowing. Kenet is now consumed with getting through a trial so he can provide for his son.

Due to some attempted blackmail and some medically induced flashbacks, the truth behind his wife’s murder is slowly revealed and the plot fully developed. We find out that Kenet’s wife was a wartime bride, was greedy, materialistic and not a particularly good mother and that she was having an affair with Whitcombe. Nevertheless Kenet faces huge obstacles in getting justice, some of them self induced. Fortunately he is aided by Doctor Lorrison who begins to fall for Kenet. There are chases and manhunts through rain soaked streets and two small but essential scenes featuring Vince Barnett, known to Noir fans as Burt Lancaster’s cellmate in The Killers and as Mugsy in Brute Force. We find out that Whitcombe turns out to be not only an adulterer but an embezzler as well in a richly ironic way.

There are some interesting plot twists but in the end we do get a Hollywood ending. The code demanded that evil must be punished but the overwhelming tone of the movie is that the world is a dark, foreboding place full of cynical and corrupt hypocrites and the few decent people in it face overwhelming odds in surviving. Like so many Noirs of those years 1946 and 1947 High Wall really shows a world that is out of joint and where betrayal and mistrust are commonplace. Thematically the movie shares some of the same elements as The Blue Dahlia which is also about a returning war hero who is accused of killing his unfaithful wife. Also like Blue Dahlia, High Wall shows a world that stinks with corruption and where everyone has a price. Taylor is a better actor than Ladd and the direction and cinematography is better than Dahlia. Of course the latter has Veronica Lake and has William Bendix who is a familiar and comfortable face for old movie buffs. Both movies are good Noirs and certainly Dahlia has the notoriety of being the inspiration for a real life L.A. murder but I do think High Wall is a slightly better film. The rich, deep blackness that envelops the film is delicious both visually and metaphorically. The only sunshine in the film occurs in flashback. It’s as if a High Wall separates the postwar world of darkness from the sunshine of the past.

Written by Tim Brophy

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

2009-06-28T17:33:00.005-05:00

"Beware of false prophets that come to you in sheep's clothing."

The Night of the Hunter - Charles Laughton's only directorial effort - was a box-office flop thanks partly to a misguided advertising campaign and lukewarm reviews when released in 1955. Around the 1970s movie goers began to embrace foreign and more artistic films. The daring-for-it's-time thriller was reexamined by film buffs and grew into a cult classic. Today there's no doubt that Laughton's Night of the Hunter is considered a great film.

The depression-era story – told like a twisted fairy tale – is about a young boy trying to protect 10-thousand dollars hidden in his little sister's beloved doll. The money's from a bank robbery John's father (Peter Graves) pulled before being caught. Wounded, the young father hides the money just as the police arrive at the house. Ben Harper killed two men in the hold up and is eventually hanged for the crime. Young John swears an oath -right as the police arrive- to his father to keep the loot from everyone until he grows up. He's tested when a slick-speaking preacher – an ex-con and his dad's former cell mate - shows up at his doorstep looking for the cash.

The preacher (Robert Mitchum) woos John's vapid and love-starved widow mother (Shelley Winters) and a marriage is quickly performed. John knows the preacher is after the money but all the adults in his world either don't believe him or are too weak to help him. What follows is a story -told mostly from the point of view of John – about children trying to survive a dangerous adult world. The film becomes unsettling when the narrative switches between the child's view to the twisted reality of the cracked preacher.

Jeffrey Couchman's book, The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Filmis a detailed story about how the film was made and the reaction to the now-classic movie. In it, Couchman mentions Mitchum – the coolest cat in film noir – was coached by Laughton to give a performance that ends up being a mix of Mitchum's film-noir toughness and more than a bit of Charles Laughton's physical acting and line delivery. Mitchum wanted to preacher to be even more sinister in the film. Laughton insisted he perform a few pratfalls and lighter comic moments. The two compromised and created a perfect balance. Preacher Harry Powell turns out to be Mitchum's greatest and most unexpected performances. Mitchum sings a lot in the movie and who could forget the chilling sing-song “Chil—dren?” chant at the top of the stairs?

The film based on Davis Grubb's first published book. Laughton considered the novel very visual and instructed screenwriter James Agee to create a script that would be as close to the novel as possible. Agee wrote a phone-book sized draft. Laughton – experienced with editing down large works when working on plays based on novels and his own one-man story-telling shows – whittled down the first draft into a shooting script. Laughton seems to have kept the movie true to the novel. Agee insisted Laughton get co-screenwriter credit but the director refused. Agee died before the film could be released.

Walter Schumann was hired to do the score. The music was written before the film was made. Like the film, the score is creepy and unforgettable. The soundtrack vinyl record – recently re-released on CD with Rózsa's The Lost Weekend score- isn't a soundtrack at all. It's Laughton, Mitchum and others telling a condensed version of the film over Schumann's unforgettable music. The album – sounding a bit like a radio program – is unique and showcases Laughton's great gift as a storyteller. Laughton was not unlike Orson Welles – a great teller of tales both behind the scenes or in front of a microphone.

The Night of the Hunter cast is solid from top to bottom. The children in the movie have been criticized by some as being weak actors. I disagree. Certainly John Harper's little sister Pearl is annoying and does occasionally look off camera. However, I find their raw performances to be better than the alternative. Nothing kills a thriller quicker than sticky sweet kids and weepy weddings. Instead Night of the Hunter has kids in it that seem real. Speaking of weddings, Shelley Winters as the preacher's bride is perfectly cast. Willa Harper's honeymoon turns torturous when her misogynist husband loudly rejects her advances. Winters can be grating – even this early into her career (watching her in The Big Knife is like sixty-grit sandpaper being rubbed on your toes)- but she hits all the right notes here showing lust, disappointment and shame in a brief scene. Her death scene – shot in an German expressionistic style in a bed room that's shaped like a church steeple and in a bed that resembles a tomb– is one of the best in the film. Finally the underwater shot of her lifeless body sitting in her sunken car with her long hair flowing like seaweed probably still gives people nightmares. (I have to admit it, after a recent viewing, the scene reminded me of Winters in the unfortunate The Poseidon Adventure.)

Evelyn Varden and Don Beddoe play Willa's neighbors – the Spoons. Varden plays a busy body. She does all she can to get the preacher and Willa together – which turns into a fatal mistake. Walt Spoon suspects Harry Powell isn't all he seems to be but gets shouted down by wife Icey. Beddoe is in a lot of films (including The Killer is Loose and The Narrow Margin) but he usually ends up being invisible. Laughton seemed to have been generous to his cast. Even the smallest supporting roles have a bit of an edge to them. When Icey announces to the ladies at the church picnic, “When you've been married to a man for forty years you know all that don't amount to a hill of beans. I've been married to Walt that long and I swear in all that time I just lie there thinkin' about my canning.” Don Beddoe's reaction is priceless.

Lillian Gish enters the picture about 2/3rds of the way through and almost steals the movie from Mitchum. She plays a woman who no only is the only true Christian in the film but also one strong enough to stand up to Harry Powell.

The most memorable image in the film is probably Mitchum's tattooed knuckles. L-O-V-E on one hand and H-A-T-E on the other. Silver and Ursini's Film Noiruses them on the cover of their handsome coffee-table book. Meatloaf had the same tattoos in Rocky Horror Picture Show and Bruce Springsteen makes mention of the the famous ink in his song “Cautious Man.” Today – even when Sunday school teachers can be spotted with “tramp stamps” on their backs – the knuckle tattoos are outrageous. Grubb used that physical feature in the book after remembering seeing a man with those actual tattoos years before. The publicity still of Mitchum outside of Rachel Cooper's house is familiar to any classic movie fan.

The film is a hard one to classify. It's part horror. Certainly, you can see some of Universal's Frankenstein in the movie. Mitchum looks like the monster with his outstretched arms chasing the children. Then there's the angry sanctimonious “Christian” torch-carrying mob lead by Icey Spoon near the end. Mitchum is hypnotic and sexy – just like Béla Lugosi in Dracula. The shotgun standoff at Rachel's farm is reminiscent of classic Westerns.

Would you call it film noir too? After reading Mr. Couchman's book (an excellent read) this week I emailed him that question.

“It’s probably fair to call it “noirish.” How’s that for an evasion? Well, it’s not quite an evasion, because the film both contains and lacks elements of noir. It has such film-noir characteristics as high-contrast lighting, an expressionistic use of shadows, and a psychopathic main character. But it also has a pastoral feel that is unlike noir, and it contains a character of pure goodness (Rachel Cooper, played by Lillian Gish) who is alien to the corrupt, morally ambivalent world of noir. The happy ending is also not what you expect in a film noir. So I guess the final answer for me is . . . the film is part film noir.”

The film certainly makes a good case for film noir not being a genre but rather a style seen in many genres. If you look at it that way then I would definitely call it noir.

Stanley Cortez's camerawork should not be overlooked. The famed cinematographer makes the film look like a cross between Tom Sawyer, The Red House and Cape Fear. (trivia: Cortez worked on Black Tuesday (1954) also with Peter Graves playing a young prisoner that won't reach old age.)

Laughton instructed Cortez that he wanted the film to look like an old silent and, in parts, like a children's book. Laughton certainly took a risk making his first -and last – film a combination horror, suspense, children's story and even comedy. On top of that having Cortez shoot it in an expressionistic style and dealing with issues like religious hypocrisy probably made the film impossible for it to be marketed in theaters. Time, however, is usually kind to truly great films – regardless of their box office. This is one of the best.

Written by Steve-O

Dead Reckoning (1947)

2009-06-19T21:10:00.014-05:00

Errors in Judgement in Dead Reckoning

“Didn’t I tell you all dames are the same with their faces washed.”

With The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), and The Big Sleep (1946) under his belt, Humphrey Bogart made the rather disappointing film Dead Reckoning in 1947. From director John Cromwell and with the two main stars: Bogart and Lizabeth Scott, this should have been a first tier film, but it isn’t. When the film was released it received a mixed review from The New York Times and was criticized for its rambling plot, Scott’s lifeless performance and for the implausibility of some of the main male character’s actions. I’d go along with placing the blame for the film’s failure on the plot. The original story is credited to Gerald Drayson Adams and the film’s producer, Sidney Biddell. After that, add Oliver H.P. Garrett and Steve Fisher for the screenplay, and then stick the name Allan Rivkin on top for the adaptation. That gives us a list of five writers, and it’s easy to wonder if some of the script’s problems came from the sheer number of hands editing and altering until the original story morphed into a convoluted mess.

The film’s title, Dead Reckoning probably meant more to post WWII cinemagoers than it does to today’s audience. Dead Reckoning is the term of a basic navigational method used in the absence of instruments. Position is estimated based on previously known information, and then the navigator advances that position based on using known or estimated speeds and time elapsed. It’s flying blind in a sense, and one error made--no matter how slight in the formula--will be magnified as errors are calculated onto errors, creating the potential for cumulative disaster. This clever title reflects not only the echoes of WWII that still resonate in the hero’s life, but it also exactly describes the choices the hero, Murdoch (Bogart) makes as he stumbles into Gulf City and stirs the embers of a long-smoldering crime. He makes his first errors in judgment and bases his actions on these errors, compounding his mistakes as he gets sucked in deeper and deeper into deception.

The first half of the film is told in flashback mode by the main male character, Captain Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart) to a stray priest Murdock corners in a Gulf City church. Murdock, running and evading the police, lurches into the church, loiters around a pillar and then corners the priest. In supplicant mode, Murdock begins to tell his tangled tale. At first the implication is that Murdock is wounded and that he’s gasping out his tale as a version of a deathbed confession. This scene is the first of many superfluous plot twists; it serves to justify and introduce the strong voice-over narration that dominates the film.

In flashback mode, Murdock’s tale to the priest begins strongly enough with two WWII heroes returning to the States. Captain Rip Murdock (Bogart) and Sgt Johnny Drake (William Prince) have been holed up injured in a French hospital, and they’ve been flown back with no small amount of expense and trouble, but the pomp and ceremony is about to come in Washington when both men are decorated for valor. When Johnny hears the news that he’s going to be awarded the Medal of Valor, he does something peculiar. He ditches the train to Washington, ditches Captain Murdock and hops a train going in another direction. Murdock vows to find him and bring him back, but just who is Drake? Murdock begins to question the identity of his war buddy right as he disappears, but before Murdock can get answers, Drake is long gone.

Murdock’s curiosity and determination to bring Johnny Drake back to Washington leads him to the discovery that his longtime pal used a fake name. ‘Drake’ was really Preston, a Yale graduate who hailed from Gulf City, and Murdock’s guts tell him that Johnny will return back to his home town, and to a particular blonde: “Cinderella with a husky voice”--a girl whose memory troubled Johnny even on the battlefields of France.

So far so good, but the plot is heading to the murky depths from which it will not return. Murdock arrives in Gulf City and discovers that there’s a room reserved for him, so evidently Johnny expected his old army pal to arrive. Along with the reservation is a cryptic note that includes the word “Geronimo” --the tag used prior to a parachute jump. Murdock now knows two things: Johnny is back in Gulf City, and that he’s laying low….

When Johnny doesn’t show, Murdock begins to worry and he decides to do some investigating. Using Johnny’s enlistment date to estimate when he left Gulf City years before, Murdock discovers that Johnny Drake (Preston) confessed to a murder involving cabaret singer ‘Dusty’ Coral Chandler (Lizabeth Scott) and her much-older wealthy real estate magnate husband. This information is delivered problematically through a spilt second visual flash at a newspaper headline. There’s another split second flash on the screen of more essential information. An important witness to the crime was a waiter at the Sanctuary Club named Louis Ord. This device of on-screen split-second flashes of essential plot twists is a major trip up for the film.

Murdock takes a side jaunt to the morgue where he exchanges some snappy dialogue with the resident cop who’s hanging out for kicks. Posing as a traveler concerned about a suicidal man, Murdock checks all the new stiffs and discovers Johnny as a John Doe burned to a crisp.

Now Murdock goes on the hunt for the waiter Louis Ord (George Chandler), and he heads to the Sanctuary nightclub where he runs slap bang into the gorgeous Chandler dame as she sits at the bar. The first look we get at Scott (nicknamed “The Threat” by Paramount) is through Murdock’s eyes as he scans her body from the ankle up those long legs teasingly crossed and glimpsed through her seductive evening gown. Although bothered by club heavy, Krause (Marvin Miller), Murdock manages to steer the Chandler babe to a table for two. Here she croons a lifeless song to the club’s patrons before Murdock drops the news of Johnny’s death.

The plot gets even thicker with the introduction of club owner Martinelli (Morris Carnovsky), and it’s not long before Murdock is drugged and wakes up in his hotel room next to a stiff. A few scenes later, the film segues back to Murdock’s confessional stint with the priest at which point Murdoch ditches the priest and bails back into the present Gulf City action. Thrown into the plot is a letter written in secret code, a missing murder weapon, and a safe expert loaded with explosives.

Although the film is packed with snappy dialogue, basically the plot needs a complete rewrite, although I have a nagging feeling that the original script had so many re-writes the pages bled red. There’s too much emphasis on minor characters while major developments are delivered as minor asides. What was the point of the priest since that entire scene went nowhere? And what was the point of the Louis Ord character except to provide a skinny stiff that travels around town in the back of Dusty’s car?

Apart from the sappy ballad Lizabeth Scott delivers in sickly-sweet sentimental fashion, she plays the femme fatale well. The flawed hero, Murdock, already half in love with the blonde he’s heard so much about, forgets his common sense when it comes to Dusty. Mulling over the implications of the scent of Jasmine he can’t forget (reminds me of Walter Neff’s memory of honeysuckle), Murdoch heads right back to the duplicitous dame after ditching the priest. Obviously since the newspaper headline that exposed the crime placed Dusty, Johnny and her dead husband together at the scene of the murder, with the husband dead that left two possibilities. And with Johnny fried to a crisp that leaves one. You’d have to be impossibly naïve or blindly in love to think Dusty didn’t pull the trigger on her old man, and since Murdock isn’t naïve, that leaves one possibility….

Murdock’s actions exemplify Dead Reckoning. He knows one thing when he arrives in Gulf City--the man he’s come to know as Johnny Drake is a good human being--a man he’d trust his life to. Johnny is in trouble, but Murdock doesn’t know why. Poking around Gulf City raises the possibility that Johnny is a murderer, but Murdock doesn’t believe that. He searches for Johnny and finds a corpse, and from then on Murdock wants to discover the truth. He begins to make errors in judgment with each error sucking him in deeper and deeper. He continues to trust Dusty even though that cloying scent of jasmine tells him otherwise, and his continued relationship with Dusty smacks of doom. If love or infatuation explains Murdock’s sometimes ill-conceived actions, Lizabeth Scott’s lifeless performance (per the critics--not me), can be explained by the fact that like most femme fatales, Dusty detracts her claws in favor of deceptively sweet, ultra-submissive behavior, and if you’re a sap--like Johnny or Murdock--you suspend your intuition and skepticism and fall in love with a succubus. One scene between Murdock and Dusty sets the stage for the relationship as he defines his perfect woman as the type who will keep quiet and disappear until nighttime, and Dusty listens, absorbing Murdock’s description. She becomes that woman--pliant, submissive, gentle…well at least on the surface.

The Columbia DVD releaseshows luscious Lizabeth Scott in Bogart’s arms. The implication is that she’s fainted, but in the cover picture she looks as though she’s been decapitated. This poor choice is just a hint of what’s in store in this problematic film. But Bogart, at least, is faultless as Murdock. Not many men can address a bartender as “sweetheart” and get away with it, but this is all part of Murdock’s charm: his sentimentality, his devotion to his old friend, and his willingness to be duped…up to a point….

Written by Guy Savage

The Glass Key (1942)

2009-06-14T15:36:00.011-05:00

Imagine a glass key twisting in a lock and falling to the ground in glittering shards....The plot of The Glass Key, despite its folklore-esque title, is not indicative of an amuletic object as is The Maltese Falcon. Rather the glass key is a metaphor for the types of fragile human relationships explored in the film.

Dashiell Hammett, dean of the hard-boiled school of fiction, authored The Glass Key.It was dedicated to one of his former lovers, American author Nell Martin. The Glass Key was said to be Hammett's personal favorite amongst his own works. As a side note, Hammett was a pretty hard-boiled guy himself, being one of the survivors of the deadly Spanish flu pandemic!

This noir version is actually the second cinematic adaptation of the book. The first Glass Key film was produced by Paramount in 1935 and received strong reviews in the New York Times.

The two starring roles in the 1942 film are played by Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd. The pair also starred together in This Gun For Hire released in the same year. Interestingly enough, they were cast together not because of chemistry, although that was present in truckloads, but rather in regards to their petite statures! Alan Ladd stood only 5'5" and Veronica Lake was a tiny 4'11".

Really, The Glass Key embodies the definition of noir. Hook, line and sinker: Janet Henry (Veronica Lake) is the hook, Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy) has got all the lines and Ed Beaumont (Alan Ladd) sinks everyone who crosses him, or his boss Madvig...

We will start with the hook. Of course it's the dame. Janet Henry, daughter of a politician, has got a mean but intriguing right hook when defending the gambling ways of her younger brother, Taylor Henry. Paul Madvig shouldn't have said it so loud. "If Ralph Henry is so anxious to reform someone, why don't he start on that son of his?! He gets in more jams than the Dead End Kids!"

Janet walks right up to Paul and slaps him across the face. He is titillated by her blonde beauty, confidence and passionate anger. "What a slugger...."

Madvig exclaims to his right-hand man: "Ed! I just met the swellest dame. She smacked me in the kisser." At that moment, Paul Madvig has decided to himself that Janet Henry is the women that he will marry and that he will support her father in a bid to be re-elected as senator.

The shocked look on Ed's face, more than anything else, is that of a jilted lover. Now the viewer begins to see hints of a homosexually charged relationship between Ed and Paul, very similar to what one observes between Neff and Keyes in Double Indemnity.

Veronica Lake's deadpan depiction of Janet Henry has all the qualities of a medieval painting of a devilish Madonna. The clever costume designer had Lake appear in several scenes with hair totally covered by nun-like hats, giving her exquisitely molded face an eerie otherworldly quality. The electricity between Janet Henry and Ed Beaumont is evident from their first meeting as she shoots him naughty sidelong glances, however he is highly suspicious of her manipulative un-veiled advances.

It fascinates me to notice so many examples of clothing used symbolically and erotically in noir films. Especially footwear---think of Edward G. Robinson painting Joan Bennett's toenails in Scarlet Street, hep kitten Ella Raines's rosette heels enticing Cliff the drummer in Phantom Lady, and who could forget that first sexy glimpse of Phyllis Dietrichson's anklet and platform shoes on the stairwell in Double Indemnity?

A particularly intimate scene takes place near the beginning of the The Glass Key, while Ed and Paul are talking in his office. Ed is perched on the edge of Paul's desk, and Paul has his feet propped up on the desk with his shoes removed. Ed is seriously advising Paul to keep up his good relations with underworld gangster Nick Varna, rather than backing the reform candidate, Janet Henry's father. The entire time, Ed cannot take his eyes off Paul's feet on the desk and finally affectionately criticizes his time-piece themed socks.

"It's wrong. As wrong as those socks."
"Wait a minute, what's wrong with them?"
"The clock. It ticks too loud."

Then the plot really gets twisted around. We discover that Paul Madvig's younger sister is in love with Taylor Henry, much to the chagrin of her older brother. The events of an evening result in the murder of Taylor Henry. Ed Beaumont discovers the body. And The Glass Key quickly becomes a whodunit mystery.

The relationship between Ed and Paul reaches its head during a heated argument that can only be described as a lovers quarrel shortly after the funeral of Taylor Henry. Ed has proclaimed he is leaving town for good. He and Paul have one last beer together at a table in the back of the bar. By the time the waiter appears they are already going at it and the subject is Janet Henry. The look on the waiter's face is that of someone who is observing an argument between a couple.
Ed growls an impassioned: "Take your hands off me!" Paul gets knocked out and then when he gets back up to defend himself, Ed ruthlessly breaks the beer mug on the table and threatens him with the sharp remains.

In spite of this hot tiff, Ed Beaumont continues to remain fiercely devoted to Paul Madvig, for reasons unbeknownst to the viewer, but alluded to throughout the film. One can glean that Ed Beaumont has a gambling problem and perhaps Madvig fished him out of a very deep hole.

Another performance in The Glass Key that cannot go without mention, is William Bendix playing the role of Jeff, gangster Nick Varna's thuggish henchman. Bendix administers to Ladd, perhaps the most overtly sadomasochistic beating that I have yet to observe in a film noir. I would go so far to say it would even rival the beating of Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly.

At one point Jeff is roughing Ladd up with such homoerotic glee, punching him onto nothing other than a bed, another one of Varna's thugs blurts out: "Watch it! You're liable to croak him."

Jeff insists that his victim is enjoying it. "He's a tough baby, he likes this." Ed Beaumont certainly is a tough baby....Ed's daring creative escape from Varna's cronies makes the whole movie a worthwhile watch.

Yet as a true thick-skinned Hammett character, Ed Beaumont goes back for revenge and more. Ed sets up another typically noir scenario, cornering and manipulating an inebriated Jeff in a sordid dark room above a bar. Again, the shadows of set and cinematography make this scene a viewing necessity for every die-hard noir fan. This scene is one of those which christened the birth of true film noir. During their sordid exchange, reiterating noir's foot fetish, Varna walks in and the hulking Jeff drunkenly throws his arm around Ed Beaumont and proclaims, "Hiya Nick. Meet Mr. Beaumont. He's a heel!... (to Beaumont) I think you're a pair of heels."

The Glass Key is not the same kind of stylish catchy thriller as This Gun For Hire, it has a definite slower pace. However the former more clearly illustrates the elusive atmosphere and thematic elements which define film noir. Alan Ladd reigns supreme in both films, as a master of multifaceted characters. Not only did he master the role of a feline-loving hitman in This Gun For Hire, but he interjected a profound complexity to the character of Ed Beaumont.

All of the key components of noir are present in this film: a very definite crisis of patriarchy, strong willed femme fatales and a plot centered around an expose of a political nature. And in regards to the surreal aesthetics attributed to noir film, what else could so gloriously conjure the ghost of Andre Breton like the shots of a somber black umbrella parade through the rain at Taylor Henry's funeral?

Written by Phantom Lady

Editor's note: Check out her fun website Phantom Lady Vintage

The Set-Up (1949)

2009-06-04T19:03:00.012-05:00

Robert Ryan as Battered Boxer of Principle in The Set-Up

Early in the gritty film noir boxing classic The Set-Up a close-up reveals tired, battered veteran boxer Ryan, his years of wear and tear visible in the generous layer of scar tissue over his eyes and his mashed left cauliflower ear.

Slated for one more battle, a 4-rounder following the main event at Paradise City Arena, he makes one more stab at optimism in the manner of a tired warrior seeking purpose after two decades in the boxing ring. The 35-year-old boxer, whose ravaged body possesses the wear of someone much older, tells his faithful wife Audrey Totter that he is “just one punch away” from an upset win over his 23-year-old opponent.

A victory will bring a chance for at least a semi-final or perhaps main event rematch against Hal Baylor, a young fighter who is being groomed for bigger things. The higher paying rematch will afford an opportunity to purchase the contract of a young middleweight who, according to Ryan, is the most promising prospect in that class since the great Harry Greb.

Audrey Totter, a woman of wisdom far beyond her years who has suffered many psychological scars amid her husband‘s punishment, has an answer.

“You were one punch away from being champion,” she tells him with melancholy low-keyed impact. “You’re always one punch away.”

That telling line from a script by Art Cohn, who also scripted the 1952 boxing movie Glory Alley starring Ralph Meeker, describes what Ring Magazine editor and longtime boxing expert Bert Sugar called the “search for the dream” that is the motivator for boxers seeking to overcome astronomical odds.

Compressed, Rapid Action

Robert Wise, who would eventually direct one of the biggest moneymakers in film history with The Sound of Music, began in the industry as a film editor and worked with Orson Welles in two of his greatest masterpieces, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.

The sharp synchronization involving Wise’s direction, Cohn’s script, and Oscar winner Milton Krasner’s camera work results in 72 swiftly paced minutes of drama. Cohn boils the dialogue down to a lean level, giving the cast, especially the two lead characters, the chance to internalize their performances as the camera generates probing close-ups.

Paradise City, the film’s venue, is a lot like the Atlantic City of the late forties. It is revealed that, in the twilight of his career, Ryan as Stoker Thompson had his last fight in Trenton and has been appearing in smaller fight clubs on the Eastern Seaboard.

Ryan receives a jolt when Audrey Totter as faithful wife Julie refuses to attend the fight. It is the first time during their marriage that this has occurred. After the fighter enters the ring he peers a long look at the empty seat in the fourth row. He periodically looks in that direction with the same result.

Distinctly Different Viewpoints

Ryan listens attentively, his emotions being drawn, as he examines two boxers of differing ages. James Edwards, a lithe, supple-muscled African American, is young and on the upswing. He oozes confidence as he awaits his appearance in the main event.

Edwards makes Ryan hearken back to his own youthful days when a bright future loomed. Edwards talks about a big fight in Philadelphia, after which he looks forward to fighting in New York’s historic Madison Square Garden and eventually a championship bout.

While Edwards evokes smiles, David Clarke generates worried concern. Cast as Gunboat Johnson, the veteran fighter’s face is so heavily scarred that he appears to have been systematically hacked by a razor blade.

Clarke repeatedly insists that he will follow the example of a former middleweight champion who lost 21 bouts, could not even get a fight at Paradise City Arena, yet ultimately won the title in a major upset.

Ryan’s expression becomes even more worrisome after Clarke is carried out of the ring following a vicious second round knockout. When he is asked to identify himself he begins spouting the name of the fighter he idolizes, the underdog who won the title.

The fate of David Clarke is to be swiftly driven by ambulance to the hospital. Ryan has little time to shake off the grim reality of what has happened before going into battle himself, but sees his spirits lift after Edwards wins and wishes him luck.

A Wife Relieved Amid Tragedy

As heavyweight boxer Ryan steps into the ring, he is unaware of a transaction made by his manager, George Tobias, and the manager of his opponent, a local mob gambler known as Little Boy.

Despite the fact that the promising local fighter that Little Boy, played by Alan Baxter, hopes to steer to the top is a heavy favorite over the presumably overmatched Ryan, as a gambler he seeks to hedge his bet. He bets that Stoker will lose.

Tobias is so convinced that Ryan has no chance that he does not mention the agreement at first. During the first two rounds Ryan takes a frightful beating. When the veteran survives, however, and remains determined to win, Tobias realizes he has a problem.

Hal Baylor, as Tiger Nelson, begins the bout oozing confidence. As it moves into Round 4, however, and Ryan, despite severe punishment and having his face battered to a bloody pulp, appears more determined than ever, Baylor begins reflecting the same concern as his manager.

Enough is enough as far as George Tobias is concerned. After earlier advising Ryan to be satisfied going “the distance,” he tells him finally about the agreement. Tobias is blunt about what the gangster will do if he fails to receive the benefit of his intended bargain.

A prideful and determined Ryan presses on, sensing a final moment of glory in a career that has been rushing steadily downhill.

After Ryan scores a knockout Baxter tells Tobias that he is unworried about the loss and that four victories later nobody will even remember it. He states bluntly that his displeasure is from failure to “get what he paid for.” Baxter tells Ryan that they will “talk it over” outside.

Ryan is unable to run away. Baxter supervises the beating meted out by his henchmen, including the fighter the veteran had just battled in what is assured to be his last fight. Baxter commands that Ryan’s right hand be broken. As Ryan is held, his career is finished when this result is achieved.

The staggering, badly bloodied Ryan makes it to the sidewalk outside the hotel where he has been staying with Totter. His wife beseeches onlookers to summon an ambulance.

Despite feeling saddened by the beating, the camera closes in on a wife showing relief for the first time, knowing that her husband, someone she feared would be killed in the ring, will never put on another pair of boxing gloves.

The Set-Up is strong and convincing drama from beginning to end. The close-ups reveal as the hard edges of a tough profession examined with scalpel precision.

The arena used for the film was the famous Hollywood Legion Stadium on El Centro near Hollywood and Gower. Not only did a constellation of great fighters appear there in its fabled history until it ceased operating and became a bowling alley in 1959; the regular Friday night bouts there drew a large contingent of movie faithful.

Al Jolson, a fight enthusiast who was once manager of Henry Armstrong, the only simultaneous three time champion in boxing history, was a regular, as were Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, George Burns, and many others.

The most colorful and memorable fight colony regular, however, was Lupe Velez, star of the “Mexican Spitfire” series. Velez, who had a well publicized romance with handsome Legion headliner Bert Colima, lived up to her Spitfire image by removing a shoe and slamming it on the canvas to urge more action.

Written by Bill Hare

Editor's note: Bill Hare is a writer who is currently working a new book about film noir. I highly recommend his earlier work, Early Film Noir: Greed, Lust and Murder Hollywood Style

Body and Soul (1947)

2009-05-30T13:37:00.015-05:00

“After all the assorted prizefight pictures that have been paraded across the screen—after all the pugs and muggs and chorus girls and double-crosses and last-round comebacks that we've seen—it hardly seemed likely that another could possibly come along with enough zing and character to it to captivate and excite us for two hours. Yet Body and Soul has up and done it...”

That's how Bosley Crowther begins his 1947 review of the first great boxing movie. There are plenty of boxing movies with similar structures before Body and Soul – including the now hopelessly dated Golden Boy and the wonderful but schmaltzy City for Conquest – but none have the taught and desperate feel of Robert Rossen's film.

Body and Soul was an independent film made by John Garfield's production group after he left Warner Bros. Garfield was the face of yet-to-be-defined film noir. The physiognomy of Garfield was a perfect fit for noir and he made the most of it in films like The Postman Always Rings Twice and He Ran All the Way. He played boxers before Body and Soul but this film was to remove any sentimental romances and light comedy that was prominent in previous movies.

The modest-budgeted film could not match similar slick big studio releases. Garfield had to make the movie on the cheap. He personally hired cinematographer James Wong Howe to lens the film. Howe uses slightly uncomfortable-looking tight shots in cramped spaces to tell the story instead of grand shots of screaming crowds usually seen in boxing epics.

“Since Garfield was working for his own company, he set his salary at a minimum. Garfield was the one who wanted me for Body and Soul. We made quite a number of pictures together, and in the course of them I came to understand how Johnny worked and how to photograph him. He liked the way I worked because I gave him a lot of freedom. I didn't put a lot of chalk marks on the floor for him to hit; I gave him a larger area to work in without being out of focus or how of his light. Worrying about things like that upset him, and he was afraid it would affect his performance.” James Wong Howe interview from Film Noir Reader 3: Interviews with Filmmakers of the Classic Noir Period

Howe understood that being a bit out of focus even adds a bit of drama. It certainly worked during the fight scenes in Body and Soul. Howe famously shot some of the fight footage using a hand-held camera while on roller skates. Director Rossen and editors Francis D. Lyon and Robert Parrish smartly used the shots sparingly in the finished film. However, they're the most memorable shots in the fight scenes. Seeing Garfield sweaty and bloody from Howe's handheld camera view give the scenes a kind of news reel/documentary feel.

The film begins with boxing champ Charlie Davis (Garfield) waking up from a nightmare. The scar-faced Davis rushes to to see his mother and ex-girlfriend. His mother is shocked to see him and eventually kicks the man out of her house. Davis gets tanked and by 3 in them morning ends up in the arms of the trampy nightclub singer Alice (the leggy Hazel Brooks). The next day, hungover Davis prepares for the evening's main event. His gangster manager Roberts (blandly played by Lloyd Gough) reminds Davis he's being paid 60K to throw the fight. As Davis tapes up, he flashes back to the beginning of his boxing career and the events leading up to the match – and his broken relationships with his family and friends.

Things were tough in the old neighborhood. Davis sees his poor broken father killed after a mobster bombing of a neighboring speak easy collapses the family candy store. Davis has just decided to take up boxing against the wishes of his mother (Anne Revere – who made a career out of playing mothers in 40s films). His best friend Shorty becomes Davis' manager and he quickly convinces a boxing trainer to take a chance on the young Jewish street kid. After a series of successful bouts Quinn (William Conrad) gets Davis a shot at the title. For a price. He sells his boxer to a mobster that owns the current champ.

This is when it becomes every man and woman for themselves. Shorty protests Davis' new found connections with the mob. Davis – following the advice of his manager - cancels his wedding plans the same night he gets engaged. His girlfriend (Lili Palmer playing a sophisticated Greenwich Village artist) quits him and his mother disowns him and is left penniless. Meanwhile, Quinn is trying to make it with sexy tight-sweater-wearing Alice who in turn is trying to strike it rich with Davis.

None of this drama fazes the young pugilist. He has a shot at the champ and he's convinced himself that once he's champ he can take control of his career and straighten everything out. Davis is paid cash advances and given a swanky apartment with a rotating bar that conveniently hides a painting of his former fiancée when necessary. He pummels the champ who's left with permanent brain damage. Shorty is disgusted by it all. He's fired, beaten up and eventually killed. Davis convinces himself that Shorty's death is an accident – not the direct result of his own mob ties. He does, however, feel guilty about hurting Ben (played by former real-life welterweight Canada Lee) so he hires him to be in his corner.

After many fights Davis is put in the same spot Ben was years ago. He must defend his title against an up-and-coming fighter. Davis is told to take a dive; and to take his payoff money and bet against himself.

This is Rossen's second directing effort after the equally gritty (but somewhat muddled) Johnny O'Clock. Body and Soul was written by Abraham Polonsky who would go on to write and directed Garfield's Force of Evil. The film apparently set off alarm bells in some Washington circles due to it's supposed leftist “anti-capitalism” theme. In fact, the movie is a who's-who of future blacklisted talent. Polonsky, Garfield, Gough, Revere and even former boxer Canada Lee were eventually blacklisted. Director Rossen refused to testify at the HUAC hearings initially, but then named names and admitted to being a member of the Communist Party in the early 50s. Years later – with the ugliness of HUAC behind everyone - Rossen would top the tough mean-streets sports story when he helmed The Hustler.

Sports fans will probably see a lot of parallels to today's boxing world. Where would Mike Tyson be today if he had a circle of friends that looked out for him instead of a bunch of eerily similar hangers-on bleeding him of his fortune? Boxing has always been – and always will be – run by underworld types taking advantage of boxers in an attempt to cash in. That makes it the perfect sport for film noir.

Champion released a few years later in 1949 is even more vicious. The Set-Up (also from '49) is, I guess, considered a better movie than Body and Soul. I find it a bit heavy handed and even slightly phoney compared to Garfield's New York-based story. However, The Set-Up has a lot going for it. It just doesn't compare well with the tough Body and Soul.

Some of the then original but now overworked story lines probably makes the film seem tired when viewed by some checking it out for the first time today. I wonder if people recognize the film as being the boxing movie almost all that followed emulate? I'm convinced the Rocky franchise wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Body and Soul. Nearly all of Body and Soul's plot lines are used in the series.

(spoilers follow)

Champ Charlie Davis ultimately doesn't throw the fight – but it's not because he's rejecting money. He does it because he realizes -while sitting in his corner between rounds - that he's been a chump for the mob all along. Davis keeps telling himself once he's champ he'd be in control -- but even at the top other fighters are paid off to either throw fights or to make the fights look closer than they are. Even his loyal trainer is part of the schemes. When Davis realizes it mid-fight he snaps. “I'm going to kill him!” he spits out in his corner. Way behind in points in the last round, Davis – looking like a mad dog- chases his now-scared opponent who quickly becomes aware that Davis wants to take his head off.

“I've never seen anything like it before in my life. A great silence has descended over this crowd. They seem to sense the kill. There's fear in Marlowe's eyes as Davis looks for an opening.” the boxing radio announcer whispers during the finale.

The results are not unexpected but highly satisfying. When Davis leaves the ring he's threatened again by his mob handler.

“Get yourself a new boy. I retire.”
“What makes you think you can get away with this?”
“What are you gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies.”

Written by Steve-O

Naked Alibi (1954)

2009-05-22T11:33:00.010-05:00

To the End of the Line
by Guy Savage

“They’ll get you copper. One of those trigger-happy bulls you used to boss around is going to blow your head off.”

I was watching a Guy Ritchie film when 15 minutes into the plot, I realized that I didn’t have the foggiest idea what was going on. All those zoom in and zoom out shots, quick cuts and other gimmicky Ritchie maneuvers just confused me. I gave up, and it was with a sense of relief I turned to the 1954 noir, Naked Alibi from director Jerry Hopper.

Naked Alibi is not a first-tier noir. It’s a B movie. No argument from this fan, but at the same time, simply because it’s a B film, low budget, stripped down to its bare bones, and relying on camera, plot and the main characters, well some film makers could learn a few things from this B film. Subtract big budget, special effects and gimmicks, and let’s see what’s left, and in Naked Alibi, shot in just one month, we have a clean, simple, surprisingly good noir.

From the beginning of the credits, we know this is 50s noir as a police cruiser glides in front of a police station. It’s night and the music suits the mood, but then segues into shades of a tawdry stripper-Peyton-Place drift. This is the 50s giveaway. The action then moves to a police interrogation room. The cops have arrested a man for being drunk and disorderly. He has no ID. Perhaps that wouldn’t be a big deal on another day in another town, but in this town things are tense. There’s been a string of armed robberies and the pressure’s on to solve the crimes. But with no clues and no leads, the cops are getting jumpy, and tonight, they’ve jumped on a drunk.

The drunk in custody claims to be a baker. Funny, he doesn’t look like a baker. He looks like a tough guy. The drunk is belligerent but sticks to his story; he claims to be Al Willis--married man, father, and the owner of a bakery. This all sounds very respectable, but nervous and sweaty Al (Gene Barry) not only doesn’t look like a baker he doesn’t act like one either. When Chief Joe Conroy (Sterling Hayden) arrives, the questioning has become rough. Out of the blue, Al jumps the cops, whacking one over the head and tussling with all three. But it’s Al’s reaction that bears scrutiny. Like a caged tiger teased with a stick he snarls “stinking cops. Nobody socks me around like that.” He swears he’ll get even, and he looks as though he means it.

Al’s identity is proven correct, and he’s released. That night Lt Parks (Max Showalter), one of the three cops involved in the Al Willis brawl is gunned down, and Conroy remembers Al’s promise to get even. He arrests Al, but without a murder weapon, and with an alibi, nothing will stick. Then, the other two cops who brawled with Al Willis are blown up, and again Conroy is convinced that Al is to blame. Al is arrested but once more nothing sticks thanks to his cast-iron alibi. Conroy’s insistence that the local baker is a cop killer doesn’t sit well with either the Police Commissioner or Al’s councilman, and before long it looks as though Conroy is out to harass a “respectable citizen.” To be a cop killer, you have to be a cop hater, and while Al spews hate at some moments, he also knows how to play the meek victim. Although he’s warned off by his superiors, Conroy continues his relentless pursuit, and some compromising, misleading photos lead to Conroy being out of a job.

Just as Al swore to get even with the cops, Conroy swears to get even with Al, and Conroy seems to understand his quarry well. Reasoning that Al has an explosive temper (and he’s seen proof of it), Conroy decides to provoke Al into a confrontation. With the veneer of mental stability rapidly unraveling, Al wisely decides to take a trip. He tells his devoted, long-suffering little wife that he’s going away. He takes a bus south--across the border into Mexico and sallies into Border Town. Conroy decides to follow Al right into Border Town--a thinly disguised Tijuana. It’s a wild place as Conroy finds out about 5 minutes after hitting town. Approached by a kid who’s selling dirty postcards, Conroy then runs right into some local hoods.

It’s here in Border Town that things get hot, and most of the heat comes from gorgeous Gloria Grahame as Marianna. Employed to sing and dance in a tawdry little dive called El Perico, Marianna seems wildly out of place. But her mesmerized, drooling audience of hungry men don’t stop to ask questions, they just stare as Marianna performs a sexy number. Dressed in a revealing dress that looks more like something for the vamp boudoir, Gloria lip synchs as she sashays around the room. Gloria couldn’t, apparently, carry a tune, but that’s okay because she more than makes up for this in every other department. Her performance rivals that of Rita Hayworth in Gilda, and as you watch her make her moves, the question of what such a gorgeous dame is doing in a dump in Border Town is answered when Al shows up. She’s his girl and she’s been waiting for him.

Once in Mexico, Al sheds his mild-mannered baker demeanor and reveals his true psychotic nature: giggling (think shades of Tommy Udo), violent and dangerously jealous, and all on a split second trigger….

Humans seethe with desire and lust while coveting every conceivable object not yet possessed--it’s all part of our nature, but one of the characteristics that differentiates noir characters from the mainstream is that they are prepared to do something about it. In fact noir characters have the determination to get what they want by going as far as it takes. Consider Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity. Neff is an ambitionless insurance salesman content to take the easy path in life until he meets Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), a woman he desires so much he’s ready to go all the way, abandoning his professional ethics and his loyalty to Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) on his careening path to murder. And then there’s Lt. Halliday (Robert Mitchum) in The Big Steal who meets up with Joan Graham (Jane Greer) in Mexico while they are both on a no-holds barred pursuit of Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles)--a character who ripped them both off. In true noir form Halliday and Joan don’t leave it up to others to pursue their quarry as Fiske slips deeper and deeper into Mexico. Faithful to the no-holds barred creed of noir behaviour, Halliday and Joan go for the jugular as they pursue Fiske to the end of the line, and it’s this sort of ruthless, relentless determination that marks noir characters from the herd--on both sides of the good and evil divide. They never give up.

Noir often focuses on the characters’ lemming-like drive to obtain the goal of a woman or cold hard cash and who then are paradoxically willing to destroy themselves in the process of securing their greatest desire. For these driven characters, desire dwarfs common sense and all moral considerations as they buy a one-way ticket to self-destruction. This self-destructive determination is clearly evident in Naked Alibi, and it’s a phenomenon that sets all three main characters--Al, Conroy and Marianna on a collision course. Cast in the middle of the explosive Al Willis and the calm steadiness of Conroy, Gloria acts as a perfect foil to both the male characters. Their violent 3-way relationship forms an echo chamber that very effectively amplifies and reinforces Conroy’s determination to get revenge, Al’s paranoia and desire to keep his double life, and Marianna’s desire to discover the truth. Each character has opportunities to walk away, but none of them can. They are committed to the final destination--whatever that may be. Marianna, the character who becomes swept up by the hunt and quest for vengeance has plenty of opportunity to walk away. But she doesn’t. Given the opportunity to stay outside of the destructive vortex created by this triangular-cyclone she steps back into the action, committed to the end of the line. Fate is irresistible and unavoidable and explodes into one of noir cinema’s greatest final scenes on the roof of a church.

One of the reasons Naked Alibi works so well is its excellent casting. Hayden, Barry and Gloria Grahame make the perfect noir cocktail. Even though Hayden’s career began as a model, he plays a true straight arrow. At 6’5” he always seemed to be too damn tall to be a criminal and made a much better cop, sheriff, government agent. Perhaps his days as an undercover agent in the CIO (Office of the Coordinator of information) left a mark. Hayden was married 5 times--three times to the same woman.

With previous credits such as The Atomic City (another Hopper film) and Those Redheads from Seattle to his name, Naked Alibi represented a big break for Gene Barry. In spite of the fact he’s uncomfortably convincing as the psychotic Al Willis, Barry’s Hollywood career never really made the big time, but he certainly made an enormous splash in television.

Gloria Grahame, one of my all-time favourite noir actresses, was at the peak of her Hollywood career in 1954 with a string of recent noir films to her credit--Sudden Fear & The Bad and The Beautiful (1952), The Big Heat & Human Desire (1953) when she made Naked Alibi. In her personal life, Gloria and her second husband, director Nicholas Ray were divorced in 1952, and she was dating soon-to-be third husband, Cy Howard during the making of Naked Alibi. The scandal over her relationship with her stepson, Tony (who later became her fourth husband) was in her past, but certainly not off-the-record. In Suicide Blonde: The Life of Gloria Grahameauthor Vincent Curcio states that Gloria came on to Sterling Hayden so strongly that she frightened him off, and this shows in the scene when Conroy is in bed and Marianna makes a move. A million men would gladly change places with Hayden as he sprawls in bed and Gloria moves in for the kill, but Hayden doesn’t look comfortable and you can almost see him cringe. Gloria Grahame is at the height of her smoldering beauty for this picture, and the form-fitting dress worn for the El Perico scenes shows off her spectacular shoulders to perfection. Gloria was undergoing obsessive plastic surgery on her upper lip during this period, and again this shows in a few profile shots when you can spot her upper lip’s immobility. Gorgeous Gloria--one of the greatest and most enigmatic names in noir film never got over her image problems. But for fans, she left behind a legacy of riveting noir films, and Naked Alibi succeeds largely due to her presence.

Criss Cross (1949)

2009-05-16T21:10:00.012-05:00

Written by Steve-O

Note: This week I've double dipped taking a second look at Out of the Past and Criss Cross.

I always find the music in film noir interesting. Unlike self-conscious noirs like Farewell, My Lovely and Body Heat, most noir soundtracks are orchestral – not jazz. The slow wailing saxophone over a Robert Mitchum voice-over can be found in noir parodies like the Guy Noir segments of A Prairie Home Companion. Strangely enough, that kind of music track is never actually heard in classic film noir. With some exceptions (Odds Against Tomorrow, for example) jazz and other forms of popular American music is usually heard only when it's performed on screen and not in the background or over opening credits.

Music performed on screen in noir can be put into two categories. First, there's the tunes belted out by sexy femme fatales in glamorous night clubs. Often the songs, by the likes of Rita Hayworth and Liz Scott, are upbeat and don't have much to do with the film except that they reinforce the fact that the woman are sexy – the Jessica Rabbit effect. Then there's music played by bands in seedy night clubs and bars that are integrated into the context of the film. Instead of being somber and slow the music from the second category is pounding and disorientating – totally fitting the mood of the film. Watch D.O.A. for an example. The most effective music in the film (right behind the bombastic but wonderful score by Dimitri Tiomkin) is a performance in a San Francisco jazz club by the band the Fisherman – an all-black group that jams with so much force it’s exhausting to watch. Edmund O’Brien –after following partiers from his hotel to the club- is so annoyed by the music (and from a jealous husband’s evil eye) it causes him to leave his fellow drinkers and hit the bar alone. That opens up a golden opportunity for villains to then slip him a glow-in-the-dark Mickey Finn.

When Kansas goes undercover in Phantom Lady she’s eventually lead to a creepy drummer in a night club show. The music at the show is typical of a 1940s film. The Carmen-Miranda riff is stagy and bland. Things get better though. After the show drummer Cliff leads Kansas to a seedy jazz club to hear some real music. The scene that follows is both sexy and even a bit grotesque. The drum beats build like a sexual climax as “hep kitten” Kansas watches a sweaty Elisha Cook Jr. go all out on the drums. Director Robert Siodmak’s use of the music makes it clear that Kansas is putting herself in real danger. An assault or some sort of violence is almost expected later in the night after witnessing Cliff’s drum solo.

Siodmak’s best use of music, however, was in 1949’s Criss Cross when Steve and Anna reunite. More on that scene in a minute.

Criss Cross begins with a long aerial shot of Los Angeles over the chief composer of film noir Miklós Rózsa's noir score. The camera finally stops and focuses on two lovers in a parking lot startled after being caught in an embrace by passing headlights. Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) and his ex-wife Anna Dundee (Yvonne De Carlo) are planning to double cross her husband Gangster Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea) after a planned armored car heist the next day.

(About the casting: I feel Lancaster's performance as Steve "the prize sucker of all time" is a role only he could play although some will tell you he's miscast. Gary George's Noir of the Week on Criss Cross states, "Shelly Winters was also a strong contender for the (Anna) role... however, I will remain eternally grateful to the Gods of casting that Yvonne De Carlo landed the role." He both disses Winters and flatters De Carlo at the same time!)

The elaborate set up by the couple also involves pulling one over Steve’s cop friend (Stephen McNally) in addition to the gangsters. The complicated job looks like it will fail from the start. The next morning, as Steve (the inside man) drives the armored car to the heist location, he flashes back - remembering the events leading up to the crime in progress.

Steve has been away from his home in Los Angeles for a year. After his divorce from Anna – a short marriage of less than a year – Steve traveled around the country doing odd jobs by day and no doubt drinking heavily at night. After a year away he makes it home after hopping off the trolley car. Steve trots up the street on Bunker Hill to his mother's house right on the trolley line. He says hi to his dog (who doesn't seem all that interested in seeing him) and immediately goes to his and Anna's old hangout. Steve is full of contradictions. He'll tell anyone that will listen that he hasn't returned home to see Anna again. He says he wants nothing to do with her. Yet, the first thing he does is go to the old club to find her. Steve acts like this through the whole movie – always doing the opposite of what's expected of him. He's a danger to himself - even more than Anna - the film's possible femme fatale - and Slim.

Steve's old hangout is a local bar. It's narrow, dark and anchored by a local barfly and a rotund bartender (Percy Helton). The outer area opens up to a night club. It's not all that swanky – though certainly an upgrade to the bar area. For the neighborhood patrons it's a sophisticated and classy place to be seen in. That's where Steve sees Anna again. The scene that follows mixes music and image perfectly. It's electric.

With an impressive tune played by Esy Morales' Rumba Band, you see the world through Steve's eyes. And his world revolves around Anna. As she's dances to the pounding rumba you can see why Steve will do anything to get her (including robbing a bank). Sharp eyes will notice that she's dancing with the (mercifully silent) Tony Curtis. The scene is remarkable because the band is so good and the music syncs with Steve's reaction to Anna.

Siodmak shoots the film from Steve's perspective (like a Raymond Chandler novel). That element makes it unlike the other Siodmak/Lancaster collaboration The Killers which is told in a Citizen-Kane type flashback. This point of view makes it hard to see Anna's faults even after Steve finds out (in a heartbreaking scene) that she'd run off to marry Slim. Siodmak uses the first person perspective effectively throughout the film especially at the end of the movie when Steve's recovering from a bullet wound and broken arm. He – in pain and just waking in a hospital bed – must play a game of cat and mouse with a man that may or may not be one of Slim's henchmen. Steve -caught in his own twisted deception- tries to both evade the cops and Slim's suspicions while trapped in the bed. The suspense doesn't get any less intense when Steve's dragged from his bed to a boat house where he has a fatal final confrontation with Anna and Slim.

Special mention should be made about the bad guys in Criss Cross. Duryea is a perfect contrast to Lancaster. He's not just “slim” to Lancaster's beefiness. When Slim catches Steve with Anna in a key scene leading up to the heist Duryea's sporting an all black suit with a white tie while Lancaster is wearing a white t-shirt over light colored pants creating a perfect contrast. A suit – no matter how sharp – doesn't make a performance however. Duryea – the ultimate noir pimp and small-time criminal -is a key element in this unique love triangle. He fits the suit well and gives an appropriately slimy performance.

Praise for the cast and almost universal acclaim for the film can be found by reading criticism of film noir. Tom Flinn in his article in Kings of the Bs applauds the character portrayals including “Percy Helton... with a voice like wood rasp; Tom Pedi, Slim's henchman Vincent, who delivers his dialogue with a greedy verve (“That's the ticket”); John Doucette, another of the gang, with a dour voice to match his somber personality; and Alan Napier, Finchley, the alcoholic mastermind of the big heist.”

In A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941-1953)Criss Cross is called the summit of Siodmak's American career stating, “ To be sure, it never attains the unalloyed ferocity of certain scenes in The Killers, but the work is much smoother, more profound, more truly distressing.”

Unlike Siodmak's Phantom Lady, Criss Cross avoids the dreaded “happy ending.” We're never sure if Anna – who not only marries Steve's rival but also takes the robbery money – is shallow minded, a victim or just a conniving classic femme fatale. Criss Cross doesn't answer the question. Instead the ending bluntly snuffs all three lives before anything can be resolved. Like Esy Morales' Rumba Band's performance earlier in the film – it rocks you.

Out of the Past (1947)

2009-05-16T20:48:00.011-05:00

Written by Steve-O

Out of the Past is the masterpiece of film noir. Combining actors, writer, director, composer and cinematographer at their peaks makes what could have easily been a forgotten B movie a great film.

The cast is just about perfect. The trifecta of Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas isn't just a winning combination but one necessary for the film's success. Replace any of the three and the film becomes just another thriller. Mitchum as the private detective shows a slouched-over vulnerability behind an indifferent exterior that's both believable and tragic. Jane Greer is beautiful and charming. She spends most of the time looking up at Mitchum with her doe eyes - transforming the cool and laconic PI into a love sick sucker with just a bat of her eyelashes. Douglas – not yet a movie star- is rigidly confident, young enough to be Mitchum's rival and so sure of himself that it's scary.

Casting rumors had Dick Powell in the lead role at one time. I just can't see him pulling off the rugged outdoorsman by the lake Mitchum does. Also, I find Mitchum to be more like Bogart. He's cool and confident until he meets up with the woman that will be his demise. Bogart would have approached Kathie Moffat with caution, however. Mitchum is heads-over-heels for her the second she makes that angelic-like walk into the Acapulco bar out of the bright sunlight. When he utters, “Baby, I just don't care.” after their romance gets hot and sticky in Mexico you know it's the truth. He really doesn't care if she's manipulating him. As long as he can be with her he's fine. Whenever there's backstabbing or dumping to do it's done by femme fatale Kathie. And Jeff (Mitchum) knows it.

Explaining the plot of Out of the Past would be a chore and frankly the film's plot isn't meant to be clear. It's a dream-like puzzle that Mitchum is walking through. It's the journey from present, past and present again all the way to the fatalistic ending is what makes the film so interesting. It's not about the mystery. The same could be said for The Big Sleep. A brilliant movie that both writer and director had no idea who the killer was. That wasn't the point.

Out of the Past is a collection of great scenes at different locations with a number of different sub plots. Determined to understand the plot, I took notes watching the DVD a few years ago and was surprised to see that the movie becomes a totally different film just about a third of the way through. Try to explain that to a screenwriting class.

Most of the film doesn't even look film noir. The uncloudy High Sierra country and summery Mexico seem too bright for noir. Later the story does drift into the familiar rain soaked streets of the city – with cigarette-sharing cabbies and seedy night clubs. Markham noted in his previous article on Out of the Past the contrast “between the bright and sunny world of Bridgeport and the dark, corrupt streets of San Francisco.” Nicholas Musuraca uses that over and over again in the film.

Daniel Mainwaring's dialog - like half-learned foreign language – makes the film sound noir even when the locations do not. Everyone – from the small time Bridgeport residents to Kirk Douglas's cronies - speak noir. They're always ready with a quick, witty comeback. No ones ever left speechless. Not even Mitchum when he finds Kathie back in Whit's (Douglas) arms.

One of the finest scenes in the film – and the most “noir” looking - takes place in a cabin in the woods. It's also the second best entrance in the film, after Kathie walking out of the sun into Jeff's life. Noir vet Steve Brodie plays Fisher – Jeff's former PI partner who's now following him. After Mitchum drives around for days knowing that Fisher is on his trail finally convinces himself that he has lost his tail. He goes to the couple's rendezvous spot confident he's shaken his former partner. You see Fisher in the shadows slowly walk up to Kathie and Jeff's cabin in the woods his identity revealed by a low-angle light. Jeff -via voice over- explains what's happening, “We had played it smart and forgotten nothing. Forgotten nothing except one thing... He had followed her.” The music stings. Then comes the fist fight between Fisher and Jeff inside the cabin. Kathie watches the fight. She looks both aroused and at the same time seems to be calculating out the odds in her head. Finally, she comes up with the best possible solution for her. A bullet in Fisher's gut. Mitchum is shocked. Before he can even ask what the hell she was thinking she's taken off. Jeff finds out that she was lying to him all along. He leaves her and the sorted business in the past. But he can't run from it.

This scene is a real showcase for Musuraca's camerawork – inside of the cabin is lit low and sideways with only a fireplace's flickery lighting the dark space. Add to that Roy Webb's dramatic score and you have one of the most memorable film noir moments ever.

Of course director Jacques Tourneur should get credit for putting this film together. Horror/noir Cat People and the superior western Canyon Passage were made before this but Out of the Past is unequaled.

Want to see how this story could fail under lesser talent? Check out the remake Against All Odds. The scene described above is reshot with Alex Karras taking over for Steve Brodie. Instead of being a private eye, he's a football athletic trainer shot to death in a Mayan pyramid. I'm not kidding. The isn't even a flashback in the movie! The only thing making the remake worth watching is seeing Richard Widmark and Jane Greer. Both look strong and dominate every scene they're in.

China Moon (1994)

2009-05-08T20:50:00.009-05:00

Written by Alexander Coleman (Coleman’s Corner in Cinema)

The 1991 (finally released theatrically by Orion Pictures in 1994) romantic neo-noir thriller China Moon establishes early its central character's most palpable traits and attributes, which deceptively foretell his eventual unraveling and undoing. Ed Harris plays cagey, intuitive (fictional) Brayton, Florida (filmed in Lakeland, Florida and the surrounding area) detective Kyle Bodine, whose observant attention to detail allows him to read murder scenes like road signs, knowing within minutes who the perpetrator is. Because he is good at his job, he rarely considers why he is doing it; when questioned by his somewhat green, and in Bodine's words, “okay,” partner, Lamar Dickey (Benicio Del Toro) why he is a cop, Bodine replies that he knew there was a reason. He will think about it sometime.

Bodine's intelligence and awareness prove to be indirect vulnerabilities when placed alongside his ostensible lack of greater motivation. When he discovers a beautiful, mysterious woman named Rachel Munro—played with almost vampiric luminescence by Madeleine Stowe—he falls head over heels for her. Unfortunately she happens to be married to an equally powerful and abusive local banking kingpin, Rupert Munro (a one-note Charles Dance). Gradually, the film's tone shifts from the fairly sumptuous tale of passion between Bodine and Rachel to a serpentine murder mystery.

China Moon is longtime cinematographer John Bailey's (whose credits include American Gigolo, The Pope of Greenwich Village and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters) directorial debut. The lighting the seasoned director of photography utilizes allows for some mesmerizing visualizations which enhance what is fundamentally a routine potboiler. The screenplay, by Roy Carlson, is sufficiently serviceable when it must be, providing just enough in the way of narrative glue for the picture's subtly dyspeptic yarn to give impetus to the ocular pleasures China Moon offers to the viewer. Bailey and Belgian cinematographer Willy Kurant ably conspire to create a visually rich canvas of coolly colored nighttime vistas and interiors. One particularly memorable setting is the lushly romantic setting of a lake. The reflection of the “china moon”—Bodine tells Rachel that his mother used the term for a full moon, under which people would “do strange things,” he states—is captured against the smooth, seemingly tranquil surface of the body of water in delicately composed shots.

When finding himself in the unenviable position of covering up a murder, Bodine's mercurial gifts are turned against him, and as the cliché goes, the hunter becomes the hunted. Bailey and Kurant's occasionally delicious visages figuratively brighten and literally dim the picture as Harris' detective becomes not only wholly entangled in the mystery but the most suspected figure in the film by his fellow officers, including his partner. Following the time-honored noir template, the protagonist's apparent strengths prove to be strangely debilitating, as Bodine's certainty and sharpness leave hints of hubris. Those seeds are indeed immediately sown in the film's prologue, during which Bodine surveys the scene of a homicide with all of the clinical precision of a genuine expert. “Sooner or later,” he says derisively of murderers, “they all fuck up.” Little does he know his tumultuous future when he makes this comment to his colleagues.

China Moon's most sound component of all, however, is the lead performance by Ed Harris. Harris is dynamic and subtle, forceful and equable all at once. He gives a compelling, convincing performance that keeps the film humming even when too many coincidences and plot holes needlessly distract from the vastly more important emotional through-line with which Harris endows the humble film. Harris' eyes are especially captivating in a film peopled with indelible pools of light as eyes, most notably his costar, Stowe's, which accurately belie her truer nature. Harris makes every little movement of his eyes matter, and it fits wonderfully with his character's chief gift of observation. There is a doom in his eyes, and it is matched, if not with straightforward and engrossing presence, then with a complementary sense of intrigue by Stowe, working off of the guilelessness and fierceness Harris supplies.

Where Stowe comes up short is in the range of her performance; the screenplay and Bailey's uneven handling of his actors contrive to limit her. Whereas many noirs allow for the female presence to display greater shades of character, China Moon is actually the opposite. Stowe's Rachel is if anything too nebulous and murky a figure, and the fact that the very ending hinges on her true motivations leaves a peculiar aftertaste as there has been minimal buttressing of her emotional state beyond common, hoary and hackneyed abused-wife syndrome scenes. As with other conventional neo-noirs that follow similar storylines, the husband, here played by Dance, is completely one-dimensional and totally unsympathetic; if and when such a character meets a violent end, the ramifications of his demise are almost always only of interest insomuch as they relate to the other characters' fates.

Nevertheless, Harris' carefully calibrated turn excellently draws the viewer in with great, meticulous thoughtfulness. When Bodine finally reaches his breaking point and lashes out, the viewer is caught up with him; it's not an entirely different sensation than relishing the confused, furious righteousness of James Stewart's John “Scottie” Ferguson confronting the inscrutable Kim Novak in the closing moments of Vertigo when Harris' Bodine points the finger of indignation at the untrustworthy Rachel. The sophistication that is missing in other parts of the film is evident whenever Harris makes his presence profoundly felt. In a landscape of noir, marked by countless dupes, sometimes what matters is simply trying to get the last word in. Bodine tries his best, and this flawed film is better for it.

Night Moves (1975)

2009-05-03T08:42:00.019-05:00

Editor’s note: This week’s article is written by David N. Meyer. David is the author of Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music.He is the Film Editor and lead critic for the fine-arts monthly BROOKLYN RAIL. Film Noir fans know him as the writer of one of the coolest noir books: A Girl and a Gun: The Complete Guide to Film Noir on Video

ANY KENNEDY: THE MERCILESS, BLINDING SUNSHINE OF NIGHT MOVES

David N. Meyer

Even by the standards of gritty, mid-1970s, mid-budget, street-noir, Night Moves is ugly. It's shot like serial television; Director Arthur Penn possesses no discernable visual language. Most frames are functional, set up to deliver information. There's no noir shadowing - the whole bleak tale takes place in merciless blinding sunshine - no metaphorical frame composition, just basic prose presentation. The willfully cheap mid-'70s interiors feature that mid-'70s glaring overhead key light halo-ing everybody's relentlessly mid-'70s hair. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees' first jobs (Play Misty For Me, Dirty Harry) were for the one-take-and-print-it master, Clint Eastwood, who worked fast, thought literal and wouldn't know a visual metaphor if one shot at him from horseback. The model here seems to be the brutal realism of Surtees' prosaic frames on John Flynn's The Outfit (1973). Yet between The Outfit and Night Moves,Surtees DP'd the expressionist, black & white, Lenny. So the aggressive simplicity of his work on Night Moves apparently derived from money limitations. And/or directorial indifference.

Dotting the film like truffles in an omelet are three dynamic tracking shots and three mind-blowing, visually sophisticated stunt sequences. These suggest that with more money, maybe Penn would have made an expressive, more visually noir noir. Or maybe not. Only when he showcases violence does Penn's visual grammar rise above the pedestrian. Like the bullet-spattered finale of Bonnie & Clyde, the orgasmic blood-letting climactic stunt of Night Moves features a bravura that doesn't manifest anywhere else. Penn keeps the quotidian moments exactly that, and the fulcrum moments get the full heavenly choir. Night Moves lurches about, but the crucial moments linger. Despite the Starsky & Hutch framing, you cannot take your eyes off the screen. And that's because Gene Hackman is in pretty much every shot. And Gene Hackman is in pain.

Parsing Gene Hackman's singular gifts is a sucker's game. He just is. Hackman doesn't look, speak, dress or move like a movie star. He has little grace and sports the gnarliest mid-'70s hair/mustache combo in the history of gnarly mid-'70s hair/mustache combos. Yet he commands every moment. His character - Harry Moseby - a pro football player turned second-rate private eye, lives out his self-loathing the same way he lived out its only escape - through his body. The more Harry Moseby's lied to, or the more his feelings are hurt - and they're hurt easily -- the more slumped, crushed and childlike his posture becomes. When Moseby channels all his self-directed psychic violence outward - as he did on the football field - he's ecstatic. It's not Penn who communicates the depths of Harry's indifference to the outcome; it's Hackman. Harry doesn't care if he wins or loses, if he beats or is beaten. He wants only the release of the moment, regardless of consequences. He wants only to escape himself.

And so he immerses in the private eye life, following clues into the lives of others to avoid seeing himself. Harry takes control by remaining invisible. His dilemma is unique in noir. In The Conversation, Hackman's Harry Caul spied because without the Other, Harry Caul did not exist; he filled his empty shell with the conversations he stole. Harry Moseby suffers the opposite problem. Harry Moseby's interior existence is full to overflowing. And his exterior existence is turning to shit.

Even after he catches his wife fucking around (Susan Clark - who logged 150 episodes of Webster, God help her - rocking a seriously mid-'70s post-Jane Fonda shag mullet ), Harry has to endure a New Age lecture from her on all his poorly evolved aspects. The trouble is, she's right on every point. Her being in the wrong but absolutely right enrages him. Harry's all too human; his self-righteous anger drives away the connection that might save him. His wounded eyes ask: how dare his cheatin' wife give him such a drubbing? The simple answer: he deserves it.

Night Moves grapples with the most profound themes of noir: trust (betrayed), love (denied), greed (indulged), violence (solving/creating problems) and good old existential dread (by the truckload in Harry's case). The characters - no matter how extreme or contradictory their behavior -- remain complex, naturalist and recognizable. None are the walking plot-devices or living metaphors who appear in classical-period noir with quote marks around their heads (The Noble Negro, The Born Sucker, The Sidekick Doomed To Die, The Slut). Of course there's a femme fatale (Jennifer Warren in an unapologetic frenzy of neurotic self-knowledge, self-disgust and determination - did she radiate too much intelligence to become a star? ), and Harry, sap that he is, falls big. He doesn't realize that her trait he finds most annoying is exactly what makes him fall. Just like Harry, she's incapable of a straight answer.

This leads to a classic exchange:

She: Where were you when Kennedy got shot?
He: Which Kennedy?
She: Any Kennedy.
Harry pours out his sensitive memories, thinking she'll respond to the emotional openness he could never grant his wife. When he's done, believing a moment of true soul-connection has taken place, he queries hopefully: Why do you ask?
She: Oh, I dunno; it's the one question everybody knows the answer to.

Snap! The answer's a slap, and Harry retreats like an abused cur. For a noir hero groping after his own destruction with both hands, such treatment is catnip. Warren seduces Harry with a perfectly mid-'70s technique; first she confides her painful childhood memories, then she peels off her clothes as he watches. For a guy who craves intimacy and needs to spy, it's foolproof.

These delicious, poisonous moments - these cookies full of arsenic - come courtesy of Alan Sharp's venomous, entrapping, perfectly circular screenplay. It's hard not to regard him - rather than Penn - as the engine of Night Moves' enduring power. Sharp had an unbroken forty year career writing features and television. Of course he's responsible for a ton of crap: Damnation Alley's at the top of the pile. But prior to Night Moves, Sharpe wrote three eccentric, quixotic, bittersweet screenplays that could have been produced only in the 1970s: The Last Run (1971), a depressive road movie featuring George C. Scott as a double-crossed small-timer fleeing for his life; The Hired Hand (1971), Peter Fonda's dream-like, ultra-violent, psychedelic Western and Ulzana's Raid (1972), a Vietnam allegory revisionist Western (wait - is that redundant?) starring Burt Lancaster. All are marked by Sharpe's mordant Scottish wit and tough, spare language. Sharpe's not afraid to get his Harold Pinter on, as in this exchange between Harry and his wife, with whom he's come to a bruised rapprochement:

He: I didn't mean just you.
She: I know perfectly well what you didn't mean!

She begs him not to leave. But Harry, like all the abused children before him, refuses to face his own problems. He'd much rather solve someone else's, even if it, uh, kills him. So back he goes to the most accurate representation of the down and out Florida Keys ever set on film. Moseby was there before, rescuing the barely post-pubescent but definitely post-coital sixteen year old Melanie Griffith. Her incandescent energy, unaffected vulnerability and constant, guileless nudity suggest the career she might have had.

Penn seems indifferent to location, but he brings Harry to this grubby backwater for a reason. Harry's ping-ponging between two realities: the relatively polite social murder of LA and the straightforward primordial brutality of the swamp. Whether drowning someone in a dolphin pond, screwing a stranger while her boyfriend sleeps yards away or bashing a guy in the face using a ridged conch shell as brass knuckles, folks in the sticks exercise a lot less internal censorship. As dolphins cavort over a floating corpse, Harry's hosts unleash the Id.

Harry's not an Id dude, however. His rampant Superego makes him vulnerable to the machinations of those with excess will. It's not that the beachcombers pretend to be someone else; everyone's so straightforwardly corrupt they turn Harry neurotic (or, neurotic-er). He's deeply confused, and so are we. The sequence of narrative incident, that is, the plot, doesn't make a lot of sense, but so what? That's a hallmark of only the finest noir. (I have no idea what actually quote happens close quote in Out of the Past and it's one of my favorite pictures. And let's not even talk about Lady From Shanghai or The Maltese Falcon.) The casting of two down-and-outers who look a lot alike - one a villain, one an ally -- does not clarify several murky plot points.

But it does clarity the psychological reality. John Crawford, a B character actor with a lifetime of TV credits, incarnates a specific sea-side heartiness: slovenly, drunk, casual with no visible means of support, murderous. The history of his failure is written in his saggy body and Crawford plays him without vanity. Ditto Janet Ward as one of the worst mothers in all film noir - and that's saying something. Like Crawford, Ward's understated commitment to her selfish, soulless character speaks volumes about Penn's skill with actors. Several over-amped performances - James Woods and Kenneth Mars foremost - are counterbalanced by the realist nuances of Harris Yulin and Ed Binns. They portray semi-aware, world-weary, middle-aged men whom Sharpe's script pities but has no mercy for.

Would the film be improved if it were less low-rent? If Hackman got a better hairdresser or Penn a budget that permitted him to properly light a set? It might be more engrossing; the crude visuals push one away from the story. And nothing pushes harder than the unspeakable mid-'70s score from hack composer Michael Small. The story screams for Bernard Herrmann, but Small gives us wanna-be Lalo Schifrin, all watery Fender Rhodes and pointlessly sustained bass notes. It takes great concentration to stay with the portrayed emotions when the music swells. No other film would be more improved by re-scoring.
No other film.

What sustains fascination is that Hackman's performance and Sharpe's words are driven by the steady, remorseless pulse-beat of editor's Dede Allen's rhythm. Allen cut all of Penn's pictures. Here her relentless momentum brings to mind - of all things - the apocalyptic, unwavering drums in the Beach Boys' Wouldn't It Be Nice? Up top, the Boys sing happy fantasies; below the pulse of life, the march of mortality, the ticking tock of time. Fantasize all you like, the drum says, but when you're done, I'll be waiting. Each of Allen's metronomic edits say to Harry (and to us): one step at a time, boy, one step toward that grave at a time. Each cut metaphorasizes the incidents that brings Harry nearer to his reckoning.

Allen's rhythm sharpens the action, and raises the harsh awareness of consequence that fuels film noir. When evil rises from the ocean depths, and the dying sink reluctantly in a fog of rising bubbles, Harry discovers a problem that cannot be observed; it must be lived. From that, and from himself, there is no escape.

The Locket (1946)

2009-04-27T10:25:00.018-05:00

Editor's note: This week's film noir article is taken from film historian Wheeler Winston Dixon's just-released book Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia.Wheeler generously gave us permission to post his thoughts on the mesmerizing noir, The Locket.

John Brahm’s The Locket (1946), or “What Nancy Wanted”

Written by Wheeler Winston Dixon

There are certainly any number of labyrinthianly complicated noirs, but nothing can quite prepare the viewer for the experience of watching John Brahm’s The Locket (1946), famous for its “flashback within a flashback within a flashback” structure, perhaps the most convoluted narrative in the history of noir. The plot itself is relatively simple: Nancy (Laraine Day) is a kleptomaniac, driven to steal anything that strikes her fancy (the original title of the film was “What Nancy Wanted”). Nancy’s compulsion springs from a childhood incident, in which she was given a locket as birthday gift, which was then taken away from her by the cruel Mrs. Willis (Katherine Emery), her mother’s employer. When the locket goes missing, Nancy is suspected of having stolen it to recover the trinket for herself. Although it is later discovered that the locket simply fell in the hem of a garment, Nancy is never truly exonerated. Now, twenty years later, Nancy is poised to marry John Willis (Gene Raymond), and thus regain admission to the household she was banished from as a child; Mrs. Willis does not recognize Nancy, having only known her as a child (played by Sharyn Moffet).

But within this seemingly straightforward narrative, there are numerous obstacles. The film itself begins on the day of Nancy’s wedding to John Willis. Just as the ceremony is about to begin, psychiatrist Dr. Harry Blair (Brian Aherne) breaks in demanding to see John. Dr. Blair, it turns out, was one of Nancy’s former husbands; Blair knows that Nancy is insane, and pleads with Willis not to marry her. As Blair recounts the tale of his marriage with Nancy in a flashback voiceover, he unfolds the tale of another of Nancy’s husbands, the late Norman Clyde (Robert Mitchum), a moody artist who ultimately committed suicide because of Nancy’s compulsive thefts, and her participation in a murder. All this unfolds in reverse, back to Nancy’s childhood and the incident with the locket, and then reverses to end in the present, where the still doubting John Willis, having heard Mr. Blair’s tale, confronts Nancy, who predictably denies everything.

Only Nancy’s collapse at the altar, brought on by Mrs. Willis’s “re-gift” of the locket Nancy briefly had as a child, saves John Willis from a similar marital fate. As The Locket ends, Nancy is taken off to an asylum ostensibly for a cure, but the camera remains within the gloomy precincts of the Willis family’s gloomy Fifth Avenue mansion. What has transpired has left a mark not only on Nancy, but all who knew her, and even Dr. Blair’s supposed skill as a psychiatrist is useful only after the fact. For most of the film, Nancy’s mania eludes detection, and everyone who discovers her secret is summarily destroyed. Thus, all surfaces are suspect, all appearances deceiving, and nothing is to be taken at face value, especially protestations of innocence.

Director John Brahm keeps a firm hand on the proceedings, and effectively stages The Locket so that most of it happens at night, on claustrophobic studio sets. Mitchum, a rising star at the time, is oddly convincing as Norman Clyde, a Bohemian artist with attitude to spare, and Nicholas Musuraca’s moody lighting leaves the characters, and the viewer, in a state of continual confusion and suspense. Most intriguing, of course, is the triple-flashback structure of the film, which brings into question the reliability of the film’s narrative. When Dr. Blair bursts in on John Willis and begins his recital of Nancy’s crimes, Blair’s flashback contains Norman Clyde’s reminiscences, which in turn contain Nancy’s own memories of her childhood, as told to Norman, containing the incident of the locket.

Thus, we have only Nancy’s word, through Norman, and then through Dr. Blair, that any of this is really true, and yet we unquestionably believe in the veracity of all three statements. Why? The entire story is so fantastic that one can understand John Willis’s lack of trust in Blair’s accusations; Nancy seems like a “nice girl.” The failed wedding that climaxes the film is proof enough of Nancy’s affliction, but are all the details of her illness quite correct? For this, we have only the word of three narratives that enfold each other like miniature Chinese boxes, refusing to give up their secrets, opening only when the proper pressure is applied to the correct location.

The world of The Locket is one of absolute doom and betrayal. The relationship you thought would last forever is doomed. Your friends don’t believe you. The police don’t believe you. You can’t even trust yourself; indeed, you are your own worst enemy. Powerless before the forces of fate, which have once again capriciously decided to deal you a new, much more unpleasant future from the bottom of the deck, you simply have to take it on the chin and hope for the best. The world of The Locket is the domestic sphere in peril, in collapse, existing outside the normative values of postwar society, values that are themselves constantly in a state of flux. The family unit is constantly celebrated in the dominant media as the ideal state of social existence, but is it, when so much is at risk, and so much is unexplained? For Nancy in The Locket, the answer is a resounding no.

Video courtesy of TCM

The Velvet Touch (1948)

2009-04-16T21:22:00.011-05:00

In Praise of a Fat Man

Written by Steve-O

Sydney Greenstreet was one great presence in film – literally. In The Maltese Falcon he filled every inch of the screen. John Huston shot “The Fat Man” from such a low angle that he actually looked even larger than he was – which was pretty big. At 62, this was the first film the proud stage actor agreed to be in. His film career would only last eight years but through Warner Bros he would work with some of the greats in movies. WB paired him with Peter Lorre nine times including two of the most beloved films of all time, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.

Because of his large size, age and lack of leading man looks Greenstreet wasn't expected to ever be the main attraction. He was a standout supporting player around bigger stars – but never bigger in actual size. Peter Lorre was lucky he didn't go into orbit around his frequent WB co-star. Warners eventually used used the unique Greenstreet as a top-billed star in more than a few releases. They include the film noirs The Verdict, The Mask of Dimitrios and Three Strangers. All three are worth the effort to find and watch.

Then there's The Velvet Touch – the 1948 film directed by Jack Gage. Greenstreet is billed fourth behind Rosalind Russell, Leo Genn, and Claire Trevor. Greenstreet doesn't appear in the film until after the 45 minute mark. Getting to that point in this routine drama is a chore for any movie fan.

Russell plays a middle-aged Broadway leading lady trying to break away from her light comic plays and act in something “serious”. She has an argument with her former love - lecherous producer Gordon Dunning (Leon Ames) – after a performance. Russell kills him with a blunt blow on the head with a Tony Award. Once she realized what she's done she quickly exits the back stage of the packed theater. She, all shifty-eyed and nervous after the killing, rushes through coworkers and fans and gets into her limo - successfully exiting the theater before the body is found. It's amazing that no one suspected her of the crime. Russell pulls off a unique performance - appearing guilty and looking down her nose at people at the same time. I suspect she was trying to play the part as a hammy actor trying to keep her cool. However, all these acting ticks actually makes her character annoying and unlikeable.

Looking back at reviews from 1948, The New York Times infamous reviewer Bosley Crowther nails Russell's performance:

“This foregone conclusion of the story is only one of the film's weaknesses. The muddiness of the character played by Miss Russell is another one. The role was so randomly written by Leo Rosten that one finds it hard to see any solid personality or consistency in the dame. At this point she's sweet, at that she's vicious, here she's pitiable and there she's vile, with no purpose or reason to the bridges—save, perhaps, to give Miss Russell things to do.

True, she does them with forthright application. She acts charming, lovable and sad with the same glittering polish in performance as when she's acting deceitful and cruel. She also has sobbing hysterics with the same evident emotional thrust as she shows in tossing her sweet self ecstatically into her lover's arms.”

After the killing Valerie Stanton (Russell) returns to her swanky apartment. The film goes into flashback mode and tells her back story – including the romance Crowther hints at.

All the Broadway sophisticates talk and behave like they were somehow live versions of New Yorker Magazine cartoons. The two standout performances are from noir regulars Claire Trevor and comical Esther Howard. It's not surprising that they're the only actors in the film to play anyone even close to down-to-earth. Trevor is refreshing as a love-sick but hard-boiled actress who's accused of the crime and Howard is funny as an obsessed Broadway fan. All the men, unfortunately, are lanky, mustached fifty-somethings that every young woman in these types of film seem to find dreamy.

Before the film becomes totally unbearable the flashback finishes and the film returns to current time. The police call the whole theater group to meet with Captain Danbury to discuss the killing. With the entire theater group seated in front of him Greenstreet takes the stage and carefully examines a rickety wooden folding chair. The whole theater groups erupts in laughter after Greenstreet carefully plants himself in the creaking chair and breathes a sigh of relief. The scene is funnier than any of the supposed comedy shown on stage throughout the film. Capt. Danbury explains why he's there and begins questioning all the people in the theater in front of everyone. “Routine, ladies and gentlemen.” he says. “Simply routine.” No one believes it especially not Russell who pegs him as a clever man she needs to be wary of. (Notice how Russell can look down her nose at everyone even while sitting.)

It's at this point when the movie becomes familiar but at the same time quite enjoyable. The audience knows who-done-it but the fun is following the food-loving and dapper Danbury find out the truth. (Crowther found Greenstreet “quite ludicrous as the sleuth” but I disagree. He's excellent.)

The melodrama is considered “film noir” probably due to the crime, the lengthy flashback at the beginning of the film, and the shadowy shots at Russell's apartment after the killing. Cinematographer Joseph Walker worked on other noir-like films including The Dark Past, The Lady from Shanghai, Harriet Craig, The Mob and Affair in Trinidad. He makes New York City's Broadway seem a nighttime world filled with glamorous people and bright lights. Unfortunately it's not as dank as you would expect from a film noir.

A better “Broadway noir” would be the outstanding A Double Life released in theaters just six months earlier. Ronald Coleman – playing a cracked Shakespearean actor a little too into the characters he plays - kills a loud-mouth waitress from the wrong side of the tracks (Shelly Winters). Edmond O'Brien plays an enterprising press agent. Winters, Coleman and O'Brien bring just enough grit to make the stagy film a superior noir film.

However The Velvet Touch - even with it's shortcomings - is not without charm. The film's worth seeing for one of the “Queens of Film Noir” Trevor – always a welcome sight – and the giant known as Sydney Greenstreet.

Home viewers of the movie are advised to fast-forward past the male-chorus-sung theme song written by the usually reliable Leigh Harline.

R.I.P. Maxine Cooper

2009-04-16T21:09:00.005-05:00

"Do me a favor, will you? Keep away from the windows. Somebody might... blow you a kiss." - Maxine Cooper as Mike Hammer's Velda in Kiss Me Deadly

Clash by Night (1952)

2009-04-10T09:21:00.015-05:00

Editor's note: This week's article is from storyteller and film-noir scholar Megan Abbott. Abbott won a 2008 Edgar Award for her fantastic crime thriller Queenpin.Her new novel Bury Me Deep- featuring a cover that all film-noir fans will appreciate - will be released in July.

Written by Megan Abbott

On his DVD commentary track, Peter Bogdanovich notes, in passing, that some call Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952) a film noir, which he refers to as a genre. He dismisses such claims on the ground that it is not “a thriller or a suspense piece.” He concedes, however, that it’s “shot a bit like a film noir.” There’s a lot in his comments to irritate noir aficionados, most especially their reductiveness. But what Bogdanovich misses most is the fever that pulses through the movie is the same one that burns through most classic film noir: that constant, brooding fear of sexual betrayal and loss of power. In fact, few movies better capture the post-war mood of gender anxiety and rage.

With its showy Clifford Odets screenplay (adapted from his 1941 play), Clash by Night features a quintessential noir plot: Mae (Barbara Stanwyck), a woman who’s been knocked around by life, returns to her hometown and settles down with Jerry (Paul Douglas), a nice, stable working man even as she finds herself sinking into a violent affair with Jerry’s best friend, Earl (Robert Ryan), a self-hating, hard-drinking misanthrope who harbors fantasies of sticking his burlesque performer wife “full of pins just to see if blood runs out.”

The first time the pair meets, Lang focuses in on Mae’s appraising gaze as she watches Earl, a movie house projectionist, load the film reels, clearly admiring his form. It’s a traditionally male gaze, a male position. Likewise, it is Earl who preens, poses, who talks too much, who performs. Mae is so quiet that first night (listening to Earl spew venom about his wife, whom he says, in vintage Odets-speak, “eats money”) that Earl even comments on it. Her quiet is a kind of power and it unsettles him. She has his number. “You don’t like women, do you?” she finally says. He replies, “Take any six of them—my wife included—throw them up in the air, the one who sticks to the ceiling, I like.”

From the start, then, the movie is a pitched battle between two lions. “What are you,” Jerry demands of them both when he learns of their affair. “In a zoo, the keep them in a cage. They keep them apart. They keep them from hurting people.”

But the battle between Mae and Earl is endlessly complicated. “You’re just like me,” he tells her at one point. “You’re born and you’d like to get unborn.” They both see in each other what they hate in themselves and it both horrifies and arouses them. Desire and violence aren’t so much joined by the plot as revealed as always simultaneous. And always conflicted too. The yearning to practically consume each other, to tear each other to pieces, transmutes four or five times in the same scene to a longing for connection, a neediness—especially on Earl’s part. And that need is both repulsive to Mae and infinitely appealing.

In various commentaries on the film, critics have claimed that Mae likes Earl’s brutality, that she is turned on by it. But Clash by Night is so much twistier than that about gender relations. For Mae, relationships are about a complicated negotiation of power and control. When asked by Peggy (an awkward and delicious young Marilyn Monroe) what she wants in a man, Mae replies, “Confidence. I want a man to give me confidence. Somebody to fight off the blizzards and the floods. Somebody to try to beat off the world when it tries to swallow you up.” She doesn’t just want to be cared for; she wants someone who will make her feel strong and yet not feel emasculated by it. The arch subcommentary in this scene is that Mae offers her insight while wearing an apron and hanging laundry. In a later scene, Earl will say to her, “I can’t see you doing it. Hanging up the family wash.” Indeed, there is something pained about the pristine white blouses and immaculately flared skirts she dons, as if a costume. Earl implicitly understands it as a kind of defeat. It is a feeling he shares. “You know they used to call me the Kingfish of Buckman County,” he tells Mae. “I had zip, flash, pep a future. But that was faraway and long ago.”

But Mae marries Jerry not because she has surrendered to repressive domesticity. She feels he is a “comfortable” man—a man who “isn’t mean and doesn’t hate women.” Later, when Jerry first shows his jealousy, she bemoans to Earl, “Aren’t there any more comfortable men in this world? Now they’re all little and nervous like sparrows or big and worried like sick bears. Men.” All the fears and tension of post-war masculinity are contained in that short speech. But Earl, whom one might think would be enraged by her words, is too busy being aroused by the hate in it. Listening to her excitedly, he spits out his matching epithet, “Women.”

Mae is not crying out for an uncomplicated brute here, however. She’s asking for a man who doesn’t feel threatened, by other men or by herself. Weakness is not about a lack of virility but a lack of a sense of self (she tells Peggy to marry her lunkish boyfriend because he “knows himself”). As for Earl, she dismisses him as a “sparrow in a tree top.”

In the end, though, it’s Earl’s desperation that Mae is drawn to, especially when twinned, perpetually, with a clawing desire. “Somebody has to need me, love me,” he begs her.

“Help me. Mae. Help me.” It’s always reciprocal, if not commensurate. Both lovers want to be needed but not sucked dry. But everyone of Odets’s sentences coils back on itself, showing the way desire is always cruel, sadistic. Wanting is always about taking, needing is always a vulnerability exposed. And if the language doesn’t offer that turn of the screw, the performers do. “Tell me what you want me to be and I’ll be it,” Earl says. “Mae, I’m dying of loneliness.” Only Ryan could make such vulnerable, open-hearted words also seem like a threat. You watch him as he utters these anguished lines and you can’t help but feel them as sheer menace. We understand them as both a plea for love and a power grab.

When Mae finally succumbs to Earl’s violent advances, we see it as a fair fight and one in which the terms are absolutely understood. In the very center of ’50s domesticity, the kitchen—in fact, right against the kitchen sink—Earl seizes her and, as Lang positions the camera behind Earl’s back, Mae’s hand jams itself under his undershirt, clawing beneath it. It is both achingly sexy and horrifying. We, like Earl and Mae, don’t know if we want to lean forward or shield our eyes.

The Strip (1951)

2009-04-04T16:28:00.011-05:00

Written by Raven

The Strip is Mickey Rooney’s second of his three early 50’s noirs and is sandwiched nicely between and Quicksand and Drive a Crooked Road. In the former Mickey plays an auto mechanic lead astray by a dame. Ditto the latter so it’s no small coincidence automobiles play a major role in Mickey’s deadly dilemma in The Strip but more on that later.

Released by MGM in 1951 with the tagline “M.G.M.’s Musical Melodrama of the Dancer and the Drummer," The Strip is rather an unconventional noir to say the least, but more on that later.

The Strip, besides the aforementioned Rooney as Stan Maxton, stars Sally Forrest as Jane Tafford, James Craig as Sonny Johnson and William (Uncle Charley) Demarest as Fluff. More than ample support is provided by noir regulars Tom Powers, Don Haggerty, and Robert Foulk. Support on the musical side is given by Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden and 23 year old Vic Damone, one gent in Tinseltown who’d never be caught wearing a monogrammed sweater! Also of note is the rotten kid played by pre-Lassie, Tommy Rettig.

We open with the conventional wide angle shot of the city and voice-over narration introducing the viewer to Los Angeles at 5:00 A.M. and more specifically “...The Strip. It’s just a piece of land running a mile and a half through Hollywood.” Seems a prowl car is racing down the road for reasons unknown to which the narrator tells us “Might be a traffic accident, or a prowler, or maybe something for Homicide?” Give you three guesses which the first two don’t count.

The deputies rush into an apartment and find the limp body of Jane Tafford lying on the floor. Soon thereafter in another part of the city, police detectives find local gangster and playboy Sonny Johnson dead of a gunshot wound. Both he and the weapon are laying on the floor of his Hollywood Hills bachelor pad. The connection between Tafford and Johnson? If you guessed Stan Maxton go to the head of the class. Seems one was Stan’s squeeze and the other his boss and I’m not telling which was which.

The cops of course easily find Stan at his apartment, worse the wear from a recent beating and packing his bags for a quick trip out of town to Sun Valley. Once downtown he’s shown a photo of Tafford, and he admits he knew her. Shown a photo of Johnson, he also admits he knows him. When this is done, the investigating officer, Lieutenant Detective Bonnabel (Powers) tells Stan that Jane is “very ill.” To which Stan replies “If Sonny Johnson’s hurt her at all I’ll kill him dead as a doornail!”

Bonnabel points out that’d be tough given the fact Johnson’s already dead and begins grilling Stan for info about Johnson and his connection with him. “If I tell you my life’s story I’ll be here forever,” states Stan and of course that’s precisely what he proceeds to do and the noir staple, the flashback kicks in.

Several years earlier we see Stan before a board of doctors at a Veterans Hospital. While it’s never made clear, it appears to be more of a mental hospital as once the doctors give him his release Stan tells them “Thank you doctors for helping to straighten me out.” While inquiring about future plans and if he’s been on the drums, Stan indicates he’ll be heading for Los Angeles and getting his old band back together. As a going away gift the other G.I.s have pitched in to give Stan a drum set on which he’s given the first opportunity to display his ample talents on the skins.

Soon on the road with his drums piled high in the back of his jalopy, Stan makes his first of several fateful encounters with automobiles. While attempting to pass the slow motoring Stan another car forces him off the road wrecking both his car and drums. The errant driver stops to give assistance, offers to pay for all the damages and even drives Stan all the way to LA. This is none other than Sonny Johnson.

Once in LA Sonny convinces Stan to forgo the drums and instead cast his lot with him to the tune of two hundred bucks a week working in one of his bookmaking joints. Things are going great till the joints are knocked off by the cops. Here’s where being short of stature pays off, for as the cops are rounding up the bookies, Stan’s able to slip under a table and scoot out a window. In his flight to escape he hops into the moving car of one Jane Tafford whom he tells the story he’s running from his wife and eight kids!

In real life, Rooney at the time only had two children and it’d be several more years until he finally had and surpassed eight with nine! Talk about life imitating art!

Anyway, Jane doesn’t buy his story but figures he’s harmless and lets him know she dances at a place on The Strip know as Fluff’s and he should stop on by sometime. Of course “some time” turns out to be that very night. Ends up Fluff’s is a Dixieland joint and no less than Louis Armstrong and His Band are the headliners! Jane doubles as the cigarette girl and dances at the club and of course Stan falls all over himself trying to get her to give him a tumble.

In that Jane won’t date a fellow unless Fluff gives him his blessing, Stan hangs around till closing and once the place clears out begins messing around on the drums. So impressed is he Fluff not only gives the Stan the green light with Jane but also offers him a job to play drums.

What follows is Stan walking out on Sonny for Jane and Fluff, Jane walking out on Stan for Sonny, Stan involved in two more automobile accidents, Sonny offering Stan the chance to head up his Phoenix bookie operation, Stan refusing and getting his brains beat out and Jane rushing to his defense and a double murder. Talk about a tin of mixed nuts!

While clocking in at 85 minutes the action, combined with top notch musical numbers, discounting the duet Stan and Fluff sing, the whole production moves very quickly. While mentioning musical numbers, I’m not a fan of the obligatory numbers that are woven within the fabric of many noirs. There are some exceptions, Road House and Gilda come to mind, but The Strip offers first class talent doing what they do best and there’s never a distraction from the story. The whole production comes together very nicely and as the tagline says it’s the “Musical Melodrama of the Dancer and the Drummer.”

Thieves’ Highway (1949)

2009-03-28T16:51:00.011-05:00

Written by clydefro

(editor's note: You can check out clydefro's blog here)

Film noir has always been predicated on the loss of innocence. There’s an inherent cynicism, a battered degree of expectation, that goes hand in hand with noir. It tends to be the only reliable area of film where we know, with almost extreme certainty, that bad things will happen to characters we like. If there’s a happy ending in noir it’s false and studio-mandated. If there’s any seed of hope left by the final credits the burgeoning distrust we’ve wrapped around our eyes refuses to fully buy in to the result. It’s a painful, often masochistic form of coping with the outside world. We still root for the protagonist, but we know he’s doomed to heart ache or a broken jaw or any number of other ailments. And, of course, we revel in it just the same.

Bad things happen in Thieves’ Highway. Actually, almost everything that occurs in the film is for the worst aside from that overly happy ending. Director Jules Dassin neither approved of the final scenes nor was consulted about them after he finished the picture and trekked over to London to make Night and the City amid the wrath of a Congress-sponsored witch hunt. It hardly ruins the movie, though, and you’d have difficulty finding a superior, more engrossing look at the proletariat class through the lens of film noir. Thieves’ Highway carefully depicts the world of produce markets and the truckers who supply them, never leaving any doubt as to which side deserves the bulk of our sympathy. It’s a relentlessly dramatic and entertaining picture that surely deserves placement alongside the very best of the film noir entries of its day. Dassin and screenwriter A.I Bezzerides bring to life a fixed match of dirty business excused by capitalism and the men who are mere pawns in a flawed game. It’s difficult to know whether Henri-Georges Clouzot saw Thieves’ Highway prior to filming his masterpiece The Wages of Fear, but he certainly should have.

While I’m familiar with a significant number of Richard Conte’s films made at Fox in the ’40s, nothing else really seem to have the pull of his work here. There are some quality pictures in there, things like Somewhere in the Night and Cry of the City, but Conte absolutely maintains the perfect temperament of nice guy sifted rage as WWII veteran and world traveler mechanic Nick Garcos in Dassin’s film. He returns home from globe trotting in the Far East, gift boxes in hand, only to find his father has been confined to a wheelchair after tangling with shady market dealer Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb). Nick’s girl Polly (Barbara Lawrence) is thrilled to see him, but decidedly less enthused by the geisha doll present he gives her. The ring on the doll’s hand places a nice salve on the situation, though not before the viewer gets reason to doubt Polly’s sincerity. Polly’s cute but icy. She’s the typical disposable paramour.

Nick’s all set to enter into a business arrangement with Polly’s father until he broods over Mike Figlia cheating his old man. The film ably lets Nick reveal a temper lined with rage in his promise to retrieve the money owed from Figlia’s carcass if necessary. Even with hindsight, the plan doesn’t necessarily coalesce for Nick. I don’t think the movie is ever really concerned with being a revenge tale or a means to let the son collect on the indignities served to his father. The more impressive approach of fate utterly sliding its foot into Nick’s path at every turn is used by Dassin and Bezzerides. A plan is hatched so that Nick and Ed Prentiss (the reliable Millard Mitchell) will drive in separate trucks up to San Francisco. Over 400 miles and 36 hours plus on the road without sleep. Nick wants Figlia. Ed wants the cash his Golden Delicious apples will fetch. Neither gets exactly what he bargained for, and the addition of Pete (future director Joseph Pevney) and Slob (Jack Oakie) as disgruntled followers would seem to only enhance the tension.

Thieves’ Highway is bursting with plot, far more than the typical mood-dominated film noir. Each development builds firmly on the whole and we’re ultimately left with a usual Dassin cocktail of defeatist intensity. I don’t exactly know where or how the film most appropriately should close, but the actual result does feel less than satisfying. Dassin laments this too-easy tying up of loose ends in his interview on the Criterion Collection’s magnificent DVD releaseof the film. Not only was the paternalistic, Daryl F. Zanuck-endorsed scene where the cops come in to passively reprimand Nick for not letting the police handle the situation (when they were, of course, hardly integral to overseeing the market’s depravities) added without Dassin’s input, the false smile of Nick coming in to sweep Rica (Valentina Cortese) off her feet in marriage was equally manufactured. It’s a very Hollywood addition and ending to an otherwise fiercely iconoclastic effort on Dassin’s part.

There’s ample reason to celebrate Jules Dassin’s contribution to film, especially his noir pictures indelibly imprinted in the mind of anyone who’s seen them. I’m an unabashed admirer of Dassin’s. His films like this one, Brute Force, Night and the City and Rififi, are pure, raw examples of film noir sliced efficiently to the bone. Later works outside the crime drama genre reveal a masterful director equally at home exploring female disintegration in the face of a spouse’s affair (10:30 P.M. Summer) or an all-black cast extending the boundaries of John Ford’s The Informer (Up Tight!). Almost anything Dassin touched was brilliant and interesting regardless of its overall merit. No Dassin picture after his apprenticeship at MGM is easily ignored. His diverse, yet guarded output remains one of the more fascinating in all of 20th century film. And no other filmmaker managed to so defiantly rebut the House Un-American Activities Committee while later succeeding on his own terms. Dassin refused to testify despite being named by former colleagues Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle and instead moved to Europe for work. It took him five years before finally answering with Rififi, but the result ultimately earned Dassin a share of the Best Director prize at Cannes.

I think this all speaks to the high level which Dassin was working on even with films like Thieves’ Highway, which has been neglected for far too long. There’s a distinct and real affectation of empathy that Dassin continues to master in this film. He was so adept at forming favorable portrayals of these flawed, demonstrably volatile protagonists that you can’t help but cheer the characters’ potential redemption. With Nick in Thieves’ Highway, we have a man ticking away with anger and doom. He’s a mechanic, but he nonetheless fails to properly address a flat tire while traveling on the road to San Francisco. His element is completely and totally pierced. It’s difficult to establish a hold on Nick, but we still remain fascinated with his determination and sense of justice. Thieves’ Highway doesn’t necessarily endear itself as an essential unraveling of the human condition so much as it lets the viewer connect the dots at his own pace. The various external factors leading Nick to the room of the tempestuous Rica are entrenched in fate’s most shrouded rationalizations.

Yet, we take it just fine, believing in the character and his bouts with whatever hand is in front of him at the time. Much of the willingness to go along with Nick comes from Conte’s amiable characterization. He’s vulnerable and tough and believably integrated in a total mess, all at once. As I mentioned earlier, this is a film where things go horribly wrong at every possible opportunity. Dassin provides a burned-in opportunity for memory making in the dissolution of Mitchell’s character. It’s horrific, savage, and far too real for a studio film. You can smell the charred flesh and burning apples. Oblivious to the plight of his partner, Nick meanders around the market area before falling into the bed of Rica. Valentina Cortese, who also happened to be Dassin’s girlfriend at the time, is remarkably sensual playing an apparent prostitute. Rica demonstrates her claws in one highly evocative game of tic-tac-toe played out on Conte’s naked chest. It’s a moment like this that endears us all to the slightly unusual frequency of film noir.

Classe tous risques (aka The Big Risk 1960)

2009-03-21T23:07:00.015-05:00

The Gangster Code in Classe tous risques

by Guy Savage

“I’m telling you because we always think we’re clever, but if you stop standing your ground, you’re nothing. You slip a little more every day until you’re nothing. Like today.”

The 1960 French film Classe tous risques (AKA The Big Risk) is director Claude Sautet’s second feature length film, and while films such as Bob le flambeur (1956) and Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (1954) show their hood protagonists as elegant, glamorized men, Classe tous risques smacks of gritty realism in which all glamour is glaringly absent. Perhaps this is due in part to the fact that Classe tous risques is based on the novel by José Giovanni. Giovanni was mixed up in a murder and racketeering case, sentenced to the guillotine, and then served a commuted sentence of hard labor. Imprisoned for a total of eleven years, Giovanni wrote a number of novels--some of them completed while still in prison, and a number of which were made into films including: Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960), Classe tous risques (Sautet, 1960), L’Excommunie/Un nommé La Rocca (Jean Becker, 1961) remade by Giovanni as La Scoumoune (1972) and Le deuxième souffle (Melville, 1966). Le Trou is based on Giovanni’s attempt to escape from prison while Classe tous risques is based on the life of gangster Abel “the Mammoth” Danos, a prominent member of the Bony-Lafont gang, the Gang des Tractions Avant, and the Carlingue.

More than twenty years after the film’s release, Claude Sautet discovered that the fictional Abel Davos was based on the real-life of Abel Danos, one of the most notorious French gangsters of the 40s. Sautet admitted to interviewer Michel Boujut that if he had known about the Davos-Danos connection he “might not have made the film.” The real-life Danos was executed by firing squad in 1952 for treason. However Eric Guillon’s recent book Abel Danos: Between Resistance and Gestapo throws some doubt on the absolute demonizing of Danos as a collaborationist. By the time Danos came to trial, there was only one living witness to testify against him, and the witness had an adversarial relationship with Danos. On the other hand, another witness testified that Danos was a member of the Marco Polo Network.

When Classe tous risques begins, sad-faced gangster Abel Davos (Lino Ventura) is not at the pinnacle of his criminal career. Living on the run in Milan, and under a death sentence in France for his crimes, Abel has lived in self-imposed exile in Italy for almost a decade and raised a family there. But now with the money running out and the police closing in, Abel decides to return to France and his network of friends. Ventura who already had a number of solid roles in his impressive resume, plays the role of Abel with a tired, but determined, laconic acceptance.

On one level it makes a great deal of sense for a criminal to return to a familiar network of fences, fellow thugs, and tipsters, and this is particularly true for any criminal existing on the run. In Abel’s case, he also has a family to support, but since Abel is under a death sentence, returning to French soil is a desperate move that brings him uncomfortably close to the guillotine. Abel’s decision to return to France is taking an enormous risk (hence the film’s title), and he knows that if he’s caught, the game is over. At some point in the story, Abel’s risk morphs into self-destruction.

Abel and his longtime loyal henchman, Raymond (Stan Krol) ship off Abel’s wife Therese (Simone France) and two small children by train with the plan of meeting back up and then sneaking into France illegally by boat. When the wife and family out of the way, Abel and Raymond commit one last job on Italian soil with the idea that this heist will set them up for some time. The heist is also emblematic of the reductive progression of Davos’s criminal career. It’s a street snatch and grab--short, simple, and violent, boiling down to a daring daylight robbery, in which Abel and Raymond cosh security guards and make off with a bag of loot while slipping through heavy city traffic.

Abel and Raymond count the loot and are disappointed to discover that the haul is a fraction of what they expected. Splitting the money, the two men separate with a toss of the coin. While Raymond, a crony of Pierrot Le Fou wins the coin toss, he subordinates his safety to Abel and gives Abel the car while he takes the motorbike to the border. Although things go wrong at the border, incredible split-second timing and luck bring the two men back together for the reunion with Therese and the children.

The film’s initial breathless pace underscores the sheer professionalism of these two hoods--men who both have long rap sheets and a slew of bodies in their bloody pasts. But luck also plays a huge role, and luck delivers them to a French beach and dumps them there….

Abel returns to France with the idea that he’s returning to his reliable network of pals--fellow hoods who can help ease him back into the French crime scene. Abel tells himself that perhaps he’s been “forgotten,” and there’s an irony to this hope as while the police still remember him, Abel’s pals would rather he didn’t exist. Stuck in Nice and with cops crawling all over roadblocks, Abel needs help to get to Paris, but his pals in Paris suddenly don’t seem that eager to have him back. They mull over Abel’s request to send an ambulance to Nice, and every one of them comes up with an excuse why they have to hire a total stranger to go to Nice and haul Abel back to Paris.

At this point Eric Stark (Jean-Paul Belmondo) enters the picture and he takes on the risky job of traveling to Nice and rescuing Abel. But Stark does a great deal more than that. Picking up a new, instantly faithful girlfriend along the way, Stark essentially replaces Raymond as Abel’s right hand man.

By the time Abel makes it back to Paris, he feels betrayed and disappointed in his friends, former gang members Fargier (Claude Cerval), Jeannot, and Riton of the Gates (Michel Ardan). While perennial loser Jeannot is currently out on bail between prison stays, Riton and Fargier have become bourgeois and comfortably affluent. In one great scene that takes place in Riton’s café, Riton’s wife nags Abel while listing the inconveniences he’s caused in their lives, and Riton, who’s too hen-pecked to stop her, lets her ramble on until Abel forces a confrontation and limits the discussion to gang members. At this point, Fargier announces his plan to help retire Abel to a remote place in Brittany. Abel isn’t ready to be put out to pasture and he reminds his pals of the debts they owe him. Shame-faced and unable to look Abel in the eye, Fargier and Riton waffle and ultimately refuse to help him. They’ve done the minimum by hiring Stark, but now that Abel is back in Paris, he’s too hot to handle, and none of Abel’s former pals want him under their roofs. It is left once again for Stark to step in and help Abel--in spite of the fact that these two men don’t really know each other and that Stark doesn’t owe Abel a thing.

Abel’s situation has plummeted from bad to worse. The police are hot on his heels and it’s a matter of time before he’s caught. Considered a pariah by his former pals, without safe shelter and unable to provide for his two young sons, Abel takes his chances robbing a Parisian fence. This act crosses the line as far as Abel’s pals are concerned, and by robbing a fence they use and know, Abel has cannibalized his own network. On the other hand, Abel’s robbery of a former underworld connection is the desperate, self-destructive act of a cornered man who is willing to alienate all of his former contacts to break out of his current untenable and incredibly humiliating position. By robbing the fence, Abel symbolically acknowledges that old debts remain unpaid and that any crumbs of loyalty are worthless. This is an act of war, but it’s also the last possible, self-destructive choice for Abel. He can be cornered, snitched out, and starved out, or he can take action that symbolizes a break with the past and heralds a path of bloody final revenge. But Abel’s final defeat comes in the humiliation of acknowledging his inability to help Stark. The message is that if a man is unable to pay back his friends, then he is nothing.

Loyalty and friendships between gangsters remain a dominant theme in films and books that explore the labyrinthine codes of criminal life. According to the film, Abel funded Riton’s café and got Faurier out of prison. In return, he gets a one-way ambulance ride to Paris, but ultimately his friends abandon him. Abel’s former associates clearly decide to not return favors because he is so powerless and in such desperate need of their help. They elect to abandon him simply because they can. Their failure to help, and their failure to repay Abel at the lowest point in his life, is a betrayal of gangster ideals, and Classe Tous Risques is a magnificent exploration of those abandoned ideals from the view of a gangster who’s tumbled from the top of the heap and now needs a few of those owed favors in order to remain in the game.

Unfortunately Classe tous risques was released just a few weeks after Godard’s Breathless. Overshadowed by the Godard blockbuster, Classe tous risques was a box-office failure, and Sautet swore he’d never make a film again. But luckily for French film fans, Sautet relented and added many films to his resume including the subtly brilliant Un cœur en hiver (A Heart in Winter) and Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud. Ironically it is Breathless that is credited for catapulting Belmondo to stardom while Classe tous risques sank in the dust for many years. Criterion’s 2008 releasewill bring a new audience to this underrated film, and as usual the Criterion print is gorgeous. The DVD extras include excerpts from a documentary about Sautet, an interview with Jose Giovanni, archival footage, trailers and a booklet.

Ace in the Hole (1951) part 1

2009-03-16T20:15:00.007-05:00

Written by Tim (aka - Mappin and Webb Ltd)

Despite its barren environment, the seemingly infertile ground of the blistering hot New Mexico desert proves to be more than amply fecund to grow a story that’s as sharp and cutting as the metaphorical scythe used to slash, reap and serve to the audience the gripping narrative crop - and the bounty harvested tastes as bitter as a spoonful of lye. The man wielding the aforementioned blade is writer, producer and director Billy Wilder whose film Ace in the Hole is a dark juxtaposition in it’s themes of profaneness, immorality and inhumanity as the bright New Mexico sun under which the tale is set.

The first appearance of down and out newspaper reporter Charles “Chuck” Tatum (Kirk Douglas) comes as he sits in his convertible coup reading a newspaper while it’s being towed down an Albuquerque street by a wrecking truck. He hops out at the offices of the local newspaper the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin on a mission. From the way he hits the return key on a Sun-Bulletin employee’s typewriter so the bell will get their attention and other equally less than charming behaviors, Tatum exudes brash confidence and his arrogance is as distinct and noticeable as the cleft in Douglas’ chin. He meets with the Sun-Bulletin’s editor and publisher Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall). Boot is a cautious man, as Tatum observes aloud that he wears suspenders and a belt, and Boot’s personal motto, “TELL THE TRUTH” is embroidered and framed both inside and outside his office. Tatum shows his clippings to Boot and pitches his services as a reporter to his newspaper for 50 dollars a week telling him he’s a 250 dollar a week reporter that worked in all the major big city markets, but left them for various reasons (affair with the publisher’s wife, libel suits, boozing it up on the job.) Tatum is a good reporter by his own immodest assessment, “I can handle big news, little news and if there’s no news I’ll go out and bite a dog.” Tatum however is no longer a hot shot reporter in New York or Chicago, as he presently finds himself in Albuquerque with, “a burnt out bearing, bad tires and a lousy reputation.” Boot succumbs and offers Tatum a job at the paper. Tatum sees it as a chance to get back in the offices of a big time city paper, if he can only get a juicy story that will have the big market newspapers clamoring for his services once again.

A year passes and the office walls of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin seem to be closing in on Chuck Tatum as he has yet to get the big story that will be his, “loaf of bread with a file in it” ticket out Albuquerque. Boot sends Tatum and a young cub reporter Herbie to cover a rattle snake hunt in a remote county, hours outside of Albuquerque. On the drive, Tatum lets Herbie know he is unimpressed with the story potential of the rattle snake hunt. Herbie asks him why and Chuck tells him a real story would be 50 snakes on the loose in Albuquerque for days - slithering around in churches, schools and keeping the town in a panic. He imagines aloud to Herbie that one by one the authorities would hunt down all the snakes except for the last one they would be unable to find. The reason for number 50 eluding capture: Tatum would keep the final snake in his desk drawer to continue the story’s run for a few more days. Then when Tatum’s, “…good and ready we come out with a big extra, ‘Sun-Bulletin Snags Number 50.” His speculation on such a morbid scenario such as this indicates to the viewer that this isn’t the first time Tatum has thought about ignoring journalistic ethics to benefit the sensationalism factor of a story and his own gain. Perhaps his earlier threat of biting a dog to manufacture a story wasn’t just a sharp quip. A journalist focusing on panic, disaster and misery is what Tatum tells Herbie to be paramount: “Bad news sells best, because good news is no news.”

On the way to the snake hunt competition Tatum and Herbie stop at a desolate old roadside trading-post to get gas. A Police car’s siren signals there’s something brewing up at the desert mountain Navajo cliff dwelling near the road side trading-post. Tatum tells Herbie they should check it out as Tatum’s nose for news is still strong and accurate. They discover that the adult son of the owner of the “Minosa Trading-Post” (where they stopped) is trapped alive in one of the caves in the mountain cliff dwellings due to the ceiling collapsing on him. At the mouth of the cave several people are already there including the deputy sheriff who refuses to go inside the cave to get the trapped man supplies and assess the situation. When the deputy asks the local Navajos standing by if they would go in, because of their familiarity of the caves, they decline as the “Mountain of the Seven Vultures” (as it’s known to the Navajos) is an ancient burial ground that has been disturbed by the white man and will curse anyone who now enters. Chuck Tatum thinks the “Mountain of the Seven Vultures” name has a nice ring to it. Seizing the moment due to the Deputy Sheriff’s ineptness, Tatum’s aggression and arrogance is almost a positive quality for the first and only time in the film as he pushes the Deputy out of the way, takes his flashlight, some essential supplies for the trapped man and heads into the cave with Herbie in tow.

As the two reporters enter the cave, Chuck begins telling Herbie about the human interest factor of a good story featuring an individual in peril, as opposed to say one where you read about hundreds of men being killed. Tatum recounts the real life story (which the film’s plot is loosely based upon) of W. Floyd Collins being trapped in a Kentucky cave for a week in 1925. Disgusted that Herbie has vaguely heard of the Collins story, Tatum spits at him, “It was one of the biggest stories that ever broke, front page in every paper in the country for weeks… maybe you heard that a reporter on the Louisville paper crawled in the cave for the story and came out with a Pulitzer Prize.” After scolding the young reporter, Chuck tells Herbie to stay back a bit in the cave as he gets closer to the trapped man. The Floyd Collins talk serves as a territorial catalyst - Tatum wants this story all to himself. As Tatum ventures deeper inside, the dark and twisted labyrinth of the cave is a metaphor for the nebulous trappings formulating inside his own mind. He thinks this may be his big break for getting out of Albuquerque, but Tatum’s hubris and greed will eventually cave in on him like the trapped man.

(click here for part 2)

Ace in the Hole (1951) part 2

2009-03-15T20:41:00.013-05:00

(click here for part 1)

Tatum reaches the trapped subject Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) and provides him with some blankets and supplies while also snapping some pictures of him for the breaking story. Leo is an unlucky lug who ventured into the caves to swipe Indian artifacts for selling back at the trading-post when the cave collapsed in on him and pinned him there. As Leo explains that maybe there is something to the Navajo curse, Tatum is half listening to him and half formulating the lead of the story in his head. Chuck Tatum promises to get Leo out and ventures back outside, but not before a tiny cave-in potentially traps Tatum in there as well. It serves as a reminder to the audience: the danger inside the cave is omnipresent. Meeting up with Herbie again, Tatum is champing at the bit about spinning the potential angles of the story, “Curse of the old Indian chief, white man half buried by old Indian spirits. What will they do? Will they spare him? Will they crush him?” But in his excitement, Chuck has to backtrack some to Herbie regarding their earlier snake in the desk drawer conversation. Herbie asks him how soon they can get Leo out and Tatum replies that all he needs is just one week of this story. Puzzled, Herbie asks him that he wouldn’t really wish for anything that unfortunate, to which Tatum replies, “I don’t wish for anything. I don’t make things happen, I just write about em.” But Chuck Tatum is already formulating how he can milk this story for everything its worth to ensure it will get him back to the journalistic big leagues. If that means keeping Leo Minosa trapped inside for longer than necessary, Tatum will indeed “make things happen” to ensure such. Returning to the trading post, Tatum gets on the phone with Boot to start the ball rolling on the story and sends Herbie back to Albuquerque with the pictures of pinned Leo Minosa. Chuck Tatum has the story formulated in his head to make sure it’s as gripping as possible, but one bleach blonde obstacle stands in his way, Mrs. Leo “Lorraine” Minosa (Jan Sterling).

The next morning as Chuck Tatum bangs away on his typewriter in the trading-post, Lorraine Minosa is completely unaffected by the life threatening situation her husband is in. She is bitterly jaded and isn’t the only Minosa feeling trapped. Her personal quagmire is being married to Leo and stuck in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. Lorraine resents Leo as she feels she was misled by him when they first met in a saloon in Baltimore years back. Lorraine recounts to Tatum those five years ago in Charm City, Leo told her, “He had a 160 acres in New Mexico and a big business. Look at it, we sell 8 hamburgers a week, a case of soda-pop and once in a while a Navajo rug, maybe.” Lorraine then grabs the measly 11 dollars in the cash register with the intention of boarding the Trailways bus that’s about to stop in front of the trading-post and will take her away. She plans on leaving Leo, the Minosa Trading-Post and the integral worried wife angle of the trapped man for Tatum’s story behind and getting as far away as the 11 bucks will take her. Chuck knows he can’t let her leave for the story’s sake and tries to call her out on her planned heartless action made possible by Leo’s situation, “Nice kid…He can’t run after you lying there with those rocks on his legs.” Lorraine, who is on to Tatum’s true motives at Leo’s expense chimes back, “Look who’s talking. Much you care about Leo. I’m on to you. You’re working for a newspaper; all you want is something you can print. Honey you like those rocks just as much as I do.”

As Lorraine steps out of the trading post in front of the Trailways bus stop sign, dramatic timing and opportunity drives up in the form of a vacationing couple and their sons hoping to take a look at the cave containing the trapped man they read about in the morning edition of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin. Tatum has followed her outside and tells the couple they can drive up to the mountain for a gander and get breakfast at the trading-post afterwards. They drive off to the mountain and Chuck tells Lorraine that the curiosity of this family is only the beginning, “Get this, there’s three of us buried here, Leo, me and you. We all want to get out and we’re going to. Only I’m going back in style. You can too if you like, not with any 11 stinking dollars. You saw those people, a couple of squares, but to me they’re Mr. and Mrs. America…they’ll eat it up, the story and the hamburgers…there’s gonna be real dough in that cash register by tonight.” For her to leave now, Tatum tells Lorraine, when they bleached her hair they must have bleached her brains as well. The Trailways bus pulls up in front of the camera obscuring Lorraine facing it with her suitcase in hand. Momentarily keeping the audience in suspense as to her impending decision, the bus pulls away revealing Lorraine has turned her back to the camera and is walking back to the trading-post. Chuck and Lorraine have now become accomplices. Tatum is correct in his prediction that the public’s morbid curiosity will turn Leo’s plight into a literal media circus with Tatum controlling the spin of the story and Lorraine helming the overflowing trading-post cash register. The crowds exponentially grow over the next few days and Lorraine even rents out carnival rides and ice-cream concession stands on the Minosa land for the public to enjoy and her to reap the monetary benefits in the midst of a life or death atmosphere that shouldn’t be anything other than somber.

Where the darkness of Charles Tatum takes its most sinister turn is his meeting with the corrupt county sheriff and the engineer in charge of getting Leo out. Sheriff Gus Kretzer (Ray Teal) is on board with exploiting Leo’s situation for political gain due to the upcoming county election as Tatum promises hero status PR in the paper for the Sheriff as long as he agrees to keep other reporters at bay, thus ensuring the story is Tatum’s exclusively. The final obstacle to this cabal is the contractor/engineer telling both men that shoring up the walls of the cave to get Leo out would take 18 hours - too short a time for Tatum and Kretzer’s liking to get the maximum possible exploitation bang for their buck. The sheriff reminds the engineer that he was just a lowly truck driver a few years ago and thanks to the Sheriff’s help, if he wants to remain a successful contractor in the county, he should heed Chuck Tatum’s idea for getting Leo Minosa out: drilling a hole from the top of the mountain to extract the trapped man. The contractor warns them that this process will take a week before finally reaching Leo Minsoa, but that’s just what Tatum and the Sheriff have in mind. Seven days is just enough time for the Sheriff’s favorable media coverage to cinch the upcoming election, Lorraine Minosa to make money hand over fist at the trading-post and Charles Tatum to perhaps get a Pulitzer, but at the very least a way back to a big city newspaper “in style.” Once the top of the mountain drilling path operation is committed to, the engineer informs Tatum and the Sheriff days later that the shorter, original plan of rescuing him via shoring up the cave supports is impossible. The drilling has made the cave too unstable for the original plan to be executed later. As Leo’s health rapidly deteriorates in the cave, the question becomes will he survive in time for the purposely prolonged rescue Tatum engineers to succeed?

The cast of Ace in the Hole is top notch all around. Jan Sterling is perfect as the cold hearted Lorraine Minosa who is the only character that comes close to matching up with Douglas’ Charles Tatum. She serves as an accomplice at first to Tatum, but eventually becomes something of a nemesis when she tries to deviate from the worried wife role Tatum needs her to play to keep the story palatable for the public. He tells her to go to a special mass arranged at the local church for her husband one evening, to which she replies with perhaps the films best line, “I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.” Tatum keeps her in line through violence and manipulating her sexual desire for him, exploiting everything he can to make sure his story doesn’t cave in and he ends up trapped in Albuquerque. The film belongs to Douglas all the way however, and his unyielding and scheming anti-protagonist Chuck Tatum is so convincingly thorough, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else pulling off the role as adroitly as Douglas did. Even when Tatum scrambles for what appears to be redemption toward the end of the film, the motive is thoroughly blemished. He’s saving his own skin as it becomes apparent Leo Minosa will not survive in time for the rescue and Tatum’s orchestration will end in a crescendo of decimated reputations and criminal prosecutions when the real story comes out. Ironically in the end, Tatum can’t get his actual twisted story he masterminded behind the trapped man to be heard by the big city papers he so desperately wanted to be embraced by once again. Wilder brilliantly leaves it open-ended if Tatum’s numerous schemes we witnessed will be brought to light, or remain entombed in the darkness forever like Leo Minosa.

Visually Ace in the Hole could be one of Billy Wilder’s finest works. The way he and cinematographer Charles Lang Jr. (The Big Heat, Sudden Fear, The Magnificent Seven) film the growing mobs and carnival like atmosphere outside the cave is strikingly eerie and majestic simultaneously. The carnival set was massive and the 500 extras Wilder hired only grew as onlookers and people came from surrounding towns came to look for themselves at the filming, not unlike the story’s curious gawkers showing up to see what the gathering was all about. Wilder makes especially clever choices in framing such as the close-up of Kirk Douglas’ fist grabbing the back of Jan Sterling’s hair during the only “kiss” in the film and the final haunting verbatim shot of Tatum ending up back in the offices of the Sun-Bulletin right where he started. Only this time (without spoiling it) he tells Boot he can have his services for nothing as that is all he has left.

The absolute caustic recklessness, with which the characters in Ace in the Hole selfishly operate, is nearly unmatched compared to any in Wilder’s other films (one would have to include Phyllis Dietrichson from Double Indemnity in that discussion at least.) It is Wilder’s most cynical film with regard to his outlook on not only the dark nature of man and his selfishness, but the insatiable morbid curiosity of the public that often occludes moral consciousness. The film suffocates the audience with its bleak outlook on humanity just as Leo Minosa gasps the dirty air in the cave, while the growing mobs outside inappropriately revel and celebrate in close proximity to what will eventually become his tomb. One might speculate that because Wilder was so profoundly affected by the Nazi atrocities committed in the Second World War (Wilder himself escaped Germany to America in the 1930’s before some of his own relatives were later rounded up and murdered at Auschwitz), Ace in the Hole was his unflinching mirror held up to reveal some of the most base and malign behaviors humanity is capable of demonstrating. Wilder also does not spare the journalistic community from his barbs as he sees their complicity in exploiting the misery of others as not unlike vultures such as Charles Tatum, circling the desert skies, waiting for a human life to become cadaver and carrion sustenance in the harsh and unrelenting desert plains. Ace in the Hole pulls no punches, candy coats nothing and leaves the kid gloves at home. Because of its brutality though, it still remains a potently damming and brilliant film over half a century after its release.

I Confess (1953)

2009-03-01T23:07:00.014-05:00

Written by Bill Hare

Montgomery Clift and a Hitchcock Portrait of Sensitivity

For filmgoers who like performers who render sensitivity Montgomery Clift becomes an obvious favorite.

In the important realm of close-up projection where eye contact between performer and audience is the critical barometer, Clift’s register catapulted him to soaring heights.

A definitive example came in the 1951 drama “A Place in the Sun” directed by George Stevens. Wily veteran Stevens used Clift and leading lady Elizabeth Taylor to exquisite advantage. Taylor, one of Clift’s closest friends, had captivating eyes that were made to order for close-ups in the manner of Clift.

One of the most unforgettable close-ups in cinema annals occurred as Taylor walked into Clift’s cell just prior to his execution for killing a woman he had impregnated but did not ultimately love. His passions burned for Taylor and the feeling was mutual. Their expressions told the ultimate story and the scene was etched forever in the minds of all who saw it.

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s most successful traits in the career of a film stylist who basked in triumph was his ability to skillfully cast performers. Clift was an exquisite choice for the sensitive Father Michael William Logan in the 1953 release “I Confess.”

The setting is historic and picturesque Quebec City in Canada’s Quebec Province. The cinematography of Hitchcock regular Robert Burks emphasizes dark clouds on overcast days and shadows when the sun is shining.

The brooding mood synchronizes with a man whose heavily laden conscience is torn in conflicting directions in two important dimensions. Therein lies the film’s plot and inherent dramatic conflict.

Secrets of the Confessional and Deep, Abiding Love

Hitchcock was a practicing Roman Catholic and the story, adapted to the screen by George Tabori and William Archibald from a play by Paul Anthelme, surrounded a priest accused of murder who can clear himself by breaking his vow of silence relating to confession. In this case Otto Keller, played superbly by German actor O.E. Hasse, has confessed to Clift in the sanctuary of the confessional of the church where the parish priest served.

To those familiar with U.S. law, where privilege attaches to confidences involving members of the clergy, differing circumstances applied to Canadian law of that period. This brought an element of torture and dilemma for Clift. Despite repeated interrogation by police detective Karl Malden, he refused to waver.

Clift’s Father Logan was also a war hero who had fallen in love before service duty abroad. Anne Baxter expressed her willingness to marry him, but Clift responded that there were “too many war widows already” and declined.

By the time Clift returns Baxter, after not receiving letters from him following a certain interval, marries Roger Dann, a leading local political figure as a Member of Parliament.

After Clift’s return Baxter, who concedes, even to her husband, that she has always loved the man who, after returning home, becomes a priest, is found one morning with Father Logan after they had become caught in a storm. As a result they spend an evening together in a guest house where they had sought shelter.

Suspicious Circumstances Equal Motive

To the distinct disadvantage of both Clift and Baxter, they are found the following morning, after the storm has ended, by the disreputable owner of the guest house as well as the main residence. His eyes dance with opportunistic delight when he recognizes Baxter as the wife of a well known Member of Parliament.

Does this make Baxter a logical target for blackmail? Does the fact that she is seen in the company of a local priest make the prospect even more enticing? The answer is yes to both questions and a target she becomes, with Clift dragged along in the ensuing circumstances.

The web of suspicion tightens even more after Clift and Baxter were both viewed leaving the scene of the blackmailer’s home around the time of his murder. While Clift could potentially clear himself by revealing what he has been told in the sanctity of the confessional by O.E. Hasse, that he went to the blackmailer’s home to rob him since he and his wife badly needed money, to do so would betray the sacred confidence of the Catholic institution of confession, part of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

While Malden, who reveals himself to be a practicing Catholic, and is someone who feels sympathy for the sensitive priest, facts are facts. Prosecutor Brian Aherne is convinced that with Clift possessing sufficient motive along with being observed leaving a home where a murder occurred on or about the time in question, he should be compelled to stand trial.

An Honest Wife’s Guilt and Hitchcock’s View

Clift’s position generates even more audience empathy for another basic reason. Hasse has been befriended by Clift. As a European émigré in need of employment, the priest sees that both Hasse and his wife, played by Dolly Haas, like Hasse a German born performer, are employed at the rectory where Clift, another priest, and the parish pastor reside.

Not only does Hasse maintain silence while knowing that Clift will be tried for a murder he committed; he goes one step further by planting evidence that increases suspicion toward an innocent man.

Aherne does his best at trial and presents his evidence. While the jury returns with a “not guilty” verdict the foreperson adds that there was insufficient evidence to convict. Strong suspicions remain. Clift leaves the courtroom with courtroom observers furious. The anger develops at a swift, furious pace when he leaves the building.

Dolly Haas has seen enough. She knows that her husband, someone who committed a murder for profit and then planted the dead man’s blood on the priest’s cassock, has victimized Clift grievously to serve his own ill ends.

In Hitchcock fashion there is a grand finale, and this one is played out in the historic setting of Hotel Frontenac, perhaps the beautiful city’s most spectacular and best known building.

After Hasse shoots his own wife to save himself, he is finally hunted down in the august setting of the hotel.

The film’s unique linchpin rests on the bond within Catholicism’s confessional secrecy. The anguish is clearly visible on Clift’s face as he realizes that he can save himself from a murder conviction and punishment for breaking the bonds of that secrecy, which he refuses to do, even after Karl Malden has pled with the priest to provide all information within his knowledge.

As a practicing Roman Catholic, Hitchcock was the perfect director to make “I Confess,” feeling an empathy toward a priest tormented by a natural desire to extricate himself from a murder charge and his obligation toward the church as an ordained priest.

Highway 301 (1950)

2009-02-27T14:40:00.030-05:00

Written by Steve-O

Warner Bros. was considered the gangster studio par excellence. By the 1940s a new type of crime film evolved thanks in great part to The Maltese Falcon. Film noir - the darker and cynical son of crime films of the 1930s - replaced the gangster film in popularity. However, noir did take many of the elements of Warner's gangster films when the film style evolved during its peak of popularity.

Warner's incredibly successful 30s gangster films were considered morality tales. Big time gangsters started small but rose fast in the underworld's ranks. In WB thrillers, immoral and streetwise hoods would always succeed in organized crime but in the end they'd usually be shot down - literally - at the height of their mob careers. Although sold to the public as morality tales ("crime does not pay!") the truth was the high-living gangsters lives looked pretty nice. The women, cars, piles of cash and swanky apartments enjoyed by charismatic gangsters played by Cagney or Edward G. Robinson seemed much more desirable than the bland flat-footed cops' hum-drum lives. It was only at the end of the films when Robinson would be gasping his last breath after a hail storm of bullets riddled his chest did it seem like a life of crime would actually be a bad thing. Film noir was different. Regular guys committed crimes out of desperation or lust. Haunted by their decisions - and bad decisions - they would be punished by their own conscience as much as by the police or fate that would eventually catch up with them.

Warner Bros. forgotten 1950 film Highway 301 is a bit of a hybrid of old WB gangster and film noir - which was then at its peak. Star Steve Cochran - who naturally looked like a former thug from the streets - plays George Legenza the leader of a gang of not-too-bright bank robbers blandly dubbed The Tri-State Gang.

Cochran was a talented actor who alternated between playing the lead and supporting roles in dozens of films and TV shows including the unforgettable Twilight Zone episode "What You Need." Highway 301 is just one of Cochran's excellent film noir/gangster films. Check out the outstanding The Chase, White Heat, the Ronald-Reagan-KKK movie Storm Warning, Tomorrow is Another Day, Private Hell 36, and the bizarre beatnik/abortion tale The Beat Generation. The actor was a natural to play a slightly dim but deadly gang leader in Highway 301.

Highway 301's beginning and end features some hack attempts at the "crime does not pay" message Warner Bros. was known for almost 20 years before. The movie begins with not one but three governors introducing the film and touting how their states have crime under control and this story - based on actual events - as told in Highway 301 could actually stop someone from beginning a life of crime. The seemingly endless opening is followed by a semi-documentary-like voice over introducing each member of the Tri-State Gang as they enter a bank they're about to rob. The voiceover, like the introduction by stuffy politicians, is totally unnecessary. Former musical and light comedy director Andrew L. Stone starts his first gritty crime film perfectly - without the need for the obviously studio-imposed tacked-on open. You could turn down the volume and still know that steel-eyed Steve Cochran is the leader and the other men are his followers just by their performances alone. It's obvious and totally unnecessary to announce that these men are career criminals that should probably still be in jail. Instead the unwelcome voiceover (by Edmon Ryan who also plays Detective Sgt. Truscott) barks out what is already obvious on the screen and then is mercifully silent until near the end of the picture.

The film begins with a bank robbery that even in 1950 must have had viewers scratching their heads wondering how they could have gotten away with their crimes. The gang enters a bank, holds it up, and then all of them hop in a black sedan and speed off. Later, after nearly running a local off the road, they ditch the black sedan for a nearly identical dark blue sedan. Again, they speed off past the man they nearly ran down earlier who gets a partial license plate number. Richard Stark's Parker would have never worked with these guys. The cops don't link the crime with a series of other bank robberies at first. This is probably because they have been going over state lines to hold up banks.

After the robbery, the gang members head out to a nightclub with their women. Apparently, the gang has no plan but to keep doing these snatch and run crimes and party on the road until they're finally caught. The girlfriends know about their men's criminal activities and turn a blind eye because of the high life they're leading. All except for the girlfriend of Phillips (Phillips is played by Robert Webber who would later become a familiar face in films playing dozens of gray-haired corrupt politicians and shady business men. To me he'll always be the guy who shockingly elbows a Mexican hooker in the face in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia). Phillips' new French Canadian girlfriend has know idea that the gang robs banks. When Cochran's squeeze drops hints about their crimes there is hell to pay. The scene featuring Cochran silencing his girlfriend is one of three outstandingly suspenseful scenes that take place in the strangely dark and empty city streets.

The crime spree continues but now the police are slowly closing in. The next robbery of an armored car is better planned but things turn deadly pretty fast when a man is shot during the holdup. The gang members themselves don't seem to have a problem with the crime and violence that goes along with their careers. It's Phillips' girl Lee (Gaby André) that becomes racked with guilt that she's involved with violent criminals. That element gives Highway 301 a "noirish" feel that would normally be absent from a typical crime-gangster movie.

Around the 3/4 mark the cops are finally shown in a more positive light when the police cleverly monitor and guard a potential witness to the bank robberies at a busy hospital. Stone handles the complicated hospital scenes very well. I can't help but be reminded of The Godfather when the gangsters go to the hospital to kill someone while the cops guard the patient. It's hard to believe Stone never directed a crime film before Highway 301. Clearly, he was very good at it. Later Stone would helm other on-location semi-documentary thrillers including the outstanding Cry Terror! and The Steel Trap.

Critic Roger Ebert wrote that a great film is a film that has three great scenes and no bad ones. If you follow that guideline then Highway 301 isn't a great film. However, a few well-handled suspense scenes and some fine performances by Cochran, Webber, Richard Egan, Wally Cassell, and especially the actresses Virginia Grey and Gaby André make Highway 301 a crime thriller worth seeking out.

This Gun for Hire (1942)

2009-02-20T21:31:00.016-05:00

Editor's note: Alexander writes a movie blog that's quickly becoming very popular. Coleman's Corner in Cinema is constantly updated and always entertaining.

Written by Alexander Coleman

Frank Tuttle's early film noir, This Gun for Hire, made Alan Ladd a star in the role of Philip Raven, a mentally unhinged, and psychologically disturbed contract killer. As Raven, Ladd would employ the particular assets that he would continue to bring to his best roles: a laconic mysteriousness and nuanced, cerebral lethality of presence that distinguished him as a rara avis among the quotidian ordinary. Having sojourned for a decade in colorlessly inconsequential parts in approximately forty films, Ladd was finally given an opportunity to demonstrate his captivating talent. Ladd's commanding ubiety in This Gun for Hire is established by Tuttle in the star's first scene, which likewise begins to etch the dour artistry of lighting Tuttle and cinematographer John Seitz. In a scene to be mimicked by Jean-Pierre Melville for his Le Samouraï (1967), the insularly framed lone gunman stays in a slightly unsettlingly empty room. In This Gun For Hire, Ladd's Raven is loving toward only one kind of creature: cats, and when Tuttle's camera captures him smiling, in two of the three cases the predominantly uncharacteristic grin is aroused by the sight of a feline. In Le Samouraï, Delon's killer showed love for a pet canary. (Delon would later love cats playing a ruthless spy in the Michael Winner thriller Scorpio.) Le Samouraï starred Alain Delon in the role from which Ladd's Raven serves as a template, whose similar first name draws an unintended comparison as well.

Tuttle's mise-en-scene is often rather precise, and is repeatedly marked by dazzlingly expressionist chiaroscuro lighting. As Raven holds his tool of the trade, his handgun, the low-angle camera angle accentuates the man's isolation and power all at once. The shadowy lines that span the wall behind him, and framing square and triangular shapes in the wall and ceiling, connote a subtle gradation of entrapment and doom. As piano playing gently seeps into the room, the killer behaves like a man apart, and when a pushy maid attempts to shoo the kitten away from the room's windowsill, he snaps, spinning the woman around and slapping her. As the film continues, Raven's affinity for cats juxtaposed with his moderately bemused, glassy-eyed distrust of and dislike for people will serve as an important implement of narrative and character indicia. In this instance the episode serves to highlight the character's respectful admiration for the feline as solitary animal fighting for its own survival. Later, as he strokes a cat, he will remark that a cat brings luck—which is one of the only universal things he believes in as a force of aid.

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When asked by the effeminate and rotund man who has last hired him to eliminate a chemist how he feels when working, he callously replies, “I feel fine.” Ladd's delivery is flawlessly deadpan, portraying Raven's coldblooded demeanor as a sort of deeply ingrained psychical state rather than mere remoteness of attitude and feeling. Ladd's physical conciseness and verbal succinctness endows the character's most consistent attributes with a naturalness that seamlessly matches the vision of screenwriters Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett in their fascinating adaptation of Graham Greene's novel, "A Gun for Sale."Greene's novel was set in Great Britain, but while the Los Angeles setting significantly changes some of the atmospheric qualities of the film from Greene's book, Tuttle conjures a similar percolating quality to the narrative developments. Tuttle does this by utilizing the visual language of cinema that helped to signify the oncoming flurry of aesthetically attractive and visually communicative 1940s Hollywood film noirs.

That man with whom Raven converses after rubbing out the chemist is Willard Gates, played with an effective amalgamation of smarmy unctuousness and bubbly jocoseness by Laird Cregar. Gates is a manager at the Nitro Chemical Corps. who moonlights as manager of the Neptune nightclub, where he finds himself enchanted by an auditioning gorgeous blonde magician Ellen Graham, sensuously brought to life by Veronica Lake. Graham is clandestinely working for United States Senator Burnett (Roger Imhof), who believes the Nitro Chemical Corps. is guilty of selling secrets to America's wartime enemies. Aboard a train from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Raven and Graham find themselves linked to one another when they sit next to one another. The noirish emphasis on luckless circumstance and seemingly random misfortune is palpably rendered. When, at the twenty-nine minute mark, Graham attempts to make contact with Raven, he fittingly asks her the future question of Travis Bickle's from Taxi Driver: “You talkin' to me?”

Tuttle's mise-en-scene is especially sharp in the early and late stretches of the film. A midway excursion into an estate with a thunder-and-lightning storm appears like a horror film. When Raven and Graham are on the run together, Tuttle's camera examines them as an impossible pairing—he is a stoic killer for hire, she is the girlfriend of a police detective named Michael Crane (a feckless Robert Preston) trying to solve a robbery from which Gates has paid Raven with marked bills. The compilation of multiple threads tying into one knot is one of the more satisfying, but possibly distracting aspects of This Gun for Hire's narrative. As Raven and Graham are physically adjoined to one another, with Raven on the run from the police as he attempts to exact revenge for Gates' double-crossing, This Gun for Hire slows down and the screenplay endeavors to explain the chief source of Raven's psychological trauma. Visually and thematically dark, the scene is lit with expressionistic intensity. As Raven and Graham look out through the gaps between wooden planks in a filthy warehouse window, the light skips down diagonally on the two. As Raven describes a recurring dream in which a tyrannical woman continually beat him as a child.

“I dreamed about a woman. She used to beat me—to get the bad blood out of me, she said. My old man was hanged. My mother died right after that and I went to live with that woman. My aunt. She beat me from the time I was three to when I was fourteen. One day she caught me reaching for a piece of chocolate... she was saving it for a cake... a crummy piece of chocolate. She hit me—with a red-hot flat-iron! Smashed my wrist with it. I grabbed a knife—I let her have it! In the throat! They stuck a label on me: killer. Shoved me into a reform school and they beat me there, too. But I'm glad I killed her. What's the use? [There is] nothing I can do.”

This legitimate effort to create melodrama out of the hitman's origins of spiritual, mental and physical (the permanent scarring on his left wrist is used by the police to identify him) disrepair and wounds is successful in creating an empathetic attachment to the character when he continues to run away from the police. As the police struggle to locate the elusive Raven, the film takes a pessimistic but almost lightheartedly comic shot at the cops as bungling and ineffective. Raven rather easily escapes the clutches of the cops who know he is aboard when he exits the train. Over the course of the film, policemen make tragicomic mistakes when attempting to capture Raven. In one such especially personal confrontation, a lone policeman tries to handcuff Raven late in the film, only to fatally underestimate the killer, who shoots him to death for his trouble. Quite late in the film, as Raven tries to satisfy his blood lust, he finds himself looking directly at Detective Crane, who he could have effortlessly eliminated—but he knows he is Graham's man (“You're a copper's girl,” he once dismissively sneers)—and consequently spares him. Graham's gentleness and kindness toward Raven endears her to him and when a villain suggests she ought to be killed, Raven furiously comments that she has been “nice to me,” a most sparse—and perhaps, the film seems to subtly suggest, nonexistent—way in which someone has ever treated him. With a plot that veers perilously close to making This Gun for Hire another propaganda picture—in which even the stone-hearted assassin is finally moved to defend his country from despicable traitors—the screenplay and Tuttle's interpretation of it keep the dilemmas and choices personal and almost disconnected from politics. As with other Greene novels, it is the personal that informs the politics of the story, and This Gun for Hire is finally, gratifyingly, no different.

This Gun for Hire's climax would also be borrowed by Jean-Pierre Melville for his Le Samouraï as the hunted killer is chased on an ominous rail bridge. As Ladd's Raven once again outmaneuvers the police, Tuttle captures the entire chase sequence in a bravura depiction of action. The memorable long shot of Raven jumping off the rail bridge onto a moving train is exciting, and the interest and care the audience has for Raven makes it genuinely meaningful. This Gun for Hire is an early film noir and its limitations and imperfections—some of the supporting players give uninspired performances and Tuttle's direction is somewhat lax in the film's midsection, as is the screenplay—while not to be overlooked, should be considered with fairness when assessing it. As such, this is a most thoughtful, interesting and important film.

Trapped (1949)

2009-02-14T22:24:00.020-05:00

Juggernaut Institutions
written by Guy Savage

"You don’t make that kind of dough selling bibles."

Inaccurately labeled as a semi-documentary style film, Trapped from director Richard Fleischer begins with a heavy voice-over describing and lauding the efficiency of various government agencies: the Treasury Department and its Secret Service agents, the Coast Guard and the Customs Department. According to the film’s preamble these departments work synergistically to not only do their jobs, but also to stop anyone from interfering with the smooth operation of the U.S. money supply. While listening to this monologue, you get the distinct feeling that you’re watching some sort of recruiting film, written by--and a homage to--the government--and its myriad institutions that collectively form a faceless monolithic beast...

Trapped’s stiff and laudatory introduction underscores the film’s central theme--that crooks are trapped in a web of efficient crime detection orchestrated by the Secret Service Treasury Agents--T-Men. And the more criminals struggle to get out of this web, the more they become entangled in the intricate pathways created by the various government departments. In fact, the way Trapped lays out the story of the futile struggles of career criminal Tris Stewart (Lloyd Bridges), crooks are so out maneuvered, they might as well give up before they even try savoring a life of crime.

When the film begins, a hardworking restaurant owner stands in line at the bank to deposit her measly earnings, but one of her twenties turns out to be a clever forgery. While the poor woman tearfully asks if she can get a replacement--a real $20--the bank clerk snottily and self-righteously scoffs at the notion, and in an offended tone tells the woman that it’s the responsibility of everyone who handles money to learn to distinguish the real thing from the fake.

The bank clerk’s moral high ground is all part of Trapped’s depiction of the crushing Righteousness of Institutions--from the police department, the prison system, the FBI, and the Treasury Department. But this scene establishes that a bank clerk--as part of the banking industry (albeit a small part) still has the ‘moral right’ to lecture a hard-working stiff who’s been fooled by a slick counterfeit.

This particular banknote comes to the attention of the Secret Service who recognize its similarity to counterfeit notes made by criminal Tris Stewart years ago. While the counterfeit plates have never been recovered, Stewart is rotting away in an Atlanta prison, so the conclusion is that Stewart’s ex-partner must be back in business churning out fake notes. Agents visit Stewart in prison and make him an offer: he can become a stool pigeon and tell them where his ex-partner is and then, in exchange, he can go free. Stewart refuses. But then the next scene shows Stewart on a bus being transferred to a Kansas City prison. Sitting in the window seat, Stewart is focused on the traffic--while his lackadaisical guard is snoozing on the job. Stewart grabs his guard’s gun and makes a daring escape from the bus to a waiting car.

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This entire escape is fabricated to hide Stewart’s cooperation with the Secret Service, and Stewart’s so called ‘desperate escape’ is orchestrated by Secret Service agents with Agent Foreman (Robert Karnes) driving the getaway car. Holed up in a hotel room with Foreman, Stewart discusses his girlfriend Meg Dixon (played by the luscious Barbara Payton) before suddenly cold-cocking agent Foreman and dashing out the door.

Meanwhile switch to Meg Dixon who is working in a Los Angeles nightclub under an assumed name, Laurie Fredericks. While she dresses scantily and sells cigarettes to customers, Meg--now Laurie--makes it clear that that’s ALL she’s selling to customer Johnny Hackett (John Hoyt). He’s loaded and as a would-be Romeo, he sniffs around Laurie, hinting that he’s ready to show her a good time, but Laurie isn’t interested and brushes off this potential sugar daddy. This is just as well as Stewart, now apparently free from the long arm of the law, makes Meg (aka Laurie) his first stop before getting back the plates.

At this point in the film, Stewart has made a faux escape and a very real escape from U.S. Treasury agents. He plans to grab his girl, grab the plates and hightail it to Mexico, but since agents are already bugging Meg’s apartment, Stewart’s every move is known the minute he voices his plans. When Stewart’s alcoholic ex-partner confesses that he sold the plates, Stewart finds himself doing business with shady real-estate developer Jack Sylvester (James Todd) in a desperate attempt to fund his dream life in Mexico. Before we can say ‘entrapment’ Stewart is unwittingly being funded by the Secret Service in a sting operation that is guaranteed to throw him back in the slammer.

Lloyd Bridges is terrific as explosive, gum-chewing hood Tris Stewart. I’ve never been a huge fan of Bridges mainly because the dominant image I have of this actor is in various cheesy television programmes. I’ll admit that Trapped made me revise my opinion of Bridges. As the desperate Tris Stewart, he’s violent and unpredictable. And if you sniff real-life chemistry between Bridges and Payton, you may be right. According to Payton’s biographer, John O’Dowd in his book, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, The Barbara Payton Story,there are rumors that the two had a passionate affair, and while Payton didn’t name names, she hinted at a liaison with her costar in her autobiography, I Am Not Ashamed.O'Dowd notes that director Fleischer freely admitted selecting Payton thanks to the fact she was “visually stunning,” and that she fit his search image of Stewart’s faithful lover. But Fleischer was also impressed with Payton’s audition, so the 22-year-old blonde bombshell, who was working freelance after her contract with Universal was cancelled, got the part. Trapped is one of Payton’s few starring roles, and in this film she is at the height of her beauty. The camera seems to caress that marvelous bone structure, using lighting to accentuate Payton’s cheekbones and perfectly symmetrical features. Payton exudes health; it’s difficult and immensely sad to grasp this star’s subsequent self-destructive plummet. While Payton sank into oblivion within a few years, Lloyd Bridges went on to enjoy a long, successful career.

Trapped, and what an appropriate title that is, was filmed in approximately 35 days. Labeled a B noir, it’s a perfectly executed tale that never deviates from its theme. The film has the designation of ‘semi-documentary’ but since the heavy voice over occurs only in the film’s introduction and is noticeably absent from the film’s main narrative, the term seems somewhat inaccurate--especially when authoritative voice over could have been added to the film seamlessly. The absence of voice over infused into the plot argues against the term semi-documentary style film, but also very subtly renders the intricate web created by the Secret Service almost invisible, so that there are moments we imagine that Stewart has a fighting chance. The film’s structure toys with viewers’ perceptions--allowing us briefly to think that Stewart has eluded the Secret Service agents. But these moments are swept away by the film’s unrestricted narrative. Viewers know more than the film’s main characters--Stewart and his moll, Meg. As a doomed man, Stewart only thinks he’s free, but he’s caught in a maze--allowed to escape from one environment into another carefully controlled situation simply to encourage him to let his guard down and lead the Treasury agents to those highly-prized plates. Escape is a paramount goal for both Stewart and Meg, yet escape becomes the motivation that spurs this doomed couple back into a world fabricated and controlled by the Secret Service. In one scene escape beckons when Meg sits in an airport with a plane on the runway in the background. But she doesn’t take the flight, and once more she’s lured back into the trap from which there is no escape.

Stewart’s life will be spent in a cage--whether that’s an obvious cage: the prison, or a much more subtle cage--a cage without bars and chains, carefully constructed by the Secret Service. He escapes his first cage only to enter an entirely fabricated environment as fake as Disneyland, and in Stewart’s world, delivery men, grocery stockers, bar patrons, maintenance workers, and car mechanics are all gung-ho members of the Secret Service working undercover and waiting to pounce. With Stewart’s every move anticipated, apartments bugged, streets and nightclubs stuffed with undercover agents, the Secret Service constructs a nightmarish scripted reality for Stewart, and the more he struggles against his fate, the more entwined he becomes in the Secret Service’s intricate network.

The film’s cinematography underscores this theme of closed-in environments, traps and claustrophobic spaces. In the amazing closing sequence, agents chase Stewart’s slimy partner Sylvester in an underground trolley car barn. Shots of Sylvester crouching and running from the T-men accentuate the overhead structures, emphasizing the idea that he’s caught in a giant cage from which there is no escape. Similarly when Agent Downey mounts the stairs with Sylvester to his underground lair the camera catches the claustrophobic setting of hallways and stairs lit only by hanging bulbs.

Director Fleischer has a number of noir credits to his name, including Follow Me Quietly and The Narrow Margin (one of my all-time favorites). Fleischer had a long, productive film career and several decades later he notched up Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Red Sonja (1985). Trapped certainly pales next to The Narrow Margin, and it may be labeled a B noir, but in my book it’s an A presentation for its strong themes, fast-paced plot and perfect delivery.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

2009-02-08T22:33:00.009-05:00

Editor's note: Despite being firmly rooted in the fantastic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers - like Cat People last week - has an overwhelming feeling of paranoia, dread and fear. With those familiar traits - including it's shadowy visual style- an argument could be made that it's also a film noir. Regardless how you classify it, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a great film.

Written by HJ

The 1950s were a great time to grow up for (at the time) a kid like me, and one of the best parts was the sci-fi Movie! I loved the B.E.M.'s (Bug-Eyed Monsters) just like every other kid, but occasionally a really different movie would come along.

Back then, I had no idea that the term film noir even existed, much less having any idea of the definition of the term, but a particularly creepy movie dealing with persons losing their individuality impressed the heck out of me. It was Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

It starts with a seemingly demented man trying to obtain a ride on a crowded highway, with cars braking and honking their horns to avoid him. He is apparently picked up by police and taken to a hospital where his seeming psychosis can be observed by a pair of doctors. And so begins the story, in a voice-over fashion...

The little 1950s town of Santa Mira, CA has a handsome young doctor by the name of Miles Bennell, who has just returned from a convention. While Doc has been away, very strange things have begun happening in his little town. Seems that the townspeople have begun to become strangers even among their own families. The "new" family members are technically correct in appearance, and even in knowing all sorts of "secrets" and happenings from years in the past, but there's a hollowness and lack of passion and affection in them.

Thank goodness there's still spontaneous passion and affection between childhood sweethearts Dr. Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) and his old girlfriend Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), both recently divorced.

Now all of a sudden large pods containing sort of "generic people" have begun appearing in town, and these pods are sort of unfinished copies of actual people living in Santa Mira. Doc and Becky observe several of these "people-in-development" and become very alarmed.

Dr. Bennell attempts to communicate his suspicions with various law enforcement organizations including the Los Angeles office of the FBI, but his calls seem not to be going through.

Doc gradually comes to understand that these pod-bodies complete their "detailing" and take over the personalities of those whom they resemble when the person to be replicated sleeps. So constant wakefulness becomes the first order of survival.

Fortunately Doc knows what "bennies" are and has a good supply of them. He and Becky become aware that almost the entire town has been "replaced" in the last few days, and that they will not be allowed to escape to another town.

I should mention here that Kevin McCarthy does a very convincing expression of disbelief mixed with horror when he sees these developing "pod people." Also a generous dash of voice-over is provided by McCarthy, giving this sci-fi flick a bit of noir legitimacy.

Perhaps one of the most alarming scenes is the (shall we say) "farmer's market" scene in the town square where exportation of undeveloped pods is in progress to other California cities near Santa Mira.

There's a desperation and paranoia which grows throughout the movie that moves it into the noir canon. Loss of individuality and becoming conformists were the hobgoblins of the 1950s, and this movie plays into that fear in a big way.

I've already told too much of this, but will withhold some of the details so any "first-timers" (if there are any out there!) can still enjoy the movie.

Although he looks kind of thirtyish in this movie, Kevin McCarthy was actually 42 when it was filmed, and still very much the leading man type. Dana Wynter, who plays Becky Driscoll, was a very lovely 25-year-old actress when this movie was filmed. Virginia Christine (Mrs. Olson in the Folgers Coffee commercials) is in this one, as is Carolyn Jones, who would become Morticia Addams in the mid-1960s. Whit Bissell and Richard Deacon appear at the beginning and at the end of the movie as medical personnel who meet up with the "crazed" Doc Bennell at the end of the story. The final scene is a superb little coda to the story, in my opinion.

Carmen Dragon provided an excellent musical score for this movie, with Daniel Mainwaring doing the screenplay based on Jack Finney's Collier's Magazine serial.

There have been several other versions of this movie, with the 1978 version being probably the best-known. (Somehow the visual of Donald Sutherland opening his mouth to emit strange sounds strikes me as rather repulsive!) In my opinion, none of them have anywhere near the impact and tight, compact editing of this original. And you can enjoy the mid-1950s flavor and scenery of this movie. Doc Bennell's 1955 Ford Fairlane sedan would look just fine in my driveway.

This movie has been reissued on DVD and can be had at a very reasonable price, so give it a try!