Film Noir of the Week

Without Warning (1951)

2009-11-22T10:37:00.012-05:00

“In the annals of crime of any great city, there is always one case that for sheer savagery will never be forgotten. No professional criminal could ever match its fury, for it is the record of murder without reason, of fear and of terror of a killer who strikes without warning.”

So begins the story of the garden shear wielding love-killer, at large in 1951 Los Angeles, who has a murderous penchant for blondes.

Originally released through United Artists, on DVD by Dark Sky Filmsas part of their “lost noir” series, directed by Arnold Laven, this is a little-known gem that I find unique for many reasons, which I will be discussing below.

Opening outside a motel with blaring jazz music, the police are investigating the murder of a lovely blonde who was killed by a large pair of gardening shears. It is determined that the woman was in her twenties and married, although her husband is clearly not in the picture. As the cops probe the scene, our love-killer, boyish gardener Carl Martin (Adam Williams, North By Northwest), collapses into bed, awakening the next day to head to a local gardening supply store, where he spots the owner’s comely daughter Jane (Meg Randall) who is helping out her dad while her husband is overseas. (And let me just add, there is a little girl, Carmencita, who has the tendency to show up in some of the most inopportune moments for Carl). The police, meanwhile, think that the latest murder is linked to one a month earlier – the similarities are striking. While the authorities do everything and anything they can to stop and identify the murderer (including having pretty blonde decoys accompanied by plainclothed cops in an attempt to lure the psycho into a trap, studying torn fabric from the suit he was wearing at the time of the motel killing), Martin is still able to claim two more victims, but not before the police psychiatrist makes his diagnosis. The love-killer is a less than confidant guy who fell head over heels in love with, and married a woman (you guessed it, a blonde) who left him high and dry for another man. So the women he chooses as victims are prototypes of his ex-wife. Blonde, attractive, married but estranged from their husbands for whatever reason. He was unable to punish his wife so instead he punishes other women. Although Martin does pick up one of the decoys, while driving to an out of the way place, he notices that they're being followed and promptly drops her off - alive - but not before delivering a quick little speech regarding morals. It seems that he may be cunning enough at times to stay one step ahead of the law, but he's bound to be found out or exposed - it's just a question of when and how. By the time the detectives discover Martin’s identity and that he is a gardener by profession, it may be too late for Jane, who finds herself alone with Carl as his murderous rage is about to explode – again.

Adam Williams spent most of his career in television, and I can’t help but think that had he had more film roles, if his portrayal here is any indication, he may have become a star in the Richard Widmark mold. His smile could go from sweet to chilling within seconds, his demeanor and facial expression drastically change just by spotting a gal with blonde tresses or noticing any trace that could lead to his capture. When Carl searches for prey in shady nightclubs, or when he stalks Jane, you can feel his eyes on his targets. When he finally tells Jane that she reminds him of his wife, she (and the viewers) know that it's not a term of endearment. You don't know what will set him off, and that makes for on-the-edge-of-your-seat suspense.

Without Warning is also a very interesting viewing experience because it introduces some investigative techniques that have become much more prevalent and advanced in recent years – analyzing crime scenes, fabric fibers, cigarette butts, soil and criminal profiling. While not exactly what you’d see on CSI today, the determining of the type of suit the perpetrator was wearing and what motivates him to commit his crimes makes this early 50s noir a cut above the rest that I’ve seen. Also, Martin seems to get a perverse kick out of reading about his savage mayhem in the papers, and along with his clean-cut, seemingly “normal” exterior his inner rage simmers, his murderous intent could explode suddenly or could have him meticulously planning his next move. I couldn’t help but think of Ted Bundy in that respect – Martin, like Bundy, seems on the surface to be last person you’d suspect to be capable of such savage killings.

Of course, I can’t review this film without addressing what critics and fans of the genre have debated – whether Without Warning should be considered film noir or not. And I’m going to answer that as honestly as I can – yes and no. At times, it seems that the movie can’t decide what it wants to be – a noir, a detective story, or a documentary-style thriller. It has very strong elements of all three, but I do think that it does earn the title of noir, even if it is missing some of the better known ingredients (femme fatales, hard-boiled detectives), and only a handful of scenes take place at night – which is usually considered a noir staple. The rest of the action (including a dramatic chase as Martin evades police after claiming his third victim, and the climax) takes place in broad daylight. The police detectives, while dedicated to their jobs, seem to be rather average Joes apart from it and there is no insight into their personal lives. Even Martin’s primary target, Jane, is a regular gal who just wants to help out her father and innocently bide her time until her husband returns. However I suppose it doesn’t matter that Jane is not a two-timing dame, because all attractive blondes of that age are the same in Carl Martin’s eyes. The narration is on hand pretty much throughout, giving the story an air of realism.

The DVD transfer looks very good, crisp and clear for the most part, although one of the night time sequences shows some specks in the top corners. English subtitles are provided on the disc menu along with a photo gallery of lobby cards. The cover art (taken from one of the original posters) and the synopsis on the reverse side of the case made me think of the detective magazines of the era (which I was lucky enough to find in flea markets and/or second-hand stores).

In conclusion, Dark Sky films did an excellent job in restoring and making this “lost noir” available. Check it out if you can.

Written by NoirDame

Riffraff (1947)

2009-11-15T16:35:00.012-05:00

There's an intimidating number of books written about classic film noir. One of the most underrated is Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir. Arthur Lyons lists only B-movies – skipping over major-studio classics like Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon and others. He concentrates on mostly forgotten, low-budget films. Over the past few years I have managed to dig up copies of most of the movies written about in the book. Many of these cheapies are probably best forgotten by all but the most serious noir completest. Others are absolute gems. One of Lyon's picks in the book stood out. Riffraff.

"… This all-around entertaining film has … exceptional cinematography. In the first five minutes of the movie, one of filmdom's absolute classic beginnings, not a word of dialogue is spoken!"

After reading about it I impatiently tracked down a copy of the movie. (it's been released on Laser Disc and VHS in the past) I was blown away by the intense opening dialogue-free 6-and-a-half minutes. Riffraff starts during a middle-of-the-night rainstorm at a small airport. The storm makes Slattery's Hurricane look like a summer day. As the rain drowns out all other sounds, men wait in quiet anticipation for the second of two passengers to arrive. He finally does – clutching a briefcase he's clearly protecting. The drenched pilots board, start the engines, and muscle the prop plane – carrying supplies including live chickens as well as the two men – through thundering clouds heading toward Panama. A man is killed in the most dramatic way possible on a plane slicing through a 3am rain storm. Eddie Muller calls the open “as good as any in noir” and I agree.

After the rainy night opening, director Ted Tetzlaff down-shifts gears. The movie becomes a very familiar detective story. Every 40s-private-detective cliché is used in a story involving a missing map showing the locations of rich oil deposits in South America. A rogues gallery of familiar RKO faces are after the map that was taken off the plane the night of the storm. Private detective Dan Hammer (Pat O'Brien) – donned in a wrinkled white suit, fuzzy panama hat and matching white shoes- is hired by Charles Hasso (Marc Krah) as a body guard. Hammer doesn't know anything about the valuable map and certainly doesn't know Hasso killed a man to steal the document. When Hasso first met Hammer he hides the map in plain sight in Hammer's unlocked dump of an office when Hammer isn't looking. (Lyons' book points out that this is “the old Purloined Letter gag”) Hammer drops Hasso at a local hotel. Only hours later the detective is hired by a second man -shady oil businessman Gredson (Jerome Cowan)- to find Hasso and the map. Before the thrifty Hammer – now playing both sides for the biggest pay out- can return and cash in on his client, Hasso is tracked down by hired killer Eric Molinar (played with spice by Walter Slezak). Hasso is killed and his corpse is found by Hammer in the hotel bath tub. Gredson – not trusting Hammer with the priceless map -- orders his girlfriend Maxine Manning (Anne Jeffreys) to get close to Hammer. The nightclub singer gets too close and the two start up a romance. Molinar- who turns out to be also hired by Gredson who was clearly covering all his bases -sees the value of the map ends up killing his employer and beating Hammer to a pulp. Eventually Hammer comes out on top thanks to the fact that everyone in Panama City knows him and owes the detective favors.

Hammer is helped along the way by his scruffy dog and a loyal taxi driver Pop (Percy Kilbride). These characters and several other light touches makes Riffraff a breezy film noir. One running gag about private dicks wearing ties has a satisfying payoff too. The snappy dialogue – especially when delivered by O'Brien - and some amazing visuals makes Riffraff one fun film.

Pat O'Brien made a name for himself in the 1930s when Warner Bros. were churning out fantastic gangster films. O'Brien was usually second banana to guys like Bogart and John Garfield – and most often and successfully with James Cagney. O'Brien and Cagney appeared in many films together including Angels With Dirty Faces and Cagney's swan song Ragtime in 1981. In the 30s O'Brien was usually seen in movies playing cops, priests, newspaper editors and wardens. O'Brien brought a strong sense of morality and strength to his characters. In the hands of lesser actors his WB characters would probably come across as horribly pious. O'Brien could always be relied on to deliver when playing beneficent men. In 1947 O'Brien was past his prime and certainly an unlikely leading man. O'Brien – balding a looking much older and heavier than Bogart who was born the same year – is charming in Riffraff. He delivers his lines with just a hint of the Irish brogue – which is no doubt part of his charm. It's also surprising to see O'Brien play a bit of a con man so convincingly.

His chemistry with co-star (and almost 25 years his junior) Anne Jeffreys is fun to watch. Alan Rode recently talked to Jeffreys about her role in Riffraff:

“The climatic fight in Pat O'Brien's office took three days to film. Anne Jeffreys told me that she had fun jumping on top of Walter Slezak although that bookcase falling down almost got both of them. She also recalled a wrap party at O'Brien's house where he jumped into the swimming pool and capsized everyone who was riding on a pool raft. She enjoyed making the film and it shows.”

Jeffreys was the long-time wife of veteran actor Robert Sterling. They were probably best know together playing a pair of debonair ghosts in the 1950s sitcom Topper.

Riffraff was Ted Tetzlaff's second picture as director. His first feature -a comedy filmed before WWII - was apparently a stinker. Just a year before making Riffraff Tetzlaff was cameraman for Alfred Hitchcock's classic Notorious. Clearly some of Hitch's style rubbed off on Tetzlaff. Going into Riffraff Tetzlaff had a reputation as a good technician but it was not known if he could make the transition to being a creative and competent movie director. Riffraff proved that he was a capable film helmsman. His background as an exceptional cameraman is apparent too. There are some beautiful black-and-white visual images including some playful shots of Venetian blinds transitioning from one location to another. The drip of bath water leaking from a floor above onto a dead man's signature on an open hotel registry is also clever. The first image in the film is of a brave Texas horny toad perched on a rock just outside a rainy airstrip. Some credit for the unique visuals should probably also go to veteran lensman George E. Diskant who was no stranger to shadowy film noir (Port of New York, Desperate, They Live by Night, The Narrow Margin and so on).

Tetzlaff's best film as director (and best noir) is The Window -filmed the same year as Riffraff's release but held for release for two years by RKO chief Howard Hughes. Tetzlaff gets a decent performance out of wide-eyed child star Bobby Driscoll. However besting all is Tetzlaff's use of Paul Stewart as the creepy villain. The Window– about a boy with an overactive imagination who witnesses a murder but no one believes him – is a wholly original film. Not long after its release Hitchcock made Rear Window similar in plot to The Window. Both films were based on stories by Cornell Woolrich. Was Hitchcock inspired by his former cameraman's film?

Riffraff is a good candidate for the Warner Bros DVD archive. It's a great film noir but it doesn't have any major stars or known talent behind the cameras making it a nearly forgotten film. If you see Riffraff playing at a film festival or on late night TV do yourself a favor and catch it.

Note: Noir fans probably wonder if Dan Hammer has any connection to the eerily similar Mickey Spillane detective Mike Hammer. Riffraff was released in the summer of '47, the same year the first Mike Hammer book I, The Jury was published.

Also, the movie posters for the film calls the movie Riff-Raff... but it's one word in the movie's opening credits.

Written by Steve-O

Romeo Is Bleeding (1993)

2009-11-08T09:38:00.013-05:00

Hell is the Choices We Make

“You ever wonder what hell is like?
Maybe it ain’t the place you think.
Fire and brimstone?
Devils with horns poking you in the butt with a pitchfork?
What’s hell?
The time you should’ve walked…but you didn’t.
That’s hell.
You’re looking at it.”

How right Al Capone was when he said, “Once corrupted always controlled,” and this maxim comes into play in the marvelous 1993 neo-noir film, Romeo Is Bleeding. The film is from director Peter Medak who created the phenomenal film The Krays (1990), the true story of the infamous Kray twins, who ruled London’s East End crime world until things spiraled out of control. Medak also directed Let Him Have It (1991), the back drop story of Derek Bentley who was executed in 1953. Both The Krays and Let Him Have It are examinations of British crime viewed through a working-class point-of-view. While at first glance, Romeo Is Bleeding may seem quite different from The Krays and Let Him Have It, it’s a portrait of a working-class egoist who becomes trapped in a web of corruption and sex through his lust for wealth.

Romeo Is Bleeding is a frame story, and the film opens with a character named Jim Dougherty (Gary Oldman). It’s May 1st and Jim sits alone in the Holiday Diner, a café stuck out in the middle of the Arizona desert, and he reminisces through a photo album about “a guy” named Jack Grimaldi. The film then flashes back to the past and the life of its New York protagonist, a cocky, corrupt police sergeant named Jack (Gary Oldman):

“Jack was a romantic guy. Big dreams. Problem was there was always a little daylight between his dreams and his wallet. He was a working stiff. 56 Grand a year and never made it past sergeant.”

Using a strong narrative voice-over, the script written by Hilary Henkin, shows that Jack’s problems stem from exposure to the lavish sex-soaked world of gangsters. These are men with expensive tastes who wear designer suits, live in palm-tree lined estates, and sport with beautiful women. Jack envies these men and the lives they lead, and as he watches the orgies between middle-aged, grey-haired gangsters and gorgeous, scantily clad women, Jack thinks he deserves that kind of life too. After all, he reasons, what do these men have “that old Jack ain’t got?” The voice-over makes the point that while most men would stop at envy, Jack goes beyond that: “Inside he wasn’t like anybody. He was doing something about those big dreams.” And when the film begins, Jack isn’t on the slippery moral slope-- he’s thoroughly corrupted.

A sense of admiration radiates towards Jack from his fellow cops, and they’ve nicknamed him Romeo. He regales them with tales of his latest conquests with a deadpan, self-assured manner that generates more than a little envy. One of the cops asks: “How come nobody loves me like that?” and Jack’s sarcastic reply underscores his notions of superiority. But Jack’s private life is overly complicated, and it’s about to become impossible. Not only is he terminally unfaithful to his sexy, beautiful wife, Natalie (Annabella Sciorra), but his simple-minded, pathetically eager-to-please mistress, waitress Sheri (Juliette Lewis) is trying to pressure Jack for more than a quick grope. Sheri is in love with Jack, but she’s wasting her time. Someone should have told her that Jack’s biggest love affair is with himself. Jack thinks he’s really something--from his back street affairs, his joking with the boys, to the way he’s on the payroll of local heavy, Sal (Michael Wincott), trusted henchman of mobster, Don Falcone (Roy Scheider).

Jack’s problems begin when he informs Sal of the whereabouts of Nick Gazzara (Dennis Farina). Nick, safely stashed and busy stuffing his face at the Monte Carlo Hotel, is about to sing for the feds about Don Falcone in exchange for immunity and a new identity in the witness protection program. Jack’s job is simple; he tells Sal where Nick is and is then amply compensated for his trouble: “a quarter goes into a phone booth and 65 grand comes out.” To Jack, it’s all about “feeding the hole” in the back garden where he keeps his payola from the mob. But this time the hit against Gazzara is carried out by “that Russian bitch” Mona Demarkov (the gorgeous, gravel-voiced Lena Olin), a woman who “don’t give a fuck about nothing.” According to Sal, Demarkov is “very modern” and “she wants it all. You know the kind.” Demarkov is now in custody for the hit on Gazzara, and that makes her a liability. Sal offers Jack his usual 65 G to inform on Demarkov’s location…

The film establishes that Jack has two vulnerabilities--women and money--although just which vice is number one to Jack can be argued. But while he has a healthy respect for money and the things it can buy, Jack sees women as brainless playthings to be toyed with and then discarded. Some women go along with that attitude, and some women don’t. Sheri for example, works hard at brainstorming sex fantasies for Jack’s self-centered needs--dancing, stripping, a little B&D--all interspersed with plaintive, disappointed, and tired questions, such as “is it hard yet, baby?” The plot cleverly juxtaposes the lavish sex fantasies of the rich with Jack’s working class version--an overworked waitress pretending to be a lusty Budweiser girl during her coffee break.

Jack accepts all of Sheri’s efforts with an air of boredom and entitlement, and while he’s moderately nicer to his wife, Natalie, there are dangerous undercurrents in their trivial conversations. In one scene, Jack arrives home (late as usual), to dinner and a bottle of wine sitting on the table. He bitches about the meal mumbling that he wishes she’d stop reading those cooking magazines and ending with, “whatever happened to meat and potatoes?” And this is, of course, a dangerous leading question that Natalie zones in on as she edgily replies: “I don’t know Jack, you tell me?”

Jack’s love affair with himself allows him to operate in the grime and the double cross with the idea that he’ll come out ahead because he’s surrounded by idiots. While this may be true in the case of Sheri, it isn’t true about the other women in his life, and when he becomes involved with Mona Demarkov, “he wondered how smart she was.” He should have stuck with that thought, because against Demarkov, Jack is wildly outclassed. Not only is Mona Demarkov extremely intelligent, she’s a lethal, irresistible combination of Jack’s two vices: money and sex. When the amazingly sexy Demarkov makes her moves on Jack, it’s impossible to say whether he’s ultimately seduced by a case full of money or her garter belt. Since Demarkov drapes herself half-dressed over the money, she knows quite well that Jack cannot resist the double lure--and predictably Jack is mesmerized by the sight of the greenbacks and her black lace stockings.

Since Jack lacks a moral core, he isn’t capable of making a decision based on morality, and as an egoist, Jack is only concerned with his own self-interest. Falcone, like Demarkov, understands Jack and makes the point: “You know right from wrong. You just don’t care.” And Falcone’s assessment of Jack is dead right. Jack makes his decisions based on what he thinks is best for Jack, and unfortunately, he interprets that to feeding his self-interest with women and money. Of course with that operating principle it’s just a matter of time before Jack lands so deep in the muck, he can’t climb back out. As the story continues and Jack switches employers, he fails to see the warning signs, underestimates his enemies, and fails to ask himself the appropriate questions.

Jack gradually slips from his power spot as corrupt cop, unfaithful husband, and much-envied Romeo. His physical deterioration parallels his loss of power and control. Whereas in the beginning of the film the males appear to hold the power roles (Sal, Jack and Falcone), with the females trapped in the roles assigned to them, the appearance of Demarkov subverts male dominance. The script hints that Falcone and Demarkov were once romantically involved, and of course, it’s impossible to imagine Demarkov in any sort of relationship--let alone one with a male as the power broker. Once Demarkov is unleashed, and Jack begins to lose control, all the other female roles shift in an unspoken revolt of sorts. Sheri takes a stand (or tries to), and Natalie, the long–suffering wife has some surprises of her own.

In classic noir, women are usually seen as trapped in the roles assigned to them by the males in their lives, and of course then bored and sexually frustrated, women turn to seduction and enroll men as muscle in the plan for murder (Too Late for Tears, Double Indemnity). Sheri and Natalie accept the roles assigned to them by Jack--not that they are happy about it, but they continue to function in relationships in which they exist solely to keep Jack fed, pleasured and in clean laundry. Sheri, in spite of being cast as the floozy girlfriend, isn’t the femme fatale. Instead she’s just seen as another one of Jack’s sad little victims, shoved into an unsatisfying role. Romeo Is Bleeding offers an updated femme fatale in Dermarkov--an intelligent psychopath, a lone she-wolf, who prefers to do her own killing. Jack’s wife, Natalie is also intelligent--far more intelligent than Jack realizes. Jack’s pathetic double-life as a Lothario was never as secret as he imagined, but he was too busy admiring himself to stop and wonder what went on in her head. While Natalie is supportive, faithful and fairly docile up to a point, her subsequent actions counterbalance Demarkov’s extraordinary violence and explosive power-grab.

Romeo Is Bleeding is non-stop neo-noir action complete with flash-forwards and a nightmare sequence. It’s a morality tale of sorts--a man who had everything--except it wasn’t enough, ends up with exactly what he deserves. By the end of the film, in a conclusion that echoes shades of Sartre’s No Exit, Jack is left to rot in a living hell full of memories. Stuck at the Holiday Diner--the planned destination for Nick Gazzara, he’s “better off dead.” The voice-over, sometimes a belated conscience and sometimes a vehicle of regret, makes the point that “A man don’t always do what’s best for him.” And in Romeo Is Bleeding’s character-is-fate scenario could Jack have done anything differently?

by Guy Savage

Fallen Angel (1945)

2009-10-31T14:33:00.015-05:00

Alice Faye Noir and Brooding Darnell as Femme Fatale

The 1945 film noir drama Fallen Angel was seen by Twentieth-Century Fox’s boss Darryl F. Zanuck as an opportunity to show a new Alice Faye as a transformation to dramatic star from her hugely successful previous career as the studio’s premiere leading lady of musicals.

Alice Faye’s meteoric rise to stardom beginning as a Great Depression is the stuff of which inspiration is generated. Young Alice Leppert, daughter of a New York City policeman, used her smooth, mellow voice to become a network singing sensation before Twentieth Century-Fox came calling and cinema stardom along with it.

A big assist for Faye becoming a great international superstar goes to the first American crooner, Rudy Vallee, for giving the blonde actress her major show business break. Author and former actor Robert Kendall, a friend of Faye’s for years, described the important Vallee link and what it meant to her.

“Alice’s career began as a chorus girl in the Broadway production of ‘George White’s Scandals,’” Kendall explained. “At a cast party when the show closed Alice chanced to make a recording of the song ’Mimi’ just for fun. Rudy Vallee heard her sing that number.”

Vallee was slated for an engagement at a Cleveland Hotel. He invited her to accompany him. Vallee wanted to see how she would be received by a nightclub audience.

“When Alice sang the audience responded with thunderous applause,” Kendall related. “It was then that Vallee knew that Alice Faye was star material.”

Vallee was then star of The Fleischmann Hour, a popular network radio show. It was his practice to introduce talent discoveries. One was Kate Smith. Another, ironically enough, was the man who would eventually become Alice Faye’s husband, Phil Harris. He introduced Alice with huge audience reaction the result.

When Vallee was called by Fox to come to Hollywood to film George White’s Scandals (1934) as Faye starred alongside the crooner and comedian Jimmy Durante. She became a rarity in two respects, starring in her first film effort and doing it while still in her teens.

The thirties and forties achieved major results for Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox with Alice Faye becoming the number one female star on the lot. Musicals were her forte as she appeared alongside Tyrone Power, Don Ameche, and John Payne in such major hits as In Old Chicago (1937), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), Rose of Washington Square (1939), Tin Pan Alley (1940), That Night in Rio (1941), Week-end in Havana (1941), and Hello Frisco, Hello (1943).

With Faye films raking in solid profits Zanuck pushed his star full throttle into a whirlwind pace. When asked about the surge of activity Faye delivered her friendly laugh and exclaimed, “They didn’t call it Twentieth Penitentiary Fox for nothing.”

Conversion to Drama and Film Noir

At the age of 29, at a time when Faye had introduced more hit songs into films than anyone before or after her, Zanuck decided to move her into a more concentrated dramatic role. She diligently rehearsed one song, which was to be her lone musical contribution to the film, and therein a controversy surfaced that has not diminished speculation better than six decades later.

Arthur Nicholson, who until his recent death was president of the British based Alice Faye Appreciation Society, revealed that she was supposed to sing the hit tune “Slowly” in a beach scene with leading man Dana Andrews.

“The idea was to have Alice sing the song with Andrews and for the popular male vocalist of the forties Dick Haymes to be heard singing it from a jukebox,” Nicholson explained. “The reason is that the film’s other female star, Linda Darnell, wanted to listen to ’Slowly’ on the jukebox and it was her favorite song. This furnished a contrast since Linda and Alice were the two women in Dana Andrews’ life.”

After Faye had worked diligently on the song it was decided by Zanuck and director Otto Preminger to eliminate her rendering of “Slowly.” The reason generally given for the decision was that, given Faye’s full-fledged introduction into straight drama, it would be better not to remind audiences of her musical star status. The decision upset Faye to the point that it is given as at least part of the reason why she retired from films after Fallen Angel and did not return until almost two decades later when she starred with Tom Ewell, Pat Boone, and Pamela Tiffin in the 1962 Fox release State Fair.

Strong Supporting Woman, Femme Fatale of Sorts

Dana Andrews begins Fallen Angel as a drifting con man seeking to chisel a dollar whenever and wherever he can. The first scene finds him being caught by a bus driver pretending to be asleep so he can ride beyond the price of his ticket to San Francisco.

In the novel by Marty Holland the character Andrew plays, Eric Stanton, is forcibly evicted by the driver. In the film the driver gives him a gesture reminiscent of an umpire tossing an arguing manager from a game, and so fate connects fast buck artist Stanton with the small town of Walton, located a hundred miles south of San Francisco.

Andrews’ Eric Stanton needs fast money. His agile brain connects him to fellow con artist John Carradine, who is a circuit traveler claiming to connect love ones to the dead. Andrews performs with such public relations gusto that, after he fills the local auditorium for Carradine, he is offered a regular job traveling the circuit with him.

Under other circumstances Andrews might have accepted as Carradine clearly admires his talents and the prospect of some impressive money looms in the future, but by then he has set his sights on a local woman with a contingent of local admirers. The object of Andrews’ fascination is dark-haired, voluptuous, and tough as nails Linda Darnell.

Darnell works as a waitress at the local restaurant run by Pop, played by Percy Kilbride, who would in the fifties click big opposite Marjorie Main in the successful Ma and Pa Kettle series from Universal. Pop has a crush on the younger woman as does another regular patron, a former New York City police detective played by Charles Bickford, who has come to California allegedly to improve his health. Meanwhile Darnell is also seen dating traveling salesman Bruce Cabot.

Andrews experiences Darnell’s toughness in his first visit to Pop’s restaurant. The gentle and accommodating Kilbride tells new man in town that he does not have to pay for his coffee. Darnell tartly demurs, telling her boss that he had provided a coffee for the town’s new visitor and that he should have to pay for it.

Far from being repulsed by Darnell’s toughness, Andrews is instead instantly smitten. He feels a camaraderie. She is, like him, someone from the wrong side of the tracks and he can relate to her, which means that Darnell has picked up one more male admirer in Walton, and this one is determined to proceed to great length to win her over.

Alice Faye emerges as a designated financial pigeon for Andrews. Her deceased father has left his two daughters financially secure, Alice and older sister Anne Revere. A far more skeptical Revere is dubious about Andrews’ motivation when he begins dating her sister.

The wily Revere has every reason to be skeptical. Tough girl Darnell, after telling Andrews about her impoverished youth in San Diego, delivers an ultimatum. She wants marriage to a man of means, not a drifter who will move her from town to town. Andrews will either obtain sufficient funds to keep her in style or she will have nothing to do with him. She had earlier coldly abandoned Bruce Cabot for not measuring up to her expectations.

A dramatic contrast is established between two women, a gentle trusting soul in Alice Faye not about to give her heart without purposeful sincerity and a tough opportunist in Linda Darnell. When Faye begins seeing a good side in Andrews that he at one point tells her does not exist, she assumes the role of the strong supporting woman, determined to convince him to see a side of him that she knows ultimately exists.

Faye’s character is reminiscent of Jane Wyman in another 1945 release, The Lost Weekend. Wyman is certain that a man of purpose and meaning exists beyond the alcoholic fate into which Ray Milland has fallen. Faye sees similar good in the drifting con artist, look after oneself Andrews. They both see different men beyond those that people of lesser vision and patience observe, including, ironically enough, the men themselves.

Faye fits into the classic definition of the strong supporting woman of film noir, but what about Darnell? Can she be classified as a femme fatale? She is definitely tough, uncompromising, and selfish. Darnell feels no compassion for Faye after learning that Andrews’ game plan revolves around a brief sham marriage to grab her money.

If Darnell is a femme fatale then it is one without the noticeable deadly sociopath’s demeanor of classic noir leading ladies Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Jane Greer in Out of the Past. Murder is an intrinsic part of doing business to Stanwyck and Greer. Tough Darnell could therefore be called a femme fatale with qualification. She is a femme fatale of sorts.

Darnell Killed, Andrews a Prime Suspect

Andrews was seen and heard arguing with Darnell the very night that she was killed. He is fingered as a murder suspect by former New York City detective Charles Bickford, who was called upon by local Walton police authorities to take charge of the investigation.

While in San Francisco with Faye, Andrews is convinced that he needs to continue his traveling ways, telling his wife about his long pattern of scruples deficiency.

At that point Faye’s inner strength and persuasiveness rises to the fore as she convinces Andrews that just because he has experienced tough times in the past is no reason that he cannot improve his character. She convinces him that continuing to run will only bury him in a deeper mire, asserting that he needs to go back to Walton and clear himself.

Andrews is very shrewd. It is just that previously his intelligence had been put to negative rather than positive results.

When he begins his own investigation he discovers that Bickford is anything but the former upstanding police officer he represented himself to be. He ties Bickford’s past record to his permanent fixture status at Pop’s Restaurant and his shared zeal with Stella to play her favorite song “Slowly” on the jukebox.

Fallen Angel is a noir gem with characters sharply delineated by Marty Holland in the novel and Harry Kleiner with his screen adaptation. As was the case in her famous musical roles opposite Tyrone Power, Don Ameche, and John Payne, her quiet strength propels Dana Andrews in the right direction.

Written by Bill Hare

Editor's note: Bill has a new book about Film Noir coming out very soon!

Suspense (1946)

2009-10-25T19:22:00.018-05:00

1946 was a big year for film noir. Two years earlier Double Indemnity was a smash. The-yet-to-be named film-noir style was the rage in Hollywood. All American movie studios scrambled to put out the next big Cain-like crime thriller. After the '46 release of the classic noirs The Postman Always Rings Twice and Gilda came Monogram's biggest budgeted film, Suspense.

Suspense – with a storyline that's almost exactly like Gilda released a month before – was put together by the King Brothers after their huge success Dillinger with Laurence Tierney a year before. Monogram was one of the Poverty Row movie companies. Monogram films always looked cheap. Even good films like Decoy and The Guilty are a challenge to appreciate when many of the actors are unprofessional and the sets appear to be ready to fall down. Only Suspense would be different. The notoriously thrifty King Bros. threw a million into the project. They hired This Gun For Hire director Frank Tuttle to helm the project. The solid and unique sets were constructed - instead of reusing old ones. The legendary Karl Struss was brought on as the cinematographer and the writer of Dillinger – just nominated for an Oscar for the work – Philip Yordan worked on the script. Yordan (one of the great noir writers - penning many thrillers including The Harder They Fall and The Chase) was nominated again for an Oscar later in his career for the yawner Detective Story - but The Big Combo in 1955 would be his best noir work.

Barry Sullivan was hired in his first leading role and young figure skater Belita was brought in as the female lead. Did I mention Suspense is a figure-skating film-noir hybrid?

The story is pure film noir

Joe Morgan (Sullivan) – looking like a street bum- stumbles into town and cons his way into a job. After a shave he become a peanut vendor for Frank Leonard's ice skating night club. Joe moves up quickly and is soon managing the place while Frank is out of town. He also comes up with a very dangerous skating routine for Frank's much-younger wife Roberta (Belita). Joe starts making the moves on Roberta and soon they're having an affair. When Frank takes Roberta away for a romantic getaway Joe finds an excuse to drive up to the snowed-in cabin and invite himself over for the weekend – much to the annoyance of Frank. While Joe watches the beauty queen practice her routine on a frozen pond the next day, jealous Frank tries to shoot his rival with a big-game gun. Unfortunately an avalanche kills him before he can kill Joe. Or did it? With Frank gone Joe is now clear to pursue Roberta. However, complications make things tough for him. His ex-girlfriend shows up (Bonita Granville) and she's crazy-obsessed with him. Meanwhile Roberta is convinced that her husband is still alive and stalking her. The unexpected twists that follow puts Suspense firmly in the film noir category.

Not a total success

Suspense isn't a classic film noir for several reasons. Even with all the talent hired for the film Tuttle did not have a great story to work with – unlike This Gun For Hire based on the Graham Greene book. However, the dialog is snappy and the film looks great. Karl Struss isn't known as a film noir lensman (although he did do the handsome Journey Into Fear with Orson Welles) which is a shame because his work here is fantastic to look at. I would have liked to see more noir from him. His best work is one that probably influenced all noirs during the classic period – 1927's Sunrise. Struss uses shadows to great effect in Suspense.

A few of the standout moments in Suspense include a trip to the zoo that looks like it was cut straight from Cat People; Belita jumping through jagged swords; and a scene in the woods (the set designers create a cozy atmosphere in the cabin then the camera peals back to reveal a crazy ornate spiral staircase going up to the bedroom. Every set and backdrop in the film look surreal.)

The actors

Barry Sullivan is good in the lead role but he was just not a leading man. Sullivan found much more success as a second banana in films like The Bad and the Beautiful.

Sullivan is just about forgotten today. Even his later roles on TV he is unrecognizable. He never became a star he probably hoped he would after Suspense but he was a reliable film supporting actor until his retirement in the early 80s. Some of his noir roles that followed were interesting. Jeopardy with Barbara Stanwyck, No Questions Asked and Loophole are all worth watching.

Belita – who's unique bio is featured this month at the Film Noir Foundation – wasn't the greatest actress but the camera loved her and she looked like a movie star. She seemed to only show any range of emotions when she was skating.

The skating numbers are a bit of a problem as well. They look great – in a strange Salvador Dalí-like way. How many figure skating acts feature the female lead smoking? As corny as the first skating number is I found it sleazy – and somewhat entertaining. However, whenever subsequent numbers popped up in the film the story comes to a screeching halt. Belita would star again with Sullivan in The Gangster a year later – without her skates. When she died in 2005 obituaries mentioned mainly her skating career (Belita did represent England at the 1936 Olympic games at the age of 12) but mostly ignored her acting. She only made a handful of films but today – looking back- she's seen as one of the queens of noir thanks to potboilers Suspense, The Gangster, and The Hunted. I have to say she successfully mimicked an American accent perfectly in her films.

Albert Dekker plays Roberta's husband. He's most famous for playing Burt Lancaster's rival in The Killers released only a few months later in '46. Dekker is basically George Macready in Gilda. (Deckker's death in the film Suspense can't top how the actor died in real life as Bill Hare notes in his review of The Killers.) Dekker is also in the classic Mike Hammer film Kiss Me Deadly.

Bonita Granville is excellent (maybe the best performance in the film) as Joe's ex. Granville became famous for playing teenage Nancy Drew in the 1930s. As she grew up she tried to shake that good-girl routine in Monogram thrillers like Suspense and The Guilty. Later she would have her greatest success as a Television producer with her producing partner and husband.

Joe's beefy mentor Harry is played by Eugene Pallette. Pallette is familiar character – and voice- in classic films. Suspense would be Pallette's last film.

Frank Tuttle

After Suspense, film directing veteran Tuttle would continue to work regularly in and out of Hollywood – many times getting projects based on the reputation of the classic This Gun for Hire. Some of Tuttle's later films are excellent action thrillers – even if they are as rare as Suspense. A Cry in the Night, Gunman in the Streets and (re-teaming with Alan Ladd – in color!) Hell on Frisco Bay are three standout films.

Not Top Shelf but enjoyable

There's a lot to like in Suspense. In the past the film - despite being a box office success in its day - was only seen by noir collectors trading copies of the film or at film noir festivals. Now that it's available on DVD (through the Warner Bros. Archive) it will no doubt find a larger - and possibly cult- audience. Just don't expect it to be a top-shelf noir and you'll enjoy yourself. Suspense isn't suspenseful but the tale told on cold hard water is a fun watch.

Written by Steve-O

Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951)

2009-10-18T20:28:00.008-05:00

“You worked a whole day just to dance a minute at Dreamland?”

“It was worth it.”

Woody Allen’s most sentimental gesture comes at the end of The Purple Rose of Cairo, when Mia Farrow, kicked around by men and by life, finds joy in the fleeting images of Fred and Ginger dancing across the screen. In that moment, so wonderfully free of dialogue, Allen speaks directly to the audience more poignantly than in all the times he ever tossed witticisms through the fourth wall. For me Tomorrow Is Another Day, a film noir light on crime and laden with emotion, recalls that moment at the end of Allen’s film. There has been little written about this astonishing movie, and what there is criticizes the ending as too upbeat and “studio” to be taken seriously. I disagree. Like Mia’s Cecilia I find in movies entertainment and escapism; and like her I live vicariously through the characters, imagining myself in similar situations. That’s my personal attraction to film noir — watching flawed people in trouble try to get out from under, and hoping they’ll make it. There’s something so desperately American in that notion that it stands to reason the best film noirs (and Westerns) were made in that brief period after the war when America quite possibly stood its tallest. If movies can teach us about redemption there’s no better model than the morality plays of film noir.

Tomorrow Is Another Day is an intelligent, very well acted film that explores paths to redemption — whether or not change is possible, if people are damned by their pasts, if grace even exists. It’s a movie about two troubled souls who somehow save one another. The first is Bill Lewis (Steve Cochran), who at thirteen shot his father and went to prison. Bill is a unique noir hero — he shot an abusive drunk in order to protect his mother, leaving his soul free of stain but suffering from a severe case of arrested development. Cochran is a surprise — what he lacks in physical expressiveness he makes up for through a deep understanding of character. There’s a moment in the opening scene, when Bill meets with the warden prior to his release, where this comes through loud and clear. Bill is nervous, fidgety — swimming in a prison-issue suit. Though the warden is supportive, Bill’s got eighteen year’s worth of chips on his shoulder. When scolded to make good choices lest he end up back behind bars, Bill responds, “Nobody’ll ever put me in a stinkin’ cage again.” This is where Cochran shines — although trying to sound tough Bill can’t make eye contact with the older man — and pauses before summoning the guts to add the word “stinkin’.” Cochran understands that even though Bill is now a “free,” he remains a kid in a man’s body, mad at the world for punishing a guiltless crime, equally terrified of returning to prison and of being set free. Bill’s standoffishness springs from his inability to grasp that the older man, an authority / father figure, may actually care for him. Cochran nails the part — Bill reenters society with a bitter heart and hardly more maturity than when he left it.

The film convincingly depicts the first moments of freedom for such a man-child. Bill’s age is incalculably significant — in spending his formative years behind bars he missed out on the life experiences that turn boys into men, including the one in particular that defined his generation. No only has Bill not kissed a girl; he’s never even spoken to one. He missed the vital school-age interactions that we take for granted, instead spending those years with hardened criminals. He’s never driven a car, voted, or taken a drink. He has no friends, and with a prison record instead of a war record, he has little in common with men his age. We see Bill’s first walk on the streets of his hometown through the eyes of a newshound who shadows him. He’s drawn first to automobiles — he can’t help but lean into a convertible and test the buttons and knobs. Then he notices a woman and does a quick one-eighty, falling into lockstep behind her. Again Cochran’s portrayal rings true. When she pauses to meet a friend Bill thrusts into her personal space, studying her as if she were a sculpture. She nervously flees and Bill skulks into a hamburger joint, where he does what any kid would do: he orders not one, but three pieces of pie, as well as his very first beer. It’s here that the reporter introduces himself. Although he doesn’t reveal his intentions, he admits making Bill as a jailbird and draws him into conversation. The following day Bill is furious to see his mug splashed across the front page, and he departs for the anonymity of New York City.

In Manhattan we encounter the film’s other main character, peroxide blonde dime-a-dance girl Cay Higgins (Ruth Roman). Although Cay’s job as a taxi dancer at Dreamland is meant to suggest that she’s really a prostitute, I’ve long been fascinated by this precursor to the burlesque club and choose to interpret the scenario at face value. The taxi dance craze swept America between the wars and dance halls sprang up from coast to coast. Patrons bought a ticket for a dime, which entitled them to one dance with the hostess of their choice. The system was mutually beneficial: in keeping a nickel on each ticket, a girl could do well — provided she was pretty and light on her feet. For the customers the dance halls afforded the chance for social outcasts to buy time with a girl of their choice. As with all things that bring the sexes together it fell prey to vice, and by the early fifties the dance halls were fading. Nevertheless, a few remained in New York, and Tomorrow is Another Day portrays them accurately. Someone like Bill would naturally gravitate to a dance hall, which serviced his need to interact with women he wouldn’t have access to if left to his own social skills.

Cay came to New York to pursue a ballet career. “I started out on my toes and ended up on my heels” (or back, if you prefer). Now she’s a taxi dancer (pro) with a cop boyfriend (pimp) when Bill Lewis enters her world. Cay sees him as a yokel and an easy mark, though she finds herself unexpectedly charmed by his boyish naiveté. She accepts his gifts and even agrees to a sightseeing date, afterwards inviting him to her room. There they find detective George Conover, Cay’s beefy beau. In the ensuing fight Conover knocks Bill out before turning on Cay, who shoots him in self-defense. Injured, Conover shambles out in search of a clandestine physician. When Bill awakens, unaware that Conover was shot, he finds Cay leaving for her brother’s place in Jersey, where she intends to hole up. He learns of the shooting later via the evening newspaper, and heads south for a confrontation with Cay. It’s in New Jersey that the story takes a crucial turn. Bill confronts Cay with his knowledge of the shooting and asks, “How did it happen?” Cay realizes that Bill has no memory of the shooting she decides to convince him that he pulled the trigger. She also drops the bombshell that Conover has died. This is the moment in the film where Cay becomes something like a femme fatale. Her character can best be summed up as morally ambiguous. Always the schemer, she figures that an innocent like Bill will fare better with the cops than her, and that he’ll beat the rap by claiming self-defense. Bill refuses this idea and shows Cay the recent clipping from his hometown paper, finally exposing his prison record. Realizing that the cops are unlikely to believe either of them, Bill and Cay decide to run. They borrow a car (Cay driving, Bill doesn’t know how.) and head for the state line.

The turning point in the film comes at a rural motor lodge. Bill and Cay check in pretending to be married, though the jaded Cay recognizes that the proprietors couldn’t care less. This is the moment, far from Manhattan, when they have the chance to separate — yet choose not to. Bill departs for a time but returns with a cheap wedding ring. This romantic gesture causes Cay’s tough façade to crumble, and in a heartbeat their antagonistic relationship becomes tender. Bill then discovers that during his time away the blonde has become a brunette. Cay’s physical transformation is the climax of the middle of the film, and is symbolic of the deeper change in her character. The tramp from Dreamland is gone, replaced by a wholesome and demure portrait of fifties womanhood. Though this transition seems fatally abrupt on paper, Roman pulls it off — she makes us believe the old Cay was an illusion, easily discarded when Bill discovers the woman within.

Through marriage Bill experiences sex and intimacy, and he begins to open up. However Cay, fearing that she’ll lose him, remains unable to come clean about Conover’s shooting. The newlyweds’ Joad-ian odyssey ends at a California farm camp, where he finds work in the lettuce fields and she keeps house amidst a community of shanties. They ingratiate themselves with the other workers and begin to live a relatively normal life. It all comes crashing down when Bill’s mug shot and a substantial reward offer appear in a Confidential-style crime rag, and a neighbor in desperate need of cash reluctantly informs on the couple. Sensing their impending doom, Cay summons the courage to tell Bill that it was she who really shot Conover, but he doesn’t believe her. Whereas earlier Cay set Bill up as a fall guy because she thought he’d get off easy, he now thinks she’s trying to take the blame for the same reason — that her recently discovered pregnancy will rate a soft sentence. When the police come knocking Bill, remembering his vow to the warden, prepares an ambush. In one of the most ironic moments in all of film noir Cay grabs Conover’s revolver and shoots Bill with it. The symbolism here is critical — in shooting Conover Cay was selfishly trying to protect herself, but now she shoots Bill in order to save him. As the police take him away, Cay pleads, “I couldn’t let you get into more trouble on account of me.”

Tomorrow Is Another Day is a film of mirrored halves, of repeated acts imbued with new meaning — it ends as it began, with an authority figure summoning Bill to his office through the intercom. In that first scene Bill moves from one prison to another — without walls, yes, but a prison just the same. The final time, with Cay, he is truly set free. The scene is the Manhattan DA’s, with Bill and Cay clumsily trying to take the blame for each other. In attempting to sacrifice herself for the man who loves her, Cay is able to overcome the sins of her past, while Bill is able to consummate adulthood by assuming responsibility for the life of another. Here is revealed possibly the most ironic twist in the entire story, but I’ll leave it up in the air. As I wrote earlier, the film ends well. Redemption indeed.

Written by The Professor

Editor's note: The Professor's film-noir blog is a great read.

Director: Felix Feist

Cinematographer: Robert Burks

Story: Art Cohn

Screenplay: Guy Endore

Starring: Steve Cochran and Ruth Roman

Released by: Warner Bros.

Running time: 89 minutes

The Fallen Idol (1948)

2009-10-11T11:29:00.014-05:00

Secrets and Power in The Fallen Idol (1948)

“It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”

I can’t remember the exact year I saw The Fallen Idol for the first time, but I wasn’t much older than Phile (Bobby Henrey), the child star of the film. While I identified with the child’s point of view, the film had an even greater significance for me as my grandparents were life-long professional servants, and they worked, coincidentally, in a mansion complete with a marble staircase very like the staircase in The Fallen Idol. The life of a domestic servant--was, according to my grandparents, a difficult profession--one that required certain behaviour based on discretion, correct deportment and the ability to be invisible at the right moment. While servants certainly had private lives, personal problems weren’t supposed to interfere with daily life. Servants were hostage to those-crucial-to-the-profession references, and if a household servant lost his job, he lost his home too.

And that brings me to The Fallen Idol--a quiet masterpiece that delves into the strange insular world of servants, and their difficult, murky relationships with their employers.

The Fallen Idol is the first of three films from a fusion of the minds of author Graham Greene and director Carol Reed. The Third Man followed in 1949, and Our Man in Havana was released in 1959. Of the many film adaptations of Greene’s work, he was apparently most pleased with The Fallen Idol. The film is based on the short story The Basement Room, and Greene acknowledged that converting a novel into a film called for “compromise.” He surmised that perhaps The Fallen Idol was so successful an adaptation because it was based on a short story. Indeed the plot is simple and takes place over the course of a weekend.

Some interpretations of the film label it as a tale of the ‘loss of childhood innocence.’ Since the film’s focus is the relationship between the child, Phile and the butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson) the title, The Fallen Idol infers that Phile learns that his idol, Baines, has feet of clay, and while that is true, just how innocent Phile is remains debatable. Reactions to the film may depend on how viewers see Phile and childhood in general, so it’s a good idea to keep in mind that Graham Greene’s novels explore the amazingly complex grey areas of morally ambiguous territory.

The film’s setting--with the exception of a few scenes--is the embassy of an unspecified Francophone country. When the ambassador departs for the weekend, he leaves his son, Phile in the care of the faithful butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson) and his formidable wife, the housekeeper, Mrs. Baines (Sonia Dresdel). Baines has a soft spot for Phile, and in return, Phile adores Baines. The opening scene is seen from the bird’s-eye position through Phile’s eyes. Staring through the banisters of the embassy’s top floor, he sees things he’s not supposed to see, and in the film’s very first scene he witnesses a strange incident between Baines and the embassy secretary, Julie (Michèle Morgan). When the ambassador and the rest of the household servants leave, a holiday atmosphere reigns with a feeling that perhaps all the formality--along with the rules--will relax a little. The ambassador will return on Monday along with his long-absent wife. Details about her absence are vague, but there is reference to an ‘illness.’ There’s something fishy--something that indicates a problem, and it’s ugly enough to be covered up. Has the ambassador’s wife had an affair, or has she been locked up in rehab somewhere? But these questions are never answered and remain open to speculation. Nonetheless, the remoteness and distance between Phile and his father are established in this very first scene. Only Baines seems to intuit Phile’s despondency and loneliness, and it’s immediately clear that Phile’s primary relationship is with the butler.

Phile, an effete, fey child, slight and blond, who speaks English with a slight lisp, has a strange, confused position in the household. On one hand, he is just beginning to grasp the notion that he has a position of some importance, but then again he’s subject to the authority of the servants. He’s relegated to the top floor of the huge embassy and is restricted to just a few rooms in a strange, lonely exile and confinement. Embassy business is conducted on the first floor, and Mr. and Mrs. Baines, butler and housekeeper, live in the basement flat.

In the kitchen, Baines entertains the lonely, bored child with heroic tales of his days in Africa when he fought off the ‘natives’ in various uprisings. These make-believe stories keep Phile enthralled while Baines assumes the role of substitute father, deftly avoiding the complex moral questions continually lobbed at him by his small charge. Baines even keeps the existence of Phile’s pet snake, MacGregor from the neurotic Mrs. Baines. Mrs. Baines has ordered Phile to ‘dispose’ of it, but both Baines and Phile know that the snake is still alive. With a bond of solidarity in the presence of the tyrannical Mrs. Baines, the message between Phile and Baines seems to be that the less Mrs. Baines knows the better.

With Phile’s continual spying from the vantage point of the top floor, he watches Baines leave the house, and so he follows, only to discover Baines in a near-by teashop with the embassy secretary, Julie. Baines introduces Julie as his ‘niece,’ and it’s clear to the viewer that Julie and Baines are in love. During this scene, Phile’s invasion of Julie and Baines’s tryst underscores the difficult relationship between the butler and the boy. The boy has the ‘right’ to invade Baines’s private life but Baines, fearful of exposure feels compelled to lie in order to keep Mrs. Baines at bay. This scene effectively conveys the restraints endured by the adults under Phile’s fidgety presence.

Sworn to secrecy about Baines’s ‘niece,’ it doesn’t take long for Phile to spill the beans to Mrs. Baines. In order to discover the identity of the other woman, and to lure Baines into a feeling of security, Mrs. Baines pretends to leave. This unexpected reprieve grants Baines an opportunity to take Julie and Phile to the zoo. While Baines and Julie try to talk, cleverly paced scenes show Phile’s continual demands for attention, and also his disappointment that he doesn’t have Baines’s exclusive attention. Subtle clues indicate that Phile regards Julie as an intruder--someone he’d rather not have included in the outing. Repeated imagery at the zoo echoes Phile’s virtual imprisonment in the embassy where the banister rails appear to form cage bars, but here at the zoo, Phile is no longer the caged animal. He’s unleashed and his demands escalate as the day continues.

The trip to the zoo is followed with a game of hide-and-seek in the embassy rooms, and in these marvelously photographed scenes, full of Dutch angles, Phile is seen scampering through rooms and under tables. But even in this familiar innocent childhood game, the minefield of the adult world--a world of deception and adultery--intrudes and is seen through the child’s excited, terrified eyes.

During the evening, just how innocent Phile becomes a subject for some debate. As Phile, Baines and Julie return to the embassy, Phile begins to drop broad hints, and if Baines and Julie were listening, they’d have serious cause for alarm. Phile asks just how important it is to keep secrets and then rather pointedly asks: “Even Mrs. Baines’s secrets?” Phile desperately wants attention, and while Baines and Julie ignore the child as much as they can, Phile continually tries to reassert himself into their lives with his hints and questions. The three adults--Baines, Mrs. Baines and Julie--have empowered him by sharing their secrets, and they’ve also taught him that the keeping and giving of secrets makes him the center of attention, so whenever Phile feels neglected, he fires up those comments.

Later that evening, Mrs. Baines ends up dead, and Phile, whose imagination works overtime, wanders the streets of London in his pajamas. In the film’s most amusing scene, a terrified and silent Phile is handed over by the police to prostitute, Rose (the great British comedienne Dora Bryan) on the assumption that a woman will reassure the boy. While Rose is limited to her usual pick-up lines, Phile responds to her femininity, and this scene accentuates Phile’s basic innocence. He hasn’t a clue that he’s in the arms of a prostitute, but of course, it’s quite obvious to the viewer. This scene of innocence acts as a bridge between Phile’s demanding behaviour at the zoo and the behaviour he’s about to show at home to the police.

Back at the embassy, Phile’s behaviour becomes even more erratic. While up to this point, Phile has been sidelined by the adults in his life, suddenly he becomes the centre of attention, and when that focus moves away, he continually attempts to get back in the limelight. It’s much too simplistic to ascribe Phile’s behaviour as an attempt to save Baines because Phile continues to pester the police, becomingly increasingly desperate to get their attention even when Baines is off the hook. By the film’s conclusion, the police, who at first couldn’t pry enough out of Phile, just want him to shut up, and when one of the police detectives declares: “Somebody take this child away,” we’re ready to see him shipped off to boarding school.

Phile has learned the hard way that Baines is no brave, romantic hero, but a shriveled, pathetic, henpecked husband, but then on the other hand, Phile is no innocent little boy. Phile’s desperate need for attention is heightened by a degree of transference he feels for Baines, and when Phile defies Mrs. Baines and tells her that he hates her, Phile is acting as a proxy for Baines. Similarly the idea that Baines wants his “freedom” haunts Phile, as Phile too wants his freedom. He’d like to be a normal little boy who plays with friends and who goes for walks in the park, but instead he’s also a captive--an idea that’s underscored by the trip to the zoo and also the game of hide-and-seek with the table and chairs forming a cage-of-sorts.

The Fallen Idol is a deceptively simple story, fleshed out by excellent cinematography, and reinforced with Greene’s superb screenplay. The film captures its audience by its heightened attention to the universal features of childhood and by its intense use of suspense. In the final scenes, the camera keeps the clue--a large tilting window--in the centre of the screen, and rarely moves from it. The Fallen Idol is a small masterpiece sadly overshadowed by the release of The Third Man in the following year and it’s often delegated to the late-night viewing slot for insomniacs. Criterion produced a gorgeous editionof The Fallen Idol in 2006, and it’s an edition that this film so greatly deserves.

Written by Guy Savage

Note: IMDB states that the child's name is Phillipe. The review refers to the boy as Phile. This is the way his name is spelled, by Baines, in the film.

Storm Warning (1951)

2009-10-03T08:43:00.016-05:00

[Editor's note: This article by the "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller originally appeared in April 2009 as the first “Noir … or Not?” feature in the Film Noir Foundation’s bimonthly periodical, the Noir City Sentinel.]

When Jerry Wald began production at Warner Bros. on Storm Warning in 1950, his intention was to serve up a message picture disguised as a crime thriller, something along the lines of RKO’s 1947 sleeper hit Crossfire, which used an all-night murder-manhunt to sell its underlying attack on anti-Semitism. Wald even hired Richard Brooks, author of the novel upon which Crossfire was based (The Brick Foxhole), to cowrite Storm Warning with the always-reliable Daniel Fuchs, who’d penned its original story.

Somewhere during preproduction the top dogs at Warner Bros. lost their nerve, and Storm Warning’s script was declawed and defanged. Even its bark is oddly meek. The studio congratulated itself in its advertising for making a film “as startling as the screen has dared to be,” but for a purported exposé of the Ku Klux Klan the film is as hard-hitting as 40 lashes with a wet noodle. To “take on” the Klan and then omit any mention of its racism or religious bigotry—presenting instead cracker Fascists as garden-variety goons keeping their town clean of “Northern” influence—smacks of cowardice. Especially compared to another film made across town at virtually the same time, Fox’s No Way Out (1950), an unflinching take on racism that reaches far beyond the Mason-Dixon Line.

Not to suggest that Storm Warning is bad. The script may be spineless, but overall it is brilliantly made and utterly engrossing; it may be Stuart Heisler’s best work as a director. He and director of photography Carl Guthrie transform a rural Southern town (actually Corona, California) into a pestilent noir nightscape. Think Road House, only peopled with ignorant, armed peckerwoods. The visual punch is so strong that over the years Storm Warning has nudged its way onto numerous lists of vintage film noir.

But is it noir?

It certainly feels like Noirville, right from the jump. In an opening that plays like a distaff version of Fallen Angel (1945), dress model Marsha Mitchell (Ginger Rogers) steps off a bus in Rock Point to pay a visit to her newlywed sister. Depot and diner patrons give the brush-off to this out-of-town dish, instantly arousing audience suspicion. Clicking her big-city heels through gorgeously chiaroscuro’d streets, Marsha walks smack into a murder scene. Hooded Klansmen shoot and kill a trussed-up man, and from the shadows our hidden heroine catches an eyeful of the ringleaders, who have conveniently doffed their dunce hoods to pose for close-ups. After reuniting with sister Lucy (Doris Day), Marsha is stunned to discover that her new brother-in-law, Hank Rice (Steve Cochran), is one of the hooded killers.

So far, so noir: stranger in town, murder cover-up, familial conflict, guilty consciences, evil lurking beneath the town’s placid surface. But right at the tipping point, when the story could become either a full-blown descent into darkness or a conventionally “well-balanced” story of right versus wrong, the script introduces laconic county prosecutor Burt Rainey (Ronald Reagan), an Upright Joe determined to rid Rock Point of its “hoodlum” element. He’s a Southern cousin of Crossfire’s Detective Finlay (Robert Young), a man who has never in his life suffered a twinge of moral or ethical doubt.

Two things quickly cause Storm Warning to lose credibility as hard noir. Reagan gets so much screen time (to his credit, he gives an easygoing performance that, if anything, is a shade too amiable) that Marsha’s predicament—will she inform against the man her sister loves?—loses its urgency. From a storytelling standpoint, the distinguishing characteristic of a hard noir is that the tale almost always hews—subjectively, empathetically—to its central character. As a protagonist, however, Marsha has too little at stake. She testifies or she doesn’t . . . either way she’s on a bus and back into an orderly life at the end of the day. It’s her sister who is the trapped character, living the noir life. If the film had instead focused on her (as in the similarly plotted, if ultimately stupid, 1988 Joe Eszterhas-scripted Betrayed), it might have had a stronger dramatic thrust.

Secondly, the murder victim should have been black. Instead he’s a “nosy reporter” looking to expose the Klan, a “good man” who “didn’t deserve to die.” For all the film’s righteous huffing and puffing, it never works up a sweat-bead of genuine moral outrage. That’s because the victim is just one more dead white plot device in a Warner Bros. melodrama. If they’d been brave enough to show a bunch of buffoons in bedsheets graphically killing a black man—and then have the characters treat the incident as nothing more than fodder for their southern-fried sex drama—that would have been genuinely disturbing, morally outrageous . . . and more authentic. Instead, the Klan’s most vile act is to gang-whip Ginger Rogers while she writhes around in her underwear. Exposé? Or exploitation? Jack Warner probably jacked off in his private screening room.

But back to what’s right about the film. For starters, the quality of the acting. If you’ve put off watching it because the cast—save Cochran—seems resolutely lightweight, think again. As noted, Reagan’s performance is actually good; it’s just a shallowly conceived character. I have never liked Ginger Rogers. Her brassy-dame routine single-handedly prevents Tight Spot (1955) from making my list of Phil Karlson’s best films. Here, however, she’s terrific. She underplays throughout, conveying inner turmoil quietly and convincingly. There’s a wariness in her eyes and a weariness on her aging face, which Rogers rarely allowed on-screen. We are left wishing her character was more complex, since she seems up for a challenge, and inspired by Heisler’s ability to conjure tossed-off, character-building bits of business. Her first scene with Lloyd Gough (as her salesman sidekick) is a marvel of efficient character setup, perfectly executed.

Rogers and Doris Day are utterly believable as sisters, and Day delivers a great character, full of beguiling spunkiness that suddenly curdles into hurt and anger. As written, her “shocking” demise is a routine plot device. With Day in the role, the twist feels truly tragic.

The film is at its best when it sticks with its nasty Streetcar Named Desire–inspired dynamics: two wily women dominated by a lustful lout, a character Steve Cochran renders with his usual canine mix of hangdog charm and attack-dog ferocity. The Streetcar similarities veer dangerously close to plagiarism when Cochran tries to rape his sister-in-law. But the way Cochran plays Hank Rice, you won’t think of Stanley Kowalski. You might, however, mistake him for Elvis Presley, if the Big E had never gotten hooked on “race” music and found his calling.

The biggest pleasure of Storm Warning is watching Heisler at the top of his craft, directing the hell out of what he thought was sure to be a hot, controversial film. His shot selection is spot-on, the camera moves always accentuating the play without intruding on it, and the match-cutting on action (a Heisler trademark) is not just flawless, but thrilling. Heisler obviously schemed many of the cuts in advance, not too common for a studio director of that time. Watching this film is a primer on when to cut into action, and how far into or out of the action the camera can move before becoming obvious.

Heisler’s other noir hybrids—Among the Living (1941), The Glass Key (1942), Smash-Up (1947)—give little indication of a noir-infused visual sensibility—not like what you see in Welles or Mann or Siodmak, for example. Much of the film’s visual allure must be attributed to director of photography Carl Guthrie, a man who spent the bulk of his career shooting TV shows before an untimely death in 1967 at age 62. Guthrie isn’t often associated with noir, but here his work is exemplary.

His framing always maximizes the contributions of the art director and set decorator, without displaying them. And the lighting is simply spectacular: The enticing gleam of the town’s bustling bowling alley, the hot dead air of the jailhouse, the musky funk of Lucy and Hank’s clapboard love nest, and, most memorably, the nocturnal postcard shots of Rock Point’s hash houses and bus stations are, I believe, the primary reasons Storm Warning feels so much like noir. Closer analysis reveals it to be a deftly made “issue” drama, but one whose sagging spine and diluted social conscience are greatly invigorated by its deep, dark, noir patina.

Written by Eddie Muller

Chicago Deadline (1949)

2009-09-27T19:37:00.012-05:00

Chicago Deadline is one more entry into that sub-genre, the newspaper noir. You know the story; hard-boiled reporter follows a hunch and uncovers layers of corruption.

This time the story starts innocently enough with Ed Adams (Alan Ladd) chasing down a runaway girl in a cheap hotel. Just so happens while the girl agrees to return to her home and her worried mother, the girl occupying the room next door is found dead by the cleaning lady. So what would any reporter worth his salt do, of course go snooping around in the dead girls room. While foul play is nowhere to be seen, Ed lifts the girls address book from her purse just in case.

Soon the cops and coroner are on the scene and the cause death, which must be a first in noir, is given as a hemorrhage caused by TB.

With nothing to indicate anything more than death by natural causes, once back in the newsroom Ed begins the process of non-systematically calling each of the 54 names listing the girl’s book. Rather than staring at the first name, Ed asks his sidekick, Pig (the always watchable Dave Willock) to pick a name at random. This leads nowhere until a number with just the initials G.G.T. is called. Pig correctly surmises the initials stand for one G.G. Temple, V.P. of a major financial house, or as Pig tells Ed; “He’s a big shot, a four handicap man.”

Thank goodness there’s some snappy dialogue and boat load of bodies piling up along the way to hold ones interest because the stories harder to unravel than the Gordian knot. Fortunately a couple times along the way Ed explains what’s going on to whomever he happens to be with at the time. Near the end he pretty much sums up the whole plotline so the viewer can make sense of the whole mess.

Once on the trail of the dead girl with the unlikely moniker of Rosita Jean D'Ur, Ed gets to pump out more zingers like when asked why he’s so interested in Rosita he shoots off these:

“Simply routine. A kid dies alone in a cheap hotel without friends, relatives, or any one caring whether she’s buried in a cemetery or an ashcan”

“When you mention the name of Rosita D'Ur people run and hide”

“So far I’ve just been digging but I’m beginning to get a pretty dirty smell in both my nostrils.”

Somewhere around the 24 minute mark, we finally get to see the reason for the dirty smell, the mystery woman Rosita D'Ur (Donna Reed) via a snapshot shown to Ed by her brother Tommy (Arthur Kennedy). This is also when the first of several flashbacks begin, complete with the use of the wavy screen method of transporting the viewer back in time.

This one starts with Tommy meeting up with Rosita at a roller skating rink in San Francisco. So now I’m thinking, oh no not another of those noir roller rink pictures! Fortunately the film doesn’t head off in that direction but what is somewhat amusing is the large picture window in the rink with the view of the bay. It’s quite obvious the folks from OSHA hadn’t done an on site inspection of this joint. There’s really nothing that complements roller skating like a huge panel of glass!

Anyway, Rosita’s run away from the farm in Texas and met up with the man of her dreams, Paul D'Ur. He’s a budding architect and soon he and Rosita are married and off to New York. Sadly, Paul ends up the victim of an auto accident and becomes the first of many who end up biting the bullet after encountering the lovely Rosita. Fade back to present and Tommy’s telling Ed; “There always seemed to be a wrong guy around,” which seems something of a misnomer given the bodies that start stacking up it should be “the wrong gal’s around’”

Let me digress here a moment and mention the raft of colorful characters, all with major speaking parts, we encounter during the 86 minute run time; Bat, Belle, Blacky, G.G., Hotspur, Leona, Minerva, Pig and Solly, really!. The cast itself is made up of much more recognizable names, for in addition to Ladd, Reed, Kennedy and Willock we get; June Havoc, the always slimy Berry Kroeger, Tom Powers (for once not playing a cop), Roy Roberts and several other “I’ve seen that guy in something” faces.

Mean while back to the story; after Paul’s death Rosita makes her way back to Chicago where she bunks in with Leona (June Havoc) and begins dating the somewhat shady Blacky Franchot (Shepperd Strudwick). All seems fine until Rosita ends up meeting the aforementioned G.G. Temple at a party and he’s of course smitten by her and must have her as his next play thing.

To make sure Blacky’s out of the way, several charming fellows stop by and rearrange his face and convince him the climate elsewhere would suit him better than Chicago. The connection being Temple is financing the illegal actives of one Solly Wellman (Berry Kroeger) and these nice fellows are working for Solly. Once Blacky’s out of the picture, Temple begins throwing gifts and other things (while it’s not made clear it does appears he and Rosita are sharing living quarters) to entice her.

As noted, following the storyline is somewhat difficult as some key characters are never seen and only after their actions are we clued in as to what took place. For example, how Rosita breaks away from Temple and ends up as a housekeeper for the wheelchair bound uncle of one of Solly’s thugs is never shown and is only much later explained in one of Ed’s conversations.

While on conversations, let me share a few more bits of dialogue:

Ed; “Look Solly I don’t care how many are killed or who does it.”
Solly: “Naturally not, you being a reporter.”

Wonder what the censors thought of this one from Ed to Leona (who becomes his love interest)

“Don’t lie to me baby, you know I’m going to get it out of you.”

And from the prophetic police detective Anstruder to Ed;

“Somebody’s going to shot you sooner or later.”

But my favorite is from Pig to Ed when speaking of Rosita;

“You got a lot of seeing to do brother. She was as loose as ashes”

Pig’s words ring true as along the way Rosita continues getting men stuck on her like flies to flypaper. In addition to her husband, Blacky and bedding down with Temple, there’s one of Solly’s thugs, and a prize fighter by the name of Bat Bennett. At least he escapes the fate of the others but does end up getting clobbered in his fight on the way to the championship because of his remorse over hearing of her untimely demise.

As noted above by the police detective, Ed does get plugged but not before getting roughed up a couple times by Solly’s boys too. But you can’t keep the wavy hair reporter down and from his hospital bed he rises and with the faithful Pig by his side confronts Solly for the final showdown in a downtown parking garage. During this final bit of mayhem, one of Solly’s boys is plowed into by a speeding car being driven by the one armed Ed. At last, Solly himself is taken in by the old, no more bullets, when in fact there’s one left, ruse by Ed. He ends up taking a sole slug right in the gut and face plants himself in the oily mess left from a used Studebaker on the floor of the garage.

To sum it up, in the end you’ve got something less than perfect. A pretty confusing story (although I think part, if not all of it may be attributed to TV editing) to go along with some nice exteriors of Chicago. These go from the opening montage, to the elevated train platform, to the final cab chase near the end. In addition you’ve got a dandy final body count of 7 as Rosita and virtually every man she comes in contact with meets their maker. For those without a scorecard, in order they are: Rosita, Paul, Blackie (Shot dead), John Spingler (found in ditch), Temple (shot dead), Solly’s henchmen (run down by car), and lastly Solly (shot dead). All that said, one thing that is perfect is the title Chicago Deadline which doesn’t conger up the idea of making the “deadline” in connection with getting a Chicago newspaper out on time but rather the line of dead bodies left in the wake of Rosita Jean D'Ur as she made her way through Chicago.

Written by Raven.

Journey Into Fear (1943)

2009-09-20T18:13:00.016-05:00

Magician, burlesque dancer, ballistics expert and assassin: Like Norman Foster's taut thriller, Journey Into Fear, all of these professions rely on excruciatingly good timing.

"The terror of waiting for the final revelation, not the seeing of it, is the most powerful dramatic stimulus toward tension and fright." Curtis Harrington, Hollywood Quarterly 1952.

Timing is the essence of this particular journey into fear.

The year of the film's release is 1943, and presumably, that is the time period indicated in the story line.

"Nineteen forty-three was a year of intense war effort in the United States. Industrial production reached a figure it wouldn't match again until 1951. The war marked all civic activity." (A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941-1953)by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, page 39.)

Both actors and movie-goers could relate to the experience of dire "real-time" pressures and deadly consequences during the ongoing fight against the Nazi regime. Much of the world's focus was on which side would win.

Our story unfolds in Europe, as our characters arrive at the exotic locale of Istanbul.

Promptly after their arrival in Turkey, Howard Graham (Joseph Cotten) and his wife Stephanie (Ruth Warrick) are greeted by an associate, Kopeikin (Everett Sloane).

Kopeikin ends up taking Graham for a boys night out to a nightclub with burlesque and illusion performances. During a magician's disappearance act, Graham is persuaded to participate. Graham is tied to a cross and the magician nails himself into a coffin-like box. The lights go out in the nightclub. We hear a gunshot. The lights go on. The act has ended successfully, as the magician is now tied to the cross and Graham is in the box. But tragically, the magician has been shot. It is clear that the intended target was Graham.

"I knew that shot was meant for me. You know how many months I spent for the company on the Turkish navy. Well time counts in this war, and with me out of the way it'll take all that time and more with somebody else out here, before Turkey can get any more guns. That's why they're after me." (Much of the tale is revealed to us in this voice-over, Graham reading a letter he is writing to his wife.)

An imposing Colonel Haki (played by Orson Welles, notably showcasing one of the only believable foreign accents in the film), is head of Turkey's secret police, and legendary not only for being a womanizer, but also his ability to drink two buckets of whiskey without becoming intoxicated. Under the circumstances of the attempted murder, the Colonel rushes Graham to board a cargo ship transporting cattle, to ensure a safe return to the United States.

So, naval engineer Howard Graham commences a terrifying voyage across the Black Sea. The real "noir" triumph of the film at this point, is that the viewer is suspicious of EVERYONE. All of the supporting characters (with the exception of Graham and his wife) could potentially be in alignment with the Nazis seeking Graham's death.

In one scene on the ship, Graham comes face to face with Banat the hitman, sitting across from him at a meal. Shocked and scared, realizing that the cold-blooded killer is his fellow passenger, Graham tries to concentrate on his food. As Banat violently crushes crackers for his soup, Graham reaches for the salt and spills it. Here we see the mythic, superstitious quality of the noir protagonist. While keeping eye contact with said killer, a trembling Graham reaches for some of the salt and proceeds to toss some over his shoulder.

A few comic jewels relieve this kind of deadly tension throughout the plot.

There is the Turkish captain of the ship (Richard Bennett), a stereotypical salty drunken seafarer, who is thoroughly amused at Graham's paranoia that a murderer is on board. He does not speak English, but knows how to point and teasingly says "Bang, bang" every time he encounters Graham.

There are Graham's weak attempts in the voice-over/letter to wife, justifying his blossoming friendship with Josette Martel (Dolores del Río), a fellow passenger and a dancer in the nightclub where the magician was murdered. "I was lonely!!"

Then there is one of the ship's passengers, Mathews (Frank Readick), who explains to Graham that he has "tamed" his disagreeable shrew of a wife (Agnes Moorehead) by publicly making outrageous claims about his own political beliefs. The most hilarious moment occurs when the ship makes its final stop in Batum. Mathews is surreptitiously "arming" Graham with unlikely weapons, a pocket knife and an altered umbrella, then Mrs Mathews walks in. "Discreet?!" She looks on disapprovingly. "What is there to be discreet about?"

Mathews replies, without pausing, "Ahhh. You may ask! Mr Graham and I are going to blow up the bank of England, seize Parliament, shoot the gentry and set up a Communist government."

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One aspect of this film that I found to be most intriguing from a technical perspective is the rumor that Orson Welles took over the directing of Journey Into Fear, which he vehemently denied. Welles stated instead that he did not direct any part of the film and his friend (Norman Foster) was the director. I do not want to disregard the talent of Norman Foster, whose filmography also includes two other noirs, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) and Woman on the Run (1950).

However any fellow Orson Welles fans watching Journey Into Fear would agree with me, without a doubt, that significant creative input from him is evident in this film. It has all of the marks of an "Orson Welles project." The camera angles and visually detailed arrangement of the shots have Welles's distinct thumbprint. In addition, it is coincidental that the cast of characters has many of the same actors that starred in Citizen Kane (1941).

Orson Welles, like Tim Burton, apparently liked to cast the same actors over and over again. Both Citizen Kane and Journey Into Fear starred: Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotten, Ruth Warrick and Welles himself.

Orson Welles produced and designed Journey Into Fear, and co-wrote the script with Joseph Cotten. Apparently this is the only script that Cotten is credited with writing despite his long career in film. Welles's stand-out contribution was the beginning pre-credit sequence. The camera slowly glides up to his apartment room from outside, mimicking the style of crane shots in Citizen Kane. It depicts the portly assassin listening to a phonograph; the record begins to skip, as he prepares for his next murder. The sound of the skipping record is creatively and strategically used in other scenes of the movie to emphasize the murderer's proximity to Graham.

In the 1992 autobiography he wrote with Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles,Welles was documented as saying that he thought he was the first to come up with a scene before the credits but that he later learned that there were a few films that did this in the late thirties.

In any case, the godfathers of noir (Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton) profess that Journey Into Fear, "bears the signature of Norman Foster....Welles collaborated on the scenario, and the exceptional breeziness and subtlety of his style emerge in the precision of the shooting script and the plastic beauty of the photography. Basing the film on a spy case that's only a pretext and visibly turns into a hoax, Foster and Welles have rediscovered the chief laws of the noir genre: an oneiric plot; strange suspects; a silent killer in thick glasses, a genuine tub of lard buttoned up in a raincoat, who before each murder plays an old, scratched record on an antique phonograph; and the final bit of bravura, which takes place on the facade of the grand hotel of Batum." (A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941-1953), page 39.)

And the final bit of exciting "bravura", played out in a slippery downpour, made that slow journey by boat to Batum worth the wait!

Written by Phantom Lady Vintage

Her entertaining website is here

Our Man in Havana (1959)

2009-09-13T08:40:00.010-05:00

If you have ever wondered how to turn your vacuum cleaner into a satirical film noir, then this movie is for you.

British novelist and screenwriter Graham Greene and director Carol Reed, who brought you Harry Lime, The Third Man (1949), team up again for Our Man in Havana (1959). Shot on location, it’s noir in the tropics with a strong rip current of dark humor.

It’s a cross genre flick. Although my library classifies it as a comedy, the movie has elements of film noir.

Expatriates and Amateur Espionage

The story is about a British expatriate living in Havana, Cuba in the late 1950s. Set against a backdrop of political instability, James Wormold (Alec Guinness) unwittingly and gradually slides into a dangerous world. The stakes are high; it’s Cuba on the brink of revolution in the cold war.

In the first act, Greene and Reed introduce us to Wormold and his difficulty. He faces money troubles. His only teenage daughter, Milly (Jo Morrow), has expensive tastes: horses and country clubs. An ordinary expatriate, Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in Cuba, but does not produce enough money for his daughter’s expensive tastes and his ambitions for her.

As sure as the trade winds blow, opportunity blows Wormold’s way. The British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) needs a man in Havana. Spymaster for the Caribbean, Mr. Hawthorne (Noël Coward) offers Wormold a job - to spy in exchange for money. Wormold accepts the offer.

Wormold’s task is to recruit local agents to work for MI6. But without training and experience in the art of spy craft, the hapless amateur does not know what to do. So to keep the spy cash flowing, our man in Havana invents a list of phantom agents who include local country club elites and strippers.

And to add to the untruth, Wormold draws what is supposed to be a secret military installation in the mountains of Cuba, inspired by a vacuum cleaner design. The drawing gains the attention of the top clandestine directors at MI6 and the British Prime Minister. Wormold also attracts the attention of the enemy. Cold war paranoia gets everyone believing Wormold.

As we enter the third act, the story turns noir. Folly leads to dark results and transforms our man. The satire is dark, and the circumstances and choices are existential.

A prolific writer who wrote critically acclaimed and popular novels, Graham Greene served in the British Secret Service in World War II. In this satire, he delivers insight about the murky world of espionage and political paranoia. Faulty thinking and confusion run amok.

In a general way, the theme of Our Man in Havana reminds of Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There (1979) staring Peter Sellers, as Chance the gardener who gives metaphorical advice to world leaders. Our Man in Havana is about amateurs duping professionals. And, as Graham Greene illustrates, being misled by disinformation in the espionage business is dangerous and embarrassing. And, material for dark satire and film noir.

On Location Cinematography

Carol Reed guides us through the streets, clubs, and bars of 1959 Havana with excellent cinematography.

The on location shooting is a remarkable tour. We see the city as it looked just after Castro overthrew the Bautista regime - the transfer of power of one strong-arm dictator to another. We see Havana in its heyday - sleazy, corrupt, and beautiful. A hot town in a cold war.

Throughout most of the flick, Reed delivers daylight cinematography paralleling the lighthearted humor in the early part of the movie. But, as the story turns dark towards the end, he gives us night scenes, long shadows, back alley streets, seedy bars, and gunfire. It’s typical expressionist film noir. Some of the camera shots and angles are reminiscent of Vienna in The Third Man.

But Reed gives us only a few snapshots of noir Havana; he could have given us more. Only about 10 to 15% of the cinematography contains noir features: dark scenes, wet streets, long shadows, sleazy hangouts, offset camera angles, mayhem, and tough dialogue.

Greene’s book was darker than the movie. I suspect a corrupt, crumbling, and revolutionary Havana in the late 1950s was not a lighthearted place laced with British reserve, understatement, and double entendre.

Satirical Dialogue

Greene’s dialogue throughout is largely satirical. It’s not the hard-boiled dialogue of James M. Cain, Art Cohn, Cornell Woolrich, or Raymond Chandler, but Chandler would have probably appreciated the wit.

While sitting in Sloppy Joe’s bar (Ernest Hemingway’s favorite Havana bar), here is how Hawthorne lures Wormold into the spy business:

Hawthorne, “Where’s the gents?”

Wormold, “Through there.”

Hawthorne, “You go in, and I’ll follow.”

Wormold, “But I don’t want the gents.”

Hawthorne, “Don’t let me down. You’re an Englishman, aren’t you?”

Overall Convincing Acting

Alec Guinness does a notable job portraying the amateur spy…a buffoon, who gets nasty in dark alleys when he has to.

Noël Coward plays a persuasive British spymaster; his performance almost steals the show from Guinness. Hawthorne warns Wormold spying is a dangerous business, but Wormold doesn’t grasp that fact until it’s too late. Coward and Guinness interactions are some of the flick’s high points.

Burl Ives plays the rotund Dr. Hasselbacher, a German expatriate friend of Wormold, who gives Wormold the idea to invent spy stories. And, although Ives plays the character well, one wonders what the impact of Orson Welles playing the character would have had on the film. Welles’ influence on The Third Man is undeniable.

Comedian Ernie Kovacs plays a strong supporting role as the smooth Captain Segura, a corrupt sleaze-ball and double-dealing cop who wants to marry Wormold’s daughter - Milly. Kovacs has several bits of dark satirical dialogue, including a debate about torture, which he delivers in deadpan style. Captain Segura believes torture is for the lower class.

Maureen O’Hara makes an acceptable appearance as MI6’s appointed assistant to Wormold. Her character adds some mild tension to Wormold’s problems, but she under delivers in the romantic role.

Bland and blonde, Jo Morrow plays the teenage Milly. Her acting is uninspiring. The other cast members and the strength of the story carry her along. She is not a femme fatale, but rather an innocent catalyst. Wormold’s need for money to satisfy her lifestyle sets the plot in motion.

Paul Rogers plays the stuttering enemy agent, who has trouble talking to women, even in pick-up joints.

As Entertaining as Gin and Tonics in the Tropics

The movie is entertaining.

Although the flick does not have the emotional impact of The Third Man, which is one of the all-time film noir greats, Our Man in Havana is well worth the watch, just to see how Greene and Reed create. They are master artists.

For film noir addicts, sorting out the out the noir from the satire is half the fun. And for students of cinema, Reed is an expert director, stylist, and expressionist.

At the very least, Our Man in Havana has given me new respect and ideas for my vacuum cleaner.

Written by Hard-Boiled Rick

City That Never Sleeps (1953)

2009-09-06T09:56:00.016-05:00

There's a lot to like in 1953's City That Never Sleeps. Unfortunately there's plenty off unintentional laugh-out-loud scenes as well.

City That Never Sleeps is one of the last Noir documentaries – a noir film filled with newsreel-like location shooting and “voice of God” narrations – also known as semi-documentaries. The 1953 film is clearly modeled after the best noir doc The Naked City released five years earlier. Noir documentaries were popular for a short time during the classic noir period. Following World War II and the popularity of documentaries, film critics predicted that Hollywood films would become more “realistic” and “show the real truth” by shooting movies in a documentary style. The prediction came true – at least partly in 1945 with the release of The House on 92nd Street. Conservative film critic Bosley Crowther in 1949 praised the use of location shooting and naturalistic photography and wanted to see it become a lasting style in Hollywood. By that time the Noir documentary was already on it's way out. Lasting only until the early 1950s the style at the end was seen as more of a fad; and the most obvious elements were dropped from realistic films that followed. In particular the films' opening and closing “voice of God” voice overs – once done brilliantly and poetically by an obvious New Yorker Mark Hellinger in The Naked City- didn't play well in other films. Noir documentaries – unlike The Naked City with its simple murder plot – when seen today appear unbearably preachy (instead of the original intention to be “real” and “truthful”) when they focused on topics like Nazis/Communism (House on 92nd Street), problems with corruption (The Street with No Name), flaws in the legal system (Boomerang), bad cops and juvenile delinquency. Sometimes film studios had to backtrack on its supposed “truth” by tacking disclaimers onto films. One of the best examples is Richard Conte looking into the camera and praising New York's Bellevue Hospital at its doctors at the beginning of The Sleeping City after public outcry and industry reaction after seeing the film. The juvenile delinquent film City Across the River toned down the unflattering opening voice over and stripped any mention of Brooklyn in the film's advertising after citizens' groups protested the film's depiction of their neighborhood.

City That Never Sleeps is a film about a gloomy night in 1950s Chicago. After a laughable opening voice over by folksy cowboy actor Chill Willis the film kicks in. Willis – the spirit of the city who inexplicably becomes a "guardian angel" cop early in the movie that shatters any attempt at reality – introduces the viewers to a number of people in the city that are all trying to escape their own world and be something else. A cop who wants to quit and move to California; a failed actor working as a “mechanical man” in a night club that wants to run off with an uninterested burlesque dancer; a punk bell boy that wants to join the mob; a stripper who wanted to become a ballerina; a former pickpocket who once had dreams of becoming a magician; a famous lawyer who is more attracted to power and the criminal element in his city than justice; and his wife who wants his magician friend and all her husband's money – all are interconnected and play a part in the story. Come to Chicago: where your dreams are never fulfilled!

The best film noir focus on “a struggle with powerful inner forces” like the characters in Double Indemnity and Sorry, Wrong Number. Noir documentaries instead give us lots of characters and a external voice to tell us what's happening and what's wrong. The main character in City That Never Sleeps is a cop (Gig Young) that wants to quit the force and his wife. He's nagged by his wife and mother in law. Even his stripper girlfriend is pressuring him to do something. His story – the main story – isn't all that interesting when compared to others in the film. It's the use of the documentary style, however, that makes the story even less engaging. I suspect that if the story was shot as a straight noir drama it would have been more successful.

So what's to like about City That Never Sleeps? Plenty. First of all, the Czar of Noir Eddie Muller, in his list of the top 25 film noir, praises director John Auer for at least having the chutzpah to use the city as a narrator and hits the nail on the head when he says “Plus, it's got Marie Windsor and William Talman as lovers. That's noir.” Talman (the magician) and Windsor (wife to lawyer Penrod Biddel played by Edward Arnold) are absolutely great in the film. They're the only actors that show any spark in the film. Bug-eyed Talman – who got his ass handed to him by Raymond Burr every week on Perry Mason – is always good in film noir. Earlier that same year he had his best role as the unblinking killer in The Hitch-Hiker. Windsor – 5' 9” of sexy – was just too tall and intimidating to be a movie star. Instead she killed every time she played the untrustworthy and vicious black widow. Her part is too small in City That Never Sleeps but she's one of the best parts of it.

Psycho's cinematographer John L. Russell's night-for-night camerawork is amazing too. Sweaty nightclubs and back alleys never looked so nice in a noir. Gig Young chasing William Talman through the streets of Chicago is a wow too. Pickpocket Talman slipping between trains until the final confrontation on a raised rail is something every film noir fan should see.

City That Never Sleeps doesn't do for Chicago what The Naked City did for New York. The colorless leads are overshadowed by Talman and Windsor. The obvious production values that marred most Republic Pictures does the same here at times. While the cheap studio sets and some performances are stale film noir fans, however, should be able to overlook these flaws and appreciate some of the supporting cast and amazing on-location camerawork. City That Never Sleeps is worth a look.

Written by Steve-O

Private Hell 36 (1954)

2009-08-28T08:40:00.008-05:00

Editor's note: This week, hardboiled writer Megan Abbott takes on the criminally overlooked cop thriller Private Hell 36. Edgar-winning Abbott's latest page turner is Bury Me Deep

“A policeman, unlike most men, lives close to evil and violence. He can, like all men, make his own private hell. The good pass through it with minor burns. The evil stumble and fall. And die in strange places.”

Private Hell 36 is one of that special brand of B noir that just revels in the claustrophobic tawdriness of its characters. But it’s also one of those—like Crime Wave and Pushover—that is at least twice as smart and potent as its gears-turning plot first reveals. Shot through with the 50s-noir nihilism of Kiss Me Deadly, it’s also a film very much of its moment—that 50s midpoint that, arguably, summons up the world of standard love-gone-wrong big-city noir only to smash it against Eisenhower-era ideals: suburbia, security, family.

Directed with grim, artful efficiency by Don Siegel (with a young Sam Peckinpah as dialogue director), Private Hell 36 was one of the last films to come from The Filmmakers, the independent production company created by Ida Lupino and producer Collier Young, Lupino’s second husband. The couple coscripted Private Hell 36, but by 1954, the year it was released, the company was on its last legs and Lupino and Young had divorced. Completing the roundelay, the movie boasts Lupino’s new husband, Howard Duff, as one of the leads. Don Siegel reports a set suffused with alcohol and misery, which seems perfectly suited for a film drunk on its own darkness. It’s hard to watch the nightclub interview scene with Lupino, Duff and Steve Cochran talking in front of three enormous, novelty bottles of booze and beer and not wonder if Siegel is making a winking aside. (An equally great meta moment has Duff’s wife scold him for drinking too much, to which a guilt-ridden, sneering Duff replies, “It’s supposed to be a party, isn’t it?”)

Private Hell 36 is a tale of two Los Angeles cops, Farnham (Duff) and Bruner (Cochran) investigating a robbery with the reluctant help of Lilly, a nightclub singer (Lupino). Bruner falls hard for Lilly and, when the two cops uncover a portion of the stolen money, he suggests that he and Farnham split the money. Farnham reluctantly gives in and the two stash money in a trailer park, unit #36. The rest of the film witnesses the two men circling each other, Farnham tormented with self-disgust and Bruner turning more and more rancid—cop to criminal in a heartbeat.

On the surface, it’s just a nasty little movie ripe with noir pleasures, including Lupino singing “Didn’t You Know,” bare shoulders swaying, Dorothy Malone in full-on ’50s house wife mode, as Duff’s worried wife and magnificent location shooting at the famous Hollywood Park Racetrack—you half expect The Grifters’ Lilly Dillon to stroll by.

You can probably guess most of the plot turns, hear the gears clicking, but that’s part of its efficiency. It’s putting a group of characters through the noir iron-maiden. But what characters, and what a world they live in.

Among its greatest, grittiest pleasures is seeing Lupino and Cochran spark off each other. Has any actor ever so consistently made seedy cunning so seductive as Cochran, his eyes glittering with mayhem? (On a personal note, Cochran was the actor I could never stop picturing when creating my own version of the “homme fatal” in my novel Queenpin). Throughout the film, you find yourself begging for Cochran’s character to sink lower and lower just for the erotic kick he gives it. His scenes with Lupino crackle and buzz, dirty up the story. Their been-around slyness with each other—Cochran untying and tying the straps on her halter dress—and their frank shallowness feels like lost pages from a James Ellroy novel, rank with self-loathing, romantic in its view of love as shared irredeemability.

Seeing Cochran and Duff together is nearly as intriguing. The film delights in linking the two as opposites-attract lovers. “Sometimes I wonder why we go steady,” Duff jokes with Cochran early on, to which Cochran replies, “Because I’m irresistible.” (He is.) Later, when the robbery tears them apart, Lupino notes archly, “You two having a lovers’ spat?.” Another cop refers to Duff as Cochran’s boyfriend. The jokes are more than jokes. They cleverly link the pair to not just other cop partner movies but to countless noir lovers who turn against each other when money and guilt enter the picture (it’s important that, as much as Cochran desires Lupino, it never feels like she is his only, or even primary motive. The film is subtler than that. Cochran, unconsciously or otherwise, is looking for the rabbit hole from the very start. And he turns out far worse than you could guess.)

As for Duff, it’s easy to dismiss his whimper-faced, eyebrows-knitted expressions as simplistic—is this what self-loathing really looks like?—but it actually works perfectly with Cochran’s wheels-always-turning, slick-eyed cunning. “You’re sick, Cal,” Duff tells his partner, late in the film. “I should’ve known that a long time ago. You don’t care about anything or anybody. You’re sick.” It’s the kind of cop world partner dynamic Ellroy and others will both deepen and dissect in the years to follow, but that makes it no less compelling here.

As noted (see “Domesticity That Never Sleeps”), the movie offers very timely contrast between the urban noir sleaze of Lupino and Cochran’s scenes together, in nightclubs and in Lupino’s moderne L.A. apartment, and the rising suburban domesticity represented by Duff’s family, his sunny blonde wife, the care with which she keeps her home, her mother’s pride in her child. Cochran and Lupino are drawn to each other by a shared distaste for just this kind of world. “Rice is for eating, not throwing,” Lupino notes. Cochran replies, “That’s how I feel. We’re a lot alike, Lilly. We won’t settle for just anything. We want the best. And we’re going to get it.” Their dream is the big gold one—but the film asks how different that is from the one represented by Duff’s overstuffed faux-colonial home.

The two worlds are thrown together in a dinner party scene at the Duff household. Guilt-ridden Duff, who has been forced to straddle the line between the two worlds, stumbles through his own house, drunkenly knocking his own furniture around as if a stranger in his own home. When she wants to bring out her baby, Duff refuses angrily. He does not want to contaminate his child with the presence of Cochran, the grinning reminder of his own sin. Meanwhile Cochran and Lupino seem cool, relaxed—and equally out of place, Lupino kicking her shoes off and lifting her feet for Cochran to rub. It’s sexy and cheap and delicious and the movie’s all the better for having Malone not bat an eye. She doesn’t mind. And when Cochran, in a moment so slight it seems like it could have been ad-libbed, grabs Malone around the waist for a goodbye kiss, it’s jarring. He manhandles her like he does Lupino, or like he might a whore (late in the film we see him exchange silent greetings with a likely streetwalker as if he knows her quite well). But it’s a cunning move—lining up Duff and Cochran this way. Instead of hoisting Duff up as the noble do-gooder, it shows how both men are driven by the same longings. How is Cochran’s desire to live the good life with his diamond-hungry girl so different from Duff’s desire to keep his suburban family on the track to the American consumer dream?

Ultimately, Private Hell 36 is a film that refuses tidy answers. It’s comfortable in messiness, and slippery truths. The story is book ended by what first appears to be an authoritative, Dragnet or Naked City-style voiceover. But it’s Dragnet–Meets-Sartre, or Freud. While a kind of order is restored at the end, what kind of order is it? Whether in the balmy burbs or the gaudiest of nightclubs, the drive is there. The hunger. It’s inside us and it’s hoisted upon us by the Big Dream, the American one. Who are we to stop it?

Written by Megan Abbott

Night Train (1999) part 1

2009-08-23T06:50:00.009-05:00

A Journey to Hell in Night Train

“Good judgment is a hard thing to men like Joey Butcher. It doesn’t matter who they are and what they’ve done. Hard luck and bitter circumstance get in the way.”

Modern noir film has two things in its favor: improved film technique and different standards for censorship, so in theory, neo noir should look better and could potentially include more sex, more violence, blatant perversion and endings that don’t necessarily include the bad guys getting their just desserts delivered by the good guys. And Night Train from director Les Bernstien exemplifies just how far an updated noir film can go in terms of looks, presentation and plot.

First-time director Les Bernstien has an impressive back ground as a visual effects director of photography (Contact, Escape from L.A., Fight Club) and in Night Train, he appears to take everything he knows and uses it in this low-budget, low-life neo noir set in a sleazy corner of Tijuana. Mexico is a favorite setting for film noir. Classic noir icon Robert Mitchum often washed up south of the border. But in Night Train, tame Tijuana of the 40s and 50s is replaced and the film’s voice over narration explains:

“Down town Tijuana—a real nice place in its day. It catered to the best. Bullfighters, celebrities wanting a drink and a girl. Runaways wanting a new career.”

But this patina of respectable tourism has vanished and Bernstein’s Tijuana is the town where whores are cheap and people disappear in this no-holes barred playground for perversion. Bernstien doesn’t try to hide the fact that the story centres on the dregs of Tijuana society--in fact he seems to wallow in the gutter, opting to make the story as ugly as possible while simultaneously presenting that ugliness and converting it to beauty with exquisite camera shots, deep inky blacks and incredible use of light and shadow. The first shots of Tijuana include a bullfight in a packed arena and a shoeless woman stopping traffic as she humps an ambulance in meaningless, rhythmic motions. Whether a mystery key is retrieved from human excrement or a man vomits in the toilet, the camera captures it all--every horrifying shot and then delivers it with exquisite perfection.

Just as the plot embraces the tawdry and cheap side of life, the film’s presentation boldly embraces its low budget with a musical score that’s a cross between Ennio Morricone and the Ventures. In another brilliant stroke, dialogue was re-recorded against the original background noises in a process called “looping” and this replaced dialogue also serves to complement the film’s strange texture.

The plot is startling simple. Ex-con, Joey Butcher (John Voldstad) takes the night train to Tijuana to hook up with his brother Zach (also played by Voldstad). It may be “next stop, Tijuana,” but in reality it’s all aboard for a trip to hell. Joey received a telegram from Zach telling him to join him at the appropriately named Hotel Colon, “the center of the universe.” Once in Tijuana, Joey meets “resident American” the film’s narrator, Sam (Barry Cutler) a ferret-faced drifter who tells him that Zach is dead--killed as the result of a hit-and-run accident. Unable to return to America because he “did something bad,” Joey is committed to staying in Tijuana and discovering the truth about his brother’s death, and this brings him to the attention of a deviant dwarf, a homicidal stripper, and a snuff film ring.

As the days pass, Joey begins to undergo a physical transformation. Since everything from booze to women is “so damn cheap” he can lead a fairly unrestricted life. This results in constant drinking which leaves him with black ringed eyes and a stumbling gait as he careens from one trouble spot to another. Joey is on an endless roller coaster ride of alcoholic binges while women parade in and out of his room, and sweaty Joey, who packs a substantial gut, isn’t picky. Prostitutes, the vengeful stripper, Bobby (Nikoletta Skarlatos), and even Mary-Lou (Donna Pieroni), the hotel’s resident psycho all have sex with Joey and a few scenes show Joey laying in a half drunken stupor while he’s coyly teased, titillated and tweaked into performance by women grimly determined to ride him to the finish line. Forget love. Forget romance. Instead sex is an urge that’s met with a grubby encounter, a lackluster performance, and no illusions. As Bobby says, “We’re not married. I gave you a free fuck. Now go away.”

The film’s fantastic nightmarish hallucination sequences rival those of Stranger on the Third Floor, but in Night Train, the ghoulish nightmares take place in the whirl of toilet bowl water. Using bold phantasmagorical scenes reminiscent of Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Night Train is a clear illustration of film noir’s debt to German Expressionism. From the film’s opening scene of a breathtaking, spectacular shot of a bridge, this extraordinary, stunning visual adventure shows us just how magical the camera can be. The film’s incredible nightmare sequences are packed with symbolism--train tracks cross, merge and graveyards beckon. In one nightmare scene Joey crawls through a shrunken room across a mismatched geometrically patterned floor while other scenes are transposed on top for a layering effect. The film subtly foreshadows Joey’s fate by comparing Joey to the confused and weary bull trapped in the arena. Scenes of the slaughtered bull being dragged from the ring are juxtaposed with flashes of the disoriented Joey as he crawls across the floor, grunting and groaning.

As the film continues, Joey’s life becomes as bad as his nightmares. The film’s juxtaposition of nightmares and nightmarish reality and the symbolic merging and crossing of train tracks emphasize the idea that in Tijuana, Joey’s already marginal life has merged into a hellish existence. The sense that Tijuana is devoid of traditional societal boundaries transfuses into the film’s bizarre fabric and effectively reinforces Night Train’s hypnotic circulus in which repulsiveness blends into beauty, nightmares merge into reality, and evil merges into good.

Night Train won’t appeal to all viewers. It’s an ugly tale, deliberately rough in spots and as cheap as the wasted lives it portrays. Bernstien doesn’t glamorize his characters or their environment, and neither does he glamorize their actions. There are no good guys in Night Train’s morally bankrupt universe, but by the time the film concludes, the thoroughly unpleasant Joey Butcher, who viciously tortures a man in the first scene, will begin to look like a boy scout in comparison to the other freaks, lowlifes, scumbags and murderers who surround him. Joey becomes a hero of sorts in a High-Plains-Drifter fucked-up way as he begins to grasp the horrifying truth about his brother’s Tijuana business interests. There are, after all, some depths that even low-life, violent career criminals won’t stoop to, and it’s down in Tijuana that Joey discovers a boundary even he won’t cross.

Written by Guy Savage

Click for part 2: Interview with director Les Bernstien

Night Train (1999) part 2

2009-08-23T06:45:00.011-05:00

Guy Savage interview with Night Train director Les Bernstien:

GS: Please describe your background for our readers.

LB: I’ve been in the film business for over 30 years working as a Visual Effects Director of Photography and Supervisor. My background is in photography and cinematography. I began in New York, where I grew up and went to school, but moved to Los Angeles and worked on films dating back to Ghostbusters and Beetlejuice. More recently, I’ve worked on films like Apocalypto and The Unborn.

GS: What sort of budget did you have for Night Train and how did you get funding for the film?

LB: Night Train’s budget, I’ll just say, was way less than a million. It would easily be a “Poverty Row” picture if this were the ‘40’s. I think even Edgar Ulmer would be proud. Funding was by way of private investors and out-of-pocket.

GS: How long did it take you to make the film? What were the biggest hurdles?

LB: It took 5 years to make the film, the same length of time it took Lynch to make Eraserhead. Biggest hurdle was getting it finished. Always easy to start a film, near impossible to finish one on my budget.

GS: Did you use any unprofessional actors for the film and if so how did you find them?

LB: Except for the leads (the parts of Joe, Bobby, Sam and MaryLou), all the parts were locals found around Tijuana. We even hired a prostitute for one scene, who wanted to do porn. We had to tell her this was not porn. Another “actress” we saw when we were walking from one location to another – she stopped an ambulance in the middle of the road by holding onto its radiator and proceeded to pee in the middle of the street. I just had to turn on a camera and film her, it was so precious. I think she was a little drunk.

GS: Did any films act as an inspiration for Night Train?

LB: I could go on for hours citing films that inspired Night Train, beginning, of course, with the great German Expressionist films like Der Golem, Metropolis, Spione, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, all the way through the many obscure noirs that I could get my hands on, from Strangers on the Third Floor, Detour, He Walked By Night, Kiss Me Deadly, etc, etc. There are also the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Sergio Leone, Russ Meyer and Michael Powell’s great Peeping Tom (obvious influence). From the noir canon, I must say that Kiss Me Deadly in particular, is one of my favorites and became a model for our sound design. Due to the budget restrictions, the “gun and run” method of shooting with a small, guerilla crew and lack of control over production sound, George Lockwood - a frequent collaborator and the editor/optical effects man/sound designer – wanted to experiment by completely looping EVERYTHING in the film. The surrealistic quality of Kiss Me Deadly’s bizarre sound design offered up the cacophonous answer and voila! Night Train was born. The result is very much like Tijuana: an aural assault on the senses. Not for everybody, though. I’ve gotten complaints.

GS: Night Train is an incredible looking film. How did you create the German Expressionist look but updated with clear, deep inky blacks?

LB: The look of Night Train took some experimenting. I found an (what was then) East German film stock from a company called ORWO, the parent of AGFA. I found out they were using a lot more silver in their B+W stock than anyone else (since 1917!) and my tests looked like no other stock. Also, it was cheap. I ordered a shitload of the stuff and pulled the trigger on starting the film. Later, I personally timed the film at DuArt Labs in New York and got incredible results. I kept pushing the timer to “go deeper” and richer with the blacks without clipping the highlights.

GS: What special challenge does neo noir present for a director and a director of photography?

LB: If you’re going to really do “noir” (I hate the term “neo” noir), you have to shoot B+W 35mm film stock and use hard light. There is no other way to do this. It is borne of the look and soul. Also, the term “Film Noir” as invented by the French does not really classify a genre. It is a feeling, like the “Feeling” movement in music. In film this is extended into the photography. The look of the film MUST have equal footing alongside the actors and screenplay. Not one element can overshadow the other. My experiment with Night Train failed because the look overshadowed my direction of the actors and the script, but hey, that’s part of a learning curve. If I were to do it again, I would keep everything the same; just work the actors harder, much harder. At the same time, I make no apologies any more than Ulmer would for Detour or Kubrick would for Killer's Kiss (although he disowned Fear and Desire). It’s all part of a curve and there’s no sense repeating yourself.

GS: In your experience how has the use of mechanical effects in film impacted optical effects?

LB: Optical Effects no longer exist; they are now all digital (Night Train used all Optical and “in-camera” effects). Mechanical effects work on the set and digital effects go hand-in-hand with these techniques for post-production. As we say in the film business, if you can “get it real” then do it real. I think Mechanical effects will never go away, and in fact, get more sophisticated.

GS: In the hallucination scenes, sequences appear to be layered on top of each other. How is this achieved?

LB: George Lockwood did all of the post Optical composite effects. The hallucination sequences, in particular, required many long hours of shooting one layer, backwinding the film on the printer and shooting another layer on top of the previous. Some of the shots I created with glass paintings, matte paintings, swirling water effects, and what we call “elements,” which are individual pieces of an effect shot against black, then exposed later on top of a scene. I did a lot of this shooting in a rented warehouse and in my garage. George then later took these pieces and after hours of the two of us sitting around and discussing in front of the film on a flatbed editor, composited the pieces on an optical printer. A lot of work.

GS: Would you explain the role of the lyrically beautiful Torch Song sequence?

LB: In Mexican cinema (even in Hong Kong cinema), the role of a “reflective song” creates a breathing space for the pacing of the film. The Torch Song sequence allows the main character to look back on his life up to that point and reflect on how he got there. It ends with him sitting in the pile of money everyone is looking for. Also, it helps bring the length of the film up to 80 minutes.

GS: How did it feel to make a film in which you had so much project control?

LB: Because the film was so low-budget and largely self-financed, I, like Mel Gibson (the only true independent filmmaker left), had to answer to no one. It felt great and frustrating at the same time because money was such a factor (unlike, say, Mel Gibson).

GS: How do you feel about noir and German Expressionism? How much do you think these genres have added to filmmaking?

LB: German Expressionism helped fuel what became film noir. If not for the economic/ post-war trauma of the time and the European émigrés in Hollywood, noir would not have had its “bite” and would probably be just like any other stupid period in American cinema (like right now). Its influence goes all the way to guys like Martin Scorcese (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver), Francis Ford Coppola (Godfather, The Conversation), Paul Schrader, and writers like James Ellroy. Noir was the true period of originality in American cinema. Except maybe for MGM musicals. Just ask the French.

GS: What are you working on at the moment?

LB: Right now I am working on a couple of documentaries, one about jazz and urbanism in Tijuana and another about the collision of the US Mafia and the rebel forces during the Cuban Revolution. The Cuban film will also, hopefully, later be made into a narrative about the 2 men whose stories I am telling in the documentary, representing both sides of the conflict. I’m quite excited about that project because it shows a really ugly side of US crime and complicity in Cuban affairs. It’s never been done before. It was alluded to in Godfather II, however. Also, I’m working on some noir scripts, of course…

Click for part 1, Guy Savage's review of Night Train

Try and Get Me! (1950)

2009-08-14T15:13:00.019-05:00

Editor's note: Glenn Erickson AKA The DVD Savant recently wrote about one of the most neglected films from the fifties, Try and Get Me! This informative article is reprinted with Glenn's permission.

1950's Try and Get Me! has never been an easy film to see. Its only home video release is a Republic Home Video VHS from 1990. It's both a socially conscious tract against lynching, and one of the most pessimistic, frightening films noir from the classic period. It encourages examination from several angles. Its director was blacklisted. It was released as The Sound of Fury late in 1950, and underwent a title change while in its initial run. No official reason is given, but the title might have been uncomfortably similar to MGM's 1936 film Fury, which is loosely based on the same factual incident.

Not unlike Jules Dassin of Night and the City, versatile director Cyril (Cy) Endfield was just getting his career in motion when the blacklist made him unemployable in Hollywood. Endfield would later achieve success in England directing, writing or producing tough minded pictures like Hell Drivers, Zulu, Sands of the Kalahari and Zulu Dawn.

Try and Get Me! was filmed on location in the Phoenix area. Unemployed Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) already has one young boy. His wife Judy (Kathleen Ryan) is anxious that he finds a job soon so she can see a doctor to deliver her second child. Demoralized by the bleak job prospects, Howard falls in with Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), a narcissistic braggart who lures him with promises of easy money: "Getting any other offers lately?" Howard drives the getaway car for a series of robberies; he tells his wife that he's found a job and begins to drink heavily. Then Jerry bullies his reluctant partner into helping kidnap the son of a wealthy local. The unstable Jerry murders the kidnapped man. Torn by guilt and self-loathing, Howard continues to drink. He accompanies Jerry on a nightclub holiday with the loose Velma (Adele Jergens) and her mousy friend Hazel Weatherwax (Katherine Locke). Unable to keep silent, Howard breaks down in Katherine's apartment. The secret gets out and the police close in. Howard is locked up with the now-deranged Jerry. Stirred up by alarmist newspaper headlines, a huge mob converges on the city jail. The sheriff (Cliff Clark) can't hold them back.

A social horror movie for depressed times, Try and Get Me! is not recommended for everybody -- its emotions run high even before the crime and kidnap story gets in gear. Howard Tyler's unemployment experience is sheer misery and humiliation, death in small doses. It hurts when his kid asks for money to go to a ball game. He can't possibly tell his wife how hopeless things have become. The neighbors' new television is just more evidence of Howard's failure.

Author-screenwriter Jo Pagano indicts American society as aloof to the needs of working class citizens in economic straits -- the Land of Riches doesn't give a damn if Howard's family goes homeless or starves. A bartender sees nothing wrong with charging Howard extra for a grade of beer he didn't order. The situation is emasculating, especially with the preening, suppressed homoerotic Jerry showing off his muscles and asserting his superiority. The film's key image shows Howard unable to sleep, standing in the dark staring out the window. He's a criminal; he knows that he'll be caught sooner or later.

Howard Tyler loses what's left of his judgment and dignity, and the sordid trap becomes tighter. Unable to tell Judy the truth, he turns to the pathetic Hazel, a wallflower who thinks she's found the love of her life. Howard's personality disintegrates, as the story races to a finish devoid of redemption. Judy Tyler can only wail, "Oh Honey ... what have you done?" Tyler's son witnesses the arrest. He bolts upright in bed with a nightmare, traumatized like the kid from Invaders from Mars three years later.

Jo Pagano's second thesis is that law abiding, "decent" Americans are easily stampeded into savage acts. He based his story on a true incident from the Depression year 1933. Two suspects in a kidnap-murder were openly lynched before a huge mob, not somewhere in the South but in San Jose, California. The mob action was triggered by sensationalized newspaper coverage suggesting that the suspects were going to be set free on a technicality. Towns for miles around emptied out to attend the hanging. Despite an early warning, California's governor refused to reinforce the local police. He then praised the vigilantes in interviews. Unlike Fritz Lang's 1936 Fury, Endfield's Try and Get Me! closely follows the true incidents, including the fact that college students were key participants in the lynching violence. Nowhere is the horror of lawlessness so graphically represented: in full view of their neighbors and hundreds of strangers, citizens defy the civil authority: "There's no law against what's right!"

Try and Get Me! also contains a socially-conscious argument for civic responsibility. The secondary hero of the story is Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson), a newspaper columnist set up as an obvious audience surrogate. At first unforgiving of Howard Tyler, Gil meets the despondent Judy and shifts his column to a more understanding tone. Everybody resents him except the Sheriff. Gil's publisher (Art Smith) takes over and continues to churn out provocative headlines, to keep his papers selling out three times a day. Velma and Hazel become the pawns of the publicity machine, and pose smiling for photos in the courthouse.

Injected into the screenplay is a character out of left field, an Italian mathematician-sociologist (Renzo Cesana) who appears at regular intervals to lecture Gil and others on social responsibility. His erudite but superfluous harangues are the epitome of weepy liberal pleading -- "environmental factors" are responsible for the "breakdown of social decency". It's understandable that conservatives would consider the speeches obvious propaganda, especially when delivered by a man who is both an intellectual and a (gasp) foreigner. Actually, Cesana's speeches contradict the film's true message. Howard Slocum isn't an underprivileged slum kid lacking a moral upbringing, he's a desperate man pushed aside by the economy. The body of the movie faults society's emphasis on material success and conspicuous consumption. Howard goes bad trying to keep up with a rat race he can never win.

This confusion hurts Try and Get Me!'s chances for classic status, the same way that a vague ending hurts the otherwise ferocious race-riot movie The Well. The question is, were these early 1950s pictures damaged by Production Code pre-censorship? It's difficult to tell. Although Lang's Fury and Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident remain the classic lynch law movies, Pagano and Endfield's film is much closer to historical reality.

There's no denying the power of Try and Get Me!, which begins with a blind street revivalist preaching at full pitch: "Why do you do the things you do? Why?!" The actual "Sound of Fury" is the roar of the mob, which transforms society into a savage animal. Howard Tyler and Jerry Slocum are dead-to-rights guilty yet wholly undeserving of their barbaric fate. Howard collapses into psychic agony, and Jerry fights back like a rabid dog. The onrushing mob overwhelms the few deputies and storms the jail. Forget movies where the Sheriff threatens to kill "the first man who steps forward". Doing that would probably result in multiple deaths, including most of the deputies. It's a scene of total horror. The implication is that citizens can be herded and bullied into doing terrible things -- by newspapers, by politicians, by television demagogues encouraging lawlessness: "There's no law against what's right!"

The scenes with the Italian busybody aside, Cy Endfield's direction of his actors is superb. ¹ The shooting style evolves as the story progresses. Howard Tyler's long days trying to find work are shot in documentary style, but his alcoholic panic attack at the nightclub is highly expressionistic. Endfield was not the only participant to suffer a career interruption. Alleged Communist connections put Lloyd Bridges on bad terms with HUAC until he cleared himself by becoming a friendly witness. A veteran of many socially conscious dramas and films noir, Art Smith was blacklisted after being named by his old colleague Elia Kazan. Producer Robert Stillman's early credits include the hard-hitting Champion and Home of the Brave, but he went directly from Try and Get Me! into TV work with Queen for a Day. Talented Frank Lovejoy didn't get many more starring roles, but his very next one was in Warners' reactionary I Was a Communist for the FBI. The soulful Irish actress Kathleen Ryan may hold the record for appearances as the suffering woman of political victim-heroes: between 1947 and 1950 she appeared in Carol Reed's allegorical Odd Man Out, Edward Dmytryk's pro-Communist Christ in Concrete and Endfield's searing Try and Get Me!

To fully appreciate how unusual films like Try and Get Me! were, one must understand that America's screens in 1950 were flooded with fare promoting family values, military vigilance and the joys of peacetime prosperity. Movies even slightly pessimistic toward American life, even hits like The Asphalt Jungle were considered "unhealthy" by many in the industry. Although the HUAC witch hunters focused mainly on the past affiliations of Hollywood talent (mostly bread & butter creatives unable to fight back), the socially critical messages were present in several of their films, themes that conservatives would surely label subversive propaganda. Christ in Concrete and Salt of the Earth were barred from release or boycotted by ultra-conservative organizations. Joseph Losey's The Lawless and Leo Popkin's The Well are about vigilantism and racial/ethnic prejudice. Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway indicts business as a closed system of rackets; Abraham Polonsky's superb Force of Evil extends that logic to charge that our entire business culture is compromised by corruption.

Today's "free" movie screens approach political controversy almost exclusively in documentaries. Few current dramatic films seem as morally courageous or sophisticated as the above examples from the highly politicized postwar years. Dramas even tangentially critical of the war in Iraq haven't been particularly successful. If one can appreciate its political context, Try and Get Me! remains a searing revelation.

Savant has seen Try and Get Me! in a revival print and on the old, good-quality Republic VHS. It may have played once or twice on Turner Classic Movies, but not for many years. Although not considered a core noir title, it's surely more powerful than many of the noir classics, and well worth seeking out.

Written by Glenn Erickson from his column at DVD Talk: DVD Savant

Try and Get Me!
Not on Home Video
1950 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 85 min. / The Sound of Fury
Starring Frank Lovejoy, Kathleen Ryan, Richard Carlson, Lloyd Bridges, Katherine Locke, Adele Jergens, Art Smith, Renzo Cesana, Irene Vernon, Cliff Clark, Donald Smelick.
Cinematography Guy Roe
Production Design Perry Ferguson
Film Editor George Amy
Original Music Hugo Friedhofer
Written by Jo Pagano from his novel The Condemned
Produced by Robert Stillman
Directed by Cyril Endfield

1 Judging by the way they integrate with the rest of the movie, Renzo Cesana scenes were clearly not added as reshoots.

99 River Street (1953)

2009-08-09T17:22:00.013-05:00

“The harder you’re hit, the harder you have to hit.”

Imagine this: you’re a prizefighter in the heavyweight division — a real comer after more than sixty bouts, never once knocked down — and you finally get a shot at the greatest crown in sports. Going into the last round up on all cards, you get a deep cut from an accidental bump and the ringside doc declares you the loser. As if that weren’t enough, the state athletic commission bars you for life, claiming that another hard pop could dim your lights. Three years later you pay the rent driving a cab through the five boroughs, and not one of your fares gives you a second glance. Your nag of an ex-showgirl wife has been working too many late nights, and now she’s flashing jewelry that you didn’t buy her. You’re a nobody. A sucker. Just another schmuck in the big apple.

That’s how it is for ex-pug Ernie Driscoll at the beginning of 99 River Street — one of the most hardboiled, brutal, and inexplicably forgotten films of the noir cycle. Self-pity is the deadliest of emotions and it defines Driscoll. There’s a certain kind of guy who, having fought for the heavyweight crown and lost on an accidental cut, would strut through later life like a big shot. He’d hit the bars after his shift to tell fight stories and relive the good old days — jabbing and hooking to the applause of drunks and floozies. John Payne’s Driscoll isn’t that guy. Instead, after coming so close and having it all snatched away, he’s a bitter, brooding, short-tempered hulk who considers his ring years a waste. Yet he’s also like the schoolgirl who’s had her heart broken — not eager to stick his chin out again. So what’s a guy like Ernie Driscoll, stumbling through life in a daze and hating himself for it, choose for a dream? A gas station. Saving up his tips to buy one is an absurd an ambition for a man who recently stood toe to toe with the champ, but even Ernie knows he’ll probably never make it happen. Driscoll is a man who feels sorry for himself and can’t get over it. Payne’s performance sweats with pathos and verisimilitude.

The story is a knockout. Phil Karlson takes a complicated script and delivers a fast-paced and coherent movie that plows ahead with well-drawn, convincing characters. A plot summary would read like an unwieldy mishmash so I’ll omit it — and besides, some of the film’s best moments are meant to surprise. The picture opens with first-rate ring footage where a beefed-out Payne makes like a real fighter. Heads snap from believable punches that the foley artist gives the resounding crash of hammer blows. In one of the film’s numerous, clever directorial nuances, what at first appears to be a live event turns out to be a televised ‘classic fights’ rerun that Ernie is watching on the small set in his flat. Payne is thereby transformed from hero to hangdog with one simple camera movement. Wife Pauline, played by Peggie Castle, turns the set off in a bickering exchange that is pure Dana Andrews and Virginia Mayo: “I’d have been a star if I hadn’t married you,” she says, and he fires back, “You were a showgirl — I could have been champion.” To which she smirks with venom and sarcasm, “Could have been.” Ernie then shuffles off to his cab for a night that will change his life forever. Before the sun rises again he’ll discover the truth about his marriage, and then scramble to steer clear of cops and crooks after Pauline turns up stiff in the back seat of his taxi.

The supporting cast is made up of a broad pastiche of downtown night dwellers — from hoodlums and hustlers to philanderers and insomniacs. Whether through lucky casting or plain good direction each role is strikingly realized. Evelyn Keyes, coffee shop habitué and Broadway wannabe, is Linda, the gal pal who makes a chump out of Ernie(in the film’s slickest and, possibly, most memorable scene) and then has to get square. Fighters and their trainers are never far apart in classic films, so it makes sense that Ernie’s best friend and former corner man is also his dispatcher at the cab company. Frank Faylen (who in a strange bit of movie serendipity played a cab driver named Ernie in It's A Wonderful Life) is Driscoll’s pal and confidant, though his part is the least colorful in the cast. Brad Dexter plays John Rawlins, the sleazy jewel thief who cuckolds Driscoll. He’s even more memorable here than he was three years earlier as a crooked investigator in Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle. Both parts call for the same sort of viperous scumbag, but Dexter is better in this film if for no other reason than his role has more meat. The best support in the film is offered by Jay Adler as Christopher, pet shop owner by day and big time jewelry fence after dark. Adler, with his quiet demeanor and air of almost grandfatherly respectability, makes Christopher into the most coolly terrifying presence in the film. Even amongst such a strong cast Adler is the scene-stealer.

The film’s brutality is plentiful and vividly cinematic. Films of this period often age poorly due to the artificial quality of their violence. Not so here. From the beginning boxing match to the climactic sequence at the titular address, the punches, slaps, gunshots, and crashes are unusually authentic. Blood spreads across cheeks and foreheads with surprising regularity and loving care. The film embraces the spectacular physicality of criminal life, and lingers blithely on those moments. Jack Lambert plays in many of those scenes, his face instantly recognizable as one of the more grotesque hoodlums in film history. Here he’s Mickey, an ambitious young thug who works for Christopher. In once scene, Pauline and Rawlins visit the pet store that serves as Christopher’s front. As they enter Mickey feeds milk to a puppy from a baby’s bottle, but within minutes he’s slapping Pauline to the floor while holding Rawlins at bay with a .38. Later he gives Driscoll the third degree, punctuating each question with a heavy chop, Ernie’s head jarring from one side of the screen to the other. Yet Mickey takes the beating of his life when he discovers, the hard way, that Driscoll was just biding his time and waiting for an opening. Ernie makes the hoodlum pay for not remembering him as he unloads every ounce of pent up frustration onto poor Mickey’s face — and we get to see every punch. The closing set piece is potent and rewarding, and includes one of the best “deaths by car” in noir history, as well as an operatic climax where cruel fate finally rewards Driscoll: he’s shot, he’s exhausted, and he’s nearly broken, yet he’s given the chance to rise to his feet and answer that bell one final time.

Within the canon of film noir there are numerous fight films — from the famous Body and Soul and The Set-Up to the slightly less well known, yet equally brilliant, Champion with Kirk Douglas. 99 River Street isn’t a boxing film per se, but it is a story concerned with a boxer whose life and sense of self are defined by the events of one fateful night in the ring. In part what makes noir films so wonderful is their oppressively dark atmosphere of alienation and menace (99 River Street takes place entirely at night). However that atmosphere needn’t carry beyond the conclusion of the story — the film noir hero can occasionally live happily ever after. The doomed lovers from such archetypical examples as Criss-Cross, Double Indemnity, and Out of the Past don’t survive their respective films, yet despite the extraordinary popularity of those pictures they represent a fairly small percentage of noirs where the protagonist doesn’t end up alive, kicking, and somehow redeemed through his ordeal. For every cocksure Walter Neff who deserves the hand fate deals him there’s an Ernie Driscoll who endures circumstances worthy of Job in order to claim his own fair share of redemption. 99 River Street screams “Look at this sap. Life gave him a kick in the teeth and he deserves better, but brother, he’s gotta pay for it.” Things are grim for Ernie in the beginning and they get worse as the reels unspool, but the same narrative convention that assures us Walter Neff will get his in the end also promises that Driscoll will come out on the other side, and that payoff is what keeps us watching. We ache for slobs like Ernie -- we want to see him get clear of his bad luck and find some sort of happiness. Despite its violence, cruelty, and capricious fates, in the end 99 River Street reveals itself to be a film that ultimately rewards our hopes.

Written by The Professor

Editor's note: The Professor has one of the best film noir sites on the web - Where Danger Lives.

Director: Phil Karlson
Cinematographer: Franz Planer
Screenplay: Robert Smith
Story: George Zuckerman.
Starring: John Payne, Evelyn Keyes, Peggie Castle, and Brad Dexter.
Released by: United Artists
Running time: 82 minutes

Shield for Murder (1954)

2009-08-02T10:34:00.011-05:00

Starring Edmond O'Brien (Barney Nolan), Marla English (Patty), John Agar (Mark), with Emile Meyer, Carolyn Jones, Claude Akins.

Bitter and burned out, veteran police detective Barney Nolan longs to distance his nightclub-worker girlfriend Patty and himself from the chilly realities of life on the street - and is willing to shatter the laws he's long upheld if they keep him from realizing his twisted dream of middle-class domestic bliss. Robbing and brazenly murdering a connected bookmaker for $25,000 - and then claiming the man's death was the result of a warning shot gone wild, Nolan's story immediately raises the eyebrows of his colleagues and captain, as his attitude and actions in recent years have reflected an alarming corrosion of spirit. Serving as a makeshift safe-deposit box, a hole behind the freshly-built tract house Nolan is securing for himself and Patty is fed the ill-gotten gains undercover of darkness...

Clearly suspicious, but reluctant to embrace the notion of Nolan's guilt are both his commanding officer (Meyer) and his longtime friend-on-the-force Mark (Agar), a younger cop who displays a not-so-brotherly protectiveness for Patty - who herself hints at a reciprocal attraction. While they reserve judgment, two shady private eyes hired by the dead man's boss immediately beleaguer the gruff, defensive Nolan - and introduce the other hostile, probing entity he must hoodwink if he is to successfully reach his suburban oasis. Nolan's plan is further disrupted by the emergence of an eyewitness - a deaf mute who knows the incident was no accident, but not that it was Nolan who pulled the trigger - until the desperate cop pays him a nocturnal visit, and irreversibly worsens the situation for both he and the do-gooder.

One of several 'dirty cop' noirs to hit silver screens in 1954 (the others being Rogue Cop, Private Hell 36, and the under appreciated Pushover), Shield For Murder holds no claim as the most stylish, poignant, or artfully produced. It's meat-and-potatoes noir for the masses - which is by no means a critique, as many of it's ilk are memorable, respect-worthy genre entries. It's just that Shield could've been far better than it turned out - more nuanced, stylized, and resonant - with a bit of structural tweaking here, and the odd infusion of sophistication there. Beginning the story proper after a tantalizing glimpse of it's downbeat conclusion would've added a welcome artsy spark, and been more in keeping with the genre's patented and favored storytelling style - the flashback structure. Nothing casts a gloom over a lead character quite like a brief fast-forward to his/her downfall or demise, and Shield would've benefited immeasurably from just such a stylistic device.

Normally, one can't find fault with an Edmond O'Brien performance, but in his role as the embittered cop on the verge of mortal meltdown - or Norman Rockwell-ness, the genre favorite skirts the edge of camp, delivering his laughably hard-boiled lines through gnashed teeth - spitting out dialogue more appropriate for a 30s pot-boiler (if it's use was meant as character development - to color Nolan as department dinosaur - it wasn't worth it). Rarely, if ever, are we shown the rogue cop in a moment of quiet contemplation, struggling with the tangled web he himself wove. It's damn near impossible to relate to him, or to sympathize with his plight, when he regularly alienates the viewer – unlike Fred MacMurray's conflicted cop in Pushover, who we actually want to see get away with murder (and Kim Novak).

As unimaginatively shot and directed (by first-timer O'Brien himself) as it is undeniably engrossing, 'Shield' feels like an early television morality tale - cast with actors and actresses of wildly varying ability. Merely passable, the film is like a short, forgettable crime story brought to black-and-white life.

Written by Dave

Mystery Street (1950)

2009-07-24T11:30:00.014-05:00

Vivian Holden (Jan Sterling) is having some problems. She’s dead broke, owes her landlady two weeks worth of rent and the mysterious Hyannis 3633 man she keeps trying to reach on the phone is giving her the run around. In desperation, Vivian takes advantage of innocent-bystander Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson), a sad man drinking away his sorrows in attempt to forget his sick wife current hospital stay. Vivian drives Henry’s yellow Ford down to Hyannis from Boston, abandoning Henry along the way. When Vivian finally confronts the Hyannis man that has been eluding her, she finds herself face-to-face with the barrel of his gun.

Six months later, Vivian Holden’s bones are found at a beach, but only we, the audience, know that those bones are hers. It’s up to Lieutenant Peter Moralas (Ricardo Montalban) solve the mystery of both the crime and to identity the victim. What results is an intriguing film noir, directed by John Sturges, that blends murder mystery with forensic science. If anyone tells you forensic science is a new phenomenon in contemporary entertainment, just direct that person to Mystery Street (1950) and they will be in for a pleasant surprise.

Even decades before DNA analysis and other technological advancements in criminal science, the forensis used in this film are still very advanced and relevant. With very little to go one, besides the partial skeleton of Vivian, the doctor is able to determine age, gender, time of death, cause of death and even the victim’s occupation from his vast knowledge of human anatomy and plant pathology. Even a jaded CSI-watching contemporary could still appreciate the intricacies and the methods used in the film’s forensic study.

Montalban plays Lietuenant Moralas, a local officer who has just been put on his first murder case. This is a considerably difficult case because all the detective is left with to go by are bones, hair and leaves. He works together with a Harvard scientist Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett) who specializes in using his science to solve particularly difficult criminal cases. McAdoo brings an unbiased viewpoint to this mystery. To him, the solving of the mystery boils down to scientific study. He doesn’t make assumptions or come to any early conclusions, rather he allows the evidence and the revelation of the clues tell him the story.

Moralas (Montalban) on the otherhand is McAdoo’s polar opposite. He’s the streetsmart to McAdoo’s booksmart and has developed his detective skills from working with people rather than science. Moralas watches people intently and deals with them on an individual basis. He uses neither aggression nor compliance but basically charms his way into people’s confidence by his own charisma. However, his major flaw is that, unlike McAdoo, Moralas jumps to conclusions and this can alienate key witnesses in the investigation that he could have alternately brought into his confidence.

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The dynamic between Montalban and Bennett in their differing temperments and the juxtaposition of their characters makes for an interesting film. However, I would be remiss to not point out the wonderful performance of Elsa Lanchester as the landlady Mrs. Smerrling. Smerrling is a live wire; a neurotic who can easily throw the investigation for a loop. Moralas is suspicious of her motives at the very beginning but is also intrigued by what information she can provide. Smerrling is nosy, money-hungry and uses Vivian’s life and death for her own selfish purposes. She leads a drab life and becomes intoxicated by the power her connection with Vivian and her knowledge has over the various men involved in the case. Lanchester does a superb job tapping into the Smerrling’s neuroses bringing us a character who is both apalling and enthralling to watch on screen.

Besides the blend of forensic science and old-fashioned gumshoe work, what is also interesting about this film is that it is shot entirely on location in Boston, Cambridge, Roxbury, Hyannis and Barnstable, Massachusetts. As a Boston local, my heart went pitter patter when I saw the familiar sites of the gate entrance of Harvard University on Massachusetts Avenue and Harvard Yard. In the short documentary “Mystery Street: Murder at Harvard”, we learn that after WWII, more and more films were shot on location and that Mystery Street might be the earliest example of a film shot entirely in the Boston area. What we get is the added element of real locations becoming part of the story which in my opinion enhances the movie watching experience.

Written by Raquelle
Raquelle blogs about classic films at her always-interesting site, Out of the Past.

Crime of Passion (1957)

2009-07-19T16:11:00.006-05:00

“Strange offenses committed by seemingly normal people”: The Subversion of the American Dream in Crime of Passion (1957)

“Don’t call me Angel. I loathe it.”

The subversion of the American dream is the theme in the superb proto feminist film Crime of Passion, from director Gerd Oswald (A Kiss Before Dying, Screaming Mimi). Released in 1957, Crime of Passion is a woman-centered noir--a film ahead of its time in its depiction of a career woman who sinks into housewife hell and is subsequently driven to commit murder.

The American dream may be a happy marriage, a car, a couple of screaming kids and a mortgage on a little house in suburbia, but it’s not the dream of Kathy Ferguson (Barbara Stanwyck), tough-as-nails columnist for a San Francisco paper. Ambitious, efficient and all business, Kathy delivers her story in spite of obstacles, and when the film opens, Kathy is at work at her desk. A fellow employee reads her a lonely-hearts letter from a reader that includes a confession of loving a married man. The reader, seeking advice, asks Kathy what to do, and Kathy tartly replies: “forget the man, run away with his wife.” This revealing comment reflects Kathy’s outward attitude to marriage and men: there’s no room for either in her life, but that all changes when a couple of Los Angeles cops arrive in San Francisco to nab a woman who’s murdered her husband.

Kathy expects to work with the police and build a story about the fugitive woman, but the L.A cops, snotty Captain Alidos (Royal Dano) and his quiet partner Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden) don’t cooperate. Alidos’s condescending attitude towards career women shows when he tells Kathy she should be home ‘making dinner for her husband.’ This re-direction to the kitchen leaves Kathy momentarily speechless, but fiercely competitive, she comes out fighting by appealing through a newspaper column for the murderess to contact her directly. The column focuses on the shared female experience:

“There you are deserted by him in whom you have placed all your faith. We are alone. Women tortured by fate, betrayed by all men. Where can we turn except to the heart and the understanding of another woman who knows what you are suffering? I feel for you. I suffer with you. I want to help you. Let me stand by your side in your fight for justice and compassion in a world made by men and for men.”

This commonality of female experience is depicted through cleverly paced scenes that show various types of women reading Kathy’s column aloud. While the female-centered column is directed to the fugitive murderess, lonely housewives, working women, bar girls and a couple of tough female cabbies--women from all walks of life read Kathy’s column and it’s as though she addresses them personally.

Alidos pressures Kathy for information on the whereabouts of the killer and threatens to have her arrested if she doesn’t comply, and she sends him off on a wild goose chase, offering to give the arrest to the gentler, meeker Doyle. But the ambitionless Doyle draws the line at double-crossing his partner, and the two L.A. cops get their fugitive killer courtesy of Kathy’s information.

After acknowledging a mutual attraction, Kathy and Doyle share a candlelit dinner, and during the gooey moments, Doyle asks Kathy if she wants to get married. He believes there’s no better goal in life than to be married and raise a family Kathy replies that she doesn’t think she’ll ever get married. It’s all “propaganda,” Kathy firmly states: “For marriage, I read life sentence. Home life, I read TV nights, beer in the fridge, second mortgage.”

Some time later, Kathy lands a plum job in New York, but while she clears her desk at work, a call comes in from Doyle. He wants Kathy to detour to Los Angeles on her way to New York. At first she puts up obstacles, but then folds and lets Doyle make all the arrangements.

Kathy’s career is put on permanent hold when she marries Doyle. There’s a swift, no frills ceremony before a female Justice of the Peace with Captain and Mrs. Alidos standing as witnesses. Mrs. Alidos (Virginia Grey) breaks the spell by telling Kathy to feel free to come to her with all of her “little problems.” After the ceremony, Kathy and Doyle return to his modest house in the suburbs. It’s a perfectly timed scene, and Doyle’s car pulls in the driveway to the accompanying sounds of children playing, a dog barking and an ice cream van jingle. Yes, Kathy has arrived in housewife hell.

Kathy, narcotized by the promise of sex, is still in her delusional phase--although the sight of the house--exactly like all the others on the street--does seem to take the wind out of her sails momentarily. There’s another gooey scene with Kathy telling Doyle she only has “one ambition,” and that’s to be a “good wife.” She even goes as far as to gushingly confess, “I hope all your socks have holes in them and that I can sit for hours and hours darning them.” The film makes it clear that it’s sex--plain and simple--that binds this disparate pair together, and Doyle, who has a certain crumpled charm, growls that he has “other plans” for his new wife, and with the bedroom door invitingly open, the scene closes with Doyle following Kathy into the passion pit.

Sometime later, Kathy is immersed in her life as the wife of a policeman. Her evenings are spent in an endless round of meaningless chatter with the other wives as the men, segregated from the women, engage in cop talk, discuss pensions, swill beer and play cards. This leaves Kathy with the mindless wives, and like geese, the squawking women flock around Sara, the captain’s wife, in a circle jerk of gushing, fawning compliments. The obnoxious Sara Alidos holds court amongst the Stepford wives while they compete to see who can be the most obsequious. Kathy, desperate for some intelligent conversation, tries invading the male domain a few times, but even though she breaches the walls, she’s rapidly put in her place. Surrounded by nauseatingly silly women obsessed with hors d’oeuvres, television sets and dress patterns, it looks as though Kathy is being driven to the point of insanity, but then she hatches a scheme….

Kathy chafes at her husband’s lack of ambition without realizing that this frustration is just sublimation of her own thwarted career. Kathy plays hardball in order to secure a relationship with the woman she sees as being the most influential female on the totem pole of power, Inspector Pope’s wife, Alice (Fay Wray). Sara Alidos has made it perfectly clear to the other wives that as the captain’s wife she’s on a exclusive first name basis with Alice Pope, and so Kathy tricks her way into the Popes’ elite social circle. Soon Kathy and Doyle are rubbing shoulders with the Inspector and the Commissioner. There’s one great scene where Pope (Raymond Burr) is serving drinks when he witnesses Mrs. Alidos wrestling for the limelight with Kathy Doyle. Kathy, whose newspaperwoman sharpness has finally resurfaced, delivers a cutting remark that leaves her adversary speechless. Pope is intrigued and he makes a point of singling out Kathy.

While Doyle is out of his league with Kathy, never understanding the depths of her character, Pope spots Kathy a mile away, and he isn’t fooled one minute by her fake wifely persona. Pope and Kathy understand each other perfectly, and there’s a charged sexual attraction simmering from the first time they meet. The relationship, laced with innuendo, will inevitability lead to a coupling of intellectual equals.

Crime of Passion is an amazingly bold film for its time. Not only does the plot effectively eviscerate the American Dream, but it also laces the drama with two contrasting visions of female relationships. On one hand, there are the wives of the police department--giddy, silly, bitchy vacuous women who seem bred for lives of conspicuous consumption (note the lengthy manicure session Kathy has with Alice Pope), and then there are ‘other’ women--the hard-edged kind who struggle and fight their way in the male-dominated workplace: Kathy, the female justice of the peace, and two female cab drivers, for example.

As a columnist Kathy appeals to the linear experience of women--the shared lot in life--whereas with the police wives, she’s forced into the position of an underling in a fiercely hierarchical system. In this male dominated world, the police wives cannot affect their husbands’ careers other than offer endless support while they ‘fit in’ to the intensely political social evenings. While the policemen’s wives support their husbands’ careers with mega-sessions of ass kissing, paradoxically they also shorten their husbands’ careers with their emotional and mental demands. Ultimately these women--designated to the kitchen and sock darning--seem sadly stunted in their boxed-in roles of happy housewives.

Criticism of the film is often directed to the implausibility of career-minded Kathy marrying Doyle in the first place, and indeed the film does present ‘two Kathys.’ It’s easy for us to predict disaster for Kathy and Doyle as their wildly disparate values are laid out very early in the film. He wants marriage and a family, and she wants a career. Kathy even notes Doyle’s lack of ambition and comments that while he’s a “nice guy,” he won’t go far in life, and yet in spite of all the evidence that screams against these two ever maintaining a successful relationship, they plunge headlong into marriage with disastrous results. This is Kathy’s first mistake. Her second mistake is her decision to take a short cut to power through Inspector Pope. Both of these mistakes are guided by sex. While Kathy wanted a career and didn’t want marriage, she hadn’t placed sex in the equation. She marries Doyle thanks to a strong sexual attraction and she hunts Pope for the same reason. While Kathy claims that her relationship with Pope is guided by her desire to further her husband’s career, the air between Pope and Kathy is too electrically charged with sexual anticipation for Kathy’s ‘sacrifice’ theory to fly.

Kathy should have ripped off her apron and gone back to the newspaper.

Written by Guy Savage

Laura (1944)

2009-07-12T12:05:00.014-05:00

Once you're dead, every inch of you will be searched. Not just your body, but all your belongings. The things you have hidden in your house or apartment; the things you prize, and the things you're ashamed of. Stuff you believe safe, that no one else in the world will ever see. Your most private possessions. Journal pages. Secrets. And every concrete detail to who you were as a human being before you died.

Whether it's pilfered through by your next of kin, or by the police, depends on whether or not you get murdered.

According to Lt. Mark McPherson, "Murder victims have no claim to privacy."

But what if the detective, in charge of finding your killer, makes a second home of your apartment? Enjoys pilfering through your belongings. What if he falls in love with you! Simply from staring at your portrait? And one stormy night, while sleeping with too much scotch in his veins, he imagines you resurrected and walking through the living room.

Mark McPherson -- played by Dana Andrews -- is a young detective who's never met the woman of his dreams. And now that's he's found her, she's already dead!

But Laura Hunt is more than just the murder victim in McPherson's latest investigation; and more than just a pretty face in a painting: she's also in the memories, and on the lips and pen of famous New York columnist, Waldo Lydecker -- played by the equally effeminate, well-dressed, and clever, Clifton Webb.

Waldo: and his precious, razor-sharp tongue and wit. Currently writing Laura's story in the bathtub, as the film opens, with Lt. Mark McPherson pawing at delicate antiques. Unaware that he is being studied by Waldo, who purposely left the bathroom door ajar...

Now despite his love for the deceased Laura Hunt, I believe Waldo -- like Webb -- is essentially asexual. Too refined to let loose sexually with ANY gender; physically though, I think Waldo craved men; but emotionally and mentally, he wanted Laura.

And every time she fell in love with another man, Waldo would dismiss him as unworthy of Laura; since Laura was Waldo's Pygmalion-esque creation, and obviously the world is unworthy of glorious HIM.

So yes, Waldo thinks himself superior to everyone, regardless of gender. But observe how fond he is of Mark in the opening scene. Of how comfortable he is, in washing himself, dressing himself, even rising from the tub, in front of Mark.

Upon realizing who Mark McPherson is -- a few years prior, McPherson gained a hero's reputation by taking down a gangster, and receiving a leg full of lead in the process -- Waldo says, "I always liked that detective with the silver shinbone."

Ha. I'll bet he did.

Though I assure you, McPherson isn't interested.

The handsome and subtle detective, like Dana Andrews himself, is very masculine.

So desperate not to lose his temper, Mark plays with a handheld baseball game throughout the film. "It keeps me calm," he says.

But upon seeing it for the first time, Waldo begins with his 'usual pattern' of emasculating any and all men who surround him; the unworthy -- If Waldo can't be a real man, no one can! -- but is amused by Mark for being something of a realist; a purist detective who cares only about getting at the truth.

Mark, on the other hand, is rarely amused, and never impressed by the likes of Waldo and Laura: high-society New Yorkers with fancy apartments, luxurious belongings, and seemingly-platonic relationships. [Yawn]

Speaking of platonic, Mark agrees to have dinner with Waldo. This is when the flash-backs begin. And where we finally meet Laura, as played by the gorgeous Gene Tierney.

Investigating her murder, but also delving into this rich world that McPherson is unfamiliar with, this world he believes is false, and snobbish, Mark becomes fascinated. Perhaps not by the shimmering edifice of the world itself, but of how it's former resident, Laura Hunt, could have been suckered into it! She sounds like a nice girl, and here's Waldo Lydecker, talking about how he added a layer of gloss to her, and made her as well-known as his own walking-stick.

A possession.

A lump in the coal that slightly revealed itself -- that day in the Algonquin hotel, where Laura approached the famous Lydecker, in hopes of his endorsement of an advertising campaign she created herself -- and he saw this naive, fresh-faced young beauty, also with brains and talent. But Waldo mainly saw Laura's potential. He plucked the untouched diamond from the earth. He dusted it off (or so he thought) and made a bracelet of her! Polished her. Gave her a sense of culture and breeding.

In reality, Laura's upbringing and beliefs were more akin to Mark's. But Waldo knew Laura was capable of rising up to HIS lofty level. He could never find another human-being he felt was as good as him, or deserving enough, to be near him. At least Laura was close enough...he used her career as a starting point, as an excuse! Waldo then molded Laura into his ideal woman.

And Laura allowed it, because it would skyrocket her beloved career. But in going along with Waldo's 'renovations' of her -- improving her looks, her wardrobe, her social status -- Laura began to feel less human. More like one of the cold, glass ornaments in Waldo's collection.

But then she met Shelby Carpenter -- in whom Laura found her chance to be WOMAN again, for a cold glass ornament can't have sex with a big handsome man! -- as played by Vincent Price.

Waldo brags to Mark how he was always capable of destroying Laura's affections for undeserving men, but with Carpenter, Waldo failed to dissuade her. And at the time of her death, Shelby and Laura were engaged.

But Waldo assures Mark that Laura was having second thoughts. She made more money than Shelby. Her career was above his, and she was strong and independent. Perhaps due to his Southern heart and mindset, Shelby soon felt insecure, and less of a man. He had to PROVE he was a man! The same way Laura proved she was a woman...by going out and screwing around; Shelby cheated on Laura, not only with an attractive young model, named Diane Redfern, but also with Ann Treadwell, Laura's own aunt!

Scandalous: yes.

But I don't think Laura truly enters Film Noir territory until Waldo relinquishes the film's narration, allowing Mark to become the official view-point character.

After that, everything gets a little darker...

The painting of Laura watches over Mark as he drowns his sorrows. In the bedroom, he inspects her closet, smells her perfume, and fondles the contents of her dresser drawer -- delicates? Sure, but where's Waldo to tell him not to! -- besides, they're not breakable.

Neither was Laura.

Alone in her apartment. Only a few feet away from the spot where she was murdered! The rain pours, and the clock chimes, and after one last glimpse of Laura's portrait, Mark drinks himself to sleep.

It's debatable whether or not the remainder of the film is actually real or Mark's dream.

When Laura Hunt enters her own apartment, she automatically becomes a suspect for killing Diane Redfern, the girl that was actually shot last Friday night; she was also the model Shelby Carpenter had sex with!

Gee, why would Laura want to kill her?

Mark doesn't care; Mark's thrilled! Not because Laura might be guilty of murder, and therefore sent to prison, or worse! But because his dream woman is a reality now -- flesh and blood, and all that goes with it! -- and by walking into her apartment. By returning to the scene of her own death? No! To the scene of the crime. By stepping down from her own painting; by finally leaving the pedestal built for her by Waldo Lydecker, Laura also finds Mark. A man not here to worship her, but protect her. A man with a capital M. Wanting to make love to her, for she is giving, and optimistic, warm and friendly; not fodder for a platonic relationship! Like with Waldo...her sardonic and possibly sadistic Henry Higgins, to whom Laura always felt indebted.

To Mark, Laura owes nothing.

And Mark doesn't feel insecure, like Shelby and Waldo. Mark is one hundred percent man, with nothing to prove! No reason to make Laura into living proof that he deserves an attractive woman. He wants to take her out of that glass cabinet, and remind her that she's human! A real woman: not a trophy, or a status-symbol, or an old diamond bracelet never worn.

Laura likes finding Mark in her apartment.

"As if he were waiting for me," she says.

So once the crime of 'Who killed Diane Redfern while mistaking her for Laura Hunt' is resolved, Mark and Laura can live happily ever after!

Or maybe not.

Perhaps Laura IS a dream, a ghost, a vision from too much Scotch! The beautiful idea of Heaven while McPherson has succumbed to alcohol poisoning -- someone cue the Twilight Zone theme!

And of course there's always the major problem of whoever tried to murder Laura Hunt, RETURNING to murder Laura Hunt! Now that she's returned from the grave.

But at least this will give Mark McPherson the chance to save his dream woman: and that's more than he could ever do for her portrait, or her ghost.

If you don't know who the killer is, I'm not gonna outright spoil it -- I've already ruined the 'twist', the least I can do is salvage the ending -- but even knowing the killer's identity, the finale is shocking to see.

And surely the ghost of Diane Redfern will enjoy the ironic sight of her own killer dying in the same spot, in the same apartment...

I'm guessing Mark sent someone else to pilfer through Diane's apartment? It must not have included a giant portrait, and a bottle of scotch...

Ha. But who needs it? Mark has Laura, and the music swells, and I could watch it a million times over!

Laura. A unique, romantic mystery. Perhaps not a strict film noir, but a classic: unforgettable.

Written by Ginger Ingenue
Her website is must read.

High Wall (1947)

2009-07-03T09:41:00.013-05:00

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