Film Noir of the Week

Repeat Performance (1947)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 12:39:05 PST

Film noir and The Twilight Zone have more in common than you'd probably think. B-movie actors from the 40s peppered the casts of Twilight Zone episodes almost 20 years later. Dutch angles magnify tension; and other impressive black and white photography (at least before the Twilight Zone started to shoot on video late in the series) on the CBS show could easily be mistaken for a classic noir. Watch the credits at the end of a TZ and you'll see many names sometimes associated with film noir: Harry J. Wild, Joseph LaShelle, John Brahm, Richard Florey to name a few.

Of course the fantasy/sci-fi element of the Twilight Zone are usually not found in noirs. The exceptions being Val Lewton's RKO horror films and the New Years Eve thriller, Repeat Performance.

Repeat Performance was released in 1947 by Eagle-Lion films who at the time were trying to establish themselves as a major force in Hollywood. They put out some “nervous As” – not cheap enough to be Bs but not expensive enough to be As. Repeat Performance fits that description.

Clunky and far-too-dramatic opening credits leads to a classic noir open, then a cheapish looking movie filled with former stars (Louis Hayward) and actors just starting out (Richard Basehart in his first film roll.) Repeat Performance may be a bit too full of soapy dramatics to be a top-shelf noir, but it certainly could be served to noir fans without complaint. The fantastic looking – dark and stylish – opening and end of the film more than make up for the frothy middle – and for me makes the film a worthy entry in the film noir classic period.

Despite its obvious flaws – and it really is probably only loved by fans of old black-and-white mysteries --it's one of my favorite New Years Eve tales.

Encore!

Just before midnight on New Year's Eve, 1946, Broadway actress Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) shoots her husband Barney (Hayward) and then rushes to see her friend, odd-ball poet William Williams. After a distressed Sheila confesses her deed to William (Basehart), he suggests they talk to Sheila's producer John Friday (Tom Conway). As Sheila and William are walking up to John's apartment, Sheila wishes that she could relive the past year, insisting that if she had it to do over, she would not make the same mistakes twice. Upon reaching John's door, Sheila notices that William has disappeared and then gradually realizes that something is wrong.

An unnecessary voice over explains what is obvious to the viewer. Her hair and clothes have changed and she's been transported to an earlier time – exactly a year before. She has one year to make up for the mistakes she made leading up to her crime. The “voice over” is a common element found in film noir. But in this case it sounds much more like the Rod Sterling TZ introductions than a typical film noir Mitchum-esque V.O.

The film is based on a book by William O'Farrell. O'Farrell doesn't seem to have many other books after this, his first. Published in 1942, the book is something. Over at the Mystery File, Dan Stumpf writes,

“O’Farrell can write. He can put across a bitchy theatrical milieu and a seedy flophouse with equal aplomb, evoke a desperate chase and a disparate seduction with commensurate suspense, and weave a tale of murder and melodrama (verging on Soap Opera at times, but teetering skillfully on the edge) with prose that keeps the pages turning very nicely.”

There are many changes from the book (which is wonderfully bleak) and the movie. Barney is the actor that goes back in time, not Sheila. Barney begins the novel as a flop-house drunk after shooting his girlfriend following the suicide of his wife Sheila. When on the run from cops, Barney and William and Mary (a gay man in the book that Basehart smartly hinted at in the movie) get shot at by the cops leading to the magical happenings. The scene is so cinematic I'm a bit surprised they didn't find a way to shoe-horn it into the film. And although it is soapy, O'Farrell's novel concludes more satisfactory than most thrillers. A good read if you can find it.

O'Farrell's book was his only one to gain any attention. His movie and TV credits are slim too – he did write an episode of Alfred Hithcock Presents. Repeat Performance was remade into a 1980s TV movie (with Joan Leslie in a small part).

The cast of the '47 film includes Louis Hayward. Hayward's career wasn't what it was just a few years before, but he did make some interesting choices. He was best friends with Edgar G. Ulmer and appeared in Ulmer's Citizen-Kane-of-B-noir drama Ruthless in 1948. 1950 he starred in one of Fritz Lang's last US productions House By the River. Ladies in Retirement, And Then There Were None and Strange Woman all were released around the same time as Repeat Performance.

Tom Conway is a favorite. In addition to Cat People and the 7th Victim he was The Falcon in that long running mystery series (replacing brother George Sanders who got bored with the part. Similarly, Sanders replaced Hayward as The Saint in the movie series that The Falcon was most likely based on.)

Joan Leslie - so good in High Sierra - isn't as strong as her Repeat Performance co-stars but she gets the job done. Not an easy task when you consider how outrageous the story gets.

Finally, Richard Basehart captures the book's “William and Mary” part without being obvious about it. I know most remember Basehart from TV's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and the voice of the 1984 Olympics but his contributions to film noir is impressive. The next year Basehart would star in the unforgettable He Walked by Night. His other noir credits include the period film Reign of Terror, Tension, Outside the Wall, Fourteen Hours, The House on Telegraph Hill, and the Brit noir The Good Die Young.

Submitted for your consideration: 1947's Repeat Performance. Repeated viewing encouraged... in the Twilight Zone.

Written by Steve-O

Also check out our discussion on the noirish TZ episodes at the Back Alley

Follow Me Quietly (1949)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:47:52 PST

In 1949, RKO Pictures was in financial trouble (but then again, when wasn’t it?). Howard Hughes was in the process of ruining the studio, due in large part to his poor decision-making when it came to which pictures to greenlight and his constant meddling with films as they were being made. In 1948, the year before Follow Me Quietly was released, RKO had seen its profits drop by a staggering 90 percent, from $5.1 million in 1947 to a mere $500,000 in 1948. Moving forward, the company would focus on churning out even more low-budget, one-hour B pictures in an effort to turn a quick profit.

One of RKO’s favorite directors for these one-hour programmers was a man whose name isn’t spoken in noir circles as often, or with as much reverence, as some of the other directors who have spent significant time in Dark City. However, from the late forties to the early fifties, Richard Fleischer had a decent run at the tables, directing no less than seven noirs (all but one for RKO) in a five-year period—Bodyguard (1948), The Clay Pigeon (1948), Follow Me Quietly (1949), Trapped (1949), Armored Car Robbery (1950), His Kind of Woman (1951, uncredited) and The Narrow Margin (1952). He also returned to the genre one more time in 1955 to the direct the color crime noir Violent Saturday (1955).

In terms of quality, Follow Me Quietly marked a turning point for Fleischer. He recognized this when he said, “This is the film that, above all, increased my knowledge of the trade. I learned how to organize a film.” It’s true. Follow Me Quietly is an enjoyable, tightly-organized film that gives the impression that Fleischer would go on to even make even better films, which he did.

The plot of the film is fairly straightforward B fare. A serial killer who calls himself The Judge has been murdering people for months, strangling them only on rainy nights. He leaves notes that are made out of letters cut from magazines that claim he’s punishing sinners and meting out justice. The two cops on the case, Lt. Harry Grant (William Lundigan) and his wisecracking sidekick St. Art Collins (Jeff Corey), are sitting on a lot of individual pieces of evidence that they just can’t seem to piece together, and his own lack of progress is driving Grant crazy. In addition to his stress over not cracking the case, he’s also trying to fend off Ann Gorman (Dorothy Patrick), a reporter for the lower-than-low tabloid rag “Four Star Crime,” who is doggedly pursuing him for his take on the case.

Then, one day when Grant is staring at all of the evidence they’ve compiled, he gets an idea. Instead of just sending out the standard, blasé description of what they think The Judge looks like, why not make a faceless but life-size dummy of him based on what they know? The idea is a hit within the department. They bring in all of the department’s cops and let them see it so that they get a better idea of his shape and size. They stand potential perps next to it in the lineup room to see how they measure up. They take pictures of it from various angles and canvass the neighborhoods where the crimes were committed to see if anyone recognizes him.

If you’re thinking that this idea sounds…wacky, you’re not off base. Why would a dummy be any better than a sketch, especially when in many instances they’re just using pictures of it to try to identify the killer? Fleischer needs to sell this as a serious idea and not a hammy plot device, and for the most part, he succeeds. The scene when the dummy is introduced becomes creepier as it progresses—with the sole light in the lineup room focused on the back of the dummy, Grant provides a voiceover through the speaker system from the point of view of The Judge, based on the psychological profile they’ve established for him. Fleischer sells the seriousness of this scene, which successfully walks the line between disturbing and unintentionally ridiculous, through creative camerawork and stark lighting on the dummy, making its anonymity and facelessness seem menacing. Later in the film, Grant, who has stayed late into the night, talks to the dummy, who he keeps sitting in a chair in his office, projecting his anger and frustration toward The Judge onto it. Again, while this scene could have played out as silly, it instead plays out as tense and suspenseful, because the way Fleischer stages and lights the scene, we’re immediately wondering if it really is just the dummy, or if The Judge has sneaked into the office and taken its place.

In order to sell such a gimmicky plot, Fleischer needs to get at least serviceable performances from Lundigan and Patrick, and despite one clunkily delivered exposition dump from Lundigan early on, they sell their roles well enough. He aids their performances through creative cinematography—the night scenes in the rain are particularly well done and affecting—and some of the aforementioned stylistic flourishes (Dutch angles, anyone?) add a nice touch. The climax of the film—a chase through an empty factory—is well-paced and exciting, and it contains a nice bit of symbolism at the very end.

No one would mistake Follow Me Quietly for an A picture. It’s short, it’s low budget, and the performances are good but not great. (Sidenote: about two-thirds of the way through the film, its B budget gets the better of it, resulting in a great unintentional laugh. Grant is sitting at his desk at night, and it starts to rain outside, signaling to him that The Judge may strike again. However, the seriousness of the moment is undercut by the fact that when the rain starts falling against his windows, it’s clearly coming from must have been several sprinkler heads just above the windows. The water sputters out of them initially as the water pressure builds up, then starts hitting the window in a fan pattern instead of falling straight down.) However, none of this detracts from the fact that this is a briskly paced, nicely photographed and highly enjoyable little noir with enough punch to keep you thoroughly entertained throughout its one hour running time.

Written by Nighthawk

The Small Back Room (1949)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:23:17 PST

The Small Back Room (1949) was the first film made between Alexander Korda’s London Films and The Archers--the name given to the partnership between filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The Archers, whose official working collaboration lasted for approximately 15 years, and whose personal relationship lasted until Pressburger’s death in 1988, had worked separately for Korda in the past and had just been dropped by the Rank Organisation. Rank precipitously dumped The Archers as they mistakenly predicted that their last film, The Red Shoes (1948) would be a financial failure. The Small Back Room was much praised by critics at the time of its release, but it was a box office failure, and Michael Powell attributes the film’s initial failure to the fact that it was seen as a war story--a subject that failed to draw the cinema-going public. The film is based on the superb novel by Nigel Balchin (Mine Own Executioner, Darkness Falls from the Air). Michael Powell was a die-hard Balchin fan and read all of his novels. Korda owned the rights to all Balchin’s novel, and so one of the great British films of the High-Noir period (a term derived from Andrew Spicer’s book Film Noir) was born.

In The Small Back Room (alternate title: The Hour of Glory), it’s London, Spring 1943 and Sammy Rice (David Farrar) is part of an obscure research team led by Professor Mair (Milton Rosmer) which operates under the auspices of the Ministry of Defence. London and its pubs are full of raucous crowds of servicemen and women determined to live whatever life they have left. In stark contrast to the prevailing and determined Carpe Diem attitude seen in the film’s slivers of nightlife, Sammy’s existence as a man with a “tin foot” is a sustained battle against pain, bitterness and alcoholism. Certainly those elements are more than enough demons for one man to fight, but Sammy, far from the front lines of battle, also faces a number of bureaucratic skirmishes within his own department.

The film begins with the arrival of the congenial, yet deadly-focused Capt. Dick Stuart (Michael Gough) who seeks the help of Mair’s research department. A number of unexplained explosions--most of which have claimed the lives of children--have led Stuart to the conclusion that “Jerry” is dropping explosive devices along the coastal regions of Britain. Stuart tells Mair that he’s there for advice, and that he’d like to know “how to handle it when we get out hands on one.” Specifically seeking the help of a fuse expert, Stuart is directed to Sammy. Sammy, however, has already left for the day, but secretary Sue (Kathleen Byron), who is Sammy’s secret love-interest, promises to track Sammy down. Sue calls The Lord Nelson pub and speaks to publican Knucksie (Sid James) who acknowledges that Sammy is there (already being a bit of a nuisance), so Sue, with Stuart in tow, goes to collect Sammy from the pub. There’s the sense, since it took just two phone calls to pinpoint Sammy’s location, that this is a familiar event. As the film plays out, it’s clear that The Lord Nelson is a frequent refuge for Sammy, and that he doesn’t always behave well when it comes to the subject of alcohol. Certainly the name of the pub cannot be a coincidence since Lord Nelson lost one arm and sight in one eye but still continued his military career, while in The Small Back Room, our hero, Sammy continues his job with just one foot. Sammy claims that painkillers do little to alleviate the pain of wearing his “tin foot,” and he argues that alcohol is much better than anything the doctors are willing to prescribe. There is, however, a psychological component to Sammy’s pain as he’s sometimes seen rubbing or whacking at the foot in his most pensive moments.

Back at his cozy flat with Sue and Stuart, Sammy is noticeably intrigued by the idea of a new, sophisticated type of booby-trap, and he agrees to help, so Stuart arranges to contact Sammy immediately when another explosive device is found. They both reason that the devices may look reasonably harmless, and this idea is endorsed in the not-too-distant future. Their next meeting occurs over the body of a dying soldier who manages to give Sammy and Stuart some vital information about one of the explosive devices.

While scenes including bomb disposal obviously provide the film with a great deal of tension, large portions of the film reveal Sammy’s other pressing struggles. At work, Professor Mair is being slowly eased out, and since Mair’s more familiar environment is academia, he’s blithely unaware that his days working for the government are numbered. Meanwhile, the rather sharp character, a shady civil servant named Pinker (Geoffrey Keen), who has a nebulous professional role, hints that Sammy can steer the department’s helm if he just plays the right political game. But Sammy isn’t a ‘yes’ man, and neither is he much of a committee man--unlike Sue’s boss, the slippery, hideously misogynistic R.B. Waring (played by the phenomenal Jack Hawkins). Professor Mair’s Waterloo occurs over the issue of new weaponry--specifically, the Reeves Gun--which has been tested recently and according to Sammy, found lacking. Waring raves about the gun and dismisses both the army and Sammy’s reservations about its abilities. We get the measure of Waring’s political and personal sliminess when he also dismisses, with derisive scorn, those men who ‘know their jobs.’ Another of Waring’s targets for elimination within the department is also the most vulnerable, the horribly damaged, cuckolded and stuttering fuse expert, Cpl. Taylor (Cyril Cusack).

The film’s title, The Small Back Room refers quite literally to the ridiculously small space in which these scientists work. One shot shows the ceiling with a grid through which shoes of passer-bys can be clearly, and distractingly, seen and heard. The fact that this motley crew of scientists is shoved into basically a cupboard underscores that idea that their work is undervalued, and indeed that conclusion is punctuated by a brief visit from a patronizing government minister (Robert Morley). Waring, of course, has recently grabbed a large office space for himself, replete with impressive furniture fitting for what he assumes is his imminent change of status once Wair is given the heave-ho. The amoral, ambitious Waring is one of those men who will do well on the sweat of others simply because he knows the political games played by committees and bureaucrats. The film creates an interesting subtle parallel between the invisible forces that drop the mysterious new explosive device and the revelation of the banality of the committees that select weaponry with little acknowledgement of the consequences. Sammy, for all of his flaws and complications, brings some humanity to the issue of war, and for him, ultimately he can no more endorse a gun that may cost precious lives, than he can allow Waring to run a department without some degree of culpability.

Another area of Sammy’s life that’s problematic and under scrutiny is his complicated relationship with Sue. In Balchin’s book, they live together, but since censorship would never pass such a radical idea, the script inserts one line in which Sue tells Stuart, who’s just met and is clearly smitten with Sue, that she lives across the hall. However, it’s never quite established if that is true or if the line is for Stuart’s benefit as much as for the censors--a double blind line if there ever was one in the history of cinema.

As a noir protagonist, Sammy is seen both figuratively and literally as an isolated individual whose tenuous link to civilization is through Sue. Already hideously damaged when the film begins, he manages to juggle a job of immeasurable responsibility with physical problems, alcoholism and a badly battered psyche. Several scenes depict an increasingly restless and edgy Sammy as he waits for Sue. As time ticks away with Sammy in solitude, a sense of panic and a low grade anger both brew inside Sammy’s mind while his personal demons wait, never far away, in the shadows.

Kathleen Byron and David Farrar as Sue and Sammy appear to be very comfortable with each other, and the frequent looks between them are both secretive and intuitive. Anyone else on the screen is definitely outside of their intimate, sexually powerful bond. They both appeared together in another Powell and Pressburger film: Black Narcissus (1947), another story of a tortured relationship. Kathleen Byron had an affair with director Michael Powell, and this resulted in him being named as the co-respondent in her divorce. The stunning cinematography from Christopher Challis makes incredible use of Kathleen Byron’s facial structure--that secret Mona Lisa gaze she has--illuminated by brilliant use of limited lighting which highlights her face to incredible effect.

The Small Back Room owes no small debt to German Expressionism--mostly in the scenes between Sammy and his precious whisky bottle which is not supposed to be opened until V-Day. Several scenes depict an enormous Highland Clan whiskey bottle with Sammy in its threatening shadow, and of course, time, also Sammy’s enemy appears in these scenes as a gigantic alarm clock. While Sammy’s alcoholism is featured in the book, these hallucinatory nightmares sequences are exclusively for the film.

In the interview with Michael Powell on the Criterion edition of The Small Back Room (excerpted from his memoir Million Dollar Movie), the director states that instead of Balchin’s sandy beach, the location for the intense bomb disposal scene, he immediately envisioned Chesil Beach. Several shots in the film capture the unique perspective of this coastline. Powell describes the area as showing “eternal England,” and no doubt this is also why Stonehenge is used for the site of the testing of the Reeves Gun. These two sites establish the antiquity and history of Britain and a way of life under assault from the Nazi war machine. Powell and Pressburger films always uniquely exploited landscape to illuminate character and psychology, and what better way to depict Britain at war than including scenes of Chesil Beach and Stonehenge.

The Small Back Room is an anguished dark masterpiece and certainly one of the most important British films of the century. Balchin’s novel, throbbing with despair is darker still. Balchin’s Sammy isn’t quite as heroic, and the novel concludes differently with less optimism but with a certain grim determined acceptance.

Written by Guy Savage

Chinatown at Midnight (1949)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:57:21 PST

“You’re a very paradoxical young man.”

Shops closing early! There’s a killer thief on the loose in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, and the cops are hot on his trail. That’s a bare bones plot description if ever there was one, yet it jibes well with Chinatown at Midnight — a rabbit punch of a movie that cashes in on the success of He Walked by Night, the granddaddy of film noir cop procedurals, released to theaters just a year before. It’s a fast paced little movie with just a few cheap sets and scenes glued together by plenty of voice-of-god narration. But it also boasts some solid basic filmmaking; looking good in spite of its meager budget, with some striking photography and a few flashy sequences that belie its doghouse budget. The film is ruined by its sloppy, often nonsensical script, though to its credit it manages to dodge the expected racial stereotypes.

The man on the lam is Clifford Ward, played by Hurd Hatfield, who had a modest acting career after making a big splash as the title character in 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Hatfield seems a little too urbane to be credible as the unbalanced heist man-cum-killer in this film, but the movie does its best to justify his casting by spinning the murderer as a multi-lingual dandy whose bachelor pad landlady raves about his “excellent taste for a young man.” Hatfield’s Clifford is in cahoots with an upscale interior decorator Lisa Marcel (Jacqueline DeWit). She locates expensive pieces in expensive shops; then he shows up at closing time and knocks the places over. Maybe he loves the older woman, maybe he doesn’t — who knows the angles? She doesn’t make eyes at him and she doesn’t pay him off either. We never get the dope on their relationship. Maybe Clifford just likes to takes risks — he certainly has no qualms about killing. Just after we meet him, he visits a curio shop in Chinatown and guns down the young clerk; when the girl in the back room tries to call the cops he blasts her too. In a veer from the expected, Clifford actually picks up the receiver and completes her phone call: “come quick, there’s been a robbery and shooting!” The zinger is that his frantic exchange with the switchboard operator is in fluent Chinese.

So that’s why we get Hurd Hatfield instead of a tough monkey like Charles McGraw or Mark Stevens. Our boy is able to call in his crime with a Cantonese dialect, convincing the cops that their quarry must be Chinese. From that moment onward Chinatown at Midnight is a cat-and-mouse game between Clifford and San Francisco’s finest, led by the pugnacious Captain Brown, played by iconic film noir actor Tom Powers. (His name might not be that familiar, but Powers probably appeared in a million crime films — often as a cop — though he got his bust in the noir hall of fame for playing the ill-fated Mr. Dietrichson in the big one, Double Indemnity.) The procedural aspects of Chinatown at Midnight are handled with care, showing viewers a few of the clever ruses used by the police to ferret out a suspect — the best is when a clever matron poses as a census taker in order to search the flophouses and tenements. The film is divided roughly in half between Clifford’s occasionally witty escapes and the semi-doc cop stuff, but the thing never really gets off the ground until the final reel, when Clifford starts to knuckle under from a nagging case of malaria and the ever-tightening dragnet. He finally takes to the rooftops, automatic in hand, for an exciting showdown with the buys in blue — pity our boy Clifford: they've got Tommy guns.

This is a fairly competent and successful effort for all involved, except the hack screenwriters. The worst moment in the story has to be the most eyeball-rolling example of shoddy police work in the entire canon of B movies — one that altogether sums up the visual strengths and the narrative weaknesses of the film: there’s a sequence in the middle that places Clifford within arm’s reach of justice. Having just killed again to keep the law at bay, he is forced to hide in a darkened room after his shots draw the police. What follows is exciting stuff, well-edited, strikingly filmed, and very tense — culminating in a pitch black exchange of gunfire that brings to mind Henry Morgan’s big moment in Red Light. It’s an exhilarating scene, the sort of thing that draws us all to film noir. Yet after Clifford makes a break for it, shedding his jacket, tie, and .38 revolver in a back alley garbage bin, he attempts to hide by shuffling into a queue of four or five down-and-outers waiting in a bread line. When the dicks come huffing and puffing around the corner a breath or two later, they just give up — tossing their hands into the air without so much as a look around, completely giving up, but not before adding for our sake, “Funny, he didn’t look Chinese to me!” Too bad for them that their rabbit is five feet away, and all they have to do is brace the hobos in order to put Clifford in the little green room at Quentin. They can’t even manage a pathetic “which way did he go?”

Photographed by prolific journeyman Henry Freulich, clearly influenced by John Alton, Chinatown at Midnight is heavily steeped in the noir visual style. The cardboard sets and low rent cast are more emblematic of a poverty row effort than a second-feature from a little major like Columbia, but the studio’s B-roll exteriors of various San Francisco locales almost pull off the illusion of an on-location shoot, and further separate it from Poverty Row. The acting here is merely passable and the script is a bloody shame, but Freulich and director Seymour Friedman give the finished film has a strong visual identity, even if everything else is from hunger.

Chinatown at Midnight (1949)
Directed by Seymour Friedman
Produced by Sam Katzman
Written by Robert Libbott and Frank Burt
Cinematography by Henry Freulich
Art Direction by Paul Palmentola
Starring Hurd Hatfield, Jacqueline DeWit, and Tom Powers
Distributed by Columbia Pictures
Running time 67 minutes.

Written by The Professor His blog is Where Danger Lives!

I Walk Alone (1948)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:16:01 PST

It's the battle of the strutting, preening alpha males!

Fighting out of the blue corner, with the prison pallor, the brand new cheap suit, and the "not good, not bad" room at the Avon, it's Frankie Madison (Burt Lancaster), former world heavyweight champion of bootlegging.

Fighting out of the red corner, with the jutting cleft chin, the expensive wardrobe, and the controlling interest in the swank night spot the Regent Club, it's Noll "Dink" Turner (Kirk Douglas), the current world heavyweight champion of upscale criminality.

Let's get ready to ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuumble!

When the film begins, Frankie, a former hard man in the bootlegging rackets who came up in a tough neighborhood and knew how to handle himself, has just gotten out of prison after a 14-year stretch for murder.

He's picked up at Grand Central Station by his old friend Dave (Wendell Corey), who's now the bookkeeper for Dink Turner.

The killing that sent Frankie to prison occurred when he and Dink were running rye whiskey from Canada through upstate New York and they blew through a roadblock set up by hijackers, which led to a chase and a gun battle that left one of the hijackers dead. Afterward, Dink and Frankie split up and agreed to go 50-50 for each other, no matter what happened or which one of them got nabbed.

All of Turner's men call him "Noll" now, but Frankie mostly still refers to him as "Dink." When Dave takes Frankie to the Regent Club, Frankie recognizes his old friend Dan (Mike Mazurki), a hulking mug who used to be behind the door of Dink and Frankie's speakeasy the Four Kings, staring through a little peephole. Now he's out front, in a snappy uniform.

A lot has changed in 14 years, but Frankie's still the same guy he was when he went to prison.

Dink tells him, "The world's spun right past you, Frankie. In the '20s you were great. In the '30s you might've made the switch, but today you're finished. As dead as the headlines the day you went into prison." (On New Year's Day, 1930, Burt Lancaster was 16 years old and Kirk Douglas had just turned 13, so I think both men might be a little young for the roles they're playing.)

The Regent Club was built on the force of Dink's personality. It was his personality that controlled Frankie back in their bootlegging days. He expects the force of his personality to still be able to get Frankie to do what he wants, but all of his smooth talk and finesse only carries him so far.

Frankie is bitter than Dink never came to personally visit him in prison, and instead sent Dave, even though the prison was only an hour's drive on the new parkway. All Dink did was send Frankie a carton of cigarettes a month.

Dink tells Frankie he feels terrible about never coming to see him, but that he just couldn't be associated with a convicted murderer when he was building up a high-class joint like the Regent Club. Back in the days of the Four Kings they ruled things by force, but now Dink deals with banks and lawyers, and his nightclub has a Dun & Bradstreet rating.

Dink manages to deflect Frankie for a little while by setting him up with his paramour Kay Lawrence, who's played by the angular, dead-eyed beauty Lizabeth Scott. Dink tells Kay he wants her to find out what Frankie really wants, so he can help him, but she can't help falling for Frankie a little, especially after Dink shows his true colors by planning to marry the wealthy Mrs. Alexis Richardson (Kristine Miller) while telling Kay that it's just to increase his wealth and prestige, and his upcoming nuptials don't have to change anything between him and Kay.

Frankie is volatile and brutish. He wants what's his. But he's like a bulldozer and Dink is like a silk curtain. No matter how hard he comes at him, Dink just seems to slide harmlessly to one side.

Burt Lancaster senses that they may be in trouble.

Dink tells Frankie that their 50-50 agreement was based on their partnership in the Four Kings, not on anything future. Dave brought Frankie a lot of things to sign in prison that he didn't read very carefully, and one of them was a dissolution of his partnership in the Four Kings. After closing costs, plus 6% interest compounded over 14 years, there's $2,912 Frankie has coming to him. Dink makes it an even $3,000 and wishes him well. Frankie wants half of everything Dink has, but Dink doesn't think Frankie's entitled to anything Dink earned on his own after the Four Kings closed down. "How can you collect on a race when you don't hold a ticket?" Dink asks Frankie rhetorically.

This confrontation occurs about two-thirds of the way through the film, and it's a great sequence. Burt Lancaster was a former acrobat and circus performer, and he was always wonderful at using his body. When he finally realizes how little he can do to get what he wants from Dink, he stands alone in the middle of Dink's conference room, his fists balled, bent over in anguish.

I Walk Alone was directed by Byron Haskin and produced by Hal B. Wallis. The screenplay is by Charles Schnee, and it's based on the play Beggars Are Coming to Town by Theodore Reeves.

It's not a bad film, but it's not good enough to be called a classic. Part of the problem is that it too often strays from its most compelling feature, the snarling macho men at its center who oppose each other. I was really caught up in the story when Dink denies Frankie his half and Frankie vows to kill him, but then the story veers into less interesting territory. Where does Dave's loyalty lie? What does Dink have over Dave? Will Dave be able to break free? Does Kay really love Frankie? And so on.

Lancaster and Douglas are both outsized personalities who dominate the screen. By the time things come to a head two-thirds of the way through the film, the picture might have been more compelling if it focused solely on them and their head-to-head conflict, instead of spinning off a variety of plot threads.

The film ends with a shootout in a darkened room that we've seen a hundred times before and will probably see a thousand times again. Like everything else in the film, it's not terrible, but it's too run-of-the-mill to be truly outstanding.

I Walk Alone is definitely worth seeing if you're a die-hard fan of either of the two lead actors, and worth a look for film noir fans who've never seen it. If, however, you're looking for something truly great, I Walk Alone never quite rises above the level of entertaining mediocrity.

Written by Adam Lounsbery

Dark City (1950)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:39:35 PST

Dark City (1950) is commonly listed by film experts as an important film in the noir canon. I have a feeling it may be because of the title. Dark City (directed by William Dieterle), The Dark Corner, The Dark Mirror, Dark Passage and Dark Waters all are consider noir and share a similar monikers. They all certainly have the right “look.” But only The Dark Corner and Dark Passage are shady and dim enough while the rest are just handsome melodramas.

After rewatching Dark City again (recently released on DVD – and looking great-- by Olive Films) I find myself agreeing with Jon Tuska's opinions in his book on noir (Dark Cinema – see the pattern here?) who calls the film “a fine example of film noir malgré.”

The story starts out just right (well, after Charlton Heston does his walk down the city street behind credits. Carrying a wrapped box – later revealed to be a stuffed bunny for his girl for Easter. Seriously, I could invalidate the movie as noir in the first 30 seconds.) But after that. Heston's workplace – a bookie joint --is shut down by the cops for the third time in as many months and the mugs working there are beginning to show signs of the pressure getting to them. Their payoffs aren't getting them anything. (The gang of professional gamblers could be an earlier generation of the gang in Mamet's House of Games.)

Later at the nightclub, Heston chats with an out-of-towner that's flashing a check for 5 grand. Gears move in his head and a poker game is set up. The gamblers let Arthur Winant (a perfectly cast Don DeFore [Too Late for Tears also with Liz Scott]) win the first night only to clean him out the second night forcing him to sign over the check to them. Upset that he lost his company's money, Winant goes back to his hotel and hangs himself. With the check uncashed and now “dynamite” if the cops find it, the gamblers hold on to it. Then one by one the card sharks begin to get killed off – hanged after being strangled by Winant's crazy brother. The cops, lead by Dean Jagger, are suspicious but have no proof the gamblers were involved.

Dark City then leaves that noir “city” and heads to Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Danny Haley goes looking for Winant's wife – to get a photo of the man who is out to kill him. He quickly bonds with Winant's son and, surprisingly, Winat's widow. Once he finally reveals to the grieving wife that he's not from an insurance company but instead is one of the gamblers that fleeced him, Victoria (a wasted Viveca Lindfors) kicks him out and then legs it to Vegas to meet up with Augie (Jack Webb). There he finds another one of his gambling partners, Soldier (Harry Morgan – playing the limping, simple-minded war vet.) He, despite being the “punchy” one, gets Haley and later his lingering lounge-singing girlfriend Fran (Lizabeth Scott) jobs. Haley deals cards at a casino – every day looking around wondering if the man who wants to kill him is getting closer.

After this long, drawn-out middle, he's finally tracked down and the final confrontation happens. It doesn't hurt that the killer turns out to be Moose Malloy. But man, it takes a long time to get there.

The problems with Dark City are a combination of things. First veteran director Dieterle hasn't been dealt much of a hand by his scriptwriters (he did, however, have the moody camerawork of Victor Milner and the appropriately disconsolate score by Franz Waxman that fits noir like a glove). Second, the lead actors. Charlton Heston is soon to be a cinematic monumental hero thanks to Cecil B. DeMille. In Dark City, he actually starts to resemble that familiar hero quite closely after first playing the heel. Haley saves everyone and rehabilitates himself by the time credits roll – hell, even the cops believe and help him in the end. That's a big no-no in noir. When I finshed watching I could feel the 50's patriotic celebration of values and family life which dominated 50's films and certainty tainted many noir films – but not all-- that followed.

Heston isn't helped by the dame. Lizabeth Scott stops the film in her tracks when she lip syncs torch songs at the club. She seems to only exist to be the love interest and to model swanky gowns. And although they try to play up Haley's problem with relationships he seems to be always doing the right thing by his woman. Scott played identical roles in Dead Reckoning, The Racket, and I Walk Alone.

What works? As I mentioned previously, the score and camerawork. The dialog occasionally is perfect – but the noir-ish banter is in short supply. A few of the lines are wonderfully memorable.

Add to that the excellent supporting cast. Ed Begley (Sr.) is given a rare meaty role as the worry-wart gambler with a painful ulcer. I'm not a fan of Jack Webb but he's very good as the trickster that always seems to go too far. DeFore is great when he's sweating at the poker table realizing that he's been suckered. Mike Mazurki presence in any crime film is a plus.

Finally little Harry Morgan (credited as Henry Morgan.) He will always be the characters he played in M*A*S*H and Dragnet but his movie roles – especially in noir – should not be overlooked. The Well, Red Light, Moonrise, and The Big Clock all showcase his talents. In Dark City he plays the “punchy” guy – a role he was suited for with his droopy eyes and small size. In Dark City, he turns out to be the only one with any sense.

Dark City is not an essential noir, despite the title and some critics labeling it so. I do, however, think there are enough positive reasons to see it. Even more so if you love noir and are willing to forgive the saggy middle.

Written by Steve-O

While the City Sleeps (1956)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:53:04 PST

Preliminary disclosure: I’m a huge Fritz Lang fan.

In my early twenties, when I first started to discover the world of film outside of contemporary Hollywood productions, Lang’s earlier films were some of the touchstones by which I quickly started to measure the quality of all other films. M (1931) remains a favorite; Lang's expressionistic cinematography, dark subject matter and perfect pacing foreshadowed the subject matter and stylistic touches of countless film noir projects from other directors that wouldn’t arrive on the Hollywood scene for more than a decade. Once he arrived in Hollywood, he also directed many excellent noirs within the studio system, such as The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), Clash by Night (1952) and The Big Heat (1953).

So when I finally sat down to watch the remastered Warner Archive release of While the City Sleeps (1956)—finally available in a decent print and in its correct aspect ratio—I had high expectations. And slowly but surely, Lang destroyed them.

The film begins with two events—a murder and a death by natural causes. The two quickly become linked, because Amos Kyne, the man who dies of old age, ran a media empire and wanted the murder story on the front page of his newspaper, The Sentinel. The murder lends itself to sensationalism—after all, the murderer wrote a cryptic message (“Ask Mother”) on the wall of the female victim’s living room with her lipstick. Kyne’s hapless son, played by Vincent Price, takes over the company, even though he and everyone else who worked for his father know that he doesn’t have a clue when it comes to running his father’s business. To establish his power, he decides to pit the three men in charge of various divisions with the company—the paper’s managing editor, the head of the wire service, and the chief photographer—against each other by creating the position of “Executive Director” and then awarding the job to whoever can crack the case of the lipstick murderer.

While the City Sleeps was, along with Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), Lang’s Hollywood swan song. He would leave America shortly after these films were released and never direct another American film. Apparently, he’d gotten fed up with the Hollywood system, and unfortunately, his fatigue clearly manifests itself in his lackluster direction of this film. Every aspect of While the City Sleeps—the acting, the cinematography, the pacing, even the sets—come across flat and uninteresting. And for a film that boasts a fantastic noir cast—Dana Andrews (who would also work with Lang on the superior Beyond a Reasonable Doubt), Rhonda Fleming, Vincent Price, and Ida Lupino, among others—the potential seems especially wasted. The film is populated by basic, low-budget sets—there isn’t a single exterior scene in While the City Sleeps for the entire first hour—that are unimaginatively lit and perfunctorily used. The plot of the film has potential, but the actors all seem like they’re phoning it in, and Lang seems satisfied to let them. For the first hour and fifteen minutes, nothing seems to happen. Sure, there are double-crosses and backstabbings as the characters vie for the Executive Director position, but it’s all done with such a ho-hum attitude that it’s hard to care about the proceedings any more than the characters seem to care.

What makes watching this film even harder is the fact that a flash of Lang’s genius briefly shows itself toward the end of the film, when Dana Andrews, who plays a television reporter/writer who doesn’t want to get involved with the underhanded competition but nonetheless does, is chasing down the killer (who, in another failing, we never really get to know) on foot through a subway tunnel. The scene is strikingly photographed and quickly paced, and even calls to mind the manhunt for Orson Welles’ Harry Lime in the sewers at the conclusion of The Third Man. For roughly five minutes, fans of Lang’s work are treated to a glimpse of Lang’s genius as a director. But unfortunately, the scene quickly ends, and we’re left with a denouement that remains as flat as the rest of the picture.

Lang’s other final Hollywood film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, resonates much more than While the City Sleeps, because in Doubt, Lang was able to give free reign to the cynicism he so clearly possessed regarding the American film industry. But in While the City Sleeps, he was stuck with a script that required the typical Hollywood “happy” ending. It’s no wonder he didn’t try harder to make this film a success.

Written by Nighthawk

Hatter's Castle (1942)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:27:05 PST

“He who sows the storm, reaps the whirlwind.”

In 1942, Mrs. Miniver, the winner of six academy awards was the biggest box office draw in Britain while the gothic noir Hatter’s Castle, from director Lance Comfort and the Paramount British production company was the box office runner-up. Could two films be more dissimilar? The overly sentimental Mrs. Miniver, a film used for WWII propaganda, extolled the virtues of the family and the strengths of women while Hatter’s Castle takes a dark, pessimistic and bleak look at the family and the vulnerability of women. Hatter’s Castle, currently shamefully out of print, is based on A.J. Cronin’s first novel. Cronin’s novels became a fertile ground for filmmaking, and the impressive list includes: The Citadel (1938), The Stars Look Down (1940), The Keys to the Kingdom (1944), The Green Years (1946), The Spanish Gardener (1956), and Web of Evidence (1959). Cronin, a medical doctor who gave up practicing once his writing career became successful, also created the popular Dr. Finlay character, the much-loved subject of a television programme that ran from 1962-1971.

British noir often depicts the struggles of the individual to rise in the rigid class structure of British society, and so Hatter’s Castle is a perfect example of one man’s obsessive and self-destructive aim to become a member of the gentry. Since Hatter’s Castle is a gothic British noir, it also contains elements of melodrama. Adultery, rape, suicide, attempted murder, theft, cruelty, and illegitimacy all appear in the film, but in Hatter’s Castle melodrama is subtly woven into an intense character study of paternal malevolence and hypocrisy. Gothic drama frequently emphasizes the vulnerability of women and the predatory nature of men, and Hatter’s Castle certainly fits that scenario. This is the story of Brodie (Robert Newton)--a heartless, mean-spirited, cruel man whose fate is ensured by his impossible vanity and pride. While Brodie’s actions create countless enemies, since this is noir, it’s relevant that ultimately he opens the door to his own destruction. Brodie is one of the most chilling villains in British noir and while he’s a perfectly respectable member of society--a man who never breaks a law--he’s psychotic--although his insanity is initially masked by the paternalistic Victorianism of his times. Brodie, then, is significantly not a criminal, but he repeatedly, and with obvious relish, transgresses moral law.

The novel, published in 1931, is set in 1879, in the small, fictional town of Levenford in the Firth of Clyde, not far from Glasgow. Brodie is the bombastic, proud, vain owner of the local hat shop. Grierson (Henry Oscar), the obsequious owner of the ironmonger shop next door complains about Brodie’s influence: “Does nothing ever happen in this town without Brodie having a say in it. What is he anyway? A hatter and not even a good one” Behind Brodie’s back he’s the local joke--a man who has over-extended his bank account by building a preposterous house complete with ramparts and a suit of armor. The house, known derisively as “Hatter’s Castle” is a monument to Brodie’s pride and vanity. He imagines that he’s connected to the peerage, and thinking himself too good to mingle with the proles, he gives himself airs and graces and tries to ingratiate himself with the local gentry. Most of his peers find Brodie too much of a bully to challenge him to his face, but enemies amass behind his back. There are only two men who tackle Brodie. One of those men is Lord Winton (Stuart Winsell) who vehemently and emphatically denies any family connection to Brodie, and the other is the new doctor in town, Dr. Renwick (James Mason).

The film aptly begins when Brodie is at the prime of life and at the peak of his nastiness, and in the film’s opening scenes, Brodie also sows the first seeds of his spectacular destruction. It’s the Winton Arms and the local merchants and men of means meet in an upstairs chamber to discuss whether or not they should fund the appointment of a doctor to the local school. The issue may go either way, but once Brodie makes an appearance, he squashes the idea. He’s firmly entrenched in Victorian ideals, and the education reforms in London mean little to him--especially if that change is going to cost money. This initial scene shows how Brodie dominates and bullies his peers, winning no friends in the process. He has no elaborate speeches to make on the issue and as usual his way of annihilating discussion is to dominate and control.

To add to his pride, vanity, hypocrisy, and cruelty, Brodie has another weakness, and that’s his indulgence for his brassy mistress, Winton Arms barmaid Nancy (Enid Stamp-Taylor). Brodie keeps Nancy in relative luxury, and lavishes her with trinkets while his wife and children suffer from his stinginess. Turning on the flattery, Nancy wheedles a job in Brodie’s hat shop for her slimy ex-lover, Dennis (Emlyn Williams) by pretending that he’s her step-brother in dire need of a fresh start. Brodie has no problem firing his elderly, faithful long-term employee to make way for Dennis. The opportunistic Dennis loses no time sizing up the best way to exploit Brodie, and imagining she’s an heiress, he sets his sights on Brodie’s sweet, innocent, brow-beaten daughter, Mary (Deborah Kerr). Dennis also slyly takes advantage of ironmonger Grierson’s financial problems to broker a deal that will bring a business rival right next door to Brodie. All this happens under Brodie’s nose while he’s busy bullying everyone who dares to speak a word in his presence.

Brodie is an obnoxious bully with his peers, but he’s unleashed at home, and his family quake in terror when they hear his step. His washed-out mouse of a wife (Beatrice Varley) is reduced to slave status, and although she’s ill and in pain, she’s constantly bullied into scrubbing Brodie’s castle in a futile and never-ending attempt to make him happy. When Mary asks Dr. Renwick to visit her mother and give his opinion, the request results in an ugly confrontation with Brodie. Brodie would rather take the advice of old-timer, Dr. Lawrie (Laurence Hanray) who, naturally, agrees with Brodie that there's nothing wrong with Mrs. Brodie. Renwick, on the other hand, diagnoses end-stage stomach cancer and suggests that Brodie employ a servant to give his wife relief. As a result, Mary secretly defies her father’s command that Renwick is not to come to the house again, and from this point, Dr. Renwick is forced to visit Mrs. Brodie in secret. A slow-burning love affair begins to grow between Mary and Renwick. Normally Renwick would be an excellent catch for the daughter of a shop owner, but Brodie runs Renwick off--ostensibly because he’s not ‘good’ enough for his daughter, but there’s the underlying idea that this is more about control, and Brodie would rather keep Mary as an unpaid servant.

Brodie’s son, Angus (Tony Bateman) appears to be his father’s pride and joy, and while he may appear to fare better than the females in the Brodie household, ultimately his role of Brodie Heir Apparent comes with a price. He’s an unhealthy lad, nervous and terrified of his father’s displeasure and the object of derision at school. Angus struggles to win the academic success his father demands, and cringes when his father begins his oft-repeated tirade about Angus’s imagined, bright future as a peer of the realm.

Gradually over the course of the film, Brodie sows the seeds of his own destruction, and while Brodie is seen as an out-of-control male, he’s also an extreme product of the unhealthy, unpleasant society in which he operates. Brodie’s hypocrisy seems to have no limits--he fires a loyal employee in order to please his mistress, but expects his customers to be loyal to his shop. He lectures Grierson about living beyond his means while he faces bankruptcy. He accuses his daughter of “dragging his name” through the “mire” and yet no one has shamed the family more than he. By the end of the film, however, we see Brodie’s hypocrisy as just part of the general unhealthiness of Levenford--a town which fostered Brodie’s cruelty and whose residents now condemn Mary rather than acknowledge that she, too, was a victim of her father’s cruelty.

The camera focuses on Brodie’s physical size so shots emphasize his intimidating height and chest girth. Interior shots dominate. This is a film in which structures add a great deal to atmosphere, so a large chunk of the action takes place in Hatter’s Castle and in Brodie’s shop. As Brodie’s life deteriorates, his shop subtly falls into decline, but just as Brodie is his own worst enemy and brings on his own destruction, so destruction of Brodie’s property is literally, and finally, in his own hands. Note that nature often appears to reflect Brodie’s black mood or even further his devilish schemes.

Beatrice Varley who played Mrs. Brodie is a British noir regular--just compare her roles in Hatter’s Castle and Tiger in the Smoke to appreciate the range of her ability. Robert Newton who played Brodie is best remembered as Long John Silver in Disney’s Treasure Island. On a note of trivia, the accident in the film is a depiction of the real-life Tay Bridge disaster of 1879.

Written by Guy Savage

The Whip Hand (1951)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:15:07 PST

whip hand

n.

1. A dominating position; advantage. 2. The hand in which a whip is held.

William Cameron Menzies had one of the most unusual careers in the cinema. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Menzies studied at Yale and The University of Edinburgh, served in the Army during World War I, and then attended the Arts Students League in New York. Soon he was an accomplished draftsman. From there, he worked his way to Hollywood, and joined the Famous Players / Lasky Picture Company, and did the Art Direction for such films as The Thief of Bagdad (1924), The Bat (1926), Sadie Thompson (1928), and Tempest (1928). This early work won him great critical notice. At the very first Academy Awards, held on May 16, 1929, Menzies won for Best Art Direction for both The Dove and Tempest.

Menzies at work on Gone With the Wind

Menzies also created an early series of short films somewhat like the Walt Disney Silly Symphonies cartoons, attempting to combine visual imagery with classical music, in Irish Fantasy (1929), Impressions of Tchaikovsky’s Overture 1812 (1930), Hungarian Rhapsody (1930) and Paul Dukas' The Wizard's Apprentice (1930). This work led to more assignments, on such films as The Iron Mask (1929), Alibi (1929), Condemned (1929), Coquette (1929), Puttin' on the Ritz (1930), and Paramount’s bizarre version of Alice in Wonderland (1933), which featured Charlotte Henry as Alice, W. C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Edna May Oliver as the Red Queen, Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, Edward Everett Horton as The Mad Hatter, and numerous other luminaries in other roles. The film’s curious use of ornate costumes, coupled with a lopsided and episodic screenplay by Menzies and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, made the film at once deeply unusual, and also a notable box office failure of the era; the film was simply too outré for mainstream audiences.

Around this time, Menzies also began to publish his drawings for the sets he designed in various journals, seeking to draw more attention to his work as a primary creative force behind the visual look of the films he worked on. Typically lavish and enormous in size and scope, with a strong stream of romanticism and his trademark forced-perspective framing, Menzies’ work soon attracted even more attention, and he was drafted to design and direct the ambitious British production Things to Come (1936), which H.G. Wells adapted from his own novel, and hampered the production seriously by giving Menzies a free hand visually, but insisting that his long-winded dialogue remain intact.

Thus, while Things to Come has justly gained fame as a prophetic science-fiction spectacle, and its sets and overall design are deeply impressive (the film predicts, among other things, enormous flat screen televisions and numerous other technological advances that are now commonplace), Menzies took the blame for the somewhat stilted acting style adopted by the film’s stars Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, Sir Cedric Hardwicke and others, when in fact he really had little say in the matter. As a result, no further “A” level work as a director was immediately forthcoming.

Thus, Menzies returned to the States, and worked on the 1938 production of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and then received the assignment for which he is best known; production design of Gone With the Wind (1939). This was also the first film on which the term “production designer” was used, for Menzies did indeed design the entire film from start to finish, and though Gone With the Wind went through a number of directors, including George Cukor and Victor Fleming, who finished the film, it was Menzies’ overall vision that put the film over in terms of its lavish and extravagant texture and production values. From then on, Menzies was regularly employed as production designer on any number of films, but the films he directed were few and far between, and all are very, very unusual projects. Address Unknown (1944) is based on Kressmann Taylor (real name: Kathrine Kressmann Taylor)’s short story of the same name, and is in many ways a noir film; it tells the tale of two friends – Martin Schulz and Max Eisenstein -- who are art dealers. Both were born in Germany, and when Hitler rises to power, Martin Schulz returns to Germany and becomes an ardent Nazi, much to the dismay of his partner, Max, who is Jewish. When Max’s daughter Griselle (K.T. Stevens) is arrested as a Jew, Martin refuses to help her, and she is killed by the Gestapo. In retaliation, Max begins to send a series of increasingly cryptic messages to Martin, seeming to be in a code of some sort, which “implicates” Martin in a plot against the Reich. As Max sends more and more messages, Martin becomes frantic, and begs for Max to stop, but he will not relent, and finally, a message comes back stamped simply “Address Unknown,” signifying that Martin has been killed himself by Hitler’s minions.

In the film, however, it is Martin's son Heinrich (Peter van Eyck) who, still in American and in love with Griselle from afar, who sends the messages that seal his father’s fate, a significant twist on the original narrative. Menzies’ films of Address Unknown, unavailable for years, has recently been reissued on archival DVD, and displays Menzies’ usual bravura style, with extreme close-ups, exaggerated depth perspective, and empty, ominous sets that extend into infinity, accentuating the cold, empty world of the film’s protagonists. After this came much work as a production designed on numerous other films, and then Menzies’ peculiar Drums in the Deep South (1951), a Civil War film which can be viewed a sort of revisionist, downbeat Gone With the Wind, done for Howard Hughes’ RKO on a shoestring, and then The Whip Hand, which had one of the most curious production histories of any film, even a Howard Hughes production. As noted by the excellent TCM website,

“The working title of this film was The Man He Found. The film's release title, The Whip Hand is derived from horse-racing terminology, meaning someone who has the upper hand, or is in control. RKO production files, contained at the UCLA Arts-Special Collections Library, and Hollywood Reporter, New York Times and Los Angeles Times news items add the following information about the production: RKO purchased Roy Hamilton's original screen story in July 1949. Curt Siodmak worked on a draft of the screenplay in 1949, but the extent of his contribution to the final film, if any, has not been determined. In January 1950, Stanley Rubin was assigned to write and produce the picture. Although Rubin was replaced as producer by Lewis J. Rachmil, [Rubin would later have his name taken off the film] his contribution to the final script has not been determined. Some scenes were filmed in Big Bear Lake in Southern California's San Bernardino Mountains, and at the RKO ranch in Encino. The picture, which was shot in great secrecy, was first set in postwar New England. The original story line featured a plot to hide the still-alive Adolf Hitler [Bobby Watson, the perennial Hitler of 1940s movies]. In November 1950, after viewing a rough cut of the film, RKO head Howard Hughes ordered extensive retakes. Hughes demanded that the Hitler plot line be replaced with the Communist germ warfare story . . . [T]he film cost $376,000 to make and lost $225,000 at the box office.”

That’s the story of the film’s production in a nutshell, but in an interview with Tom Weaver, the film’s star Elliott Reid offered some additional details. An associate of Orson Welles and John Houseman, and primarily a radio and stage actor from New York, Reid got the job after a solid test reading at RKO, and was summarily cast as Matt Corbin, a reporter for the fictitious American View magazine. On a vacation fishing trip to Lake Winnoga, Wisconsin, Corbin stumbles on a plot by Communists to pollute the United States water supply with deadly poison, headed by mad scientist Dr. Wilhelm Bucholtz (Otto Waldis), an ex-Nazi now aligned with the Communists, aided by tough guy Steve Loomis (Raymond Burr) and his associates.

After numerous dead-ends and double-crosses, Reid gets word to his editor in New York, the FBI show up at Lake Winnoga, machine guns at the ready, and blast their way into Bucholtz’s laboratory, where the doctor has been experimenting with human guinea pigs to perfect his deadly virus. In the film’s conclusion, the deformed and deranged victims of Bucholtz’s experimentation turn on him, and beat him to death, while the FBI looks on with satisfaction, and the threat of germ warfare is averted, at least momentarily. As a repertory actor, Reid felt that he lacked the requisite toughness of someone like Robert Mitchum, who would be more obviously at home in the part, and most conventional wisdom supports this view; personally, I think his casting is one of the strong points of the film, as his character is essentially a man in over his head, trying as best he can to deal with an almost incomprehensible situation. In his interview with Weaver, Reid praised Nick Musuraca’s typically superb black and white cinematography, as well as Stanley Rubin’s script, but complained that “Menzies never directed me, ever. He was very involved with the set-ups and the look of it. I think his focus was more on the visual aspect of a film.”

Reid also thought the last minute switch from Nazis to Communists was a mistake, and deplored what Hughes did to the final cut of the film, as well as the reshoots, but predictably had little say in the matter. Reid recalled that Waldis, a cultured and educated man, despised himself for appearing in the role of Dr. Bucholtz, because he knew that The Whip Hand, in its final form, would now play directly into the hands of the anti-Communist witch hunt that was just starting to take definitive shape in Hollywood. Reid hated doing the remakes, and interestingly, never even saw Hughes once during the entire production, and told Weaver that during the retakes, all of the cast members, at least in his view, seem disgusted with what they were doing, even if they were all still on salary. This may all be so, but The Whip Hand, which has yet to be released on archival DVD or in any other format, is an authentic talisman of 1950s ultra-paranoid hysteria, and despite Reid’s reservations, one of Menzies’ most brutally nihilistic works. As always, Menzies thrusts his characters into the forefront of the frame for their most significant moments, and designs the entire production with a dreamlike, nightmare perspective, so that even the few genuine exterior sequences on the lake at night have the feeling of impending doom.

Menzies would do on to direct only two more films before his death in 1957: The Maze (in black and white 3-D), and the equally paranoid sci-fi classic Invaders from Mars, shot in lurid color (1953). The Maze is atmospheric, but fails to really engage the viewer due to its astoundingly implausible plot line (a gigantic, undying frog dominates the lives of all the inhabitants of a remote Scottish castle); but Invaders from Mars, though produced for a pittance, is one of the most frightening and alienated films about 1950s childhood to emerge from the era; you can read my essay on Invaders from Mars, which is really a sci-fi noir, here.

Ultimately, The Whip Hand is a work as curious and resonant as the reclusive lifestyle led by its true auteur, Howard Hughes; while Menzies designed and executed the film, paying as little attention as possible to the actors but lavishing enormous attention on the sets and mise en scene of the film, it was Hughes own obsessions and paranoid delusions that really inform the bulk of the film’s convoluted narrative. Elliott Reid may have hated the changes Hughes executed after the film wrapped, but Hughes typically reshot films after they were finished, and in his own mind, the Communist threat was not only more timely than the Nazi angle; it was also more real. What Menzies did was to give solidity to Hughes’ paranoid fantasies, and it is this, more than anything else, that makes The Whip Hand simultaneously preposterous, and yet all too real; this was the way Howard Hughes saw the world in the 1950s, and Menzies brought his vision to life.

Author’s Note: Sources used or cited for this essay include Tom Weaver’s excellent interview with Elliott Reid in his book Earth vs. The Sci-Fi Filmmakers: 20 Interviews (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), pages 313 – 334, as well as Weaver’s interview with the film’s scenarist, Stanley Rubin, in the same volume, pages 335-343; the TCM Website for The Whip Hand production information; Wikipedia and IMDB for production dates, titles, cast and technical credits for Menzies’ earlier work; and David Bordwell’s superb essay on Menzies’ work, William Cameron Menzies: One Forceful, Impressive Idea, here.

Written by Wheeler Winston Dixon

About the Author: Wheeler Winston Dixon is the Ryan Professor of Film Studies, Coordinator of the Film Studies Program, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and Editor in Chief, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, of the Quarterly Review and Film and Video. His newest books are 21st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; Rutgers University Press, 2011); A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2010; reprinted 2011), Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (Edinburgh University Press /Rutgers University Press, 2009), and A Short History of Film (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; Rutgers University Press, 2008; reprinted 5 times through 2011). His website, Frame by Frame, can be found here, and a series of videos by Dixon on film history, theory and criticism, also titled Frame by Frame, can be found here.

The Crimson Kimono (1959)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:33:43 PST

Samuel Fuller never met an idea he wasn't willing to explore on film.

That he rarely did so in a focused or coherent way hasn't stopped him from winning legions of fans. In fact, it might be one of his selling points.

Fuller's films exist in their own bizarre world. It's a pulpy, slangy, slapdash place where plot threads are picked up and abandoned willy-nilly, where stuntmen's faces are clearly visible during fight scenes, and where emotion trumps reason.

The Crimson Kimono was the first movie Fuller made after signing a four-film deal with Columbia Pictures. It wasn't exactly a box office smash — after its first three bookings, it ended up playing on the bottom half of a double bill with Battle of the Coral Sea (1959).

On the other hand, it wasn't enough of a failure to stop Columbia from giving Fuller bigger stars to work with in his next film, Underworld U.S.A. (1961), which, incidentally, starred Cliff Robertson, the star of Battle of the Coral Sea.

The poster for The Crimson Kimono trades heavily on its interracial romance angle, with titillating lines like

"YES, this is a beautiful American girl in the arms of a Japanese boy!" and "What was his strange appeal for American girls?"

That the poster does not accurately reflect the film's subject matter should come as no surprise, but we'll get to that in a bit.

The opening credits of The Crimson Kimono unfold over a static shot of a painting. Through a series of dissolves, the painting is fleshed out, becoming a woman in a kimono, holding a fan. As soon as we've learned that this film was written, produced, and directed by Samuel Fuller, the camera zooms in on the lower right-hand corner of the canvas, and a paintbrush signs it with the name "Chris."

Then we're hit with a blast of raunchy jazz music and an aerial shot of Los Angeles at night. An enormous image of a blond stripper rises up like a skyscraper over the marquee of a burlesque show that features "Sugar Torch and Nudie Dolls."

Sugar Torch is played by Gloria Pall, who previously played strippers in uncredited roles in The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Jailhouse Rock (1957).

Fuller arrests the audience's attention early with the never-fail combo of sex and death. Pall's burlesque performance is almost unbearably sexy, but it's over quickly, and before long, Sugar Torch is fleeing barefoot down Main Street from an unseen assailant wielding a revolver.

She doesn't make it far.

Enter Detective Sgt. Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) and his partner, Detective Joe Kojaku (James Shigeta). Bancroft and Kojaku are more than just partners. Bancroft was Kojaku's commanding officer in the Korean War, and the two men are best friends who live together in a swanky bachelor pad.

Sugar Torch's sleazy manager, Casale (Paul Dubov), describes an act she was working on with some mystery men involving a samurai lover, a brick-crushing karate master, and — of course — Sugar in a crimson kimono.

When the detectives throw a hard line of questioning Casale's way, he responds "Who said I had anything against her? She was shifty as smoke, but I liked her!" Kojaku and Bancroft track down Sugar's mystery men — the karate master she wanted to involve in her burlesque act, Willy Hidaka (George Yoshinaga), a hulking Korean named Shuto (played by the Japanese-American wrestler and stuntman Fuji), and a creepy dark-haired man known only as "Hansel" (Neyle Morrow).

With the help of an alcoholic, fun-loving, middle-aged painter named Mac (Anna Lee), Bancroft also identifies the artist who painted Sugar in her kimono. Much to Bancroft's surprise, "Chris" turns out to be a beautiful young woman named Christine Downs (Victoria Shaw).

Up until this point, Bancroft has had little interest in the case. "Nobody cares who killed that tramp" he tells Kojaku, and claims Kojaku is only taking the case seriously because he's bucking for promotion to sergeant. But Chris piques Bancroft's interest when she speaks fondly of Sugar. "You liked her?" he says, sounding incredulous.

It's not long before Bancroft is head over heels in love with Chris without realizing that she doesn't quite share his feelings, and is herself falling in love with his best friend, Kojaku.

For a long stretch of the film, the affaires du coeur dominate the proceedings, and the mystery is all but forgotten.

Fuller had a unique way of being heavy-handed without having a coherent message. It didn't always work in his favor, but it does in The Crimson Kimono. If the message of the film had been something simple like "racism is bad," then the Japanese-American Kojaku resisting Chris's advances by saying "Chris, let's not trigger off a bomb!" wouldn't sound nearly as weird and ironic as it does.

The Crimson Kimono is a classic example of Fuller's restless artistry. Unlike his previous foray into Japanese culture, House of Bamboo (1955), which was a colorful, beautifully lensed heist picture that was entirely filmed in Japan, The Crimson Kimono is a black and white picture shot on the cheap in Los Angeles. But while House of Bamboo was ultimately somewhat lifeless, The Crimson Kimono is bursting with half-finished ideas and stylistic flourishes. For instance, the scene in which a shadowy assailant prepares to shoot Chris in her sorority house features a creepy phone call and P.O.V. shots from the shooter's point of view that would be at home in a horror movie. Fuller's storytelling isn't always coherent, but his willingness to throw things at the audience until something sticks is a lot of fun to watch.

Another example of this is the homage Fuller pays to the 442nd Regiment Combat Team, the highly decorated World War II military unit that consisted entirely of American soldiers of Japanese descent. He shows the plaques in their cemetery, but he doesn't spend much time explaining who the Nisei troops were or what they did.

He also has a lot of fun playing with images of duality in the film. Bancroft and Kojaku, despite being from different racial backgrounds, dress alike, talk alike, live together, and have the same kind of laid-back cool.

Neither Corbett nor Shigeta had ever appeared in a film before, but they both turn in excellent performances in The Crimson Kimono. Viewers today might not realize how revolutionary Shigeta's romantic scenes with Shaw were. There had been plenty of films about interracial romances before, but I can't recall seeing a film before this one that featured an Asian-American man and a white American woman together. Interestingly, Fuller paints a picture of Los Angeles in which Asian-Americans and white Americans freely intermingle, and the biggest stumbling block to Kojaku's relationship with Chris is Kojaku's loyalty to his friend and his own feelings of persecution.

I wouldn't call The Crimson Kimono a great film, but it's rarely boring. A lot of it comes off as half-baked, and the pieces of the puzzle don't always form a coherent whole, but that's pretty standard for a Samuel Fuller movie.

Written by Adam Lounsbery

Drive (2011)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:43:22 PST

New releases are rare at Noir of the Week, but it isn’t often that such a fully rendered yet unpretentious film noir hits theaters. Make no mistake: Drive is no period piece like L.A. Confidential or Chinatown; nor is it an homage to classic noir like Walter Hill’s 1978 The Driver (though it certainly winks and winks at that film); and it isn’t any Tarantino-esque retread of drive-in pulp. Drive is an exhilarating crime picture — one that marks the maturation of an important young director and one that will inevitably increase the wattage of Ryan Gosling’s nearly incandescent star. And although much of its power owes to the refreshing filmmaking Nicholas Winding Refn (Bronson, Valhalla Rising), who was named Best Director at Cannes, Drive is not an unconventional film, and it heartily embraces its ancestors. Perhaps it’s convenient at this moment to mention Quentin Tarantino once again, though only insofar as the experience of viewing Drive is like watching Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction for the first time. The subject matter may be familiar, but the director’s voice is so enthralling that while you are at once engrossed in the storytelling and performances, another part of you is excited at the myriad ways in which the movie breaks with Hollywood banality. And while Drive isn’t perfect, it is positively captivating. It manages to situate the central character types of forties film noir in modern Los Angeles, while synthesizing the peculiar austerity of William Friedkin and the gloss of Michael Mann. All of this is bound up in an operatically violent, visually striking, and even more intensely sounding movie, that in spite of its intentional stylishness manages to avoid wallowing in postmodern hogwash.

This is neither a heist movie nor a muscle car film. Those elements are part of the allure, meant to sell tickets, as is the curious appearance of Mad Men’s Christine Hendricks. (The trendy actress with the retro figure is in and out so fast — albeit spectacularly — that if you take a breath you’ll miss her.) It is a polarizing movie — some viewers expecting a testosterone fueled The Fast and the Furious style action piece left disappointed, while those familiar with Refn indie-style high art thought Drive too mainstream. A convoy of professional critics, with seemingly brief cinematic memories, either praised or panned the film as a paean to the seventies and eighties, missing what it truly is at heart: a classic film noir — one that proves the enduring power of the character archetypes and narrative conventions established well over a half-century ago. Though unlike other films that have tried to revitalize noir tropes, Drive does so quietly — it uses them, but isn’t about them. It shows that well-worn conventions don’t have to be stale; and like the best classic noirs, it employs visuals to reinforce the narrative. (One scene in particular — the elevator — took my breath away.) Drive succeeds in this all-important visual brand of storytelling when countless other modern attempts have fallen short. Perhaps it is a result of its total commitment to classic noir construction that it doesn’t feel compelled to self-referentially poke at the audience.

Particularly noteworthy is how the script successfully integrates numerous classic character types. Drive gives us a pair of urban gangsters much more rooted in the noir canon than the wise guys of Scorsese or Coppola — not corporate icemen or immigrant superheroes, but insecure sociopaths more in reminiscent of Richard Widmark than Al Pacino. Ron Perlman delivers his usual high quality work, but Albert Brooks is simply astonishing — be on the lookout for an off-casting Oscar nomination. Brooks demonstrates that De Niro-like ability to vacillate between genial and terrifying while maintaining an affable, unruffled exterior. We know Brooks’s screen persona so well that his initial impression feels a bit like a gag, but by the final reel we’re convinced he missed his calling. More than a decade after a brief appearance in Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 Out of Sight, Brooks finally gets the opportunity to really show what he can do with a distasteful character. Gangsters are like Kryptonite in most contemporary crime films — so one dimensional that their mere presence thrusts most movies irrevocably into cliché. Drive delves into the noir canon to give us a pair of neurotic, frightened crooks who feel both refreshing and real.

Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Malcolm in the Middle) is a scene-stealer as Shannon, a throwback to one of noir’s most beloved character types: The Loser. He owns the garage where the driver spends most of his days, serving as Gosling’s criminal pimp and ostensibly as his father figure. Cranston cheerfully limps in and out of scenes, always in a good mood but never firing on all cylinders — a sad, trusting soul lifted from the pages of Steinbeck. The pronounced hitch in his stride is a visible reminder of an unfortunate life, with luck so mythically bad that the Brooks character can’t seem to stop joking about it. To top off the irony, Shannon even sports a horseshoe tattoo under one ear. If Drive had actually been made during the late forties, Harry Morgan or Elisha Cook, Jr. would have played Cranston’s role —*his luck is that bad.

And then there’s the girl. This is where Drive takes convention and pulls a U-turn. Noir has always given us two kinds of women: the femme fatale or the sweetheart. Drive combines both into one girl: Carey Mulligan (An Education), whose form is all sweetheart, but who functions as a femme fatale. Mulligan’s Irene isn’t duplicitous — she’s so angelic that she belongs in a Teresa Wright picture — but her innocence is so overwhelming that it compels the driver makes the sort of reckless choices that are typically orchestrated by a femme fatale. He puts everything on the line to protect this girl and subsequently find some small measure of grace for himself, though in a classic, post-war noir his motivation would spring from lust, while here he seeks merely to save her. Nevertheless, what the driver sacrifices for a down-on-her-luck diner waitress draws a direct connection with the films of the past and, at the same time, puts a less misogynistic spin on typical crime film characterizations. It might also be fair to explore the similarities between Drive and the 1994 Luc Besson film Léon, at least in terms of redemption, innocence, and gender, though the latter film, as revered as it is, is more thoroughly rooted in stereotype and visual pizzazz than it is in the noir tradition.

Finally there’s Gosling, whose casting in a tough guy part such as this may seem questionable. In the real world, it would be difficult to believe such prettiness in a man possessed of the unusual skills, the toughness, and the latent ferocity of the unnamed (wink-wink, see Hill’s The Driver) character Gosling portrays here, yet the actor is credible and Refn embraces his physical beauty. The camera lingers in close-up after close-up, and because his character rarely speaks, Gosling uses his face to tell us everything we need to know. In him we discover an archetypical noir anti-hero: enigmatic, melancholy, alienated, and alone; yet also a man who lives by an abiding code. How he became like this is a mystery; whether he grew up on the streets, did time at Folsom, or a stretch in camouflage is unclear, but we learn early on that he can handle himself and doesn’t tumble easily. When he assures his potential “clients” that as long as they do their dirty work within a five-minute window he’ll stick with them “no matter what,” it is with sincerity. For him such things are simply a matter of honor. We also know that like other film noir protagonists (and as the title of the film suggests) the driver is moving irrevocably towards some hidden destiny — that the wayward strands of his Spartan, empty life are fated to tangle in some unknown but final way. The perceived control he exercises over his reality — metaphorically realized in the way he handles an automobile — is merely an illusion. The truth the audience comes to understand that remains hidden from our anonymous hero is that his prowess behind the wheel has little to do with skill and everything to do with art.

Go see Drive. It’s delightfully old and new.

Drive (2011) Directed by Nicholas Winding Refn Starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, and Bryan Cranston Cinematography by Newton Thomas Sigel Art Direction by Christopher Tandon Edited by Matthew Newman Released by FilmDistrict Running time: 100 minutes

Written by The Professor
His blog is "Where Danger Lives!"

Le Jour se Lève (1939)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:59:45 PST

A French Allegory of the Working Man’s Life

“He’s not a criminal. He’s just an ordinary man.”

Marcel Carné’s 1939 film Le Jour se Lève (Daybreak) is often considered the French director’s greatest work, and also one of the most significant films of the French Poetic Realism period. This psychological drama, based on a story written by Montmatre art dealer Jacques Voit, is one of several films made by the successful partnership of director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. While Le Jour se Lève is not an overtly political film, nonetheless it’s a film created and impacted by its times. The early 30s saw French Premiers using decree laws (and thus avoiding parliamentary debate) to cut wages and raise taxes which resulted in widespread demonstrations, riots and strikes across France. Léon Blum’s Popular Front government of 1936-7 heralded in a fresh optimism for workers through the Matignon Agreements--a series of new labor laws and improved working conditions (including the creation of a 40 hour work week, 2 weeks holiday a year, and the right to strike). By 1939, externally, the threat of impending war overshadowed France while internally, with the dissolution of the Popular Front (an alliance of the French Communist Party, the French Section of the Workers’ International, the Radical and Socialist Party and a few smaller antifascist parties), France saw a return to right-wing elements and of course eventually the collaborationist government led by Marshal Pétain. Under Pétain’s rule, Léon Blum was shipped off to a concentration camp, and The Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) went into full operational mode with the result that an estimated 650,000 men and 44,000 women were sent from France to Germany as forced labour--a form of slavery that is perhaps the worst insult to a worker. In 1939, however, these horrors were yet to be realised, but to many French workers, men and women who had memories of working 14-17 hour days, the demise of the Popular Front signaled a return to the past. Significantly, Le Jour se Lève appears to be set earlier than the passage of the Matignon Agreements.

Le Jour se Lève can be seen as a simple tale of love which goes wrong when jealousy and rage enter the picture. The film, however, can also be seen an allegory for the times. Director Carné is not concerned with showing a general view of French society--instead the film offers a glimpse of the existence of an uncomplicated French factory worker, François (Jean Gabin in his thirtieth film)--a doomed Everyman, a member of the proletariat who wants very little from life.

The film begins with a murder which takes place within François’ small bleak, isolated room located at the very top of a narrow, six-story building. The sense of doomed fatalism is established immediately and grows menacingly until the film’s spectacular conclusion. François’s room is seen as an inescapable trap while internal shots of the building emphasize the maze-like layers of floors and stairs. In the very first scene, a shot rings out, a man tumbles down the stairs dying, and a blind man hearing the noise, is unable to grasp what has happened. At this point, François, in a state of siege and holed up in his room, does not try to escape. Instead he spends a sleepless night, chain-smoking and recalling the events--parceled into three distinct episodes--that led to the murder. The film’s structure alternates the three episodes of François’s memories with three increasingly aggressive attempts by the police to storm the room.

Each of the three episodes of memories follows the chain of events that led to the murder. In the first section of flashbacks, less than three months earlier, factory worker François is interrupted in his hazardous work as a sandblaster by the arrival of a lovely, fresh-faced young girl named Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent). She’s there to deliver flowers, and François and Françoise (back to that French Everyman/woman idea), both orphans, very quickly establish some common ground. An almost idyllic relationship begins, and the courtship is chaste and whimsical.

During a visit to Françoise’s lodgings, François notes that her mirror is covered by postcards from the Riviera. To François, the Riviera is a world of absurdities where one can pay 10 francs to “watch the English” walking along the promenade. Françoise, however, is not so dismissive of Nice, and when she describes the climate and vegetation of the place she’s never visited, her face is filled with distant longing. While François is not overtly suspicious of the postcards, Françoise’s reaction sets off alarms and when Françoise breaks a date to meet a friend, François acts on his suspicions by following her. The “friend” as it turns out is sleazy, ferrety showman Valentin (Jules Berry), a cruel dog trainer who also sidelines training the many women in his life to put up with his love-‘em-and-leave-‘em behaviour. As François sits at the bar in order to watch Françoise greet Valentin, he meets Valentin’s disgruntled partner, his attractive and sexually provocative assistant Clara (Arletty), and the two exchange words that hint of possible sexual encounters. Clara, after putting up with Valentin for three years, has decided to leave him, but Valentin doesn’t seem quite ready to let her go yet.

During François’ second phase of memories, it’s about two months later. François appears to have a relationship with both women, and although it’s not quite defined whether or not his relationship with Clara is sexual, it seems likely. According to Clara, François stops by “like a tourist, seeing the sights.” One scene shows her emerging from the shower obviously naked, but the possibility of sex is squashed when Valentin arrives. While it seems that he’s come to discuss Clara, she knows better. Familiar with Valentin’s womanizing ways, she knows that he’s there to discuss Françoise with François, and as it turns out Valentin questions François about his intentions towards Françoise. This is where Valentin, a manipulative, pathological liar who resents François’s relationships with both women, drops a bombshell.

The third section of François’s memories brings the story full circle with the arrival of Valentin in François’s shabby room earlier that day.

While it’s easy to see Le Jour se Lève as a story of jealousy, there are several threads embedded in the dialogue which hint that François’s crime of passion has a great deal to do with the pitiful lot of the average working stiff. In one scene, François and Françoise enter the florist greenhouse--a veritable Garden of Eden compared to the bleak dark concrete streets shown throughout the rest of the film. As Françoise reclines on her back, François confesses his love and agrees to no longer see Clara. In a moment of revelation, the usually laconic François leaks discontent, acceptance and finally weary defeat at his lot:

“Work. No work. Is there a job I haven’t done? All different, all the same. Spray painting, lead painting. Lead painting’s no good, just like the sand gun. When I couldn’t fight it anymore, I just gave in. Things went from bad to worse but I got used to it. You know, like waiting for a streetcar in the rain. You try to get on. Ding! It’s full. Second car, third car, ding, ding! You’re left standing in the rain like a sucker.”

The thread of the endless drudgery of François’s life also occurs in the bedroom scene which takes place between François and Clara. She complains about being alone at night, while he defends his absence stating that nights are for sleep:

“A night of love. You’re crazy. That stuff’s for books or for guys with nothing to do, and even then who knows? When you bust your back all day, the night’s for getting some sleep. Whereas daytime…that’s another matter.”

While Valentin’s life is one of irresponsibility, traveling around, picking up women, using, seducing and abandoning them, François has broken his back in various hazardous jobs with the result that he’s now suffering from lung congestion. When Valentin, a self-proclaimed “nomad,” goads François with his obvious ill-health, François is nettled enough to react violently. Later Valentin once again goads François by taunting him on the subject of “manual laborers” while sneering and simultaneously arguing that as a man of intelligence and education, “I can do exactly as I please.” Valentin, who’s described by Clara as “rotten like a piece of old fruit,” doesn’t seduce women by his looks; he seduces women by exploiting their dreams and capitalizing on his honey-tongued reminiscences of sunshine and mimosa. François, on the other hand, can only vaguely promise Françoise a day in the country picking lilacs sometime in the distant future. Doubtless Valentin’s seduction of Françoise and mistreatment of Clara contribute to the crime, but Valentin’s feckless behaviour is the antithesis of the sheer drudgery of François’s life and is inarguably a trigger point that provokes violence.

The allegory of the destruction of the working man is also evidenced by the appearance of the police who swoop down like proto-fascist storm troopers turning on the crowd in order to suppress their obvious popular support for François. The massive force of men who set out to contain and then systemically destroy François is strongly similar to the pursuit and annihilation of the various members of the Bonnot gang in 1912. As with the Bonnot gang, the police aren’t interested in surrender, and as far as François is concerned, he’s already dead, snuffed out by the forces in society which are beyond his control:

“A killer! Now there’s something to gossip about! Sure, I’m a killer, but killers are a dime a dozen! They’re everywhere! Everyone kills! They just do it quietly, so you don’t see. It’s like sand. It gets deep inside you.”

Murnau’s influence on Carné is evident throughout this beautifully structured film which manages to convey emotion through the merest flicker of the eye. The film’s final spectacular scene (Carné insisted on real bullets), complete with the irony of the alarm clock, is one of the most memorable endings in film history.

(editor's note: Although the trailer is in French, no translation is necessary)

Written by Guy Savage

The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 18:40:51 PDT

The Hitch-Hiker is a tense film that never lets up for a minute. Clocking in at only 71 minutes, the film is about three men. A crazy killer on the lam and the two men he's taken along for the ride.

The movie is an answer to a trivia question (“What's the only film noir directed by a woman?”) but it should be treasured because it's good cinema -- not just because Ida Lupino was the director (she made the weepy The Bigamist – a borderline noir – around the same time.) For the record, she stepped in to direct when the original director fell ill. Her husband/collaborator Collier Young were producing the film for their production company Filmways for RKO and she slid into the empty director's chair. Future projects for Lupino would have a much more feminist slant – hell, The Hitch-Hiker doesn't have a single woman in it!

Lupino uses two settings to tell this lean story: either in the claustrophobic confides of a car, or outside – on the hot, lost barren expanses of desert. Director of photography is Nicholas Musuraca. Musuraca captures the bleak, featureless desert as well as he photographed the shadowy noir worlds in Out of the Past, Cat People, Deadline at Dawn and Roadblock.

The location shooting plays almost as big of a part in the story as William Talman (as killer Emmett Myers), and Edmond O'Brien (Ray Collins) and Frank Lovejoy (Gilbert Brown).

The Hitch-Hiker's pedigree is even more impressive when you find out Daniel Mainwaring – who's original story the film is based on (it was based on a true story). Mainwaring – persona non grata at RKO at the time– was uncredited. Mainwaring wrote the novel and screenplay for Out of the Past.

The Film Noir Encyclopedia's entry on The Hitch-Hiker credits the writing is what makes The Hitch-Hiker so noir:

“As with Vanning in Nightfall, the upheaval of the lives of Collins and Bowen is sudden, ill-chanced, and impersonal – a typical noir reflection o f the lack of security and stability in everyday living, no matter how commonplace.”

Finally, there's the three lead actors:

Talman as Emmett Myers. Wow. He's handicapped with a droopy right eye that never closes. When he kidnaps the two fishing buddies (after they pick him up hitchhiking) he watches them at night with “one eye open” all the time. The men are terrified not knowing if Myers is sleeping or if he's just toying with them waiting for them to make their move so he can unload his revolver into them.

Frank Lovejoy and Edmond O'Brien are the two friends. Key to the film is the fact that these two can never can escape or turn the tables on Myers because one of them could be killed. They bicker in hushed tones when Meyers is out of range about how to escape. Lovejoy is his stiff self (he's not one of my favorites) but O'Brien (part of the Noir Hall of Fame for starring in D.O.A.) is very good. He slowly unwinds as Myers constantly taunts him – finally ending with O'Brien going ape on his helpless tormentor at the end. The two actors are bland to look at and a bit soft in the middle. No doubt if the film was made today they'd cast actors 25 years younger with rock-hard abs in the parts. When they discuss a notorious woman from a border town they used to visit, Lovejoy comments, “She must be dead by now” as they drive on. How old are they, anyway?

Without resorting to cliché, The Hitch-Hiker is a gem that has some excellent performances and interesting location shooting. Some online have called the film exceedingly dull – I find it thrilling.

The Back Alley has a thread going now about some unloved, under-appreciated film noirs. This one would certainly be on my list. The movie is in the public domain – which usually means there are some horrible copies of the film out there. DVD buyer beware.

Another cool thing we do at Back Alley is try to pair noirs for double features. This one would go well with Detour or even the twisted 2009 horror-road movie Dark Country.

Written by Steve-O

Railroaded (1947)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:21:09 PDT

Anthony Mann's Railroaded represents a number of missed opportunities and a few modest successes.

In 1947, Mann made his first really good film noir, Desperate, which was released by RKO Radio Pictures. It wasn't a perfect film, but the actors were decent, the story was suspenseful, and many of the lighting setups by Mann and his cinematographer, George E. Diskant, were stunning.

Railroaded was the next film he made. While I was watching it, I found myself frequently saying "If only..."

If only the script was more focused. If only the music wasn't so terrible. If only the actors were talented. If only the film featured more screen time for the interesting villains and less screen time for the uninteresting heroes. If only Mann had been given a larger budget. If only he had worked with cinematographer John Alton.

But if you want to watch that kind of movie, you have to dig into Mann's later work; his six collaborations with Alton, made between 1947 and 1950, or the five westerns he made with James Stewart between 1950 and 1955. Railroaded is a modestly entertaining little picture if you have no expectations, but if you're familiar with Mann's later work, it's bound to disappoint.

Mann made Railroaded for Producers Releasing Corporation (P.R.C.), a dependable old Poverty Row workhorse. It was the last really cut-rate movie that Mann would make. (P.R.C. was in the process of being bought by the powerful British film distributor J. Arthur Rank, and P.R.C.'s name would soon be changed to "Eagle-Lion International" to class it up a little. It was through Eagle-Lion that Mann's excellent T-Men would be released later in 1947.) While Mann's budgets were low, he was able to work with less studio control at Eagle-Lion International than he had been faced with at RKO, Universal, Paramount, and Republic.

In Jeanine Basinger's book Anthony Mann (published in 1979; expanded and republished in 2007), she writes that Railroaded "is more unified than Desperate and points toward the coherence of Mann's later works. It is perhaps his first really unified film, presenting the story of a young woman ... and her attempts to clear her brother's name of a murder charge." I don't agree with Basinger's assessment, and find Railroaded an even more uneven film than Desperate.

Guy Roe was Mann's cinematographer on Railroaded, and even though he's not as good as Alton, there are still a number of impressive sequences, particularly the robbery that opens the picture.

John Ireland (the only actor in the film with any talent) plays a sneering criminal named Duke Martin who perfumes his bullets. (What's a B-noir bad guy without a gimmick or two?)

The robbery is of a joint controlled by Jackland Ainsworth (Roy Gordon). It's a numbers operation hidden in the back of a beauty shop run by Clara Calhoun (Jane Randolph). Clara is Duke's girlfriend, and the inside job was supposed to be a cinch, but the cops show up, and Duke snuffs one of them, which sets the events of the film in motion.

Duke arranged everything to point in the direction of a patsy, Steve Ryan (Ed Kelly). Steve is a young guy who lives with his sister, Rosie Ryan (Sheila Ryan), and his mother, Mrs. Ryan (Hermine Sterler). At the breakfast table, Rosie talks about the movie she saw the night before, and how she cried at the end, when the police got their man. Even though he was a criminal, she felt bad for him. Steve is unsympathetic, and says "Maybe some guys need a goin' over." Minutes later the police bust in and arrest him for murder. (John C. Higgins's screenplay, which is based on a story by Gertrude Walker, could have used more clever and ironic moments like this one.)

Things look bad for Steve. Duke used Steve's scarf as a mask during the robbery. Steve's car was stolen and used as the getaway vehicle. A paraffin test to see if Steve has recently fired a gun comes up negative, but that doesn't mean much after Duke's partner, Cowie Kowalski (Keefe Brasselle), who was shot during the robbery, gives a deathbed confession that implicates Steve.

Railroaded isn't actually a very accurate title for the film, since the cops don't railroad Steve. They work with the evidence they have. (Framed would have been a more accurate title.) Unlike Desperate, which followed an innocent man's terrifying flight from both gangsters and the police, the unjustly accused protagonist of Railroaded pretty much disappears from the film as soon as he's jailed. Enter Sgt. Mickey Ferguson (Hugh Beaumont), a police detective who grew up in the same neighborhood as the Ryans, and is still sweet on Rosie.

Rosie believes her brother is innocent, and eventually starts to convince Sgt. Ferguson. This is where the picture really took a nosedive for me. Sheila Ryan is nice to look at, but she's a completely unconvincing actress. Beaumont is even worse. He brings the same gravitas to his role as Sgt. Ferguson that he did to the scenes on TV a decade later in which he punished Wally and The Beav. Watching his scenes is like watching grass grow, and he and Sheila Ryan are the protagonists of Railroaded, not bit players.

With no one to root for, the only enjoyment I got out of Railroaded was watching John Ireland's scenes, especially the ones with Jane Randolph. With the heat on, Duke orders Clara to hole up and stay off the booze. He's planning one last score — a robbery of the Club Bombay, where the vigorish from Ainsworth's bookie shops goes. Duke figures he can get revenge on Ainsworth and make off with $30 to $40 grand, which he'll use to finance his and Clara's getaway to South America. Of course, he can't keep Clara off the sauce, but things aren't all bad, since occasionally something exciting happens, like a vicious catfight Clara gets into with Rosie that Duke impassively watches while hidden:

Railroaded is a pretty typical P.R.C. product. The sets look like they're made out of cardboard, the dialogue is stilted, the music is awful, and actors who can carry a scene are in the minority. Stretches of the film are entertaining, and occasionally the cinematography and editing create suspense and some real excitement, but overall, this isn't one of Mann's better pictures. There are plenty of people who champion the film, but for me, if a picture doesn't have decent actors and strong characterizations, it doesn't hang together. A few great scenes do not a great film make.

Written by Adam Lounsbery

Mine Own Executioner (1947)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 17:23:28 PDT

“Do I have to take off my clothes or anything?”

Mine Own Executioner (1947) from director Anthony Kimmins and based on the excellent novel by Nigel Balchin is a dark British noir tale which explores the burgeoning and controversial use of psychotherapy in post WWII Britain. Dedicated psychologist Felix Milne (Burgess Meredith) divides his time between middle-aged wealthy women who bore him to tears, and poor patients who attend free sessions at the Norris Pile clinic--an impoverished charitable institution. Milne is married to Pat (Dulcie Gray), a tolerant, loving and understanding woman who bears her husband’s short temper and unconcealed lust for her long-time friend, bad blonde Barbara (Christine Norden). When the film begins, Milne’s marriage under stress from financial constraints and work-related problems is in trouble. Pat acts as both a sounding board for her husband’s rants and the receptacle for his low-level frustrated rage.

One of Pat’s latest ‘mistakes’ is to book an appointment late in the afternoon for a Mrs. Lucien. Felix is certain that this new patient is going to be yet another bored, unhappily married middle aged woman, so he’s delighted when Molly Lucien (Barbara White) turns out to be a young, pretty woman who has some genuine problems. She tells Felix that she met her husband, RAF fighter pilot, Adam Lucian (Kieron Moore) in 1940, and that he shipped out shortly after their marriage. She received news that he’d been shot down “in flames” somewhere near Rangoon, but in spite of the odds, she always believed that he’d return. And she was right, but the Adam who returned some time later after escaping from a Japanese POW camp was ‘different.’ Molly describes Adam’s detached behaviour and the fact that he mostly seems “as though he wasn’t there.” There’s been a significant development recently in Adam’s behaviour when he suddenly and inexplicably tried to strangle Molly.

Felix is visibly intrigued by the case, but he immediately tells Molly that Adam really should seek the help of a “medical man,” a certified doctor. He also cautions Molly against remaining with her husband. Molly, an engaging young woman, spiritedly explains that her husband loathes doctors--that’s why he’s likely to agree to see Felix, and she further argues that if Adam’s “got to half-strangle somebody, it’s got to be me, hasn’t it?” The implication behind Molly’s statement is that she can protect Adam from the legal consequences of his actions.

While the film, at first, divides the plot between Felix’s troubled personal and professional life, the plot then veers to the case of Adam Lucien. Although Felix feels out of his depth with the case, he continues to probe Adam’s strangely detached behaviour which he labels as “schizoid.” At one point, Adam even undergoes an injection which induces a semi-conscious state in an attempt to force him to recall what happened when he was taken prisoner.

The characters of Felix and Adam are a study in contrasts, yet there are also some commonalities. Felix is a man who’s devoted his life to helping others, and all of his patient understanding--his better self--goes to his patients while he’s unpleasant and difficult at home. Felix is capable of some rather underhanded behaviour and considers that it’s alright just as long as he talks about it and doesn’t keep it buried. This is manifested in his explanations to Pat regarding his lust for Barbara who appeals, as he explains it, to his adolescent self. While Felix accepts his feelings for Barbara as a perfectly natural desire, his compulsion to be ‘above board’ with Patricia about the situation would provoke the patience of a saint. Felix also argues that this immature attraction to Barbara is harmless (Pat argues, ineffectually, otherwise), and meanwhile Felix, feeling sanctified by telling his wife all about his attraction to another woman, actively seeks an opportunity to engage in an affair. At one point, he even agrees to see Barbara at the request of her older, portly, clueless husband for Barbara’s so-called “sex complex.” Given the glaring, mutual attraction between Barbara and Felix (not to mention the question of professional ethics), this scenario provides a springboard for hanky-panky. Barbara’s stuffy husband, Peter (Michael Shepley) is oblivious to the dangers of throwing his wife into Felix’s hands to discuss sex, but poor Patricia is informed about it, even has to book the appointment, and is expected to swallow her anger about it too.

Felix acknowledges that he’s frequently unkind to his wife--even though she deserves better. For Felix, simply acknowledging the problem somehow makes it better. One fascinating scene shows Felix, almost entirely in shadow, as he leaves Patricia’s bedroom moments after he’s supposedly ‘openly’ explained to his wife about agreeing to see Barbara for her “sex complex.” Because Felix is apparently open with Patricia about his decision, he seems to think this makes it okay, but in reality, Felix isn’t being entirely honest with himself. This deception--this acting in the dark--is symbolized by Felix seen only as a dark shape as he stands in the shadow saying goodnight to his extremely upset wife.

Then there’s Adam Lucien, a dangerously disturbed, violent young man whose behaviour covers a lifetime of not talking about things. While his problems initially seem to have erupted after his time as a POW, there’s a craftiness, a wariness about Adam that hints at far deeper, long buried damage. Indeed the plot addresses this issue at several points, but ultimately the film, which throws out hints about Adam’s other problems, lands on safe damaged-war-hero territory when uncovering Adam’s mental illness. This is, after all the 1940s, and it’s easier, and probably more topical, to create a film about a hideously mentally damaged war hero than to portray the book’s complex psycho who happened to go to war and returns home even more damaged than he was before.

Both Felix and Adam are men who have two distinct sides to their personalities, and in each case, it's really up for grabs which side is going to win. That's where the title comes into play, for the better side of both men is in mortal conflict with the darker, buried self. Interestingly, both Felix and Adam’s wives act as buffers for their husbands against the real world. Molly is willing to be killed, if necessary, and Pat acts as a sponge for her husband’s disappointments and petty rages.

The film also includes a sub-plot regarding Felix’s tenure at the Norris Pile clinic. Felix is called a “lay practitioner” throughout the film, and the story taps into an issue of some topical controversy in the underlying thread of Felix’s lack of medical certification. Felix styles himself on the Freudian model, and Freud, who moved to London in 1938, did not believe that it was necessary to have a medical degree to practice psychotherapy. Due to limited funds, Felix decided early in his career to study in Vienna rather than go to medical school. The lack of a medical degree is raised by Felix’s colleagues in the film, and while most of them respect his training in Vienna, he encounters prejudice for not being a medical doctor repeatedly in the film. Apart from his sessions at the Norris Pile Clinic, Felix, like most “lay practitioners” of his time practices in his own home, and this, as it turns out, exposes his wife to danger. This pre-National Health film rather subversively addresses the issue of the value of psychotherapy and the dangers its practitioners assume since they are not under the protected, and respected, cloak of the established medical community. While subtle, the film’s implication is that Felix is barred from the upper echelons of his profession largely due to class and inherent money restrictions. Felix chafes against the fact that it takes a Harley Street reputation to save him from total disgrace.

Nigel Balchin, the author and screenwriter of Mine Own Executioner, is sometimes described as one of the most neglected authors of 20th century British fiction. It’s true that some of his books have fallen out-of-print, but a few film versions of those books have helped keep some titles alive: The Small Back Room, Separate Lies (based on the book A Way Through the Wood). Balchin, whose father was a baker, won a scholarship to Cambridge where he studied agriculture and psychology. Later he became an “industrial investigator” and pioneered the application of psychology to the workplace environment. Balchin was also responsible for the creation of the highly successful Black Magic chocolate marketing campaign. One sly scene in Mine Own Executioner shows Felix attending a dinner party and being solicited by Julian (Joss Ambler) an advertising agent for the “psychological angle on cream cheese.”

Written by Guy Savage

The Long Night (1947)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 12:43:24 PDT

Anatole Litvak's The Long Night is a remake of Marcel Carné's 1939 drama Le Jour se lève. It stars Henry Fonda, Ann Dvorak, Vincent Price, and Barbara Bel Geddes in her screen debut.

Litvak, who was born in Kiev, worked in the Soviet cinema system in Leningrad, in the pre-war film industry of Berlin, in France after Hitler's rise to power, and finally in Hollywood, where he became a contract director for Warner Bros. in 1937. Litvak became an American citizen in 1940, enlisted in the Army, and worked with Frank Capra on his Why We Fight series of short films. Litvak finished the war with the rank of colonel and returned to directing Hollywood features. Two of his most famous films would follow — Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) and The Snake Pit (1948).

The Long Night, his first post-war feature, is less well-known. For a long time, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who remembered seeing it. But thanks to a pristine print on DVD from Kino Video (released in 2000 along with a VHS version), this flawed but worthwhile drama is now widely available. In the special features section of the Kino DVD, there are a couple of side-by-side comparisons with Le Jour se lève — a murder sequence in a darkened stairwell and the first meeting of the two lovers — that show how heavily Litvak borrowed from Carné's film, at least stylistically. (The ending of The Long Night is radically different from the ending of Le Jour se lève, however, which is a standard practice in Hollywood remakes of depressing European art films.)

Despite the happy ending, Litvak infuses The Long Night with a pervasive sense of doom. After shooting a man in his apartment building in an unnamed steel town somewhere near the Pennsylvania-Ohio state line, Joe Adams (Henry Fonda) sits alone in his rented room, the door barricaded as police and onlookers swarm the street below his window. Accompanied by a refrain from Beethoven's 7th Symphony, Joe tells his story through flashbacks, and we learn what brought him to this desperate place. "How can I explain when I don't understand myself?" he thinks to himself.

Joe Adams grew up in an orphanage. "Class of '34," he tells the pretty young Jo Ann (Barbara Bel Geddes) when he meets her. (We must presume that Joe is younger than the man who plays him, since Fonda was 29 years old in 1934.) Jo Ann also came from the orphanage, and her romance with Joe is simple, childlike, and profound. Fonda plays Joe like a sweet-natured boy with no ability to plan long-term or handle disappointment or frustration. Bel Geddes plays Jo Ann in much the same way, but instead of being petulant she is naïve and unworldly, and open to the manipulation of a slimy magician named Maximilian the Great (Vincent Price).

Maximilian is a congenital liar. His relationship with Jo Ann is nebulous for some time in the film. He first tells Joe that Jo Ann is his daughter, but that he had to go on the road for 15 years and leave her in the company of strangers. After another series of flashbacks, however, it becomes clear that Maximilian and Jo Ann were romantically involved. He took her to see the Cleveland Symphony when she had never been as far west as Pittsburgh, and forced himself on her when she had never been kissed. Jo Ann was uncomfortable with Maximilian's actions, but she was also lonely, and Maximilian offered her a world of excitement and glamor.

The visual style of The Long Night, its doomed protagonist buffeted by forces outside of his control, and its story told through flashbacks are all hallmarks of film noir, but it also has elements of social realism. For instance, Joe befriends Maximilian's assistant Charlene (played by the always wonderful Ann Dvorak). He lies on her bed on a Sunday afternoon, reading the funnies, in her crummy room full of clutter, next to a couple of big bottles of beer and a bag of pretzels he brought for them to eat. She provides a stack of toast. She's in the bath when he arrives, and throws on a slinky silk robe. It's unclear how close Joe and Charlene really are, but the realism of the setting and the intimacy of the situation push the limits of Hays Code acceptability.

Along with the realism and intimacy of some of the interior settings, there's plenty of artifice in The Long Night. Unlike the typical Hollywood production in which backdrops were either matte paintings or rear-projection film, production designer Eugène Lourié used elaborate sets with tricks of forced perspective in The Long Night. For example, a factory on a hillside in the distance is really a small model that could be lit in whichever way the filmmakers wanted. Lourié and Litvak intended to achieve a kind of "poetic reality," and they succeeded. At the same time, the artifice sometimes clashes with the realism, and when it does the film feels aimless.

The Long Night was a commercial and critical failure, and lost approximately $1 million, but it was also the springboard for Barbara Bel Geddes's long onscreen career. After seeing her performance in the film, RKO signed her to a seven-picture deal.

Written by Adam Lounsbery

The Racket (1951)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:16:05 PDT

“Who said I was an honest citizen? And what would it get me if I was?” – Lizabeth Scott to Robert Mitchum in The Racket

The traumatized figure of Robert Ryan as old-school rough and tough gangster Nick Scanlon towers over the wreckage of John Cromwell’s The Racket (1951), although the film has so many “punch up” scenes inserted after the completion of principal photography by director Nicholas Ray that it almost qualifies as a co-direction job. In addition, the actor/director Mel Ferrer, the film’s editor Sherman Todd, the film’s producer Edmund Grainger, and even director Tay Garnett (of The Postman Always Rings Twice) also took a hand in the proceedings, all under the overzealous and one might say hyper-controlling supervision of Howard Hughes, who at this point owned RKO Radio, the studio where this film was made, having acquired controlling interest in the company in 1948. Hughes could never leave a project alone after it was finished shooting, in some cases scrapping whole elements of a film’s plot after principal photography. William Cameron Menzies’ delirious noir The Whip Hand comes immediately to mind; the film originally was about a plot devised by Adolf Hitler (Bobby Watson) to fatally poison America’s water supply, but after the film wrapped, Hughes decided that the villains should be Communists, who were suddenly much more trendy, and large segments of the film were reshot, at considerable added expense.

In the case of The Racket, the film was based on a silent film from 1928, also produced by Howard Hughes, and directed by a youthful Lewis Milestone, which was based in turn on a Broadway play by Bartlett Cormack, and starred Thomas Meighan, Louis Wolheim and Marie Prevost. Interestingly, the Broadway play version starred Edward G. Robinson, and, as an actor, a young John Cromwell, the director of the 1951 version, and the stage production subsequently toured throughout the country, winding up in Los Angeles, where Robinson was discovered by Warner Bros. and thrust into a series of gangster films that made him a star. For many years, the 1928 version of The Racket was considered a “lost film,” but a print was finally located by Dr. Hart Wegner of the University of Nevada Las Vegas Film Department, and restored by Jeffrey Masino, with a new music track by Robert Israel. In 2004, the film was screened on Turner Classic Movies for the first time, but has yet to make it on to DVD; the 1928 version is certainly more coherent than the 1951 version, but the later version also has its merits – in a bizarre sort of way.

Chief among the pluses for the 1951 version are Robert Ryan, at his psychotic, raging best as outmoded gangster Nick Scanlon; Robert Mitchum somnolently strolling through his role as Captain Thomas McQuigg, an honest police captain in a city that has gone completely corrupt; the always dependable Lizabeth Scott as Irene Hayes, a nightclub singer who is predictably mixed up in the rackets; William Talman, surprisingly cast against type – he usually played murderers, thugs, and psychotic killers – as eager-beaver Officer Bob Johnson; Ray Collins as the exquisitely corrupt District Attorney Mortimer X. Welch; and last but far from least, William Conrad as Detective Sergeant Turk, another corrupt cop, who says almost nothing throughout the entire film but always seems to be hanging around the edges of the frame, chewing gum, and effectively stealing scenes from anyone who tries to upstage him.

Nor is this all; a gallery of pug-uglies, stoolies and other assorted noir characters round out the dramatis personae, from Walter Sande as a reliable sidekick cop to Mitchum’s Captain McQuigg, Les Tremayne as Harry Craig, head of the Crime Commission, the smooth heavy Don Porter as R.G. Connolly, front man for the never-seen “Old Man” who runs the entire corrupt enterprise, and noir regulars Harry Lauter, Don Dillaway, Howland Chamberlain, Tito Vuolo, Herb Vigran, Richard Reeves, Iris Adrian, Don Beddoe and others too numerous to mention. RKO had a heavy pool of talent to draw from in 1950s Hollywood, and even if these actors weren’t stars, they were solid professionals who could be counted on to show up on time, know their lines, and get through their scenes efficiently and with absolute conviction, even if the film’s script sometimes crumbled beneath them.

The film opens with a stern boardroom “get tough on crime” scene in which the members of a “Crime Commission,” transparently modeled after Senator Estes Kefauver’s Senate Crime Investigating Committee, then very much in the headlines as the first government inquiry with any real value into organized crime. Indeed, it was when the Kefauver Committee began dominating the headlines that Hughes decided the reshoots were essential, to bring the film right up the second with a “snatched from the headlines” feel, no matter how manufactured it might have been. Nicholas Ray directed this opening sequence, like most of the scenes in the film with any real punch, after Cromwell had departed the project; indeed, the key sequences of the film were shot very rapidly indeed, shortly after the film was supposed to have been finished.

Cromwell, who was not well at the time, shot the main body of The Racket from April 9 to May 14, 1951, but after one screening, Hughes called in veteran screenwriter W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar, among many other credits) to add more action to the film, which seemed curiously stagebound, and asked Nick Ray to take over the shooting, which Ray did from June 18 to June 22, 1951 – just five days of work. But Ray moved fast – very fast, especially for a Hughes production. In that time, Ray shot the opening chunk of the film, a scene in the police locker room, a fight scene between Mitchum and thug Eddie Parker, some glamour close-ups of Lizabeth Scott crooning during a nightclub scene, and numerous other bits and pieces which make the film more effective throughout, though it still seems like a patch job, which it is.

But what makes the film most effective, like so many RKO noirs, even after the eccentric and often unfathomable Howard Hughes took control of the studio, is the air of desperation that the production exudes, as if Hughes is constantly trying to get it right, convinced that reshoots and newly inserted sequences will transform The Racket, or any of his films, from dross into gold. Of course, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work here, it doesn’t work on The Whip Hand, it doesn’t work on the remarkably schizophrenic His Kind of Woman, and least of all on the utterly botched Jet Pilot, which was “in production” under a hailstorm of different directors at RKO from 1949 to 1957, until the film was finally dumped on the market as one of RKO’s last releases. You can’t put a solid film together like a patchwork quilt; it has to be built from the ground up, but Hughes, a born tinkerer, couldn’t control himself.

Then, too, as an ardent – to say the least – anti-Communist, who bugged his studio’s soundstages and asked his employees to sign loyalty oaths if they wanted to continue working with him, Hughes was in the peculiar position of having in Ryan – a complete leftist – and Mitchum, who had just been arrested for possession of marijuana (thought the charges were later dismissed), the two biggest male stars in his dwindling stable of actors, while Jane Russell and Faith Domergue, a Hughes protégé, held up the distaff side. Then, too, Nick Ray was hardly on board with the HUAC witch-hunt, and had already directed the superb They Live by Night and In A Lonely Place, both excellent films, and yet here was doing pickup work for Hughes at RKO. Hughes had s strange hold on all these men in the fearful 1950s in Hollywood; Mitchum was grateful Hughes hadn’t dropped him after the pot bust, Ryan was trying to stay on top in a turbulent era, and Ray was too young to offend anyone; he wanted a career. It worked out for Ray, Mitchum and Ryan in the end, but right now, it was very uncertain terrain indeed.

It was an odd arrangement all around, and it made for odd films; films that are put together from shards and scraps of shooting, and then tied together with new material to supposedly pull it all together. Even the script went through a number of variations, even though Hughes owned the original script outright; for the 1951 remake, he first assigned young screenwriter and future director Samuel Fuller to try his hand at a draft in May 1950, but Fuller’s version was too dark – both McQuigg and Scanlon are equally crazed – that he rejected it outright, and called in William Wister Haines to craft a more conventional narrative, with Mitchum’s McQuigg as the instantly recognizable good cop, and Nick Scanlon as the main sociopath in view. Then, too, Hughes was constantly fighting the Breen Office on the script, which Breen felt projected an image of society in collapse that was unacceptable to him, and contained too much violence as well. This, it itself, led to numerous memos back and forth and many rewrites to satisfy Breen, which might account for the generally bland nature of what was left to shoot – before Nick Ray was brought in to add some fire to the picture.

But when the smoke finally cleared on the whole pre-production process, Ryan easily emerged with the better role, and grabbed it with both hands, making Nick Scanlon at once tragic, violent, and somehow curiously sympathetic. There’s also the Shelley Winters factor; the actress was announced for the role of Irene in January 1951, but then left or was removed from the project, so Scott could move in and take over the role. Then, too, for Nick Ray’s reshoots, W.R. Burnett was pressed into service to create some more action-packed scenes, and so you have a grab bag of writers, directors, and actors, with even Sherman Todd, the film’s editor, working as a director on the project, probably because he recognized in the cutting room that there were some missing scenes that were absolutely essential to put the finished film together.

So The Racket is a mess, but with Mitchum, even walking through it, and Ryan at his volcanic best, while Liz Scott coos coolly in the background and Don Porter smarmily fronts for the never seen Mr. Big, as well as some nifty cinematography by George E. Diskant, a noir veteran, there’s much to enjoy here. But for me, the real star of the film is the omnipresent and yet seldom heard William Conrad as Turk, who finally shoots down Ryan’s character Scanlon with two well-aimed bullets in the police station after Scanlon makes an ill-advised, last ditch attempt to escape through a fire escape window. “It was the second one that got him,” Turk idly observes, as if killing Scanlon was no more important to him than swatting a fly. Simply by doing almost nothing until the end of the film, Conrad (later a director, and an excellent actor in radio, television and film) manages to dominate the narrative’s rather hectic, uncertain proceedings, lending a much needed gravity to a film that seems to sprawl in all directions at once, sometimes effectively, and sometimes not. He’s always there, even when you think he isn't, lurking in the background, waiting to strike.

Written by Wheeler Winston Dixon

Note: The author wishes to acknowledge the valuable insights afforded by veteran noir writer Eddie Muller on the DVD commentary of The Racket for many background details of the film’s production; additional material on the film was obtained from the author’s personal files, IMDB, and the UCLA Arts-Special Collections Library in Los Angeles.

About the Author: Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Professor of Film Studies, Coordinator of the Film Studies Program, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and Editor in Chief, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, of the Quarterly Review and Film and Video. His newest books are 21st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; Rutgers University Press, 2011); A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2010; reprinted 2011), Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (Edinburgh University Press /Rutgers University Press, 2009), and A Short History of Film (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; Rutgers University Press, 2008; reprinted 5 times through 2011). His website, Frame by Frame, can be found at http://blog.unl.edu/dixon/, and a series of videos by Dixon on film history, theory and criticism, also titled Frame by Frame, can be found at http://mediahub.unl.edu/.

The Tattooed Stanger (1950)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:56:38 PDT

In the period of 1947-48 Universal-International took their cameras to the streets of New York City to make The Naked City, a semi-documentary policier about the hunt for the murderer of a young woman. In 1949, with what looks like a fistful of dollars (in reality, around $125k) RKO took a cast of unknowns, and using New York City exteriors and interiors produced the bargain basement The Tattooed Stranger. Like it’s predecessor, Tattooed’s real star is the city of New York, warts and all. In its pairing of a callow young homicide detective along with a wily pro, The Tattooed Stranger takes us into a NYC of precinct stations, hospital basements, vacant lots, tenements, a Bowery tattoo parlor and a dingy greasy spoon (liver and onions, 60 cents). Many of those locations were soon to be swept away by city planner Robert Moses and his mid century transformation of the cityscape that eliminated many of the older neighborhoods.

A young woman has been found dead in a parked car in Central Park. Her face blasted away by a shotgun. The only key to her identity is a globe and anchor military tattoo on her arm. A rookie detective (John Miles) is put on the case teamed up with a cynical and philosophical veteran (Walter Kinsella) who has seen it all. Working with clues provided by their crime lab, they venture throughout Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn searching for the killer; all the while their prey is following them. Along the way they encounter shifty locals, who just “don’t want any trouble” in having to talk to cops. Seldom seen actors or semi professionals are used, like a harried and suspicious diner owner, or the slovenly tattoo artist in an ink-stained shirt gives a lived in grittiness to the proceedings. After a crisp 64 minutes of running time, Miles traps the murderer on the grounds of a company that makes cemetery monuments.

The film is entirely shot in daylight, but there is one scene where the use of noir chiaroscuro is as bold as can be found. When the detectives are at the hospital checking in on the murdered victim’s autopsy they are led on a chase into the bowels of the hospital. Among the darkened hallways, amid the pipes and machinery, they are chasing a deranged alcoholic who has been hired by the killer to mutilate the corpse so her identity can’t be traced by her tattooed arm. The alky, flickering in and out of the shadows, holding a knife, creates a sense of menace, fear and psychological imbalance that is missing from the rest of the film.

For the beetle-browed John Miles, this was to be his last role at the tender age of 27. Among the other unknown lead actors, there is young actress, Patricia White, who portrays a sharp, fresh-faced and spunky botanist who is assisting the police with their clues. Later, as Patricia Barry, she had a very successful TV career, often in a much sexier persona than she exhibits here. Also, lurking in the background as a police lab technician, with only a few lines, is a young New York City actor by the name of Jack Lord, with his own distinguished career in TV ahead of him.

Audiences walking into a movie palace in 1950 for a double bill probably gave short shrift to the opening feature. Usually running between 60 to 75 minutes these B films were fillers, made for the late arriving crowd who didn’t mind missing the first 10-15 minutes, while they went to the snack bar and/or primped in front of the mirror in the restroom. As they jostled past others already seated, one’s mind was on the main feature of the night. People came to see Bogart, Davis, Grant and Heyburn, but in the meantime they had to wade through the last 45 minutes of films like The Tattooed Stranger.

It wasn’t until decades later, where in the leisure of one’s own home, people could watch these B films and wonder how some of these nuggets could have been bypassed, totally unnoticed, upon their first release.

Written by Bob

Murder Is My Beat (1955)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:26:50 PDT

Edgar G. Ulmer, the very mention of the name congers up of the dark images of his first U.S hit, The Black Cat and the suffocating femme fatale Vera from his noir tour de force on a shoestring, Detour. Via personal rather than professional pitfalls, involving his affair with the wife of the nephew of Carl Leammle, Ulmer never reached the heights of his German/Austrian counterparts and former co-workers; Fred Zinneman, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, and Fritz Lang, While resigned to work for the bulk of his Hollywood career for his personal transgressions within those studios collectively known as “poverty row,” Ulmer nevertheless carved out a niche for himself and remains in many noir camps revered for his mixed bag of films within the genre.

Occupying the grimy bottom of that bag is his final foray into noir Murder Is My Beat released by RPC in 1955. The stars are one time “party girl” Barbara Payton, the serviceable Paul Langton and the reliable Robert Shayne in a tale of murder, double blackmail, suicide, a cop gone bad and love conquering all.

While the debate still rages as to exactly what constitutes that thing called noir, the two most vocal camps are “it’s the story” and “its how the story is told.” Some overly zealous campers from the “how it’s told” camp have openly questioned the noiriness of Murder Is My Beat stating there’s nary an off-kilter, close-up, starkly contrasted frame in the whole of its abbreviated 77 minutes of running time. To them I say; you’re right!

On the other hand, those pitching their tents in the “it’s the story” camp will shout it’s got murder, in fact it’s got a couple murders; it’s got a double-crossing dame, it’s got blackmail, it’s got an urban setting (well sometimes), a cheating husband and a hard-boiled cop that goes soft. Plenty of elements to give it some noir cachet and if all that weren’t enough, it’s got Barbara Payton, the original walking, talking full sized noir windup doll in her last role.

The oft told story of debauchery and sin that came to signify the life of Ms. Payton is well known so I’ll not spend time to rehash it. That noted, it bears mentioning her physical condition in the film; the plainly visible paunch accentuated by the tight sweaters she wears, the beginning of a double chin and her almost moon-round face are tell tail signs of the grip alcohol had on her. Plainly her days as one of Hollywood’s favorite playthings with the likes of Bob Hope, John Ireland, Howard Hughes and even the equally reprehensible Tom Neal are long behind her. Also quickly fading into the distance were films with her playing opposite the likes of James Cagney, Gregory Peck, and Gary Cooper. Her most recent work was alongside the aforementioned Tom Neal and another of Hollywood’s “Bad Boys” the redoubtable Sonny Tufts. One could view her career as akin to pulling on a pair of shorts whose elastic has been stretched one too many times; up fast and down just as fast.

Had Ulmer been working within the ranks of a well-heeled studio, Murder Is My Beat may have amounted to something other than the strictly B production it is. Say you put Jane Greer, Robert Mitchum and William Bendix along with some location shooting and a half million dollar budget and you’d have something. Instead we get the three “stars” mentioned above, a couple of stock shots of the L.A. City Hall and Union Station along with a bunch of rear projection shots and some cardboard sets. Not too much to offer here in the way of filming with the one exception being the story itself.

Fortunately, we do have a decent story which begins with police Captain Bert Rawley (Shayne, who seems to be playing his long running Inspector Henderson role from TV’s Superman) catching up with wayward Homicide cop Ray Patrick (Langton). Rawley’s tracked down Ray and Eden Lane (Payton) who are holed up in a flea bag motel, or Ray as notes upon their arrival “We registered in the collection of dog kennels”. Busting into their room, Rawley finds Eden has taken a powder and left Ray holding the proverbial bag.

By virtue of their long working relationship somehow Ray is able to talk Rawley into giving him 24 hours to try and locate Eden and prove her innocence of the murder she’s recently been convicted of and sentenced for. Rawley grudgingly agrees but only as long as he and Ray work together to round up the recently disappeared Eden.

At this juncture the time honored noir flashback sequence begins with Ray called in to investigate the bludgeoning murder of Frank Deane. Deane was found by his neighbor with his face and fingerprints burned beyond recognition. As fate would have it, having being belted with a ceramic figurine, Deane landed face and hands first into his fireplace which resulted in them both being disfigured to the point that positive identification is impossible. Some quick questioning of the neighbor by Ray turns up the name of Eden, as the neighbor points out “…sounds like original sin” who works as a carney at a downtown bar.

Once at the bar Ray tries to shake down the bartender, the always entertaining Jay Alder, but comes away with a bunch of nothing except that Eden rooms with the gal who snaps photos in the joint the shapely Patsy Flint (Tracy Roberts). Trying to get information out of Pasty ends up more of the same “know nothing” answers as he got from the bartender so he drags her back to her room where he turns up a clue that Eden’s hightailed it north on a Greyhound bus.

Using all his cop savvy, Ray tracks Eden down to a remote and snow bound cabin owned by Deane. With the snow piling up the two have no alternative other than to ride out the storm in the company of one another. While the stay is purely plutonic, Ray begins to doubt the guilt of Eden once he begins to view her as a woman rather than merely another suspect. The fact that she freely admits hitting Deane and is willing to face the charges, which she believes are minor completely unaware her blow to the head, could have resulted in anything like murder.

Once Eden’s convicted and sentenced, the still doubting Ray volunteers to ride along on the train with the police matron taking Eden to prison. During their ride north the sole excellent filmed sequence plays out. Ray’s torment and doubt is contrasted against shots of the speeding locomotive. Over the course of the minute or so, Ray’s wracked with questions of Eden’s guilt played against his growing non-platonic interest in her. The clackity-clack, clackity-clack, clackity-clack of the big engine’s wheels working in perfect concert with his churning mind brings on one real moment of tension to an otherwise drab film.

While on the train a string of convenient coincidences pop up. The first occurs when Eden spies what appears to be Frank Deane standing on a station platform as the train slowly passes by. This triggers Ray to put his job as a cop aside and act on his desire to aid Eden. Next, the train slows to 10 miles an hour allowing Ray and Eden of jump off at a point that just happens to be the home town of Patsy Flint. Later while driving around the town Ray spots Patsy walking down the street and for no apparent reason Ray visits a plant that makes ceramic figurines and sees the very same one used as the murder weapon. It’s a darn good thing all these “coincidences” occur as in one voice over Ray laments the fact that one man trying to solve a case is impossible for such a job requires the vast resources of the police department. As he earlier notes “Every Day I put behind us drawing nothing but blanks was a day put in the ash can and hauled to the city dump.” Shear poetry.

About this time is when Rawley shows up on the scene and we’re snapped back to the present. Now for all intents Ray’s doubled his police resources. Soon he and Rawley are on the trail of the shapely Ms. Flint and with a bit of illegal police work, such as unlawful entry into her hotel room and lack of a search warrant, Ray discovers a false bottom, in the suitcase that is, that’s full of dough. As the saying goes, “here’s where the plot thickens”. Without giving away the entire mystery, in short order, we soon find; the dead body of the blackmailing dame, the exposure of the double life of a prominent citizen and his scorned wife’s involvement in a combination blackmail/murder/suicide. All of which of course clears Eden of any wrong doing other than putting a small lump on the head of Deane. As far as her cutting out on Ray at the motel, she’d gone to turn herself in to the warden at the prison so everything’s Jake in her corner.

In the final analysis, Ulmer gets a pass for committing the final crime in the film and its one fatal flaw. One in which perhaps even those of the “it’s the story” camp will take umbrage with. Mainly that of giving us the corny happy ending as Ray and Eden head for the marriage license bureau with Captain Rawley in tow as the best man. Maybe it was the limited resources Ulmer had to work with. Maybe it was the knowledge his European cronies had to make it big while he languished and he was simply trying to put a happy spin on a bitter little world. Whatever the reason, I’d have preferred something with Ray just having the knowledge Eden was in the clear and let it go at that. Then again I don’t get the big bucks to direct Hollywood feature films. Then come to think of it, neither did Ulmer.

Written by Raven

Chicago Calling (1951)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 16:18:55 PDT

Bill Cannon (embodied—not played—by Dan Duryea) is a sad sack of buffalo chips—even by film noir standards. His relatable plight makes Chicago Calling (1953) something more than your standard noir.

The film is, arguably, not a bona fide noir. Its main goal is to emulate the neo-realist movement of post-war Italian cinema. Director/co-writer John Reinhardt has no interest in crafting a routine tale of crime and punishment. Everything that happens in Chicago Calling could reasonably occur in your life or mine—were the chips to fall as miserably as they do for the feckless Cannon.

A struggling alcoholic, Cannon is a once-gifted photographer whose boozing and lack of self-confidence have sent him on a long, slow slide to oblivion. He lives in a shabby Bunker Hill apartment with his long-suffering wife, Mary (Mary Anderson) and their daughter Nancy (Melinda Plowman).

The film starts at the end of a personal tether. Mary has had enough of her husband’s excuses, weakness and lack of resolve. She is leaving him, with Nancy in tow, and going cross-country to her mother’s. Bill is blind-sided by this decision, and tries vaguely to keep wife and child from going. Mary has heard these feeble promises of reform twice too often. There’s no changing her mind. She still loves Bill, but he’s beyond her personal pale.

Bill is in a haze—he’s clearly reached rock bottom with this terrible turn of events. His fight to win back his family, while buried alive under the rubble of his bad decisions, is among the bravest struggles ever to face a film noir anti-hero.

Any actor but Dan Duryea wouldn’t have worked in the role of Bill Cannon. No other actor could so perfectly convey desperation, flop-sweat and lack of personal resolve. His ability to personify the sad sack persona of Bill Cannon, to the nth degree, is the solvency of Chicago Calling.

Duryea’s Bill Cannon lacks basic survival skills in a hard urban world. The constant movement of the city bewilders him. He isn’t a villain, he isn’t a saint—he just is. This is the finest moment of his film career—the spotlight is exclusively on him, and he pushes past easy gestures and stock reactions to forge a performance that lingers in the viewer’s mind, long after the film has ended.

As I viewed this film, I kept thinking of his character in the 1941 Warner Brothers A-pic, The Little Foxes. His spineless, shifty Leo Hubbard seems the spiritual forefather to Bill Cannon. We’re given only fleeting glimpses of Bill’s past. It appears that he was once a whiz-kid—perhaps one who coasted too long on his promise, rather than on physical achievements.

That cockiness is long gone from Cannon’s arsenal by the time we meet him. He can’t find a job—let alone keep one—and is a nuisance even to his friends. His only ally is his dog, left behind by wife and child.

Bill numbly walks the streets of Bunker Hill. Like other independent L.A. noir productions (Joseph Losey’s M, et al), Chicago Calling makes the most of location shooting in the seediest sectors of the City of Angels. These long-demolished low-income neighborhoods live on via these films.

Bill uses an icon of Bunker Hill in his daily travels—a long, steep flight of cement stairs. These are to film noir what the stairway in Laurel and Hardy’s short, The Music Box, are to classic comedy. Each flight is a symbol of man’s struggle: one used to inspire comedy, the other to convey tragedy.

Those long, steep stairs, which memorably serve in a fight scene in Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me, Deadly, have removed plenty of Bill’s shoe leather over the years. He and the dog aimlessly wander the downtrodden streets of Los Angeles, in search of some answer to his confused, half-formed plea of mercy.

Chicago Calling turns decidedly noir in these haunting moments. What might have been a straight-laced Hollywood account of a loser turning his life around becomes a drifting, episodic tone poem of poverty and despair.

Bill Cannon does redeem himself, in his own hapless way. He must grovel to achieve this faint salvation. He gets news that his daughter has been seriously injured, in transit. Her life hangs in the balance at a Chicago hospital. News is imminent via his home telephone. Said phone is on the disconnect list, due to non-payment of a large bill.

Cannon’s personal crisis is a dusk-to-dawn struggle to raise the money to pay the damned bill so he can receive that phone call. He opens himself up to anyone and anything that can help him.

In the course of this dark night of the soul, he meets Bobby (Gordon Gebert), one of those 1950s movie kids who seem wise beyond their years. Bobby innocently indicts Bill in a minor-league crime, in an attempt to help him.

Despite this disaster, Bill and Bobby bond. Bill is no hero, but he recognizes a fellow outcast. By reaching out to Bobby, Bill is given a form of hope, as the events of his life grow increasingly bleaker.

Chicago Calling has ambitions to transcend genre and budget boundaries. Thank heavens it was an independent project. Had this film been made by, say, MGM’s B-movie unit, heavy moralizing and an “uplifting” message would have gelded it completely. Director Reinhardt, as said, seems clearly inspired by the gritty efforts of Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti. Echoes of Bicycle Thieves and Open City permeate this film.

Bill Cannon suffers in a way that most noir figures don’t. His problems and personal pain are achingly real. He goes through hell for the wont of 53 dollars, According to the inflation calculator at dollartimes.com, that’s the equivalent of $435.07 in 2011 dollars. To anyone in need, then or now, that’s a hefty chunk of change. Bill can’t solve his problems with a .45 and a quick wit. He is left to face his worst fears, at ground level. Director of photography Robert de Grasse is the tacit co-star of Chicago Calling. His unflinching vistas of the downside of L.A. life are moving and atmospheric. Particularly choice are the film’s nighttime sequences. They capture the groggy crawl of a city that can’t afford to sleep, no matter how weary it may be. Despite its half-hearted happy ending—which doesn’t convince us for a moment, given Cannon’s past track record—Chicago Calling is among the most despairing, relentless entries in the film noir cycle. Because it lacks fedoras, femmes fatale and gleaming gats, this film has been overlooked and under-estimated. Thanks to the recent Warner Archive DVD-R, Reinhardt’s bleak view of a life hanging by a thread can reach across six decades and remind us how little life—and human nature—has changed.

Written by Frank M. Young

His Kind of Woman (1951)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:07:36 PDT

They were two of a kind ! ...and bound to meet, but neither of them knew what such a meeting would mean! - Original tagline.

Loitering uncertainly near the hinterlands of film noir is the Howard Hughes produced, John Farrow/Richard Fleischer directed film His Kind of Woman. The pedigree of the film destined it for greatness: seasoned directors, smoldering stars, and a stable of gritty noir screenwriters, all financed by the large bankroll of a playboy genius. His Kind of Woman just may be the greatest noir film that never was. What RKO delivered to theaters was a bloated, schizophrenic film – a Frankenstein’s monster of beautifully crafted noir spliced together with a smattering of scenes from several genres. Is the film noir? Yes, undeniably. However, it is also an ensemble melodrama, a Hollywood satire, and a battle of the sexes comedy, mixed thoroughly with a dash of slapstick. So what went wrong? It may be ungracious to lay the blame entirely at the feet of Hughes (after all, what better match for a noir film than a producer controlled by a dark obsessive nature?), but his incessant tinkering and additions are what ultimately doomed the film.

His Kind of Woman was a perfect fit for production company RKO. Though the company had been in financial flux for years, it produced and distributed a heap of films that were successes both critically and commercially in a number of genres. Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, William Wyler, Laurel and Hardy, and Walt Disney all had ties with RKO before Howard Hughes gained control of it in 1948, but noir was a house special by that point. The pre-Hughes RKO had released some of the finest films noir we know today: Born to Kill, Murder My Sweet, The Woman in the Window, Stranger on the Third Floor, Out of the Past, Desperate, The Stranger, and Crossfire. His Kind of Woman wasn’t the first or last film noir that Hughes would meddle with, turning out less than stellar results (see also: The Racket and The Las Vegas Story) but the genre would survive in spite of him. Consider the following films, released under RKO during Hughes’ reign: The Narrow Margin, Clash by Night, Cry Danger, The Big Steal, The Set Up, The Hitch-Hiker, Sudden Fear, On Dangerous Ground, Armored Car Robbery, and Beware, My Lovely. This hindsight makes it all the more sad that His Kind of Woman doesn’t quite fit in with the other great films being made alongside it.

In His Kind of Woman, Mitchum plays Dan Milner, a down on his luck gambler lured to exotic Morro’s Lodge by a cadre of shady characters and the promise of $50,000. On the way to Mexico, he meets millionaire chanteuse Lenore Brent, played by Russell. In actuality, she’s a gold digger (with a heart to match) hoping to snag fellow Lodge guest, Hollywood actor Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price). The film stalls in its Mexican locale, with Milner and Russell rubbing elbows with supporting cast players while Milner, and the audience, try to unravel the reason we’ve all traveled so far. When Milner overhears suspicious plans between two resorts guests, Krafft and Thompson (John Mylong and Charles McGraw), his curiosity is deferred by another stack of cash. Milner is eventually reinvigorated by the arrival of undercover immigration agent Bill Lusk (Tim Holt), who lets Milner know deported gangster Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr) is behind the scheme and that Krafft is actually a plastic surgeon! Ferraro’s plan is to kidnap Milner, kill him, rearrange his face, and waltz across the border using Milner’s identity. It’s an interesting plot, but gets shelved for too long while Milner is dragged into the useless side stories revolving around the supporting cast of Morro’s Lodge guests. By the time the film gets back on track with the shockingly brutal climax between Milner and Ferraro, the whos, whats, and whys of the plot are almost distant memories.

The plot may be farfetched, but it works in Hollywood, and even in the realistic world of film noir (we’ve seen plastic surgery before in Dark Passage and an even stranger premise in Decoy). Here, it gets lost in the morass of superfluous genres. The biggest detriment to the film was Hughes’ inability to edit himself. Director John Farrow finished the film, but unhappy with the result, Hughes brought in Richard Fleischer to reshoot much of it, recast villain Nick Ferraro, and neatly inserted himself into the screenwriting process. In the end result, you can pick out Hughes’ contributions with near certainty: useless subplots, not one but two dashing aviators, and the endless scenes involving Vincent Price’s character, whom Hughes fell in love with. Yet a patient film lover can pluck out the noir diamond in rough. There are many faultless elements in the film, from cast to cinematography, that tell us His Kind of Woman was carefully crafted and not carelessly churned out of the Hollywood mill.

The stable of actors in His Kind of Woman is somewhat of a noir dream. Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Charles McGraw, Raymond Burr, Vincent Price, and John Mylong carry with them the experience, grittiness, and sex appeal to pull the film off. Unfortunately, the cast became bloated with a number of supporting actors (Hughes pet Mamie Van Doren supposedly beautifies the background; can you spot her?) that advance the runtime of the film, but not the action. Time spent with bit players Jim Backus and Marjorie Reynolds would have been best served developing the underutilized McGraw and thoroughly creepy Mylong.

Mitchum is the typical noir anti-hero, albeit a little watered down. Milner is a professional gambler, yet he eschews bourbon for milk and ginger ale. He can take a beating and handle a Luger, yet he shows a softer side to help out a couple of struggling newlyweds at Morro’s Lodge. Despite this, Mitchum is the same tall, dark, and sardonic underdog that we like to see, sauntering lazily through the lodge, or gazing half-lidded at Jane Russell. He’s at his best throughout the film, especially sharing scenes with Burr. Recasting Burr as Ferraro is the best “bad” decision Hughes made during the filming. Had the comedy and melodrama been cut and the climax between Ferraro and Milner come a half hour earlier, His Kind of Woman would be a darling among noir lovers. The clash between shirtless, sweaty Mitchum and chillingly sadistic Burr is so disturbing and provocative one wonders how it escaped censors.

Vincent Price, though he is talented here, is ill-used. Hughes fixated on the Cardigan character and padded Price’s role with comedy, action, and romance, much to the detriment of the film, which is such a shame because he’s fantastic! Watch Price during the scene where Cardigan is shamelessly screening his own film to the entire resort: he writhes and simpers in his seat, demurring the accolades he thinks he is receiving from his audience. The problem is the insistent shoehorning of Cardigan into the film – going so far as to maddeningly portray him as hero alongside Mitchum. In one scene Price is the Errol Flynn-like Hollywood actor butting heads with his agent and wistfully longing to be a real swashbuckling hero. In another, he’s the male third of a love triangle trading quips about love and marriage with wife Marjorie Reynolds and mistress Jane Russell. One almost wishes that Hughes had contrived a Mark Cardigan series of light comedies to produce and left him out of His Kind of Woman. Indeed, you could chop out Price’s entire contribution to the film with no ill effects. He adds almost nothing to the working plot, and what little he does to advance the story could (and should) have been handled by Mitchum.

Russell was one of Hughes’ most famous muses – it’s telling and touching that when jumping ship at RKO in 1955, two of the things Hughes took with him was a sack of cash and Jane Russell’s contract. Perhaps at first Hughes was most attracted to Russell’s two most famous assets, but he unearthed a Hollywood talent. As Lenore in His Kind of Woman, she is the femme fatale with the heart of gold, able to stand up to Mitchum with both her stature and ability to deliver the necessary repartee. Louella Parsons called them “the hottest combination to ever hit the screen,” and it’s a pity we don’t see Lenore take a more pivotal role in the film. When Cardigan locks her in the closet near the end of the film it is almost as if Hughes found a way to get rid of Russell in order to make room for more Mark Cardigan screen time.

The noir scenes are as beautiful as noir gets, shot by cinematographer Harry J. Wild, who had already been behind the camera for several noir films including Murder My Sweet, The Big Steal, Pitfall, and Nocturne. Wild’s shadowy scenes are striking; the line of demarcation between the beautifully lit noir scenes and the run of the mill scenes is clear, making it more of a pleasure when Mitchum and McGraw amble into rooms slashed with moonlight. The set designer deserves some credit for heavy lifting here: the mid-century design of Morro’s Lodge seems to be built for a talented cinematographer. Low ceilings and gaping louvered blinds lend a sense of urgency to Milner’s plight the script doesn’t seem eager to impart.

It’s hard to justify a film that begins with a boxcar diner scene reminiscent of The Killers, and ends with Vincent Price sinking a boat filled with Mexican policemen, but His Kind of Woman isn’t terrible. It might not even be bad. Certainly we have an instance where the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. His Kind of Woman is often looked down upon as not being real noir among genre fans (there’s ridiculous comedy, and a lot of it), yet the heart of the film – the best of it – is real noir. Like an insect trapped in amber, it’s surrounded by the trappings of Hollywood… an interesting artifact of the genre worth studying.

Written by Nauga

Hoodlum (1951)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:39:34 PDT

By 1951, Lawrence Tierney's career was on the skids, and he knew it.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Breaking into films in the early 1940s after a career as a catalogue model and theater actor with bit parts at RKO Radio in such films as Gordon Douglas’ Gildersleeve on Broadway, Dudley Nichols’ Government Girl, Mark Robson’s The Ghost Ship (all 1943), and then William Clemens’ The Falcon Out West, John Auer’s Seven Days Ashore, and Robson’s Youth Runs Wild (all 1944), Tierney learned the ropes playing everything from cab drivers to orchestra leaders to FBI agents , until he got his big break at the ultra-cheap studio Monogram Pictures, in Max Nosseck’s Dillinger (1945). It was his first role of any consequence, but it was the lead role of Dillinger himself, and the film made a splash with both the critics and the public, even if was made very cheaply and quickly.

Produced for Monogram by The King Brothers, Frank, Maurice and Herman (tough customers themselves, who made their initial fortune in slot machines), Dillinger was shot for a total of $193,000, and raked in more than $4,000,000 in rentals – an astonishing figure for a Monogram production, where profits were usually paper-thin. Even more amazingly, Philip Yordan’s screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 1946 Oscars, and though it didn’t win, this was another first for Monogram.

Noir director Fritz Lang heard all the commotion about Dillinger, and asked to see a copy, which was run off for him in a screening room. As Lang’s biographer Lotte Eisner reports, Lang ”was astonished to find that [the bank robbery sequence in Dillinger] was in fact some 200 meters of the bank raid from [Lang’s own film] You Only Live Once [1937], which fitted quite easily into the new film . . . “ since all the protagonists in the sequence wore gas masks (182). But no one else noticed this obvious economy at the time, and the film cleaned up at the box-office.

Overnight, Tierney became a star, epitomizing the hardboiled tough guy whom society can’t control. Back at RKO, Tierney was rewarded with slightly bigger roles, usually as a convict or strong-arm man, and not given much chance to extend his range as an actor. Felix Feist’s The Devil Thumbs A Ride (1947), in which Tierney plays cold blooded killer Steve Morgan, hitching a ride after committing murder, is a sort of forerunner to Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953), but runs only 62 minutes, and was designed and distributed as a second feature.

Tierney got his first real leading role in an “A” film in Robert Wise’s memorably vicious Born to Kill (1947), where Tierney’s character, the appropriately named San Wild, is a homicidal maniac who kills on a whim, and tries to scheme his way into a wealthy marriage. With Wise’s sharp direction, and excellent support from Claire Trevor, Elisha Cook Jr. and Walter Slezak, to name just a few of the many superb cast members, Born to Kill was a critical but not commercial hit; the film was simply too bleak for mainstream audiences, and Tierney’s character was so violent and brutal that it was impossible to feel any empathy for him.

Born to Kill is a masterpiece, but it would be Tierney’s last uncompromised vision of hell; from here it was back to B territory with Richard Fleischer’s Bodyguard (1948), which was dumped as a second feature. Convinced that Tierney would never become a major star, even in a sympathetic role (as he was as private eye Mike Carter in Bodyguard), RKO cut Tierney loose, and he began to bounce around from studio to studio; the big chance had eluded him.

Two years passed. After Joseph Pevney’s Shakedown (1950) at Universal, where he supported Howard Duff, rather than taking the lead role himself, Tierney found that his drinking, brawling, and off-screen misbehavior had made him virtually unemployable.

As Tom Vallance noted, “Tierney was noted for living a life almost as tough and unruly as that of his screen characters. He was frequently in the headlines for drunken brawls and was arrested several times, including an occasion on which a woman apparently committed suicide by leaping from her New York apartment . . . accounts of bar-room brawls, drunken driving and scrapes with the law gave newspapers such headlines as ‘Film Dillinger Booked on Drunk Charge,’ ‘Actor Tierney Must Sleep on Jail Floor’ and ‘Tierney Goes to Jail Again’”. The result was that Tierney found himself persona non grata with the majors, and even the minors, and so in 1951 he found himself working for the very low budget Jack Schwarz Productions, cranking out yet another violent, nihilistic, low budget film – with Max Nosseck, his director from Dillinger, again at the helm.

But this time, everything was different.

By 1951, Max Nosseck's career was also on the skids, and he knew it.

One of the most maudit directors of the sound era, Nosseck began his career in Germany, but as a Jew, he was forced to leave with Hitler’s ascent to power, and wandered first through Europe, making a film in France - Le roi des Champs-Élysées (The King of the Champs-Élysées) in 1934 with no less a personage than Buster Keaton in the leading role. But sensing that France would eventually fall to the Nazis, Nosseck wisely kept going, making films in Spain and even Holland, until he finally realized that America offered the only safe haven.

Arriving in the US in the late 1930s, Nosseck made the Yiddish language film Overture to Glory (1940) – a sort of variation on The Jazz Singer – in Astoria, Queens, New York, on a shoestring, and then gravitated to Hollywood. His first US film was the Columbia noir Girls Under 21 (1940), but then Nosseck found himself at PRC cranking out the anemic mystery Gambling Daughters (1941) with a young Gale Storm, before, after much negotiation and hard effort, he got the assignment to direct Dillinger. As with Tierney, Dillinger should have made Nosseck a major player, and vaulted him into the majors. But it didn’t happen.

Nosseck did turn out the effectively dark, violent murder mystery The Brighton Strangler for RKO in 1945, but then left RKO, and was inexplicably handed a low budget independent “family film,” Black Beauty (1946), which, although about a young girl and her beloved horse, has nothing to do with the Anna Sewell novel, and is thus something of a rip-off, although it does feature real life husband and wife Richard Denning and Evelyn Ankers in the leads.

The downward spiral continued with the ultra cheap Return of Rin-Tin-Tin (1947), again trying to get a little less-than-authorized mileage out of a famous character (the film stars a dog christened Rin Tin Tin III, along with a very young Robert Blake), and then Korea Patrol (1951), Nosseck’s initial outing with producer Jack Schwarz, one of the most cost-conscious of all the Hollywood bottom feeders.

What had gone wrong? How had he sunk so low? This was worse than working for PRC or Monogram; much worse, because now he had been to the top, and the only place he could go was down.

Nosseck himself could never explain it, and after another low-budget film with Tierney, Kill or Be Killed (1952); the sleazy soft-core mystery The Body Beautiful (1953); and the even seamier nudist camp film Garden of Eden (1954), Nosseck saw the writing on the wall, and returned to what was then West Germany, where he spent the rest of his career – until 1962 – making trifling romances and adventure films, with one return trip to the US for Singing in the Dark (1956), which merits attention as one of the first films to deal directly with the Holocaust. Nosseck clearly had much more to offer than he was ever allowed to give, and his death on September 29, 1972 at the age of 70 brought an end to a career of largely unfulfilled promise.

But in 1951, Tierney was virtually unemployable, and Nosseck available for a mere pittance, only six years after Dillinger had made its producers and studio $4,000,000 in 1945 dollars, which, adjusted for inflation, is (astoundingly) worth $49,253,707.87 in 2011 dollars.

And so Nosseck and Tierney set about cranking out The Hoodlum, starring Tierney alongside his second-real life brother, Edward Tierney. Lawrence’s other brother was tough guy actor Scott Brady, born Gerard Kenneth Tierney, who was far more successful in managing his career than Lawrence Tierney ever was; Brady died on April 16, 1985 age at 60. Edward Tierney went on to a few more roles in cheap American films, then supporting work in German films as “Edward Tracy,” and on the US TV series Combat!; he died at the age of 55 on December 18, 1983. Despite his hellion lifestyle, Lawrence Tierney beat them both out in terms of longevity, dying at the ripe old age 82 on February 26, 2002.

The Hoodlum is a damned film, a doomed film, a cheap and rotten film about a cheap and rotten world, which begins with a rear-projection trip to the dark, forbidding city dump in a dilapidated jalopy, with career criminal Vincent Lubeck (Lawrence Tierney) looking dazed in the front seat as his brother Johnny (Edward Tierney) does the driving.

A large sign tells the viewer to “dump here,” and one can hardly imagine a more depressing opening. The Hoodlum is a flat, hermetically sealed embrace of death, with Lawrence Tierney obviously resigned, though none too happily, to his real life and cinematic fate.

The film flashes back to the parole hearing that got Vincent out of jail. The parole board is about to rule against his release, after a long string of increasingly violent crimes have put Vince behind bars – we get a brief taste of his past in a rapid recital of his crimes, complete with increasingly harsh punishments – until Vince’s mother (Lisa Golm) tearfully intercedes on his behalf.

Released against the better judgment of the authorities, Vince walks out of the prison a free man, but not before the warden (an uncredited Gene Roth) gives him an up-close look at the prison’s electric chair, predicting that Vince will soon be sitting in it, reminding him that “there are no paroles once you pass though this door.” Vince is shaken up, but only mildly; not even the threat of death can stop him from a life of crime.

Discovering that his brother has purchased a gas station with money left from the death of his father, Vincent immediately starts scheming to get his hands on the business, and betray both his brother and mother. His mother, for some unfathomable reason, still has faith in Vincent, and at the family home, reminds him that it’s much nicer now that they don’t live next to the city dump – the one we saw in film’s opening. “You can breath the air now” she tells him, to which Vince replies:

“Stop it, Ma! Keep the windows closed? What was the use? The stink came through them anyhow into all the corners of your lungs, your skin! Even if you took a bath every day, the stink would still stink! Our playground, where we picked up a few pieces of junk to get spending money. A rotten stink! Even now we're not too far away from it! Yeah, but you wait! I've got ideas. I'll get plenty of money! Yeah, dough! That's the only thing that'll ever cover up the stink of the city dump!”

It seems that Vince hasn’t learned anything from his life of crime, his many imprisonments, and the compassion of his family. Almost immediately, he starts making the moves on his brother’s girlfriend, Rosa (Allene Roberts), and downplays his brother’s offer to work in the gas station. Soon Vince is romancing bank secretary Eileen (Marjorie Riordan) – there’s a bank right conveniently located right across the street from his brother’s gas station – eyeing an armored car as a potential robbery target, and antagonizing his parole officer Lt. Burdick (Stuart Randall), who accurately observes that Vince is a “cheap hood – always looking for a fall guy, and never realizing that you’re it.”

At the gas station, Vince is a less than ideal employee. When a customer asks for a dollar’s worth of gas, Vince doesn’t like his tone of voice, and sprays the man with gasoline. When his brother objects, there’s a blow-up, which Vince compounds by sexually assaulting Rosa on the rooftop of their building, seemingly without consequences. During his weekly meeting with his parole officer, Vince meets his now- paroled former cellmate Marty Connell (John De Simone), and the two start to plan an armored car robbery, while Vince continues to force himself on Rosa, and romance Eileen for her connections at the bank.

But Rosa has become pregnant, and can’t stand her betrayal of Johnny anymore; abruptly, she jumps off the roof of the tenement they live in, killing herself. Johnny is understandably anguished, but Vince couldn’t care less. “Why did she do it?” Johnny asks rhetorically at the dinner table, and Vince unconcernedly tucks into his dinner. “Because she was nuts,” Vince reflexively replies. “Any dame who would jump off a roof must be nuts.” Johnny moves to slug him, but Vince brushes him off; as far as he’s concerned, Johnny is just a chump to love a woman like Rosa.

When Rosa’s body is taken to the mortuary, Vince hits on a scheme to pull off the armored car robbery; they’ll stash the proceeds in a hearse, which, according to Mr. Breckenridge, head of the Breckenridge Mortuary (O.Z. Whitehead, in one of the film’s best performances), is always waved through by the police as a “courtesy of the road.”

Vince reads about an unclaimed body in the city morgue, and members of his gang pose as relatives of the dead man, now named “Uncle John,” and use the corpse as a pretext to hire a hearse. The robbery goes off as scheduled – though two gang members are killed in the process – and Vince has to slug his brother Johnny with a revolver to stop him from calling the cops.

Despite a few tense moments, the hearse ruse works, and Vince and the gang escape with their ill-gotten gains. But Lt. Burdick is on the case, and soon figures out the scheme, and takes off in hot pursuit. Predictably, the gang falls out, and Vince is slugged and left for the police, as the other members of his gang make off with the loot.

Vince takes the fall for the entire affair in the press, and though penniless, finds himself on the run from the law. For all of his plans, he has nothing to show for his efforts; interestingly, we never see or hear from the rest of the gang again, for whom apparently crime does pay.

With nowhere else to turn, Vince goes home to his long suffering mother, but she’s finally had more than enough, saying; “it’s too late, Vincent, too late. What can your mama do? Go to the electric chair for you?” Aghast, Vincent breaks down and cries for mercy, “when it is too late for tears,” as his mother puts it. Hopelessly, she caresses Vincent’s head, and then succumbs to a heart attack; as Vince exits her bedroom, his brother Johnny suddenly appears, revolver in hand.

“Johnny, Mama’s dead” Vince stammers.

“Yeah, she’s dead” Johnny responds. “Nothing could stop her from loving you but death. Well, now she’s dead, and you killed her. Just like you killed Papa and Rosa. Well, we’re going on a little ride, to the city dump. I’m gonna finish all this where it started.”

And so we flash back to the beginning of the film, as Johnny grimly drives Vince to his final destination. Pulling up at an ash heap, Johnny is about to shoot Vince in cold blooded execution style, but can’t bring himself to do it; Lt. Burdick, however, has been trailing them, and has no such compunctions. Vince is shot to death in the dump, and dies in a heap of garbage, old tires, and industrial refuse.

It’s hard to imagine a more bleak, depressing, or unrelenting film than The Hoodlum.
The film shocks even the contemporary viewer not only in its relentlessly downbeat story structure, but also in the cheapness of its execution, the complete absence of any directorial flourishes, and its utter absence of any sort of hope of redemption. Vincent Lubeck destroys everything and everyone he touches, and the film simply documents his downward spiral into the gutter, as he takes everyone who cares for him with him.

One can only wonder how Nosseck and Tierney felt making The Hoodlum, a 60 minute programmer with a non-existent budget only six years after their smash hit with Dillinger, when it seemed both were headed for the “A” league. In life, as in the film, neither man had escaped the gutter, and they were doomed to repeat the past without variation, telling the same story over and over again; the death spiral of the damned, the doomed, the hopeless and helpless in a world of pain, betrayal, and death. It’s the only story they knew, the only story they could tell, the only story the public wanted to see. For Lawrence Tierney, as for Vincent Lubeck, the only way out was death.

Written by Wheeler Winston Dixon

About the Author: Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Coordinator of the Film Studies Program at UNL, and with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Editor-in-Chief of the scholarly film journal Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His newest books include the 21st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; forthcoming, Rutgers University Press, 2011); A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2010; second printing 2011), Film Noir and The Cinema of Paranoia (Rutgers University Press and Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and A Short History of Film, written with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Rutgers University Press and I.B. Tauris, 2008; five printings through 2011). As a filmmaker, his complete works are in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, following a career retrospective at MoMA in 2003.

Works Cited

Eisner, Lotte. Fritz Lang. New York: Da Capo, 1986:182.

Vallance, Tom. “Lawrence Tierney: Obituary,” The Independent March 1, 2002. Web.

Time Table (1956)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:34:47 PDT

“Yeah, I know what Joe says. And patience is fine for a guy like Joe, it goes with his two pants suit, his washable necktie, and his ’49 car! For me patience is poison!”

Despite a five-decade career in film and television, Mark Stevens was most visible in the years immediately after the war. He made his first big splash with Lucille Ball and Bill Bendix in 1946’s The Dark Corner, followed by a pair of notable 1948 films: the FBI-noir The Street with No Name and the Academy heavyweight The Snake Pit. Stevens is of less interest for those projects (to me, at least) than he is for his 1950s work, after he struck out on his own. He was the force behind his own film production and music publishing companies (he could sing), as well as the star and occasional director of Big Town, a popular weekly television series in which he played a crime-busting newsman. Although Stevens failed to carve out a lasting place for himself as filmmaker, his earliest efforts, Cry Vengeance (1954) and Time Table (1956), both surprisingly good noirs, beg for increased attention in contemporary film circles, and make one wish the fledgling director had framed more crime movies.

Unfortunately for anyone who hasn’t seen Time Table, it’s impossible to discuss without spoiling its big twist — so let’s get it out of the way right now (and don’t worry, the reveal occurs in the first half of the film): Stevens plays an insurance investigator who — here it comes — turns out to be the brains behind the very robbery he’s asked to solve. Although it’s a rather old saw and may bring to mind Double Indemnity, Time Table more closely resembles titles like Roadblock, Private Hell 36, and The Man Who Cheated Himself. It draws its conventions from a myriad of noir films rather than those of any one in particular. This much is certain: in spite of being a cinematic mutt, Time Table is an intriguing movie that deserves to be seen. However, if your taste prohibits enjoyment of a “derivative” film, then it probably isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you can still connect with a noir picture that utilizes familiar genre tropes and still manages to captivate, keep reading. Or better yet, go track this down. It will surprise you.

The movie opens with a ten-minute-long heist sequence, cleverly staged on a train speeding west through the Arizona night. A polished crook posing as a doctor manages to crack the train’s safe and snatch all the money inside. The job is perfectly planned and calmly executed, using high-tech explosives, a precisely detailed timetable, and a cagey scheme involving a “sick” passenger and his “wife” — both in on the caper. The trio of bandits exit the train in a scrubby desert town, and abscond in an ambulance with half a million dollars. The railroad’s insurers will have to make good on the policy unless the money is recovered, so they assign the case to Charlie Norman (Stevens), their best man, forcing him and his wife Ruth (Marianne Stewart) to delay their long-planned Mexican vacation. Charlie is partnered with railroad detective and best friend (yeah, yeah) Joe Armstrong (King Calder).

The second act contains a healthy dose of cop procedure. Charlie and Joe chase leads, pal around with the yokel cops, and generally marvel at the efficiency and brains of their quarry — all while Charlie becomes more preoccupied and nervous. We're convinced his frustration owes to the lost vacation, until the twist occurs and we discover otherwise: Charlie masterminded the entire robbery in the first place, and he’s torn up because what he believed to be a perfect crime is unravelling all around him. He dreamt up the caper, recruited the players, and worked out the all-important timetable. Why? For some unknown reason Charlie is fed up — with his job, with his home, and with his marriage. He intended to pull off the heist, then use his Mexican holiday as a means to skip out on his old life and rendezvous with his accomplices south of the border. There he intends to cut up the money and start fresh in Argentina with Linda (Felicia Farr), with whom he has fallen in love. Yet fate, as it so often does in film noir, has a different agenda: one of Charlie’s crew is accidentally shot and killed, throwing off the timetable and forcing his partners to hole up. In the meantime, Joe’s dogged police work gains more and more momentum, while Charlie grows ever more desperate. He is finally forced to commit a murder in order to protect himself, scaring his remaining co-conspirators into making a run for it. Just as Joe finally gets wise to the whole scheme, Charlie heads for Tijuana in a last-ditch effort to meet up with Linda. With the Federales riding shotgun, Joe corners the lovers in TJ and guns are drawn…

Whether explored deeply or viewed as pure escapism, Time Table scores. Aben Kandel’s (City for Conquest) accomplished script surpasses typical B movie fare, with an airtight plot and plenty of tough, pithy dialog. Kandel also has a gift for subtle double-entendres that reinforce the story’s central theme and reward attentive viewers. For example, early on when Ruth replaces the blanket on a dozing Charlie, he mumbles, “What’re you trying to do, smother me?” All of Kandel’s characters, in one way or another and regardless of their gender, are struggling to overcome the emptiness of a world in which they’ve discovered, all too late, that the fairy tale assurances of their younger years are simply not meant to be. Charlie finds no comfort in his bleak, middle class existence. Fulfilling the role of the perfect wife brings Ruth little but disappointment. Linda trades her alcoholic, disgraced husband for the promise of a better life with Charlie, but instead leaps from the frying pan into an altogether deadlier fire. Even Joe runs himself into the ground living up to the image of a dead cop father who taught him there’s no such thing as a perfect crime. In Time Table, perfection is as ethereal as the cloud of cigarette smoke that perpetually hangs over Charlie and Joe.

Stevens’ direction might be described as workmanlike, but he understands where to linger, when to move quickly, and how to get a lot out of his actors — Time Table has a great cast. Wesley Addy (Kiss Me Deadly, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) is fantastic as the drunken ex-M.D. who holds it together just long enough to rob the train, while King Calder, who worked previously with Stevens during his run as television’s private detective Martin Kane, excels as the relentlessly driven railroad cop. Calder’s face and body language are so hang-dog it’s hard to imagine him in roles outside of the crime genre. However two of the most memorable performances come from actors in small parts. Jack Klugman, appearing in his first film role after having met Stevens on an episode of Big Town, plays a chain-smoking wheelman who squirms under the lights like nobody’s business. Klugman has just one scene, but he steals it cleanly away from Stevens and Calder. The second standout is Alan Reed, whose name and face may not be incredibly familiar, though his unforgettable and iconic voice certainly is — even thirty-five years after his death. Reed’s stocky build, unique look, and instant pathos made him a natural for this stuff — it’s surprising he didn’t make more crime pictures. Reed vividly brings to life the helicopter pilot most responsible for Charlie’s plans going down the tube. He burns the candle from both ends and pays a steep price for turning stool pigeon — it’s one of the film’s best moments.

At a quick 79 minutes, Time Table is a second feature — it plows ahead, sacrificing much at the altar of brevity. Yet while similar films are repudiated as rote exercises in “what happened next?” moviemaking, they frequently provide an instructive lens through which we can examine the cultural values of their era. Time Table in such a film. At its core is the question of Charlie’s motivation to self-destruct, and he offers no clues beyond a vaguely expressed desire for a change. At a critical point in the final reel, Ruth confronts him:

“Charlie, why’d you do it? Why?”
“Why? What does it matter?”

And later in the same scene:

“We had so much Charlie. Why, why?”
“The house becomes a prison, the job a trap.”
“What did you want?”
“A new kind of life.”

Yet the film doesn't explain why Charlie so desperately wants this new life. Personally and professionally he has everything a man could reasonably ask for — his situation is even admirable. Ruth is a kind and attractive woman for whom he has genuine affection, and his tough-guy job as an insurance cop makes him a bona fide man’s man. The most telling aspect of Time Table is how it takes for granted that viewers will embrace Charlie’s compulsion to escape his circumstances without being given a reason.

Look closely at the absurdity of Charlie’s actions: he trades his job and his honor for a satchel of easy money; a fine suburban home for assuredly more squalid digs in Argentina; and a caring spouse another woman, albeit younger and a little prettier, who nevertheless seems to be cut from the same beige piece of cloth as his wife. It’s also worth pointing out that Linda is a Mexican — another way in which the film drives home the point that Charlie’s all-American situation somehow isn’t adequate. And he knows his trades are for keeps — permanently sanctified through blood and betrayal. After all, Charlie’s a law enforcement man who, like Walter Neff, understands the risks but believes his knowledge of the game provides an edge. At the same time, he is aware of the looming possibility of the little green room at Quentin, where one’s final black moments are strained listening for the plop-plop-fizz-fizz of everlasting relief.

Unlike in other noir pictures, the protagonist’s downfall can’t be attributed to a femme fatale. Time Table doesn’t have one. Sure, there’s a girl, but Charlie’s inamorata is hardly an upgrade on his wife. Here’s a guy who is winning the rat race and still wants out — he hates everything about his situation. The answer to his motivation lies in the movie’s unrelenting cynicism. Time Table consciously subverts the post-war American dream of happiness through national prosperity and material achievement. It thumbs its nose at the white bread promises of the Eisenhower era: the steady jobs, home-sweet-homes, and June Allyson wives that saturated mainstream media offerings. It gives us a protagonist who has achieved these material things and more, yet remains unfulfilled. In many ways, Charlie’s case is even more compelling than that of the pill-popping Ed Avery in another 1956 film, Nicholas Ray’s brilliant Bigger Than Life — if only because Time Table is neither a character study nor a message picture. For the men of film noir, the ones who fought the war and returned to a changing country, the idea of a dutiful and submissive wife, a white collar, and a white picket fence just couldn’t cut it — and heaven knows our noir heroes tried to fit back in. They squirm in their suits, tugging at those tight collars, chewing their nails, always on the make for that thing that might break the monotony and remind them of what it feels like to be alive. Pour another drink, Don Draper.

What makes Time Table so enthralling (as well as numerous other film noirs), is that while modern audiences might find Charlie Norman’s gambit unfathomable or absurd, some of the 1956 crowd undoubtedly recognized themselves in him — feeling every bit as suffocated while having to acquiesce to the vanilla model of happiness offered up on countless roadside billboards, magazine advertisements, and sponsor-centric TV programs. Consequently, Charlie becomes a poster child for those who felt trapped in that uncanny era of prosperous conformity — and an authentic film noir anti-hero. In recognizing and understanding the daring of filmmakers who so openly questioned the fleeting promises of the American Dream, we further appreciate the enduring allure of film noir.

Written by The Professor

Editor's note: Check out more from The Professor Where Danger Lives!

Blood Simple (1984)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 13:09:30 PDT

“The world is full of complainers. The fact is nothing comes with a guarantee. I don’t care if you’re the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or man of the year. Something can all go wrong. Go ahead, you know: complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help and watch him fly. Now, in Russia they got it mapped out so everyone pulls for everyone else. That’s the theory anyway. But what I know about is Texas. And down here, you’re on your own.” – Loren Visser, Blood Simple

So begins the voice-over introducing us to Joel and Ethan Coen’s somewhere-in-Texas world of Blood Simple. On the face of it, Blood Simple is your basic homage to films noir in the grand tradition of Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice. What the Coens deliver is a darkly humorous neo-noir so full of suspense, it would be at home on a shelf next to Hitchcock’s best. Everything you’d expect to see in a noir is here, as if the Coens were using a recipe to craft the film: an adulterous woman, seedy bars and motel rooms, frame-ups, and double-crossers. The Coens took their film’s title from Dashiell Hammett’s story “Red Harvest”: a term that describes the frame of mind a person is in after being exposed to murder or intense violence. The film itself explores the characters as circumstances turn them all blood simple, and is as neatly crafted as any Hammett or James M. Cain story.

Dan Hedaya plays Julian Marty, a dyspeptic Greek bar owner, who is having his faithless wife Abby (Frances McDormand) and his employee, Ray, (John Getz) tailed by sleazy private detective Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh). Marty’s scheme is simple, but about as sturdily built as a house of cards. Visser double-crosses Marty, frames Abby, and plans to take the money and run, but crime is never that neat. What ensues is like watching Abbott and Costello play a round of Russian roulette while doing “Who’s On First?” A series of miscommunications, suspicions, and fatal assumptions have Abby and Ray eyeing each other warily while a predatory Visser circles on the outskirts of the plot. The viewer is left in a unique position for this type of film - most directors would leave out key bits of information for cheap thrills and plot twists, but the Coens show their hand: we know who murders who, and how the deed was done. The characters flounder and struggle while we look on, smug and full of dread.

The film’s small cast all fit comfortably into their roles, with Hedaya and Walsh being the standouts. Hedaya plays Marty as noir’s typical impotent, cuckolded husband, his rage over Abby’s infidelity steadily simmering just below the surface. He’s got a big house, a shiny car, a beautiful wife and absolutely no control over anything in his life, especially the rogue private investigator he’s just hired. Hedaya’s character is an obvious parallel to Nick Smith’s (Cecil Kellaway) Greek diner owner in Postman, but he’s not the poor, sad sap Smith could be. Marty is at all times smarmy and unlikable, unable to evoke any sympathy from the viewer.

As Abby, Coen brothers’ muse Frances McDormand is a modern noir female. She’s an appealing crossbreed of both ingénue and femme fatale. With her sweet, open face and big, guileless eyes we can see Abby may have once been naïve and idealistic, but a few years of marriage to Marty has distilled her Texan pragmatism. She carries a snub-nose in her pocketbook with a vague notion of using it on Marty, should the situation present itself.

John Getz is arguably the weakest actor here, but that’s not saying much. He’s not supposed to be the hero; he’s just trying to keep his head above water. Ray is a simple man with not much to like or dislike about him, and through the course of the film we see his nerves stretch taut and begin to fray as he desperately tries to make sense of the violence surrounding him. If inexperience keeps Getz and McDormand from fully evoking their characters’ emotions, the exceptional plot excuses them. Ray and Abby spend a lot of the film looking bewildered, but who wouldn’t, trying to untangle this mess of murder?

The knockout performance of the film hails from its villain, a role written specifically for the actor. Had the Coens produced Blood Simple on the heels of Fargo, it’s likely M. Emmet Walsh would have been given an Oscar nod. Watching Walsh settle in as the husky, dissipated Visser is a real treat for the viewer. With his high-crowned woven cowboy hat, chunky turquoise ring, and pastel yellow leisure suit, Visser borders on the comical but his calculating reptilian eyes veer him into the grotesque. At separate points in the film a beetle and a fly land on Visser’s face and explore the terrain. Whether it’s a bit of movie-making luck or orchestrated by the Coens, the viewer understands: here is a bottom-feeder; insects can smell the death on him. Walsh is so good at being bad that by the end of the film you may be rooting for him, or at least hoping he’ll go out in a blaze of glory. You will not be disappointed.

Fifteen years later the Coens would go on to write and direct The Man Who Wasn’t There, a send-up to noir so self-aware and referential that, in comparison, Blood Simple almost reads truer as a film noir. Instead of being constrained by color here, the Coens play with it in between scenes of drab Texas landscape: Visser is half-bathed in shadow, half-lit in buttery Texas sunlight, or harshly lit crimson billboards rising out of a dark desert. The cinematographer for the film was a young Barry Sonnenfeld, but the Coens meticulously storyboarded the story themselves. The result is a style that doesn’t speak particularly to Sonnenfeld, but one that is visible later Coen films like Fargo and No Country for Old Men. Stretches of highway and vaguely familiar landscapes make the film feel like a docudrama… this could have happened! After all, truth is stranger - and funnier - than fiction, and it’s the funny parts of the film that keep it relatable. At one point, as Ray struggles to clean up a bloody crime scene behind a two-way mirror, potential witnesses enter the bar and fire up The Four Tops’ “It’s the Same Old Song.” It’s a dark, absurdist humor commonplace in Coen films, making the audience chuckle in dismay while they wait for the other shoe to drop. In a later interview Joel Coen would say Ray’s infamous burial scene would take just as much inspiration from Chuck Jones (creator of the coyote and roadrunner cartoons) as it did from Hitchcock suspense movies (one can almost see poor bungling Ray captioned in Jones’ pseudo-Latin: homicidius botchus.)

Like Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Blood Simple is one of those films that movie-goers would revisit after the Coens’ commercial successes of later films like Fargo and O, Brother, Where Art Thou? It’s sometimes judged harshly when standing alongside the Coen canon of work, but small filming mistakes due to lack of budget, time and experience do not detract from the film’s overall impact. Once the credits roll, the viewer will sit back and wonder at the richness of plot the Coens were able to build using only a handful of characters. Here is a film revolving around murder and not once do we see a police officer! Blood Simple opened in 1985, and though it took home the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance that year, it enjoyed most of its success much later amongst viewers willing to devote the time. Make no mistake: this film is dense and plods along fairly leisurely, but it packs a wallop of a sucker punch at the end. Put your feet up, nurse a drink and pay attention to the dialogue and small details… this film is worth the investment.

Blood Simple will be released on Blu-ray August 30, 2011.

Written by Nauga

The Unholy Wife (1957)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:50:14 PDT

“I know in your book, there’s no such thing as the perfect crime.”

Diana Dors also known as the “British Marilyn Monroe” was fresh from the success of the 1956 film Yield to the Night (Blonde Sinner)--arguably the performance of her career when she made Unholy Wife (1957), possibly the worst film of her career. Yield to the Night gave Diana Dors a marvelous, sensitive and appealing role as condemned woman, Mary Price Hilton. Due to the film’s timely, uncanny resemblance to a controversial murder case (Ruth Ellis’s murder of David Blakely) and the fact that it became part of the argument for ending the death penalty in Britain, the film had, and continues to have, great social significance.

The first film Dors made in Hollywood was I Married a Woman, a comedy directed by Hal Kanter. Although the filming concluded in late August 1956, the film was held for release until 1958. As a result, Unholy Wife was Diana Dors’ first Hollywood release, and while the film was supposed to be the beginning of Dors’ glorious Hollywood career, the film finished up more as an embarrassment than anything else.

Director John Farrow (father of Mia Farrow) was almost at the end of his career when he made Unholy Wife, and he’d already made a respectable number of noirs including Alias Nick Beal (1949), Where Danger Lives (1950), and His Kind of Woman (1951). Farrow was to make just one more full-length feature, John Paul Jones (1959) before his death in 1963 at age 58. Unholy Wife is based on a story by William Durkee and adapted to the screen by cult crime writer Jonathan Latimer (Lady in the Morgue). Latimer and Farrow had worked together several times before, and with a cast including Diana Dors and Rod Steiger, this noir tale should have been successful. Instead Unholy Wife is a limp, listless drama in which inflamed passions don’t reach boiling point but remain merely tepid. So what went wrong?

The film is set in California’s wine country of Napa Valley, and the plot follows a very familiar pattern: a young sexy wife, with a lover on the side, married to an older man of means. In the case of Unholy Wife, the adulterous woman is Phyllis Hoochen, played by a luscious, ripe Diana Dors at the height of her potent beauty. She’s married to stodgy Paul (Rod Steiger), a man who’s deeply locked into his family traditions. Paul and Phyllis live in the Hoochen family mansion along with Paul’s ailing mother, Emma (Beulah Bondi) and Phyllis’s young son, Michael (Gary Hunley). Phyllis isn’t interested in motherhood, and doesn’t bother pretending. When she’s not trying to ship the kid off to boarding school, she’s busy banishing him to his room. Even to the casual observer, Michael is a boy who’s destined to grow up with ‘mummy issues.’ While Phyllis isn’t much of a mother, neither is she much of a wife, and for most of the film, she prowls around the Hoochen family mansion pacing restlessly like a caged panther.

The film begins with a scrubbed-face, brunette Phyllis telling the story of her past to a man. We don’t see the man’s face--only his shoulder, and Phyllis goes back in time to the recent past to explain a seemingly “perfect crime.” From this point, we see a very different Phyllis--bleached blonde, sexily dressed, and bored out of her mind at home with her decrepit mother-in-law who insists she’s heard a prowler. The prowler is none other than sweaty young rodeo stud, San Sanders (Tom Tryon). It’s not clear exactly how San and Phyllis met or how long they’ve been having an affair, but it is clear that San is the restless sort. Phyllis concocts a plan to get rid of Paul but the plan goes wrong. Since Phyllis is a girl who thinks on her feet, she turns the mistake to her advantage.

Scenes narrated by Phyllis also go back even further in time, to the year before when Phyllis first met Paul in Los Angeles. She was hanging around in a bar with a gal pal waiting for promising, affluent looking men to show up, and the film’s a bit fuzzy about exactly what she was hoping to achieve. There are hints that she’s a prostitute or at least in the market for wheedling expensive gifts from suckers (later, there’s a scene in which Paul gives Phyllis an expensive bracelet she just happened to admire in a jeweler’s window). Paul, who’s in L.A. for a convention, is a prominent Napa Valley vintner. Phyllis explains to Paul that she came to America with an American serviceman, and that she has a 6-year-old son, Michael, she rather brutally describes as “a souvenir from the Air Force.” She sees her lack of parental interest as part of her overall moral failing. At one point she tells Paul:

“I’m no good. Take Michael. Maybe it’s because I hate his father or maybe it’s because I just don’t like kids.”

Unfortunately Paul isn’t listening. He idealistically compares Phyllis to a vineyard that needs tender care. A double date on the beach seals the relationship, and Paul carries Phyllis off to his Napa Valley home.

Unholy Wife has all the ingredients for success but fails. It shares the same basic story as Double Indemnity (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Human Desire (1954), and Marilyn (1954), yet Unholy Wife fails where those films succeed. One of the big differences between Unholy Wife and these other films (apart from quality), is that the films portray wives who need the brawn of their lovers to off their nuisance hubbies. Unholy Wife is an exception; Phyllis is more than capable of scheming and killing simultaneously.

While Unholy Wife is supposed to be a tale of torrid passion, there is zero screen chemistry between either Phyllis and Paul, or Phyllis and San. And this is in spite of the fact that Phyllis appears in a series of stunning outfits that appear to have been spray painted on her hourglass figure. No florals or patterns for Diana Dors--instead her clothes are solid colours: black, white, liquid silver, electric blue, and hot pink. The three characters, Paul, Phyllis and San are supposed to be in the throes of passion, but instead these three mull around like disconnected passengers on a cheap package holiday who’d like to pretend they’re not together.

Perhaps some of the film’s failure can be explained by the fact that the viewer is not privy to the initial meeting between Phyllis and San. There’s no screen presentation of the passionate attraction of these two characters who then slide into an illicit affair, and the few scenes that place San and Phyllis in the same room show San’s growing boredom and restlessness. The sex scenes are not the only manifestation of wooden emotion. In one scene, someone close to Paul is killed, and when he looks at the corpse, there’s no emotional impact, no breakdown, nothing. He might as well be looking at a leftover casserole. In addition, the numerous scenes are too short and choppy, have very little continuity, and are patched together by the explanatory narrative. When Diana Dors later saw the completed film, she stated that it was so badly edited, she barely recognized it.

The New York Times review called the film a “dull, unholy mess,” while noting that Dors’ “real forte” is comedy. The review also stated that Steiger delivered a “curious performance.”

The behind-the-scenes story of the film is far more interesting than the film itself. Diana Dors (real name Diana Mary Fluck--no wonder she changed it), was married to flamboyant playboy Dennis Hamilton, who also acted as her manager, when the film was made. The couple left for America and sailed for Hollywood together in June 1956. While Diana stated that she had “no intention of staying in America indefinitely,” and that she hoped to enjoy a split transatlantic career, husband Dennis stated just the opposite. He was expecting a lucrative RKO contract and declared that the couple would “become American.” Diana Dors’ shot at Hollywood proved that the actress, while fully capable of handling herself in Britain, was ill-prepared for Hollywood and its publicity machine.

Problems began in August soon after Dennis bought a mansion in the Coldwater Canyon area of Beverly Hills, and on the night a lavish party was thrown, somehow Diana, Dennis, and two other people posing by the pool, were pushed in. Hot-tempered Dennis attacked a photographer who ended up in the hospital. Bad press resulted for the British couple, and already RKO were seeking ways to renege on the contract.

Unholy Wife--also known as The Lady and the Prowler was initially set to star Ernest Borgnine as Paul Hoochen, but he was unavailable, so Steiger, who was estranged from his wife at the time, was cast in the role. Rumours of a relationship between Steiger and Diana began, and at one point, Dennis drove to the studio to confront Steiger. Some sources claim that Dennis drove to the set with a shotgun, but other sources state that the gun was an embellishment to an already juicy story. Reporters for the notorious Confidential Magazine even broke into Diana’s home looking for evidence of the affair. According to the book Diana Dors: Just a Whisper Away by Joan Flory and Damien Walne, Steiger and Dors were separated to “damp down rumours”:

“Steiger was sent away to a hideaway in Malibu, while Diana stayed in Beverly Hills. When they were eventually allowed back on the set, there was no question of a tête-à-tête between shots. They were made to wait in separate caravans.”

In Unholy Wife, perhaps all the acting effort went into bolstering the myth for the public that nothing was going on between its two stars.

After the filming of Unholy Wife concluded, Steiger dumped Diana via telephone and returned home to his wife. In November Diana returned to Britain. Although Diane and Dennis Hamilton managed to patch up their volatile marriage, the truce was just temporary. They were both chronically unfaithful, and while the relationship with Steiger went nowhere, when Diana made The Long Haul (1957) she had an affair with Victor Mature’s body double, Tommy Yeardye, and shortly afterwards the marriage was over. Hamilton took Diana to the cleaners for the divorce, and Diana rather passively agreed to all his financial demands. He died in January 1959, and the cause of death, according to some sources, was tertiary syphilis.

Diana Dors and Treasure Productions (one of Hamilton’s companies) sued RKO for $1,275,000 for its failure to meet its contractual obligations for three films, but the suit ended in a settlement of $200,000. RKO pictures argued that Diana had cancelled her contract and that “she had become an object of disgrace, obloquy, ill-will and ridicule” and had “an international reputation for insobriety, unchasity, intemperance and exhibitionism” (Come by Sunday: The Fabulous Ruined Life of Diana Dors by Damon Wise). Never again was there any promise, hint or sign of international super-stardom, and Diana’s later career was firmly entrenched in British television. She died in 1984 of uterine cancer at age 52, and she remains a much loved British star who never really reached her potential.

Written by Guy Savage