Film Noir of the Week

For You I Die (1947)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 21 May 2012 09:53:06 PDT

Georgia: ‘Maybe you’ve got something. (He’s) almost like having a wild animal for a pet’.
Hope: ‘You make me sick’.

Convict Johnny Coulter (Paul Langton), nearing the end of a prison sentence, is forced to take part in a prison break organized by gangster and thug Matt Gruber (Don Harvey).

Coulter is told to hide out in a backwoods holiday camp. There he’s to make contact with Gruber’s woman, an ex-chorus girl Hope Novak (Cathy Downs) and let her know that Gruber will be along to fetch her as soon as things cool down.

Coulter locates the camp, makes the meet, and keeps his head down. However Novak is not at all the hard-bitten hoofer that he’d been expecting. And it turns out she no longer wants anything to do with Gruber.

Hope also believes she sees good in Coulter, a guy who’s taken every kind of beating there is and is now on the ropes. For his part he starts to see her as someone he might trust. It starts to look like there may be Hope for Coulter.

Meantime Gruber is out there and nothing‘s changed for him – which is going to present a serious problem for everyone else down the line.

For You I Die sounds like and is a film noir with some basically sound bones. However after a promising start the picture’s black magic gives way to wayward conjuring remindful of the foolishness in His Kind of Woman. The film wobbles wildly as the script/ director hands it off to a group of theatrical inanities who hang around the motor camp’s café in some unexplainable attempt at comic relief.

Among the misfits: Alex Shaw (Misha Auer), a manic Russian artist and spiritualist; Smitty, an alcoholic hash-slinger who’s sweet on Hope; Mac and Jerry, cartoon cops who live at the lunch counter and repeatedly challenge Coulter, ‘You know, you sure do look familiar’ or ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere’ (the joke is that Coulter’s wanted poster is knocking around in their black-and-white).

Thankfully after a time For You I Die’s central plot and characters are allowed to re-exert themselves and the movie again plainly threatens.

Johnny Coulter is straight out of the film noir workbook – though Paul Langton a journeyman character player at first doesn’t quite take as featured lead. However eventually he comes into focus bringing together something of Dennis O’Keefe’s unaffected brashness and Richard Basehart’s sinister calculation.

Maggie Dillion (Marian Kerby), the resort owner, is a toughened Ma Joad with a bible in one hand and deep-fryer in the other. She’s a sentimental character but she’s okay, our Maggie.

Georgia (Jane Weeks) is a blonde tramp in the tradition of all great blonde film noir tramps. She slinks around the cafe and comes on to every guy who walks in the door including Coulter. She might be listed on the menu as ‘Apple Strumpet’. But Georgia’s no fool and proves to be more dangerous than Coulter suspects.

However, it’s Hope Novak, Gruber’s once-girlfriend really who takes charge of the movie. Novak is a girl who’s had a life but wants another. She has no illusions about where she’s been and is resolute about never going back. Intially Hope seems a bit too much of a goody two-shoes for someone who’s had such a hard start. It’s also a stretch to think that she’d hook up with another felon. But the under-rated Downs is able to convince us that Hope knows what she’s about and what she’s doing.

Director John Reinhardt (The Guilty, Open Secret, Chicago Calling) and Cinematography William Clothier (Confidence Girl, Track of the Cat, Gangbusters) do a reasonable job of things given the fractured script. The film, an abject poverty row cheapie, has a contained and theatrical construction but some of the framing and lighting of the stage-like sets are evocative, sometimes haunting.

But overall For You I Die is a bit of a disappointment. It’s obvious the film could have been rendered a more compelling drama, even a fierce and memorable noir.

Unfortunately, the commercial DVD release on May 15 this year by Alpha Entertainment didn’t prove to be all that much cause for excitement.

Written by Gary Deane ‘Night Editor’

The Last Seduction (1994)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:24:17 PDT

“I am a total f##king bitch,”

Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino), laughing while having sex on-top, in the saddle position.

A seemingly ordinary neo noir excels because of the central character – a femme fatale who is brought to forceful life by the acting of Linda Fiorentino under the subtle direction of John Dahl.

At first glance, the film seems common. The story appears familiar. A femme fatale manipulates men to get her way. Fans of film noir and crime drama have witnessed the plotline countless times. Yet, the main character differs from the femme fatale of cinema past. Unlike some of the dislikable characters who haunted classic film noir, Bridget performs as a likeable femme fatale. She’s a paradox.

The Femme Fatale

An Anti Heroine. In the film’s opening, Bridget Gregory directs and scolds salesmen in a boiler-room telemarketing office in New York City. She knows how to sell, close deals, and manage men.

After work, she races to her apartment to meet her husband, who brings home a large amount of cash. Bridget loves money –lots of it. She fondles it, smells it, and licks it.

The Primary Chumps

Chump # 1. Clay Gregory (Bill Pullman) is Bridget’s husband. He’s a bright fellow. A doctor preparing for residency, he illegally sells prescription drugs to drug dealers to please his wife’s lust for money. Stressed after netting $700,000 in a harrowing drug deal, he slaps Bridget, igniting a chain reaction.

Chump #2. Mike Swale (Peter Berg) serves as the patsy. He hails from small town. Not content with marrying a ‘cowgirl’ and having ‘cow babies’ in upstate small town, he yearns for excitement in his relationships. In small town, Mike meets Bridget. He’s an easy mark because his libido does most of his thinking.

Her Motive

Bridget craves all of the illegal drug money free and clear. Not willing to answer to anybody, she hungers for total liberation that she believes wealth brings and will do anything to get it. Her only interest is her own, and so greed is good.

Also, a darkish disorder dwells deep within Bridget. She seems to scorn men. She uses men to her advantage, catching them, conquering them, and bending them to her will. She values money, power, and independence over relationships. She enjoys humiliating men, deriding them as ‘eunuchs,’ ‘Neanderthals,’ ‘maggots,’ and ‘sex objects.’ A trace of revenge lurks in Bridget’s behavior towards men.

Bridget operates on her terms and her terms only – she controls the game and the men.

An Ancient Character Recast

Bridget emerges as a modern reincarnation of the lethal woman.

Since the beginning of time, the femme fatale has anchored deep in our individual and collective mind. Religion, art, literature, film, and mainstream media have portrayed the femme fatale in a code of sinister representations: harlots, misfits, molls, she-wolves, sirens, spiders, spies, vampires, vixens, witches, and other forms. The images conjure deception, destruction, and death, exposing weakness, lust, and greed under the veneer of society’s acceptable face.

During the classic film noir era, the femme fatale character flourished. The deadly women of classic noir were generally disliked, detested, and sometimes hated by patriarchal society. Their creators - James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, et al. - echoed prevailing sentiment. Powerful, seducing women operating outside the confines of the household threatened the rigid order of dominating men and domesticated women. Frequently, classic film noir reinforced misogyny amongst the zealous fringes of the moral majority. As lightening rods, femme fatales induced moral anger, fury, and wrath.

In Bridget, John Dahl evokes some of the enduring cultural images of the femme fatale and also presents modern, distinguishing characteristics. Let’s look at some of the signs, and their meanings, that the director uses to sculpt the characteristics of his dangerous woman.

The Traditional Signs of a Cinematic Femme Fatale

Black Skirt, Black Stockings, Black Cape. In the presence of her prey, Bridget wears primarily black clothing. Chic and sexy, her clothes could be worn at a funeral, a witches’ brew, or a vampire outing. A familiar code, her clothes signal darkness, hinting of her ability to trap and drain life.

Animal Instincts. Bridget’s behaviors display the characteristics of a wild animal. When Bridget first meets Mike Swale in small town’s bar, she sticks her hand in his crotch, then pulls out her hand, and smells it. She sniffs the odors of her target’s genitals, analyzing sexual condition and social pecking order. She selects her sexual target. She’s the alpha wolf.

Psychopathic Gestures. In an act of utter disrespect towards the sacred values of mainstream Americana, Bridget puts out her cigarette in Grandma’s home-made apple pie. Bridget’s assault on Grandma’s wholesome goodness underscores the diametric difference of the independent femme fatale from the dependent family woman. Bridget is not Mrs. Susie Homemaker. Clever, calculating, and cold-hearted, Bridget’s attitude lacks affection, simpatico, and warmth. She does not say please. She does not say thank you. Her manners are reptilian.

Magical Powers. Bridget’s seductive power conquers. In ancient times, she could have seduced Rome for Egypt. Her ability to write backwards suggests evil. In medieval times, she would have burned at the stake.

Cunning Intelligence. Her schemes leap several steps ahead of her prey. She sets up men for their self destruction. Working by wit, Bridget lures and traps, changing personas to fit the situation, adapting like a chameleon. Sweet and nasty, Bridget bakes chocolate chip cookies for one of her victims and then sticks nails under the tires of his car. Caring and crafty, she convinces a man to unzip his pants so she can ram him through a windshield. Methodical and mean, she investigates her patsy’s past, sniffing for weakness and fear. She outsmarts her quarry - dysfunctional men.

Predatory Copulation. Bridget does not just hump and dump – she ensnares. She feeds her men sex to leash them. Sexual climax comes at the expense of manipulation, subjugation, and ruin. Bridget’s calculating use of her sexuality rivals the power of Dirty Harry’s Magnum .44, and is just as symbolic if not more so. She’s armed and dangerous.

The Modern Signs of a Cinematic Femme Fatale

Bridget distinguishes from cinematic femme fatales of classic film noir and even neo noir.

The Main Character. Bridget is the central character of the story, not just a prop in a svelte dress foiling the male protagonist. We see her world from her view, from close to medium range. All eyes focus on her. She is the anti heroine who fully drives the story, enchanting and entertaining us with mischief.

A Liberated Feminist. Set aside her criminal behavior and bad manners for a moment and she illustrates the modern feminist – powerful, independent, and in-charge. Bridget lives by her own code, wielding her power in pursuit of freedom and sovereignty.

Wit and Humor. Bridget possesses a sharp sense of dark humor. At ease with herself, she enjoys her dry wit and deadpan style. Her satirical wit makes her stand apart from Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), Cora Smith (Lana Turner), Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner), Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner), Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), and other humorless femme fatale heavies.

Eroticism. At turning points in the plot, the film’s simulated sex scenes accent the character of Bridget and drive the story forward with apt style. The scenes are erotic but not pornographic. The eroticism highlights Bridget’s power over men. Bridget could be the witty sister of Matty Walker of Body Heat (Kasdan -1981). The two films serve as examples of erotic noir – a branch of neo noir. The simulated sex in erotic noir differentiates from the suggested sex in classic film noir.

How She Seduces Viewers

Bridget is a paradox. Despite her bad behavior and attitude, we want to like her. Her likability separates her from many femme fatales. Although Bridget descends from the gene pool of femme fatales of the classic noir era, she’s not detestable like Phyllis Dietrichson of Double Indemnity (Wilder- 1944).

Why like Bridget?

She not only seduces, but amuses. She entertains tragically comic. Our pleasure of the chumps’ misfortune allows us to enjoy the majority of Bridget’s clever escapades. We laugh with her. We applaud several but not all of her conquests. Most of the time, we cheer her on.

Her brazen ability to operate outside the social norms of the silent majority mesmerizes. Her audacity marvels. Her smarts impress. She enjoys ‘bending the rules’ and ‘playing with people’s brains.’ As the storyline evolves, she unleashes the unexpected. A naughty prankster, she’s also a nasty troublemaker, a vicarious fantasy.

Dahl’s lens is the keyhole through which we eye Bridget. The director reveals the juicy life of a wild woman from a big city running amok in a small town. Bridget as an aggressive outsider contrasts with the naive locals. The sharp contrast focuses attention, keeping us on edge.

As film noir fans, we feed on scandal, lust, greed, seduction, betrayal, and ruin of our beloved, wayward characters. Film noir is our National Enquirer. Bridget beckons us with tantalizing headlines, front-page news, and sensational pictures.

Despite her strength of cunning and sexuality, Bridget’s weakness of absolute greed looms. Her greed is a familiar trait of film noir characters. Her defect raises the dramatic question - does she self destruct like so many film noir characters.

An Award Winning Character

Dahl constructs Bridget as an award winning character, but with a minor flaw. Dahl omits a back story about Bridget. We don’t know why she scorns the male species. In Luis Buñuel’s film Belle de jour (1967), which stars Catherine Deneuve as an upper-class woman who secretly spends her afternoons working as a prostitute (while her husband works as a surgeon), the director suggests the woman’s behavior was caused by her being molested as a child. Buñuel presents a brief, effective flashback. In Bridget’s case, Dahl leaves us wondering about the causes of her antisocial state.

Linda Fiorentino won prestigious awards and nominations for her efforts in The Last Seduction, as did John Dahl. Applaud John Dahl for selecting Linda for the role of Bridget. Above all applaud Linda. Her ability to play Bridget with sensual ease and subtle humor delivers a distinctive character. Linda’s performance cements the unabashed Bridget in our minds. Also give credit to screenwriter Steve Barancik whose script and dialogue allowed Linda to breathe life into the character. And appreciate Joseph Vitarelli for the jazzy music that highlights Bridget’s improvisational wit and satirical tone. All four artists created Bridget as a likeable femme fatale.

“I can be very nice when I try.”

Bridget

Written by Hard-Boiled Rick

Hot Cars (1956)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:37:12 PDT

Her: ‘Do you always sell every car you demonstrate?’

Him: ‘No, but I don’t always get taken for a ride either’

It’s a good bet that any movie made in 1956 called Hot Cars would be another ‘sinsational’ teens-gone-wild pic along the lines of Dragstrip Girl, Teenage Thunder, Hot Rod Gang, Speed Crazy, Hot Rod Girl, Young and Dangerous or Joy Ride.

But you won’t find any messed-up teenagers, street rods, candy-apple customs in this one, just deluxe production sleds and foreign sports jobs that are ‘hot’ because they’ve been stolen - something Nick Dunn (John Bromfield) suddenly gets wise to after a few days on the job as a sales jockey for a string of Los Angeles used car lots.

Though Dunn realizes that owner Arthur Markel (Ralph Clanton) is running a big-league chop-shop (Markel likes to call it ‘a refrigeration plant where hot cars are brought to cool down’), Dunn has nowhere else to go.

Fired from his last car sales job for being too straight-up with the customers, Dunn now has a financial gun to his head. His infant son Davy desperately needs an operation which could save the child’s life, surgery for which Markel says he’s prepared to pay if Dunn will play.

But Markel already knows that he will. The crooked car dealer was hip to Dunn’s situation before hiring him and earlier had used a blonde knockout named Karen Winter (Joi Lansing) to bait the hook. Winter arranges for Dunn to take her out on a phoney test drive to get the wheels rolling.

By the time Dunn figures out he’s been duped it’s too late and he goes along with being just another of Markel’s flunkeys. What he doesn’t know is that he’s about to be fitted up as a one-size-fits-all patsy.

Hot Cars a trim little programmer was a release of Bel-Air Productions, a joint venture of 20th Century Fox producer/ director Howard W. Koch, and independent producer Aubrey Schenck. For a time in the ‘50’s the company turned out a trunkful of low-budget, quick-buck features including several titles familiar to fans of B noirs: Big House U.S.A. (1955), Crime Against Joe (1956), Three Bad Sisters (1956), The Girl in Black Stockings (1957), and Hell Bound (1957).

However, other than an abbreviated entry on IMDb, Hot Cars appears to have gone unreferenced and unseen until last year when MGM put it out on DVD as part of a Limited Edition series. Good choice. This is a B entry that deserved to be found, given the full frame-off restoration and put back on the road.

Hot Cars runs fast and smooth on a nicely-tuned script by screenwriter Don Martin whose film and television credits extended four decades. Martin scripted several of the original ‘Falcon’ releases and from 1947 to 1958 contributed to a creditable list of efficient B thrillers, among them: Lighthouse (1947), The Hatbox Mystery (1947), Search for Danger (1949), Destination Murder (1950), Shakedown (1950), Double Jeopardy (1955), Confession (1955), The Man is Armed (1956) and The Violent Road (1958). His pulp novel Shed No Tears was filmed in 1948. Long regarded as a ‘lost noir’, the movie surfaced recently as an Alpha Entertainment DVD.

Despite the poverty-row limitations, Martin could be counted on to deliver some smart plotting and snappy dialog. Hot Cars has plenty of both and much of the pleasure to be had from this movie lies therein.

On the other hand, neither director Don McDougall nor cinematographer William Margulies bothered working up much that’s visually arresting in the film apart from a couple of striking night-time scenes. But by 1956, television had come to dictate an unequivocally flatter style in movies and both McDougall and Margulies to that time mostly had worked in television. In fact, Hot Cars was to be McDougall’s only feature credit as director.

However as mundane as a lot of the set-ups and framing are, they don’t impact much on Hot Cars high-performance. The movie rockets along like a monkey on a zip line, propelled by a hipster jazz track by bandleader Les Baxter. The film’s worth-the-price-of-admission climax is explosive and is a serious treat for fans of back-in-the-day amusement park settings.

Much of the Hot Cars was shot on location offering interesting, sometimes tantalizing views of mid-century Los Angeles - from Santa Monica’s scenic Ocean Avenue and beach fronts to Culver City’s signature commercial strips (special thanks is given by the film-makers to Big John’s and O’Tooles Used Cars!).

And who wouldn’t kill to be sitting at the bar at the fabulous Jack’s at the Beach restaurant and lounge where Joi Lansing first begins stroking John Bromfield to see if he’s up for the ride.

Lansing, another very good reason to get hold of a copy of Hot Cars was ‘on the scene’ in Hollywood from the day the bus pulled in. She was a teenage model then moved into films and TV. Well-known as a party girl, she had affairs with many of the usual suspects including George Raft, Mickey Rooney and Frank Sinatra and was still good for four marriages along the way.

On the other hand, Lansing had her head screwed on straight as far it went as pursuing some kind of a career - though she wasn’t that much of an actress and likely was never encouraged to be one given her famously alluring pout and stunning purpose-built figure. Her movie appearances were limited mostly to bit parts (including Touch of Evil). She did better on television, landing smaller supporting roles plus regular stints on The Bob Cummings Show, Klondike, and The Beverly Hillbillies.

However, Hot Cars offers Lansing a memorable movie outing. She’s sexy and real and delicious to watch, especially when she goes go to work on straight-arrow Dunn:

Him: ‘I told you already, I’m married’.

Her: ‘I have a terrible memory’.

Hot Cars also provides a better than usual part for John Bromfield, himself a ready-made leading man who never really found solid footing in movieland. Though tall dark and athletic, he joined a deep bench that already held Hollywood hunks like Rory Calhoun, Ray Danton, Brad Dexter, Steve Cochrane, Richard Egan, William Campbell, Jeffrey Hunter, Vince Edwards and many, many others.

Bromfield had started out encouragingly enough in tryout roles for Paramount in Sorry, Wrong, Number and Rope of Sand. However, as a featured actor he soon had to settle for an assortment of undercard westerns, horror titles and second-rate crime programmers such as The Big Bluff, Crime Against Joe, and the exhilaratingly trashy Three Bad Sisters (of which the late Bill McVicar wrote,

‘script, acting and production boast no redeeming qualities whatsoever, except excess and sheer effrontery. In regard to those qualities, Three Bad Sisters offers an embarrassment of riches’).

In 1956, Bromfield managed to land a minor television cop series, Sherriff of Cochise (retitled U.S. Marshall after two seasons). But at the end of four years, the show was cancelled and John Bromfield walked away from Hollywood to become a commercial fisherman and big-time outdoors show organizer.

Bromfield was a capable actor just not a deeply interesting one, evincing no particular charisma, sexual intensity or dark places. He was what he was: a handsome and rugged straight-shooter and that’s generally how he was cast. Bromfield’s both well-suited for the role of Nick Dunn and very good in it.

Also on set are a number of favored character actors including Dabs Greer as a coyly guileless police detective who knows what the scam is and who attempts to offer Dunn a way out; also, Robert Osterloh as ‘Big John’ Hayman as the boss who who fires Dunn. The versatile Osterloh apeears in many iconic noirs e.g. 711 Ocean Drive, Gun Crazy, Criss Cross, White Heat, The Prowler. Although his part in Hot Cars is a smaller one, Osterloh as usual makes everything out of it.

Hot Cars presents more as a conventional crime thriller than classic film noir. It doesn’t bother itself much with moody atmospherics and visual stylisms. Karen Winter arrives as a femme fatale but fails to damage or destroy. Nick Dunn is neither a doomed protagonist nor chump. He’s not a victim of his own device. While he is a man in a trap, he’s able to find his own way to an escape.

That said, Hot Cars still feels like noir. The basic constructions are there, needing only to be framed slightly differently - as they perhaps would have been a decade or so earlier. But In that way the movie is not so different from others now regarded as ‘late-period’ noirs.

But beyond all that Hot Cars is just one cool ride that’s definitely worth taking out for a drive.

Written by Gary Deane ‘Night Editor’

Guilty Bystander (1950)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:27:41 PDT

The no-budget B noir Guilty Bystander (1950) establishes its oppressively bleak tone as soon as the opening credits finish rolling. In the first scene, Georgia (played by Faye Emerson) shows up at a fleabag motel to see her ex-husband Max Thursday (Zachary Scott), an alcoholic ex-cop turned house detective. She needs to tell him that someone has kidnapped their two-year-old son. But before she can deliver the news, she has to kick her way through the empty beer bottles on the floor of his small, dingy room and rouse him from his attempt to sleep off a hangover. Max lets her know he’s not really in the mood to talk -- that is, until he gets the bad news. Georgia only has one clue for him -- a note from a neighbor in the boarding house where she lives, telling her that he took their son for a walk. He never came back.

This inciting incident kicks off a plot as convoluted as they come. Thursday stumbles around the seedy, sleazy parts of New York City, trying to put together the pieces and solve the puzzle of who kidnapped his son. Along the way, he bumps into some memorable characters, most notably Varkas (J. Edward Bromberg), an aging mobster who can’t speak above a whisper or do anything excitable because of a cardiac condition that requires him to constantly monitor his heart rate. Bromberg’s convincing performance makes Varkas menacing rather than weak; he plays him as a man struggling against an undercurrent of rage that constantly threatens to sweep both him and those around him out to sea.

As Thursday staggers and lurches his way through New York’s underworld, he also constantly battles his desire for a drink (or three). He knows he shouldn’t touch the stuff, and everyone around him knows it, too. But this doesn’t stop him from indulging from time to time. He loses a fight with his addiction immediately after he finds out about his missing son, getting blackout drunk while trying to interrogate his initial suspect and ending up in the slammer overnight, only to wake up to a lecture from his former police boss. It also doesn't help his case that the motel’s aging manager Smitty (Mary Boland) is all too willing to keep his throat from going dry. In his intermittently sober state, it’s a wonder that he can keep all of the connections and clues straight -- the viewer of the film's increasingly confusing plot has a hard enough time understanding what’s taking place without (presumably) being drunk.

Guilty Bystander was the second of two B noirs Joseph Lerner directed for the independent outfit Laurel Films (the first was the 1949 film C-Man). Both Lerner and Laurel had short careers on the dirt-cheap fringes of the film industry -- Lerner directed only six films in his entire career, and Laurel Films only produced a total of four films. The film’s main star, Zachary Scott, started off with a bang in the classic noir Mildred Pierce (1945) but spent most of the rest of his career in B films such as Edgar G. Ulmer’s Ruthless (1948), Ulmer's Poverty Row companion piece to Citizen Kane (1941).

So while Guilty Bystander clearly had a meager budget and no star power on either side of the camera, it doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t largely succeed in transcending its humble associations. The film embraces the squalor of its settings and its characters, and the frequently excellent cinematography turns seediness into a dark beauty. The performances are occasionally over-the-top (especially from Scott) and the film gets a bit talky at times, but this can be forgiven, as it is clear that everyone associated with the film was giving it everything they had. In keeping with the film's down-and-dirty aesthetic, it seems to have survived only in ratty, beat-up 16 mm prints. Watching a pristine copy of it just wouldn't seem right, anyway. If you like your noir cheap and dirty, Guilty Bystander is right down your alley.

Written by Nighthawk

When The Clock Strikes (1961)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:38:04 PDT

The Doomed and The Damned: When The Clock Strikes and the Films of Edward L. Cahn

“Sitting in his chair, waving his pipe, he came on like [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt with a cape. He was the first one who gave me a cold chill of what it must be like to be a has-been.”

--- Charles B. Griffith, screenwriter (as qtd. in McGee, 51)

“Eddie Cahn was the kind of a fella, especially on a small show, that wanted to show how fast he could go. So he’d start a scene and then step in front of the camera and yell ‘Cut!’ and then point to the next place where the next set-up was going.”

--- John Agar, actor (as qtd. in McGee, 51)

“It isn’t what I want -- it’s what I must do.”

Henry Daniell as Dr. Emil Zurich in Cahn’s The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959)

I’ve never met Dave Kehr, who writes a column on DVDs for The New York Times, regularly contributes to the journal Film Comment, and also maintains a blog on the web, or even corresponded with him, but it seems that we have similar tastes. I write on Josef von Steinberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), and so does he; I praise noir director Bernard Vorhaus in a post in my Frame by Frame blog, and in the pages of Film Comment, Kehr weighs in on Vorhaus’s career as well. I’m not implying any “cause and effect” pattern here -- it’s simply obvious that we both admire the same sorts of films. So I was pleased to read Kehr’s excellent essay, “Shadow World,” published in the November / December 2011 issue of Film Comment, on the maudit director Edward L. Cahn, one of the truly damned and doomed figures of the cinema. Not that many people appreciate Cahn’s work – he’s hardly a household name, for many reasons – and Kehr’s piece came as a welcome surprise. As Kehr wrote of Cahn,

With remarkable consistency for so prolific a filmmaker, he portrays a world of relentless cruelty and callousness, where even cowboy heroes kill without compunction and where betrayal within a couple is simply something to be anticipated and planned for. His characters move through a half-formed shadow world of flimsy surfaces and generic, impersonal objects; they lurch along seemingly sapped of all independent volition. At best, they are impelled by greed (the crime films are frequently centered on a treasure hunt), rage (Cahn’s Western heroes are almost always out to avenge the murder of a father or brother), or sheer, mindless destructiveness (embodied by the many different varieties of zombies that inhabit Cahn’s horror films). But in the end, all they know is that they must keep moving -- it’s that or cease to exist.

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Yes, they didn’t call him “Fast Eddie” for nothing. Despite his considerable bulk, Cahn could move through a script at lightning speed, knocking off setups with an inspired, manic precision that only the truly gifted -- or cursed -- possess. In his lifetime, Cahn directed no fewer than 71 features and innumerable shorts before his death in 1963, and his distinctly detached visual signature, coupled with the unremitting bleakness of his personal vision, is present in nearly all his work. Born on February 12, 1899 in Brooklyn, NY, Cahn attended UCLA and broke into the film business in the mid 1920s as an editor at Universal, working at night to pay his college tuition. This apprenticeship served him well in his later career, as Cahn early on learned how to piece a scene together with minimal, yet efficient coverage, and by 1926, Cahn was head of the Editorial Department at Universal. So, for the moment, his career seemed on track.

The move to the director’s chair was thus all but inevitable, and in 1931, Cahn took the plunge with the brutal policier Homicide Squad (co-directed with George Melford). Law and Order, an exceptionally violent Western for the era, starring Walter Huston as Wyatt Earp, followed in 1932, along with the somewhat routine Radio Patrol and the superb study of big-city political corruption, Afraid to Talk (both also 1932). In Afraid to Talk, Eddie Martin, a naïve young bellhop (Eric Linden), is framed for a murder he didn’t commit, thanks to the efforts of mob leader Edward Arnold, as corpulent and slimy as ever, and the equally ruthless district attorney, portrayed with smooth duplicity by Louis Calhern, who many years later would appear in John Huston’s classic noir crime thriller The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Afraid to Talk was also shown under the rather ironic title Merry-Go-Round, an obvious reference to the runaround that Linden’s character endures from the authority figures in the film.

Afraid to Talk, for many years consigned to oblivion, has recently been resurrected, restored, and screened at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their “To Save and Project” series, curated by Joshua Siegel, to considerable public acclaim. Photographed by the gifted Karl Freund, Afraid to Talk already has the visual assurance of a master filmmaker, just two years into his directorial career. Cahn obligingly followed up with the equally cynical and ruthless proto-noir films Laughter in Hell and Emergency Call (both 1933), and the dark “numbers racket” crime thriller Confidential in 1935. But then something happened, and nobody seems to know exactly what that “something” was.

Cahn abandoned – or was forced out of – his career as a feature filmmaker, and summarily joined the MGM short subject department, a distinct demotion for a man who had made such an auspicious debut only a few years earlier. Why? No one really knows for sure, and a more noir fate one can hardly imagine for such a hardboiled director. For the next two decades, Cahn would be forced to helm the merest trivialities, films that he had no connection to, films that were made to order, for a price.

At MGM, Cahn toiled with the last gasp of the Our Gang series, long after Hal Roach had sold out his interest to MGM lock, stock, and barrel; Cahn also directed travelogues, novelty shorts, 10-minute musicals and other assorted junk until MGM finally gave him a shot at two low-budget crime films based on the studio’s “Crime Does Not Pay” two-reel shorts; the first was Main Street After Dark, a minor film starring noir icons Dan Duryea and Audrey Totter; the second was Dangerous Partners (both 1945), about a search for missing Nazi loot after the end of the war.

But these modest films did nothing to revitalize Cahn’s career, and by 1947, Cahn was directing the execrable Bowery Boys knockoff Gas House Kids in Hollywood (ironically featuring former Our Gang member Carl “Alfalfa” Schweitzer as one of the “Gas House” kids), made for PRC, or Producers Releasing Corporation, without a doubt the most marginal studio in Hollywood history. The next step after PRC was usually the gutter, but Cahn’s speed and reliability served him well in the low-budget indie crime films The Great Plane Robbery, Destination Murder and Experiment Alcatraz (all 1950), which were released on a negative pick up deal through RKO. Two Dollar Bettor (1951), an ultra-cheap independent production in which “B” veteran John Litel plays a poor chump who becomes hopelessly addicted to gambling, followed -- and then, nothing. Nothing at all.

Between 1951 and 1955, Cahn’s considerable talents were sidelined -- again, no one knows precisely why, or why he had walked away, or been pushed away, from his initial foray into features at Universal so many years earlier. Cahn directed one episode of the early, half-hour television series Martin Kane, Private Eye, “Trouble on Board,” in 1952, but for a man of Cahn’s talents, this was just a mere trifle; he also helmed the promisingly grim Betrayed Women (1955) from a script by pulp novelist Steve Fisher, which dealt with harsh conditions in the fictional but all too realistic Bayou Reformatory For Women.

But Betrayed Women didn’t really get Cahn’s career moving again; what he needed was a real break, a chance to turn out films almost endlessly, films that would deal with subject matter that appealed to him, one after the other. Finally, in late 1955, Cahn got his break, directing the astonishingly graphic and bizarre horror/crime/science-fiction thriller The Creature with the Atom Brain, in which the reanimated bodies of dead gangsters, remotely controlled by an unscrupulous criminal mastermind and his assistant, a renegade ex-Nazi scientist, wreak havoc by pulling casino robberies, committing murder, and thus amassing a “war chest” of stolen funds with which to take over the United States government.

Some measure of the sheer viciousness of The Creature with the Atom Brain can be gleaned from the film’s opening moments, in which one of the revived corpses, possessed of super human strength, breaks into a mob-run casino, lifts a mob leader over his head, and without a moment’s hesitation, snaps the hood’s body in two like so much firewood. Made for Columbia in a mere six days, under the notoriously penurious producer Sam Katzman, The Creature with the Atom Brain managed to do what all of Cahn’s other work had not -- it put him firmly on the map as a feature director, but with one qualification -- his films were now mostly 6-day affairs, with budgets in the $100,000 range, and he would never again have a shot at the true “A” feature.

But there was plenty of work, and suddenly Cahn was in demand. The then-fledgling American International Pictures grabbed Cahn and put him to work directing lurid teen exploitation films such as Girls in Prison, The She-Creature, Run Away Daughters, Shake, Rattle and Rock (all 1956), and then Voodoo Woman, Dragstrip Girl, Invasion of the Saucer Men and the bluntly named Motorcycle Gang (all 1957). By this time, Cahn had established himself firmly as a “speed artist,” someone who could bring in any picture, regardless of genre, in on time and on or under budget, but paradoxically, his work never betrayed the haste with which it was made. As Kehr accurately observes,

[. . .] Cahn seemed to embrace the aesthetic of speed with a passion and personal commitment not always apparent in the work of his more feverishly productive Poverty Row peers. On a level of production where simple coherence is rare, his work seldom if ever seems sloppy or indifferent. The framing is careful and varied, the lighting studied and expressive, the eyeline matches execute with classical precision -- all evidence of the extensive planning that Cahn (who began in the silent era as an editor) invested in his work, and which reportedly allowed him to film an astonishing 40 setups a day. (20)

Indeed, although their subject matter was very different, Cahn’s late films remind me inescapably of the work of Robert Bresson, the idiosyncratic French director known for his assured, measured style, in which each shot follows the one before it with almost mathematical precision. And, like Bresson – director of the noirish existential thriller Pickpocket (1959) and other equally dark films – Cahn seemed to identify with his protagonists; they’re society’s outcasts, the losers, the ones who can’t win. They’re Cahn’s people; he knows them, and they know him.

Then, in 1958, stepping way from AIP, Allied Artists and Columbia, Cahn found the perfect partner for his brutal, unrelenting, hyperdriven vision: Robert E. Kent, a producer and screenwriter so prolific that he scripted his films under not only his own name, but under a variety of pseudonyms as well. In Edward L. Cahn, Kent found a soulmate -- someone who wanted to make genre films quickly and efficiently, and at the same time, bring their own mordant worldview to the screen, in the guise of genre entertainment. Working under a variety of corporate banners, such as Vogue, Zenith, Harvard, Peerless and Premium, and releasing their films, astonishingly, through the rather upscale company United Artists, Kent and Cahn formed a team that would create a blistering barrage of films that form the bulk of the director’s true legacy. Cahn’s bleak worldview – fatalistic, stillborn, embracing nihilism as its guiding light, was at last allowed free reign.

Starting with It! -- The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), which famously served as the template for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) 21 years later, Cahn and Kent began knocking out a wild series of outré, violent noir/crime thrillers, of which the title usually tells all -- Curse of the Faceless Man (the dead return to life); King Kong Confidential (exoticist crime in Asia); Guns, Girls and Gangsters (is any explanation needed?), Jet Attack (got it?) and Suicide Battalion (again, a war picture with a pretty obvious narrative trajectory). Astonishingly, all these films were made in one year -- 1958.

In 1959, Cahn and Kent collaborated on Riot in Juvenile Prison, Invisible Invaders (more mayhem effected by the resurrected dead, this time controlled by forces from outer space), the crime thrillers Pier 5 - Havana, Inside the Mafia and Vice Raid, and my personal favorite of all of Cahn’s late work, the atmospheric Gothic horror film The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, in which an ancient curse is visited upon all the male members of the Drake family, as a result of their ancestors’ slaughter of a tribe of South American natives as “collateral damage” during a colonialist trading expedition.

Jonathan Drake, with its funereal and methodical approach to the ritual slaughter and beheading of all the men of the Drake clan, proceeds with a certain awful, deliberate grace towards its compellingly unexpected climax. In the personage of the chief malefactor, Dr. Emil Zurich (another member of the dead), we also get about as close to the essence of Cahn’s personal worldview as we are ever likely to, when Zurich intones the line quoted at the beginning of this essay – “it isn’t what I want -- it’s what I must do” – before dispatching another of his unfortunate victims.

By 1961, as Kehr notes, Cahn was directing 11 features a year, including the Western and crime thrillers You Have to Run Fast, Five Guns to Tombstone, Gun Fight, Gun Street, and the film that’s the centerpiece of this essay, the absolutely death obsessed and utterly individualistic When the Clock Strikes, which was partially shot in Cahn’s split-level Hollywood home, as were many of his late features. Why rent a studio when you can have the real thing, if all you need is a living room, or a hastily repropped hotel lobby, or a makeshift scientific laboratory? In the pressbooks for these twilight-world films, Cahn even boasted about this obvious economy. For When the Clock Strikes and other crime procedurals, it made more sense to bring the actors to Cahn’s home, set up the camera, and keep knocking out those 40 setups a day. Working from a script by the obscure genre artist Dallas Gaultois, Cahn, in this film, paints a convincing vision of the limbo of eternal waiting.

When the Clock Strikes opens on a stretch of desolate, rainswept road, as Sam Morgan (James Brown, a regular in many Cahn films) disconsolately drives to the state prison, where the hangman will execute Frank Pierce, whom Sam has identified as a murderer, at midnight. The storm knocks a tree down across the road, and Morgan can’t go on; neither can passing stranger Ellie (Merry Anders, another member of the Cahn “stock company”), whose car has broken down in the torrential downpour. Sam gives Ellie a ride to Cady’s Lodge, perhaps the most uninviting guesthouse imaginable. Cady, the proprietor (Henry Corden) takes obvious, morbid delight in the plight of the bedraggled pair, and informs Sam and Ellie that whenever there’s a hanging at the prison, which is located only a mile or so away, all the “specs” (as he calls them), or “spectators,” gather at the lodge to watch the clock mounted on the wall by the fireplace, which predicts with split-second accuracy the hour of every prisoner’s execution -- which is always at midnight.

With his ghoulish, obsequious manner, Cady is the last person anyone would want to have baiting them with lurid descriptions of a prisoner’s final death agonies, but since Sam and Ellie are stuck there, they have to endure Cady’s repellent presence. Sam grows more and more uneasy by the minute, and tells Ellie and Cady he’s tormented by the thought that he might have fingered the wrong man. The warden of the prison (played by Francis De Sales) stops by on his way to the prison to witness the execution, but tells Sam there’s nothing anyone can do about it at this late date -- Frank Pierce will die at midnight, and nothing can stop the execution.

The warden leaves, the clock strikes twelve, and Pierce is executed. We never see Pierce’s execution, and never even get to the prison gates; we, like Sam and Ellie, are trapped in Cady’s Lodge forever, and there’s no escape. Suddenly, a large man, Martinez (Jorge Moreno) rushes in out of the storm, covered in mud, and explains that he can’t bear his guilty conscience any longer -- he is the real killer, and Pierce is -- or was -- innocent. We’ve never seen Martinez before, and we have no idea what’s compelled him at length to confess, but here he is; the real killer. Ellie, who now reveals to Sam that she is Pierce’s wife, goes into shock, while Sam isn’t faring much better -- his faulty identification has just cost a man his life. And on this macabre scene, Cahn fades out, as Martinez is summarily hauled away by the sheriff (Roy Barcroft, best known for his portrayal of numerous villains in Republic serials of the 1940s, and now at the end of his career).

The next day, events become even more complicated when Ellie reveals to Sam that she isn’t Pierce’s wife after all, but rather a gold digger who wants to lay her hands on some $60,000 that Frank Pierce had stashed away from a bank robbery several years earlier. Almost immediately, and with complete amorality, Sam agrees to help Ellie find the stolen money. When the prison authorities deliver a box to Ellie the next day containing the last of her “husband’s” belongings, Sam and Ellie find a key to a post office box in New Mexico, where they surmise that Frank has hidden the stolen loot. Sam and Ellie contact the post office, and arrange to have the contents of the post office box sent to them at Cady’s Lodge.

But suddenly, fate lands another unexpected blow, as the real Ms. Pierce (Peggy Stewart) shows up, surprisingly uninterested in the money, but also with the news that although Frank Pierce wasn’t guilty of the murder for which he was executed, Pierce was guilty of the murder of the real Ms. Pierce’s father, something that she’s still trying to deal with. Trapped in the lodge, drinking too much alcohol from Cady’s well-stocked bar (“help yourself, and don’t forget to turn out the lights -- I’ll put it on your bill” Cady assures them), Sam and Ellie are becoming edgy, when the postman finally -- one of the lessons of Cahn’s world being that one must always wait, and wait, and then wait some more --arrives with the box. Sam and Ellie immediately open it, and discover that the $60,000 is indeed there.

But Cady, true to his unscrupulous nature, has found out about the cash, and tries to kill Sam and Ellie, and abscond with the funds himself. Ms. Pierce intervenes, and Cady, panicking, kills her instead. Holding Cady at gunpoint, Sam and Ellie at first openly contemplate fleeing to Mexico with the money for a life of leisure, but in the film’s final seconds, think better of it, and turn Cady and the money over to the sheriff. Now, Cady will stand trial for Ms. Pierce’s murder, and Sam and Ellie’s testimony will send Cady to the scaffold; the next time the clock strikes twelve at Cady’s Lodge on an execution night, it will be Cady who swings from the end of a rope.

The claustrophobic sets that comprise Cady’s Lodge, surely one of the most sinister mountain retreats ever depicted on film, coupled with Cady’s morbid pleasure in watching his “guests” squirm as he recites, in minute detail, the specifics of earlier executions, make the film an embrace of Hell, in which even the living are already dead. Although When the Clock Strikes seemingly ends on an upbeat note – Cady will pay for his crime, and Sam and Ellie resist the temptation to steal the cash – in the final analysis, it seems that there is really little choice for Sam and Ellie. As Cady tells them, if they flee to Mexico with the money, he’ll simply tell the authorities that Sam and Ellie killed the real Ms. Pierce, and then smile with smug satisfaction as both are convicted and executed on the “strength” of his perjured testimony. Sam and Ellie really don’t have a choice; they have to stay, forfeit the money, and testify against Cady. In short, it isn’t what they want – it’s what they must do.

This is one of the many things that makes When the Clock Strikes so compelling -- even when the characters make what seems to be a morally correct decision, they are in actuality forced into it, because to do otherwise would jeopardize their own existence. All in all, When the Clock Strikes is one of the bleakest and most personal of all of Edward L. Cahn’s films, and as with all of his late work, he handles both the cast, and the camera, with patient assurance. As the film unspools, the viewer feels almost as if she or he is also an unwilling “guest” at Cady’s Lodge, which certainly can stake a claim as one of the inner circles of Dante’s description of Hell. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” indeed. When the Clock Strikes depicts a world of unreleased fear, doubt, pessimism and greed, and despite its obviously commercial origins, is really more of a personal film than a standard genre entertainment.

As for Edward L. Cahn, he was nearly at the end of his career, and by 1962 had slowed down to just two films that year, Incident in an Alley (1962), and his last film, and Cahn’s only feature in color, a peculiarly somber version of the classic fairytale Beauty and the Beast (1962), in which Cahn seems to be trying to move beyond the death mythos of his previous work and create a narrative aimed at a family audience. Of course, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version La belle et la bête remains the definitive screen adaptation of the classic tale, but Cahn’s mise en scene here seems almost entombed, as if he wants Beauty and the Beast, which perhaps he knew was his last film, to stand as some sort of final summation, as well as a significant and much more hopeful departure from his earlier work.

Beauty and the Beast was released on December 8, 1962, and Cahn’s career was complete. Cahn died on August 25, 1963, at the age of 64 in Hollywood, the city he had labored in for so long. As Kehr notes, between 1955 and 1962, just a seven-year span, Cahn cranked out an astonishing 48 feature films; now, it was time to rest. For Cahn, to live was to work; nothing more and nothing less. Why did Edward L. Cahn make so many films? Perhaps, as Kehr notes, it was because Cahn’s “work reflect[ed] a sensibility so deeply disaffected that perhaps only constant motion allowed him to outpace his demons . . .,” or perhaps, Cahn felt that as long as he was working, he simply couldn’t die; the film, whatever film he was working on, had to be finished. As Kehr sums up,

With the same actors (James Brown, Merry Anders, Cameron Mitchell, Mamie Van Doren, Jim Davis, Ron Foster), the same situations (most of the screenplays are the work of Orville H. Hampton but are shaped by Cahn’s obsessive themes), and the same minimal studio sets returning in film after film, Cahn seems to be staging the Poverty Row version of the eternal return. . . . Shadow people in a shadow world, enacting the same empty gestures again and again. If there is a hell, Edward L. Cahn has found it, and its address is Hollywood, USA. (21)

It’s reassuring to see Cahn’s work finally getting some small measure of the respect that it so clearly deserves; fortunately, many of his late films with Robert E. Kent are now available as streaming downloads on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and elsewhere. Initially relegated to the bottom half of the double bill at the moment of their inception, Cahn’s work is now available to millions at the click of a mouse, reaching many more viewers than he ever did in his lifetime. Perhaps that’s Edward L. Cahn’s final victory; his films, once the most obscure of the obscure, are now everywhere. That may be the final victory of Edward L. Cahn, the poet of the doomed and the damned.

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 the author of Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (Rutgers University Press, 2009), along with numerous other books.

Works Cited Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. Rev. Fred Klein and Ronald Dean Nolan. NY: Harper Resource, 2001. Kehr, Dave. “Further Research: Shadow World,” Film Comment November/December 2011: 20-21. McGee, Mark Thomas. Faster and Furiouser: The Revised and Fattened Fable of American International Pictures. McFarland: Jefferson, NC: 1996.

Wicked Woman (1953)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:52:58 PDT

With the affect of a sleazy 1950s paperback novel’s cover, and all its lurid come-ons and empty promises, Russell Rouse’s Wicked Woman appears to be just another campy, trashy wallow in the lower depths of American life.

Behind that crude exterior is an admittedly tawdry but sobering slice of femme fatale film noir. Writer-director Rouse had three unusual films noir to his credit before Wicked Woman. His screenplay for 1950’s D.O.A. blends comedy and pitch-black drama. 1951’s The Well, Rouse’s directorial debut, tackled racism and myopic small-town attitudes. 1952’s The Thief ostentatiously tried to be wordless, during one of Hollywood’s gabbiest eras.

Neither of Rouse’s first two films entirely succeeds in their goals. Both are ambitious, unusual and distinctive. Wicked Woman was, perhaps, an attempt by Rouse to make a more conventional, crowd-pleasing picture. The creative team’s collective tongue may be slightly in cheek, but a grubby gravity rescues the movie from mere camp.

Over the film’s opening credits, ex-Duke Ellington vocalist Herb Jeffries moodily croons a title song. We follow the trail of a Trailways bus across desolate highway landscapes. “You know that what she’s doin’/is sure to cause you ruin,” Jeffries warns us in song. Seen in one bus window is Billie Nash, embodied by actress Beverly Michaels. A disillusioned drifter, Nash rolls into dismal Anywhere, USA., deceptively dressed in virginal white. A quick tip from a bus station clerk leads her to nearby Gary Street and a shabby rooming house.

As Billie approaches her new abode, she’s given the eye by Charlie Borg, a mole-like tailor, played to the hilt by Percy Helton. I believe this was Helton’s highest billing in a motion picture. His name appears third, after Michaels’ and co-star Richard Egan’s. Helton obviously relished this rare opportunity for plentiful screen time.

Wicked Woman is largely the story of Charlie Borg’s pathetic attempts to woo this B-girl, despite impossible odds. His possessive, manipulative and desperate courtship of Billie leads to misery and confusion for her more than for him. Despite the theme song’s warning siren, it’s Billie who gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop, constantly, throughout this film.

After some zesty banter with the flophouse’s owner, Mrs. Walters (Bernadene Hayes), Billie attempts to settle into her $6-a-week digs and find a job. Borg is like white on Rice, if you’ll pardon the pun. He wastes no time trying to worm his way into Billie’s life—and panties.

She understands that this marsupial manipulator might be useful to her, and she immediately strings him along in a fevered sexual fantasy that’s 100% projection on Borg’s part. After Billie talks her way into a waitress job in a neighborhood tavern, run by amicable alcoholic Dora Bannister (Evelyn Scott) and her brooding, hunky husband Matt (Richard Egan), Billie wheedles a sawbuck off of Borg to buy a new work outfit.

Bug-eyed with lust, Borg shells over the 20 and begs her to let him know when she has a night off.

At this point, Wicked Woman thumbs a ride from the works of James M. Cain. Billie and Matt Bannister take a shine to one another. Matt is the long-suffering spouse of a lush, and, like Billie, seems to barely contain his own personal trauma and dejection. These two lost souls bond, and soon hatch a scheme to pose as man and wife, sell the bar, and skedaddle to Mexico—the place of choice for noir desperados.

Billie is, in fact, obsessed by a recording called “One Night in Acupulco.” It appears to be the only record she owns, and she asks the bar’s jukebox service to put the platter in its machine. This cartoon dream of escape proves her downfall. Borg learns of her plans, and snares her in a web of sexual blackmail.

We see him sadly and noisily kissing her arms, cooing like a sick dove, as she withers with contempt. Worst of all, it’s made crystal clear that she spends the night with him, and that he has his way with her… brrr!

It’s tempting to laugh at this desperate display of helpless passion. But the scene is also quite sad. There’s no way Borg will find contentment or satisfaction with this set-up. These love-making scenes entrap us in an awful voyeuristic contract. We can’t look away… but it hurts to look; thus, to protect ourselves, we reflexively laugh.

The fraudulent scheme to sell the bar fails. (If this is a spoiler for you, you don’t know your film noir.) In a fit of pique, Billie breaks her treasured record of “One Night in Acupulco.” At film’s end Billie is disgraced, while Matt Bannister is rewarded with his own private hell: a lifetime chained to his verbally abusive alky spouse, who now has the permanent upper hand.

For his troubles, Borg is slapped by Billie (fuel for his future fantasies, I’m sure) and is out 20 bucks. Billie is booted from Walters’ seedy digs and back on the bus, en route to more of the same—sadder but probably not wiser for her troubles.

Wicked Woman is not a standard bad-girl B noir. Its characters are too busy being miserable to get what they want, and too resigned to their dreary fates to fight them.

Billie seems more down in the dumps than seductive throughout the movie. Her detachment from life seems profound. Her eyes are sad mirrors of her downtrodden life. She doesn’t seem to enjoy herself, even when she smiles.

The documentary-like attention to detail in the film’s surroundings enhances this glum air. Billie’s room, with its hotplate, battered fridge and time worn furniture, is a temple for the blues of a lifetime. The Bannisters’ tavern, while successful, is well-worn, with a potentially deadly stove in its kitchen. No one could really be happy in these shabby surroundings, regardless of their emotional or financial circumstances.

Michaels’ gloom permeates this and other films she’s in. I don’t suppose Dejected Dame would have done much box office, but that’s a far more apt title for this picture. As in Michaels’ contemporary noir roles (the Hugo Haas films Pickup and The Girl on the Bridge, both from 1951), the actress exudes a hard-bitten unhappiness that seems to speak of personal experience.

Noir themes would continue to dominate director-writer Rouse’s work. Following Wicked Woman were New York Confidential (1955) and the fascinating House of Numbers (1957), with twin Jack Palances enacting an eccentric story by novelist Jack Finney.

Percy Helton would find noir immortality via his brief bit role in Robert Aldrich’s 1955 Kiss Me, Deadly, and cult-level recognition from his countless television roles.

Wicked Woman is viewable, in its entirety, on YouTube, in six parts, starting here. Brace yourself for lowlife noir at its seamiest—and then go take a hot shower… you’ll need it!

Written by Frank M. Young Now available--Frank's new graphic novel (done with David Lasky) OREGON TRAIL: THE ROAD TO DESTINY!

No Country for Old Men (2007)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:40:37 PDT

“…I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, ‘Okay, I’ll be a part of this world.’”

– Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.

1980. A gas station somewhere in Texas. The station’s proprietor rings up a transaction and, taking a gander at the vast expanse of dry nothingness out the window, asks the customer in front of him if there’s any rain up his way – seeing as how he’s got Dallas plates on his vehicle. The customer’s expression is unreadable. He sighs as if there’s a job at hand and he withdraws a quarter from his pocket: “What’s the most you’ve ever lost on a coin toss?” And slowly, through the course of a clumsy and dreadful conversation, the proprietor begins to realize every day in the gas station, with every customer walking through the door, in every attempt at small talk, he’s been gambling with his life.

In 2007, Joel and Ethan Coen presented No Country for Old Men, which would earn the brothers their first Academy Award for best picture. (The Coens borrowed heavily and interfered little with their source material, Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name.) Though generally admired by critics, No Country would alienate viewers with its graphic violence, anger more than a few people with its abrupt ending, and forever baffle movie store employees trying to shelve it under a genre header. While Ethan Coen called it “the closest we’ll come to [making] an action movie,” action may be the last word that comes to mind when pondering the nature of No Country for Old Men. The film is a wink and nod to Sam Peckinpah with its blunt and joyful violence; the photography basks in the Southwest landscapes in a way that recalls John Ford’s beloved Monument Valley; fists will clench through the suspense; laughter is often, and often uncomfortable. Finally, a small, dark understanding from the viewer: this film is about me.

On the face of it, No Country for Old Men resembles the Coens’ earlier offerings of Fargo or Blood Simple. The brothers are deft manufacturers of the noirish kind of crime procedurals that center on the simple man caught up in vicious circumstances beyond his control. Here, our ordinary guy discovers two million dollars in a drug swap gone sideways. His decision to keep it and flee will set two men on his trail: a psychopath bent on recovering the stolen cash and an aging sheriff trying to make sense of the new type of crime creeping into his county. McCarthy’s novel offered the Coens a much more sobering and contemplative look at violence than previous films. Dark humor is present but does nothing to temper the grisly nature of the story the way it did in, say, Fargo. Violence is a silent partner in No Country, his capricious nature lending as much personality to the narrative as the three main actors.

Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a welder in the West Texas town of Sanderson when he stumbles across the leavings of a Mexican drug exchange while on a weekend hunting trip. Brolin plays Moss as a straight shooter; you get the feeling he’s the type of guy who does a job right the first time. Moss is no bumbler, but by the time the viewer meets him we’ve already seen two killings. Neither is he naïve: after all, he finds the money amongst shell casing and bloated bodies, so he’s seen firsthand the violence this business provokes. But like a lot of protagonists in the “everyman” noir genre, he’ll try to hedge his bets because he believes the possible payoff is worth the possible cost. He may reckon two tours in Vietnam and sturdy Texan genes will help him through the aftermath of poaching drug money, but we know he’s doomed the second he slaps eyes on the cash. Deep down, he might have the same inkling: “Things happen. I can’t take ‘em back,” he tells panicky wife, Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald). Moss’s coin has been flipped. He’ll just have to decide how to call it.

Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, more chigger than sugar) is tracking Moss, sent by a nebulous crime organization to retrieve the money before the Mexican cartel. We don’t learn Chigurh’s name until almost an hour into the film, but by then, we have all the information we need about him. Namely, he sports a chilling Prince Valiant haircut, doesn’t like to get his feet bloody, and prefers to kill folks by way of cattle bolt. One assumes he likes to keep things neat. In McCarthy’s work, he’s described in barest detail: his one defining characteristic is a lack of sense of humour. He’s a psychopath with warped ideas about fate, and the coin toss is a favourite trick of his. It’s a callous way to decide whether or not to take a man’s life, but Chigurh’s got a twisted code of honor. He believes the three separate paths of killer, victim, and coin have converged for a specific reason. Later in the film, Chigurh confronts a fixer named Wells (Woody Harrelson) who’s been sent to dispose of him – Chigurh’s body count is climbing and making his shadowy bosses uneasy. After he gets the drop on Wells, he mocks him, asking, “If the rule you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?” Chigurh’s honest with himself in a way that most of the world around him is not – even the smallest actions of yourself and those around you can have the highest consequences. If you’re a part of society you must accept that.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is Terrell County’s venerable lawman, drawn into the chaos surrounding by the drug massacre that’s landed within his jurisdiction. Tommy Lee Jones is one of those actors whose name and face should overshadow any role he plays, but there’s none of that here. Jones is a deep-in-the-heart-of-Texas native and his craggy face and homespun way of speaking inserts him seamlessly into the story. If the viewer identifies somewhat with Moss, and not-at-all with Chigurh, we are all in with Jones’ sheriff. He is the only character whose internal voice the viewer is privy to, in a plainspoken voice over at the beginning of the film. It’s Bell’s story really, more than it is Moss’s or Chigurh’s, and we sympathize with him by the end because it’s our story, too. Bell may be a participant in a cynical story about death and violence, but his feelings are shared by anyone who has ever felt left behind or overmatched by changing times. At the beginning of the film, Bell tells us that as a new deputy he knew police work was a job he had to be willing to die to do… but it is a sentiment he didn’t fully appreciate. It’s a decision he made as a young man, feeling indestructible and not having seen the things men are capable of. As an old man, he’s a parable: if you haven’t despaired of the world you live in, just wait.

By the end of the film, Moss is cornered by Chigurh. Having made no decision other than to keep the money for himself and his wife and run as long as he can, Chigurh calls it for him. He makes Moss a new proposition: give me the money and Carla Jean stays alive; keep it up and I’ll hold you both accountable for what you’ve done. Still, Moss refuses the two outcomes. His new plan to give Carla Jean the money and run is disastrous. He’s gunned down by the Mexican cartel men, a factor he hadn’t given much credence to since encountering Chigurh. Turns out another coin had been in the air all this time. Everyone is given an exit in the film, even if some are ambiguous (and since when has life provided resolution to all our outstanding questions?) Chigurh retrieves the drug money, and in a sweet irony (that reinforces his own beliefs about fate), is blindsided and grievously injured in a car accident, after killing Carla Jean. He walks away, perhaps to enter another small town the way he entered Bell’s, perhaps not. As for Bell, he has squared himself with his part in a violent world, and retired from the job to detach himself from at least part of it.

The Coens are fantastic world builders. As writers and directors they are masters at adding minute quirks that orient their characters. (The fact that Moss picks up his empty shell casings while hunting speaks volumes about his nature.) No Country for Old Men doesn’t feel like a period piece, probably because most of us are old enough to recognize the fashion and cars within the film, but the visual details in each scene are so suspiciously perfect, you wonder if the Coens used a time machine. The cinematographer was the Coens’ ace-in-the-hole Roger Deakins, an old hand when it comes to filmmaking. He makes the most of the location shooting (mostly dodgy motels and borderlands in Marfa, Texas and Las Vegas, New Mexico). The music and dialogue are sparsely used – long stretches of absolutely nothing, sometimes punctuated by carefully chosen words or a few music notes. The supporting cast is small, but strong, the standouts being Woody Harrelson and Garret Dillahunt, who plays Bell’s deputy, Wendell. Harrelson can’t quite get beyond his identity as well as Tommy Lee Jones is able to. He’s still Woody here, but that’s okay because his lines are few and the role calls for a certain cocksure quality Harrelson naturally provides. Dillahunt’s role is small, but important. Wendell is a reflection of Bell: he’s the young deputy Bell once was, more concerned with impressing “the old-timer” than with making sense of the violence around him.

When No Country for Old Men was released, critics were mostly positive, while audiences were mixed. For some, the film contained too much gore and violence. The contemplative tone was found boring and tedious. Others felt cheated when the criminal element of the film took back burner and didn’t answer the questions raised: Who took the drugs? Who does Chigurh work for? Where did the money really go? Perhaps, like the country its title alludes to, this film is not for everyone. Perhaps you have to have learned how raw a raw deal can be to appreciate the anguish of it. Most of those who had issues with the film were unsatisfied with the ending in which Sheriff Bell reveals a dream he’s had about his deceased father, also a lawman: “And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead.” And if you can see yourself in Bell, I’m willing to guess you’ve lost a few wagers yourself.

Written by Nauga

Desert Fury (1947)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:22:42 PDT

For me, Lewis Allen's Desert Fury is currently running neck and neck with Felix Feist's The Devil Thumbs a Ride for the honor of "wackiest movie of 1947."

But maybe I'm comparing apples to oranges. While The Devil Thumbs a Ride was a zany thrill ride with oddball characters and a lot of unexpected humor, Desert Fury is a ridiculously campy melodrama in which most of the humor seems unintentional.

Also, it has gay undertones that are strong enough to power a small city for a year.

The poster implies that Burt Lancaster and John Hodiak spend the movie fighting for Lizabeth Scott's love, but that's not the case. More accurate is the tagline: "Two men wanted her love ... The third wanted her life!"

Scott plays a beautiful 19-year-old girl who lives in a "cactus graveyard" in the middle of nowhere — Chuckawalla, Nevada. She lives with her mother, Fritzi, who's played by Mary Astor (an actress from Hollywood's Golden Age who was just 16 years older than Lizabeth Scott). Fritzi always calls Paula "baby." Not in a sweet, maternal way, but the way a barfly might say, "Hey, baby! C'mere!"

Fritzi wants Paula to go back to school, but Paula wants to help her mother run the Purple Sage Casino. (Paula's father was a bootlegger who was killed when Paula was very young.)

Burt Lancaster plays Tom Hanson, a former bronco buster who barnstormed around the country, but washed out of the rodeo and now works as a sheriff's deputy in Chuckawalla. Fritzi wants Tom to marry Paula and make an honest woman out of her. He'd like nothing more than to marry Paula, but he doesn't push, because he knows that her love for him is strictly platonic.

Into their lives comes runty, mustachioed gangster Eddie Bendix (John Hodiak) and his gunsel Johnny (Wendell Corey), and Paula — quite inexplicably — falls head over heels in love with Eddie.

The love triangle formed by Paula, Eddie, and Tom is weak sauce compared with the love triangle formed by Paula, Eddie, and Johnny.

Johnny is more than just Eddie's "muscle." He's his longtime companion, his best friend, and — just possibly — his lover.

Is he or isn't he? Let's look at the evidence. Eddie and Johnny form a tight unit, and seem to both know what really happened to Eddie's first wife, who died in a car accident. Johnny hates Paula, and seems insanely jealous of her relationship with Eddie.

And how does Eddie explain to Paula how he first hooked up with Johnny?

"I was your age, maybe a year older. I was in the automat off Times Square about two o'clock in the morning on a Saturday. I was broke, he had a couple of dollars, we got to talking. He ended up paying for my ham and eggs," he says, a note of shameful resignation creeping into his voice.

"And then?" Paula asks.

"I went home with him that night. I was locked out. Didn't have a place to stay. His old lady ran a boarding house in the Bronx. There were a couple of vacant rooms. We were together from then on."

The relationship between Eddie and Johnny isn't the only hint of a gay union. Paula and Fritzi are so close in age, and Fritzi's attitude toward her daughter lacking so much maternal warmth, that they seem more like a lesbian couple than anything else. Fritzi seems like the older, more dominant one, and Paula seems like the younger, more restive one, who might also be interested in men. (In further defense of this reading, Lizabeth Scott and Burt Lancaster might walk off into the sunset at the end of the picture, but their lips never meet. The final — and most passionate — kiss of the film is the one Fritzi plants on Paula's lips.)

There's a lot of talent in front of and behind the camera, but that only counts for so much. For instance, compare Miklós Rózsa's brilliant score for Brute Force (1947) with his score for Desert Fury. His score for Desert Fury is powerful, but without the dramatic underpinning of a great film, it just writhes and flails all over the place, seemingly in search of a better movie, or at least a more lively one.

The script by Robert Rossen (with uncredited assistance from A.I. Bezzerides), which is based on Ramona Stewart's novel Desert Town, has a lot of snappy dialogue, but the story just doesn't move with much intensity. Also, the Technicolor cinematography really undercuts some of the noir elements of the story and the situation.

Desert Fury is campy, and worth seeing if you're into camp, but that's about it. Also, if you're a connoisseur of face-slapping, there's plenty of that going around, too.

Written by Adam Lounsbery
Originally published on his blog, OCD Viewer

Crime Wave (1954)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 06:51:29 PDT

Noir 101. The Essentials. Crime Wave.

Really?

If this little policier from Warner Bros. (filmed in 1952, released in 1954) isn’t part of your vocabulary then it needs to be; and considering it was finally released on DVD a few years ago, there’s no excuse not to see it. Crime Wave doesn’t stand out from a narrative point of view (despite a bucket of writers); the plot is routine, like a million other second features cranked out during the fifties. Although the story and characters are heavily steeped in noir tropes, it’s André De Toth’s sharp direction that sets it apart from other low budget crime pictures and demands that it be seen by any enthusiast. It can be argued that no other film noir is as influential as it is unknown.

The story is old hat: Ex-con tries to go straight. His old crew breaks out of the Q and comes knocking. When he refuses to help, they hold his fresh new wife in order to force him to take part in one last caper. All the while, the cops are along for the ride, except they don’t believe for a second that our boy is on the up and up.

The cast here is special, and although Sterling Hayden isn’t (necessarily) the protagonist, he dominates the film. This is the sort of role the movie gods had in mind when they placed Hayden in front of a camera: LAPD Detective Lieutenant Sims, bigger and tougher than any hood in the mug book. For my money this is the role of Hayden’s career — not the meatiest or the most well known, but the one in which he leaves the impression of having been the part, rather than merely having played it. (Put it another way: during the DVD commentary, author James Ellroy asserts that Hayden in Crime Wave simply is Bud White.) There are those that prefer him in The Asphalt Jungle or The Killing, but Hayden has a distinct vibe as a cop that isn’t there when he’s playing a crook: you can cross to the other side of the street and dodge a hoodlum (and it isn’t like you won’t see Hayden coming from a mile away) but you can’t avoid the police. With the force of law behind him, the prospect of cop Hayden looking for you is scary as hell.

At a beefy six-and-a-half feet tall, Hayden towers over everyone else in the film. André De Toth and cameraman Burt Glennon keep the camera low, catching the big fellow from underneath but looking down on all of the other actors, as if from Hayden’s point of view. He has to slouch, unkempt, a toothpick in his mouth, scruffy hat, tie perpetually twisted backwards — almost too big to be allowed. The film has numerous stellar sequences, but for Hayden one in particular stands out; it begins at around the eleven-minute mark and finds the cop in his homicide division office, interviewing an eyewitness about the Quentin breakout suspects. The scene opens with him at his desk, then it follows him around the bureau, moving shark-like among a half-dozen routine interviews. Ostensibly the purpose is pure semi-documentary storytelling, providing audiences with an up-close look into the inner workings of the LAPD: A middle-aged broad is rambling on about how she and her guy (replete with bandaged head) don’t really fight — she didn’t mean to conk him, they were just kidding around. At another table, a hang dog B-girl dripping with mascara and dime store jewelry sobs about some chucklehead boyfriend from her past, while at yet another a career stool-pigeon chastises a junior cop about bracing him in front of his neighbors. What makes the whole thing work is the extraordinary authenticity: pay attention to what is going on in the frame away from subject, almost as if the extras forgot for a moment the cameras were rolling. And this ain’t no soundstage — most of the scenes in Crime Wave, interiors and exteriors alike, are filmed in real Los Angeles locations. And if Hayden wasn’t so utterly believable as a 1952 LAPD homicide detective, none of it would work — he’s the glue that holds the entire movie together. If part of the allure of these old films is seeing things as they actually were way back when, this is a scene (and a film) that will keep you in goose bumps.

Then there’s Gene Nelson, of nimble feet and Oklahoma! fame, who plays Steve Lacey, ex-con. Nelson rightly underplays his part. His performance doesn’t offer much beyond matinee good looks and rolled up shirtsleeves. Like I said, this is Hayden’s movie, and Nelson stays out of his way. Whether it was his idea or De Toth’s, Steve Lacey is Lieutenant Sims perfect foil. From a noir perspective, Lacey is a protagonist in the classic mold: trying to make good after doing some hard time: employed, married, permanent address. Crane Wilbur’s story puts him in the classic bind: when his old cellmates come looking for help, he knows that helping them puts everything he’s worked for at risk, yet failing to do so is even more dangerous. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and you can't outrun the mistakes of your past: the rock and the hard place of classic film noir, with only fate to decide whether or not a man comes out clean on the other side.

The wife is model-turned-actress Phyllis Kirk. Kirk did most of her work on television, but if you remember her at all it’s probably as the damsel in distress in De Toth’s most famous picture: House of Wax. Kirk and Nelson are well matched — and the mature depiction of their relationship is surprising for a film noir, and rather progressive when we consider typical gender depictions in similar crime films. Ellen Lacey wears the pants in the family; her assertiveness perfectly balances her husband’s diffidence — yet she’s neither a nag nor a shrew. Steve Lacey’s time behind bars has wrecked his ability to function outside the walls. He needs this strong woman to prop him up and constantly assure him that he has a future. That he had been, of all things, a fighter pilot during the war especially heightens the unusual nature of their relationship. Gone is the recklessness and bravado typically found in screen characterizations of such men, while the wife is equally surprising — a strong, modern woman who is neither a femme fatale nor perky a June Allyson. The film gives us an ideally matched couple, each offering what the other needs.

The crooks. Ted de Corsia: Eddie Muller says he looks like he was born in a boxing gym. James Ellroy: he “oozes Pomade.” Iconic in The Naked City, de Corsia shines reliably here as the brains behind the breakout. Crime Wave’s theatrical audience was familiar with him in heavy roles dating all the way back to The Lady from Shanghai. De Corsia’s screen persona was as hard-boiled as they come —*like an old-school Raymond Burr. His young partner is Charles Buchinsky, who also worked for De Toth in House of Wax. Of course Charles Bronson would go on to be one of the icons of seventies crime films, and one of the biggest movie stars in the world, but it’s always jarring to see him this young. His face is somewhat lined, but nowhere near as weather-beaten as it would become. Crime Wave offered the young actor one of his best early roles: he actually gets to act a little, and even has a few moments where his physicality is on display. The juxtaposition of a studio era character actor as traditional as de Corsia with someone as contemporary as Bronson gives the pair an unusual chemistry. Then there’s Tim Carey, the wild man of the American movie scene. There’s not enough room in any film review to dig into the strange case of Tim Carey, though on the strength of his appearance alone this one is worth the price of admission. His few brief moments of screen time are so bizarre — whether he’s at the center of the shot or mugging from the corner of the frame — that Crime Wave would be notable if for no other reason.

Enough about the cast, as good as they are, there are more worthwhile reasons to watch this, especially if you appreciate how a film looks, even more if you can feel a film. Usually when a noir essayist digs on cinematography, he’ll discuss the lighting and composition of individual shots — I’m not going to do that. From top to bottom, Crime Wave is a beautifully and thoughtfully staged movie, yet it’s not a one-trick-pony when it comes to visual style (check out Witness to Murder). Instead, it’s a movie that employs a variety of techniques depending on what individual scenes call for. The sunlit exteriors are pure documentary naturalism: showing LA locales (Burbank, Glendale, downtown) in a straightforward “this is the city” fashion. It’s difficult to follow the movie during these scenes; one’s inclination is to instead focus on signs and landmarks, trying to get a feel for the way the streets, the people, and the cars looked during those spectacular post-war years. At night, Glennon goes for drama, placing klieg lights in off kilter spots to create a chiaroscuro effect that seems as contrived as the day shots seem real; yet somehow it works, and the transitions barely register.

However the scenes are staged, the greatest thing about Crime Wave is where they are filmed: on location all the way through — and not just the exteriors. De Toth somehow swung access to city hall; the homicide bureau scenes are the real deal. Crime Wave is a superlative example of the way in which a low budget feature could be extraordinary: without money to build sets or dictate production values, De Toth was forced to find locations for the film, and it’s clear after just a single viewing that he had a peculiar talent for doing so: it’s is one the most attractive, even exhilarating, film noirs ever made. Pause on almost any frame and you’ll find something to linger on. De Toth successfully captured all of the content tropes and moviemaking techniques that had become germane to film noir in this tiny little film, and he did it with only half of his promised budget, and in a shoot of only thirteen days. The location work of The Naked City, the backseat point of view from Gun Crazy, the tones of John Alton, the jittery handheld cameras, semi-professional actors, and the quagmire of the ceaseless urban landscape. This a mean, unglamorous movie — populated with Dudley Smith cops ready to shoot a suspect in the back, hard-boiled killers, damaged goods, floozies, stool pigeons, strongarms, and professional losers. The good, the bad — even the insane — all trying to claw their way through a world that no longer gives a damn. It’s a cheap, but delicious buffet of everything noir buffs hunger for — and the final few frames make for one hell of a dessert. It should be on many of those ubiquitous top-ten lists, but the guy beside you probably still hasn’t seen it.

Crime Wave (1954, filmed 1952) Directed by André De Toth
Screenplay by Crane Wilbur
Adaptation by Bernard Gordon and Richard Wormser
Original Story by John and Ward Hawkins
Produced by Brian Foy
Cinematography by Burt Glennon
Art Direction by Stanley Fleischer
Starring Sterling Hayden, Gene Nelson, and Phyllis Kirk
Released by Warner Bros.
Running time: 74 minutes

Written by The Professor
This article originally appeared on The Professor's blog, Where Danger Lives!

They Live by Night (1949)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 11:00:30 PDT

The force that drives noir stories is the urge to escape: from the past, from the law, from the ordinary, from poverty and stifling relationships and personal failure. Noir found its fullest expression in America because the American psyche harbors a passion for freedom and autonomy, forever shadowed by a corresponding fear of loneliness and exile. Both find expression in the road story and its fiercest variant, the lam story. To be on the road is to be moving forward, released from all bonds. To be on the lam is to be hunted, running away from something that is always closing in, shutting off options one by one. The “key to the highway” has its B side, the haunted persecution of a “hellhound on my trail.” As they are powered by the need to escape, noir stories are structured by the impossibility of escape, so their fierce, thwarted energy turns inward on itself.

Film noir has no monopoly on man-on-the-run stories, but noir versions emphasize the isolation of fugitives, their vulnerability to betrayal and exploitation, the ruthless closing in of the law-enforcement dragnet, the physical and mental fraying of outcasts unable to settle anywhere in safety, and the way outlaws are driven further and further out of society, until they eventually become something less than human—something to be hunted down and slaughtered with overwhelming force, like rabid animals.

The lam story is as ritualistic and full of repeated motifs as the heist movie or the prison drama. Fugitives drive all night, sleep in back seats, abandon their cars as the license plates are reported over the radio, steal new cars; hop freight trains; stay in motels and tourist cabins; get married in quickie roadside ceremonies; work menial laboring jobs, hold up gas stations, wake doctors in the middle of the night to treat wounded companions; charge roadblocks, flee cops armed with machine guns, see Wanted posters trumpeting the prices on their heads; haggle with used-car dealers, pawnbrokers, immigrant smugglers and other carrion crows of the road. The claustrophobic city may be the quintessential noir setting, but the transient, banal, melancholy world of road travel is an essential noir locale too. The in-between realm created by postwar car culture, what James Kunstler called “the geography of nowhere,” embodies the essential alienation of the noir world, where no one is ever really at home. Film noir relentlessly mapped the false lure of the highway, which promises freedom and escape but leads only deeper into danger. All roads are blind, in both senses of the word: full of twists and corners concealing the dangers beyond, and leading ultimately to a dead end.

The title of Edward Anderson’s 1937 novel Thieves Like Us sums up its theme: banks, politicians and other institutions of authority are no better than the robbers who attack them. Nicholas Ray, who adapted the book into his first film, They Live By Night (1949), was less interested in this social commentary than in the personal relationships between the characters. The pre-credit prologue introduces his favorite theme of alienated youth (“This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in”), with a heart-melting image of Bowie and Keechie (Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell) kissing in the flickering light before a fireplace. They are so fresh-faced and softly pretty that their outcast status implies the guilt of society—since they are so plainly innocent.

Like the outsiders in other Ray films, the young lovers on the run in They Live By Night briefly find a home, this time in a tourist cabin in the mountains. They ask for a cabin far away from the others, and the proprietor assumes they want privacy because they are newlyweds: “Married people like to be alone,” he tells his son. The mistake is at once ironic and apt: the couple’s romantic bond is indistinguishable from their fugitive status.

When Bowie and Keechie decide to take a chance and spend a day in public, “just like other people,” they and we are reminded how completely they are cut off from normal life. Bowie has been advised by an older criminal of the importance of blending in and looking like other people. But the pair look and feel out of place, stiffly dressed up and clutching a briefcase full of stolen money. They observe everyday activities like anthropologists among baffling natives, disparaging habits that are unfamiliar and out of reach. They keep asking each other for reassurance: “Are you having a good time?”

Bowie was sent to prison as a young teenager for a killing in which he was barely complicit, and he remains child-like and unformed, though determined to seem tough and ready for anything. The two older, experienced convicts who help him escape want him as their driver for a series of bank hold-ups. T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen) is an old-school professional crook, steady and decent; he enlists his sister-in-law Mattie (Helen Craig) to bankroll their operation with the promise that they will supply money for her to mount an appeal for her own jailed husband. The desire to “break out,” to get free of the net woven by crime and the law, hangs over almost everyone in the film. Only the one-eyed Chicamaw (Howard Da Silva) wants not safety and a normal life but excitement and fame as an outlaw.

Chicamaw’s niece Keechie has a harder shell than Bowie, but her life—in a grimy, run-down service station owned by her drunken father—has been just as stunted and confined. The two approach each other warily, at first quarrelling and feigning indifference, but quickly giving way to their eagerness for love. When she comes to tend his wounds, her touch on his bare back evokes an intense yet delicate moment of adolescent awakening. Their relationship changes Keechie more than the terminally naïve Bowie, a malleable type who is easily led astray and just as easily redeemed. Keechie’s plain, grubby face—set throughout the early scenes in a look of defensiveness and disdain—becomes prettier and more feminine as she blossoms into a wife. She delivers a sentimental speech about how a good dog loves only its master, and a good woman is the same, but apart from this she manages to embody the film’s conscience without sanctimony. (One of the most significant differences in Robert Altman’s 1974 Thieves Like Us is its treatment of Keechie.)

The rich glow of the central love story is off-set by the portrait of a hard-scrabble world in which few people can be trusted. Ray recreated the rural areas he had explored during the Depression, when he traveled through the rural South with Alan Lomax, collecting folk music. Dingy motels and auto-courts and sleepy little towns like Zelton, where the men rob a bank on Main Street, look unchanged since earlier decades. Cars throw up trails of dust as they careen along dirt roads running through dry, empty fields. The overhead shots taken from a helicopter establish a raw, documentary look that contrasts sharply with the Rembrandt lighting of the close-ups in the scenes between Bowie and Keechie; their private world is very different from the world through which they move.

Ray’s film is truer to the Depression ambience of its source than most noir films based on thirties novels, but the Production Code required some changes in the story—the lovers had to marry, as they never do in the book. Ray’s staging of their marriage, however, is anything but reassuring. Bowie and Keechie are repelled by the seedy, neon-lit roadside wedding chapel, yet ominously drawn to it as well. The beady-eyed justice of the peace, stuffing a fresh carnation into his button hole as he greets them with forced cheer, pegs them as fugitives but marries them anyway. They take his cheapest wedding, and it’s all over in a minute, the pronouncement of “man and wife” immediately followed by the hint to tip the two glum, perfunctory witnesses a dollar each. The smarmy justice arranges the purchase of a stolen car, chiseling $500 for himself.

The car becomes their only permanent home as they travel aimlessly, their route traced on a black map. At first, just after their marriage, they look like any young newlywed couple, driving along in the sunshine with the wind in their hair, laughing as they struggle to drink cokes and eat sandwiches. The next time they’re in the car—after fighting bitterly over Bowie’s participation in another robbery, and being forced to flee their holiday cabin after he’s recognized—the vacation mood is gone. Rain streaks the windows; they sleep in the car or drive all night, wary of roadblocks, as the pregnant Keechie grows steadily weaker.

Their day of pretending to be ordinary people is their last happy interlude. They go to a nightclub where they’re entertained by “Your Red Wagon” (Ray’s working title for the film). It’s a song about minding your own business, and about being on your own. The lyrics are double-edged: to be left alone is what fugitives want most, but the tough-luck indifference expressed in the song (irresistibly performed by a beaming Marie Bryant) is reflected by the way no one in the film is willing to help the young couple. Bowie dreams of finding refuge in the anonymity of a big city, or in Mexico out of the reach of the law, but this fantasy is constantly punctured. In the men’s room of the nightclub, Bowie is recognized by a local crook who contemptuously gives him an hour to get out of town. There is no sense of loyalty in the underworld, or honor among thieves. Bowie is betrayed first by Keechie’s spiteful, greedy father and then by Mattie in exchange for the release of her own husband—who is so sickened by the deal that he can’t look at her. Sad, hungry-eyed Mattie is no stock villain; when a cop tries to reassure her that she has saved everyone a lot of trouble, she replies disconsolately, “I don’t think that will help me sleep nights.” The person who finally tells Bowie there’s no place he can run to is the crooked justice of the peace, who is decent enough not to con him with false hope.

The ending, in which Bowie is gunned down while Keechie sleeps inside their motel room, runs counter to the usual Bonnie-and-Clyde template where the couple is united in death. It is more tragic, since Keechie is left alone to grieve. For all the deaths and defeats, noir rarely breaks your heart: pessimism, fatalism and cynicism are, for one thing, a defense against heartbreak. But Nicholas Ray, with his bruised romantic temperament, created some of the most moving and wounding of all noir films, including his devastating masterpiece In a Lonely Place.

Ray’s first film fully expresses the concerns that would dominate his career: lonesome wandering, youthful alienation, the destruction of emotional bonds by misunderstanding and an uncaring world. Though he made only a few contributions to the noir canon, Ray added a new note to the heavily German-influenced style. It is often said that outsiders can see a society most clearly, and foreign directors like Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang ruthlessly laid bare American illusions and dreams. Ray’s tone is not acid but saddened, not cold but tender. He has been called, by Geoff Andrew, “the first home-grown poet of American disillusionment.”

***

Written by Imogen Sara Smith NOTE: This essay is adapted from her book In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City.

Imogen Sara Smith is an independent film scholar based in Brooklyn. Her most recent book was In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City (McFarland, 2011), and her writing appears regularly in Alt Screen, Noir City Magazine, The Chiseler, and other venues.

The Tender Hook (2008)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:47:42 PDT

AKA The Boxer and the Bombshell

The Tender Hook (The Boxer and the Bombshell), a 2008 neo-noir film from Australian writer/director Jonathan Ogilvie focuses on the classic love triangle. The Tender Hook is a much better and more subtle title for the story as the word Tender has multiple possible meanings: the obvious emotional reference, of course, but also the essential partnership and reliance between a pearl diver and the tender who holds the life line while the pearl diver in under water. Set in 1920s Sydney, the film’s gorgeous sets and bold colours are stunning, but for the most part, although this is a tale of desperate people trapped in their lives of subservience to a vicious underworld figure, the plot’s most heinous twists and turns take place off stage. With most of the violence and tension off screen, the hard-boiled, harsher elements are effectively censored. Perhaps this is why the film, made for $7 million dollars, was a box-office failure with earnings of just over $64,000. In spite of its failings, the film is well worth catching mainly for its fascinating look at Jazz-Age Sydney, beautiful cinematography, its well-drawn characterizations and the manner in which the plot explores some basic fundamentals of human nature.

The Tender Hook is a frame story, and the film begins on a rainy night with the camera focusing on a head-shot of the beautiful Iris (Rose Byrne) as she rides in the back seat of a car. Initially, not a word is spoken but her distress is evident. The car stops on a bridge, and two men alight and unload a trunk. A man, bound and taped is disgorged from the trunk by these two goons--one of whom prolongs the moment by using his foot to show the man the water which presumably indicates his imminent watery death. The bound man struggles and Iris tries to get out of the car. As she tries to unlock the door, a hand comes down on top of hers, pushing the lock down. That hand belongs to McHeath (Hugo Weaving).

Then it’s three months earlier, and we’re back to the events that led to the scene on the bridge….

The next scene opens at a boxing match, and McHeath appears to be a fairly talentless crooner as he entertains the boxing crowd, prematch as King Mac and the Subjects, and while this is the title of his band, it could very well serve to describe how McHeath runs both his shady business practices and his sterile personal life. Standing in the middle of the ring, complete with back up musicians, his song is directed towards the luminously lovely Iris who sits in the front row, eyes intent on McHeath. As it turns out, Iris’s attention isn’t so much adoration as much as it due to McHeath’s expectations that she will critique his performance--although more accurately she must critique the performance of the musicians against McHeath’s crooning. Although the scene isn’t overplayed, it sets the tone for McHeath’s relationship with Iris and also to his two goons, bespectacled Bolshevik Donnie (Tyler Coppin) and hefty Ronnie (John Batchelor). Are these their real names? It seems much more likely that the Bolshevik has been dubbed Donnie as his original Russian name was difficult to pronounce and also because McHeath, in his typical ownership fashion, would rename an employee. So that leaves us with Donnie and Ronnie--a mis-matched teaming of the diminutive, intelligent Russian with the gargantuan, crafty Australian.

When well-built boxer Art Taylor (Matthew Le Nevez) enters the ring, Iris can barely conceal her sexual interest from an ever-monitoring McHeath. Art’s performance indicates his tenacity and his endurance--traits that Iris, as it turns out, has every reason to appreciate. When Iris slips off to the bathroom for a sneaky drug sniff run, Ronnie is sent to follow Iris by a mere nod from the boss. He sits outside the bathroom like a massive human Rottweiler on guard/chaperone/spy duty. Into the bathroom slips Hatter (Kuni Hashimoto)--a man who’s in debt to McHeath and who is an old friend of Iris’s father. Hatter wants Iris’s help, and this relationship proves pivotal to the film’s central double-cross. A few minutes later, when Iris spots Ronnie waiting for her, with just a hint of defiance she slips into Art’s changing room, and the die is cast.

Almost as if he deliberately wants to invite trouble to his door in some sort of twisted experiment of loyalty, McHeath hires Art as a sparring partner for Alby (Luke Carroll), a promising Aborigine boxer. However, McHeath changes his mind after a trip to the cinema to see Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 film, The Ring (a film in which two boxers compete for the love of one woman). During the pre-film footage of the 1908 World Championship match which was won by Black American Johnson, the crowd boos, hisses and calls out racial slurs at the film clip of the World Champion. Later, McHeath tells Alby that the crowds “like their winners white,” and Art becomes the new contender with the Aborigine delegated to sparring partner. While McHeath’s decision appears to be made on a business basis tainted with racism, there may be a subtler reason to McHeath’s decision--he noted that Art and Alby had become friends. With Art’s promotion (and Alby’s demotion) that friendship (and any possible loyalty between employees) is replaced with bitterness.

McHeath, always well-dressed, and geared into a programme of self-improvement, fancies himself as a bit of a Renaissance man, yet this is a brutal underworld figure who has his finger in every conceivable human vice. McHeath is a thoroughly unappealing, but intelligent, well-groomed thug. Scenes show his self-improvement programme (golf, crooning, Shakespeare) interspersed with savagery in which he uses his favourite weapon--a straight razor. His relationship with Iris is grounded firmly in money (she constantly exceeds her allowance), and his possessiveness and veiled threats of violence leave little doubt as to what will happen to Iris if she strays. As for their negligible sex life, McHeath’s sneak attack lasts for all of two seconds--enough disruption for Iris to wake up just as he finishes.

Even though McHeath keeps Iris under his thumb and in view for most of the time, she still manages to squeeze a few freedoms from life under McHeath’s nose, but the problem with McHeath is you’re never quite sure how much he knows and how much rope he’s giving you to test your loyalty.

So this then is the love-triangle: a gorgeous, young, unhappy woman, a strapping young boxer, and a vicious, but loaded thug. Iris is obviously a woman of expensive habits, and it seems extremely doubtful that Art, who supports his WWI veteran brother who still suffers the after effects of mustard gas, could possibly support Iris in the manner to which she has grown accustomed. Iris organizes a money making venture under McHeath’s nose using Donnie and Ronnie as muscle. McHeath is a formidable adversary, but Donnie supports the action quoting Marx “All property is theft,” while Ronnie sees a connection between his actions to steal from McHeath and the overthrow of Empire or the natural demolishment of patriarchy. This is perhaps one of the film’s most interesting aspects--the way in which “King” McHeath and his “subjects” operate and how he keeps them paranoid and, at times, divisive with a winning “divide and conquer” strategy.

Another role of note is the effervescent Daisy (Pia Miranda), a good-natured loyal friend to Iris who’s desired by both Donnie and Ronnie. They sensibly toss a coin for her as though she has no choice in the matter. Although Daisy is an interesting character, she’s never fully utilized. While we may regret not seeing more of Daisy, her lack of appearance doesn’t hurt the film necessarily. However, Art’s character is never developed and he remains little beyond a muscular stud, and this serves to weaken the film overall.

The Tender Hook is a very stylish film which includes grainy archival footage, and at some points in the film, the current action is digitized and merged into the archival footage. For trivia nuts, some of the songs used in the film are not from the period. Also of note are the frequent stunning camera shots which show Iris through glass--a car window, a fish tank, the bottom of a glass, and these shots emphasize her remoteness and inaccessibility. This is a beautiful film with all the essential ingredients, but somehow the passion leaks out. Nonetheless, any Australian film deserves attention, and The Tender Hook, while flawed, is still well-worth catching.

Written by Guy Savage

A Double Life (1947)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:00:15 PST

George Cukor's A Double Life stars Ronald Colman as a brilliant stage actor named Anthony John — "Tony" to his friends — who loses himself so completely in each of his roles that he has to be careful about which parts he accepts.

When the film begins, Tony appears to be a charming, "hail fellow well met" sort of chap who's as friendly with theatrical agents and his fellow actors as he is with stagehands and women on the street. It's no coincidence, however, that he's starring in Philip MacDonald's comedy A Gentleman's Gentleman.

When the run comes to an end and he's offered the lead in Shakespeare's Othello, Tony hesitates. He's always wanted to play the part, and even worked out some staging ideas years earlier.

But the role of Othello is a dark one (no pun intended), and Tony fears what psychic and emotional depths he might sink to playing the tragic Moor night after night.

And he's not the only one. His beautiful ex-wife Brita Kaurin (Signe Hasso) cautions against it. She and Tony still love each other, but when she tells her boyfriend, theatrical agent Bill Friend (Edmond O'Brien), what it was like to be married to Tony, it's clear that the good times and bad times all coincided with the parts he was playing. "When he's doing something gay like this it's wonderful to be with him, but ... when he gets going on one of those deep numbers," she says. "We were engaged doing Oscar Wilde, broke it off doing O'Neill, were married doing Kaufman and Hart, and divorced doing Chekov."

Against her better judgment, however, Brita eventually takes the role of Desdemona, and everything goes just as badly as you might expect.

If A Double Life were just a burlesque version of Othello, with a stand-in for Iago whispering lies about infidelity in Tony's ear, it wouldn't be nearly as good or as interesting as it is.

Instead, it's a hypnotic portrait of self-inflicted madness. We watch Tony slide easily from one persona to another early in the film when he slips on a pair of eyeglasses and goes out to eat in a new restaurant, convincing young waitress Pat Kroll (Shelley Winters) that he's new in town.

He's a hugely talented actor, but his talent comes with a price. The more popular his performances as Othello become, the more his mental and emotional health deteriorate. (And his performances are indeed popular; his Othello ends up running on Broadway for an unbelievable, not to mention unrealistic, 300 performances.)

When Tony finally commits the inevitable murder, it's not a passionate reenactment of Othello's murder of Desdemona, it's a weird, tawdry killing committed in a dissociative state.

There's much about A Double Life that's heavy-handed, both visually and thematically. If you're paying close attention, all the attempts early in the film to hammer home the point that Anthony John has a "double life" might seem like a bit much. (Even his name — two Christian names in search of a surname — is a clue.) By the second or third reel, however, I was completely enthralled.

The plot of A Double Life is essentially pulpy and exploitative, so I think a great deal of credit must be paid to Ronald Colman for his exceptional performance, not only as Anthony John, but as Anthony John playing Othello. (The role was originally intended for Laurence Olivier. When Olivier was unavailable, the producers went with another seasoned British thespian.)

Colman ended up winning the Academy Award for best actor for his role in A Double Life. It was the fourth time he was nominated and the first time he won. (Miklós Rózsa's score also won an Academy Award.) There are moments when his performance tends to get a little exaggerated and "showy," but I thought that was appropriate for the character. He's playing a self-involved, grandiose stage actor, after all.

Milton R. Krasner's brilliant cinematography bears mention, too. There are many things about A Double Life that don't exactly place it in the category of film noir, but the look of the film is pure noir. It's full of shadows, dramatic lighting effects, city streets at night, and cramped, dark rooms. There's a mounting sense of dread running through the film, and Krasner's cinematography is largely responsible for it.

I had no idea what to expect from A Double Life and I was completely blown away. It's a film where everything comes together; Cukor's direction, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin's script, Krasner's photography, and the performances of the three principal actors. I'm looking forward to seeing it again some day, and I highly recommend it if you've never seen it.

Editor's note: Spoilers in video

Written by Adam Lounsbery

originally published on his blog, OCD Viewer

The People Against O'Hara (1951)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:32:11 PST

The People Against O'Hara is an MGM film noir starring Spencer Tracy.

MGM wasn't known for making noir, but the company did occasionally produce and release them. Some are fantastic: The Asphalt Jungle, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Side Street. The majority of their black-and-white crime thrillers (later to be known as noir) from the 40s and early 50s hit most of the notes required but are just a bit out of key. Cause for Alarm, The Lady Without a Passport, Scene of the Crime and The Bribe come across like a cover band – not the real thing. RKO and Warners were the studios that knew noir.

I'm happy to report The People Against O'Hara is (mostly) a film noir. It certainly looks like one. That's thanks to director John Sturges and (probably more so) director-of-photography John Alton. Alton – lensman for T-Men, He Walked By Night and Raw Deal – knew how to use light and shadow. Every scene in The People Against O'Hara has light coming from table lamps, Venetian-blinded windows... anywhere but from the ceilings. And they're all coming from low or sideways angles. The outdoor shots in New York City are chaotic, cluttered and strangely claustrophobic at times. The first five minutes of the movie showing the murder is all shadow – a blanket of dark. The light from a Brownstone doorway giving the only visibility of a shooting taking place across a city street.

Compare this movie to the independently-produced Vice Squad released a few years later. Vice Squad is so over lit it looks like a 50s Television show. Vice Squad suffers because of it. If it were shot by Alton – using techniques created in part because his lighting style was an inexpensive way to express tension – Vice Squad would probably be bearable. But it's not. It's one of many 50s Edward G. Robinson vehicles that just aren't very good. In my opinion, it's because of the way the film looks. But tough guy Edward G. Robinson belonged in crime thrillers. Tracy by the early 50s was carefully managed so he only appeared as a lovable family man. The People Against O'Hara was a bit of a stretch for him.

But only a bit.

Spencer Tracy – even though the film is peppered with fine supporting players and familiar noir faces – is the movie. It's all about him. It's a good thing he's so likeable because that may explain why everyone in the movie is trying to help him. It'd be hard to imagine anyone else in the part. He plays a lawyer – an indecisive drunk lawyer. And he pulls it off perfectly. Every player in the movie is pulling for him – the judge, the DA trying to prosecute his client, hell even the local bartender doesn't want him to fall off the horse. But he does. It leads to a ending that's not happy. Which was a welcome surprise and appropriately film noir as well.

It's also a bit refreshing to see the cops, DA and defense lawyers are all straight-as-an-arrow men out to serve justice honestly. And, again, it would all fall apart and probably cause lots of eye-rolling among noir purists if Tracy wasn't so convincing (it's clear that MGM pulled their punches many times in the script not just related to the DA's office, but Curtayne's drinking). The only shady dealings among lawyers is when Curtayne (Tracy) pays off a witness to change his testimony. But even that is forgiven because everyone knows Curtayne is just trying to do right by his young client – the O'Brien in the title (James Arness).

I enjoy spotting supporting actors in noir. This film has some good ones. Pat O'Brien, Diana Lynn, and John Hodiak all appear. But unlike Tracy are almost completely forgotten.

O'Brien was a big star during the 30s gangster days --along with Bogart and Tracy-- but as he aged he couldn’t continue to match his contemporaries on-screen charisma. Demoted to second or third billed in the 50s he is unmemorable in this. To see O'Brien shine during the second half of his movie career seek out the amazing Riffraff. RKO- a studio who could risk having a fading star in the lead.

Diana Lynn plays Tracy's daughter. She looks a bit like Gloria Grahame in this one. She's so well erased today the Internet Movie Database has the wrong picture of her on her IMDB page.

John Hodiak is good but not given much to do. The usually mustached actor is better showcased in Lifeboat, Two Smart People, Somewhere in the Night and The Bribe. I did mention The Bribe earlier as a bit of an off noir, but it IS featured in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. So there's that.

And the rest.

Pat O'Brien, Regis Toomey, and John Hodiak

Poor Regis Toomey (sans toupée) plays a radio operator for a couple of minutes. And they only shoot him from behind... in the dark. He was a cop in more noir than you could count – from cheap Bs like I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes to Warner Bros' The Big Sleep.

Eduardo Ciannelli (Dillinger, Johnny Staccato), Jay C. Flippen (They Live By Night) and Arthur Shields (The Verdict) play the rogue's gallery of ethnic stereotypes. Ugly in looks to be sure. Ciannelli is Sol 'Knuckles' Lanzetta, Flippen is Sven Norson and Shields is Mr. O'Hara. If you imagined what their accents would sound like you'd probably be right. See if you can spot Emil Meyer and Charles Bronson too!

Warner Archive has just recently released the DVD and it looks fantastic.

Check out the trailer below. From the start – engraved cards on a silver platter “Mr. SPENCER TRACY... in His Valiant Struggle to Free an Innocent Man”– to its misleading gangbusters voiceover – makes it clear that MGM indeed didn't know how to market it in 1951. Today, let's just call it a decent film noir.

Written by Steve-O

Wanted for Murder (1946)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:49:27 PST

Taunting Strangler Hunted by Scotland Yard

Eric Portman grabbed attention during the early post-war wave of London cinema with two gripping performances as a killer. Each was done in a different way and the result was chilling performances amid taut suspense and audiences held spellbound.

The first performance was the 1946 film noir vehicle Wanted for Murder. Here was a killer who was a highly successful export-import magnate by day and a serial strangler of young London women by night. One year later in Dear Murderer Portman emerges as an embittered husband who murders to hang on to a faithless wife.

In the earlier effort Portman’s character Victor William Colebrook was distinguished by an aristocratic manner and a superiority complex on the one hand and a realistic acceptance on the other of a man who knows he is going mad and feels powerless to do anything about it. He writes taunting letters to the police and uses a pseudonym, chiding them for what he deems their stupidity and hopelessness in catching him in the manner of San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer one generation later.

Wanted for Murder utilizes London’s interesting scenery in such a manner that the viewer can think that he or she is part of an unfolding true life documentary. Portman is seen measuring his prey as the omniscient camera’s eye looms with a sense of inevitable doom. The killer measures his victims in the manner of British sporting gentry on a hunt.

The film is divisible into three brackets. One involves lovely and innocent Dulcie Gray searching for love. The other involves strangler Portman hunting and ultimately devouring female prey. The third relates to two determined Scotland Yard detectives. The stories intersect to reveal, in the midst of Scotland Yard’s manhunt to capture a serial strangler of women, a developing triangle with the killer vying for Gray’s love alongside a humble and thoroughly cheerful bus conductor played by Derek Farr, whose middle class affability is the direct opposite of the nattily attired, egotistical aristocrat-executive embodied in Portman. Portman will also become linked to Scotland Yard detectives Roland Culver and Stanley Holloway.

This British noir film lifts off in a manner predictive of the overall consistent and solid pacing under the deft hand of director Lawrence Huntington. Farr spots Gray in a crowded London Underground Train, recognizing her as a girl he admired when he frequently punched her ticket on the Number 13 Bus. When the train encounters technical problems Farr and Gray disembark. He walks with her to Hampstead Heath, where Gray tells Farr she will be meeting her boyfriend.

Portman’s initial scene with Gray reveals him at his most imperious. He is incensed by her being late for their meeting. He is impervious to her reasoned explanation of the London Underground problem. They meet in the midst of the Hampstead Heath Fair, where others are enjoying themselves. The joyous laughter of young women on a Ferris wheel prompts Portman to condemn with shouting disdain the silly masses in whose midst he stands. He proclaims urgent desire to leave immediately.

The next day we see the charming side of the aristocratic business executive as he alights from his office in London’s financial district. He buys a flower for himself from a lady vendor, which he places in his lapel, then purchases a full spray for his secretary. This side of Portman eases warmth and an outward layer of harmony as a man of comfort.

Not only is the big news about the murder that occurred at Hampstead Heath after Portman and Gray parted company. Scotland Yard’s chief officers pursuing the case, Roland Culver and able assistant Stanley Holloway, receive a taunting letter from the killer that they are bungling fools. Not only are the police being insulted, but the brazen killer adds ominously that there will be another young woman strangled that night in Regent’s Park.

The manner in which the story moves seamlessly amid all circumstances and characters involved represents a smooth script writing enterprise with one of its members among the premiere figures of the British cinema. Emeric Pressburger, partner of Michael Powell, had earlier written the 1943 hit The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The following year after Wanted for Murder debuted Black Narcissus would appear. In 1948 Pressburger along with partner Powell’s ballet film classic Red Shoes debuted. Wanted for Murder was adapted from a stage play written by Percy Robinson and Terence de Marney. Rodney Ackland collaborated with Pressburger on the screenplay with Maurice Cowan furnishing additional dialogue.

Wanted for Murder is reminiscent of the American film noir classic Laura, which debuted two years earlier in 1944, in that the two movies featured haunting musical theme songs. In the 1944 release the David Raksin song "Laura" was played throughout the film to heighten dramatic impact, an idea suggested by Twentieth Century-Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. In the British noir release two years later the same pattern was employed with one additional twist.

The young victim in the Regent’s Park strangling began singing the haunting Mischa Spoliansky song "A Voice in the Night" in a state of comfort, delighted that a man of Portman’s social and economic distinction is interested in her. At that point the serial killer planted his anxious fingers around her neck and choked her to death.

One of the visually arresting features of the film is the manner in which the camera presents London as a dangerous city by night in the midst of a string of murders of young women reminiscent of Jack the Ripper during the Victorian period. Cinematography was provided by Mutz Greenbaum, also known as Max Greene. The camera operates as an intelligent communicator of danger by night in the same manner that it heightened the fear presence of soon to become murder victim Richard Widmark in the British noir 1950 classic Night and the City. The connection is understandable in that Greenbaum-Greene was behind the camera in the latter film as well.

An interesting story element of Wanted for Murder is the cat and mouse confrontations between the Scotland Yard team of Roland Culver and Stanley Holloway and serial killer Portman. They directly interact after the killer dropped a handkerchief on Hampstead Heath the night of the murder. The meeting process begin as informational, but in time the determined police team becomes convinced that Portman is the killer, at which point he is followed with the objective of obtaining enough proof to apprehend and eventually hang him.

What has turned this affluent aristocrat into a strangler of women? It is revealed that Portman’s character, Victor William Colebrooke, had an infamous grandfather. William Colebrooke presided over legal public hangings during the Victorian era. He became so infatuated by the process that a statue likeness of him appeared in the chamber of horrors at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. The younger Colebrooke becomes so inflamed with rage after viewing the statue and listening to the history behind it that, after the guide and viewers vanish, he in a fit of rage shatters it. This circumstance is one of the clues that convinces Scotland Yard that Colebrooke is the strangler.

Barbara Everest as Colebrooke’s mother acknowledges that she has been overly protective of her son. Everest expresses regret over having married his father, someone she had to protect from violently acting upon dangerous impulses that lay close to the surface, observable from his facial expressions. It remained for the grandson to carry out those violent impulses through serial strangulation.

On one occasion a suffering Portman, with tears rolling down his cheeks, stands before Thames Embankment across the street from the well appointed flat he shares with his mother. Portman begs for release from the burden weighing heavily on his shoulders. He then crosses the street, enters his flat, and shouts at his mother. Her son announces that he is mad.

The brilliantly organized script culminates memorably. After Dulcie Gray tells Portman she is breaking off their relationship and that she loves Derek Farr, the crushed aristocrat, humiliated over losing the young woman he hoped to marry to a bus conductor, albeit one studying to become an engineer, arranges a final meeting.

With Scotland Yard aware that this meeting will occur at the entrance to Hyde Park near the famous Marble Arch, they move quickly to seal off the entire park after Portman enters it with Gray. After Farr becomes aware of what is happening he enters a scene in which Culver and Holloway endeavor to clear out busy Hyde Park.

So often in films that earlier deliver promise viewers suffer a letdown at the end. This is anything but the case with Wanted for Murder.

editor's note: some spoilers in the video below

Written by Bill Hare

William Hare is the writer of Early Film Noir: Greed, Lust and Murder Hollywood Style, Hitchcock And the Methods of Suspense, and L.A. Noir: Nine Dark Visions of the City of Angels. He's just wrapping up his latest book and should be out soon.

Tiger in the Smoke (1956)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:10:07 PST

Class and Patriarchy
by Guy Savage

“I’ve been on the bash.”

If you’d like a glimpse of the London fog that helped cover the tracks of the notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper, then take a look at the British film, Tiger in the Smoke (1956), an excellent noir from director Roy Ward Baker. The film is based on the 1952 novel by the prolific crime author, Margery Allingham, and while it’s number 14 of the Allingham Albert Campion novels, no mention of Campion appears in the film.

The film is set in post WWII London. It’s November, late afternoon, and in terms of fog it’s a peasouper--fog so dense and thick that it’s difficult to see more than a few steps ahead. The film opens with a string of street musicians, 6 in all, walking in single-file through the crowded, noisy London marketplaces. One of them sits in an ad-hoc cart of sorts while another jiggles a collecting box on which the word “ex-servicemen” is written. While the musicians could be seen as just another element of local colour, their presence is seminal to the film.

The drama opens when a slim young woman, Meg Elgin (Muriel Pavlow) accompanied by her stuffy, bowler-hatted fiancé, Geoffrey Leavitt (Donald Sinden) pile out of a taxi and into the train station. Meg, a WWII widow, is about to marry the affluent Geoffrey, but over the last three months, she’s been receiving envelopes that include a photo of a man who appears to be her dead husband, Martin. Accompanying the last photo was a note telling her to meet Martin on the 3:23 Southend train on the 1st of November. Fearing blackmail, Meg and Geoffrey have contacted the police, and Chief Inspector Luke (Christopher Rhodes) and a handful of men are there to grab the man who may or may not be Martin. These initial scenes establish one of the film’s main themes: the clash of the parallel worlds of the so-called lower and upper classes.

As it turns out the man who claims to be Martin is an imposter--a man known as Duds Morrison (Gerald Harper). Duds is hauled off to the police station for questioning, and here it’s revealed that he’s a career criminal who was released from jail a few weeks previously. His last crime was robbery with violence committed with a thug known as Jack Havoc. Since Duds hasn’t yet done anything wrong, Chief Inspector Luke lets him go. Meanwhile Meg, who maintains a level of hysteria throughout the film, is bundled off back home to her father, the saintly Canon Avril (Laurence Naismith).

Geoffrey decides to do some sleuthing of his own, and so he follows Duds as he leaves the police station and offers him money if Duds will explain how he’s involved in these mysterious claims that Martin is still alive. After all Geoffrey has a vested interest in ensuring that Meg is a widow, and as far as the official records are concerned Martin is “posted missing presumed killed.” The spectre of the possibility that Martin is still alive is an issue that must be addressed given the flurry of photos Meg has received. Duds, however, refuses to cooperate and he appears to be terrified of something. He tears out of the pub, and Geoffrey loses Duds in the dense fog….

Meanwhile all hell is breaking loose in London with the escape of the homicidal maniac, Jack Havoc (Tony Wright). Havoc, doing time at Wormwood Scrubs, had convinced the warders that he’s a head case, and as the film plays out, it seems likely that Havoc didn’t need to try hard to pretend that he’s a nut-job. Havoc was attending an outside interview with a psychiatrist when he knifed the doctor and made a dramatic escape. Assistant Commissioner Oates (Alec Clunes) who knows Havoc well insists that Havoc timed his escape with the fog, but Luke remains skeptical. Oates argues that Havoc is one the three truly evil men he’s had the misfortune to meet in his lifetime, and that Luke will understand what he means when he meets Havoc.

Part of the film’s fascination can be found in its portrayal of patriarchy and hierarchy within British society which the plot shovels out at every turn. For example, there’s the patriarchy of the male-female dynamic in how the story deals with the idea that Meg may not have known her husband as well as she thinks she did. They were married for just three short months before Martin left for the war serving as a commando in France. For some time into the film, Chief Inspector Luke doubts Meg’s ability to recognize her own husband, in spite of the fact that they had an intimate relationship, but at the same time, he’s willing to accept the Canon’s argument that Duds cannot possibly be Martin. If Meg is insulted by the fact that Luke implies that she can’t be trusted to know her own husband while he takes her father’s word for it, any sign of umbrage never shows, and the film takes the fallibility of women as a matter of course. Luke concedes to ecclesiastical authority at several points in the film. According to the Canon, Martin was a “gentle man” whose only crime “was a so-called poem to his dog.” The implication, of course, is that cheap lower-class hood Duds couldn’t possibly be Martin--although there are some superficial similarities. So through this sequence we see that Luke isn’t convinced that Meg knew her husband as well as she thinks she did, but on the other hand, he’s willing to concede that the Canon’s opinion can be trusted. Other scenes show Meg in perpetual hysteria while the multiple males who surround her keep her in ignorance as to the facts or else try to talk her down.

Also evident is the hierarchy implicit in military structure extending to civilian life. This is largely seen in the scenes with the motley crew of mentally unstable street musicians who are willing to concede at least some authority and rank to Tiddy Doll (Bernard Miles), their tentative leader. Through the interactions between the street musicians, it becomes clear that WWII provided a cover of sorts for various nefarious activities for these petty hoods, but also now that the war is over, these largely disenfranchised human beings still cling to their uniforms and their medals as a means of survival and also as a disguise that marks prestige or merit.

The scenes that take place in the Canon’s house underscore both the patriarchal nature and the strict hierarchy of British society. The saintly Canon talks down to his female servant rather as he might talk to a naughty five-year-old, but the very best scenes in the house take place between the Canon and old “Cash-and-Carry,” the nefarious Lucy Cash (Beatrice Varley). Beatrice Varley, a British noir regular, steals the film in her role of a sly used clothing seller, one of the film’s two completely evil characters. One scene shows the Canon questioning Lucy Cash about a coat that went missing from his house, and with barely concealed hatred, Lucy manages to answer politely while every word shows both her disdain for the Canon and her bitter awareness of her perceived station in life. At one point the Canon dismisses her to the kitchen on an errand, and this small act indicates her social standing in the Canon’s eyes--she’s not a guest--she’s an underling, and this she acknowledges with the comment, dripping with sarcasm: “I don’t mind the kitchen. I did enough work there in your dear wife’s day.” Here’s the Canon on the pariah Lucy Cash:

“I’ve seen her walk down the street and window curtains tremble. Blinds creep down and keys turn in locks. She passes like a shadow.”

Lucy Cash’s involvement with Duds is implied rather than exposed, but perhaps the most revealing scene shows her hard-as-nails poker face with its charitable and implacable veneer when she’s faced with the bloody evidence of a violent crime.

In terms of a villain, reports of Havoc prior to his presence on the screen help to create an image of an almost superhuman character. He’s capable of the most fantastic feats, and he’s also remarkably cunning--planning his escape from prison to coincide with the dense fog for example. One of the striking elements of Havoc’s character is that he believes in the “science of luck,” and he is convinced that fate threw him together with Martin for a joint raid on Martin’s old home in Brittany. Not only does Havoc break out of prison but he also breaks into and then out of Meg and Geoffrey’s future home via the second floor window which overlooks spiked railings. The police are completely outfoxed by Havoc’s physical abilities, and when Meg recalls seeing a glimpse of Havoc, her impression is of “dark wings.” The implication is of course, of evil, and so the first real look at Havoc in the cellar where the street musicians live is inevitably a disappointment. Havoc is a fearsome creation--a homicidal maniac, yet the rumours and legends don’t quite match the real man who inevitably folds like a five-year old only to be conquered by his much-more intelligent ‘betters’.

In spite of its flaws, or even perhaps because of them, Tiger in the Smoke is well worth catching. It’s an engaging story which also yields excellent social commentary in its depiction of the parallel worlds of the lower and upper classes. Naturally the upper classes are good and intelligent while the crims lurk in the ‘lower’ classes and it’s the film’s rather naive supposition that crimes erupt in the crucible created by the proximity of these two parallel worlds. Note how, for example, the servants in the Canon’s house complicate life through the sale of Martin’s old jacket and also servant Will (Charles Victor) at one point even mickey finns the Canon’s milk. While Will acts with the best of intentions, the action results in placing the Canon in danger. The film effectively diminishes class problems into simplified class resentment, so that rather than showing the working class chafing at a generalized lack of opportunity, the film portrays the ‘lower’ class lusting for the valuable objects that belong to the upper class, and subsequently engaging in a criminal life of acquisition. The subconscious patronizing of the so-called ‘lower-classes’ and the implicit snobbery which runs throughout the film is also seen through the revelation that the ill-educated crooks cannot conceive of the true nature of the term "priceless” and will always go for something cheap and sparkly every time.

British cinema fans keep your eyes open for Stratford Johns in an early role as a police constable. There’s no mistaking that voice.

Written by Guy Savage

Cape Fear (1962)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:56:34 PST

“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.” – Aristotle

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Nearly a decade after defense attorney Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) acts as Good Samaritan by intervening in an attempted rape, perpetrator Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) tracks him to Savannah, Georgia and begins to deal out long-awaited retribution on Bowden’s family. As Cady carefully navigates the ever-thinning line between licit and illicit, Bowden becomes increasingly vulnerable to crossing criminal boundaries in order to protect his wife and daughter. The threat of the stable family unit by outside forces is a common motif in the noir genre, but never did the threat feel as tangible as it did in Cape Fear. An unpretentious film, it was received as coarse and vulgar in its time, yet it provokes a visceral reaction from the viewer as it questions the supposed usefulness of societal law.

The making of Cape Fear was put into motion by Gregory Peck, who also acted as producer through his motion picture company, Melville Productions. While his production house may have been named after a respectable author, Cape Fear’s origin was pulp – the touchstone of film noir screenplays. Though author John D. MacDonald was a graduate of Syracuse and Harvard universities, the Second World War derailed his life, and once discharged he found himself penning short stories for even shorter stacks of cash. Thanks to a booming crime novel market MacDonald was well-known by the time he wrote The Executioners, which eventually fell into the hands of Peck. Under the impression that films with geographical titles did well at the box office, Peck ran his finger down the Eastern Seaboard until he hit the Cape Fear region of North Carolina. In short order, Peck assigned himself the role of Sam Bowden and handed Cady’s reigns over to drinking partner Robert Mitchum.

Peck looked no further than his last director, J. Lee Thompson who had earned himself an Academy Award nomination with The Guns of Navarone. Cape Fear would be Thompson’s sole expedition into noir territory, but he was enthusiastic about conveying the film’s sense of threat and carnal undertones. Director of Photography Samuel Leavitt had little more experience with the genre. When all was said and done, his offerings were slightly dubious noirs like Johnny Cool, Crime in the Streets, and The Crimson Kimono. Yet Leavitt absolutely understood how to film chiaroscuro; after all, he took home the Oscar for black and white cinematography for Anatomy of a Murder and The Defiant Ones. Leavitt elevates Cape Fear from thriller to noir with his careful attention to shadows and light: he and Thompson shoot Mitchum behind a blur of black wrought-iron, with shadows of bar glasses gleaming on his naked back, and the sheen of sweat and black blood glistening on his skin.

“Hello, Counselor. Remember me?” – Max Cady

Max Cady has spent the last eight years, four months and thirteen days (roughly) with one thing on his mind: revenge against the man whose interference put him behind bars. Or, more accurately, Cady has spent his incarceration learning the loopholes in criminal law so he may legally terrorize Bowden’s wife Peggy (Polly Bergen), and teenaged daughter, Nancy (Lori Martin). The film follows Cady as he plagues the Bowden family unit, but always outside the long arm of the law. There are no witnesses when he poisons the family dog. And if he’s outside Nancy’s school or leering at her on a boat dock? Well, a man has a right to be in public places, does he not? Not without resources, Bowden pulls a few strings and asks police chief Dutton (Martin Balsam) to roust Cady or dig up some warrants – but he’s clean. “You show me a law that prevents crime. All we can do is act after the fact,” Dutton complains. When the chief somewhat scornfully suggests a private detective, Bowden hires Charlie Sievers (played by a positively hirsute Telly Savalas) and Bowden is finally given something he can work with. Sievers follows Cady and finds that he has picked up and brutally beaten a young woman named Diane Taylor (Barrie Chase.) However, it is Cady who is sending a message to the counselor: he’s hurt and scared the young woman so badly she refuses to press charges or make a statement. Cady’s threat to her looms so large that she flees the city in the middle of the night. Bowden and his wife, Peggy, understand now that this is what Cady means to do to Nancy. It’s not the act that is important to Cady; he wants Bowden to think about an attack on his daughter for the rest of his life.

The denouement of the film is particularly tense and almost wordless, and Bowden’s indecision about his own capabilities and the practicality of law are neatly tied up. After a nerve-wracking cat-and-mouse through swampland, Bowden has Cady lined up in the sights of his revolver but does not pull the trigger. He dooms him to spend the rest of his life in jail and restores his own faith (if not so much the audience’s) in justice.

“You just put the law in my hands and I’m going to break your heart with it.” – Max Cady

Although the ending of Cape Fear stops short of the anticipated slaughter of Max Cady, the film goes beyond B-grade horror by doing an effective job of exploring the uneasy introspection of the its hero. While Cady patiently bides his time in the murky grey waters of the law, Bowden becomes positively mired in it. He’s a man who has built the foundations of his life in the black and white world of right and wrong only to discover that a he cannot use logic to solve an illogical problem. The core struggle in the film is not whether Bowden will stop Cady’s reprisal, but whether he will give up the known truths in his life to operate outside societal rules. Sam Bowden never quite makes the transition into full-fledged noir anti-hero. Though he constantly questions the law’s ability to protect upright citizens, he only dips his toes into the criminal cesspool when he hires thugs to rough up Cady after Diane Taylor’s assault. After the thugs are neatly dispatched by Cady, Bowden waits for imminent threat to his wife and daughter before he takes personal responsibility; he’s only willing to bloody his knuckles within the confines of the laws he stubbornly clings to.

“Max Cady, what I like about you is you’re rock bottom. I don’t expect you to understand this, but it’s a great comfort for a girl to know she could not possibly sink any lower.” – Diane Taylor

Draw a line in the sand, because the debate for Mitchum’s best villainous role is about to begin. Watch these Cape Fear scenes back to back: Cady’s soliloquy on the reckoning of his ex-wife, the aroused phone call he makes after he’s worked over by a chain, and the treatment he gives Peggy Bowden on the houseboat. Mitchum’s accolades for his work in Charles Laughton’s delirious The Night of the Hunter are deserved, but his character is not as authentically depraved as Cady. Yes, preacher Harry Powell surely is a devil of a man, but his performance there is somewhat tempered (through no fault of his own) in the dreamlike mise-en-scène. Powell’s ruse of posing as a preacher renders Mitchum’s performance just the tiniest bit hammy – though no less fun to watch. However, Powell is like a character in a nightmare the audience can wake up from. Max Cady’s foundation is realism; you find him not in your nightmares, but in your local tavern.

Inevitably, what made Cady such a great noir baddie caused great concern for the censors: he stares unabashedly at a scantily clad adolescent and slowly smears raw egg across a woman’s décolletage. Mitchum doesn’t walk in this film, he oozes. During the climax he slithers into the swamp like a cottonmouth. Any perceived slight gives Cady the motivation for savagery, and he wallows in the fun of it. Though censors had grown more lenient since the inception of the Hays Code, they were still vigilant with respect to two issues. Gone was Max Cady’s past as American Government Issue. In the past, noir films had gotten away with the unstable soldier issue by giving characters a good case of shell shock or amnesia, but Cady goes through life as a psychotic rapist, unchallenged by the Army or prison. Gone too, is the real reason Cady focuses on Bowden’s daughter. The original attack the good counselor tried to prevent was not on a woman, but a fourteen year-old girl. Cady finds a certain humor and justice in despoiling Bowden’s adolescent daughter. While British censor John Trevelyan lopped six minutes of Cady’s degenerate behaviour off the UK version, American censors gave Thompson a little more leeway with his film. Good thing, too: his portrayal of Bowden’s antagonist is the driving force behind the film and Cape Fear would fall flat with a tamer villain.

Cape Fear is a transitional film, one of the last that can claim noir roots. If its predecessors were thoughtful noir films like Act of Violence, then Cape Fear ushered in the era of psychological horror along with Psycho. It was not well-received by audiences despite the release of Hitchcock’s film two years prior. It came up about one million dollars short of production costs. “What on earth is Gregory Peck doing in such a movie?” The New Yorker wondered, calling it “A repellent attempt to make a great deal of money… out of sexual pathology.” Indeed, Cape Fear would be the last film put out by Peck’s Melville Productions. But in Hollywood everything old becomes new again, and when Martin Scorsese remade Cape Fear as an homage to Thompson’s film, Peck received a rather late return on his investment and a new audience was introduced to Max Cady. While Robert DeNiro’s Cady is fun to watch, it is Mitchum’s performance that has stood the test of time. Cape Fear is ageless: still unapologetic, still chilling, still raising relevant questions. Watch this one at night with the lights turned low and raise the volume for Bernard Herrmann’s disconcerting hymn to depravity.

Written by Nauga

Small Town Murder Songs (2010)

steve.eifert@gmail.com — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:09:58 PST

Small Town Murder Songs is an expertly crafted Canadian noir written/produced/directed & edited by Ed Gass-Donnelly. In the 50's it might've been a Western, and if American could've been set in Pennsylvania or perhaps Kentucky. But it's out in a rural Canadian province that a naked woman is found strangled. Though this film is no murder mystery more a redemptive noir character study of Walt (Peter Stormare) the local police chief.

It opens with a memory of the disgust and disappointment of his girlfriend Rita (Jill Hennessy) to a brutal incident where Walt's violent nature was exposed, shown in a single pan against the fierce primitive pounding chorus of the folk/gospel soundtrack declaring "You cant hide! You cant hide! You cant hide! ... Who you are!" The shot ends with Walt divided by darkness and light shocked by his loss of control. This defining moment reappears and is alluded to throughout the film.

There seems no professional repercussions but he is personally humiliated and haunted by the incident which resulted in Rita leaving him and he is now shunned by his Mennonite family.

"We can't abide this kind of violence, wasn't how we was raised."

Walt has embraced religion and seeks a clean start through baptism. But this is an "old order" religion long on severity, short on forgiveness. "You cant change who you are, but you can act against your impulses … be what kind of man you chose to be."

In this rural town police work consists of small tasks like manning the speed trap where he snags Steve (Stephen Eric McIntyre), Rita's new boyfriend, an ex drug dealer who now hauls trash which Walt suspects he dumps illegally. Steve has a toothy rodent grin and a motor mouth with which he taunts Walt. "You're no different than you was!"

Next morning Walt is called to Point Beach where a dead woman is found. This is such a shock to their small town sensibilities that a deputy openly weeps. Since there hasn’t been a murder around here in decades a detective from the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) is sent to head the investigation. Washington is a cold professional who views them as bumpkins. When reports seeing Steve dumping something here on Sunday while out fishing on the lake. Washington dismisses it since Walt was too far away to get a license plate or actually identify Steve.

When they listen to the 911 call they recognize Rita's voice, so Rita and Steve are brought in for questioning. Walt declines to sit in on the interrogations as they "have history." Rita alibi's Steve, saying he was home all night. They try to ID the victim and have no luck until they visit a nearby strip club and find out that not only was she a dancer there but Steve was there for "karaoke" that last night she worked. This means Rita lied for Steve. Walt tries to get her to tell the truth but an angry Rita points out, "What? it was okay to lie for you, but not him!" Walt leaves furious but the memory of his ferocity during the incident sobers him. On the TV news its announced that due to a triple homicide and upsurge in biker activity OPP resources are being pulled from the woman's case. On local talk radio citizens are asking "Who's going to stand up for her? Who's going to do what's right?" The next morning Walt's Father who hasn’t spoken to him since the incident tells him, "Well I guess it's up to you."

At work he finds Steve's complained of harassment and the OPP detective accuses Walt of ruining the case and orders Walt to stay away from the couple.

Walt has to take the victim's mother to the morgue to ID the body. The grieving Mother tells him, "If it was a dog they'd put him down. Is that fair? Is that justice? ...or is it just a waste of time? ... Still wont have my Melly..."

Walt feels the pressure and increasing responsibility weighing on him.

Walt's present girlfriend Sam (Martha Plimpton) is a gentle good-hearted waitress. The day before over dinner the thought of the poor murdered woman brought her to tears and she asked Walt to join hands and pray with her. As they prayed Rita and the incident came to his mind. She tells how the town gossip says the victim had it coming, but Sam tells him, "I know you're treatin' her like a lady, doin' your best to find who done it!" This moves Walt to weeping which so frustrates him he pounds the table in anger, which scares Sam away.

Knowing he must do something he drives to Rita's and again tries to get her to tell the truth. She rages at him and Steve comes out hurling abuse, "You're embarrassing yourself! Pathetic!" and threatening Walt with a bat. They begin to tussle and Walt takes the bat and is about to bash Steve brainless when Rita's cry of "Walt! No!" freezes him. And maybe he didn’t listen to her before but he does now.

This allows Steve to jump up and begin to kick and beat Walt to the same folk/gospel song, "You Can't Hide! You Can't Hide!" Walt is now suffering the same type brutal beating as he gave in the opening incident. For Walt this has been a journey of grief and sorrow to expiation. Later in the empty church he's staring at the cross when his deputy finds him Walt muses, "I could've put'm down, but I'm not what I was." The Deputy tells him that Rita has turned Steve in.

The film begins in black screen with just an opening Biblical quote, and sections are divided by huge sized quotes like chapter headings. However the redemption in this noir comes to Walt not through baptism and the institution of the church but through a murdered woman and the women in his life.

Rita is the femme fatale, dark and surly. Sam is the “good woman”, blonde positive, empathetic. An interesting twist in this noir is that Rita shares the redemptive woman function, a role almost always exclusively belonging to the “good woman.” It's some kind of lingering love for Rita that fuels Walt's need for redemption and his concern that she "do the right thing." And he wants to take that angry repulsed look from her eyes.

There's a final scene where Steve sits in back of a cop car grinning sheepish at Rita who glares at him in tear stained anger. He gives this little boy shrug and widens his grin and she turns away, walking into her house. As the view tightens his smile fades and you see that even in this squirrely little noir the loser feels the loss of what it is to have fallen in Rita's eyes.

Written by Mike Handley

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