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Friday, March 21, 2008
Miscellaneous: Linkstravaganza!
If you’re in the San Francisco area, you are obligated to attend this because I can’t: the North American premiere of a lost Grand Guignol play by Noel Coward. It’s directed by Eddie Muller, and the run begins tonight. Eddie told me a little about the play during Noir City, and it’s not to be missed.
Speaking of Eddie, here’s the program for the 10th Annual Noir City Festival, kicking off April 3 at L.A.’s Egyptian Theatre. If you’re in the Los Angeles area, you are obligated to attend because I can’t. I recommend the program on April 12, when you’ll have an opportunity to see Eddie’s short film The Grand Inquisitor with star Marsha Hunt in person, and on April 6, when Eddie will be screening Wicked Woman featuring the one and only Beverly Michaels.
Speaking of Wicked Woman, here’s the trailer again. The movie also stars character actor Percy Helton.
Speaking of Percy Helton, he’s also in this Japanese TV commercial in which Charles Bronson marinates himself in a cologne called Mandom. (Thanks, Tony!)
Speaking of ... OK, I’m out of segues. Here’s some other stuff.
At work last night, I saw this video highlighting Big Dog, a DARPA-funded robot. To quote a colleague, “We need to kill this thing and send it back to Hell. It can carry a gun and it sounds like it’s powered by angry bees.” To me, it’s just a $500 million pack mule. But it’s still probably the first step on the road to this world. Via BoingBoing.
Noir City Northwest: Conflict (1945)/The Suspect (1944)
The love triangle gone wrong. It’s a noir stalwart. So it makes sense to close out this year’s Seattle edition of Noir City with a pair of murderous husbands that doubles as a salute to filmmaker Robert Siodmak.
Siodmak has a story credit on Conflict, and a nicely twisted story it is. Humphrey Bogart kills his wife because he’s fallen in love with her younger sister. It’s a perfect crime that has both the cops and psychology expert Sidney Greenstreet fooled. Until Bogie begins receiving hints that maybe the missus isn’t dead ...
Conflict is smartly manipulative fun, with a strong Bogart performance; he goes crazy very well. I’d say it’s surprising that the film isn’t better known, but our host and programmer Eddie Muller explained why. Legal issues held up the movie’s release for two years. That meant it came out after the seminal noirs of 1944, like Double Indemnity and Laura. Conflict was dismissed as a copycat even though technically it blazed its dark trail first, and ever since it’s been treated as a footnote in Bogart’s career. Undeservedly so.
The Suspect is another test of the flexibility of noir’s definition. It’s the classic story – guy falls for another woman, bumps off his wife, and tries to outwit the cops – but set in 1902 London. Siodmak directs what Eddie called “the best Hitchcock movie not made by Hitchcock,” inspired by the infamous Dr. Crippen case. Ella Raines, star of Siodmak’s Phantom Lady and a local girl, plays the other woman. But it’s Charles Laughton’s performance that makes the movie memorable. His character is a profoundly decent man, a killer who is not a killer at heart, and by the film’s end we’re rooting for him to get away with murder. If that’s not noir, I don’t know what is.
And so we bring down the curtain. Fourteen films plus one short in seven remarkable days. My thanks to SIFF Cinema and especially to Eddie Muller. Film noir could not have a better champion.
It’s 2:17 AM as I write this, but I made a pact with myself that I’d post about these movies every night, as if I were on deadline. I’ve realized that in a sense I am. To me, these films – about need and desire, desperation and hope – are still news. And they always will be.
Noir City Northwest: Night and the City (1950)/Road House (1948)
A pair of movies starring Richard Widmark screening just before the Oscars serves as a reminder that the actor is still with us at age 93, and still deserving of a lifetime achievement award. Need proof? Watch Kiss of Death, Panic in the Streets, Pickup on South Street, Madigan. Or either film featured on Noir City day six.
Night and the City received the full Criterion DVD treatment two years ago. I revisited the movie back then, but was still eager to see it again. So was Rosemarie, even though “it’s so hard to watch.” That’s because Jules Dassin’s film distills noir to its essence: failure. People struggle to make a name for themselves, to stake a claim to some small part of the world, only to be foiled by forces larger than they are, or by the indifference of others, or by their own weakness. It’s as bleak as movies get, and strangely beautiful.
Much of that beauty comes courtesy of Widmark’s performance as Harry Fabian, whose only wish in life is “to be somebody.” He’s a hustler down to his bones, always looking for an angle. But years of disappointment have made him desperate. There are few moments as heartbreaking as when girlfriend Gene Tierney tells him he “could have been anything. You had brains, ambition. You worked harder than any ten men. But at the wrong things. Always the wrong things.” Gets me every time. And Widmark’s response ... extraordinary.
A U.K. print was screened on Wednesday night. It’s not Dassin’s preferred cut; it’s several minutes longer and felt like it. But Harry Fabian registers in any version.
An audience needs to be talked off a ledge after Night and the City, and Road House is the movie to do it. It’s a confection of pure Hollywood hokum. Ida Lupino, the not-so-secret star of this festival, is a chantoosie brought to the title establishment by rich boy owner Widmark. He’s got his sights set on more than a six-week engagement, but Ida goes off and falls for his best friend Cornel Wilde. Road House has everything you want in an overheated noir romance. It’s a swillin’, smokin’, singin’ ‘stravaganza. The singin’ is the only problem, as Ida does her own and has a somewhat limited range. To quote Rosemarie again, “It’s like she’s both Kiki and Herb.”
Noir City Northwest: Reign of Terror (1949)/Border Incident (1949)
Director Anthony Mann concentrated on noir for only a few years in the 1940s, but over that stretch he created some of the genre’s signature films. Railroaded!, T-Men, Raw Deal. On the last two, he collaborated with John Alton, the rare cinematographer who wasn’t afraid of the dark. It’s only fitting that Noir City day five spotlighted lesser known works from these masters of shadow.
It’s official: Reign of Terror is the strangest movie screened in the festival so far. It’s the French Revolution as crime drama. The surprise is how easily history falls into the noir dynamic. You’ve got Robespierre (Richard Basehart), “fanatic of powdered wig and twisted mind,” as your kingpin making a power grab. The outside muscle (Bob Cummings) who’s not what he appears to be. Arlene Dahl as a femme fatale, and the cops all on the take. A few corners are cut with the story, but it’s refreshing to see a historical drama that doesn’t put the emphasis on spectacle and instead keeps close to the action.
What I’d like to know is why the filmmakers gave France’s past the noir treatment. What’s wrong with American history? Feature it: Robert Ryan as Benedict Arnold, a twitching wreck eaten away by guilt. Or Dan Duryea playing Aaron Burr, always with the chip on his shoulder. “Al Hamilton says he’s a self-made man. Think it’s time somebody maybe unmade him.” Hell, I’d see it. Although that should come as a surprise to exactly no one.
Border Incident is a lot less fanciful. It’s a taut, tough suspense film about a joint U.S./Mexican investigation into the murder of illegal immigrants. George Murphy and Ricardo Montalban play the lead detectives, and noir reliables Charles McGraw and Howard Da Silva turn up as the heavies. It’s sad to realize what’s changed in the span of fifty-plus years in terms of this issue: basically nothing.
Noir City Northwest: Jeopardy (1953)/Woman In Hiding (1950)
A: The theme of Noir City day four.
Q: What is dames in distress?
That’s a joke. Look at the first title. Come on, people, cut me some slack. All this noir is making me loopy.
Jeopardy begins with a voiceover by Barbara Stanwyck that could come from the American Highway Council. Only her spiel turns strangely lush and poetic. Then there’s a kicker you don’t see coming. It’s a great set up for an entertaining odd duck of a film.
Running a mere 69 minutes, Jeopardy still takes its time putting all the pieces on the board. Stanwyck, her husband (Barry Sullivan) and their son took a slow drive down Baja for a fishing trip. Just as they set up camp, Sullivan gets pinned underneath a collapsed pier – and the tide is coming in. Stanwyck seeks help, and the first person she finds is an escaped American convict (Ralph Meeker) who wants considerations before he’ll go Good Samaritan.
Meeker is never over the top in his menace. His hoodlum is simply cagey and ruthless, perfectly willing to let Sullivan die if it’ll save his own life. Sullivan is saddled with a thankless part, but he does get one fantastic scene as the water is rising and he tries to impart some advice to his young son. Plus there are excellent physics lessons to be picked up.
It’s hard to believe that Ida Lupino could ever be in distress, but Woman In Hiding does its damnedest. It’s directed by Michael Gordon, whose grandson Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a contemporary noir icon with the films Brick and The Lookout.
Ida’s new husband Stephen McNally only married her because he has designs on the family business. When she discovers the truth, he tries to kill her – only Ida escapes and goes on the run, determined to dig up evidence before McNally locates her. Her only ally is an aimless war veteran played by Howard Duff, who would soon marry Lupino in real life. The movie is a minor effort but a fun one thanks in large part to plot twists provided by Roy Huggins, a man this website has declared a stealth giant of pop culture. It also follows Chekhov’s dictum that if a hydroelectric turbine is mentioned in Act One, it must be turned on in Act Two.
Noir City Northwest: Moonrise (1948)/Night Has A Thousand Eyes (1948)
Day three’s films had two common threads, according to our host and programmer Eddie Muller: actress Gail Russell and a sense of otherworldliness. There’s also a third link, namely curses real and imagined.
Moonrise is the work of one of the least likely filmmakers ever to venture into the genre, Frank Borzage. The winner of the first-ever Best Director Oscar (for 1927’s Seventh Heaven), Borzage was an optimist and a desperate romantic. On the face of it, not a promising match for noir. Yet that spirit and a visual style honed in the silent era work wonders.
Dane Clark believes that “bad blood” courses through his veins because the father he never knew was executed for murder. When he accidentally kills his lifelong tormentor, he’s certain this family curse is about to claim another victim.
The movie announces itself as something special with the opening sequence, which captures a childhood’s worth of torture in stark images that feel more like panels from a graphic novel. There’s also a bravura scene of Clark suffering a panic attack on a Ferris wheel that’s worthy of Hitchcock. (No surprise that Moonrise’s cinematographer John L. Russell would later shoot Psycho and many episodes of Hitch’s TV series.) The redemptive ending flies in the face of what some fans may expect from noir. It also completely works. Moonrise deserves to be better known.
I’ve wanted to see Night Has A Thousand Eyes for a thousand reasons. OK, three. Fantastic title, for starters. It boasts a great premise: bogus psychic develops genuine paranormal powers. And you can’t beat those writing credits, with Jonathan Latimer co-adapting a Cornell Woolrich novel. The plot is as rattletrap as can be, but Edward G. Robinson grounds the action as the ex-grifter now exiled from his fellow man.
On top of that, we were treated to a bonus. Eddie screened a print of his new short film The Grand Inquisitor, based on his story in the Busted Flush anthology A Hell of a Woman. Marsha Hunt, the 90-year-old star of noir classics like Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal, plays a woman who finds a young girl (Leah Dashe) on her doorstep bearing a box of books and a disturbing theory about San Francisco’s greatest mystery. It’s a terrific piece of work, lean, suspenseful and beautifully acted. Look for it on the festival circuit soon.
Noir City Northwest: High Sierra (1941)/The Hard Way (1942)
Funny thing about noir. It even works in the daytime. Saturday afternoon’s films were a double-double shot, honoring both the lovely Joan Leslie and Ida Lupino, who in many respects is the first lady of the genre. (Check out that career.) I’d seen both movies before, but watching them in tandem brought new aspects to light.
High Sierra holds up on DVD, but it seemed shockingly vital on the big screen. Humphrey Bogart’s recently paroled but not reformed thief yearns for the straight life but can only take crooked roads to get there. His performance is all twisted desperation and thwarted desire. The script, by W.R. Burnett and John Huston from Burnett’s novel, sets up a stark contrast with our leading ladies: Joan as a naïf willing to take advantage of her benefactor, Ida as the hard-bitten moll who recognizes a good man when she sees one. Raoul Walsh stages a climax that still packs a wallop.
Ida comes into her own in The Hard Way, taking on the kind of role that buttered Joan Crawford’s bread. Little sister Joan (Leslie, not Crawford) aspires to a career in the theater, and Ida moves heaven and earth to make those dreams come true. The movie is terrifically well-cast, making excellent use of the comic Jack Carson in a dramatic role and singer Dennis Morgan as a slickster curdled by show business.
Our host Eddie Muller said the movie’s inclusion was sort of a test case; we had to decide if The Hard Way were truly a film noir or just a melodrama with a particularly nasty script by Peter Viertel and Daniel Fuchs. I know what my answer is. When I caught this gem on TCM a few years ago, I thought it was about as noir as it gets. Nice to know I’m not alone in that opinion.
While watching Ida today I was reminded of someone. Then, in a scene in The Hard Way where she appeared without make-up revealing a spray of delectable freckles across her face, it hit me. Lindsay Lohan. Call me crazy.
Noir City Northwest: The Prowler (1951)/Gun Crazy (1949)
Night one of Noir City was a tribute to a man not credited on either movie on the bill, the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
The Prowler is a film rich with secret history, not only because of Trumbo’s involvement and that of John Huston as a shadow producer, but because it essentially disappeared for decades. Only a single print remained in limited circulation. Die-hard noir enthusiasts, among them James Ellroy, would speak of it in hushed tones. I’d given up hope of seeing it myself, until a second copy of the original elements turned up in France and Eddie Muller and the Film Noir Foundation stepped in.
Van Heflin plays a disgruntled Los Angeles beat cop, a one-time athlete seemingly fated for bigger things until “lousy breaks” brought him low. He investigates a call at the home of Evelyn Keyes, a woman who knew him when back in Indiana. She had dreams of making it as an actress. Now she’s settled for a dreary marriage with a wee-hours disc jockey (dulcet tones provided, in an in-joke, by Trumbo). Heflin thinks the two of them together could turn their bad fortune around. The only thing standing in the way is that voice in the night.
The first half of the film charts a course through James M. Cain territory. Heflin and Keyes give it their all, but the psychology of their characters never rang completely true to me. The second half of the film takes some borderline-surreal plot twists that would be hard to swallow even if you did accept what leads up to them.
For me, The Prowler is a fascinating movie that doesn’t work. In his comments on the film Eddie Muller praised not only the subversive elements of Trumbo’s script – he’s right to say that many of the story choices were bold for 1951 – but its sheer unpredictability. “You don’t know where this movie is going to go,” he said. I only wish I could have gone with it.
As for Gun Crazy, what is there to say? It’s a landmark film that sixty years on hasn’t lost any of its vitality or its edge of danger. Every movie about young outlaws on the run and in love dwells in its shadow. Even the lousy dialogue shoehorned in by the Production Code can’t diminish its impact. I’ve seen it many times, but never before on the big screen. It was worth the wait.
It’s been almost a week now, and I can’t get Wicked Woman out of my head. Beverly Michaels’ jaw-dropping performance. The haunting theme song. The overall shoddiness of the production. And oh, how the ghost of that Brylcreem clings.
I don’t know when or if I’ll get to see this movie again, so the trailer is going to have to tide me over. Luckily, it has a little of everything that makes Wicked Woman unique. Including the song.
That’s diminutive Percy Helton smooching on Beverly. Walter Satterthwait, a longtime Wicked Woman fan, says Percy was never more slimy than he is here, and I agree with him. Eddie Muller introduced the film by saying that Percy kept the one-sheet for the movie, which featured Percy cowering before a giant Beverly, in a place of honor in his home for the rest of his life – despite his wife’s instructions to take it down. Nice to know Beverly had that effect in real life, too.
I was wowed by Scarlet Street when I first watched it on a lousy public domain DVD. Seeing a pristine print from the Library of Congress brings the full force of its fatalism to bear. Is there a better ensemble in noir? Edward G. Robinson as the middle-aged man making a final bid at living his dream. Joan Bennett as the aptly named Kitty March, the essence of lazy feline entitlement. And Dan Duryea using the insinuating instrument of his voice to great effect. (Disturbing observation: dye Duryea’s blond hair dark and he’s a ringer for Stephen Colbert.) Add an airtight script by Dudley Nichols and direction by Fritz Lang, and the result is hellish perfection.
Amazon Beverly Michaels rolls into town, lands a job as a waitress, and proceeds to lay waste to the place. She’s a proto-Nomi Malone from Showgirls, drifting from city to city, getting into trouble, and flying into spontaneous rages.
Michaels is something, blonde and six feet tall. She can’t act, but she doesn’t have to. She’s a six foot blonde. Director Russell Rouse loves her even if the camera doesn’t. He’s happy to show her shaving her endless legs, slapping around in her dirty bare feet, and tying her robe on. Three times. In seventy-seven minutes.
Michaels has her fans, though. I think we were sitting behind one. An older gent, reeking of cigarettes and Brylcreem, who began singing “Theme from Wicked Woman” as soon as it started. Clearly he’s been carrying a torch for some time. I’m happy they were briefly reunited.
The movie goes beyond awful, achieving a kind of Zen purity. The bad acting suddenly becomes naturalistic, as if you’re watching a low-budget, fly-on-the-wall documentary on when good girls stray. It’s trash. Sleazy trash. Sleazy, utterly transporting trash. (Update: Behold the trailer in all its glory!)
Michaels eventually quit acting and married her director, who went on to win an Academy Award for his work on Pillow Talk. Thus providing one of noir’s rare happy endings.
And that brought down the curtain on the debut outing of Noir City Seattle. I’m fairly sure I contracted emphysema from watching so many people smoke. My thanks to Eddie Muller for programming this extraordinary festival, and to SIFF Cinema and curator Anita Monga for hosting it.
Why did so many people hie themselves to the theater in a summer swelter for seven consecutive days to see two movies a night? Perhaps because they appreciate craftsmanship. As Eddie noted after one screening, it’s unlikely that similar numbers will turn out fifty years hence for a revival of movies being made today, when everything is twenty minutes too long and the ability to tell a story efficiently seems to have been lost.
But noir owes its fascination to more than just narrative economy. Here’s a quote from Jules Buck, who worked with the pioneering producer Mark Hellinger. It’s from the latest issue of the Noir City Sentinel, the newsletter of the Film Noir Foundation. Do yourself a favor and join.
“We didn’t know from noir in those days. Hellinger just wanted to make tough stories, filled with the passion of life vs. death. What people call noir was simply movies that grabbed life vs. death by the throat and hung on no matter what.”
The essential question of existence, stripped to its sinew and answered with dames and wisecracks. Fifty years from now, people will still be looking for that. And these movies will still deliver the goods.
Noir City Northwest: The Spiritualist (1948)/Nightmare Alley (1947)
Is there magic in the film noir world? Sure. Rigging the lights so shadows fall just so or the camera catches cigarette smoke drifting heavenward like a lost soul takes a special kind of alchemy. Pairing up actors who can convey twisted animal longing in a single glance is no easy trick.
But actual magic? No. There’s no room for illusion on these mean streets. If someone says they’re communing with spirits and you don’t see a bottle of rye whiskey, then you, my friend, are about to be rooked. Don’t say you weren’t warned. The best Noir City double-bill so far focused on the genre’s lowest of the low: the phony psychic.
For me The Spiritualist, aka The Amazing Mr. X, is the find of the festival, the B-movie perfectly executed. Turhan Bey dazzles as the title charlatan out to convince a rich widow that he’s in contact with her late husband. But the true star is cinematographer John Alton. He establishes an otherworldly atmosphere in the opening frames that never lets up. The visual tricks he deployed sixty years ago still cast a spell.
The B-movie set up the audience for the main attraction. Nightmare Alley, according to Eddie Muller, is not only one of the greatest noirs but one of the finest American films of the 1940s. I first saw it in what turned out to be its final TV airing for more than a decade owing to copyright issues, and have watched it again on the recent Fox DVD. But a 35MM print on the big screen is encountering a movie anew.
Jules Furthman adapted the singular novel by William Lindsay Gresham. Tyrone Power crosses over to the dark side like no matinee idol before or since as Stanton Carlisle, a carny who concocts a “mentalist” act that takes him from midway to mansions. But he soon learns that bogus religion has nothing on bent science, in the person of sinister headshrinker Helen Walker. Coleen Gray, Joan Blondell and noir staple Mike Mazurki round out a top-notch cast.
I heard some grumbling on the way out of the theater that the story’s outcome was apparent from the start, but far from diminishing its impact that foreshadowing gives Nightmare Alley the force of tragedy. Ignore the studio-imposed “happy” ending. It only underscores how far into hell Stanton Carlisle has fallen.
Noir City Northwest: I Love Trouble (1948)/Pushover (1954)
Three, count ’em, three Mets in the starting line-up, and an inside the park home run from the Mariners’ Ichiro Suzuki. Do I regret missing the All-Star Game? Nope. Not when there’s noir to be seen. Especially two rare titles that have never appeared on video.
What do they have in common? Screenwriter Roy Huggins, one of the stealth giants of popular culture. Creator of Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive and The Rockford Files. The man was the Stan Lee of television. I’ve already sung the praises of his film Too Late For Tears, which the Film Noir Foundation is in the process of restoring.
Huggins’s debut feature is, in the words of Noir City programmer Eddie Muller, the “egregrious Raymond Chandler rip-off” I Love Trouble. All the elements are in place: wisecracking P.I. (played by a surprisingly effective Franchot Tone), gorgeous dames a’plenty, and a corkscrew plot that ultimately proves irrelevant. Several familiar faces turn up including a few from earlier in the week, like Raymond Burr and noir’s go-to guy for mittel European creepiness Steven Geray. Last night’s femme fatale Janis Carter is back, playing two roles when one is taxing enough for her and sporting an accent that veers between Zsa Zsa Gabor and Lupe Velez. It’s the kind of movie that only a noir fan could love. Naturally, I enjoyed it.
Pushover, on the other hand, is a taut thriller that can be appreciated by everyone. It also gives the lie to the belief that Fred MacMurray never strayed to the dark side of the street again after Double Indemnity. He plays a cop who falls for a bank robber’s moll (Kim Novak, in her, ahem, unfettered screen debut). Meanwhile, his partner in the stakeout on Novak’s place shifts his attention to the nurse who lives next door to her (Dorothy Malone). Things, as they so often do, go wrong, and Huggins is merciless in piling on the complications.
MacMurray could easily walk away from Novak and the sweet life she promises. But somehow he still finds himself on a rain-drenched rooftop, gathering her in his arms and saying, “You win.” In that moment is the essence of noir. Trouble on all sides of the path, and you just keep following it down.
Noir City Northwest: 99 River Street (1953)/Framed (1947)
I didn’t do it, y’unnerstand? It was Noir City Day 4! The whole thing’s a set-up!
Phil Karlson is a treasured name among noir aficionados because he made spare, no-nonsense films. He also knew how to get strong performances out of actors like John Payne, a song-and-dance man who might otherwise have been remembered for freezing his charms off with Sonja Henie in Sun Valley Serenade. Karlson was savvy enough to see the caged animal lurking underneath Payne’s nice guy exterior. (A new DVD of an earlier Karlson/Payne collaboration, Kansas City Confidential, streets today.)
That trapped rage comes to the fore in 99 River Street. Payne plays an ex-boxer now reduced to driving a cab and about to have a night worse than any he spent in the ring. His wife leaves him for a two-bit jewel thief planning to make Payne a pawn. Payne’s only ally is a struggling actress (Evelyn Keyes) who causes problems of her own.
Some implausible plot twists go down easy thanks to Karlson’s slick direction. The real gem here is Evelyn Keyes, getting to display several styles of acting in one role. It’s a bravura performance. Ms. Keyes is profiled in Dark City Dames by festival programmer Eddie Muller, a book I expect all of you to read.
Eddie described 99 River Street as the cinematic equivalent of a Gold Medal paperback, but I’d say Framed is a better fit for that bill. Drifter Glenn Ford arrives in town and promptly lands in stir, only to find himself bailed out by Janis Carter and her cheekbones. She’s setting him up as part of an embezzlement scheme, but a strange thing happens halfway through the movie: the patsy gets wise. The devious script by Ben Maddow (The Asphalt Jungle) has Ford and Carter each trying to one-up the other as the cops draw closer. Great fun.
I’m looking forward to the next three nights in the festival more than ever now that temperatures in Seattle are expected to hit the high nineties. Dark alleys may be dangerous, but they’re also cool.
Noir City Northwest: Desert Fury (1947)/Leave Her To Heaven (1946)
Day three’s theme was a cinch to figure out. Black hearts in Technicolor. Throw in Slightly Scarlet and you’d have yourself a party. Just check for your wallet and your kidneys on the way out.
According to the fest’s program notes, 1947’s Desert Fury is a cult classic waiting to happen, ripe with homoerotic subtext. Lizabeth Scott returns to her Nevada hometown and mother Mary Astor, who runs a two-bit casino and asks to be passed off as Liz’s sister. Arriving on the same day is hard-luck gambler John Hodiak and the sidekick with whom he’s unusually close (Wendell Corey in his screen debut). Watching them all askance is town deputy Burt Lancaster. I kept waiting for Burt to ask, “What’s eatin’ everyone in this cockamamie town?,” then pound his undershirted chest and declare that he was “all man, see?”
I think Desert Fury’s cult status may be a while in coming. For one thing, it’s never been available on video. For another, it isn’t very good. (I can’t rave about them all, can I? You’d lose respect for me.) The proceedings are too lethargic; to quote Rosemarie, “I saw the desert, but not the fury.” The good stuff, like an explanation of the true nature of the Hodiak/Corey relationship, is jammed into the closing ten minutes. The scenes that crackle are the ones between Astor and Lancaster, with him as the steadfast Boy Scout who relishes her attempts to corrupt him. As for the gay subtext, it’s there if you look, but we’re not talking The Big Combo here. I can’t swallow no more salami, indeed.
I’d already seen the classic 1946 melodrama Leave Her To Heaven, but never on the big screen. The newly restored print was absolutely gorgeous. When I turn in tonight, the colors of Gene Tierney’s outfits will be starbursting on the inside of my eyelids.
Tierney plays the comeliest psychotic in the history of motion pictures, the woman who “loves too much.” Once she falls for novelist Cornel Wilde, she vows to let nothing come between them. (There’s a TV movie remake starring Loni Anderson and Patrick Duffy. I’ve never seen it. But simply knowing of its existence diminishes me as a person.)
On this viewing, I was struck by the performance of Vincent Price as Tierney’s spurned district attorney lover. He has a brief scene early and dominates the action late. His work here is a reminder of how sly an actor he was in the days before horror movies claimed him, playing well-born men of questionable morals.
Last night Rosemarie dreamt an entire film noir, featuring her, me and Raymond Burr. These movies can be hazardous to your health. And we’ve still got four days to go.
Noir City Northwest: Pitfall (1948)/Woman on the Run (1950)
There are no introductions at weekend Noir City matinees, so it’s up to me to guess the day’s theme. I’m going to say shaky California marriages. Either that or heavies named Smiley.
Pitfall was the movie I was most looking forward to in the festival’s line-up, because it’s based on a novel by Jay Dratler, one of the great unsung screenwriters of Hollywood. He didn’t adapt his own book, but I wanted to see the result anyway.
Dick Powell stars as an insurance executive living the American Dream – house, job, marriage, son. And it’s slowly killing him. All it takes for him to regain some of his youthful vigor is a brief dalliance with down-at-the-heels model Lizabeth Scott. But the shady P.I. who tracked her down for the insurance company (Raymond Burr) has feelings for Scott as well, and he’s willing to ruin Powell in order to have her to himself.
Powell’s disillusionment with the post-war ideal of success is a powerful motor, so I was disappointed to see his character quickly settle back into suburban contentment. But Burr’s sexually obsessed shamus makes a potent villain, and Scott plays a singular femme fatale in that she doesn’t use her powers for evil. She’s not a homewrecker; she’s looking for a white picket fence life of her own. It’s not her fault if men make fools of themselves over her.
The discovery of a print of the long-thought-lost Woman on the Run gave birth to the Film Noir Foundation. It’s a classic B-movie, fleet and not an ounce of fat. A regular guy witnesses a murder and lams it. His estranged wife (Ann Sheridan in an unflattering hairstyle) teams up with ambitious reporter Dennis O’Keefe to track him down before the killer does, only to find herself falling for her spouse all over again. Norman Foster, who directed several Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto entries, keeps the action brisk and stages a breathless climax at a San Francisco amusement park that puts many a contemporary thriller to shame.
Noir City Northwest: Thieves’ Highway (1949)/Deadline At Dawn (1946)
Eddie Muller kicked off the Northwest debut of his Noir City film festival with an observation. He’d stopped in for a drink at a nearby watering hole and noted:
A. One (1) sexy bartender B. One (1) gorgeous woman drinking alone C. Two (2) guys in jeans and tennis shoes deep in conversation about computer peripherals.
Seattle, he decided, needs some film noir.
Rosemarie and I did our bit. We had drinks before the show, too. I even had a cocktail named after Deadwood’s Al Swearengen. But that’s not going to be enough. Not in the ugly footwear capital of the world. Arguments continue to rage about the definition of noir, but whatever your camp on this we can all agree: no sandals. Nobody ever saw Robert Mitchum’s toes.
The festival began with a dead-of-night double feature. The action in both movies basically unfolds between midnight and 5 A.M., when decent folk should be a-bed.
Thieves’ Highway, directed by Jules Dassin with a script by A.I. Bezzerides from his novel, is more than a terrific noir film. It’s a great working class story about the human cost of getting ahead and making a buck. Richard Conte musters out of the service and sets himself up as an independent trucker mainly to seek vengeance on the middleman who crippled his father. Lee J. Cobb plays the heavy in a relaxed but forceful performance, and Valentina Cortese dazzles as the fallen woman falling for Conte. It’s tough stuff, made with a tabloid gusto that the years haven’t dimmed.
Deadline at Dawn, on the other hand, is simply unhinged. That’s to be expected when Harold Clurman, founder of the Group Theater, collaborates with playwright Clifford Odets on a Cornell Woolrich adaptation. You’ve got your standard Woolrich premise: guy comes to after a blackout and thinks he may have killed someone. In this case, the guy is the dumbest sailor in the Navy. He’s so dumb he thinks he’s in the Army. He’s aided by a taxi dancer (the fetching Susan Hayward) and a cabdriver who waxes philosophic at the drop of a hat. Because in New York City at three in the morning, everybody’s happy to help a rube solve a murder he may have committed. Odets’ dialogue is nicely ripe; now I know what Barton Fink might have accomplished if he’d only licked that Wallace Beery wrestling picture. Deadline at Dawn is weird, posturing nonsense. And I loved every minute of it.
