TV: Today’s Mitchell And Webb Moment

If you’re not watching this show, you’re missing out. I have been known to talk about the Mets this way, and will start doing the same with movies.



Miscellaneous: Links, All-Brawl Edition

As a David Mamet fan, I can’t wait to see Redbelt. In an article he wrote for the New York Times, Mamet calls it a “fight film” and discusses a few cinematic battles and battlers that left memorable impressions.

Then, in the Daily News, Mamet calls Redbelt his tribute to classic film noir and mentions a few favorites.

Interestingly, both pieces cite the original Night and the City. Which also earns a place on this list of the 20 greatest movie fight scenes. Hat tip to Bill Crider and, by extension, Walter Satterthwait.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Movies, Noir, TV

Book: Sleeping Dogs, by Ed Gorman (2008)

With the last major primary out of the way and the Democratic party’s electoral future clear – sweet Jesus, this campaign is gonna go on forever – this seems like an ideal time to recommend Sleeping Dogs, the latest from friend-of-the-site Ed Gorman. Ed, an immensely talented writer who’s done some time in politics, knows the territory and covers it well.

Political operative Dev Conrad steps into an Illinois Senate race in the closing stages. The incumbent, a good-enough pol with only a minor history of bimbo eruptions, finds himself in a pitched battle with a downstate “nut job ... (who’d) gone to sanity school recently.” Dev has to deal with campaign sabotage and the suicide of the man he’s replacing, not to mention his own doubts about the candidate he’s working to reelect. The action, as always with Ed, goes down smooth, and is punctuated by his bittersweet observations about life and culture.

Don’t just take my word for it. Bill Crider, Lee Goldberg and James Reasoner like the book, too. I might steer you wrong, but those guys? Never.

Movies: More Blast of Silence

Found: a few panels from Sean Phillips’s graphic novel adaptation of the movie that has altered the way I communicate. Thanks to GreenCine Daily.

Labels: Books, Movies, Noir

DVD: Blast of Silence (1961)

Remembering ...

You’d heard of this movie before, in whispered tones. Church voices. Blast of Silence. A gritty, low-down noir shot guerilla-style on the streets of New York. Back in the early days of scrounging together bucks to make films on the cheap. You’d never seen it. Figured you never would. But you catch a break when lips slip that it’s getting the Criterion treatment. Five star all the way.

You jump on it as soon as you have the chance. Grass don’t grow under your feet.

You watch it, this movie written and directed by Allen Baron. He even stars in it, playing Frankie Bono, a Cleveland hit man who trains in to New York over Christmas to take care of a guy. But Frankie runs into some people from his past, a girl. He starts thinking about his life. You don’t want to do that. Not with that life.

You know the movie’s not perfect. The plot gets a little convenient, and if he can’t see the ending coming you figure Baby Boy Frankie Bono may not be the sharpest cannon in the shed.

But you’re not watching this one for the story. No. You’re watching it for the mood. The feeling. The energy that Baron finds on the streets of your hometown and channels into every frame. In Harlem. In Greenwich Village, beatniks pounding their drums and their libidos ‘til everything’s raw.

Remembering ...

You read Lawrence Block’s A Diet of Treacle not too long ago, from the same time and set on those same streets. The movie takes you right there. In style, in attitude, you’re watching one of those old Gold Medal paperbacks come to life. Or as close as you’re gonna get.

Most of all, you’re grooving on that voiceover. Written by blacklisted writer Waldo Salt under a phony name. Delivered by blacklisted actor Lionel Stander under no name at all. Putting you in Frankie Bono’s head. Making you feel Frankie’s palms sweat. Or not sweat. You know the meteorology of Frankie’s hands is important. You can’t get enough of that voiceover, think that Dave Kehr had it dead to rights when he called it “second person accusative.” You start doing that voiceover all the time. You can’t stop. You understand why friends of yours lapse into it on the streets of Philadelphia after a showing at NoirCon. You wish you were there to do it, too.

You even dig the extra features on the DVD. Baron’s still around, still kicking, still feisty. You like the guy, Martin Scorsese crossed with George C. Scott from The Hustler. He had a nice career for himself in TV. He takes you back to the locations, thirty, then almost fifty years later. Shows you the ways the neighborhoods change. And the ways they don’t.

You don’t see the best extra, though. A short graphic novel adaptation of the movie by Sean Phillips, one of the genius bad-asses behind Criminal with Ed Brubaker. That’s because you punked out, rented the DVD when you knew you should have bought it. You’ll pony up now, though. You want to come back to it.

Remembering ...

You watched Murder by Contract a few months back, another hit man movie. Picked by another genius bad-ass, James Ellroy. Vince Edwards wandering L.A., starting to feel bad about killing. You remember Ellroy talking up Contract as the first movie to give you the assassin as existential hero. Yeah, maybe. But you think Silence is the first one to get it right.

Labels: DVD, Movies, Noir

Movie: Daisy Kenyon (1947)

It’s one of the latest releases from the Fox Film Noir Collection. It’s directed by Otto Preminger, who made Laura. It’s got shadowy photography and a plot that’s twisted in every sense.

But trust me on this. Daisy Kenyon is not noir, no matter what the box says. Daisy Kenyon is melodrama. Pure melodrama. Uncut melodrama. Schedule I grade melodrama.

And as such, I couldn’t get enough of it.

Joan Crawford – who else? – plays Daisy, a Manhattan graphic artist who insists on paying her own way even though she’s also the mistress of high-powered attorney Dana Andrews. She’s on the verge of ending their relationship when she meets a veteran (Henry Fonda) shattered by the death of his wife and his experiences in Europe. Daisy awakens something in him, and soon she’s forced to choose between her two suitors.

Sound straightforward? Take my word for it, it ain’t. Nothing is straightforward with Otto Preminger. There’s always a welter of perversions and neuroses beneath the polished sheen of his movies.

Dana Andrews, a Preminger favorite, is at his best here playing a blithe charmer whom Rosemarie described as “Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer combined.” Competition for Daisy’s affections and a pro bono lawsuit he takes only to demonstrate what a swell guy he is reveal the hollowness of his life to him. They also expose the deep fissures in his marriage; his high-strung wife (Ruth Warrick) is taking out her frustrations with her husband on their younger daughter, in a subplot that still startles.

Fonda gives an atypical performance as a man whose demons have stripped away his internal censor. His unflinching honesty in word and emotion teeters between charming and unsettling, with the balance tipping toward the latter once Andrews comes back into the picture.

If Fonda is stretching here, Joan Crawford is playing Joan Crawford. Again, I have no problem with that. 42 at the time of Daisy Kenyon’s release, Joan is at least 12 years too old for the role; the noir cinematography by Leon Shamroy isn’t used to establish mood, but to hide the leading lady’s age. Watching Joan at this stage in her career isn’t about seeing her disappear into a character. It’s about bearing witness to a woman trying to stop the hands of time with every weapon in her arsenal. Always a mesmerizing spectacle.

For every aspect of Daisy Kenyon that’s dated, like the divorce proceedings that take up much of the third act, there’s another that remains bracingly fresh and adult. Throw in some well-produced extras that feature several members of the Film Noir Foundation and you can’t go wrong. Noir or not, Daisy Kenyon is a movie that gets under your skin.

Labels: DVD, Movies, Noir

Jules Dassin, R.I.P.

It was just last week that we lost actor Richard Widmark. Now comes word that Jules Dassin, who directed Widmark’s best film Night and the City, has died at age 96.

Dassin led an extraordinary life. He started as an actor in New York’s Yiddish theater – his name may have sounded French, but he was Julie Dassin from Connecticut – then moved to the other side of the camera. In the wake of the blacklist he went to Europe and managed to maintain, even reinvent his career. His greatest success was probably 1960’s Never On Sunday. Dassin would end up marrying the movie’s star Melina Mercouri, and both would be nominated for Academy Awards. Mercouri would go on to become Greece’s Minister of Culture.

But it’s Dassin’s impressive body of crime dramas that will earn him a place in cinema history. Name a subgenre and Dassin not only contributed to it, he helped define it. The prison film (Brute Force). The policier (The Naked City). Two landmark noirs, Thieves’ Highway and Night and the City. During his European sojourn, he would direct a pair of essential heist movies, Rififi and Topkapi. An amazing string of films.

Ed Gorman and I talked about Night and the City in the wake of Widmark’s death here. And here’s a vintage Dassin interview. Via GreenCine.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Passings

Richard Widmark, R.I.P.

One of the last links to the classic age of film noir has been severed with the passing of actor Richard Widmark at age 93.

Regular readers know that Widmark was a favorite around here. Watch his landmark performance as cackling psychopath Tommy Udo in 1947’s Kiss of Death today and it still feels breathtakingly modern; Widmark, with his utter disregard for generating sympathy and his wealth of telling detail, seems to be inventing an entirely contemporary style of acting before your eyes. There’s his turn in Samuel Fuller’s Pickup On South Street, as a pickpocket up to his jittery eyeballs in a Communist spy plot who responds to appeals to patriotism with, “Don’t wave the flag at me.”

And then there’s his Harry Fabian in Night and the City. It was only last month that I saw it during a Widmark double bill at Noir City. It’s a movie that only grows in my estimation with each viewing, largely because of Widmark’s brave, spare work in the lead role. Performances don’t cut any deeper than that one.

The New York Times obituary features some terrific quotes and a great sense of the man’s life. Richard Widmark will be remembered, and missed.

Labels: Noir, Passings

Book: The Kind One, by Tom Epperson (2008)

Heading to California to make a name for yourself is perhaps the quintessential American story. Tom Epperson’s version is a pretty good one. He and childhood pal Billy Bob Thornton went west to break into show business. After kicking around for a hard ten years, they finally broke through with their script for One False Move, still a first-rate crime drama.

Los Angeles as a city of last chances and fresh starts looms large in Epperson’s first novel. It’s 1934, and “Two Gun” Danny Landon has a crease in his head where he was struck by a lead pipe, a severe case of amnesia, and a reputation as a tough guy that doesn’t sit right with him. He works for L.A. kingpin Bud Seitz, whose ironic nickname provides the book’s title. Bud gives Danny a choice assignment as bodyguard for his latest girlfriend Darla, a singer who is nowhere near as tough as she pretends to be.

It’s a classic noir set-up. Anyone familiar with the genre will quickly surmise who Danny is and be able to predict the fates that befall him, Bud, Darla, and the neighbors drawn into Danny’s orbit. But the characters are so well drawn that you won’t mind one bit. There are echoes of John Fante and Nathanael West here; Epperson writes with real feeling for the place and time, his story as rambling and expansive as the California landscape. I was more than happy to amble along with him.

Miscellaneous: Links

Gene Weingarten spends a grim 24 hours in the opinionscape of blogs, talk radio and cable news. Biggest surprise to me: you can now use “douche bag” as a pejorative in the august pages of the Washington Post. Oh, and pundustry, pundustry, pundustry. Read the article and you’ll know why I did that.

And the Los Angeles Times sets out in pursuit of John Hughes, the mystery man of 1980s cinema.

Labels: Books, Noir

Movie: Married Life (2008)

The theater where I saw Married Life didn’t even have a poster for it to hang outside. So I’m putting one up here, because I want to get the word out about this movie. It’s worth tracking down.

It’s based on the 1953 novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven by John Bingham, the former MI5 operative who served as the inspiration for John Le Carré’s George Smiley. (Sarah Weinman reviews Bingham’s literary career here.) The adaptation by Oren Moverman and director Ira Sachs sets the action in 1949 New York and Connecticut.

Chris Cooper’s longtime married man finds himself falling for a fetching war widow (Rachel McAdams). He’s certain his sweet, trusting wife (Patricia Clarkson) would be destroyed by divorce, so he decides that the only humane solution is to poison her. The whole sordid story is told by Pierce Brosnan, playing a lothario friend of Cooper’s with his own designs on McAdams. Brosnan looks rakish as all get out in period duds and narrates with silken menace. If ever a man was meant to do voiceover, it’s him. He should provide it for movies he’s not even in.

There are some taut Hitchcockian suspense sequences, including a dandy involving a bathtub. Noir strings are plucked, but softly. Sachs is more interested in dark comedy and shrewd observations about the deceptions that go into marriage, happy and unhappy alike. It’s said that 90% of a film’s success is dictated by the casting, and that’s certainly true here; all four leads are terrific. Make an effort to see this one.

Labels: Movies, Noir

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.

Via Neatorama, an espionage story told entirely through Google Maps.

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.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Noir, Noir City

Movie: The Great Flamarion (1945)

I’ve had this movie parked on the DVR for almost two years. During that time, I consistently referred to it as “The Great Flame Iron.” (For the record, the name is pronounced Fla-marion.) Catching a pair of Anthony Mann films at Noir City finally got me to fire it up.

It doesn’t start out so good. I take that back; the opening shot is a gem. A long, unbroken take ushers us into a third-rate Mexico City nightclub, showing us latecomers filing in, the acts on stage changing.

But the story is too familiar. Older man, younger woman, her permanently soused husband. You see where this is going. There’s some novelty in the older man being a professional trick shot artist and the couple serving as his nightly targets – but of course, when hubby’s number is up you already know how he’s going to meet his fate. The film begins with the older man recounting the entire tale in flashback after he’s been shot. The other famous example of that device is Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, made the previous year. As it happens, Flamarion was produced by William Wilder, Billy’s brother. (Were they both called Billy?) Bet that family reunion was a pip. At least in Double Indemnity Fred MacMurray doesn’t wave off an offer to call the police by saying “I’ll be dead before they get here,” and then proceed to talk for seventy minutes.

Erich von Stroheim plays the title role. He’s better known now for his work in front of the camera instead of behind it, most famously as Norma Desmond’s enabling butler in Sunset Blvd. (Hey, Billy Wilder again! No, not him, the other one.) But von Stroheim isn’t much of an actor. The first half of the movie is like watching a stone gargoyle get the Blue Angel treatment.

And yet ... damned if the ol’ Teutonic blowhard didn’t grow on me. A rock may not be able to tell you much, but you can still read changes in the weather by looking at its surface. Same effect here. Plus it turns out von Stroheim is surprisingly nimble for a gargoyle.

Other casting helps. Mary Beth Hughes, a staple of the Mike Shayne movies, initially seems too wholesome to play a femme fatale, but that quality ends up working in her favor.

It’s Dan Duryea who walks off with Flamarion as the one-time dancer reduced to dodging bullets to buy his bourbon. No one plays weak like Duryea; he actually gives petulance a kind of charm. To quote Eddie Muller’s Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, “He was a serviceable good guy, but a delectable bastard.” I’ll watch any movie he’s in.

This in spite of the fact that, to me, anyway, Duryea bears an uncommon resemblance to ... Stephen Colbert.

These photos aren’t the best, but work with me here. Just look at the eyes and face. Blond Colbert up and he’s Duryea’s dead ringer. Not that I’m comparing the two. I’m a fan of both. Besides, one is famous for playing the pushy, overbearing type, always certain he’s right but still capable of being weaselly. The other is Dan Duryea.

Labels: Movies, Noir

Movie: Born To Kill (1947)

Noir withdrawal. It’s no laughing matter.

After seeing two movies a day for a week, I needed a booster shot. Might as well go with the concentrated form. Born To Kill, directed by Robert Wise, scripted by Eve Greene and Richard Macaulay from James Gunn’s novel Deadlier Than The Male, delivers everything you could want from a film noir, pitched at delirium levels.

Femme fatale? Check, in the form of personal fave Claire Trevor decked out in a procession of impressive hats.

Doomed passion? Double check, because Claire hooks up with trouble personified: certified bad-ass Lawrence Tierney. He’s a post-crackup quick-tempered killer who insinuates his way into Claire’s clan by romancing her wealthy kid sister. But Tierney and Trevor are the ones made for each other, because they’re both schemers, dreamers, and batshit crazy to boot. Murder is their lovemaking!, as the poster should have said. Lousy Hays Office.

Plot twists? Fire it up and hang on.

Juicy character roles are another staple of noir, and again Born To Kill comes up aces. Walter Slezak as a genially corrupt private eye. Elisha Cook, Jr. as Tierney’s pal, always concerned about what’s “feasible.” Esther Howard as the bibulous old woman who can’t leave well enough alone.

Great scenes abound from the opening, a sharply observed look at the culture of soon-to-be divorcees’ rooming houses in Reno. A dazzling POV shot when Tierney’s first victim is discovered shows how much Wise drew from his experience with horror legend Val Lewton. And a confrontation between Cook and Howard in the blasted hellscape of sand dunes outside San Francisco is not to be missed.

Wise’s reputation has suffered over the years. Plenty of critics will never forgive him for his role as the perceived hatchet man on Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. Others just hate The Sound of Music. I say to hell with them. Wise knew how to tell stories, and he told them like an editor.

Born To Kill is mainly Tierney’s show. It was his one chance at a (sort of) conventional leading man role. Eddie Muller, in a terrific commentary track, provides the full sweep of the man’s career. He recounts the first time they met, at a screening of this movie, a saga involving profanity, headbutts, and unauthorized uses of promotional merchandise. It seems that Tierney – why don’t I let Eddie tell it?

Labels: DVD, Movies, Noir

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.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

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.”

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

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.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

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.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

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.

As for Gail Russell, the object of affection in both movies, well, perhaps she was cursed worst of all.

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.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

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.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

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.

Labels: Movies, Noir, Noir City

Upcoming: Noir City Northwest

It’s hard to believe a year has passed since Eddie Muller brought his dark carnival to town. That’s because it hasn’t been a year. The last Noir City was in July. You don’t hear me complaining.

It’s another dazzling line-up that kicks off tomorrow night with Joseph Losey’s The Prowler, restored by UCLA and the Film Noir Foundation. Once again, we have tickets for the entire run. Once again, I will endeavor to write up the whole megillah.

My gavel-to-gavel coverage of the previous Noir City can be found right here.

Book: An Ordinary Spy, by Joseph Weisberg (2008)

If you’ve gotta have a gimmick, former CIA officer Weisberg has come up with a gem. His novel is a putative memoir by a disgraced intelligence operative that includes the redactions imposed by the CIA. Whole swaths of text, sometimes entire pages, have been blacked out. That lack of information becomes essential to a narrative about the relationships that develop between spies and their contacts. It’s tough to describe, but well worth reading.

Miscellaneous: Post-Strike Link

Stephen Colbert welcomes back his illustrious writing staff. The last one out does the heavy lifting.

Labels: Books, Noir, WGA Strike

Movies: James Ellroy Theater

On November 13, novelist James Ellroy served as guest programmer on Turner Classic Movies. Among his selections were three relatively unheralded crime dramas, all from 1958, all set in California, all new to me.

It took a while, but I finally made my way through them. Feature it: we’re firing up the time machine and journeying back to the Golden State, when everybody claimed to like Ike but secretly sought sanctuary in shadow. It’s gonna be a gas.

First up is Stakeout on Dope Street. A trio of teenagers (including Little Shop of Horrors star Jonathon Haze and Yale Wexler, brother of cinematographer Haskell) stumble onto two pounds of pure heroin from a busted drug buy. They set an aging hophead to work selling the stuff and next thing you know, according to the out-of-place voiceover, they’re pricing “bongo drums and other racy items.” But Yale’s gal Abby Dalton wants no part of his dirty money, and the cops and drug dealers are hot on their trail.

Dope Street is a bargain basement production with a half-baked script; the JD scenes fall flat. But it’s also a crudely effective piece of filmmaking. There’s an extended withdrawal sequence that’s still harrowing, and director Irvin Kershner uses unexpected edits and camera angles to maximize tension. It’s no surprise he went on to better things. The movie also has a solid jazz score and the night’s best credit: Bowling Technical Assistance by the Redondo Recreation Center.

Murder by Contract has two things in common with Dope Street: a low budget and actor Herschel Bernardi. The similarities end there. Vince Edwards stars as a hired killer who takes up his trade solely to buy a house for himself and his unseen girlfriend. He’s sent to L.A. to eliminate a witness and has a crisis of conscience when he discovers his next target is ... gasp! ... a woman.

Objectively, Murder by Contract is terrible. Three reasons why, off the top of my head:

1. A drab look, shot in weirdly underpopulated Southern California locations;

2. A thin script packed with pretentious “psychological” dialogue, all delivered by the charisma-impaired Edwards;

3. The worst soundtrack in film history.

And yet ... the movie’s sheer lousiness and its struggle to say something exert their own fascination. Ellroy’s right in observing that its vision of the hit man as an existential figure is years ahead of its time. I can easily see how it would have made an impression on him as a young man.

ASIDE: Thanks to Ben Casey, Edwards was one of the biggest TV stars of the 1960s. Now he’s been banished to total cultural insignificance. I’ve never seen him in anything other than this movie. (Ed. note: I stand corrected. Please see the comments below.) Audiences actually bought this guy as a neurosurgeon? At least now I get another Simpsons joke. The show’s melodramatic veterinarian was drawn to look like Edwards.

The final ’58 film, The Lineup, is by far the best of the bunch. It’s based on a then-current TV series, a San Francisco version of Dragnet. The opening scenes suffer for hewing close to the show’s format. Two uninteresting cops investigate a bizarre incident at the docks and realize that unsuspecting travelers are being used as drug mules for the Syndicate.

It’s when the villains turn up that Stirling Silliphant’s script kicks up the kink. Eli Wallach, in only his second film, is the man tasked with retrieving the dope at all costs. He travels with an older “associate” (Robert Keith) who records the dying words of each person Wallach kills. Their relationship officially out-creeps anything I’ve seen in a dozen more recent, “edgy” crime dramas. There’s also nice work from Richard Jaeckel as a cocky getaway driver with a drinking problem.

Don Siegel, who knows his way around San Francisco, directs. The climax includes some shocking acts of violence and a dazzling car chase on the highway system then under construction. But it’s Siegel’s throwaway use of everyday locations that elevates the movie. A single shot of Jaeckel parking a sedan in front of a freighter that begins pushing away from a pier is a thing of beauty.

Overall, some great picks by Ellroy that highlight his influences and provide an X-ray of a young author in development. And that depresses the hell out of me. Movies like this, that don’t skimp on the mayhem but always show the toll it takes, are in short supply these days. Where is the next generation of crime writers supposed to get their fix of human-scaled sex and violence?

Miscellaneous: Links, No Country For Old Men Edition

See the movie. It’s a hell of a ride. Then you won’t mind the spoilers in the AV Club’s comparison of book and film. Nora Ephron also puzzles it out.

Music: My New Favorite Christmas Song

‘Don’t Shoot Me, Santa’ by the Killers. A novelty record that also manages to be an authentic Killers song. And it’s for charity.

Labels: Movies, music, Noir

Movie: Cops and Robbers (1973)

On the plus side, my cable company – I’ll take a page from Ivan at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear and call them Bombast – regularly adds movie channels. You just can’t watch them unless you ask, even if you’re paying for them.

A few months back two new stations appeared at the high end of the dial, taunting me with their listings. If I flipped them on, a message told me to call Bombast to subscribe. Which irked me no end, because I pony up for their “platinum premium” package. As far as I’m concerned, that means I should receive a jewel-encrusted remote every time a new channel is offered. This weekend we finally called, and learned we were supposed to be getting these stations all along. They were activated in the blink of an eye, and we’re now spending less per month on the “emerald elite” plan or whatever the hell it’s called.

I marked the occasion by tuning in one of these stations to watch Cops and Robbers, not only based on a Donald E. Westlake novel but scripted by him as well. Two New York cops (Cliff Gorman and Joseph Bologna), fed up with the pressures of the job and the city, decide to exploit their positions and pull a ten-million dollar heist during a ticker-tape parade to honor returning astronauts. Westlake being Westlake, problems ensue.

It’s an odd duck of a film, one of those laugh-to-keep-from-crying comedies thick on the ground in the 1970s. Aram Avakian, who would direct a similarly offbeat caper movie the following year with 11 Harrowhouse, keeps it all on an even keel. Tough guy character actor John P. Ryan is terrific as the Mafia middleman with a bowling alley in his house, complete with pin monkey. The bogus soul title song by Michel Legrand, on the other hand, is unforgivable.

Miscellaneous: Lessons Learned About Myself

Any movie universally hailed as “a humanist masterpiece” will bore me off my ass.

Miscellaneous: Links

A great, epic Washington Post article by Neely Tucker about the ‘70s P.I. show Mannix, its absence on DVD, and the role that it plays in the lives of its fans and cast. I’ve never seen a minute of Mannix myself. But Ed Gorman doesn’t think too highly of it, and his word is enough for me.

Allan Guthrie, a man who knows a thing or twelve about noir, lists 200 essential novels in the genre.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Movies, Noir

Book: The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (2007)

Ed Gorman’s review alone convinced me to order this book, a compendium of writing from the glory days of the pulps. Editor Otto Penzler has assembled the big names. Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, even a never-before-published story by Dashiell Hammett. Then there are the names that only the hardcore hardboiled fan recognizes. Steve Fisher, Frederick Nebel, Raoul Whitfield. And plenty more that are new to me. Short stories, novels, reproduced illustrations, biographical sketches, the works.

The volume tops out at over 1100 pages. Good thing the shipping was free. It’s literally the size of a phone book. One of the bent cops contained within could use it to obtain a confession. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it yet. So far, I just take it down from the shelf and admire it.

John Banville, the Booker Prize-winning author who pens crime fiction as Benjamin Black, offers another take on the collection in Bookforum. (H/t to GreenCine Daily.) The intro’s a touch precious, but his thoughts on Chandler versus Cain are interesting. And we’re in complete agreement on the Parker novels by Richard Stark, aka Donald Westlake (“among the most poised and polished fictions of their time and, in fact, of any time”) and Georges Simenon. Read his piece and Ed’s. Then I dare you not to buy the book. You’ll probably finish it before me.

Miscellaneous: Scenes From A Marriage

Me: Salon came out with their sexiest men alive list. Want to know who’s on it?

Rosemarie: Do I? They probably went with Dennis Kucinich. Sure, go ahead. Who’s their sexiest man alive?

Me: (bad fake drum roll) Jon Hamm.

Rosemarie: (sharp intake of breath) From Mad Men?

Me: Yeah.

Rosemarie: Wow. That’s an excellent pick.

Me: You know who else is on here? Flight of the Conchords.

Rosemarie: (another sharp intake of breath) Which one?

Me: Both of them.

Rosemarie: Who else?

Me: Um, Alec Baldwin, Tony Leung, Will Arnett –-

Rosemarie: Let me see that.

Labels: Books, Embarrassing Personal Stories, Noir

Viewing Tip: Ellroy Vision

November is guest programmer month on Turner Classic Movies. Each night, the best network on television hands over the reins to various luminaries. There are some nice surprises scattered throughout the lineup – Charles Busch picking the underrated showbiz melodrama The Hard Way, Tracey Ullman opting for Kes, an early Ken Loach film, and 1959’s I’m All Right Jack – along with the occasional dud. Like Donald Trump night. With TCM’s vast library at his disposal, the Donald selects warhorses like The African Queen, Gone With The Wind, and Citizen Kane. Nice to see his talent for the thuddingly obvious isn’t limited to real estate. (“Slap some gold trim on there. People love that crap.”)

The night I’m waiting for is this Tuesday, November 13, when novelist James Ellroy takes to the air. His choices include a trio of California-set crime dramas from 1958, all of which are new to me:

Stakeout on Dope Street, the debut feature by Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back), with a cast that includes Roger Corman staple Jonathan Haze;

Murder by Contract, a hit man drama with Vince Edwards;

The Lineup, a cult favorite directed by Don Siegel.

I can unreservedly recommend Ellroy’s last pick. Armored Car Robbery is a crackerjack heist film from B-movie maestro Richard Fleischer, starring one of noir’s great tough guys Charles McGraw.

Clips from all four films can be seen at TCM’s website, along with a brief interview with Ellroy. He doesn’t tone down his act for the network’s gentlemanly host Robert Osborne. When asked why he chose Dope Street, Ellroy replies, “Because it made me want to shoot big H and crawl back into the gutter from which I emerged.” All that plus a shout-out to the czar of noir himself, Eddie Muller. The fun begins Tuesday at 8PM Eastern, 5PM Pacific.

TCM keeps up the noir theme after Ellroy’s picks end. At 1:45AM Eastern the network will be showing another Richard Fleischer gem, 1949’s Follow Me Quietly. This thriller about the hunt for a serial killer known as “The Judge” contains one of the creepiest shots I’ve ever seen in a movie. Quietly runs a mere 59 minutes, and is worth setting the DVR for.

TV: This Week’s Reason To Love 30 Rock

Jack Donaghy reading an official NBC ratings report: “Look how Greenzo is testing. They love him in every demographic. Colored people, broads, fairies, commies. Gosh, we’ve got to update these forms.”

That line was scripted. Which brings us to ...

News: Strike Stuff

Expect this to be a semi-regular feature until this mishegoss is over.

Lawsuits are all-American, but strikes still make some people uncomfortable. Tool around the web and you’ll find wags condemning the walkout, usually citing an Ayn Rand free market libertarianism often influenced by business practices in the start-up world. John Rogers handily demolishes those arguments. Make sure you read the comments, where he does it again.

Variety’s blog Scribe Vibe has far outstripped the paper’s coverage of the work stoppage. I’d link to this entry, in which several top talents weigh in on the strike from Friday evening’s Jack Oakie Celebration of Comedy in Film, even if it didn’t contain some interesting comments. I just love that the Motion Picture Academy still has an event named after Jack Oakie.

For those coming in late, screenwriter Howard Michael Gould lays it all out.

If you’ve got a minute, why not sign this petition in support of the writers? It probably won’t do any good. But it’s certainly not gonna hurt.

Labels: Noir, TV, WGA Strike

TV: Viewing Tip

One of the damnedest movies I’ve ever seen makes a rare TV appearance this week. Deadline at Dawn (1946) screened at this year’s Noir City festival. It marks a wild confluence of talent – Clifford Odets adapting Cornell Woolrich for Harold Clurman, the founder of the Group Theater directing his only film. It airs this Tuesday, October 30, on Turner Classic Movies at 11:45 PM Eastern. It’s worth setting the DVR for.

Music: Terrasson/Vasandani

Seattle’s Earshot Jazz Festival is in full swing, and this year I’m finally making good on my annual promise to take in some shows. Not that I’m going to write about them at length. When it comes to jazz, I’m still a neophyte who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. I’ll just tell you who I saw and leave it at that.

I’m all about piano, so Jacky Terrasson was at the top of my list. His solo set was the second such show I’ve seen this month after Martial Solal at the Village Vanguard in New York. (Oddly, each offered an idiosyncratic version of ‘Take The A Train.’) Terrasson is an intense performer who attacks the piano from a variety of angles, using it as a percussion instrument or reaching inside for a harp-like pluck of the strings. The sound that results is incredible. His ‘America The Beautiful’ is a haunting reverie, while his impassioned take on ‘You’ve Got A Friend’ wrings powerful emotion from a song that I’ve previously never liked. Both tracks are available on his fine new album Mirror.

The opening act, singer Sachal Vasandani, has a warm, supple voice and a way with standards (‘Baby, Don’t You Go Away Mad’) and original material (‘Storybook Fiction,’ a charmer you can hear at his website). A good night all around.

Miscellaneous: Links

A new member of the Writers Guild learns that David Mamet loves her house.

Nerve has a three part series on the best fictional presidents in film. How they could overlook Richard Belzer in Species II and Roy Scheider in Chain of Command is beyond me.

Labels: Jazz, music, Noir

DVD: Tension (1949)/Where Danger Lives (1950)

Onward into Warner’s Film Noir Classic Collection Volume 4 we go. Tension is the sleeper of the set so far. Richard Basehart stars as a mild-mannered pharmacist utterly devoted to wife Audrey Totter. Trouble is, Audrey’s not devoted to him. While he’s mixing pills on the graveyard shift, she’s swanning around town with her lover. Basehart wants to off the beau, but realizes he doesn’t have it in him. However, if he creates another identity for himself ...

Tension’s structure has dated somewhat; the proceedings are introduced and narrated by Barry Sullivan as a homicide detective with the great unlikely moniker of Collier Bonnabel. But the storyline about what people are capable of when they let slip their everyday lives is as sharp as ever. The cast makes the most of it, especially the magnificent Audrey Totter. She’s always a lot of fun to watch.

Where Danger Lives is a dud, but an oddly compelling one. Doctor Robert Mitchum saves a woman’s life after a suicide attempt, then promptly falls in love with her. (Don’t they cover these situations in medical school?) There’s a murder, and the couple goes on the run – even though initially, no one is chasing them. The first half of the movie is a series of miscues and mixed signals, while the second half grows increasingly surreal as Mitchum begins feeling the effects of a concussion.

The troubled woman is played by Faith Domergue, one of Howard Hughes’s “discoveries.” Faith, alas, isn’t a very good actress. But as the extent of her character’s mental illness is revealed, the weaknesses in her performance become ... well, not strengths, exactly, but interesting shadings in a psychological portrait. Let’s leave it at that.

Movies: Enjoy The Show

Yesterday we saw Michael Clayton, the terrific directorial debut of one of my favorite screenwriters Tony Gilroy. Great to see a smart, grown-up movie in a packed house. Still, the experience prompted a few rants.

Rant #1. Every preview we saw – and there were a lot of them – was for a movie about death. Dead kids, dead spouses, dead lovers, dead friends. Two in a row was depressing. Three was kind of funny. Four had people turning around to look at the guy who couldn’t stop laughing. For the record, attending a movie that addresses adult concerns does not mean that the audience is simply marking time until the sweet embrace of the grave.

Rant #2. The people who sat on the other side of Rosemarie brought an entire picnic with them. Thermoses full of liquid, large plastic sacks of bite-sized chocolate bars to be individually unwrapped. I’ve made my peace with the fact that people are incapable of sitting still for two hours without feeding themselves, and that many of these people are cheap.

But then the guy right next to Rosemarie ate an apple.

Anyone who eats an apple in a movie theater is a jackass. Apples are the loudest of the natural snacks, and they spray juice into the dark.

And don’t bother giving me the speech about how you’re hypoglycemic. Not everyone who claims to have blood sugar woes can be so afflicted. Statistically it’s not possible. You know the last society so fixated on humors of the body? Ancient Rome. And we all know what happened there.

Lastly, if you do insist on eating an apple during a movie, at least have the decency to take the core with you when you leave.

Ah. I feel better now.

Labels: DVD, Movies, Noir, Rants

Miscellaneous: Neither Here Noir There

Steve Lewis, the man behind the indispensable Mystery*File, posed a question in the comments yesterday:

(T)he guys over at (hardboiled/noir mailing list) Rara-Avis are always saying that if there’s a happy ending, it can’t be noir. Do you go along with that? If not, or even if so, what’s your take on what Noir is?

Steve’s not the only one to put this headscratcher to me. At a Seattle International Film Festival noir double-bill earlier this year, I chatted with my friend and game-show competitor, critic Tom Tangney. Tom said, “What’s with you noir guys? I thought you were all about the downer endings but in a lot of the movies I’ve seen, things work out OK.”

Solving the what-is-noir riddle accounts for a hefty slice of the traffic on R-A. It gets brutal at times. Lives have been lost. Worse, feelings have been hurt. You think I’m going to wade into that contentious debate here?

OK, I will.

The safest play would be to punt, to Potter Stewart the question and say I know noir when I see it. I’m not a purist when it comes to definition. There are some who insist that “noir” can only refer to the original canon of authors published by the Série Noire line in France, or films made between 1940 (Stranger on the Third Floor) and 1958 (Touch of Evil). I don’t want to watch a movie like The Money Trap or Memento and think, “Jesus, that’s as noir as can be. Too bad it didn’t come out in ‘52.”

The recent explosion of noir films on video clouds the matter further. Steve’s question was prompted by two titles in Warner’s Film Noir Classic Collection Volume 4. Over the weekend I caught up with another movie in the set, 1955’s Illegal. Politically ambitious D.A. Edward G. Robinson discovers he sent an innocent man to the electric chair. He resigns, hits the skids, then reinvents himself as an unscrupulous criminal lawyer allied with the crime boss he was once determined to bring down – until his former assistant is indicted for murder.

Entertaining? You bet. Noir? Not really. Sure, it has its share of noirish elements, but it’s the second remake of the 1932 melodrama The Mouthpiece. The first remake, 1940’s The Man Who Talked Too Much, is about two lawyer brothers squaring off on opposite sides of a case. I’d say every iteration of this movie belongs in your video store’s “Hambone” section – a genre to which I am also partial. So why include it in a film noir collection?

A definition I picked up at Rara-Avis is known as The Bludis Heresy, after author Jack Bludis, who coined it. It states that hardboiled fiction is about characters who go into a cold, unfeeling world with no illusions, while in noir those characters are doomed to be crushed by said world. Or, as Bludis puts it with admirable economy:

Hardboiled = Tough
Noir = Screwed

I like that a lot.

Eddie Muller, a man I always listen to on this subject, said that all noir stories are about “people who know what they’re doing is wrong, but they do it anyway.” He also said that the genre’s ethos was perfectly encapsulated by Walter Neff’s explanation of his actions in Double Indemnity: “I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money ... and I didn’t get the woman.”

So what do I think?

I think noir, by definition, is about losers, the perpetual short-stickers of life. I think fate plays an active role. Look no further than Detour. Tom Neal, the poor bastard, never stood a chance. In the movie and in the real world.

It’s not darkness for its own sake. Too many contemporary writers branded with the noir label seem to wallow in misery, to enjoy torturing their characters. Noir is not about bad things happen to marginally good people. It’s about poor decisions boomeranging back with a vengeance.

True noir shouldn’t end on an upbeat note. But I’m willing to give the movies some leeway on that score. The powers that be in the business have always been reluctant to send the audience out feeling blue. Besides, happy endings, unlike Tolstoy’s happy families, are not all alike. At this year’s Noir City screening of Nightmare Alley, I heard some grousing that the closing scenes went too easy on Tyrone Power’s Stanton Carlisle. Sure, if hitting rock bottom is to be preferred over the long plunge down.

The French may have given the genre its name, but noir is a fundamentally American invention. Which is as it should be, because noir’s message cuts straight to the heart of the American dream. In a nation obsessed with winners, there are bound to be losers. And not only should their stories be told, they’re invariably more interesting.

Miscellaneous: Links

Steve Lewis keeps on giving. He sent me Wired’s list of unlikely movie scientists. And via BoingBoing, we have a stunningly thorough comparison of Simpsons scenes and the movies they pay homage to.

Labels: Books, Miscellaneous, Movies, Noir

Movies: Decoy (1946)/Crime Wave (1954)

Volume 4 of Warner Brothers’ Film Noir Classic Collection has been out for weeks, but I’m only getting into it now. It’s not my fault, y’unnerstand. I ordered it as soon as it streeted from an online retailer and somehow wound up with a boxed set of Star Trek movies. The turnaround cut into my valuable noir-watching time.

Which killed me, because the collection includes a movie I’ve wanted to see for years. Decoy has become a fabled cult item because it features what may be the most macabre plot in noir history. A woman romances a prison doctor so he’ll revive her death row boyfriend after his execution – just long enough for loverboy to reveal where he’s hidden four hundred grand in stolen loot. The movie’s production history only adds to its mystique. Producer/director Jack Bernhard met actress Jean Gillie in England, married her, and made Decoy to introduce her to American audiences. They divorced before the film was released, and Gillie died of pneumonia soon after at age 33.

Her legacy burns anew with Decoy’s appearance on DVD. She’s remarkable playing the most fatale of femmes. TV legend Sheldon Leonard is terrific as a homicide dick who believes the worst about everyone. The rest of the cast? Not so good. And the soundtrack is overbearing. But that wild premise holds your interest, and the movie is bookended by spellbinding opening and closing sequences. To quote Rosemarie: “Anybody who wants to direct needs to study that intro.”

The writer of Decoy, Nedrick Young (who would go on to pen The Defiant Ones and Inherit the Wind), appears as an actor in the other half of this disc’s double bill. Crime Wave is the kind of rock-solid, unpretentious movie director André de Toth was known for. Reformed ex-con Gene Nelson gets sucked back into the life when a trio of prison acquaintances (a young Charles Bronson among them) busts out of San Quentin and expects his help. Hard-nosed cop Sterling Hayden watches his every move. Half the cast of this movie – Hayden, Ted de Corsia, Timothy Carey – would later turn up in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing.

I’d already seen Crime Wave, but I watched it again so I could enjoy the commentary track featuring novelist James Ellroy and the czar of noir himself, Eddie Muller. Ellroy literally pants over authentic early ‘50s Los Angeles locations and notes all the ways this movie informed his novel L.A. Confidential. (He based Bud White, played by Russell Crowe in the movie, partly on Hayden’s character, and points out a dive bar that’s the inspiration for the Nite Owl.) He also says that after rewatching Chinatown, he’s decided that it doesn’t hold up, and that Crime Wave is the better film.

I don’t think he’s kidding.

Miscellaneous: Observation

The new gig prompted me to take the plunge and buy a laptop. Renovations around Chez K have reached the noisy stage, so I’ve started taking it to coffee shops so I can work. Meaning I have, at last, become one of those people I have always despised. Such is life.

Miscellaneous: Link

A completely inconclusive study hints that women with “tramp stamps” might not be able to receive epidurals when they go into labor. Gawker’s treatment of this news warms my black heart.

Labels: DVD, Embarrassing Personal Stories, Movies, Noir

Movie: Le Doulos (1962)

Sometimes corporations know exactly what they’re doing. By the time Giant Video Store Chain finally made it into my yuppie/hipster neighborhood about a decade ago, they had clearly done some demographic analysis. In addition to the standard miles upon miles of new releases, the store also stocked goodies that wouldn’t be in suburban outlets a few miles away. Loads of obscure art films. A healthy selection of martial arts flicks.

And, on a dusty bottom shelf, a single VHS copy of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos.

Prior to that point, I’d never seen a Melville film. I had only read about the world that Melville had created onscreen. A world of shadows and style, where men knew how to wear hats and lived by a code that made sense to them if no one else. Where the women were impossibly ripe. Where you could never drink too much or brood enough.

I knew sight unseen that it was a world I wanted to visit if not live in. Le Doulos was the first stamp in my passport. Since then, several of Melville’s films – Bob Le Flambeur, Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, and his grandest achievement Army of Shadows – have returned to theaters and been made available on DVD. Now Rialto Pictures has reissued the film that introduced me to le monde de Melville. High time I saw it again.

The title is a slang term from the French underworld meaning a police informant, and was originally translated in the U.S. as The Finger Man. Such is the reputation that Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) has acquired. His cohort Maurice doesn’t care; he’s putting together a heist after being released from prison, and Silien is one of the only people he trusts to help him plan it. When the cops show up in the middle of the job, Maurice begins to rethink everything he knows about his pal.

The script, based on a Série Noire by Pierre Lesou, can at times be difficult to follow, packed as it is with double-crosses and ulterior motives. It’s the kind of movie where one man will cold-bloodedly murder his close friend, another puts his life on the line for a guy he seems indifferent to, and you’re not entirely sure why. But all is made crystal clear by the gut punch of an ending. Belmondo makes no play for audience sympathy. He plays it cool and looks that way as well.

Le Doulos is showing in Seattle and Los Angeles through Thursday, and around the country for the next several months. My take on Melville’s Army of Shadows – for my money, the best movie in theaters in 2006 – is here.

Labels: Movies, Noir

Miscellaneous: Links

The Wire wraps its final episode, and the Washington Post is there. I have to wait ‘til January before the last season starts airing on HBO?

Premiere considers twenty classic twist endings. Or ruins twenty movies for people who haven’t seen them, depending on your point of view.

The latest issue of the Film Noir Foundation’s newsletter – trust me, you’re missing out if you’re not getting it – brings the sad news that actress Beverly Michaels passed away in June. Some of you may recall my powerful reaction to her performance in Wicked Woman, which screened at this year’s Noir City film festival. As a tribute to Beverly, here’s the trailer to that movie once again.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Noir

Miscellaneous: Links

Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus – go buy Prog, it’s terrific – takes a break from the trio’s tour to talk noir with Allan Guthrie. Do The Math keeps on giving: Ethan links to a new blog by critic Fred Kaplan, whose reviews are what helped me start climbing that jazz learning curve. Kaplan attended every night of the recent 70th birthday tribute to the great bassist Charlie Haden at New York’s Blue Note. Haden performed with a stellar line-up of pianists: Brad Mehldau, Paul Bley, Kenny Barron ... and Ethan Iverson. Would that I could have been there. I’ll have to fire up my copy of Always Say Goodbye, the Haden/Quartet West album that’s like a soundtrack to a brilliant film noir that never existed. See what I did there, bringing it back to noir? God, I’m good.

Fellow E.L.O. and Xanadu fan Matt at scrubbles.net digs up some great video featuring the band’s music – including one anime clip from a 1983 Japanese science fiction convention that must be seen to be believed. It’s four minutes that will change your life.

Miscellaneous: Meaningless Milestone

This is my 750th post. Do I win a prize?

Labels: Jazz, Miscellaneous, Noir

Movie: The Money Trap (1966)

Funny how these things work. When the question of forgotten pop culture personalities was raised at Hollywood Elsewhere earlier this month, Glenn Ford was one of the first names mentioned. And not without reason. Then the other day, author George Pelecanos wrote a heartfelt tribute to him, saying that “Ford, more than any other screen actor, is the paternal stand-in for a generation of boys whose fathers served in World War II” and praising the “quiet, confident masculinity that could only have come from someone who had nothing to prove.”

He’s ripe for reappraisal, with Russell Crowe taking over for Ford in his prime in the upcoming remake of 3:10 To Yuma. At Noir City I saw the young Ford in Framed. Time for a film from later in his career.

The Money Trap is an unheralded noir with an offbeat pedigree. Director Burt Kennedy is better known for comic westerns. Walter Bernstein adapts a novel by Lionel White (The Killing). Ford plays a weary detective married to a wealthy younger woman (Elke Sommer). The missus begins having cash flow problems just as Ford is handed the case of a thief gunned down in front of an empty safe by connected physician Joseph Cotten. The thief’s dying words have Ford convinced that the safe wasn’t originally empty, and that if Ford can somehow steal the contents Cotten won’t be able to go to the police.

I’m not claiming that The Money Trap is a neglected masterpiece. The plot’s a bit lumpy, and the only thing missing from the opening sequence – Ford and partner Ricardo Montalban rocketing through the rain to a murder scene at a brothel, complete with brassy jazz soundtrack – is a narrator intoning, “A Quinn Martin Production.” But it’s a good movie. More to the point, it’s a bracingly adult one, about sex and money and the need to make a name for oneself.

It has a healthy appreciation for sleaze, always a plus in a thriller. The magnificently fleshy Sommer undressing just at the edge of the frame, loads of shots of curvy women in garter belts.

That sleaze is tied to what drives the movie: Ford’s repressed paranoia that living off his wife’s money has diminished him as a man. At one point Ford looks up the thief’s widow, a woman from the neighborhood he has a history with, played by Rita Hayworth. Ford and Hayworth appeared together several times, most memorably in Gilda. They put that history to work for them in an extraordinary scene in which they compare how their lives haven’t matched the dreams of their youth and end up sleeping together one last time. Neither actor indulges in vanity, the weathered hunk and the ravaged beauty giving each other some small bit of comfort in the long night.

Black-and-white films from the mid-to-late ‘60s seem to carry a sense of their own futility. You can feel history shrugging its shoulders and asking, “Why aren’t you in color?” In a film noir that feeling is only intensified, moreso one with leads in the twilight of their careers. Stumbling onto The Money Trap was like discovering ghosts struggle with their problems, certain in their belief that no one was watching.

Labels: Movies, Noir

Book: Solea, by Jean-Claude Izzo (U.S. 2007)

Total Chaos, the first book in Izzo’s Marseilles Trilogy, dazzled me. Chourmo made a brilliant follow-up. Solea brings the series to a close in dizzying, almost punishing style.

The love of ex-cop Fabio Montale’s life has left him. But there are still pleasures to be found on the streets of his beloved city. Glasses of pastis with his small but loyal circle of friends. The Mediterranean itself. A night in the arms of a woman with gray-blue eyes.

But when another woman in Fabio’s life is forced into hiding by Mafia killers, those killers turn up at his doorstep. They want him to track down his one-time paramour, and will butcher those close to him until he succeeds.

Solea isn’t perfect; there are some aspects of the plot that I found implausible. But the book is driven relentlessly forward by Izzo’s cold fury at “how organized crime is poisoning the world economy.” Globalization has thrown ministers, millionaires and mobsters together, all of them putting their interests ahead of the common good. Montale says he feels as if the shadow of death has fallen across his life. That apocalyptic mood infects the entire novel. Montale doesn’t have to descend into hell. Hell is coming for him, f