Pulp Serenade

As near as I can tell, there's no one quite like Cullen Gallagher out there mixing it up on the internet. Gallagher is better known to hardcore noir geeks as the brains behind the blog Pulp Serenade, a treasure trove of old and new crime fiction. On a nearly daily basis, Pulp Serenade churns out reviews of long (looooong) lost pulp novels and spotlights offbeat contemporary authors. Gallagher is a perceptive critic and a dogged archivist/historian. His joy in discovering a new dusty old dime novel is palpable and infectious.

Just last week, he unveiled a new series he's doing on critical perspectives, looking at the original reception of classic crime fiction. His first entry was an overview of writer Day Keene.

Lastly, Gallagher also contributed the fascinating essay "A History of Pulp" to the new anthology Beat To A Pulp: Round One.

The Sound Of Fury (1950)

Frank Lovejoy was so underrated in the fifties. He was just another character actor with a pleasant face and an authoritarian voice. Today he’s probably best known to noir fans as Humphrey Bogart’s long suffering cop buddy in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place and as one of the unsuspecting motorists taken hostage in Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker. His best role, however, was as Howard Tyler, the doomed getaway driver in Cy Endfield’s still largely unknown The Sound of Fury.

Tyler is an ex-serviceman who has recently relocated his wife and young son to California following the war. Things are supposed to be good in the sun-kissed promised land, but they aren’t. Tyler can’t get a job, and his wife’s getting fed up. He takes off one afternoon, stops by a bowling alley for a beer, and meets a guy named Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges). Slocum’s a slick, fast-talking hoodlum with a business proposition for a man who’s steady behind the steering wheel. At first, Tyler has some reservations about being a getaway driver, but Jerry spells it out: take your dignity and go home broke, or stop being a sucker and go home with some cash in your wallet. Tyler thinks about it and calls his wife to tell her he’s going to be late. By midnight, he’s waiting outside a gas station while Jerry’s inside pistol-whipping the attendant.

The money flows. Tyler buys groceries. His wife is happy, and his kid wants a television set so they can watch westerns. All Tyler has to do is keep working the night shift with Jerry, but before long Jerry decides they need to upgrade from armed robbery to kidnapping. He picks the scion of a well-to-do family, and one night they nab the guy as he leaves his house.

I won’t say more about the plot except to note that in film noir there are a million guys like Jerry Slocum. He’s got meanness and a lot of ideas for getting rich. Surveying the world around him, he just sees a bunch of suckers, so he spends his days drinking beer and bowling, and spends his nights drinking whiskey and chasing dames. He thinks he’s smart, but he’s not. In noir, when you climb into a car with a Jerry Slocum you are hitching a ride to nowhere.

As Slocum, Lloyd Bridges is all vanity and violence. His preening is the perfect counterpoint to Frank Lovejoy’s sympathetic, believable portrayal as Tyler. Lovejoy has the ease of a natural onscreen everyman, but the last third of the film takes him places that are dark, frantic and surprising. It is a wonderful performance but a bittersweet reminder of how seldom Lovejoy was given challenging roles. (He seemed to have settled into television—with shows like his private eye series “Meet McGraw”—when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1962.) Here, forming a duet with Bridges, he does the best work of his career.

The rest of the cast is hit or miss. The acclaimed Broadway actress Katherine Locke plays a disturbed spinster named Hazel, and she and Lovejoy share some nice scenes together near the end of the film. But Kathleen Ryan is shrill and whiney as Tyler’s put-upon wife. She has one good scene late in the film reading a letter from her husband, but a stronger actress in this role could have given us more insight into the nature of Tyler’s tortured decision to be a criminal. Likewise, every time little Donald Smelick opens his mouth as Tyler’s cowboy-obsessed son, I wanted him to shut up—though, in his defense, with a few exceptions most kids in noirs are generally insufferable.

The film was directed by Cy Endfield, a director who got his start as an apprentice in Orson Welles’ Mercury Productions at RKO. After Welles was driven out of RKO, Endfield wound up directing shorts for MGM, and finally got his shot at directing features at the Z-list studio Monogram. Heads started to turn for Endfield in 1950 when he made the independently produced The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury —back to back films that were intelligent, uncompromising, and dealt with the themes of the press, mob violence, and human weakness. Unfortunately, soon after the release of The Sound of Fury, Endfield was named as a Communist sympathizer in the House on Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings on Communist subversives in Hollywood. He fled to England (where he eventually worked with fellow blacklistee Bridges), and he never retuned to work in Hollywood.

It’s damn disgrace that someone of Endfield’s talent was driven out of his profession, of course, but he left behind two impressive American films. His work in The Underworld Story is strong, but his work in The Sound of Fury is superlative. It helps that he’s working from an intelligent script by novelist Jo Pagano, whose source novel The Condemned is a sharp and underrated piece of work in its own right. Pagano intended his book, and the film that followed it, as an indictment of lynch mobs and journalistic cravenness. In both the book and the film he reaches too far in this respect (in fact he and Endfield butted heads over sections of the script Endfield felt were too didactic), but the power of its narrative comes from the way it weaves these themes in with Howard’s choice and its terrible consequences. Together, Endfield and Pagano crafted a quintessential film noir.

Read my review of Jo Pagano's over at Friday's Forgotten Books.

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

The opening scenes of The Night of the Hunter play like something out of a Flannery O’Connor story—a Southern Gothic spin on film noir—but by the end it has turned into something much more. It is a rich, scary, brilliant movie.

Robert Mitchum plays a woman-murdering preacher named Harry Powell who travels the countryside with LOVE tattooed on one hand and HATE tattooed on the other. He gets tossed in jail for theft and while he’s there he shares a cell with a condemned murderer named Ben Harper. Not long before he’s executed, Harper talks in his sleep and discloses the existence of some money he left hidden with his young son and daughter, John and Pearl. After Powell is released from prison, he heads off to find the children and the missing money.

He’s lucky to find the kids living with their widowed mother, and luckier still to discover that she’s played by Shelley Winters, that embodiment of needy cluelessness. It doesn’t take him long to convert her into a guilt-ridden religious fanatic and seduce her into marriage. Once he’s moved into the house, he goes to work on the kids to find out where they’ve hidden the money.

John and Pearl are played by Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce. Among the interesting things about The Night of the Hunter is that it is one of the rare noirs about children. Most kids in noirs are props, exploited as symbols of domestic tranquility. In this film, however, the kids are a little weird. Neither Chapin nor Bruce are cute in a conventional sense and neither of them give cute performances. The movie features them as protagonists in a stylized nightmare, and in some ways The Night of the Hunter looks and feels like a child's storybook--albeit a weird one.

Consider the plot from their point of view. Their father is a crook, executed for his crimes. They are outcasts among other children because of this fact. Their mother means well, but she is lonely and sad. Then a man shows up. He marries their mother and moves into the house. But he always wants to be alone with them. Every time their mother is away, he goes up to their bedroom. He interrogates them in different ways. He puts the little girl on his lap, flirts with her almost. He makes the boy stand in the center of the room while he hurls abuse at him. He warns them not to tell their mother. This is our secret, he tells them. She wouldn’t believe you anyway.

In setting up Mitchum as the tormentor of two young children—and having him hide behind his privilege as an adult, and his privilege as both their stepfather and as a man of God— The Night of the Hunter gives us the perhaps the first real portrait of a child molester in American cinema. Even more than Peter Lorre’s turn as the child killer in Fritz Lang’s M, Mitchum’s child-terrorizing preacher is a dark portrait of a very real monster.

The Night of the Hunter situates this monster inside a highly stylized landscape of shadows and Expressionistic sets. It is a completely artificial world where even nature feels unnatural, and where everything is shot to accentuate artificiality rather than obscure it. This movie simply looks unlike any other movie ever made, a combination of Flannery O’Connor and Dr. Caligari. The whole thing is so fake, so scary and eerily beautiful, it feels like a children’s movie directed by a pederast--OZ with an evil Wizard.

As the evil Wizard Harry Powell, Robert Mitchum gives one of his best performances. This movie—along with his equally terrifying work as the rapist Max Cady in Cape Fear—justifies us calling Mitchum one of the screen’s great villains. Impressive, especially considering that he was also one of the screen’s great leading men.

My essay on the film—like most writing about it—has revolved around Mitchum’s crazy preacher, but it is worth noting that the final third of the film involves the children seeking protection with an old lady played by Lillian Gish. Mitchum and Gish square off at the end, HATE and LOVE battling for the lives of two young kids. Years ago, when I first saw this film I didn’t quite understand the function of Gish. The scenes at her idyllic country home seemed to go on too long after the plot had resolved itself. I was wrong. Watching the film many times over the years, I began to see these scenes as the culmination of the film’s vision, their artifice an integral part of the artifice of the film as a whole. Gish’s final speech, in particular, seems like a fairly direct comment on the barely submerged theme of child abuse.

The Night of the Hunter was, famously, the only film directed by the great actor Charles Laughton before his death in 1962. What a shame. Who knows what else he might have done? In a way, though, this sad fact only serves to make Laughton’s film all the more special. I don’t know what compelled him to make this haunting children’s nightmare, but its uniqueness only adds to its mystery.

The Night of the Hunter gets the CC treatment

On November 16th, one of the greatest of all noirs, Charles Laughton's masterpiece The Night of the Hunter gets the Criterion Collection treatment. The package looks to be all that such an important film deserves: a newly restored digital transfer, a discussion with Laughton biographer Simon Callow, and most impressively--two and a half hours of outtakes and behind the scenes footage enticingly titled Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter.

Laughton's film unfolds like a child's nightmare, with Robert Mitchum playing a woman-murdering child-terrorizing preacher named Harry Powell. I'll post an essay on the film in a few days. For now, check out the movie's page at the Criterion Collection.

David Kehr on Film Preservation

Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation just hipped me to an article by David Kehr of the New York Times entitled "The Ballad of Blu-Ray and Scratchy Old Film." It's an incisive look at the odd relationship between movie studios and the priceless film libraries they're letting disintegrate on their shelves. Will Blu-Ray and DVD be the savior of classic films? Not necessarily, according to Kehr.

Read the article here.