The Night Editor

Satan Is Real: The Ballad Of The Louvin Brothers

2012-01-25T10:58:00.010-05:00

The story of Cain and Abel is more than just a family squabble that snowballed into the world's first murder. It's a narrative that gets at a fundamental question: how can two men raised in the same family turn out so differently? Buried in this question is an even deeper mystery: what makes us who we are?

The Louvin Brothers, Ira and Charlie, were the sons of a dirt-poor cotton farmer in Alabama. They were, in most ways, a contrast. Ira was tall, brown-haired, and snake-oil-salesman charming. His younger brother Charlie was short, blond, and more reserved. Perhaps as important as any of these differences, though, was the revelation that when the two boys sang together they created a harmony that seemed both transcendent and earthy at the same time. After years of toil (and following a change of their given name of Loudermilk to the concocted Louvin), they finally hit it big, creating a body of work in bluegrass, gospel, and country music that has few equals. Their influence--on everyone from Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, to Graham Parsons, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings--is still felt today.

The music of the Louvin Brothers is their monument, but the fascination of their story goes deeper. As with Cain and Abel, Ira and Charlie were brothers at odds with each other. Charlie, like many younger siblings, grew up in awe of his domineering older brother, but Ira Louvin was a man beset with demons. The stories of his alcoholic rages are still famous--the way he'd smash mandolins on stage and cuss out audiences, his abuse of friends and family, the four different wives. He tried to choke his third wife to death with a telephone cord on their bed. She stopped him by grabbing a .22 from under his pillow (because, of course, he was the kind of man who slept with a gun under his head) and shot him twice. When he tried to run away, she shot him three more times in the back. Then she walked up to him as he lay on the floor and shot him one more time in the chest.

He lived through that, but in many ways the Louvin Brothers never recovered. Charlie, married with children and needing a steady income, finally severed their business partnership. The two men kept in sparse contact until a few years later when Ira, in an irony out of a Greek tragedy, was killed by a drunk driver.

The story of the Louvin Brothers is told in the new book SATAN IS REAL:THE BALLAD OF THE LOUVIN BROTHERS written by Charlie Louvin (who lived to the ripe old age of 83 and died in 2011) and novelist Benjamin Whitmer. The book takes its place alongside the surprisingly deep bench of fine country singer memoirs (COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER, CASH: THE BIOGRAPHY, I LIVED TO TELL IT ALL). It's funny, sad, never less than fascinating. Its most striking feature is its complete lack of sentiment. You might expect from a memoir of an old man looking back on his hardscrabble youth some tales of family unity. Indeed, when most people think of the Louvins, they probably think of Ira as a bad seed child.

The truth, as always, is more complicated. Charlie Louvin's recounting of his life growing up in poverty should be essential reading for anyone wanting to understand why country music is sad. Poverty takes every problem and multiplies it by a thousand. Louvin's portrait of his father is most telling. "Ira and I watched the way Papa worked," he recalls "and we knew the way he worked all of us kids. And I think we got to thinking he was pretty dumb. He'd made some pretty stupid choices to end up where he was... When we thought of all the things a person could be in their lives, we couldn't think of nothing worse than being a cotton farmer."

In Louvin's eyes, he and his brother were "slaves" to his father. The contempt here is palpable. Enduring backbreaking "forced labor" for no pay was only part of it. Louvin also recounts the casual violence in that poor farmer's shack, as his father took out his rage and frustration on his children, particularity his eldest son. "Papa wasn't always calm when he came after Ira to give him a whipping. And when he wasn't calm, he wouldn't wait to find a width of hickory, he'd beat him with whatever was at hand. A chunk of firewood, a piece of furniture, whatever."

Ira became a man of bottomless insecurity and rage, a depth of pain that probably didn't need the fuel of alcoholism added to the fire. Of course, what makes this a story about more than just poor abused children is the irony that it was their father who first pushed the Louvins toward music. And music rescued them from poverty.

And what glorious music it is. Charlie Louvin's book takes its name from their most famous album, SATAN IS REAL, and lifts its iconic cover art. The album is a masterpiece of tight harmony singing, impeccable musicianship, and shocking theological purity. It's an album suffused with the glory of Christ but terrorized by the evil of Satan. The cover art has camp appeal, of course, like the primitive rural art found in folk museums--self-taught artists obsessively painting pictures of heaven and hell, pictures that are both cartoonish in their stylistic limitation and terrifying in their sadomasochistic vision. (Read Louvin's account of the making of the cover art and you'll see both of these qualities in play.) The music itself, however, is dark. This is an album of drunkards and fallen men, dying mothers and stillborn babies, Christian redemption and Satanic evil. A song like "Satan's Jeweled Crown" interprets life as a pitched battle for the soul of man:

when I live my life so reckless and evil/ drinkin' and runnin' around/ the things I would do were the will of the devil/ I was giving my soul for Satan's jeweled crown

Fundamentalist Protestantism has created a handful of masterpieces, and SATAN IS REAL is one of them, an essential piece of American music. Having said that, however, it would be a mistake to pigeonhole the Louvins as a gospel act. Their other essential masterpiece is the gorgeous 1956 TRAGIC SONGS OF LIFE. The album is, in some ways, the purer piece of work, in that it features Ira Louvin's blistering work on the mandolin (an instrument the brothers had largely worked out of their act by the time they recorded SATAN IS REAL). It's a collection, as the title indicates, about loss and heartache. It features the Louvins' haunting versions of "In The Pines" "Mary of the Wild Moor" and everyone's favorite murder ballad "Knoxville Girl." No gangsta rapper, no death metal shredder has ever managed to top the chilling performance of the brothers as they sing:

We went to take an evening walk
about a mile from town
I picked a stick up off the ground
and knocked that fair girl down

She fell down on her bended knees
for mercy she did cry
"Oh Willie dear
don't kill me here
I'm unprepared to die"

She never spoke another word
I only beat her more
until the ground around me
within her blood did flow

But this is no boast, no simplistic glorying in misogyny and violence. This senseless act of murder opens up--as it always does in the fundamentalist phantasmagoria of the Louvin Brothers--a pit where the fires of hell burn around the killer's bed at night.

TRAGIC SONGS OF LIFE casts a wide net, though, beyond the gruesomeness of murder ballads. A song like "A Tiny Broken Heart" is, at first glance, almost shockingly sentimental. The tale of a little boy upset because the girl next door must move away could easily be too saccharine to stand. What puts the song over is both the specificity of its focus--we stay in the perspective of the child for whom this tragedy is nothing less than the loss of the love of his life--and its wider social context (the girl's family must move away because picking season is over and there's no work to be had). Here the brothers create, with the attention of miniaturist painters, a vision of young love crushed by implacable economic forces.

Despite the pervasive darkness of their vision, the music of the Louvin Brothers is a source of almost unbridled joy. Ira's high tenor folded so perfectly into Charlie's warm melody tenor that the two men seemed to form--at times--one voice. Mix this with the breakneck pace of many of their songs--driven by Ira's mandolin--and you get music that manages the almost impossible task of being happy and sad at the same time. This weird quality, as evidenced by Charlie Louvin's vivid memoir, was the result of the mysterious dynamic of the men themselves, two brothers born into hardship and poverty, separated by sin but bound by blood and music.

***
Here's an interview with writer Benjamin Whitmer about helping Charlie Louvin write his memoir.

High Noon At 60

2012-01-24T00:35:00.000-05:00

In a new essay at Criminal Element, I take stock of Fred Zinnemann's HIGH NOON. At 60 years old, it's an acknowledged classic, but its reputation has always been marked by controversy.

For a director who was wildly successful, Zinnemann doesn't much love from film historians. Take a look at HIGH NOON again, though, and you'll see a nuanced piece of work. Then look at his other films, like the noir masterpiece ACT OF VIOLENCE, and you'll find a gifted artist who deserves a lot more credit than he gets.

Click here to read my essay on HIGH NOON.

The Return of Spenser?

2012-01-22T01:36:00.001-05:00

I have new essay up at Criminal Element about the May 1st release of Lullaby, Ace Atkins first Spenser novel. Is it a good idea to continue the Spenser series after the death of author Robert B. Parker? Is this outright heresy? Or is it something more? Check it out and tell me what you think.

The Unsettling Case of The West Memphis Three

2012-01-15T00:16:00.005-05:00

PARADISE LOST 3: PURGATORY debuted the other night on HBO. It's a fine piece of work, the clearest document yet on what went down surrounding the murder of three children in West Memphis, Arkansas--and the subsequent arrest of three teenagers for the crime--in 1993. The film also offers a stark look at what has transpired since then, a harrowing tale of American injustice. Even its "happy" ending is infuriating.

I was living in Arkansas when the original murder trials took place. I wrote about my reaction to the case, and to the final release of the WM3, in an essay called The Unsettling Case of the West Memphis Three.

Til Death Do Us Part

2012-01-09T18:23:00.003-05:00

above: Audrey Totter in TENSION. Sexy? You bet. Good marriage material? Not so much.

I have two new essays up at Criminal Element which look at noir's most imperfect marriages.

The first is Husbands From Hell, which assembles a rogue's gallery of cheats, liars, and malcontents. These are the kind of husbands who sleep with your sister and steal all your money before trying to have you bumped off.

The ladies get their turn with Worst Wives, a collection of the sexiest, and meanest, brides from noir's classic period. The dames are beautiful; they're also banging the delivery boy and plotting your murder.

Hell In 2012

2012-01-03T19:21:00.007-05:00

I'm only going to mention Hell On Church Street intermittently on The Night Editor since my purpose here is to talk about fiction and film by other folks, but I thought this first-of-the-year post would be a good place to take note of the roll out of my debut novel.

Right off the bat, I should say that this has been one of the best experiences of my life. To see my first novel published is quite literally a dream come true, and I couldn't be more happy with the physical book itself. Many thanks to my publisher, New Pulp Press and its lord of the dark arts, Jon Bassoff.

Since its release the book's gotten some pretty sweet reviews. Here are some highlights (with links to the full reviews if you're interested):

Eric Beetner at Criminal Element called the book "one of the finest pieces of contemporary Noir I've read."

At Spinetingler Magazine the Nerd of Noir said "Hell On Church Street, Jake Hinkson's addictively creepy debut novel, reads fast but lingers long."

And James Reasoner writing at Rough Edges called it a "very strong debut" and singled out the setting and characters as authentic, which is the kind of detail that only Baptists (in this particular case) can testify to.

Over the course of the year, I'll be doing readings at various bookstores and conferences, and I'll post that information here. I've also started a Facebook page for anyone interested in following my goings-on that way. And, of course, I'd love to hear from anyone who's read the book and has thoughts (or complaints, or fiery admonitions) that they'd like to share.

2011 In Review

2011-12-31T00:01:00.001-05:00

I had a good year at the movies. Not as good as last year perhaps, but we can't really blame that on 2011. After all, I spent most of 2010 in Washington DC which thanks to various moviegoing venues including the AFI Silver in Silver Spring and the E Street Cinema downtown is a great movie town. In 2010, I went to the movies 53 times. That year was also notable because a) I got to go to an Orson Welles retrospective, and b) I fell in love with the Natalie Portman flick BLACK SWAN so hard I saw it three times.

So, okay, 2011 can't live up to all that. I 'only' went to the movies 29 times (or 2.4 times a month). I did not have a breakout movie experience like BLACK SWAN nor a once-in-a-lifetime experience like the Welles revue.

But 2011 was still a pretty good year. Herewith I present a brief overview of what I saw and what I thought, with links to longer pieces on selected films. One note before we start: since no one is paying me to see movies I am fairly certain not to like (TRANSFORMERS, et al) I don't see many movies I totally hate. I see lots of movies that disappoint me in one way or another, but this list is largely positive in large part because I only go see the movies I want to see.

2011:

1. PHIL OCHS: THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE: Documentary on the ill-fated folk singer. An interesting look at a brave, talented man tormented by the consequences of his convictions and the limits of his own gift. He wanted to be Bob Dylan, but lacked Dylan's ruthless careerism. He also lacked Dylan's genius.

2. BLUE VALENTINE: Came out in late 2010 but I didn't see it until January. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams might be our two best actors and here they perform a heartbreaking duet about falling out of love. Odd that movies so rarely tackle one of the most profound/common human experiences: meeting someone, realizing you are in love with them, and then waking up years later to find that the love slipped away somewhere in the past. A triumph for writer/director Derek Cianfrance.

3. THE KING'S SPEECH: Another 2010 holdover. You know what it's about already, an English guy with a stutter. Everyone is good here, but really, honestly, who cares? I suspect this is the kind of prestige drama that will be largely forgotten in ten years.

4. THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU: Not much to say here either. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt chased by angels with hats. It's entertaining in its set-up and then quickly loses momentum and guts. The ending is so watered down it's spongy. One bright spot: Damon and Blunt have real chemistry. Look at the scene of them meeting for the first time. Someone should put these two in a real movie.

5. DOLLY PARTON, MA MERE, ET MOI-Saw this movie in Montreal in a theater that showed everything in French without English subtitles. I don't speak French. The movie is about a girl who thinks Dolly Parton might be her mom. Did I mention I don't speak French? Still, this movie experience made for an interesting point of comparison with the new silent film THE ARTIST. While I undoubtedly missed certain nuances conveyed in the French dialog, I still followed this film remarkably well and found it moving and funny. A fun experiment in filmgoing.

6. IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT: Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert fight and flirt and fall in love and talk really, really fast. In some ways, this is the romantic comedy by which all others are judged. Seeing it on the big screen, it's clear why. With this film Capra basically created the cinematic template that people are still ripping off. Plus, it holds up obscenely well.

7. JANE EYRE: I loved Cary Fukunaga's adaptation of the overdone Bronte novel. The whole thing is a joy but the secret weapons are the fine performances by Michael Fassbender and, especially, the luminous, fragile, powerful Mia Wasikowska.

8. and 9. MIDNIGHT IN PARIS: Saw this one twice. And why not? After last year's soul-deadening YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER, Woody Allen came waltzing back with this paper-light confection of joy. Owen Wilson stumbles into a portal in time that sends him back to Paris in the twenties to hang out with the Lost Generation. Plays like one of Allen's short New Yorker pieces. How can you not love that? Also has Rachel McAdams being mean, which is topped in sexiness only by Marion Cotillard being sad and sweet. If you like Woody Allen, then this is hard to resist.

10. THE TREE OF LIFE: Poetry in motion. Read my full review.

11. and 12. GREEN LANTERN and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER: Comic book adaptations of two comic books I loved as a kid. The first is okay, the second is very good. Read my full review.

13. BRIDESMAIDS: Kristen Wiig cowrote and stars in this comedy, so it's interesting to notice how screwed up, lonely, almost pathetic her character is in it. The genius of the film--besides just being hilarious at an impressively constant clip--is that it locates its comedy in the tension between good emotions (friendship, love, devotion) and bad emotions (self-pity, resentment, anger) without shortchanging either.

14. BEGINNERS: This might have been my favorite movie of the year. It's certainly one of the most delightful. Odd then that it's about both death and the feeling of parental abandonment. Christopher Plummer plays an elderly widower who makes the self-realization late in life that he is gay. Ewan McGregor plays his son, a man who loves his father but is resentful that he grew up in a sterile home, a home where he had to watch his mother spend her life in a passionless marriage. Witty and tragic, this is the kind of movie that stuns you with how smartly it handles the tricky subject of the various kinds of pain caused by love.

15. THE FUTURE: I said I don't go see many movies that I hate, but here's the closest I came this year. After making a stunningly good first film with YOU ME AND EVERYONE WE KNOW, writer/director/star Miranda July makes a stunningly bad second film. Forced whimsy in an arranged marriage with grating melancholia. Blah.

16. DRIVE: The year of Gosling continues with this postmodern crime gem. See my full review.

17. HIGHER GROUND: Flawed but heartfelt look at the "Jesus Freak" movement in the 1970s. See my full review.

18. MONEYBALL: Brad Pitt spends millions of dollars to hire guys to hit and catch and throw baseballs. But not as many millions as other guys do. Not too sure what the message is here, or why we should really care, but this is a pretty entertaining movie nevertheless. Snappy script by Aaron Sorkin helps.

19. THE IDES OF MARCH: Gosling again, this time with George Clooney in a backroom political drama. Not a great film despite the presence of a lot of great talent, due in part to the script's predicable twists and rather pedestrian revelations about the corrupting power of politics.

20. WEEKEND: Two guys meet, hook up, spend a couple days hanging out and having sex and maybe sorta falling in love before they part ways. Sweet, sexy, observant take on the ways we drift briefly through the lives of other people via romance.

21. TAKE SHELTER: Of any movie on this list, I think this is the one I'm most eager to see again. Michael Shannon gives what might be my favorite performance of the year as a man haunted by dreams of a coming storm. Writer/director Jeff Nichols puts his finger on a certain strain of religiously-suffused American paranoia. This one stays with you.

22. J. EDGAR: Clint and Leo take on the most famous bureaucrat in history. See my full review.

23. MARGIN CALL: A big cast take on the financial crisis in this drama from J.C. Chandor. Despite good performances and tight direction, this has Stanley Kramer's Disease--that built-in "topical movie" feel that you sometimes get from films that want to make statements about big issues of the day.

24. THE DESCENDANTS: George Clooney navigates family life in this Alexander Payne drama. Read my full review.

25. MY WEEKEND WITH MARILYN: I said earlier that Michelle Williams is one of our best actors. She proves it again with her sad and sweet performance as Marilyn Monroe, everyone's favorite doomed beauty. The movie itself is lightweight, reminding me a little of those old Movie Of Week flicks about the private sufferings of rich, famous people. But something in Williams' performance sticks around and, perhaps more importantly, makes you want to revisit the real Monroe.

26. YOUNG ADULT: Gotta love a romantic comedy about love turning to shit and life falling apart. Actually, this movie isn't a romantic comedy at all, but it works like an acid-spewing critique of those movies. (I like those movies, btw, but I also like acid-spewing critiques.) Luckily, everyone here gets what kind of movie they're making, from the biting script of Diablo Cody and synced-up direction of Jason Reitman, to the fearless performances of Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt.

27. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE--GHOST PROTOCOL: Lots of fights and shit blowing up. Which is what I wanted. Saw this one at the IMAX where Tom Cruise's now legendary real life scaling of the tallest building in the world pretty much stopped the show. The show keeps going after that scene, though, which makes the last half of the movie a little tedious.

28. SHERLOCK HOLMES: GAME OF SHADOWS: If you liked the first movie, which I did, you will probably like this movie. It is more of the same, which is both its virtue and chief flaw. The first film reinvented Holmes as a big budget superhero. This one recycles that invention for a sequel.

29. THE ARTIST: This is a silent film from the French director Michel Hazanavicius and it is a full-on triumph of black and white cinematography, choreography, acting, and directing. It tells the story of a big silent film star (played with dash and dazzle by the charismatic Jean Dujardin) who is waylaid by the invention of movie sound right about the time that his beautiful discovery (the effervescent Berenice Bejo) shoots to stardom in talkies. What a mad invention this movie is, a silent film that is both a tribute to a now archaic art and a vivid, hilarious, swooning reminder that silent moving images are still the foundation of the art form known as cinema. An excellent way to round out my year at the movies.

Hard Bite & Other Stories by Anonymous-9

2011-12-27T22:13:00.005-05:00

Everyone knows we're living through seismic changes in the world of book publishing. As someone who is coming into the business at this uncertain time, I'm fascinated to watch as the business itself keeps morphing in front of my eyes. The internet and the subsequent rise of Amazon have fundamentally altered an industry that a generation ago seemed rock solid.

Now look at us. In the last twenty years, book buying has become more and more of an electronic process. This is even more the case for short stories. In the old days, stories were a bread and butter operation. "Serious" writers like Faulkner and Hemingway wrote stories for magazines because that work paid more (and paid at a steadier clip) than writing dense modernist novels. Pulp writers also pounded out stories for magazines at an astounding clip to help pay the bills.

Those days are all but gone. The number of print venues for short fiction, overtly literary or straight pulp, shrinks every year. Fewer short story collections are published every year.

But what about online? In some ways, getting published has never been easier. Amazon makes self-publishing e-books a simple matter. The Kindle and other e-readers make the purchase of cheap, short fiction more accessible than it has ever been before.

Where is all this change taking us? That's the billion dollar question that writers, readers and publishers are eager to see answered. For now, it is interesting to stop and notice how the internet is altering the way some voices are coming through the ether.

Take Anonymous-9. Here's a writer I've been conscious of for a while now. She's one of those people who keeps popping up as you travel through the world of online crime fiction. Her writing is always lean and hard and a little weird. Or a lot weird. This is a writer whose most well known story (and winner of Spinetingler's Best Short Story on the web 2008 award) is an oddly touching story about a killer monkey.

Anonymous-9's first collection of stories is a e-book called Hard Bite & Other Stories. This collection of noir, horror, and dark humor stories is exactly the kind of thing that might take a while (or forever) to make its way through the usual print publishing channels. A9 is heroically unwilling to tell the same story twice. (Hell, she even seems a little resistant to the idea of working in the same genre twice.) Yet a distinctive voice comes out of this oddball assemblage of crackpots, broken souls, zombies, cannibals, and monkeys.

At the heart of almost all her work is A9's empathy for her characters. When you read her, you know you're in the hands of someone who has done the hard dramatic work of imagining her way into another life. My favorite story in the collection is a moving piece of neo-noir called "Tequila Spike" about a lonely convenience store clerk named Bebbie who becomes obsessed with a couple of regular customers, a druggie mother with a cute kid. The key here--as it is in many of these stories--is A9's control of the voice of her narrators. Listen as Bebbie evaluates herself: "I'm glad men don't notice me. Mousey brown hair, tied back...My store apron doesn't help my figure much. It bunches up and cuts me in two, like a bed pillow tied in the middle. But...they didn't hire me for looks. I make the cash work out, end of every day."

Or listen to Bebbie explain why she prays for the kid: "I pray at night, even though I don’t really believe in it. Please help me come up with something. Please, please don’t let the kid get hurt. You have to understand; I never had a kid in my life before. I hear prayers get answered sometimes, and I figure it’s probably like playing the lottery. If you don’t buy a ticket you can’t win. So I pray anyway, for Chloe."

You hear a lot in that voice, the voice of a woman who has subsumed her feminine identity and replaced it with wage-slave exhaustion until she meets a kid who sparks her maternal instincts. Once Bebbie decides the kid's worthless mother needs to go, you know you're in Noirville.

A9's imaginative empathy goes beyond a bone-tired heroine like Bebbie. In "Claw Marks" she tackles one of the most hackneyed devices in short fiction--the story told by an animal--and makes it seem fresh. Most stories of this kind save the narrator's identity for the final paragraph (Surprise, I'm a Yorkie!) but 9 tells a story of a bar cat witnessing an act of violence, and damn if the thing doesn't read like it was transcribing the cat's perceptions.

Anonymous-9 is the nom de plume of Elaine Ashe, the former editor of Beat To A Pulp. She's currently selling Hard Bite & Other Stories at Amazon for the looooow price of 99 cents. That's one buck for the book I just described. That's a great deal. It's also, perhaps, a vision of where smart, interesting pulp is headed in the digital age.

Church Street Reviewed at Criminal Element

2011-12-20T14:45:00.002-05:00

December 20 on the Advent calendar is apparently Hell On Church Street day. I got quite the treat today when I read Eric Beetner's rave review of the book. Beetner is a writer I admire, and his good opinion means a lot to me. Moreover, he seems to have put his finger on exactly the kind of book I tried to write. Check out his review at Criminal Element.

Above is one of the alternative cover ideas we worked with.

Hell On Church Street update

2011-12-16T12:20:00.000-05:00

Above is the final cover of my novel Hell On Church Street, complete with a great blurb by one of my neo-noir heroes, Jason Starr. I don't know Starr, but I've been a fan of his for years now (his book Twisted City is one of the best crime novels I've ever read). It is a huge thrill that he would even read my book. Much less like it. Much less like it so much he'd blurb it. And compare me favorably to two of my other heroes.

I've been incredibly lucky in the blurb department on this book. The great Scott Phillips (The Ice Harvest), Hilary Davidson (The Damage Done), and David Cranmer (editor and publisher of Beat To A Pulp) all were gracious enough to give me some props for HOCS. These folks are all so incredibly smart and talented it's humbling. As is, while I'm at it, the shout out I got from Eric Beetner (Dig Two Graves) who included me on his best of 2011 list over at Guilty Conscience. Not bad for a book that hasn't officially been released yet.

Speaking of which...

Here's the update on Hell On Church Street. The book's official pub date is January 5th. Having said that, people have been telling me that while the Amazon page isn't fully up yet (nothing set up for Kindles, no blurbs, ect.) it is actually functioning already. And some folks are already ordering and receiving copies. So don't let me stop you from going over to Amazon or Barnes and Noble and ordering a copy. Or two.

Lizabeth Scott Talks!

2011-12-09T09:19:00.002-05:00

Check out this fascinating video interview with Lizabeth Scott, the Queen of Noir, shot at Janet Leigh's house in 1996. The multi-part talk ranges over many subjects. What a lady. She's as smart, classy, charming, and witty as one could hope. Best of all, at 74, she still sounds like Liz Scott. The interview starts here.

Television and The New American Noir

2011-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

I have a new essay up at Criminal Element. "Breaking Mad" is a look at the new epicenter of American noir: the cable television series. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Film Noir This December

2011-12-03T07:34:00.001-05:00

above: Mitchum in OUT OF THE PAST

If, like me, you need to gird yourself against all the holiday cheer this time of year, be of good heart. Turner Classic Movies and Fox Movie Channel are both going to be offering up passels of dark goodness in the form of classic and neo-noir throughout December.

TCM will be showing established classics like OUT OF THE PAST, ANGEL FACE, SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, THE MALTESE FALCON and much more. They'll also be showing hard-to-find titles like the Edward Dmytryk directed OBSESSION and King Vidor's LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE.

FMC, meanwhile, has essential classic flicks like KISS OF DEATH and WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS. Their schedule will also feature more obscure fare like Nicholas Ray's trippy BIGGER THAN LIFE and the late-career heist flick from the underrated director Henry Hathaway and star Edward G. Robinson.

The fine folks at the Film Noir Foundation have compiled a full list of titles, dates, and showtimes. Check it out here.

The Descendants (2011)

2011-11-28T21:43:00.005-05:00

We all do it when someone dies. We talk nicely about them, we ignore or excuse their faults. In many cases, we rewrite history to make the person look better, which is another way of saying that we lie about them to simplify our own feelings. We create a plaster saint to which we can then pay homage and move on.

But the truth lingers, doesn't it? And the truth is that other people are a mystery. All that's really left when someone dies is the mystery. Alexander Payne's new film THE DESCENDANTS (based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, with a screenplay by Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash) knows this brutal reality very well. This is a film about grieving. How do we confront the passing of someone we love but with whom we have unresolved issues? This, of course, is only more true the more you love someone. They pass on, but the issues remain.

In the film, George Clooney plays Matt King, a lawyer in Hawaii whose wife Elizabeth is lying in a coma dying after a boating accident. King has two daughters, a precocious 10-year old named Scottie and a surly teenaged daughter named Alexandra. The girls are dealing with their mother's accident in different ways. Scottie is morbidly obsessed with the idea of death and creates a photo album of her mother hooked to a ventilator while Alexandra is furious and getting drunk with a goofball boy named Sid.

Even before the accident, King had a lot to worry about. He and his wife were on the skids and he was thinking that maybe they should "have a talk." He's also managing the eminent sale of a large chunk of his family's land holdings in Hawaii, a sale worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That's all before Alexandra drops the bombshell that her mother was having an affair with a local real estate agent.

Alexander Payne is the logical director for this kind of material, and this film seems of a piece with his Jack Nicholson film ABOUT SCHMIDT. Both films are about men who lose their wives and then regain some sense of themselves in the process of grieving. (What this says about Payne's opinion of marriage is anyone's guess.) This is not to say that what Clooney is doing here is playing the same character. Poor Schmidt was a man who bought into a certain life only to find himself spat out on the other end of it with nothing to show. ABOUT SCHMIDT has a tender ending, but it's a tragedy, THE DEATH OF A SALESMAN with a comic streak.

THE DESCENDANTS, on the other hand, is a story about reconnection. Matt King has enough time to find a place for himself in the lives of his daughters. He is able to make Alexandra an ally in this process, and this film, more than anything else, is really about how father and daughter get to know each other.

The movie has its flaws (the land sale subplot never rises above the level of metaphor), but the film contains some scenes of startling emotional clarity, especially when the family gathers around Elizabeth. These are not the usual scenes of plaster saint homage. These are scenes of anger and frustration. The troubled marriage of the Kings, and its impact on their daughters, did not end when Elizabeth was injured, nor does it end as she lays dying.

This is an interesting role for George Clooney, not the first actor one would think of for this material. Of course, he long ago demonstrated that he was able and willing to complicate his leading man image either by playing against type (O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?, THE AMERICAN) or by playing to type but revealing hidden weaknesses in the character (UP IN THE AIR, THE IDES OF MARCH). Still, this may well be his least heroic turn. Clooney is excellent at playing men in charge, men in the know. Here he is convincing as, of all things, a normal man thrown off course by life.

The rest of the cast if uniformly good, but especially Shailene Woodley as Alexandra. The film is largely a duet between Woodley and Clooney, daughter and father circling each other warily as they attempt to navigate the new terrain of their lives. It is up to these two actors to create the emotional core of the family, to create the space left by the absent wife and mother, to fill it with anger and recrimination. And, maybe, redemption.

PS:
On a side note here: Clooney may well win some awards for this role. Good for him. It's a fine performance. But sometimes movie stars have to play against what makes them great before some people are willing to give them awards. This is a bullshit process that once again reveals how utterly meaningless awards are. Such has always been the case (Bogart winning for THE AFRICAN QUEEN for "proving" he could act--as if a trained chimp could have starred in CASABLANCA). The most obvious recent example is Denzel Washington winning an Oscar for playing a bad guy in TRAINING DAY when MALCOLM X and CRIMSON TIDE had already proved Washington was a great actor and screen presence. If Clooney wins awards for THE DESCENDANTS it will "prove" nothing. His work in OUT OF SIGHT and THREE KINGS wasn't simply the result of sprinkling movie star dust on a handsome face, it was great acting.

Revenge in the Noonday Sun

2011-11-18T13:00:00.002-05:00

I have a couple of new essays on the theme of revenge up at Criminal Element.

"Revenge In Black And White" takes a look at revenge-fueled classic noirs including Zinnemann's ACT OF VIOLENCE, LANG'S THE BIG HEAT, and Thompson's CAPE FEAR.

"He Had It Comin'" deals with vengeance western style. It looks at Eastwood's UNFORGIVEN, Ford's THE SEARCHERS, and Mann's THE FURIES.

J. Edgar (2011)

2011-11-13T22:00:00.006-05:00

The most gripping portrait of J. Edgar Hoover that I know of unfolds over the three volumes of James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy. Ellroy's Hoover is a bureaucratic Iago, an all-seeing all-knowing master manipulator. Like Satan--at least the Protestant idea of Satan to which Ellroy likely owes some debt--his gift is that he knows every man's weakness, every man's secret, every man's breaking point.

The irony, of course, is that Ellroy is a novelist and his J. Edgar Hoover is a work of fiction. Perhaps it is fitting, though. After all, who really knew Hoover? He was a colossal figure in American life for four decades, but this man who knew the darkest secrets of Presidents, judges, legislators, and civic leaders was himself largely a fictional creation of his own design. Hoover the crusading crime buster was in actuality an effete, squat little man who sat behind a desk. This icon of American virtue disdained the company of regular people and spent much of his time locked in a private office in the heart of Washington DC assembling blackmail recordings of politicians and civil rights leaders.

Of course, these days Hoover's reputation has been sullied by revelations about his attempts to bring down the Civil Rights movement--and in particular Martin Luther King Jr. Hoover thought that by taping King's extramarital liaisons he'd uncovered a fatal flaw. History has rendered a different judgment. King was a great man, but he was a man, unfaithful to his wife but instrumental in leading the most successful social revolution in our nation's history. His greatness only seems enhanced by the knowledge of his all too human limitations. Meanwhile, Hoover, the petty government official who tried to destroy a people's march for equality is remembered as a fossil of an earlier time. When he died, he passed on the mantle of reactionary paranoia to Richard Nixon, ensuring that the history of America during this time would continue to be written on scratchy reel-to-reel.

What drove Hoover? What combination of influences made the man? Director Clint Eastwood, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, and star Leonardo DiCaprio have taken up the task of answering these questions. For years, rumors floated through Washington about Hoover's 'unusual' relationship with his handsome second-in-command Clyde Tolson (played winningly in the film by Armie Hammer). The two men, both lifelong bachelors, were inseparable, ate every meal together, vacationed together at lavish hotels in the summers, and dressed in matching suits. When Hoover died, he left his estate to Tolson, and Tolson received the flag off Hoover's casket and moved into his home. These facts, naturally, gave rise to speculation. Could J. Edgar Hoover, the master of secrets, the tormentor of any number of homosexual left-wingers (indeed, it might well have been Hoover more than anyone else who helped to foster the idea that homosexuality and Communism went had in hand)--could this man have lived a double life?

Naturally, this mystery has led to some outlandish treatments (most notoriously in 1977's THE PRIVATE FILES OF J. EDGAR HOOVER). Happily, Eastwood and company are uninterested in the sordid details of unsubstantiated rumors. Instead, J. EDGAR tells two stories. One story is of Hoover's lifelong consolation of power. This is a story well worth telling. After all, Hoover was an unelected official who probably exerted more power in Washington DC than any one person over the course of forty tumultuous years. His private obsessions--with Communism, with Civil Rights, with the Kennedy brothers--unquestionably shaped American life. In Eastwood's film, Hoover is a man always peering suspiciously out on a dangerous world. DiCaprio plays Hoover as a man who runs all incoming data--be it political or personal, monumental or insignificant--through his own private ethical equation. His one real passion is for power, a passion that springs from a deep need for control.

The other story is his unconsummated love affair with Tolson. Here the film treads lightly, as perhaps it should. In the end, we really don't know what relationship these two men had. (The problem here is believing that J. Edgar Hoover would have ever felt safe enough to think of himself as gay, much less to actually have sex. This is a guy who had all of America under surveillance.) Eastwood's handling of Black's script on this point is, of all things, surprisingly moving. Hoover in this film is a man who cannot begin to approach the center of himself. He's helplessly in love with Tolson, but he's also devoid of any means of expressing it. The most passionate moment between the two men comes on one of their holidays together when a conversation turns to an argument and then leads to a fight which then leads to a kiss. The kiss itself--more full of fear and frustration than love--is the only one they share. Later in the film there's a tender scene where an aging Hoover gently kisses an ailing Tolson on the forehead. Only in anger or in old age, the film implies, could Hoover bring himself to admit his feelings for Tolson, however obliquely. He was a true closet case, a man unknown to himself.

Eastwood is an interesting director. He is, in many ways, wildly uneven. He's made movies that are excellent (THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, A PERFECT WORLD), including one film (UNFORGIVEN) that is a masterpiece. He's made films that have been vastly overrated (such as MILLION-DOLLAR BABY which, despite Hilary Swank's genuinely wonderful performance is a shallow treatment of serious issues). And he's made films of thudding banality (INVICTUS, MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL) which resemble nothing more than tired hackwork. His tendency toward oversimplifying conflicts means that if ambiguity does not exist in his antagonists at the script level, he rarely sees fit to inject it into the film.

One admirable aspect of J. EDGAR, however, is that it doesn't have any villains, not even the man himself. This will likely incense audience members who want to see Hoover burned in effigy. The sound of a gently tinkling piano beneath the moment of tenderness between the elderly Hoover and Tolson will perhaps strike some folks as sentimental. But the strength of Eastwood's film, and one assumes of the script by Black, is that it makes an honest attempt to conceive of Hoover as a human being. A deeply flawed human being, one who might have done evil things, but a man nevertheless. Hoover doubtless would have hated this movie and tried to crush the lives of everyone involved in its making, but it nevertheless turns the rough facts and central mystery of his life into a engrossing two hours at the movies.

Lew Archer Back On The Big Screen

2011-11-06T19:34:00.002-05:00

Laura K. Curtis has a piece up over at Criminal Element about the recent news that Warner Bothers has bought the rights to Ross Macdonald's classic PI Lew Archer. There's no word yet on director or stars, but Joel Silver is producing--which means this project could go either way. Let's hope Archer stays Archer and doesn't morph into Martin Riggs. That's not to crack on Riggs, you understand, just to say that the Archer novels are about psychology rather than pyrotechnics.

This news, of course, makes one think of the two Archer movies--HARPER and THE DROWNING POOL--that Paul Newman made in 1966 and 1975, respectively. Both films are neo-noir well worth seeing, and HARPER in particular is one of Newman's best films. He takes the classic PI and updated him, situating him in the roiling California of counterculture kooks and old fashioned greed and lies. I've never been a fan of Altman's deconstruction of the private eye movie, his adaptation of the Marlowe novel THE LONG GOODBYE, in part because I always thought HARPER was a more interesting way of dealing with the PI in a modern context.

Speaking of Philip Marlowe, this Lew Archer news also brought to mind the rumors a year or so ago that Clive Owen was gearing up to play Marlowe in a film to be directed by Frank Miller. Nothing ever came of that, but it is interesting to note that classic characters like Marlowe and Archer still have some social capital in Hollywood. Here's hoping something productive comes of this new Archer project.

For more on the history of the private dick flick, check out my post Gumshoe In Abeyance.

Quick Trips Through Hell

2011-11-01T11:04:00.000-04:00

I have a new essay up over at Criminal Element. Quick Trips Through Hell is an introduction to super-short noir, those tiny gems of B-movie nastiness that barely crack an hour. DETOUR, THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE, and more!

THE NOIR OF ORSON WELLES: PART V: Rosebud

2011-10-25T00:23:00.001-04:00

After THE TRIAL, Welles spent a few years making highbrow fare for the Europeans. In 1965, he made the film many Wellesians consider his masterpiece, FALSTAFF (CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT), an original script culled together from several Shakespeare plays about Falstaff, the disgraced old knight and “misleader of youth” Welles was born to play. In 1968, he directed, wrote, and costarred in a color adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s THE IMMORTAL STORY with Jeanne Moreau for French television. And in 1973, he directed F FOR Fake, an essay film that is part documentary, part creative nonfiction. It is a meditation on art and forgery—and one of his best films.

By then, however, the money had dried up in Europe. Welles may have been a great artist, but he was never box office gold. He was barely box office bronze. He returned to America and took roles in films that were beneath him. He channeled the money back into his projects like THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, a drama featuring John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, and his buddy from his RKO days, JOURNEY INTO FEAR director Norman Foster.

He still dabbled in pulp and noir, too. He shot an adaptation of Charles Williams’s DEAD CALM called THE DEEP with Laurence Harvey, working on it until Harvey died. He planned an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s A HELL OF A WOMAN with director Gary Graver, but like almost all of his projects in the seventies and eighties, it had to be shelved for lack of funds. Hollywood, which had never liked Welles, had now forgotten him. He was old and broke in a town where only youth and money mattered. In 1985, at the age of 70, he died at home working on a script.

There is a heartbreaking bargain you have to make with Orson Welles. Much of his work—more than that of any other major director—comes to us in damaged shape. When you consider that he was making difficult films to begin with, the full picture begins to emerge.

Orson Welles was either too much of an artist or too much of an egomaniac—perhaps both—to ever fully commit to genre, even for the duration of a single film. He liked genre but viewed it as a beginning, a jumping off place. This was no less true for a thriller than for a Shakespeare adaptation. His instinct was to be, as he once angrily wrote Harry Cohn, “original, or at the least somewhat oblique.” Win or lose—and he lost often—his films were stamped with the conviction that cinema was an instrument of experimentation and poetry, not formula.

In some ways, this brings us back to his first film, CITIZEN KANE. A flop upon first release, it influenced, directly or indirectly, almost everyone and everything that came after it. After being studied with Talmudic intensity by film geeks for nearly seventy years, it’s been enshrined as something approaching the Ur-text of modern film. Yet its reputation as the so-called “Greatest Movie Ever Made” threatens to render it a museum piece, like something Charles Foster Kane would have boxed up in his warehouse—an odd fate for a film that crackles with a giddy delight in the possibilities of cinema.

It is neither a crime film nor a thriller—indeed part of its appeal is that it defies easy categorization—but it contains many distinctly noir elements: chiaroscuro lighting, slanted angles, narrative disorientation, a sense of futility, a downbeat ending. Its fundamental story of a poor boy gaining the world but losing his soul is the American Dream turned gothic nightmare. Welles didn’t invent film noir, but he got to the party early.

Indeed, his immediate impact on noir was profound. Consider the talent he helped bring to Hollywood: actors Joseph Cotton, Paul Stewart, Erskine Sanford, Ted de Corsia, Everett Sloane, Norman Lloyd, Agnes Moorehead; producer John Houseman; composer Bernard Herrmann; director John Berry. Consider his direct influence on noir directors like Berry, Norman Foster, and Robert Wise. Or consider the stylistic influence of CITIZEN KANE, The LADY FROM SHANGHAI, TOUCH OF EVIL and THE TRIAL.

Most of all, consider the worldview permeating almost all his work. Welles was an artist with something to say. From his first film until his last, his movies presented a distinct vision, a distinctly noir vision, of life as a strange place, one we’re all struggling to survive.

THE NOIR OF ORSON WELLES: PART IV: Noir As European Art Film

2011-10-21T00:00:00.003-04:00

After his work on TOUCH OF EVIL failed to produce any further opportunities in Hollywood, Orson Welles once again found himself in trouble. An unexpected offer to direct again came in 1961 when he was approached by independent producer Alexander Salkind and asked to choose from a list of properties to direct. Welles opted to make an adaptation of Kafka’s THE TRIAL. The result is a European art film suffused with his noir vision.

The setup is pure Kafka: a man named Joseph K wakes up one morning to find that he is being persecuted for some unknown offense. He stumbles from one bizarre confrontation with the law to another, but he is never told what he's charged with. Welles, unencumbered by a need to reflect reality, takes this surreal premise and runs with it.

And what a vision he creates: the architecture is constantly closing in on Joseph K (Anthony Perkins), the camera forever angled so as to make the ceilings press down. Angles are sharpened like knives, and the film is full of sight lines of maddening symmetrical perfection. When K goes to work, it is at an office straight out of Vidor’s THE CROWD, with desks and florescent lights perfectly aligned and stretching off into infinity. Even in scenes shot outside, Welles emphasizes plain building facades with long lines of bare windows. K is like a man caught inside a machine about to crush him to pieces. Shot largely in and around Paris’s abandoned Gare d’Orsay, the film is full of huge spaces overhung with iron rafters. Welles makes an epic out of these caverns. His ambition is to give us a dreamlike world, a nightmare we can’t see through. He succeeds in this respect because the movie doesn’t seem placed in our world. It almost seems to have been shot on a gigantic studio set, every frame seeming wonderfully artificial. I say ‘almost’ and ‘seeming’, however, because it doesn’t have a studio look like Willy Wonka’s factory or the Emerald City in Oz, though it is every bit as offbeat. It seems real but not real. That it was filmed without many sets at all and still achieves this otherworldly quality is a testament to Welles’s ability to shoot on location, as well as a testament to the innate midnight weirdness of certain sections of Paris, Rome, and Zagreb.

Enjoying more freedom than he’d had on any film since CITIZEN KANE, Welles also perfected the uniquely disjointed mise-en-scène that had gotten him into such trouble in Hollywood. As his cinematographer Edmond Richard later explained it in ORSON WELLES AT WORK, “[Welles] had key positions where his actors would stop…In moving from one point to another, every eccentricity was permitted; in the key positions he wanted to see their eyes. This created an extraordinarily dynamic and syncopated rhythm: movement, pause; movement, pause. Even in complicated movements… of fifty meters, in an S shape, going up, going down, there would be infernal positions that had to be linked in a single movement."

The primary pleasure of an Orson Welles movie is the visual texture the director creates. THE TRIAL is, in some ways, the best example of this in his entire filmography. Because the story unfolds, as the film comments on itself at one point, with “the logic of a dream” Welles has the freedom to do whatever he wants in terms of creating a physical reality that hounds Josef K (Anthony Perkins). This movie was also one of the few times in his post-KANE career where he had the freedom to achieve his vision how he saw fit.

Anthony Perkins is a perfect choice to play K because he has that essential weirdness that seems totally at place in this type of story, which is to say that he seems completely incapable of figuring out what the hell is going on. He’s jittery and oddly funny, a maladroit constantly being thwarted in his desire to sort things out logically. His performance would be out of place in most movies, but this, wonderfully, isn’t most movies.

THE TRIAL is an odd addition to the Welles filmography. While visually and thematically the film has much in common with film noir, it also has a distinctly expressionist, allegorical quality that surpasses anything else in the director's body of work. If it lacks the emotional immediacy of some of his best work, it makes up for it in the evocative power of Welles's surrealist imagery. The scene of Perkins being trapped in a cage by a horde of screaming pubescent girls, for instance, seems like a harbinger not just of the sexual hysteria of Beatlemania (which, with all due respect to the Fab Four, had less to do with their beautiful music than with the fracturing of sexual repression that would lead to the sexual revolution) but also of the entire social upheaval of the 1960s. Likewise, Welles rewrites Kafka's ending to give us both a tinge of hope and a heaping of mushroom cloud paranoia. Where Kafka foresaw the rise of fascist powers in the thirties, Welles uses Kafka to invoke the splintering of Western culture and the dread of Cold War annihilation.

If THE TRIAL isn’t quite a noir, it emanates from the same dark region of the mind that produced something like the protonoir STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR (1940). Whatever label you attach to it, it is one of Welles’s great achievements.

Next week: Part V: Rosebud

THE NOIR OF ORSON WELLES: PART III: A Wild Night In A Sleazy Town

2011-10-15T00:01:00.004-04:00

Despite his struggles directing in Hollywood, Orson Welles had stayed in business there as a movie star. Once he started really packing on the pounds in the fifties, however, he became a self-described "ham actor," a celebrity supporting-player enlisted to class up inferior productions with his marquee name. He was originally slated to perform this function in a cops and robbers picture called BADGE OF EVIL starring Charlton Heston, but when Heston suggestion to Universal that Welles direct the picture the studio reluctantly agree. Seizing this opportunity, Welles changed the title and rewrote the script, transforming the standard little thriller into something truly bizarre.

The result, TOUCH OF EVIL, is one of the great pieces of cinematic trash. It’s a frantic film, wildly over the top, in love with its own squalor, infatuated with the feel and smell of decay. Among the director’s attempts at pulp, it is his masterpiece.

At its center is Welles himself, grotesque in the role of a bloated, degenerate cop named Hank Quinlan. In his small Texas border town, Quinlan is a legend, a redneck Sherlock Holmes who always gets his man. When a car bomb suddenly explodes on his side of the border, killing a rich developer and his girlfriend, Quinlan sets out to find the killer. Also investigating the bombing is a Mexican narcotics officer named Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston), a newlywed in town with his wife Susie (Janet Leigh). Vargas thinks the bombing might have something to do with a high profile case he’s working on involving a Mexican drug cartel headed by a goofball named Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff). Quinlan doesn’t want Vargas messing around in his investigation, probably because he’s already decided the killer is the young Mexican who has been dating the dead man’s daughter.

The film is a boxing match between the two lawmen, one corrupt and disintegrating, the other upright and honest to a fault. Surrounding them, in a torrent of activity, is a sprawling cast of oddities headed by Quinlan’s fidgety, overly faithful sidekick Menzies (Joseph Calleia). The film has the feel—both visually and thematically—of a spiral. Action drifts back and forth across the border, characters and plotlines swerve in and out of focus, but at the center of it, circling each other like fighters, are Quinlan and Vargas, each convinced that he is right, each increasingly convinced that the other is a bigger problem than the killer. By the end, they’ve both compromised themselves, and one of them lies dead, sinking into a drainage ditch between their two countries.

TOUCH OF EVIL is, in many ways, a culmination of everything Welles thought about pulp art. He had struggled before to get his vision of noir to the screen, and he directed this movie as if it might be his last chance (which it was). Pushed along by Henry Mancini’s blistering score, the film is relentless. Camera setups—including, of course, the famous three minute opening shot—swing in and demand attention. Trash blows down streets, people scurry in and out of frames (Akim Tamiroff unspools pages of dialog while running). Crane shots swoop up and down, shadows splash across walls. The film is a whirlpool from start to finish.

Not only is it packed with visual details, it also indulges Welles’s affection for vignettes. Take the scene late in the film in which Quinlan crosses the border and stumbles across a house-of-ill-repute he used to frequent. Still manning the house, with steaming bowls of chili in the kitchen and a tinkling pianola in the parlor, is Tanya (Marlene Dietrich, laconic as ever). She takes one look at Quinlan and tells him the truth, “You’re a mess, honey.”

And he is. Hank Quinlan is one of Welles’s great creations. The director had always been obsessed with old men—they were a constant in his work—but he had a brutal ambivalence about their disintegration. Hank Quinlan is a monster—albeit a human one—and Welles is unflinching in his embrace of the big man’s fall.

A film this manic can’t be perfect. Dennis Weaver’s portrayal of the Night Man—the twitchy manager of an isolated motel where Susie Vargas is terrorized by thugs—is the oddest character Welles ever put on screen (which, given the director’s fondness for absurdist clowns, is saying quite a lot). But pointing out the excesses of a film that luxuriates in excess is like criticizing a musical for having too much singing and dancing. TOUCH OF EVIL is exactly what it wants to be, a wild night in a sleazy town.

Alas, Universal was not impressed. The studio had been sending Welles encouraging messages throughout filming, but when it all came together…the film was just too much. By that point, Welles had gone down to Mexico to work on Don Quixote, and the film was reedited in his absence. His triumphant return to Hollywood seemed to have come to nothing.

Over time, however, TOUCH OF EVIL was recognized as a masterpiece and restored to something close to Welles’s original cut. Paul Schrader in his influential 1971 essay “Notes on Film Noir” called it “film noir’s epitaph,” and many critics have followed his lead in regarding the film as the close of the noir cycle. While that’s up for debate, the film did mark the last time Welles was able to bring a thriller to the screen. It was not, however, his last voyage into the larger noir universe.

Next Week: Part IV: Noir as European Art Film

THE NOIR OF ORSON WELLES: PART II: On The Run In Europe

2011-10-08T00:01:00.001-04:00

After THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, Welles swung by Republic Pictures on his way out of Hollywood to make his noirish adaption of MACBETH (1948), a fascinating experiment in combining the aesthetics of theater and cinema. The film was the darkest, most grisly adaptation of a Shakespeare play up to that point, but it did nothing to elevate Welles’s standing in Hollywood.

He left for Europe and pieced together financing for his four-years-in-the-making adaptation of OTHELLO (1952). Part of the funding came from a thriller directed by Carol Reed and starring his old pal Joseph Cotton, THE THIRD MAN (1949). It would turn out to be the biggest hit of Welles’s career, though he forewent a profit-sharing deal in favor of a flat fee which he channeled back into Othello.

Because THE THIRD MAN looks in some respects like a Welles film, speculation has existed for decades about the extent of his participation in its creation, but Welles himself remained insistent that he was merely a happy actor-for-hire on the project. What is beyond question is that while he only appears in the film for about fifteen minutes, his character, Harry Lime, dominates the whole of it. Reed gives him perhaps the best entrance in movie history, and Welles’s one verified contribution to the script—Lime’s speech about the cuckoo clock—is the most famous scene in the movie. In just a few minutes onscreen, Welles is able to nail the amoral charm of Harry Lime, but what often goes unacknowledged is that aside from the scene by the Ferris wheel, Welles gives an almost entirely silent performance. The last ten minutes of the film—as he runs through the sewers trying to elude capture—are largely dialog free, yet his acting here is vital. As his boyish face gives way to panic, his fear doesn’t illicit pleasure from the viewer but rather a strange kind of sympathy. Behind his bluster and mystery, Harry Lime is revealed to be a mere mortal. When Welles wordlessly beseeches Cotton to put him out of his misery, the moment is tragic rather than triumphant.

While Welles was by all accounts a bad businessman, he was able to spin off the massive success of THE THIRD MAN into a new revenue stream. He recorded (and helped write) fifty-two episodes of a weekly radio program called THE LIVES OF HARRY LIME wherein the drug-dealing murderer became a kind of rakish international adventurer. For one of the episodes he concocted a mysterious European businessman named Arkadin. He liked the character so much that Arkadin became the basis for his next film.

No one is quite sure how many different versions of Welles’s 1955 crime drama MR. ARKADIN are floating around out there. The film was taken away from Welles by producer Louis Dolivet before he had the chance to edit it, and over the years many different versions (at least seven) have surfaced in different formats. In 2006, the Criterion Collection released a box set featuring three versions of the film, one of which was a new “comprehensive version” integrating material from different sources. While Criterion’s box set is a spectacular piece of scholarship and restoration, there is one problem: MR. ARKADIN isn’t a particularly good movie.

The plot is structured as a mystery told in flashbacks. A shady character named Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) is hired by an even shadier character named Gregory Arkadin (Welles), a billionaire with underworld connections who claims he suffers from amnesia. He wants Van Stratten to investigate his past and discover his true identity, but the deeper Van Stratten looks into the past, the more dead people start showing up. Turns out Arkadin is using the investigation to find and knock off anyone who could reveal the truth of his identity. Van Stratten begins to suspect he might be next on Arkadin’s hit list.

This suspense plot lacks forward momentum because we never much care about the thinly drawn characters. While Akim Tamiroff, Michael Redgrave, and Mischa Auer have fun in comically grotesque supporting roles, the center of the film is dragged down by the uninspired performances of the central cast, particularly Robert Arden and Welles himself.

Of course, the primary pleasure of a Welles film is the visual texture of the thing, and MR. ARKADIN, for all its faults, is always interesting to look at. The opening shots of Arden trekking through a ruined city in the falling snow have an ominous beauty, and Akim Tamiroff’s weird attic hideout is a juicy bit of demented set design. Visually, the highlight of the movie is a masquerade ball at Arkadin’s mansion, a tour de force displaying Welles’s ability to blend artifice and anarchy.

But what does this all add up to? Not much. Since Welles was never able to edit his film, MR. ARKADIN never assumed its final shape, but even an editor of his skill would have had trouble breathing life into the central story. Even in its restored form, MR. ARKADIN remains Welles’s weakest film.

Luckily, however, his pulp triumph was right around the corner.

Next Week: In Part III Welles returns to America for "A Wild Night in a Sleazy Town"

THE NOIR OF ORSON WELLES: PART I: A Little Sideline in Pulp

2011-10-01T02:32:00.002-04:00

Note: Portions of this series originally appeared in Noir City, Vol. 6 No. 1. Go here to check out the great work of Noir City's publisher, the Film Noir Foundation, and read some more articles from the latest issue of Noir City. Make a small donation to the FNF and you'll not only help rescue and preserve America's noir heritage, you'll also become a subscriber to one of the best movie journals around. Now, on to Orson...

It should not be surprising that Orson Welles choose to go into the thriller business. Given his association with high art and Shakespeare, it might be easy to overlook his lifelong fondness for hardboiled crime stories. A voracious reader of pulp, he even claimed to have ghostwritten some dime novels during his youthful sojourns in Europe (an unsubstantiated boast probably more revealing in spirit than in fact). His first big success on the air was as the voice of the Shadow, and he adapted Hammet’s THE GLASS KEY for radio in 1939. Upon arriving at RKO in 1939, in fact, one of his first projects was an unrealized adaptation of Nicholas Blake’s thriller SMILER WITH A KNIFE—a clear sign that Welles had always wanted the suspense genre to be the bread-and-butter part of his Hollywood operation. Getting fired from RKO in 1942 made this desire a necessity.

Of course, like everyone else making crime pictures in those days, he had no idea he was helping to create a new genre of American film called noir. As both an iconoclast and an egotist, it is unlikely he saw himself as part of a trend, and even more unlikely that he would have wanted to be a part of any such association. He was simply being himself. What is fascinating, however, is how naturally noir seemed to come to Orson Welles.

He took his first shot at the thriller genre while still at RKO with an adaption of Eric Ambler’s JOURNEY INTO FEAR (1942), a project that hints at the kind of dual-purposed production unit Welles envisioned at the studio. If CITIZEN KANE and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS were art, JOURNEY INTO FEAR was commerce. He assigned directing duties to a journeyman director named Norman Foster, co-wrote the screenplay with Joseph Cotton, tapped Cotton to play the lead, and cast himself in a supporting role. Since Welles designed the film, intending until the last moment to direct it, some critics and historians give him de facto co-directing credit. In truth, though he did direct the final scene (in postproduction), for most of the shoot he functioned more like a producer in the Selznick mode. He oversaw all aspects of production, but since he was in South America making IT’S ALL TRUE during much of the shoot, Foster (a good director who later made the excellent noirs KISS THE BLOOD OFF MY HANDS and WOMAN ON THE RUN) was the man standing next to the camera while the film was rolling.

Alas, the movie was shot and edited as Welles’s situation at RKO imploded. CITIZEN KANE had enraged publisher William Randolph Hearst (on whom it was partly based) and exasperated most of the Hollywood establishment that feared him. Welles’s follow-up film THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS was deemed too dark for a country heading to war, and his involvement with Brazilian socialists during the filming of IT’S ALL TRUE had stirred more controversy. Welles’s champion at the studio, George Shaffer, was fired and replaced by executives sick of the boy genius from New York. The new management yanked funding for postproduction on JOURNEY INTO FEAR and transferred Foster to another project.

The resulting film is a disaster. There are things to admire, such as the opening crane lift into an assassin’s apartment as he prepares to go find his prey, or the beautifully shot fight scene on a rain-swept windowsill, but in a way, JOURNEY INTO FEAR became a textbook example of how to destroy a movie through editing. The central story of a naval engineer (Joseph Cotton) being hunted by a shadowy band of Nazis across Europe is nearly impossible to follow, and the whole affair zigzags confusingly for sixty-eight minutes (truncated from 102 minutes) before arbitrarily arriving at a conclusion. Dumped on the market without fanfare, the little thriller ultimately lost $193,000. Welles’s plan to establish a profitable sideline in thrillers was off to a bad start.

After being banished from RKO, he accepted an offer from Bill Goetz, head of the newly-formed International Pictures, to direct THE STRANGER (1946), the noirish story of a small town woman (Loretta Young) who discovers that she’s married to a Nazi mastermind named Franz Kindler (Welles). Alas, there were strings attached. As Welles later explained to critic Peter Cowie, “[THE STRANGER] is the only picture I have made in which I did not at least expect to function as a producer.” That distinction was key. Welles’s goal from the beginning of the project was to demonstrate to Hollywood that he could work as a director for hire—or a “director within the producer system” as he later explained it to Peter Bogdanovich.

While the idea of presenting the small town American idyll as a cover for a sociopathic racist engaged Welles, for the most part he kept both his style and irony in check. (One notable exception comes in the film’s terrific set piece: a murder in the woods at the edge of town—a long, single shot that mixes suspense with the morbidly funny image of Franz Kindler strangling a religious fanatic to death as the man prays for the restitution of Kindler’s soul). Goetz and producer Sam Spiegel rejected the director’s idea to cast Agnes Moorehead as the investigator hunting Kindler, casting instead Edward G. Robinson in fast talking DOUBLE INDEMNITY mode. Likewise, an opening sequence in South America—the “only chance to be visually interesting in the picture” according to Welles—was quashed as too arty. Other scenes that would have complicated Kindler’s character were either cut by editor Ernest Nims or rejected outright by the producers. When Spiegel insisted on more close-ups for Loretta Young, Welles refused. This led to a protracted fight, with Welles finally getting his way. Young, for her part, loved Welles—later telling Spiegel biographer Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni that she had a “smashing crush” on the “enormously sensitive ”director. Still, she and Welles created few onscreen sparks in their narrowly defined roles of victim and villain.

While THE STRANGER was his most financially successful film as a director (grossing $3,216,000 against a budget of a little over a million dollars), Welles always spoke about it as if it were a distinctly unloved child. In deferring to Goetz and Spiegel and delivering a routine thriller about a monster, he’d repressed his own sense of the dichotomy of human character. As both a writer and a director, he was obsessed by the nuances of personality, the ways in which a character can be both good and evil, strong and weak, admirable and damnable. Once that sense was gone, there was no idea left for him to dramatize onscreen, only plot points to check off on his way to a violent climax. Of his films, the director insisted, THE STRANGER was “the one…of which I am least the author.”

He had more freedom, at least in the beginning, with his next picture THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947). Here Welles plays an Irish boxer named Michael O’Sullivan who stumbles into the convoluted intrigues of a nasty set of characters: the beautiful Elsa Bannister; her crippled, brilliant lawyer husband, Arthur Bannister; and Arthur’s ghoulishly strange partner, George Grisby. The ace in the hole was Welles’s wife, Rita Hayworth, who would play Elsa. Because she was Columbia’s top star, Welles seemed to take her presence in the film as a form of leverage with studio head Harry Cohn. He’d had enough of holding back on THE STRANGER. This time around he went for a knockout.

The resulting film was, in the estimation of critic Andrè Bazin, “the most demented work of [Welles’s] career.” Certainly it is noir, but it is grotesque even by the standards of the genre. Hayworth looks beautiful, but Welles dyed her hair platinum and cropped it close, giving her beauty an icy glow. Nearly everyone else in the cast looks like a gargoyle. From the sweaty creepiness of Glenn Anders to the Cubist misshapenness of Everett Sloan, Welles relentlessly accentuates physical abnormality with lurching close-ups. There is a near constant swirl of action as characters cross in front of each other in overlapping lines of movement (and speak at cross purposes in overlapping dialog). Toward the end, Welles finds himself stumbling through an amusement park “crazy house,” and his brief trip through its comic horrors echoes the comic horrors of the plot. Fittingly, the sequence ends with the famous shootout in a hall of mirrors, the multiplicity of the characters reflected by the multiplicity of their images.

For all its originality, however, the film flummoxed Harry Cohn, who ordered the 155-minute rough cut amputated to 88-minutes. Despite the incomprehensible plot, Welles’s style seems to have been the main sticking point. For instance, he had filmed the opening sequence in three complicated long shots (akin to the opening of TOUCH OF EVIL), but these shots were diced up in the editing room and slapped together to approximate a conventional shot-reverse-shot style. To smooth over the resulting jumble, the dialog between Welles and Hayworth was replaced by a last minute voiceover. Likewise, Welles’s ideas for the score were rejected in favor of one song (“Please Don’t Kiss Me”) repeated in nearly every scene.

The biggest loss was the crazy house sequence. “Hell itself couldn’t be a stranger place” is how the script described it, but Columbia’s top editor Viola Lawrence slashed down this surrealist tour de force to a few glancing shots. What we’re left with is weird and wonderful, but it’s only a mouthwatering glimpse of the Caligari-like insanity the director intended.

Furious at what had been done to his film, Welles sent Cohn a scathing memo, defending the “quality of freshness and strangeness” he’d labored to give the film. When Cohn swatted away these concerns, Welles took his directing credit off the picture.

Even unsigned, however, it remains distinctly a movie by Orson Welles and marks his defiant plunge into noir’s darkest depths. If THE STRANGER was his attempt to replicate the studio aesthetic, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI was his first concerted effort to present a crime story in his increasingly turbulent style. It’s easy to see why Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton highlighted the film as an exemplar of noir filmmaking in their landmark 1955 study "Panorama du film noir Amèrican 1941-1953." Like a pulp Venus de Milo, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI is a work of art haunted by disfigurement but marked by real inspiration.

It had become clear by this time that Welles was simply not a Hollywood filmmaker. The problem wasn’t that he was too brilliant—one need only look at people like Hitchcock or Siodmak to see great artists who could flourish within the studio system—but neither was the answer as simplistic as the “overrated, reckless genius” moniker Welles was forced to wear for most of his life. While he went over budget on many of his projects (a recent article by Vincent L. Barnett in Film History suggests Welles lost RKO well over a million dollars), this hardly made him an anomaly in Hollywood. If the studios had had faith in the finished product as a commercial property, one suspects no frenzied reshoots and last-minute editing overhauls would have been deemed necessary. Therein lies the problem: Welles did not make commercially viable properties.

The key to understanding Welles’s aesthetics is to understand that he was obsessed with fragmentation, disintegration, and chaos—not only as themes and subjects, but as mise-en-scène and visual metaphor. He was drawn to the falling apart of people, ideas, beliefs, even systems of morality. In this respect, he was perfectly in tune with the emerging noir style. Where he fell out of tune was in the way he framed his images and paced his scenes, to say nothing of his resistance to tweaking these oddities for commercial considerations. In framing his shots, he privileged spatial dislocation and vertiginous movement—often at the expense of narrative clarity and audience identification. Ruin and chaos were not only the most persistent themes of his work, they were the constant substance of his images. He seemed to want his audience to stagger out of the theater. In a Welles film, the center is in a constant state of frenzied collapse. Either because of stubbornness or a temperamental inability, he never married this style to convention in a way that pleased the studios. Whether you judge this as a mark of integrity or petty insolence depends largely on your reaction to the films themselves.

In Part II, Welles goes to Europe.

Talus, Or Scree

2011-09-29T09:55:00.005-04:00

I sat down for an interview with Patrick Culliton and Jay Varner, the gents behind the web-phenom Talus, Or Scree. After a little curtain raising with Varner's visit to Civil War battlefield, the podcast proper starts. We have a pretty good talk about film noir, Hell On Church Street, and Encyclopedia Brown.

(Warning: this podcast explains explicit language. And cackling jackassery.)

Go check it out and give it a listen here.

Higher Ground (2011)

2011-09-25T13:55:00.006-04:00

Growing up in the Ozarks, I spent a lot of time at a religious campground run by my aunt and uncle. It was a 68-acre compound sprawled over the side of a mountain, and my family--my parents, brothers, and me--moved there for a brief period in 1989. I roamed over those hills and prayed among the trees, trying to get up early enough to read my Bible as the sun broke over the waterfall near our cabin. This period of piety and devotion did not last very long. I liked sleeping in too much. I also found that I liked reading Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker more than I liked reading the Bible. Within a year, my parents moved us into a house in a (relatively) nearby town--apparently I wasn't the only one who wasn't cut out to be a full-time missionary--but all through high school I still spent a lot of time out at the camp. In the summers, I was sent to their Boys Work Camp--a getaway for Christian boys that replaced water sports and pubescent sexual exploration with the edifying effects of labor and Bible Study. So while I never copped a feel at a summer camp, I did build a rock wall and read all four Gospels (I'm kind of a Gospel of Mark man, I think). The name of the camp, incidentally, was Higher Ground.

I was reminded of my time at the camp as I watched Vera Farmiga's new film HIGHER GROUND. Adapted from the memoir "This Dark World" by Carolyn S. Biggs, the film tells the story of Corine (played by Farmiga) a quirky young woman coming of age in the seventies who gives her life to Jesus after a near fatal accident. Together with her husband Ethan (Joshua Leonard) she joins an unnamed Protestant church run by Pastor Bill (Norbert Leo Butz) and his steely faced wife, Sister Deborah (Barbara Tuttle). For a while, the church seems to have every answer worth having to every question worth asking. As the years roll on, however, Corine begins to feel stifled, hemmed in by the patriarchal condescension of Pastor Bill and suffocated by the The-Lord-Wants-Me-To-Tell-You-How-Awful-You-Are helpfulness of Sister Deborah. Ethan, nice guy and devoted Christian husband that he is, can't figure out why Corine grows more and more distant. He tries to understand, but the only answer for Corine's unhappiness seems to be that God isn't good enough for her. She wants books and art and worldly friends. She wants more. But how can you want more than God?

Because HIGHER GROUND is a film about a woman's loss of faith (if 'loss' is quite the right word), it will strike many believers as something of an attack on that faith. I don't really think it is, though. It certainly judges the male-centric view of the faith and finds the church lacking in intellectual rigor, but it also plays fair with the congregation's sense of community and the way in which a belief in God's love can be as real as the love of one's own family.

The church in this film seems patterned after the Jesus Movement churches that sprung up in the later 60's and early 70's as an outgrowth of the hippie scene on the west coast. The great strength of Christianity, of course, has always been its malleability. This was the genius of the Apostle Paul, who foresaw (or, depending on how you look at such things, was granted the vision) that the story of Jesus would reach across the globe and translate well to different cultures. The Hippie Jesus that came out of the 60's was only the latest incarnation of the Son of God at the time. It's always worth remembering that black civil rights workers in the 50's who cited the words of Jesus as inspiration were opposed by racist white preachers doing the same. Or to use a different example, I once attended an exhibition at the National Gallery showing religious paintings and sculptures from Spain during the 17th century. Odd, I noticed, how much the Jesus in this art looked like a Conquistador from the 16th century. Every culture in every era remakes Jesus in its own image. Farmiga's film does a good job of showing a side of the Jesus Movement that most people are unfamiliar with, at least outside of the lyrics to "Spirit In The Sky." This film is a Jesus Freak version of Ibsen's A Doll's House.

As a debut, HIGHER GROUND shows Farmiga to be talented director. This is a smart, often funny, very moving film. It's also a fairly flawed film, unfortunately. Major plot strands are left dangling. Corine's relationship with an earthy fellow believer (played by a luminous Dagmara Dominczyk) becomes the heart of the film's middle section but then, after a devastating development, is more or less abandoned. Likewise, the relationship between Corine's parents (played wonderfully by John Hawkes and Donna Murphey) feels like it's either too much or too little. Ditto Corine's relationship with her heathen sister. I'm not suggesting that every little storyline has to be tidied up, but the film is episodic and disjointed to such an extent that the overall power of the story is diminished.

Despite these flaws, HIGHER GROUND is still an impressive piece of work, the rare film that addresses matters of faith head on. It reminds us how influenced we are by the rooms we find ourselves in, how quickly and easily our perception of the world is shaped by the people who surround us. "For where two or three are gathered together in my name" Jesus told his disciples "there I am in the midst of them." That statement, Corine learns, is one she does not have the faith to accept.

Drive (2011)

2011-09-16T22:35:00.015-04:00

James Sallis's 2005 novella DRIVE is a stripped down, minimalist story about a stunt driver who acts as a freelance wheelman for crews pulling heists in and around Los Angeles. Sallis's clipped prose is not simply as sharp and polished as a switchblade, it's also working in the service of a narrative that is nonlinear and elliptical. This is not minimalism in the vein of Cain or Carver; it feels more like a hardboiled narrative poem written by someone with too much caffeine in his system. It's easy to understand why the book was such a hit in Europe, especially in France where noir appreciation was born.

Which brings us to Nicolas Winding Refn's new adaptation of DRIVE starring Ryan Gosling as the unnamed driver (simply called Driver in the book). Refn and his screenwriter Hossein Amini have changed a lot, streamlining the story by condensing the action while also adding supporting characters to flesh things out. This film is, in fact, a very loose adaptation of the novel. What the filmmakers have kept and captured perfectly from Sallis is the central character's isolation and self-possession (captured perfectly by Gosling, an actor whose aura of autonomy is his defining characteristic). Driver is a man of large silences punctuated only by brief bursts of utilitarian dialog. "If I drive for you," he informs a would-be partner "you give me a time and a place. I give you a five minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes I'm yours no matter what."

We're introduced to his skills in a breathless opening scene in which Driver ferries two stick-up men away from a robbery while outrunning--and outwitting--a police dragnet. It's a fantastic set piece that establishes this man at the height of his power in the only arena he knows. A smart and exciting way to set up the film, it's also something of a high-speed lament for the general decline we've seen in the quality of chase scenes over the last fifteen years or so. Refn understands that a great chase scene is part race and part chess match.

Into Driver's isolated world comes a young woman named Irene (Carey Mulligan) with a sweet son named Benicio (Kaden Leos). Irene's husband, Standard (Oscar Issac) is in jail, and she and the boy are obviously lonely. She and Driver start to see each other--if not romantically, then emotionally intimate at least. It's hard to say what passes between them because they say so little to each other. In her sweet faced way, Irene is as quiet as Driver. The most touching scene in the film comes after Irene has put Benicio to bed. She and Driver say goodnight and their eyes lock and stay locked and they both smile at the warmth they generate together.

Then Standard comes home from the joint. He's better than we might expect. There is a tense moment when he first meets Driver and suspects, without ever quite saying anything, that something might have happened between his wife and this man, but he makes a kind of tentative piece with it, even inviting Driver over of dinner. Besides, Standard has bigger problems to worry about. There some guys from prison who want some money he owes them. They're willing to let him work it off pulling a heist. Driver, instantly and correctly, sizes up Standard for the heist and finds him lacking. Fearing for Irene and the boy, he offers his services for free.

This being noir, things turn to shit but quick. Of the plot complications from here on out, the less said the better. It will do to say that the last hour of the film grows increasingly violent as Driver navigates a maze of lowlifes and gangsters, battling would-be assassins and sniffing out double-crosses, all in an effort to protect Irene and Benicio.

The film is an odd mix of styles. On one hand, it maintains the less-said-the-better approach of the book. Our two main characters spend most of the film acting with their eyes. Since Gosling and Mulligan are two of our best and most expressive actors (no one in movies right now has a better smile than Carey Mulligan), the film can allow its center to be still and quiet. On the margins, however, it gives us a rich supporting gallery of verbose blowhards like Driver's mentor Shannon (Bryan Cranston), and the shady businessman Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and his even shadier partner Nino (Ron Perlman). These guys never shut up, unreeling long profanity-rich speeches. And while the film itself feels in some ways like a seventies-era Steve McQueen car flick, it is scored like an early eighties Michael Mann movie (and the titles are MIAMI VICE pastel pink).

Spiritually, if not stylistically, it is a brother to Anton Corbijn's THE AMERICAN (released this time last year) which starred George Clooney as a near-silent assassin living in Europe. Both films take American genre pieces (the hitman flick and the heist flick), peel them of their genre trappings, and reinterpret them through a sensibility that places the character at the forefront. One can't help but think of something like BOB LE FLAMBEUR. Jean-Pierre Melville would, I think, have been proud to make a movie like DRIVE.

Ultimately, however, DRIVE is its own film. It's neither ashamed of nor beholden to its genre roots, but neither does it seem awed by any arthouse predecessor. It's an original creation, brooding and fast, hyper-violent and touchingly romantic. It's a hell of a movie.

*One quibble: after you see the film, please explain to me why Driver dons the weird movie mask when he goes to take care of Nino. It's a great visual, but logically it doesn't make any sense to me.

Mickey Rooney Goes To Hell

2011-09-11T18:09:00.004-04:00

In the forties, Mickey Rooney was the biggest (albeit the shortest) movie star in America. His massive success as MGM's perky All-American teenager Andy Hardy financed a decade of booze, racehorses, and beautiful women.

Then the fifties hit him like a bomb. His films tanked and his life fell apart. Where's a guy to turn when his luck runs out? Well, film noir, of course.

Read my essay on the surprisingly impressive--and largely unknown--noir career of Mickey Rooney, excerpted in its entirety here from the new issue of NOIR CITY.

After you read it, check out the website of the Film Noir Foundation and think about joining the fight to save lost noirs.

The Condemned by Jo Pagano (1947)

2011-09-05T01:06:00.001-04:00

To understand THE CONDEMNED, Jo Pagano’s strange hybrid of social commentary novel and gritty pulp, a little background is in order. Born in 1906, Pagano was the youngest son of Italian immigrants who came to Colorado at the turn of the century so Pagano’s father could work as a miner. Jo quickly figured out that writing stories beat the hell out of swinging a pickax, and by the thirties he had started selling stories to magazines like THE ATLANTIC, SCRIBNERS, READER’S DIGEST, and YALE REVIEW. He moved to Hollywood, and by the late thirties, he was working at RKO Pictures.

Around this time Pagano became friends with the novelist William Faulkner. The great writer was in Hollywood doing script rewrites for Howard Hawks, but he spent most of his days chasing girls and getting shitfaced with other scribblers. At the time, Faulkner’s work was little read outside highbrow literary circles, but Pagano was already a devoted fan. Because Pagano could match the Mississippian drink for drink, the two men became fast friends. Faulkner became Pagano’s literary mentor and took special care to warn him about the hazards of selling out to Hollywood. Talent, Faulkner believed, couldn’t survive the compromises one had to make with the studios. He told Pagano simply, “Jo, you have got to get out of this town.”

In the midst of this tutelage with Faulkner, Pagano published his third book, THE CONDEMNED, in 1947. The novel was based on the true story of Thomas Harold Thurmond and John M. Holmes, who in 1933 had abducted and murdered a wealthy man named Brooke Hart. After the killers were apprehended and confessed to the crime, thousands of angry people descended on the Santa Clara County jail in San Jose, dragged the men from their cells, and hanged them from two trees across the street.

Pagano changed the names and turned the story into a serious crime drama. The central conflict is that of Howard Tyler, an everyman living in postwar California. He can’t find work to support his family, so he takes a job as getaway driver for a small time crook, and big time psycho, named Jerry Slocum. This decision turns out to be a catastrophic mistake because soon Jerry has decided that he and Howard need to move up the criminal ladder to kidnapping.

Neither of Pagano’s previous books—both of which were affectionate evocations of family life among Italian Americans—would have prepared a reader for THE CONDEMNED. This novel is a serious literary attempt to deal with Hart’s murder and the subsequent lynching of Thurmond and Holmes. As such, it marks a sharp departure from his previous books in terms of both focus and tone. It is also something of a swing for the fences in terms of style. It bears unmistakable Faulknerian touches such as shifting perspectives, shocking violence, and buried psychosexual motivations, but it also owes a debt to Steinbeck’s social consciousness. It was Pagano’s attempt to write a great, important novel. After its initial printing in hardback failed to bring literary glory, however, the book was radically abridged and repackaged as pulp (a process that would continue for years: Zenith Books re-released the book in 1958 under the title DIE SCREAMING).

The book isn’t entirely successful. Pagano’s weakness as a writer was preachiness. He gives us the character of Dr. Simone, an Italian professor who functions as the film’s moral and intellectual color commentator. This character mouths all of the appropriate leftist horror at the American financial and judicial systems. Moralizing in noir usually comes in the form of boring authoritarians espousing a rightwing point of view, but Dr. Simone’s sermons prove that preaching doesn’t work any better when it comes from the left. In many ways, the abridgement makes for a better read. It focuses more on the central story of the killers—in particular on Howard Tyler’s terrible guilt. After all, the key tension in the story is Howard’s gnawing sense of his own culpability, the tortured humanity of a normal man who fumbles into theft and murder and then watches in horror as his life falls apart.

Soon, Pagano accepted the job of adapting the book into a screenplay for producer Robert Stillman. The resulting film that Pagano and director Cy Endfield delivered, THE SOUND OF FURY, was a masterpiece, a dark and serious look at American society in the post-war era. Endfield rightly seized on Pagano’s strongest material and brought it to the front of the film. He also kept Pagano’s strong supporting cast of characters: crazy homme fatale Jerry Slocum, the careless newspaperman Gil Stanton, and Hazel, the odd young woman who exposes Howard to the police.

The film met with great opposition, with theater managers across the country catching flack for running such an “anti-American” picture at the outset of the Korean War. The film was re-titled TRY AND GET ME! and peddled around as a genre piece (much as the book had been), but it quickly sank into obscurity.

Stubbornly, the film lived on, and as film geeks rediscovered it, its reputation grew. It is now in line for a major restoration by the Film Noir Foundation. Pagano’s novel doesn’t have the same reputation that film the does, but this strange and beguiling work is well worth seeking out.

All Kinds of Women: The Lesbian Presence in Film Noir

2011-08-28T15:02:00.005-04:00

(This essay originally appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of Noir City)

There are no lesbians in classic film noir, and the reason for this is quite simple. Lesbians didn’t exist back then.

Well, they didn’t “officially” exist. Sure, there were places in L.A. that catered to the all-girl set, upscale nightclubs like Tess’s Café Internationale and middle-class bars like the If Club and the Paradise Club. Actresses such as Margaret Lindsay (SCARLET STREET), Ona Munson (THE RED HOUSE), and Patsy Kelly (THE NAKED KISS) either lived openly with their partners or carried on affairs with other women while hidden behind “lavender marriages” to gay men. And rumors swirled about big name stars like Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lizabeth Scott. On the nation’s screens, however, lesbians didn’t even rate the kind of offensive portrayals accorded to other minorities. According to the Hays Code, absolutely no manner of “sex perversion” was permitted onscreen—a rule so ironclad that not even the implication of homosexuality was permissible. In the culture at large, moreover, homosexuality was rarely if ever spoken about in the open. It wasn’t that people were in the closet—it’s that the closet wasn’t even supposed to exist.

So there are no lesbians in noir. Implications, however, are funny things. After all, what implies homosexuality and what doesn’t—or more importantly, what implied homosexuality in 1947? Because film is primarily a visual medium, images carry information before it is transferred through dialog or stated in exposition. As Josef von Sternberg (no stranger to weaving lesbian inferences into his films) said, “Each picture transliterates a thousand words.” To put it somewhat differently, we read the pictures that flicker on the screen. Through the images and actions presented to us we read characters as good or bad, trustworthy or diabolical. And we read some images as straight and some as queer. When Bogart sniffs Peter Lorre’s perfumed business card and raises his eyebrows in THE MALTESE FALCON, we’re invited to infer a meaning about the effete little man that the censors would never have allowed to be stated outright. As it happens, though, nearly everyone who’s ever seen the film has assumed that Joel Cairo is gay. The figure of the slightly comic gay villain pops up occasionally in noir, as he did in the hardboiled fiction that preceded it in the twenties and thirties.

Lesbianism, however, comes to us through slightly different signifiers. Unlike male homosexuality in noir, which was denoted by a broad femininity in men, lesbianism was signified not just by female-masculinity but by a complex contempt for femininity itself. While implied lesbians were almost exclusively represented as villains, they were seldom objects of comic derision. Lesbians were always presented as far more threatening, their masculinity an implicit threat to the male hegemony of the social order.

THE BUTCH FATALE

Consider noir’s chief lesbian villain, Hope Emerson. At 6’2” and 230 pounds, Emerson not only dwarfed all her female costars she also loomed over most of her leading men as well. With a large forehead, thick jowls, and a long beaked nose, Emerson looked like a heavy, and Hollywood, being Hollywood, quickly cast her in a series of violent, sexually ambiguous roles.

Born in Iowa in 1897, Emerson was an unlikely candidate for the role of Hollywood bad guy. A comic by nature and training, she started out in vaudeville playing piano and swapping jokes in a comedy team with her mother, Josie. She toured stages all around the country, working with funnyman Billy House and serving for a while as the sidekick to a sham mystic, a la NIGHTMARE ALLEY. By the thirties, she’d made it to the stages and radios of New York City, stealing the show in productions like LYSISTRATA (playing an Amazon) and the hillbilly musical SWING YOUR LADY. To help pay the bills in between gigs, she worked the New York nightclub circuit, singing risqué tunes for largely gay crowds at clubs like Fifth Avenue One in Greenwich Village.

Then in the late forties, Emerson went out to Hollywood and became a villain. Her first role in a major production was as the hulking masseuse Rose Given in Siodmak’s CRY OF THE CITY. Her first appearance in the film is unforgettable: walking through a house in the middle of the night, turning on lights in each successive room, she grows ever larger as she approaches the camera. She towers over her 5’8” costar, Richard Conte. He’s Martin Rome, an escaped convict and smooth-talking ladies man who has easily manipulated every other woman in the film. He’s come to Rose Given for help retrieving some stolen jewels, and he begins flirting with her almost immediately. When she offers him a back rub, his flirtations seem to have worked.

Rose is different from the other women in the film, though. As her hands move up his back, he rolls his eyes in pleasure. Yet her banter grows odd. She talks about fat old women trying to stave off age with money and jewelry, and then she clamps down on his throat and his entire neck disappears between her huge mitts. The woman’s threat to the man here has nothing to do with sex or seduction, it’s purely violent. Like some kind of female Mike Mazurki, she looks as if she could pop off his head like a champagne cork. The scene is the rare example in film noir—indeed in all classic film—of a woman terrorizing a man with her bare hands.

It’s the blurring of lines between the traditional representations of masculinity and femininity—and their corresponding relationship to dominance and passivity—that marks the scene as a queer moment. Rose Given isn’t a femme fatale. She’s a butch fatale. In noir’s milieu of male anxiety, the butch holds a special place. Her threat to the male isn’t based on a feminine manipulation of male sexual desire but rather through the usurpation of his role as the dominant masculine presence.

In Nicholas Ray’s IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) we have the curious figure of Martha (Ruth Gillette) the husky-voiced butch masseuse who hovers over naked Laurel Gray (Gloria Graham), rubbing her too hard while poking into her private life. After Laurel fires her for badmouthing boyfriend Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart), Martha snaps, “I’ll get out, Angel, but you’ll beg me to come back when you’re in trouble. You will, Angel, because you don’t have anybody else.” These could easily be the words of a spurned lover, and Martha’s jealous assertion that Laurel will crawl back to her when things go wrong, it should be noted, turns out to be right. Once she becomes afraid of Dix, Laurel does indeed call Martha first—a strong suggestion that Martha fills the masculine void whenever Laurel is between men. Dix seems to intuit this when he jealously intercepts a phone call from Martha meant for Laurel.

The butch fatale wasn’t merely a danger to the male ego, however. Most of the time she was seen as a sexualized threat to the female. This was never more apparent than the women-in-prison film, the butch equivalent of the classic studio “woman’s picture.”

WOMEN WITHOUT MEN

In a deftly argued essay in the last issue of the NOIR CITY SENTINEL, Alan K. Rode sought to rescue the classic 1950 women-in-prison picture, CAGED from the misapplied label of camp and restore it to its rightful place among the very best noirs of the period. One factor that necessitated Rode’s essay is the film’s lesbian overtones—and the assumption in some quarters that homosexuality automatically equals camp (which might account for why the film was released as a “camp classic” in the first place).

No, CAGED is not camp. But it is queer. Again we find the colossal figure of Hope Emerson, here starring as Evelyn Harper, a sadistic prison matron who taunts and tortures the “tramps” unlucky enough to be incarcerated under her watch. Locked into an ideological battle with the spinsterish warden played by Agnes Moorehead (herself a decidedly queer figure), Miss Harper is a sadistic monster. But her conflicts with the inmates have a kinky quality. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, Miss Harper, dressed up for an evening on the town with a man she says is waiting for her outside, preens in front of the inmates. We never see this man, nor is he ever referred to again. Did Miss Harper walk outside the prison and catch the bus home alone? Given what we know of her character, that would make more sense than the romantic scenario Harper outlines for the girls. In her book FEMALE MASCULINITY, cultural critic Judith Halberstam notes that Harper “indulges herself in ‘feminine comforts’…not, one feels, for the pleasure she gains from femininity but because femininity is what is denied to the inmates.”

Indeed, the central drama of CAGED is a prolonged attack on the femininity of the main character, Marie Allen (played by Eleanor Parker). She’s warned by Moorehead at the beginning of the film, “You’ll find all kinds of women in here.” She’s appraised by another inmate, a glamorous butch vice queen played by Lee Patrick, who looks her up and down and calls her “a cute trick.” Near the end of film, Marie finally snaps and attacks Miss Harper, a fight in which the matron’s uniform is ripped and her undergarments are exposed. Once Marie has been subdued, Harper, with her scratches and bra strap still visible, drags the inmate downstairs and shaves her head—a chilling scene that has long been read by critics as a symbolic rape.

Emerson’s butch villain in CAGED is offset, however, by the sympathetic treatment of another of the film’s butch characters, an inmate named Kitty Stark. Played with wonderful understatement by Betty Garde, Kitty first appears as a menacing force. Block-shouldered and short-haired, she arrives in the film trailed by two slightly more femme sidekicks (Jan Sterling and Joan Miller). She’s given a dead husband and snatches of dialog to provide the requisite heterosexual cover, but Kitty Stark is as butch as they come. Near the middle of the film, as she and Marie lie together on a cot—Marie on her back, Kitty propped up on an elbow gazing down at her—Kitty coos, “If you stay in here too long, you don’t think about guys at all. You just…get out of the habit.” Things will turn out hard for Kitty—after an altercation with Harper she’ll become a tragic figure. Yet in some ways she emerges as a hero at the end. In a fitting piece of irony, she’s also the one who finally takes care of the dreaded Harper, butch to butch.

The sexually repressed butch prison guard found her most psychopathic expression a few years later in 1955’s WOMEN’S PRISON. The film stars a steely Ida Lupino as warden Amelia van Zandt, an authoritarian so frigid and heartless that repressed lesbianism seems to have transmogrified completely into psychosexual-sadism. The film is overly simplistic, even by the conventions of the women in prison film, but with this performance, Lupino pretty much wrote the book on how you pull off the she’s-so-repressed-she’s-sexy pulp lesbian archetype. A coldly beautiful short-haired woman with no family who beats one of her inmates for getting pregnant…that’s a barely concealed subtext.

Within a few years, the lesbian subtext would begin forcing its way into the text of films.

(UN)BOUND…MORE OR LESS

By the late fifties, Hollywood was lagging behind the publishing world, where lesbian potboilers had become a powerful fixture of paperback imprints like Gold Medal Books. Tereska Torres sold 2 million copies of her autobiographical WOMEN’S BARRACKS in 1950, while Marijane Meaker published the first lesbian pulp novel SPRING FIRE under the name Vin Packer in 1952. When that book sold an astounding 1.5 million copies, lesbian pulp poured out by writers like Meaker’s lover Patricia Highsmith (THE PRICE OF SALT), Ann Bannon (ODD GIRL OUT) and Valerie Taylor (THE GIRLS IN 3-B). None of this success translated into representation in Hollywood films, but during the fifties and sixties, lesbian characters became more obvious, if not necessarily more sympathetic.

Orson Welles contributed a gruesome addition to the pantheon of noir lesbians with his inclusion of Mercedes McCambridge in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958). McCambridge had already issued her performance as Emma Small in Nicholas Ray’s 1954 Sapphic shoot ‘em up, JOHNNY GUITAR. As with everything else in TOUCH OF EVIL, however, Welles took the butch archetype one step further. When Janet Leigh is cornered in a seedy hotel room by a group of junkies, the threat of gang rape is made all the more real when a door opens and a short-haired, leather-wearing McCambridge creeps in. When the leader of the gang tells her to leave, McCambridge grunts, “Lemme stay. I want to watch.” This is followed by a close-up of the leader licking his lips and ordering his thugs to grab Janet Leigh and, “Hold her legs.” The presence of the butch hoodlum in a scene designed to infer a sexual assault is as explicit as Welles could be in 1958. The scene is hardly a shining moment in the history of lesbian representation in American film, but it is the most overt moment since a tuxedo-wearing Marlene Dietrich kissed a girl in MOROCCO.

Lesbianism would finally make it into the text of films in the sixties with William Wyler’s THE CHILDREN’S HOUR (1961) and Robert Aldrich’s THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE (1968). It’s purest noir incarnation, however, might well have been Edward Dmytryk’s WALK ON THE WILD SIDE (1962). Here, Barbara Stanwyck plays Jo Courtney, a New Orleans madam who is obsessed with one of her working girls, Hallie Gerard (the French actress Capucine). The movie is supposed to be the story of Hallie’s star-crossed love affair with a romantic drifter named Dove Linkhorn (played by a bored-looking Laurence Harvey), but this bland relationship is overshadowed by Jo’s fixation on Hallie.

Of course the L-word is never used, but the script gives Jo an uncommonly frank obsession with Hallie, keeping her in a room above the brothel so the younger woman can lounge and drink and make ghoulish sculptures of the madam. Hallie is unhappy living like this, but Jo won’t let her leave. When Dove tries to take Hallie away, Jo has him beaten up and framed for statutory rape. WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, while presenting Jo as the film’s antagonist, does at least humanize her to the extent that it allows her a genuine emotional stake in the drama. She’s the bad guy here, but there is no doubt that she loves Hallie. Moreover, since Harvey and Capucine lack any chemistry, Jo and Hallie become the de facto center of the film.

The script gives Jo a husband, of course, a self-hating amputee played by Karl Swenson. She treats him like a nonentity, and when he’s excited to find that Hallie might be leaving, Jo snaps, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Stanwyck gives a performance that moves between cool calculation and uncontrollable rage. It’s one of the actress’s most interesting parts, and Stanwyck plays it like she means it, as when she tells Swenson, “Don’t talk to me about love! What do you know? What does any man know?”

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE is a flawed film in many ways, but it did nudge the closet door open. In the decades that followed, neo-noir would become more comfortable with lesbian text and subtext, and films like BASIC INSTINCT, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, and THE BLACK DAHLIA dealt with lesbian or bisexual female characters with varying degrees of success and intelligence.

The main lesbian duo in neo-noir, however, are the protagonists of BOUND (1996). Here the butch-femme dynamic is allowed to occupy the center of the film, a privileged space in which the heroes, butch Corky (Gina Gershon) and femme Violet (Jennifer Tilly) attempt to steal millions of dollars from a gangster played by Joe Pantoliano. The lesbianism of the characters is in no way downplayed or obscured, but neither is it much remarked upon outside of the set-up of the film. The plot could be easily be about a man and a woman—indeed, noir is rife with variations on this very premise. Once the story starts to twist and turn, the sexuality of the characters becomes a simple fact. Since this is a crime thriller and not a drama about sexual identity, that’s as it should be. BOUND’s lasting contribution to noir is that it finally gives us a lesbian couple that is formed and tested along the conventional genre-lines usually reserved for straight couples.

Throughout much of the classic period of noir, the lesbian represented a danger to the social order, to male privilege in particular and to heterosexual stability in general. The misogyny and heterosexism implicit in these representations speak volumes about the anxieties surrounding shifting gender norms in post-war America, but they tell us little or nothing about the gay subculture that was alive and well at the time. The first lesbian rights organization, Daughters of Bilitis, was founded in 1955, and lesbians had been working in Hollywood from the beginning, from director Dorothy Arzner to legendary costume designer Edith Head, though most kept their love lives—and by extension their subculture—secret. The veil of history is simply the beginning when trying to piece together the record of gay culture. Someone like Hope Emerson, who never married and left most of her estate to the woman she lived with the last years of her life, is often claimed by authors of gay history as a lesbian, but gay history is almost by definition a mystery without a solution, the search for artifacts of a culture that wasn’t supposed to exist. While Hollywood films are inexact time capsules—history refracted by artistic interpretation and commercial imperative—they do give us some idea of how this culture began to stir in the mainstream consciousness during the middle of the twentieth century. It wasn’t always pretty, but then again history never is.

Hell On Church Street

2011-08-19T07:49:00.003-04:00

I'm proud to announce that my novel HELL ON CHURCH STREET will be published by New Pulp Press on January 5, 2012.

Above is a sneak peek at the cover.

The Tragedy of Peggie Castle

2011-08-14T11:49:00.000-04:00

Check out my new essay over at Criminal Element on one of noir's most beautiful and talented hard luck ladies, Peggie Castle.

You can also read my full reviews of her films 99 River Street and I, the Jury.

Liz Scott on the Femme Fatale

2011-08-12T01:49:00.000-04:00

"What I would say about the femme fatale is that she was always the person, in most of the films that I did, who had the greatest understanding. She knew life better than most females of the era. She knew that life could be good and life could be bad, she knew what was right and what was wrong, but...there were certain things she had to do."

Liz Scott in conversation with Robert Porfirio, Film Noir Reader 3

Robert Ryan Month!

2011-08-08T21:51:00.006-04:00

It's going to be a big month for Robert Ryan fans. First up, the upcoming issue of Noir City declares him The King of Noir. That's a bold statement of course--Mitchum partisans will likely quibble--but no one can argue that Ryan is deserving of all the attention he gets. From villainous turns in CROSSFIRE and CAUGHT to tormented turns in masterpieces like ACT OF VIOLENCE and THE SET-UP, Ryan did it all--and did it all well. The Noir City issue will feature a slew of articles on Ryan's life and career.

This tribute coincides nicely with an amazing retrospective at the Film Forum on Ryan's entire career, covering his work in noir, westerns, and even the odd 3-D epic.

For a little primer on Robert Ryan's greatness, check out my Mug Shot on him.

Beat To A Pulp: Round One on Kindle

2011-08-05T01:54:00.000-04:00

Well, my baby grew up to be an ebook. BEAT TO A PULP: ROUND ONE (which features my story "Makers and Coke") is available on the Kindle for the criminally low price of $5.99. With crackling stories by folks like Ed Gorman, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Abbott, Frank Bill, Charles Ardai, James Reasoner, and more, this book is perfect for an e-reader.

Check it out here.

Blackout (aka Murder by Proxy) (1954)

2011-07-31T01:14:00.001-04:00

In the late fifties, the small, British-based film production company Hammer Films shot to fame and fortune with a series of low-budget horror flicks. The director at the helm of most of these groundbreaking gorefests (THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA, THE MUMMY) was a talented workhorse named Terence Fisher, Hammer Films’ own resident Michael Curtiz. Churning out horror flicks quickly and efficiently made Fisher’s name in the business, but often overlooked are the impressive series of film noirs he made upon first arriving at Hammer in 1952—a few years before the company went fulltime into the monster business.

The best of these Hammer/Fisher noirs is probably the little seen BLACKOUT. The film stars Hammer-noir regular Dane Clark as Casey Morrow, an American ex-serviceman living in London after the war. When the film opens, Morrow is spending his last few pounds getting sloshed in a nightclub. He’s on the verge of passing out when he’s approached by a beautiful young woman named Phyllis Brunner (Belinda Lee) who makes this barely conscious drunk a pretty attractive deal: she’ll give him 500 pounds if he’ll marry her immediately. Morrow accepts her offer, and the next thing he knows he’s waking up in a strange apartment with blood on his coat. Phyllis is gone, but the morning papers report that her father has been murdered.

This is a wonderful setup for a noir, and the whole thing is rendered with great style. Walter “Jimmy” Harvey—the cinematographer for most of Hammer’s crime pictures—shoots the film in a hard black and white that manages to be starkly realistic in some scenes (like the opening in the bar) and Expressionistic in others (such as a later scene between Clark and Belinda on a rooftop). Meanwhile, Terence Fisher keeps his film moving even as his plot begins to make less and less sense. By the end, the plot makes basically no sense whatsoever, and BLACKOUT emerges as the kind of movie that feels like it was written during a real life blackout.

So, okay, the movie is an exercise in style over substance (another way in which Fisher’s work during this period resembles the snappy, sometimes shallow, efficiency of Michael Curtiz), but there are far graver crimes for which a director can be guilty. BLACKOUT is fast, atmospheric and like most Hammer productions it’s stocked with good actors. Dane Clark brings his likable everyguy quality to Morrow; the impossibly beautiful Belinda Lee is great as the maybe-she-is-maybe-she-ain’t femme fatale; and they’re backed by an uniformly top-rate supporting cast headed by Eleanor Summerfield.

The Hammer noirs of the fifties are a British cousin to the American noirs of the same period. While they did not produce a masterpiece on the level of an OUT OF THE PAST or an ACT OF VIOLENCE, as BLACKOUT makes clear, they are a hell of a lot of fun.

A Tale Of Two Heroes: Captain America and Green Lantern

2011-07-22T16:57:00.011-04:00

I grew up reading comic books. At one time or another, I collected Captain America, Batman, Green Lantern, and The Punisher. Somewhere along the way, though, I put away most of my comic books when I became obsessed with movies and literature. Once I discovered Orson Welles and Flannery O'Connor, well comic books started to seem a little boring.

While I still feel that way, I've never lost my affection for the crime fighters in tights. I don't rush out to see most comic book movies (I haven't seen IRON MAN 2 yet, nor THOR), but I'm not opposed to seeing them. A movie based on a comic book is, to my mind anyway, as legitimate as a movie based on a science fiction or western novel.

Let's consider that last point. Those thin, colorful little "books" (actually they were usually only eight or nine pieces of paper folded double with a couple of staples holding them together) have replaced the pulp novels that preceded them as the popular driving force of low culture. The Western, god love it, is all but dead--unless it involves aliens, apparently (though, COWBOYS & ALIENS is itself based on a comic book). Somewhere along the way, the comic book movie crawled its way to the top of the money pile. While the superhero flick goes back to the forties (the first Captain America movie came out in 1944), it had to wait until the seventies rolled around before STAR WARS, special effects, and the charm of Christopher Reeve could make it a respectable bet at the box office.

Now look where we are: every week brings another damn costumed do-gooder flick. The latest, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER, is one of the best. It's an old-fashioned entertainment that clearly wants to be RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, which is a stellar aspiration for a summertime adventure movie to possess. (The movie, set in WWII, even has a couple of winking references to "Hitler digging for trinkets out in the deserts." One gets the idea that if Captain America got on a plane and flew out to the Middle East, he'd find Dr. Jones there punching out Nazis.) Chris Evans stars as Steve Rogers, a 98-pound asthmatic, who is chosen to take a Super Solider Serum. After he takes it he turns into...well, a superhero.

The movie is tremendous fun, enlivened with good humor and exciting action sequences. It has an excellent supporting cast, with Hugo Weaving as the super-Nazi villain, Hayley Atwell as the beautiful and plucky love interest, and Tommy Lee Jones as the crusty old-timer (in the old days this role would have been played by Millard Mitchell). Best of all, Chris Evans gives a star-making performance as Steve Rogers, a good man given the chance to become a great man.

Like most good superhero movies (SUPERMAN, Nolan's Batman movies), CAPTAIN AMERICA understands the character at its center. Now, that implies that there is a character to understand. (For instance, IRON MAN was a good movie because it understood the appeal of star Robert Downy Jr. The Tony Stark of the comic books was pretty thin soup). To really set itself apart, a comic movie needs an intriguing central character and a story to support him (this is a pretty male-centric world, at least so far). The makers of CAPTAIN AMERICA understand that Steve Rogers is a man defined by a bigness of spirit and a basic goodness. He represents what is, to borrow a phrase, right about America. The film is empowered by Evan's charismatic performance as Steve. I don't think I can top Slate's Dana Stevens in her description: "He's wholesome but not goody-goody, masculine but not macho, and likable without begging for the audience's love." The key to this performance is that Evans creates a consistent character, a through line from Skinny Steve to Super Steve. In both incarnations, Steve is defined by a gentleness of spirit and a sense of moral responsibility. Square? Sure, but Captain America was always square. That's the point. He doesn't need to wink at you to let you know he's not really that guy. He really IS that guy.

Contrast this with GREEN LANTERN, which stars Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan, a callow test pilot who is chosen by an intergalactic alien police force to wield a green power ring which can do pretty much anything the bearer can imagine. In a sense, Jordan's journey mirrors that of Steve Rogers. Both are chosen to become heroes by forces beyond their understanding. Both rise to the challenge and defeat evil enemies.

The differences between the two are important, though. GREEN LANTERN is hampered by the fact that its main character is something of a blank slate. Ryan Reynolds gives it a good try, but he can't seem to find any real spark in the character. This might not be his fault. As a kid, I collected both CAPTAIN AMERICA and GREEN LANTERN. The difference between the two was this: with Cap, you daydreamed about being Steve Rogers; with GL, you daydreamed about what you'd do with the ring. No one dreams of being Hal Jordan.

GREEN LANTERN has been criticized for being a lumbering, effects-driven, corporate concoction designed only to be a big tent-pole summer blockbuster. I won't fight too hard against that description (except to say that, in all honesty, none of these movies are Cassavettian labors of love). In a way, though, it's really more of a fanboy movie. As I watched it, I wasn't angered by its machinations--I was reminded of the geeky joy of the comic. GREEN LANTERN is a triumph for the Comic-Con crowd, whose influence is perhaps disproportionate to their store of original ideas. Watching this movie I was reminded of something Roger Ebert wrote about the 2003 Civil War flick GODS AND GENERALS: "(It) is the kind of movie beloved by people who never go to the movies, because they are primarily interested in something else." GREEN LANTERN is a movie for people who love comic books, not cinema.

One can, of course, love both. I hope I've been clear in my admiration for comic books. (If not, please read this.) Despite some similarities, however, comics and movies are different mediums. CAPTAIN AMERICA plays like a real movie, bridging the gap between its pulpy roots and its Indiana Jones aspirations. GREEN LANTERN plays like a 200 million dollar comic book.

Phil Karlson and the Cinema of Ass-Kicking

2011-07-21T13:54:00.004-04:00

Who directed the kind of classic noir flicks that hit with bullet force and blackjack fury?

Who put pugilistic John Payne through the paces?

Who directed Walking Tall when he was seventy?

Go go read my new essay at Criminal Element or I'll send Phil Karlson to kick your ass.

Noir Classics Get the Criterion Treatment

2011-07-14T01:21:00.002-04:00

Noir geeks rejoice. Robert Aldrich's KISS ME DEADLY (by far the best adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel) has just been released in a handsome new edition by The Criterion collection. A prime example of hardcore noir, the movie comes with the usual CC load of extras including documentaries on Spillane and screenwriter AI Bezzerides, an alternate ending, and commentary by the guys behind the Film Noir Reader series--Alain Silver and James Ursini.

And next month (Aug. 16th), CC will release a new edition of Kubrick's THE KILLING. My admiration for this movie is nearly limitless. Working with Jim Thompson, Kubrick adapted Lionel White's heist novel of the same name. With a cast that includes Sterling Hayden, Elisha Cook, Marie Windsor, and Coleen Gray, the director forged one of the great heist movies. The CC edition will come with an interview with Thompson biographer Robert Polito (whose book SAVAGE ART: A BIOGRAPHY OF JIM THOMPSON is essential reading for pulp fans, btw). The movie also comes with Kubrick's first noir film KILLER'S KISS--a flawed but fascinating film where you see the director experimenting with the noir aesthetic that he would master in THE KILLING.

For more on THE KILLING and its place among heist films, check out my essay "Classic Heist Flicks: The Art of the Steal."

The Criterion Collection:
KISS ME DEADLY
THE KILLING

Ida Lupino: Noir's Indispensable Dame

2011-07-07T11:54:00.004-04:00

Ida Lupino: actor, writer, producer, director, all-around noir bad ass.

Check out my essay Ida Lupino: Noir's Indispensable Dame over at Criminal Element. Not only was Ida one of noir's great leading ladies, she was also one of the rare performers (male or female) to exert as much power behind the scenes as she did in front of the camera.

Raymond Burr

2011-07-02T11:05:00.000-04:00

above: Burr throws a scare into Liz Scott and Dick Powell in PITFALL

It would be interesting to know if a hundred years from now the world will remember Raymond Burr's performance as Perry Mason on television. I have a suspicion that it won't. This theory is built on my gut instinct that people won't care about a TV show from the late fifties.

And yet I also suspect that there will be a small group of cinema geeks who still love film noir (I mean, people are still reading Sophocles...). If this suspicion proves true, then at least that small group of people will know and love Raymond Burr.

At this late date, most non-noir geeks still don't know that Raymond Burr was pretty much THE face of evil in the most important film genre of the 1950s. He played masterminds, henchmen, and stone-cold psychos. The one element of all of them? That stare that contained contempt for lesser beings. Everyone around him seemed to insult his intelligence.

I've written about Burr before, and I've written about one of his best films, the De Toth masterpiece PITFALL. But there's a new essay by Carl Steward over at the Film Noir Foundation website that's an excellent overview of Burr's career of crime. Go check it out and then track down PITFALL, and RAW DEAL, and ABANDONED. Hell, any of them. Burr was always great at being bad. Even in a crappy movie like FBI GIRL, he tore up the screen.

Alias Nick Beal (1949)

2011-06-26T21:56:00.000-04:00

The first time I read a synopsis of ALIAS NICK BEAL think I groaned a little. I like my noir down to earth, and this movie concerns a politician who gets involved with the devil. As in, the Prince of Darkness. Pass, I thought.

But...the movie is directed by the great John Farrow. It stars Ray Milland, Thomas Mitchell, Fred Clark and George Macready. And it has Audrey Totter in her prime. That’s reason enough to see any movie. So I saw it.

I had no idea this movie was going to be so good. Yes, it does indeed tell the story of a politician named Joseph Foster (Mitchell) who makes a deal with a mysterious stranger named Nick Beal (Milland). Beal guarantees Foster’s swift ascent up the rungs of power, much to the surprise and mounting horror of Foster’s wife (Geraldine Wall) and his best friend, the Reverend Garfield (Macready—cast, to put it mildly, against type). The only people who seem happy about Foster’s rise are the head of the state political machine (Fred Clark) and a prostitute named Donna Allen (Totter). Beal has set Donna up in high style and placed her near Foster to tempt him toward the abyss. (I guess because I’m not greedy the thought selling my soul to the devil in order to be governor doesn’t make much sense. But selling your soul for Audrey Totter…now that's a deal worth thinking about.)

If the plot sounds cheesy, it’s because the plot is cheesy. Yet ALIAS NICK BEAL is a fine example of how style can effect the rough materials of a film, transform them into something quite interesting. This material could have been taken and turned into something awful. As it is ALIAS NICK BEAL plays like a cross between IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and DOCTOR FAUSTUS. If Mephistopheles had answered George Bailey’s prayer, the result might have looked something like this movie.

The key component here is the great John Farrow. One of the masters of noir, Farrow was also a devout Catholic who wrote a book about the popes and was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre by Pious XI. This was a man who was serious about his religion, and ALIAS NICK BEAL for all its Hollywoodized elements, has a serious undercurrent. Joseph Foster isn’t a mere dupe. He’s an essentially good man with essentially good motives, but he has certain weaknesses. While still a district attorney, he’s willing to break the law a little in order to put a crook behind bars. He’s willing to make a deal with the corrupt political machine in his state in order to get elected, but once he gets to the statehouse he plans to be an honest governor. Even his relationship with Donna is more about emotional comfort and support than sex. Farrow foregrounds the flawed character of his poor antihero. Played by the always dependable Thomas Mitchell, Foster seems like a plausible human being.

The same is true of Donna, the prostitute-turned-lady played by Audrey Totter. The film contains an extraordinary scene in which Nick picks up Donna outside a bar. She tries to flirt with him, but he’s cold to her. She’s just a pawn—and you get the sense she’s used to playing the role of pawn for men. Donna, like Foster, isn’t a “bad” person, she’s just a woman with certain weaknesses. Later in the film, there’s a sequence in Donna’s swank new apartment in which Nick coaches her on how to seduce Foster, followed by Foster’s arrival and the actual seduction. This entire sequence—from Nick and Donna to Donna and Foster is an exquisite piece of work. Totter—one of the true goddesses of film noir—was rarely better than she is here. She’s sexy, sad, and touching. (Another reason you should see this film: Totter’s apartment is an amazing set, one of the best/weirdest you’ll ever see in a film noir. It looks like Salvador Dali was her decorator.)

Of course, the real trick here is how you handle Nick Beal himself. Here the film commits a couple of sins. There are a few too many scenes of Nick appearing from out of nowhere and then disappearing. There’s a faintly ominous musical cue. Yet even in these moments, Farrow doesn’t really lay it on too thick. The scene in which Foster and Reverend Garfield discuss the possibility that Beal is Lucifer is as good as such a scene could be:

Foster: We’re in the twentieth century, Tom. No one’s believe in such things since the Salem witch burnings. Besides...where’s the tail and the horns…and where’s the contract signed in blood and promising the delivery of one slightly used soul?

Rev. Garfield: Maybe the devil knows it’s the twentieth century too, Joseph.

Most importantly, Farrow has Ray Milland portray Nick as smooth, charming, and, most importantly, smart. He reminds me in some ways of CS Lewis’s Screwtape. Nick knows people, he knows what they want and why they want it. His business is human weakness, and business is good.

One might legitimately ask if a supernatural thriller like this qualifies as film noir. I would say yes to that question by citing three things: One, it’s directed by John Farrow and stars Ray Milland, Fred Clark, George Macready, and Audrey Totter (it’s even got a bit part for Percy Helton). That’s not enough by itself to qualify as noir, but it’s a hell of a good start. Two, the film is gorgeously shot by Lionel Linden and just about every scene fits the noir aesthetic. Three, the supernatural element of the film is just a more Christianized version of an essential noir tension: individual choice versus the vicissitudes of fate (another way to put that would be as existentialism versus nihilism). The ending of the film finds a way to reconfirm Farrow’s belief in forgiveness and redemption (as well as the studio’s belief in happy endings), but it doesn’t feel cheap. It gives Nick Beal some parting words that sound like catechism in the Church of Noir: “You saved yourself just in time, didn’t you? But there’ll be others who won’t. A lot of others. And I’ll tell you why. In everyone there’s a seed of destruction, a fatal weakness. You know that now, Foster. You’re lucky. Luckier than I was when I fell. But that was a long time ago.”

Too Late For Tears Restoration

2011-06-19T21:06:00.009-04:00

Some exciting news in the new issue of Noir City is the announcement that the Film Noir Foundation will be restoring TOO LATE FOR TEARS. This is thrilling news for three reasons:

1. TOO LATE FOR TEARS is one of the real forgotten masterpieces of film noir. I'd put it among the handful of truly great films in the genre. It features a career-best performance from Lizabeth Scott and stellar work from Dan Duryea. For more on the film itself, read here.

2. It's in rough shape. This is one of those films that's been kicked around the public domain for decades and treated like a piece of trash. It's in desperate need of rescue and restoration.

3. We've been close before. Rescue and restoration is a tedious business. Finding all the proper elements to snatch this film from the jaws of oblivion is hard work. America should give an award to Eddie Muller and the folks at the Film Noir Foundation for staying true to their mission. It's exciting to think that this film could be rescued while Ms. Scott is still with us to enjoy it.

More on this as we go along.

The Maltese Falcon at 70

2011-06-11T00:05:00.000-04:00

I have a new essay up over at Criminal Element commemorating the 70th anniversary of John Huston's THE MALTESE FALCON. It's difficult to believe that this film is seventy years old--it's one of the few movies that I can show to classrooms of 18-year old kids and stay secure in the knowledge that it'll keep their attention. For an examination of this timeless masterpiece you can read my essay here.

Then come back here for more on Bogart.

The Tree of Life (2011)

2011-06-04T14:18:00.014-04:00

Terrence Malick has more in common with poets than he does with most filmmakers. He's not a storyteller in the sense that we've come to expect from American directors, especially in Hollywood. I point this out neither to praise nor diminish Malick. Going into one of his films, it's just important to know what you are going to see.

Most movies--great movies, good movies, terrible movies--tell stories. It has been thus since the early days of film. Whether we realize it or not, when we go to the movies we expect to see a sequence of events about a set of characters unfold. We expect rising action, complications, a climax, and perhaps a resolution. This is true of both artistic masterpieces and commercial dreck.

There is a whole other school of filmmaking, however, that is non-narrative, that is more abstract in nature. It is about movement, sound. Images are created not to further a plot but to invoke mood and feeling, and the juxtaposition of these images create meaning to be interpreted. You must sort through these films to decide what they mean (if, indeed, they mean anything). You can trace this type of "experimental film" back to European surrealists like Bunuel (whose 1929 UN CHIEN ANDALOU is still as fresh and scary as the day it was made) and American avant-gardists like Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, co-directors of the indispensable 1943 film MESHES IN THE AFTERNOON. (Besides being trippy and entertaining, the film is indispensable because it is such a jarring time capsule. It's hard to believe MESHES IN THE AFTERNOON was made the same year CASABLANCA won Best Picture at the Oscars). The great modern experimental filmmaker was doubtless Stan Brakhage who died in 2002 and left behind some 370-something films.

What makes Terrence Malick such an oddity is the way he straddles the two worlds of narrative and non-narrative filmmaking. His film THE TREE OF LIFE has narrative passages, but it's not really a story. It's more of a memory album. We see a man played by Sean Penn, a successful architect who works in a high rise building. He seems to be reflecting on his childhood in Texas. His memories make up the main part of the film. His father (played by a laconic Brad Pitt) and mother (played by the ethereal newcomer Jessica Chastain) create a home together that is full of love and tension and violence and wonder. There are incidents involving these characters I could recount, but there's a far more important point to make instead.

In our own lives, we all create a narrative for ourselves. I have one: about a childhood in Arkansas, about my parents, about my two brothers, about leaving home and moving out of state, about my education and relationships along the way. It's the story of my life, but it is only a story I tell. I've shaved away 99.9% of my actual life, reduced it down to some bullet points about my existence. My actual memories, though, are a collection of a million images and impressions: the heat of summer, the sound of my brothers' laughter, my father's calloused hands, the softness of my mother's skin.

That physical sense of memory is what Malick is after in THE TREE OF LIFE, and in this he succeeds gloriously. This is an art film, a film about images and memory. That's not really the odd part about it, though. Many art films get made and go unseen by the general public every year. What makes THE TREE OF LIFE an oddity is that it was made in Hollywood, has incredible special effects and a high production value, and features a major movie star in Sean Penn and an international superstar in Brad Pitt. It's because of the desire of these two stars, and particularly Pitt, to be in a Terrence Malick film that THE TREE OF LIFE even got made, much less released to the public. (I saw this quiet, contemplative tone poem at a theater that was also showing THOR in 3D.)

I have yet to discuss two major sections of the film: a twenty-minute sequence near the beginning in which we see the universe come into being, and the end of the film, an almost surrealist sequence, in which we seem to be seeing either a) heaven, b) the end of the world, or c) something else.

I love the beginning sequence, in part because it's such a vindication for the art of special effects. Like many movie geeks, I sometimes tire of watching shit blow up real good in movies. To watch Malick and his special effects team create the beginning of the world is to be swept into a realm of wonder that movies so rarely even attempt to touch.

As for the end...I don't know. Malick paints a distinctly Christianity-inspired vision of forgiveness, of restitution and spiritual resolution on the peaceful banks of an ocean after a long walk through a desert. Is he doing our thinking for us here, telling us that heaven is our final destination? Or is it a vision of the way all the people and events in our life seem to converge in our consciousness? Or is it the end of the world? Having seen the film only once, I can't say for sure what the poet is trying to tell us here.

There you have it. THE TREE OF LIFE is certainly unlike any other film playing in theaters right now. It's a film full of the inarticulate sadness and wonder of life. If that sounds too arty, then maybe you should steer clear.

But it is a beautiful work of art. I'll close with a final word about poetry. In its recreation of the beginning of the universe, the film hearkens back to The Book of Job, from which the film takes its epigraph: "where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" Yaweh's rhetorical question to Job is famously evasive. After all, he never gives Job the "reason" for human suffering, but what his answer does make clear is that the suffering of humanity is built into the foundation of existence. We live, we suffer, we die. "The Lord giveth," as Job tells us, "and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." In other words: that's life.

Finally, in its memory sequences involving the family--particularly the hard father and his sensitive son--I was reminded of one of my favorite poems, "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden and the final haunting line:

What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Tension (1949)

2011-05-28T20:59:00.000-04:00

Mrs. Claire Quimby is one of the great femme fatales, but she occupies the center of a flawed movie. As Claire, star Audrey Totter creates a full blooded man-eater, but she has to swim against the tide of a silly script. In a way, this underscores a fundamental truth about film noirs: most of them are far from perfect.

If it misses perfection TENSION is still an excellent piece of work. Directed by soon-to-be-blacklisted John Berry (one of the names Edward Dmytryk ratted out to Congress), it stars Totter as the promiscuous wife of milquetoast pharmacist Warren Quimby (played by Richard Basehart). While poor Warren slaves away behind the counter at an all-night pharmacy, Claire runs around town with the likes of liquor salesman Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough). Finally, Claire gets bored with coming back to her husband, so she dumps him and moves in with Deager for a life of drinking and sunbathing. Warren goes out to Deager’s beach house to confront them and gets his ass kicked in front of his wife for his trouble. So far, we’re on pretty solid ground. We’re on pretty solid ground, too, when Quimby decides to kill Deager. It’s his brilliant murder scheme that presents the big problem of the script.

I won’t give away his master plan (because, as I say, the movie still works despite this flaw) but I will say that it does not represent a high point in the history of premeditated murder. You watch it unfold, and you think, “God, Quimby, that’s sorta dumb. There’re a lot simpler ways to go about this, you know.” This problem is compounded by watching the cops fail to figure out the "mystery" for a while.

And yet, TENSION demonstrates another fundamental truth about film noir: great style can redeem an inadequate plot. This movie is a textbook example what a film noir should look like. Berry is nimble with his camera, always finding the best shot and the most effective way to convey information with images. Watch the scene of Quimby coming home after work, afraid of finding his wife gone. The camera movements work like music to wed his fear of finding her gone to an erotic charge of finding her there. Berry’s camera is in synch with a tremendous score by Andre Previn. The composer laces a sexy saxophone under Totter’s every appearance in the film, musical shorthand for a fallen woman promising earthly delights in exchange for a man’s soul. The final component in the film’s style is the beautiful cinematography by Harry Stradling. Stradling’s work was less expressionist than that of someone like John Alton, but it is no less effective. His work here rivals his achievement in Preminger’s masterpiece ANGEL FACE.

On top of everything else, TENSION also boasts a great ensemble cast. Richard Basehart, so often cast as psychos, is perfect as the cuckolded husband burning to get revenge. It’s one of his best performances, and a sign that he was capable of much more than was so often asked of him. Barry Sullivan and William Conrad are a couple of smartass cops, laconic and amused by the world in which they operate (though they’re a little slow to pick up on Quimby’s goofy plan). And Cyd Charisse is lovely and likable as Mary, the dark-haired good girl who falls for Quimby, an effective contrast to Totter’s blonde goddess of evil.

And Audrey Totter—she of the perfect figure and severe eyebrows —here earns her place in the pantheon of deadly femmes. Allen Rivkin’s script may revolve around her husband’s doofus-level strategizing, but Clare electrifies every scene she’s in and lifts the whole movie to a different level. Totter never plays Claire as an evil caricature but rather as a woman with a large sexual appetite and a hunger for the easy life. Even as the plot progresses and Clare becomes more of a monster, she never completely loses our sympathy. She may be no damn good, but when she tells Warren what a schmuck he’s become ( “It was different in San Diego - you were kind of cute in your uniform. You were full of laughs then. Well, you're all laughed out now.”) it’s difficult to miss the disappointment that’s driving her. Femme fatales are always most effective when their evil derives from a real emotional place, in Clare’s case her violent reaction to the postwar suburban-utopia. She prefers the speed and movement of the war years over her husband’s enthusiastic promise of a house with a garbage disposal.

Well, hell, who can blame her?

*

Here's a link to an interesting interview with Totter.

And here again I'm going to give yet another shout-out to an amazing book by Eddie Muller called Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir. If you fall in love with Audrey Totter--and you should be warned that watching TENSION might very well put you under her spell--you will want to read this book, which features a long section on her life and career. It also features sections on five other noir goddesses--Jane Greer, Ann Savage, Coleen Gray, Marie Windsor, and Evelyn Keyes. It's a fascinating book about these six women, their careers in Hollywood, struggles in life, and rebirth as cult figures.

Orson Welles and Film Noir

2011-05-22T12:37:00.000-04:00

The new issue of NOIR CITY features my 5,000+ word essay "Hell Itself Couldn't Be a Stranger Place" about the film noir of Orson Welles. (Also included in my section on Welles are a bibliographic overview of works about the director as well as a review of ORSON WELLES AT WORK.) And my work on the Great One is just a piece of an impressive collection of essays and articles, including Vince Keenan's great piece on the place of female lounge singers in noir, profiles of stars Raymond Burr, Clare Trevor, and Alan Ladd, and a look at the writer Steve Fisher. You can get a subscription to the journal and help support film noir restoration and recovery here.

Existentialism with a Happy Ending

2011-05-18T09:50:00.011-04:00

Spoiler Warning: This essay concerns the way in which the endings of film noirs affect their meaning. As such, it gives away the endings of HE RAN ALL THE WAY, WHERE DANGER LIVES, THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE, and PITFALL.

Hardcore noir fans love an unhappy ending, and we all remember the best of the bleak. Everyone has their favorite doom-filled closer, but perhaps the most brutal final moment comes at the end of HE RAN ALL THE WAY (1951). John Garfield, fatally shot, stumbles down a sidewalk and drops dead in a rain splashed gutter. The End is his only epitaph, but Garfield is hardly the first noir antihero to go out this way. The downer final scene is as much a characteristic of film noir as tilted angles and cigarette smoke.

Which makes it all the more curious to observe how many noirs end on a high note. Crime pictures of the forties and fifties were, after all, no more immune to the dictated “Hollywood Ending” than were Westerns. Of course, manufactured cheerfulness was always the town’s chief export, but noir is defined, at least in part, by an opposition to the studio-mandated insistence that everything will work out fine. A major appeal of noir is that it tells the brutal truth about the end of things. Yet, many noirs are stamped with officialdom’s seal of approval: the last minute conversion to the cult of contentment.

What effect does this have on the films? After all, a story’s resolution is seldom inconsequential, and the right ending gives a film the aftertaste of perfection. Does it simply not matter when a film makes a swerve away from its tone and theme at the last minute? If the arc of a film is clearly bending towards doom, then how much do we discount its contortions to arrive at an ending designed to please a studio boss with his eye on the bottom line?

It depends, of course, upon execution. Often, a film will hurtle toward doom, and then at the last possible instant, it will swerve like a teenager playing chicken. Sometimes the film will even give us two endings, a downer followed by a burst of sunshine. In John Farrow’s WHERE DANGER LIVES (1950), a tacked-on happy ending steps on the end of a perfect, bleak finale. Robert Mitchum—everyone’s favorite fool for women—has spent an hour following beautiful psycho Faith Domergue (above) around Southern California as they run from the cops. At a sleazy border hotel, she decides she’s sick of him and, in a brilliantly staged scene, she smothers him with a pillow. Or does she? Since Mitchum made a career out of following sirens to his doom, the commutation of his death sentence here feels even more like an anticlimax. His last minute reprieve spares a foolish man the consequences of his attraction to a femme fatale, but we all know the movie would be better if Mitchum had died on the floor of that dirty hotel. The happy ending here is a clunky way to avoid the underlying logic of the story.

In the worst cases, the happy ending comes like a sloppy second thought. The end of Fleischer’s otherwise clockwork-tight THE NARROW MARGIN (1952) provides a particularly egregious example of the slapdash resolution. After revealing that gangster-girlfriend-turned-secret-witness Marie Windsor is actually an undercover cop, the film kills her off. Inexplicably, everyone in the movie promptly forgets about her. Charles McGraw and Jacqueline White stroll off sporting smiles, and Marie isn’t even cold yet. That cheerful final scene comes like a punch in the gut, but it does have the odd effect of making a rather dour point: nothing matters. You can die, but you will not be missed. In its way, the chipper last shot of THE NARROW MARGIN is as nihilistic as the final shot of HE RAN ALL THE WAY.

Of course, some happy endings function as ironic comments on the resolution of their plots. In THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE (1947), salesman Ted North is driving home to his loving wife when he stops to pick up a hitchhiking sociopath played by Lawrence Tierney. Now, Tierney— being Tierney—promptly turns North’s life into an unbearable hell. In the end, Tierney is gunned down by the cops, and we return to North in his car, this time joined by his wife. She giddily announces she’s pregnant—a cue for celebratory music and the fade out. It’s too late, though. North’s plunge into chaos, his glimpse of the void personified by Tierney, is only reinforced by the ending’s nervous reassertion of the power of family and middle-class security. Shakespeare, it should be noted, often followed a similar structure—just look at his proto-noir MACBETH. He begins with the kingdom in order, hurls it into chaos, and then, once the stage is awash in blood, he quickly reestablishes order just before the final curtain.

At its best, this reestablishment of order can be as complex and subversive as the chaos it seeks to replace. Perhaps the best example of the multilayered ending in noir comes at the end of Andre De Toth’s brilliant PITFALL (1948). We follow a married insurance investigator played by Dick Powell as he embarks on an affair with sexy Lizabeth Scott. Trouble is, Scott is being stalked by a psycho private eye played by Raymond Burr. One can easily guess that in 1948 the censors weren’t going to let adultery go unpunished, nor were they going to let Powell leave his wife. As De Toth told Alain Silver in an interview in 2000, "In PITFALL, we did have problems with the ending before the Hays Code would approve....You couldn't commit adultery…When the Hays office looked at the script, they said no, no Code Seal.” How the film finesses the end of its plot, however, is one of its more fascinating features. Scott shoots Burr, and Powell comes clean to his wife (Jane Wyatt). The film ends with Scott being led away by the cops and Powell reunited with his betrayed wife. The ambiguity here and the intrinsic sexism of the punishment is as complicated as a Douglas Sirk film. This is not an uplifting ending—it is neither happy nor comical—but it does satisfy the dictated reassertion of the moral code. Things are once again as they “should be” with the man returned to his family and the other woman being punished for tempting him, yet everything feels irreparably damaged. The film has met its obligation to censor and studio, but in doing so it has crafted a finale that is deeply subversive. This is appropriate. Despite some ostensibly “happy” endings, film noir’s business is exposing tensions, not resolving them. Beyond whatever tidy resolutions might be arrived at, we know there’s more trouble to come. This too seems fitting. As Orson Welles once noted, to arrive at a happy ending “it just depends on where you stop your story.”

A previous version of this essay appeared in the NOIR CITY SENTIEL ANNUAL #2.

Recovering Norman Foster

2011-05-08T14:24:00.000-04:00

Norman Foster was a writer/director of enormous skill who made impressive contributions to film noir (like the freaky WOMAN ON THE RUN and the tragically romantic KISS THE BLOOD OFF MY HANDS). He was also an expat whose fascinating work in Mexican cinema in the mid-forties (like the freakier-than-freaky EL AHIJADO DE LA MUERTE) is ripe for rediscovery. For years, Foster has been overlooked, but I explore his life--a life as surprising and fascinating as that of his friend and collaborator Orson Welles--in an essay in the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal.

The Altars of Forgotten Women (revisited)

2011-05-06T12:13:00.008-04:00

above: Yvette Vickers in ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN

The recent death of actress Yvette Vickers, whose mummified body was found in her apartment at age 73 last week, is a gruesome example of an old truth about Hollywood. The movies offer a weird kind of immortality, but it's only offered to a chosen few. If you've never heard of Vickers, don't feel bad. Most people haven't. In addition to being a one-time Playboy bunny, her main claim to fame is playing slutty bad girl Honey Parker in the campy ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN. That's not much of a claim to fame (though, for the record, Vickers is good in the role and probably would have made a fine femme fatale if given the chance), but it's what Vickers had. Interestingly, she was an extra in two excellent noirs, THE SOUND OF FURY and SUNSET BLVD. Imagine being that close to greatness and watching it slip by. Vickers was just another pretty face.

Except, of course, that she wasn't. She was a human being who came close to the center of the white hot light that shines on movie stars, only to watch the light move on to other people.

Her death has put me in mind of an essay I wrote a couple of years ago about the women of film noir, so many of whom were forgotten in their day only to find stardom in the cults that sprang up around discard B-picture masterpieces like TOO LATE FOR TEARS, ROADBLOCK, DETOUR, THE NARROW MARGIN, TENSION, NIGHT EDITOR, and so many more. I've decided to reprint the essay "The Altars of Forgotten Women" here in honor of Yvette Vickers.

above: Lizabeth Scott in DESERT FURY

One of the sad ironies of film noir is that many of its icons were never stars in their lifetime. More than any other genre, stardom in noir is retroactive. Someone like Ann Savage had only the most fleeting taste of fame in her youth before Hollywood showed her the door. Yet, Savage was one the lucky people who lived to see her fame catch up to her. A cheap little sixty-seven minute crime picture called DETOUR--a picture Savage appears in for all of thirty minutes--somehow endured and prospered over the years. Savage was in her sixties and working as a secretary when she discovered that she was at the center of a cult.

Savage’s cult is just a faction of something larger called film noir, which is, among other things, largely a cult of forgotten women. Savage was not alone in finding herself as an object of worship. Within this convocation there are many different sects, sects with passionately devoted followers. Actresses like Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor, Janis Carter, and Lizabeth Scott all have legions of admirers. None of them were really stars in their day, but their movies have a life all their own. Long after their careers fizzled out, sometimes after their own deaths, some actresses finally became stars. That just about defines the word bittersweet.

Of course, major stars like Audrey Hepburn and Judy Garland experience the same life after death effect, and a select few even seem to reach beyond mere stardom and become a part of the larger shared consciousness of society. You could argue, at this point in Western culture, that Marilyn Monroe is nearly as iconic as the Virgin Mary.

Yet film noir is a genre born out of B-movie obscurity. Lizabeth Scott will never be as famous as Marilyn Monroe, but she is the queen of her own dark little corner of Dreamtown. She starred in more film noirs than nearly anyone else—and she was also unique in that her filmography consists mostly of noirs. She only made a handful of movies that didn’t involve people betraying each other and ending up gutshot at the end. She played the entire range of characters available to actresses in the genre, from doe-eyed innocents (THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS, THE COMPANY SHE KEEPS) to world-weary lounge singers (DARK CITY, I WALK ALONE) to cold-blooded femme fatales (TOO LATE FOR TEARS, STOLEN FACE). She starred in one of the genre’s real lowlights, the misogynistic DEAD RECKONING. She starred in what maybe the campiest noir ever made, the hilarious DESERT FURY. Perhaps most importantly, she starred in two of the finest noirs we have, Andre De Toth’s PITFALL and Byron Haskin’s TOO LATE FOR TEARS.

To understand the appeal of Liz Scott, one only need to look at those last two films. In the first, she plays a woman named Mona Stevens who falls into an affair with a married man played by Dick Powell. Their affair is discovered by a psychotic private detective (played by Raymond Burr) who is obsessed with Mona and proceeds to make life hell for everyone involved. The cast here is superb, and at the center , in a performance of great sympathy, is Lizabeth Scott. She makes Mona a sexy woman (which must have been fairly easy since Scott herself was gorgeous, blonde, and had a voice that was equal parts cigarettes and silk), but she also makes Mona a sad woman. Loneliness is the undercurrent of Scott's voice, the thing that pulls you further down into her trap. Even when she’s happy, you can tell that Scott is afraid of the worst. In PITFALL, she pretty much gets the worst at the hands of thoughtless men.

In TOO LATE FOR TEARS, she gets her revenge. As housewife turned criminal Jane Palmer, Scott creates a portrait of coolheaded evil. Jane and her husband Alan (Arthur Kennedy) are driving home one night when someone tosses a briefcase full of money into their car. Is the money a payment for a ransom? Perhaps a blackmail payoff? Alan doesn’t care, he just wants to turn the money over to the cops. His wife, ah, disagrees. She’s willing to do anything to keep the cash, even after slimy crook Dan Duryea shows up looking for it and slaps her around. Neither the crook nor the husband have any idea who they’re dealing with in Jane Palmer. These guys are toast. With her performance, Scott makes a pretty good grab for the most evil femme fatale on record, yet she also makes Jane Palmer curiously relatable. Again, there’s that sadness, that aching, unfulfilled need at the center of Lizabeth Scott that comes through in her performance. Jane Palmer is evil, yes, but she’s also smart, dogged, and utterly human.

It is, after all, humanity that is the great appeal of the forgotten women of film noir, our sense that we’re seeing a human being alive onscreen. Movies of the forties and fifties were made to be dreamlike, and all these years later they still seem like dreams. The dreams hook us; the humanity makes us obsessives, worshipers at the altar. Who was this woman? we ask. Not just Queen Liz (who, happily, is still alive), but so many others. We watch them laugh and cry and scheme and die and then we watch them do it all over again. It doesn’t take much to hook us.

Take Joan Dixon. In 1951 she starred in a vastly underrated film noir called ROADBLOCK alongside Charles McGraw. She plays Diane, a sexy conwoman who marries a straight-laced insurance investigator named Joe Peters, a marriage that will have disastrous results. Joan Dixon strolls through this movie as if she’s one of the great femme fatales. It’s not just that she’s beautiful, it’s that she projects that essential combination of intoxicating sexual allure and an untouchable, unknowable center. Is Diane bad? It’s tough to say. Dixon might be criticized for giving a performance that's too laid back, but I would argue that very ambiguity is her greatest attribute. She doesn’t set out to ruin Joe Peters, but once she meets him, he’s a goner. It’s an interesting take on the femme fatale. Many femmes are man-eating monsters. Diane is different. She’s a catalyst who opens up all the insecurity and greed buried beneath honest Joe Peters’ upright façade. It takes quite a gal to destroy Charles McGraw. Joan Dixon does it without really trying.

One thing’s for sure: she never had much of a career in Hollywood. She started out at RKO under contract to Howard Hughes (which was not somewhere a fresh-faced twenty-year old from Norfolk, Virginia wanted to find herself). Hughes promised to build her career, but he was too busy running RKO into the ground. Dixon spent most of her time in low budget westerns and ended her acting career in the late fifties doing bit parts on television. By then, she’d become a lounge singer and was mostly notable in the newspapers for a string of quick marriages and messy divorces. She died in Los Angles in 1992.

Yet she lives on in this little-seen masterpiece. Her fame hasn’t happened yet, unlike Ann Savage or Lizabeth Scott. Even in the insular world of film noir, Joan Dixon isn’t an icon—yet. I have faith, however, that her cult is coming. If there’s one thing that you can learn from the history of noir, it’s that there’s always time.

99 River Street (1953)

2011-04-29T23:24:00.002-04:00

Crime pictures don’t come much tougher than Phil Karlson’s 99 River Street. They also don’t come much smarter, better acted, or more suspenseful. In short, they don’t come much better.

99 River Street is the nighttime odyssey of an ex-boxer turned cabbie named Ernie Driscoll (John Payne). The night begins pretty badly, with Ernie watching a television program recounting his last fight—a fight where he not only got beat, but suffered a career-ending injury to his left eye. It’s bad enough for Ernie to watch a replay of the worst moment of his life, but his no-good, ex-showgirl wife Pauline (Peggy Castle) is watching it with him. Sensitive soul that she is, she takes the opportunity to remind him what a deadbeat he is. She married a guy on his way to the top, she complains. Now she’s stuck with a loser driving a cab and talking about opening a gas station.

Ernie drives Pauline to work—suffering an ass-chewing the whole way—and then he heads to a coffee shop before his shift starts. While he’s there he runs into his friend Linda James (Evelyn Keyes), a struggling actress. She’s on her way to an audition for a big part. Ernie wishes her luck. Nice girl. One can’t help but note the contrast with Ernie’s wife. He probably notes it, too, but he wants to make his marriage work. To smooth things over with Pauline, he buys an expensive box of candy and takes it over to the florist's shop where she works, but when he gets there he catches her with another man, a hood named Victor Rawlins (Brad Dexter). Turns out Rawlins has just pulled off a big jewel heist. He’s ready to leave town with Pauline.

Things have just begun and one of the pleasures of 99 River Street is the way the plot complications keep coming. Ernie’s in for one hell of a night: murder, multiple betrayals, police dragnets for two different crimes, a carload of gangsters, and more ass-kicking than anyone can keep track of. The script by Robert Smith, from a story by George Zuckerman (reworked by Karlson and Payne) is a brilliant example of the “long dark night” subgenre of noir.

I love the Long Dark Night. An ordinary man with pressing problems discovers one night that his entire life has come to a head. The sun has gone down, and his world is about to fly apart. Maybe he will survive this night, and maybe he won’t, but either way everything is about to change. As Ernie Driscoll crisscrosses nighttime New York City, dodging cops and gangsters, having his heart broken over and over, he’s forced to face down his demons and summon strengths he didn’t know he possessed.

Phil Karlson was one of noir’s great directors. His impressive list of credits includes Scandal Sheet with Broderick Crawford, Kansas City Confidential and Hell’s Island (both with Payne), and the early corruption drama The Phenix City Story. Any noir fan will probably have their favorite Karlson movie, but 99 River Street exemplifies what was best about his work. It’s exciting and completely unsentimental. Karlson was a master of action, and this movie is his masterpiece of brutality. It begins with a savage boxing match and ends with a white-knuckle slugfest on the docks. In between is a cavalcade of slappings, beatings, and gun fights. In a genre known for ass-kicking, 99 River Street is an ass-kicking nirvana.

Yet it’s also an incredibly well-acted drama. Payne is one of noir’s great underrated performers. A former pretty-boy song-and-dance man, he matured into a perfect lead for the mean streets. His fleshy face and stocky build belied a subtle voice and dark, mournful eyes. His support here could not be better. Evelyn Keyes, another underrated noir performer, is perky, sexy and funny as Linda. She has two big scenes (one in a theater and one in a seedy bar) that will leave you wondering how she managed to avoid a huge career in movies. The beautiful but tragic Peggy Castle (an alcoholic who eventually drank herself to death) is wonderfully mean as Payne’s no-good wife, and she’s matched perfectly with Brad Dexter as her hoodlum boyfriend. Dexter’s one of my favorite supporting players in noir, a cool, understated actor with blue eyes that are intense and soulless at the same time. He’s best known for his brief turn as the corrupt private-eye in The Asphalt Jungle, but this is his best performance. He’s so smarmy you can barely wait to see Payne beat the shit out of him.

It can be tricky to define film noir for newcomers to the genre, but here’s a pretty good shorthand for beginners: 99 River Street.

Criminal Element

2011-04-27T08:01:00.003-04:00

Starting today, I'm beginning a regular gig over at Macmillan's new crime and mystery website CriminalElement.com. I'll be contributing regular essays on noir, crime fiction, and the like.

To kick things off, I take a look at the long but foggy history of Amnesia Noir. Guy Pearce wasn't the first noir antihero with a bad memory. The roots go back to noir's early days where amnesia plots were a staple. Check out my essay at criminalelement.com