Mug Shots #6: Sterling Hayden AKA The Nothing Man

Click here to read my new essay on Sterling Hayden over at Criminal Element.

He is as subtle as a scalding cup of coffee. His art is, as they say, in his artlessness. Gruff and bellowing, his art is actually found in his artifice, his lack of “reality” making him as perfectly suited to noir as black and white cinematography. Three great performances (as a thug in Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, as a mastermind in Kubrick’s The Killing, and as a surly cop in De Toth’s underrated Crime Wave) are his claim to fame. He also gave some purely awful performances, but who gives a shit? Even more than Charles McGraw, Hayden is a man with almost no subtext. What you see is what you get, and what you get is wonderful. One of the true icons of the genre.

Offscreen, Hayden was a truly fascinating character, a free spirit who loathed Hollywood and the profession of acting and eventually quit, grew a wicked beard and sailed around the world writing books. Here's an interview.

And here's a snippet of a French television program about Hayden. It's short, but it features some footage with the man himself. What a character. They don't make actors like this anymore.

Essential:
The Killing
The Asphalt Jungle
Crime Wave

Best of the Rest:
Naked Alibi
Manhandled
The Come On

Non-Noir Work:
Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
The Godfather
Johnny Guitar
Terror In A Texas Town

Not My Favorites:
The Long Goodbye
Suddenly
Crime Of Passion

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Heist movies have a different internal energy than a lot of film noirs. Movies about sex and murder have a certain inner fire. They’re fueled by lust or bloodlust, and it’s up to the creators of those movies to get our adrenaline pumping, to tap into our inner adulterers, our inner murderers. Heist movies, on the other hand, are colder at the core because they’re not about passion but process. That’s the key to their delicious appeal. They tap into the part of us that wants to be a professional transgressor.

John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle is maybe the best heist movie ever made. If it’s not the best, then it certainly set the template that most other great heist movies (Rififi, The Killing) would follow. It assembles a large cast of character actors, arms them with a master plan to knock over a huge score, and then sets the wheels turning toward an eventual unraveling.

Sam Jaffe stars as Doc Riedenschneider, a criminal mastermind with a foolproof plan for a jewel heist. He goes to see a sweaty, smalltime bookie (Marc Lawrence) who puts him in contact with a morally compromised lawyer named Emmerich (Louis Calhern). Emmerich agrees to front the money for the heist, but we find out find out pretty quick that he has alternative plans for the jewels. The only person that Doc can really trust is a surly hood named Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) who just wants enough money to get the hell out of the city.

The cast here is superb, and superbly utilized. Character actors often relegated to the back of the frame are suddenly up front and center, and everyone rises to the challenge. Jaffe manages to be both likable and creepy as Doc, a brilliant tactician who also happens to have a soft spot for teenaged girls. Louis Calhern gives an elegantly nuanced performance as Emmerich, the very model of self-deluding corruption, and Marc Lawrence—who was in approximately every B-movie ever made— shines as the little bookie with a bundle of nerves and a big mouth. Throw in a scene-stealing James Whitmore as a feisty, hunchbacked getaway driver; Marilyn Monroe as Calhern’s much younger mistress; and Jean Hagen playing a dim-but-sweet cocktail waitress, and you have an ensemble with no weak link.

Leading this gang of thieves and misfits is Sterling Hayden as Dix, Jaffe’s right hand hooligan. Like fellow noir stalwart Charles McGraw, Hayden is about as artless as a punch in the gut, but he has a quality that seems readymade for the smoky backrooms and cheaply furnished apartments of film noir. Hulking and gruff, he looks as if he’s been up all night, drinking, gambling, and stalking his way through a city he hates. With this film alone, Hayden established himself as an icon in the genre. (He made a lot of other noirs or varying quality, but starred in two other masterpieces Crime Wave and The Killing.)

All this great casting would be for nothing if there weren’t steady hands at the wheel, but the work behind the camera is as good as the work in front. Harold Rosson’s exquisite cinema-tography is a mixture of the realistic and the atmospheric. The opening scenes remind me of something out of neorealism, but Lawrence’s hole-in-the-wall gambling den is bathed in smoke and shadows. Meanwhile the topnotch script (co-written by John Huston and Ben Maddow, from the book by WR Burnett) is finely crafted, giving dimension and good lines to even the smallest character parts (hearing a police siren in the distance, a safecracker’s worried wife says, “it sounds just like a soul in hell”).

The main creative force behind the camera was, of course, John Huston, a director who could make any kind of movie, and did, though his prodigious output was wildly uneven. He made great movies, shitty movies, and every kind of movie in between. For every masterpiece (The Maltese Falcon), he made a piece of junk (Freud). And when he wanted to, he could even make a movie that seemed both great and shitty at the same time (Reflections in a Golden Eye).

With The Asphalt Jungle, Huston reached the peak of his game. One might object that The Maltese Falcon is better, but Huston’s direction here is snappier, more interesting. There’s a showdown late in the film between Hayden and Brad Dexter (playing Calhern’s henchman in another of the film’s fine performances), and the scene is a lesson in how to use the camera to build and then release suspense. Likewise, the jewel heist itself is a classic bit of cinema and a blueprint for all the heist flicks which followed it.

The entire movie feels way. Huston marshaled his cast and collaborators into telling a story that is ultimately rich with pathos but for the most part unfolds with the cold logic of an arrest report. These characters make their living out of crime (“just a left-handed form of human endeavor” Calhern observes), and for much of the movie Huston was content to sit back and let us watch them at their work because he instinctively understood that it was the work we wanted to see, the work of professional thieves. By making that the emphasis, he created a prototype. What The Maltese Falcon was to detective flicks and Double Indemnity was to the femme fatale movie, The Asphalt Jungle was to heist movies. It is classic, indispensible film noir.

*

For an interesting look at the career of John Huston, read here. I disagree with some of what it says--Falcon and Jungle are masterpieces, not simply casting coups--but it's a smart look at his body of work.

Manhandled (1949)

After watching a good Dan Duryea performance, I’m always reminded of Dashiell Hammett’s description of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon: “He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.” Duryea’s charisma was a giddy superficiality masking an inner demon. This guy would slap around his own mother if it’d make him a buck. Like Kirk Douglas, he excelled at playing sons of bitches. He never became a leading man the way Douglas did, but he redeemed a lot of movies in the course of his career.

Case in proof is Lewis Foster’s 1949 Manhandled. The film begins with a writer played by Alan Napier who has been having recurring dreams about murdering his wife and making off with her jewelry. He goes to see a sham psychiatrist whose morally ambiguous secretary Merl (Dorothy Lamour) tells her downstairs neighbor about the dreams and the jewelry. Unfortunately, her neighbor happens to be a sleazy con man named Karl Benson (Duryea). Soon, the wife is found murdered, her jewelry missing. A smart cop (Art Smith) and a smartass insurance investigator (Sterling Hayden) look into the case, and before long their investigation starts pointing them to the secretary.

Manhandled is fun, but the plot is all over the place. Our sympathy is supposed to lie with Merl, but after setting up her character with a shady past, the film never really resolves that shadiness. Lamour was well known for her comedies with Hope and Crosby, but here she’s out of her element and turns in a bland performance. Sterling Hayden, on the other hand, looks like he’s having a good time as the insurance investigator, though for some reason his first two scenes inexplicably have him getting dressed in public, even while questioning suspects. Art Smith is as likable as always as the smart cop, but while the script gives these investigators a lot of banter, it doesn’t give them much to do.

Director Lewis Foster had the kind of journeyman career that was only possible in the old days of Hollywood, back when a person could be a jack of all trades. He started out as a comedy specialist in the twenties and thirties, directing shorts with Laurel and Hardy. Throughout the forties he worked primarily as a screenwriter, contributing to a variety of projects, including musicals. Then from the fifties to the end of his career, he switched back to directing, mostly Westerns. His few excursions into noir territory aren’t bad, but they don’t exactly demonstrate an instinctive feel for the material. He’s not helped by Manhandled’s goofy script (the psychiatrist has a secretary sit in on sessions? the cops have a car without working brakes?), though he is aided considerably by Ernest Laszlo’s cinematography.

At the end the day, however, the movie is saved by Duryea. His presence here is a blessing for a couple of reasons. First, since Duryea is the only one who knows what’s going on through most of the movie he becomes the de facto main character. Our identification with him makes the film more fun and also makes it more of a noir. It’s a hoot to watch this two-bit shyster working three or four different angles at once. And secondly, Duryea simply gives the best performance in the movie. He’s playing the same charming sleazeball he usually does—lying his face off, terrorizing women, talking fast and hatching schemes. He did this kind of thing better than anyone else, and the effect of it is only enhanced the more you’ve seen it before. Manhandled would be a fine introduction to the actor, but it will play even better if you’ve already seen Scarlett Street and Too Late for Tears.

It is a particular challenge to explain to the uninitiated just how Duryea’s charm works. Historian Eddie Muller has reported that in the forties the more Duryea slapped around women onscreen, the more fan mail he received. There’s nothing charming about misogyny, so why was Duryea a sex symbol? Part of it, I think, is that Duryea’s nastiness had a distinct shallowness to it. When Kirk Douglas was a son of a bitch onscreen, you believed it. You felt the disturbing pull of real anger there, and there usually comes a moment in a Douglas performance where he drops the charm and explodes with rage. Duryea is different. He never drops the charm for very long because charm is the chief weapon in his arsenal. He’s a coldblooded son of a bitch, but he’s always on the make.

Like a blond Satan.

*

Here's a fun piece on Duryea.

Crime Wave (1952, released 1954)

What makes Crime Wave a movie to cherish is the texture of the thing. Director Andre De Toth shot most of the movie on locations in Los Angles and populated his screen with a cast of great faces. His cinematographer Bert Glennon was an old pro, a favorite of John Ford and Josef Von Sternberg, but this cheap crime thriller is Glennon’s crowning achievement, a visual masterpiece that melds the atmosphere of chiaroscuro with the starkness of neorealism. Everything here works, and the look of the film is complimented by the use of audio grabbed on location by the sound team of Stanley Jones. If you’ve never seen Crime Wave, you’ve never seen a movie that looks, sounds, feels more like a film noir.

The film tells a fairly simple story. Three hoods bust out of jail, knock over a gas station, and kill a cop. One of them takes a bullet in the process, so the other two shove a wad of money in his pocket and send him off to get some help. The wounded man crashes in on an ex-con he knows, Steve Lacey, and drops dead. This is bad for Lacey. The cop investigating the robbery/homicide is hardnosed Detective Lt. Sims, and he thinks Lacey is mixed in with the crooks. Worse, the other two crooks show back up. They expect Lacey to help them knock over a bank and make their escape, and they’re no more interested than Sims in hearing that Lacey’s gone straight.

That’s the plot, such as it is. The film’s main flaw is that this storyline fails to ever really incite a great emotional response from the viewer. None of the characters are particularly well-developed, and while Lacey and his wife Ellen (played by Gene Nelson and Phyllis Kirk) are the ostensible heroes of the story, it’s impossible to ever care too much about their predicament. Their scenes together have a somewhat clunky quality.

But look at me spending four sentences describing the flaws of a movie this good. Nelson and Kirk have some unconvincing dialog, it’s true, but they both give strong performances as the only normal people in the movie. More importantly, the plot is dominated by the other characters, none of whom lay any claim to being normal. The two hoods who return to terrorize the Laceys are mastermind Doc Penny (Ted de Corsia) and his brawny henchman Ben Hastings (played by a young Charles Bronson, still working under the name Charles Buchinsky). These guys are terrific. De Corsia is one of my favorite noir thugs, a man who seems to have been born with a sneer and a head full of pomade. He’s a consummate performer, a man whose every line reading makes me smile. Bronson, on the other hand, has always been a performer who has underwhelmed me, but here he’s terrific. With a leering smile and biceps the size of chopped hams, he pushes Steve around and sizes up Ellen like she’s dinner. Filling out the bad guy roster, in two nice character parts, are a drunken doctor played by the great Jay Novello, and a violent oddball played by everyone’s favorite oddball, Timothy Carey.

The crooks are great, but the movie is dominated by Sterling Hayden as Lt. Detective Sims. Hayden was an amazing actor, a barking hulk of a man incapable of projecting subtext. A looming presence, all six foot five of him, he had a way spitting out dialog like he was just happy to get it out of his mouth (which he probably was; he hated acting). Somehow this all worked to his advantage because there was an integrity to his complete lack of affect. Playing a crook, he seemed like a simple-minded thug. Playing a cop, he seemed like a simple-minded lawman. When I mentioned texture earlier, I was thinking, in part, of Hayden’s face, his voice, his glower and gait. Here he fits in so well with the grain of the picture he seems like one of the pieces of local architecture.

Which brings me back to texture. Crime Wave is a gorgeous film from beginning to end. Some of the scenes look and sound as if they have been lifted out of neorealism. Watch the scenes in the Homicide Bureau, with Hayden reading reports and briefing his cops. These scenes were shot on location, and I doubt very much that a newsreel of the same thing would have looked or sounded much different. Yet these hyper-realistic scenes are blended seamlessly with the expressionist glory of a sequence like the one in which Bronson kills the drunken doctor and then escapes over a back wall and into the night. The bichromatic beauty of these images, with their white etched onto black minimalist audacity, creates a dreamlike aura. By blending this expressionism with the documentary realism, De Toth and Glennon create an aesthetic that is the encapsulation of what film noir is all about: a dream that feels more real than reality.

***

Here's an interesting interview with Hayden. I think you get a sense of what a character this guy was.

And here's a good interview with Andre De Toth, Crime Wave's director. In addition to this film he also made the masterpiece noir Pitfall. He discusses both films here.