Alias Nick Beal (1949)

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

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

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)

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 him. Going into one of Malick's 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. 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 and 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)

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?

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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

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

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.

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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.