I WALK ALONE (1948)

Byron Haskin started out in movies as a cinematographer and a special effects man—working his way up to head of the Special Effects department  at Warner Brothers in the mid-forties—but when producer Hal B. Wallis left Warner Brothers in the forties to start his own production company, Haskin followed his old boss and started a directing career (or restart, I should say; Haskin had made a handful of short films back in the silent days). His first film post-Warner was I WALK ALONE. It should have led to much better things.

I WALK ALONE tells the story of Frankie Madison (Burt Lancaster), a hood who has just been released from jail after fourteen years. He’s back in town to look up his old partner, Dink Turner (Kirk Douglas), a shifty bastard who has spent the last fourteen years getting rich. Frankie wants his cut of the prosperity, and Dink is loathe to give it to him. Caught between these two raging alpha males are mild-mannered accountant, Dave (Wendell Corey), and sexy nightclub singer, Kay (Lizabeth Scott).

The script is by Charles Schnee, one of the best screenwriters of the era (THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, THE FURIES) from Theodore Reeves’ play “Beggars are Coming to Town”, and it is unusually intelligent and perceptive. One of the interesting angles of the story is the way Frankie finds that he is an anachronism in the new world of crime. Dink is a businessman now, and Frankie’s two-fisted approach is hopelessly outdated. When Frankie hires a bunch of thugs to help him storm into Dink’s office and demand his cut, he discovers that Dink’s empire is really an amalgam of three different corporations. The best Frankie can hope for is eight percent—maybe, even that will depend on a vote by the stockholders.

Lancaster and Douglas, in their first film together, are excellent. Both men are energetic, hypermasculine performers, but what makes their pairing interesting is the different effect each of them creates. Lancaster, even playing a goon, is an honest, sympathetic protagonist. Douglas, on the other hand, is one of the screen’s great bastards. His air of ruthless self-confidence is completely mesmerizing, and somehow his self-satisfaction never gets in the way of his appeal. Here these two actors already play together with the natural chemistry that would sustain their repeated collaborations for decades to come.

Their support, both in front of and behind the camera, is top rate. Wendell Corey, one of the most dependable of supporting actors, finds a nice wounded dignity in his character, and Lizabeth Scott, once again the morally questionable lounge singer (she must have played this role a hundred times in the forties and fifties) is as sad and beautiful as always. The film’s cinematographer is Leo Tover (who had just photographed Scott in DEAD RECKONING the year before) and his work here is evocative, classic noir photography. A sequence late in the film in which Corey is chased down abandoned streets by one of Douglas’ thugs is just about perfect.

If the film has a serious flaw it is that it resolves its story a little too neatly at the end (a common failing among films of the period, of course). Lancaster’s character takes a swerve in the last few minutes that feels false. But this is a minor quibble for a film firing on so many cylinders.

The following year, Haskin would direct Scott in the noir masterpiece, TOO LATE FOR TEARS, followed a few years later by an excellent John Payne picture called THE BOSS. While for most of his career, he focused on adventure stories and science fiction, his brief excursions into crime stories in the forties and fifties are enough to make his name notable in the genre. After you see I WALK ALONE, and after you see TOO LATE FOR TEARS and THE BOSS, you will find yourself wishing Haskin had dabbled in crime pictures a little longer.

PS. I'd only seen this film on the small screen until the showing last night at NOIR CITY CHICAGO, the film noir festival (now in its tenth year!) put on by the Film Noir Foundation and Music Box Theater. If you love film noir, do yourself a favor and make your way to one of the annual NOIR CITY festivals in San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, DC, and more.

The Rebirth of TOO LATE FOR TEARS

The 1949 TOO LATE FOR TEARS was one of the first discoveries I made when I began my descent into the dark universe of film noir. I've written about the film several times: in my book THE BLIND ALLEY, in a tribute to Lizabeth Scott in the pages of MYSTERY SCENE magazine, and on this blog. The first conversation I ever had with film noir guru Eddie Muller was about this film. I have loved TOO LATE FOR TEARS for years.

All of which is to say that the resurrection of this long forgotten--and for all intents and purpose, this long lost--film noir is something that I regard as pretty close to a miracle.

The film itself is a bizarre creation. It was made by a producer (Hunt Stromberg) whose best--or at least most successful--days were behind him. It was a showcase for a star (Lizabeth Scott) whose career had never really taken off and would quickly come to an end. Its director (Byron Haskin) was talented but even today he remains widely unknown to all but the most hardcore movie geeks. The most successful person associated with the film was undoubtedly the writer Roy Huggins, who would go on to amass a legendary career in television. The most amazing thing about this list of talent is that all of these people, at one time or another, to one a degree or another, more or less disowned the film.

So how did an obscure cheapie come to be resurrected? Well, the easy answer is that the movie is a masterpiece that couldn't be denied. There are a few noirs that are as good as TOO LATE FOR TEARS but there aren't many that are better. The film is the finest moment not only of Lizabeth Scott, one of the greatest of all noir women, but also of her costar Dan Duryea, one of the greatest of all noir men. It is suspenseful, it is frequently laugh out loud funny, and it has depth and humanity. Scott and Duryea play a mismatched housewife and conman who attempt to get away with $60,000 in blackmail money, and their scenes together are some of the most entertaining moments you'll see in a film noir. I saw the film at Noir City Chicago a while back and it killed with the audience.

There is a more complicated answer to why this film has endured and it's a story that is well told on the brand new BluRay and DVD package that's just been released by Flicker Alley, in cooperation with the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Film Noir Foundation. This package is a must have for any film noir fan. It contains a new digital version transferred from a new 35mm print of the film. For fans of the film who have made do with cheap digital versions based on scratched and faded prints, this package is a revelation. The set also includes new featurettes on the making of the film and on the story of its rescue and restoration. It contains interviews with folks like Eddie Muller, Kim Morgan, and Julie Kirgo, as well as feature commentary by Alan K. Rode, and an excellent essay by noir expert Brian Light.

There is a lot of hand-wringing about the future of cinema and the loss of film culture, but there are still miracles. The rebirth of TOO LATE FOR TEARS is one of those miracles.

Lizabeth Scott in MYSTERY SCENE

Check out the new issue of MYSTERY SCENE (on shelves now) for my tribute to Lizabeth Scott.

Lizabeth Scott: The Sad-Eyed Queen of Film Noir

(top: Liz Scott as sex siren in a publicity shot for Dead Reckoning; bottom: as the girl next door in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers)

Lizabeth Scott, the Queen of Film Noir, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 92.

As long as there are movie geeks, there will be a debate over who most deserves the title of Queen of Noir. Barbara Stanwyck is most often given the crown, followed by Marie Windsor, and occasionally Clare Trevor. I mean no disrespect when I say that as great as those women are, they are not the Queen. Neither is Audrey Totter, Ava Gardner, or Anne Savage. Each of these actors is invaluable. They are movie goddesses who will, in all likelihood, live on for years and years as silvery dreams projected in the dark. But there is only one Queen: Lizabeth Scott.

Why is she the Queen? Well, first of all, she starred in more noirs than nearly anyone. It depends on what you choose to label noir, but by my count Scott made at least twelve certifiable noirs. There are a handful of other films you might add to that count. Anyway you slice it, that’s a lot of time to spend in the City of Perpetual Darkness. Consider, too, the list of noir icons she worked with: Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Barbara Stanwyck, Edmond O'Brien, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Dick Powell, Raymond Burr, Van Heflin, Mary Astor, Jane Greer, Dennis O'Keeffe, and on and on. It seems like everyone who passed through Noirville stayed a night at Liz's house.

More important than the quantity of her work, however, is the quality of it. She could do everything--and did. Achingly lovely and unbelievably husky-voiced, most of the time there’s something wounded and likable about her. In her first noir (only her second film) THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS she’s the good girl to Stanwyck’s psycho femme fatale. She played the nice gal role well, and in films like DARK CITY and I WALK ALONE she soldiered on as sweet, brokenhearted nightclub singers. Occasionally, she was cast as a conniving vixen, as she was opposite Bogart in the awful DEAD RECKONING, but her best performances are marked by ambiguity. You can see this in STOLEN FACE where she gets to have it both ways, playing both the good girl and the bad girl.


To even better demonstrate this split, consider her two best films, both noir masterpieces: In TOO LATE FOR TEARS she plays a deeply human and deeply scary femme fatale who will stop at nothing to keep a bag full of money. In PITFALL she plays a good woman who gets involved with the wrong man and pays a heavy price.

The thing these roles had in common was Liz's weary humanity. Fragile, a little sad, and completely indestructible. That's Liz. That's the Queen.

Essential Queen Liz:
Too Late For Tears
Pitfall

Best of the Rest:
Stolen Face
Dark City
I Walk Alone
The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers


Other Scott Noirs:
Dead Reckoning
Two Of A Kind
The Racket
The Company She Keeps
Desert Fury
The Weapon

Roy Huggins: Too Late For Tears

I have a piece in the new issue of MYSTERY SCENE on the life and career of Roy Huggins. He created blockbuster TV shows like THE FUGITIVE and THE ROCKFORD FILES, and gave us a bona fide film noir masterpiece with 1949's TOO LATE FOR TEARS, but he was despised by many for naming names during the HUAC witch hunts and was often derided for being a credit hog. I explore the controversies around the television pioneer in the Winter Issue, now on the stands.

Noir City Chicago 6: CAGED and TENSION

Last night was another fantastic line up at Noir City Chicago 6. The Music Box Theater, in conjunction with the Film Noir Foundation, showcased two indispensable noirs: CAGED (1950) and TENSION (1949). God, what a line up. I don't know how many times I've watched these two classics, but last night was my first time to see them on the big screen and they did not disappoint. CAGED is simply a masterpiece--an all-time, top ten, noir hall of fame masterpiece. Crime films really don't get any better. And while TENSION has less unity and formal perfection (at least at the screenplay level), it is a shimmering jewel--and an enduring testament to the glorious Audrey Totter.

I've written about both movies before. Here's more on CAGED. And here's something on TENSION.

The festival is going great. It kicked off with a magnificent restoration of TOO LATE FOR TEARS (for my money, the best thing the Film Noir Foundation has done is to restore this movie), with the wonderful ROADBLOCK as a second feature. I had to miss a couple of days, unfortunately, but Sunday night I caught Jean-Pierre Melville's rarely seen 1959 TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN. 

Alan Rode has been doing a crackerjack job introducing the films all week, and tonight the Czar of Noir himself, Eddie Muller, takes over. The remaining films all look terrific--including a double feature of Losey's 1951 M, followed by The BLACK VAMPIRE, an Argentinian feminist reworking of the M story. Here's the full schedule.

Noir City Chicago 6 and The Altars of Forgotten Women

This weekend Noir City Chicago kicks off at the Music Box Theater with two of my favorite films: TOO LATE FOR TEARS (1949) starring Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea, and ROADBLOCK (1950) starring Joan Dixon and Charles McGraw.

I've written about both of these films on this blog (here and here), and I'd like to reprint an essay I posted here a few years ago that celebrates Lizabeth Scott and Joan Dixon.

Here's "The Altars of Forgotten Women":

One of the ironies of film noir is that many of its lasting 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-five 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. Actors like Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor, Evelyn Keyes, and Janis Carter 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 actors finally became stars. That just about defines the word bittersweet.

Of course, major stars like Audrey Hepburn and Judy Garland experience a similar 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 ruler of her own dark little corner of Dreamtown because is the woman who most deserves the title of Queen of Noir. 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 women 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 (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. Most importantly, she starred in two of the finest noirs we have, Andre De Toth’s 1948 PITFALL and Byron Haskin’s 1949 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 Queen Liz. 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 as I write this), 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 name 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.

She was no one’s idea of the queen of anything, 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.

A Forgotten Masterpiece Restored: TOO LATE FOR TEARS (1949)

The set up is wonderfully simple. A woman named Jane Palmer and her husband, Alan, are driving home from a party one night when a bag full of money is tossed into their backseat from a passing car. The next day, they discover that the money is the payoff from a botched extortion drop. Alan wants to turn it over to the cops. Jane, alas, does not. That’s going to mean bad things for her husband.

So begins Byron Haskin’s TOO LATE FOR TEARS, one of the greatest—and most overlooked—of all film noirs. It was written by Roy Huggins who is best remembered today as the creator of hugely successful television shows like THE FUGITIVE and THE ROCKFORD FILES but who started his career as a hardboiled crime novelist in the vein of Cain and Chandler. This film, based on his excellent 1947 novel of the same name (first serialized in the SATURDAY EVENING POST), is a movie which has been nearly forgotten, even by many people who consider themselves noir fans. But while the film exists only in ragged prints and grainy DVDs, it remains an essential contribution to the genre.

It’s a femme fatale movie, but before we go further we need to unpack the phrase ‘femme fatale’ a little because femmes come in all shapes and sizes. Some are duplicitous girlfriends. Others are certifiable nutjobs who lure hapless men into their neurotic webs. Sometimes they’re sirens with a taste for married men, and sometimes they’re just bored housewives. What they all have in common is that they’re all bad news. 

Jane Palmer (Lizabeth Scott) is definitely bad news but TOO LATE FOR TEARS makes the diabolical suggestion that there might be a femme fatale hiding inside the ostensibly happily married woman. Like DOUBLE INDEMNITY this film sees the married woman—the symbol of fertility and domestication in most American films of the forties and fifties—as a cold blooded murderer lying in wait. Jane Palmer and Phyllis Dietrichson could be sisters.

Well, maybe. The major difference between DOUBLE INDEMNITY and TOO LATE FOR TEARS (indeed between TOO LATE FOR TEARS and most other femme fatale movies) is that Jane Palmer’s story is told from her point of view.

The truth is, most film noirs are about men. Even most femme fatale movies are told from the point of view of a man who meets a beautiful woman, falls in love (or lust) with her, and then suffers to his last breath. When Walter Neff sizes up Mrs. Dietrichson at the beginning of DOUBLE INDEMNITY, it’s his eyes we’re looking through. But in TOO LATE FOR TEARS we stay mostly with Jane Palmer. When we do leave her point of view, it is to drift momentarily to her suspicious sister-in-law Kathy (Kristine Miller) and Alan’s old army buddy Don (Don DeFore) as they attempt to bring Jane down. This, of course, builds suspense but also paradoxically strengthens our identification with Jane. She’s the smartest person in the movie. We’ve been with her from the beginning. When we eavesdrop on Kathy and Don plotting against her, we want to run off and tell Jane.

This identification with the femme fatale owes a lot to Lizabeth Scott’s performance, which alternates between desperation and cunning, and is perhaps the best one she ever gave. Part of what she brings to the role—and it is something that many iconic noir actresses (like Ann Savage and Marie Windsor) brought to their roles— is a sense of having been disappointed by life.. Scott was originally molded by studio executive Hal B. Wallis to be the new Lauren Bacall (just as Windsor was supposed to be the new Joan Crawford). When that A-list career didn’t materialize, she was relegated to B pictures, playing femme fatales and gangsters’ girlfriends. Something of her disappointment shows in her portrayals of women whose dreams have never come true, and this is especially true in TOO LATE FOR TEARS. No one in the audience could possibly root for her husband Alan (played by Arthur Kennedy as a befuddled bore). This poor sap comes across like a well-meaning prison warden standing guard over all of his wife’s dreams. We don’t yearn for his destruction, but we also don’t hate Liz for wanting to escape. And her escape starts to seem impossible once Ubervillian Dan Duryea shows up looking for his lost luggage.

With the possible exceptions of Kirk Douglas and Richard Widmark, no one ever played a son of a bitch better than Dan Duryea. And Duryea did them both better on one count: his raison d’être was terrorizing women. Inside the insular world of noir, Duryea was a woman’s worst nightmare: a charming, rakish ne’er-do-well who, when the going got tough, got tough with his woman. Duryea made this kind of thing watchable because he oozed sleazy charm and because he always wound up going to hell at the end. In TOO LATE FOR TEARS he turns on both the charm and the hard stuff, but no one slaps around Lizabeth Scott and lives to brag about it.

Ultimately, noir is built upon the themes of transgression and ruination. There is no doubt that Jane Palmer is a transgressor. She’s a thief and a cold-blooded killer. She earns her ruination. And yet the best noirs always find a way to implicate us in the guilt of the protagonist. Jane is eventually brought down by Kathy and Don, but while they’re supposed to represent the forces of normality, we never feel anything for them. Kathy is a bland cipher, and Don’s a smug asshole. We can easily imagine them sitting down with good old Alan for the most boring dinner party in the history of the world. And we can imagine Jane Palmer sitting there with them, suffocating on the inside and yearning for some excitement to drop into her lap.

***

For years TOO LATE FOR TEARS suffered the same fate of other noir classics like DETOUR and QUICKSAND. It was abandoned in the public domain —which means that you can watch this movie right now. Or you can buy one of many DVD copies (here's the best one). What you can’t do is find one in nice condition. This movie was dumped on the market, made ten cents, and then hit the market again as KILLER BAIT. As such it has been kicked around for fifty years, and once something is in the public domain any yokel with a disc burner could sell a copy. That made it impossible to find a copy that wasn’t washed out and covered in scratches. It also made it difficult to raise the funds for a restoration. The folks who pony up cash to refurbish obscure old movies understandably like to have the only product on the market (after all, unsuspecting buyers looking for a deal might buy the five dollar shit-version of the film rather than a decked out thirty dollar version). I remember speaking with Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller years ago about this film, and he hinted then that a restoration might be possible in the relatively near future. He knew as well as anyone that the film is indispensable, that it’s the Queen of Noir at her best, and it deserves the royal treatment. That restoration has come to pass, and on January 25 Muller and the Film Noir Foundation crew unveiled the new restored print of this great film. The movie will be on tour this year as the FNF does their annual NOIR CITY retrospectives around the country. Look for it.

***

One last word on Byron Haskin. A professional who worked in Hollywood as a special effects man, cinematographer, and director, Haskin is a mostly forgotten figure today. When he is remembered it is usually in conjunction with his extensive work in science fiction (he directed WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1952 and worked on the pilot episode of STAR TREK), but his contributions to noir are top rate. In addition to TOO LATE FOR TEARS he directed Liz Scott, Burt Lancaster, and Kirk Douglas in the terrific 1947 I WALK ALONE. He also directed John Payne’s best performance in the political drama THE BOSS in 1956. All these films are worth finding, and Haskin deserves to be remembered.

Talking Writing and Movies with Mike Monson

The crime writer Mike Monson was nice enough to ask me to sit down for an interview for his "Mike Monson Annoys His Favorite Writers" series. 

Our talk was wide-ranging--from growing up in the religious environment of rural Arkansas, to the glory of Queen of Noir Lizabeth Scott (above), to how much an author should worry about making a character likable.

Check it out the interview here.

And click here to find out about Monson's books. 

Lizabeth Scott Talks!

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.

Liz Scott on the Femme Fatale

"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

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 Altars of Forgotten Women (revisited)

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.

Eddie Muller Talks

Check out the Indianapolis Star's recent interview with "cultural archeologist" and film noir expert Eddie Muller. It's a good introduction to Muller and his work. There's also a bit of encouraging news for fans of the Lizabeth Scott masterpiece Too Late For Tears...

Read the interview here.

Noir City DC 2010

The Film Noir Foundation and AFI roll out Noir City DC October 16th-November 3rd, and it looks to be another raging success. The lineup this year is an embarrassment of riches:

Border Incident-Anthony Mans's gritty illegal immigrant noir, featuring amazing work by cinematographer John Alton.

Stranger on the Third Floor-Arguably the first film noir.

Vertigo-Hitchcock directs Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in one of the truly essential American films.

Criss Cross-Robert Siodmak directs Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo in a 100% perfect film noir. A masterpiece.

Act of Violence-Robert Ryan and Van Heflin in this long dark night of the soul. A beautiful and brilliant (and vastly underrated) masterpiece.

Pitfall-Lizabeth Scott, Dick Powell, and Raymond Burr in Andre De Toth's love triangle from hell. One of my favorite films.

Pushover-Yet another underrated masterpiece! Bad girl Kim Novak and bad cop Fred McMurray fall in love and hell opens under their feet.

The Night of the Hunter-Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish square off in this Flannery O'Connor meets Caligari nightmare. Brilliant--and not to be missed on the big screen.

And more!

This is an extraordinary collection of films, a mix of established gems and overlooked works of genius. If you live in or around the DC area (or if you just happen to be in town for the Jon Stewart/Stepehn Colbert rally on the National Mall), do not pass up an opportunity to see some of the these works on the big screen in the gorgeous AFI facility.

Lizabeth Scott in Person

above: Lizabeth Scott in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

Monday night, the great Lizabeth Scott showed up at a screening of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. After retiring from films, Scott has had little use for the limelight. One can certainly respect her desire for privacy—and in this age of media whoredom wherein so many people are willing to debase themselves just to be famous for a news cycle, her class and reserve is edifying. Still, she is such a hugely important figure in film noir that one wishes she could be prevailed upon to share memories and observations on her time in film. Here’s hoping that some silver-tongued interviewer will be able to convince the Queen of Noir to take a look back at one of the great careers in film noir.

For more on Scott's appearance at the screening, read here.

Now seems like a good time to mention that Silver Lode, the fine Allan Dwan Western that Scott made with fellow noir icons John Payne and Dan Duryea, is being released in a new special edition DVD. Read more about it here.

Too Late For Tears restoration hits a snag

Bad news for fans of the little-seen film noir masterpiece Too Late For Tears. As I've talked about before, plans have been underway for the Film Noir Foundation to attempt a restoration--really a rescue/resurrection-- of this thriller starring noir goddess Lizabeth Scott. In the latest issue of the Noir City Sentinel, however, FNF president Eddie Muller breaks the bad news that plans to rescue the film have ground to a halt because of a lack of suitable source materials. The search for these materials goes on.

What's so disappointing about this, of course, is that Too Late For Tears is a first rate film which exists right now in abhorrent condition. Cheap DVDs abound and you can watch the film on line, but the print looks like it's been run through a cement mixer. There are few people alive today who have ever seen this great movie in anything approaching decent condition.

So we won't be getting a clean, fresh print of the film this year like we had hoped. Having said that, though, while the hunt for an original nitrate print of the film goes on, now is as good a time as any to consider donating some cash to the Film Noir Foundation. Aside from helping to rescue and restore wonderful, and vulnerable, films from possible extinction, you'll also get a free subscription to the Noir City Sentinel, a quarterly electronic magazine featuring articles on films, stars, directors, writers, and more. The current issue features my piece on the director Felix Feist, as well as articles on the film The Scarlet Hour, a book to film comparison of To Have and Have Not, a review of the Red Riding Trilogy, The Manchurian Candidate, and a lot more. So head over there, give 'em some money (they'll take any amount; they ain't picky), get a great magazine mailed to you four times a year, and maybe you'll help save Too Late For Tears. There is no downside here, people. Go do it.

Pitfall (1947)

While I can say unequivocally that Andre de Toth’s Pitfall is one of the great film noirs, I cannot say with any certainty whether its final brilliance is by design. Is there such a thing as an accidental masterpiece? I’m not sure, but there is an ambiguity at the center of this film which is either a stroke of genius or a grievous oversight on behalf of the filmmakers.

Pitfall tells the story of John Forbes (Dick Powell) a married insurance agent who is bored at home and tired of being an “average American.” One day Forbes meets Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) the sexy girlfriend of a convict only days away from being released. Forbes and Mona have a few drinks, share some pointed conversation, and then spend a night together. Unfortunately for both of them, Mona is being stalked by a creepy private eye named MacDonald. He’s a bug-eyed nutjob, obsessed with Mona and none too happy about her new, married boyfriend. As MacDonald grows more violent, what might have been a brief adulterous affair turns into a walking nightmare for Forbes and Mona. This set-up is a perfect illustration of one of my favorite definitions of film noir (from Roger Ebert): an ordinary guy indulges the weaker side of his character, and hell opens up beneath his feet.

I’ve always loved that quote, and it certainly applies here, but what makes Pitfall so interesting is the way it sets up that basic situation but then, underneath, tells another story.

That story belongs to the “other woman” Mona Stevens. The plot prepares us to accept her as a femme fatale, but then an interesting thing happens on the way to the gallows. Mona turns out to be a nice person. Okay, she’s got bad taste in men. Her boyfriend is in jail for embezzling funds to buy her clothes and a boat. She attracts a psychopath like MacDonald on first meeting. Five minutes after meeting Forbes, she has him agreeing to stiff drinks in a darkened bar at three in the afternoon. Clearly, she’s got issues with men.

But she isn’t a femme fatale. Once she learns Forbes is married, she breaks it off with him. She rebuffs MacDonald, and she tries to shield Forbes from his wrath. While she makes some bad decisions, Mona never seems motivated by the greed and selfishness that are motivating just about everyone else. She is, without a doubt, the most interesting, sympathetic person in the movie. It doesn’t hurt that she’s played by Lizabeth Scott, one of the great women of noir, whose specialty was being world-weary and fragile at the same time. While she was breathtakingly beautiful, there was an undeniable sadness to Liz Scott. Her eyes, sensuous as they may be, always look as if they’ve been crying, and while she sometimes played the blond ice goddess in film noirs, more often than not what shone through in her performances was a bruised and battered quality, a sense that she was a smart woman forced to make due in a dumb man’s world.

That was never truer than in this movie. Forbes lies to her to get her in bed, MacDonald stalks her, and her convict boyfriend is a whiskey-swilling imbecile. Pitfall may have the set-up of a femme fatale story, but by the end it seems to be more about Mona Stevens and three L’Homme fatales. The thing is, though, I’m not sure if the movie knows this. On the surface, it is still telling the story of Forbes, the ordinary man indulging the weaker side of his character.

And that’s a story the movie tells well. Dick Powell is excellent as Forbes. As a dramatic actor, Powell’s specialty was inferiority masked as smugness. Even when he played Philip Marlowe in Murder My Sweet, you got the sense that the smugness was just a way to cover up the fact the character was in over his head. Powell’s character is in way over his head here. His chief adversary, the psycho private eye MacDonald, is played by Raymond Burr at his villainous best. You do not want to find yourself staring down Raymond Burr in a film noir, especially if you are Dick Powell. The movie generates a lot of suspense as it tightens the vise on this weak, normal, believable man.

And yet…

Notice what happens at the end. What happens to Mona? Is she being punished by the Production Code for sleeping with a married man? Does the District Attorney’s angry words to Forbes (“I think we have the wrong person upstairs”) reflect the feelings of the filmmakers? Look at the last shot of her. Notice that we see her from Forbes’ perspective. Is this robbing Mona of her final moment? Or is it a commentary on the real tragedy of the story? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but ask yourself: when hell opened up beneath Forbes’ feet, whom did it swallow?

***

Director Andre De Toth also directed the wonderful Crime Wave. For an interesting interview with this underrated artist, click here.