PICKUP (1951)

Hugo Haas was classic noir’s goofiest auteur. His films were melodramatic, overwrought, and often funny when they were trying—ostensibly anyway—to be dramatic. As a producer/director/writer, Haas created films around himself as an actor, and he usually created variations on the same story: sweet Hugo Haas meets a beautiful young blonde who sets out to kill him and take all his money. In film after film, he seemed to be doing his best to tell THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE from the point of view of Nick Papadakis.

Now, everything I just wrote has often been said as a way to dismiss Haas as a cut-rate hack. But this is where I disagree with critics like Arthur Lyons (who called Haas “one of the world’s worst writer-director-actors”). Haas is a goofy auteur, but he is an auteur nevertheless. His films have a personality, a point of view, and they have their charms.

Look at PICKUP, his first American film. It stars Haas as a railroad worker named Jan “Hunky” Horak. An amiable widower who lives alone at a secluded railway post, his life changes when he meets a sexy tart named Betty—and by ‘sexy tart’ I mean that everything about her from the first moment she appears onscreen screams ‘This woman is a sexy tart.’

Haas is not subtle, but, then again, subtly is only one among many potential virtues. Hunky and

Betty get married and descend into a marital hell that only gets hotter when a younger, hunkier (sorry, I couldn’t resist) guy shows up. PICKUP ain’t trying to be subtle. It wants to be simmering adultery yarn, part morality tale, part potboiler—and that’s pretty much what it is. PICKUP—like most of Haas’s films—has an almost classically burlesque quality to it. I think Haas takes his material seriously in the sense that he wants to put it across, but I don’t think for a second that he has any interest in what we would call “realism.” He isn’t doing a bad version of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. He’s doing a distinctly European caricature of the same kind of material—and I mean caricature here more in its 18^th or 19^th century sense of seriocomic grotesquery—and to understand this is to really enjoy Hugo Haas. More than most alleged auteurs, he actually was the controlling artistic influence on his films. There’s a certain Old World melancholy in his movies, like here when Betty asks if he got his American nickname because he’s Hungarian and he says, “No, I’m Czech, but to them it’s all the same.” There is real pathos in that line, and it comes straight from Hugo Haas.

But, god, he was goofy. PICKUP is the kind of movie that gets big laughs from audiences. As Betty, Haas cast the great Beverly Michaels. She chews the scenery from her first scene to her last. Our first view of her is a low-angle shot of her bouncing up and down on a Merry-Go-Round while a pack of men ogle her legs. This is sexuality-as-absurdity. You can’t not laugh.

There is, of course, a dark side to all of this. There’s an argument to be made that, goofy or not, this movie—like most Haas movies—has a misogynist heart. There are two women in this movie, Betty and her friend, Irma. Irma isn’t as big a floozy as Betty, but she’s cut from the same cloth and she’s only in the movie for a scene or two. After that, we’re left with Betty and Betty’s no damn good. Haas ends the movie on an ugly joke, with Hunky clutching a new puppy, saying “This is what I should have brought home in the first place.” With the bitch gone, in other words, now he has a good dog.

This hatred of the only real female character in the movie is ironic because, of course, as is so often the case, she’s the most interesting character in the film. PICKUP was the first starring role (after a scrappy supporting role in EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE) for its leading lady, and it would define the rest of her short career. Beverly Michaels had a mouth made for snarling, and she did a lot of it in her brief time onscreen. She made only a handful of feature films, and notched a couple of television credits, before she retired from acting in 1956, and in most of her movies she’s the meanest thing onscreen. After ’56, she married filmmaker Russell Rouse (who had directed her in 1953’s fantastic WICKED WOMAN) and then she more or less disappeared from public life. Even when she became a cult figure among noir geeks, she evinced little interest in stepping back into the spotlight before her death in 2007. That mystery woman quality, of course, has only added to her legend. Among film noir goddesses, she’s something special. Other goddesses are sadder (Lizabeth Scott), sexier (Audrey Totter), or meaner (Marie Windsor). No one, however, is tougher. You want to sum up Beverly Michaels’ noir ethos? She was a broad. A glorious, hilarious, tough-as-nails broad.

All hail the hard ass.

P.S. I wrote about Beverly Michaels and Russell Rouse for the e-mag NOIR CITY. You can buy that issue here.

Talking to Christopher Rouse about WICKED WOMAN

My piece on actor Beverly Michaels, her husband director Russell Rouse, and the making of their classic film noir WICKED WOMAN appears in the new issue of NOIR CITY. Check it out.

For the article, I interviewed Chris Rouse, son of Beverly and Russell, about his parents. Chris is an Oscar-winning film editor who's probably best known for his work with director Paul Greengrass on the Bourne action movies. He's a busy man, but he was kind enough to make time to answer my noir geek questions about his folks and to provide some pictures for us to use in the article. I used quotes and information from him throughout the article, but there was a segment of the interview I wasn't able to fit in for space reasons. I thought I'd include it in its entirety here. For the Beverly Michaels obsessives out there, this should be really interesting.:

JH: What was she like? I only know her as the brassy dames from her noirs. What was she like in real life? What did she like to do, to talk about? What did she care about?

CR: Mom was a very complex and highly intelligent woman. She was the product of her upbringing--a girl who grew up quickly on the streets of New York--becoming a model, a showgirl, and an actress at early ages. Not a typical path for a girl, and not an easy one. And so she was tough and brassy in real life as well, but Mom also had a huge heart, and would do anything for the people who mattered to her.

Mom loved films, plays--all the arts. She loved to read, both fiction and non-fiction. As I said, she wrote plays but stopped after while. She was highly political--a very liberal Democrat--and was involved in several political causes and with several groups throughout her life (for example “Another Mother For Peace”).

JH: The big question that all Beverly Michaels fans would want me to ask is why she retired from films. You said she was a bit of a cipher about her career, so what I would be really fascinated to know is how she felt about it overall. How do you think she saw it? I know that some of the actors who eventually became noir icons still always regarded their careers as failures. Which is to say that they got into movies hoping to be a big star like Bette Davis or Ingrid Bergman, and since that never happened they regarded their career (even if they eventually became a cult figure) as having failed. Would that describe your mom, or do you think she saw it another way? Did she appreciate that she had become something of a cult icon among noir geeks?

CR: The short answer is that Mom retired because she wanted to start a family, and she couldn’t reconcile having a career and giving her kids everything from her she thought they’d need. As years passed I think she began to feel the loss of her career more profoundly… It’s very difficult to give up such a large part of your identity, no matter how noble the cause for which it has been abandoned. Though she never gave voice to it, I imagine she wished she had become a “bigger” star. And I do think she felt somewhat underappreciated in her day… That for the most part her roles were seen as less significant “B film” endeavors, rather than as dynamic parts which portrayed complex, empowered women.

Years later when she began to realize she was a bit of a cult icon, it pulled her in two directions. She was truly flattered by the attention she received, but because she’d become increasingly private as she got older, she never really embraced it fully. 

For more of my interview with Chris Rouse, check out the article in NOIR CITY e-mag, available now.