One of the most sordid episodes of the 1950s was the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation into "communist subversion" in Hollywood. This was the Red Scare in full swing. The Committee drug private citizens in front of Congress to give testimony about their political beliefs--and the political beliefs of their friends. Failure to testify landed you on a blacklist that prohibited you from working in films at the major studios. Careers went down in flames. Friends sold out friends. Interestingly, the communist witch hunts had a particularly deep impact on the community of writers, directors and stars who worked in film noir. Perhaps no other single film is more emblematic of this ugly bit of history than John Berry's He Ran All The Way, nearly all the major talents on which were affected directly or indirectly by the blacklist. Most notably, the blacklist marked the end of the career, and life, of star John Garfield, one of noir's great icons.
You can check out my essay on the repercussions of the Hollywood blacklist on the cast and crew of He Ran All The Way at the Film Noir Foundation.
An extended six-minute trailer is out for Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, and it's already getting people talking.
The novel--which follows the career of Lou Ford, a jovial deputy sheriff and secret psychopath--has a cult following of creepy intensity. It's a twisted piece of work, even by the considerably nasty standards of the author. A first person look into the mind of a murderer, it's uncompromisingly sexualized and violent, but the most shocking thing about it is the way it traps you in the pov of an abject nihilist. Of course, fashionable nihilism is everywhere today (from franchised torture-porn like Hostel and Saw to the glut of serial killer/hit man/assassin stories and novels), but Thompson went deeper with it than any of his many imitators have done since. His novels--and The Killer Inside Me, in particular--are about nihilism rather than a simplistic wallowing in its more tawdry forms. (In the interest of intellectual honesty, I should note that there are more than a few people who would disagree with that last sentence.)
Now comes British director Michael Winterbottom and stars Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, and Kate Hudson, and it looks like they are going to go all the way with Thompson's story. Check out the preview here, but be warned that this six minutes is a hard R. Send the kids outside to play.
There's already a backlash brewing against the movie. It'll be interesting to see the finished film and just as interesting to observe the conversation it engenders upon release.
It was Goddard who said that the history of cinema was the history of boys photographing girls. He had something there. The first hundred years of cinema were dominated by men—directors, cinematographers, studio heads—and many of those men liked to take pretty pictures of pretty girls. Film noir is no exception to this rule, which is why people like Audrey Totter and Gloria Grahame are icons. We in the audience—male and female alike—are entranced by their beauty, grace, fragility, and, ultimately, by their humanity. The camera is an awesome liturgical instrument; it worships certain faces like a believer bearing witness to his or her savior’s divinity.
And yet, the history of cinema is also full of corners darkened with misogyny. Film noir has been attacked occasionally for being misogynist. Sometimes those charges will stick. The camera can capture resentment as well as love.
One of the first films to turn the camera around to take a look at the specter of misogyny itself was Edward Dmytryk’s The Sniper. It tells the intense story of a gun-toting psycho named Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz) who terrorizes San Francisco by shooting women from different rooftops around the city. His first victim is a piano player he knows named Jean Darr (Marie Windsor). Her murder—quick, hard, merciless—comes as a shock even today. Windsor, of course, is just about as iconic an actress can get in this genre, and that gives her killing nearly as much of a jolt as Janet Leigh’s murder in Psycho eight years later.
In fact, it’s difficult to watch Eddie Miller run around San Francisco shooting innocent women without thinking of all the woman-murdering nutjobs (from Norman Bates to Buffalo Bill and beyond) who would follow him onto the silver screen in the decades to come. Are films like The Sniper, Psycho, and The Silence of the Lambs examinations of misogyny, or are they expressions of it? Are they any better than slasher flicks and torture porn?
I think so. The Sniper is very much about Eddie Miller’s contorted view of women and the psychosis it engenders. If anything, the film is heavy-handed in this respect. Every single scene of Miller with a woman ends with his face twisted into spasms of anger. What is the root of this hatred of women? The film doesn’t come out and tell us, but there is a scene where, seeing a mother slap her son, Miller reflexively lifts his hand to his own face. This implication of past abuse is simplistic, of course, but is there an answer the movie could provide to us which wouldn’t be simplistic? The mystery of Eddie Miller is the same mystery surrounding real life serial killers like Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgeway. Why would these men—who outwardly seemed like normal, productive members of society—do what they did? Where does this hatred come from?
One cannot explain the unexplainable, but one can regard it and recoil from it. In doing so, this film fits into the larger tradition within noir of documenting the violent implosion of the postwar American man. While The Sniper is not perfect, it is perhaps the collapsing male ego’s starkest filmic expression in the 1950s.
One reason, perhaps, that this film has remained largely unseen for the past fifty-odd years is the complicated story of its director. Edward Dmytryk was considered a great filmmaker in his day but when he was fingered as a Communist by the House Committee on Un-American Activities he panicked and named names. It wasn't exactly a profile in courage, but Dmytryk was hardly alone in that respect. At any rate, it's unfair to degrade his work for his lack of moral courage. The two things are not connected, and while it's true that some of his films (I'm thinking The Caine Mutiny) have not aged well, some of his work--like Murder, My Sweet; Crossfire; and The Sniper--still holds up and deserves to be seen. Read more about Edward Dmytryk here.
While your faithful correspondent has been suffering with what appears to be either the H1N1 flu or whatever disease Evelyn Keyes had in The Killer That Stalked New York, the world has kept spinning by. The second annual Noir City DC festival rolled on while I lay hacking in bed. Happily, before I was sidelined, I was able to catch The Big Combo and Wicked As They Come on the big screen. I'd seen Combo before, years ago, but I'll admit that I somehow missed how incredibly good it is. That movie is amazing. More on that in the future. Wicked As They Come was new to me, and it was a terrific personal discovery. Beautifully shot, it has one of the most most complicated and interesting takes on gender I've seen in a film noir. There will also be more on that to come.
Now here's a terribly exciting piece of news: Columbia Pictures has finally releasing its first film noir box set. The set includes
The Big Heat-a damn good, if overrated, cop thriller. With two featurettes, one with Martin Scorsese, the other with Michael Mann
The Sniper-This disturbing and disturbingly groundbreaking film was directed by Edward Dmytryk and costars noir icon Marie Windsor. Has commentary by Eddie Muller. Also has a featurette with Scorsese.
The Lineup-Hard-ass Don Seigel directed this dope smuggling flick starring Eli Wallach. Featuring commentary by Muller and James Ellroy, this is the one to pop in first. Plus, as I've discussed elsewhere a commentary track with Muller&Ellroy is like a whole other movie. Muller gets a beat going and Ellory starts improvising. Also has a featurette with Christopher Nolan. Not a great film, but it's entertaining.
Murder By Contract-This might be the most philosophical hitman flick ever made. Expertly directed by Irving Lerner (Edge of Fury) and starring film noir pretty boy Vince Edwards at his best. Has a featurette with Scorsese.
5 Against the House-This one's the low man on the totem pole. It's a casino heist flick directed by the great Phil Karlson (99 River Street) and starring Kim Novak--though it's nowhere near as good as that description would suggest. As near as I can discern from press materials floating around, there's no added bonus features.
She was exquisitely beautiful, but there was also something oddly distant about her, a vacancy that was its own attribute. We see it on display in her two most famous roles: in Laura, she is perfect as the blank canvas others project themselves onto, her passivity becoming a point of obsession for the rest of the cast. In her career-best performance in Leave Her To Heaven, John Stahl uses her emptiness to personify a vast pit of obsessive neediness as Tierney places one of the most shockingly cold-blooded femme fatales on record.
Tierney had a complicated and tragic private life--guilt over an institutionalized daughter, a descent into mental illness--that is a rebuke to the lesser problems of many celebrities. Here's a documentary on her life.
I recently had a chance to interview scholar Marguerite Rippy about her fascinating new book Orson Welles and The Unfinished RKO Projects. It's not every director who can inspire a critical appraisal of works that never reached fruition, but, Welles wasn't just any director. You can check out my interview with Marguerite Rippy over at Wellesnet.
For most of its running time, Quicksand marches in lockstep precision toward its protagonist’s doom. That the film sputters out of gas toward the end is too bad, but Quicksand is hardly unique in that respect. Many of the films we call noir have the same failing. What is unique about this movie, however, is that while most noirs chart the gradual disintegration of their characters’ fortunes, few do it with such exactness.
The film stars Mickey Rooney, just three years after his penultimate Andy Hardy movie, as a regular guy mechanic named Dan Brady. In the opening scene Dan is eating at a greasy spoon and explaining to a couple of buddies why he’s been blowing off his girlfriend, Helen. He's just not ready to settle, he says. Then another woman walks through the door. She’s blonde and beautiful, and as cold as midnight. Her name is Vera, and like all women named Vera in film noir, she seems to have just wandered in from Hell looking for a man to take back with her. Dan volunteers to go with her because he’s too dense to see that all Vera really wants is a two thousand dollar mink coat. He can’t even afford to take her out to the boardwalk, so he lifts some money from the cash register at work. That sets into motion a nightmarish chain of events. Every move Dan makes only gets him in deeper and deeper, but most of the time his decisions seem to make sense. His mistakes are huge, but it’s easy to see how and why he makes them.
Quicksand is richly populated with nice character parts, a testament to the strong original script by Robert Smith (99 River Street). Peter Lorre plays Vera’s old boss—a sleazy boardwalk operator with whom she clearly had more than a working relationship. If Dan was smarter, he might ask himself why Vera would lead him to Lorre’s arcade on their first date. Art Smith plays Dan’s boorish boss, a guy who starts out as a jerk and ends up as a villain. And Taylor Holmes issues a curious performance as a lawyer near the end of the film. His character seems slightly sinister--something to do with the way he intones lines like, “Men don’t die easily. They take a lot of killing.”
At the center of the movie is Dan’s relationship with both the bad girl and the good girl. As Vera, Jeanne Cagney (baby sister of James no less) is a piece of work. She’s beautiful, but she’s got a hard edge from the beginning. Vera couldn’t fool just anybody, but she twists poor Dan Brady to her will without breaking a sweat. When the time comes for her to sell him up the river, it only seems natural.
As the good girl, Helen, Barbara Bates gives the film’s oddest performance. Helen isn’t just a sweet gal in love with a dope, she seems genuinely like a masochist. Near the end of the film, Dan confesses to a series of crimes that should send even most the lovelorn girlfriend screaming to the cops, but Helen responds by declaring a love for her man that lapses into delusion. She seems like one of those sad women who write love letters to imprisoned serial killers they’ve seen on the news. In real life, Bates suffered from a crippling depression which eventually led to the end of her career in films and later to her suicide in 1969. She makes for a sad, strange screen presence.
As Dan Brady, Mickey Rooney manages the difficult task of distancing himself from his iconic cheerfulness. He had been Hollywood’s biggest (albeit shortest) star for much of the thirties and forties, but by 1950 the country had taken a turn for the noir, and Rooney tried to go with it. At the time, the public wasn’t having it, but as the years go by I wonder if his noir work (Drive A Crooked Road, Baby Face Nelson) will have more longevity than his light thirties fare. Rooney never had a Wizard of Oz-sized phenomenon like Judy Garland, and I don't think he's had the staying power of Shirley Temple. (Does anyone watch Andy Hardy movies anymore?) Part of what Rooney brings to Quicksand is a little man’s insecurity and bluster. Dan’s a dope and doesn’t know it, and that’s exactly as it should be. I can’t tell how much of this quality is intentional and how much of it is Rooney’s forced attempt to be taken seriously as a leading man, but either way the results work.
Until the end, the entire movie works. Director Irving Pichel directs with style and restraint. The scenes in Lorre’s cheap arcade have the stink of cigarettes and sweat on them, and the big robbery scene is a taunt piece of suspense. Pichel keeps an oddball cast going strong, and the movie nearly makes it across the finishing line. Alas, it stumbles a bit at the end with a goofy deus ex machina (the lawyer’s final speech is pure hogwash), but like any good film noir, Quicksand has already made its point: an ordinary man can make one mistake that sets into motion a chain of events that will destroy him. Point taken.
Rooney's chances of being remembered for his thirties work might be hurt by the fact that a huge part of the modern audience for old fashioned song-and-dance flicks are gay men. And Mickey's been vocal about not liking gay folks too much. Here he is expressing some political/social views that are unlikely to endear him to friends of Dorothy.
