tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47970879681041216362024-03-19T05:51:26.766-07:00Down These Mean StreetsMusings of a Noir DameMargot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.comBlogger53125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-23334707731751305292020-04-25T10:13:00.001-07:002020-06-06T08:00:07.638-07:00Scarlet Street (1945)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is my very belated entry to the 2020 Literature on Film blogathon, hosted by Paul Batters of </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://silverscreenclassicsblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/the-2020-classic-literature-on-film-blogathon-is-here-day-three/"><span style="color: orange;">Silver Screen Classics</span></a></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: #fd8008; font-family: "helvetica";"> </span>on April 3, 4 and 5. Yes, I know, I cheated a bit. So there.<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Of Human Bondage</span></div>
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“Every painting, if it's any good, is a love affair.” Christopher Cross</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Scarlet Street was a remake of the French movie <i>La Chienne</i>, appropriately translated into English as <i>The Bitch</i>. What may have worked in France in 1931 didn’t fly in Hollywood in 1945 with Breen and his sanitation crew. Those boys liked to take bucketloads of strong disinfectant to morally suspect stories and proceedings.</span><br />
<span style="font-kerning: none;">So director Fritz Lang decided to take a more discreet approach, but not by much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Scarlet Street</b> was directed by Lang, together with its companion piece <i>The Woman in the Window </i>a year prior<i>. </i>That picture had been a big success, so Lang decided to get the band back together and give it another try.<b> </b>Lang always had problems fitting into the studio system that, he reasoned, stifled his creative impulses and mandated too many script changes, most notably in the aforementioned <i>The Woman in the Window</i>. Lang disliked the studio-imposed ending of the film which was Noir all the way through until the end when it pulled the rug out from under the audience and got a deadly case of the cutes. To circumvent studio interference he formed his own production company, Diana Productions (together with Joan Bennett and her husband Walter Wanger) to make <b>Scarlet Street</b>. While <i>The Woman in the Window</i> is constructed as a dream and presents a world of fantasy, <b>Scarlet Street</b> turns the nightmare into reality. The picture is a bleak masterpiece right to the closing frame, with a pitch black ending that doesn’t take the easy way out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the darkest - aka best - Noirs, the impossibility of hope is a central tenet. <b>Scarlet Street</b> is unsparingly desolate. Hope is not even an option, despair is the only constant. The movie is a study of lust, larceny, obsession, guilt, revenge and damnation without redemption. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lowly bank clerk, henpecked husband and amateur painter Christopher “Chris” Cross (Edward G. Robinson) - obvious metaphor is obvious - is leading a life of soul-destroying monotony. Like a prisoner serving his time, he’s worked in his dead-end job as a cashier at the same bank for 25 years. Into the bad bargain, he’s trapped in a marriage so frigid Siberian winters would feel balmy compared to it. He’s nearing a midlife crisis, and not just any old midlife crisis. The mother of all of them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">One evening</span> - after a celebratory dinner in his honor for his servitude - on his way home he takes a detour through Greenwich Village and happens upon Kitty March (Joan Bennett) who’s being beaten up by her lover/pimp Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea). Chris comes to her aid. No good deed goes unpunished. Very quickly he falls under her spell and soon sets her up in style in a swanky apartment. Kitty though is an expensive hobby. Chris starts to lavish money on Kitty that he doesn’t have though can always procure through embezzlement, first from his wife then from his company. Chris descends deeper and deeper into a web of lies, deceit, obsession and finally murder. And we all know, once you’re caught in that whirlpool there’s no escape.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Scarlet Street</b> is about dreams. Chris’s coworker Pringle tells him: </span></div>
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“When we are young we have dreams that never pan out, but we go on dreaming.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This quote is the entire film in a nutshell. Dreams that turn to sawdust, dreams that never had a chance, dreams that are ruined by messy human failings.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Chris is the born loser, the biggest sucker in town. He’s the perfect "nice guy" which translates in Noir into being the perfect pawn in other people's games. After 25 years at the same company, he’s still just the cashier. All he has to show for is a gold watch, and not much else. The celebratory dinner in his honor is not only the high point of his career, but the high point of his life. For once he is the center of attention. It’s just that Chris doesn’t quite realize that he’s being congratulated on a lifetime of insignificance. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">Chris is</span> Thoreau’s man who leads a life of quiet desperation. The powers that be handed him down a life sentence of unending joylessness, never-fulfilled yearnings and crushing regrets. He married his harridan of a wife Adele because he was literally dying of loneliness. Adele has completely emasculated her husband. Still carrying a torch for her saintly first husband who supposedly died in the line of duty, she has an oversized painting of the fallen hero hanging in the living room, displacing poor Chris in his own home and showing him his place. Besides, she needs someone to do the dishes. Which Chris does, in a flowery apron! He’s not a husband, he’s a housekeeper.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">There</span> are a few semi-comic interludes in the film, which led some viewers to mistake this for a black comedy. One example is when Adele’s first husband reappears. Unbeknownst to Adele, the dearly departed never really departed. He’ll turn out to be a thief who faked his own death. Yet even the “comic relief” in this film is infused with bitter irony. Hubby was on the run - not only from the law but also from her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Undesired his entire life, not only does Chris not have friends. He never had a lover either. “I never saw a woman naked”, must be one of the saddest confessions ever. He’s the guy who’d always lose the girl even if the competition is Larry, Curly and Moe. Chris sees his<b> </b>aging boss drive into the night with his young and gorgeous mistress. It hammers home the importance of money, status and power and his own impotence in such matters. Chris is ready to lose his soul for an illusion of love. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Chris’s desire for an affair is not at all born out of simple lust, a sense of gratification, a need adventure or simply boredom, as was the case in <i>The Woman in the Window</i>. Prof. Wanley had a comfortable yet dull existence. Chris’s life is hell on earth. His need is born out of sheer desperation. For this simple need he will have to suffer the torment of the damned. Lang paints a terrifying picture. A horrific destiny can befall anybody regardless of good character or inherent worthiness, and in Noir the vagaries of fate always like to kick the runt of the litter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Life is nothing but a cruel arbitrary game of Russian Roulette. There is no benevolent higher power to intervene. Fate does not show mercy and compassion to people who need it most. It would simply answer the anguished question of “why me?” with a flippant “why not you?”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Punishing transgressions is a prominent theme in Noir. I have no problem with this, after all Justice should be blind. She is, even in Noir, but not because she’s impartial and fair-minded. It’s just that she doesn’t care and impassively looks the other way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">After the celebration Chris decides for the first time to stray out of his comfort zone. He decides to go home by a different route and turns a corner - literally and figuratively - into a fantasy West Village (back then a crummy neighborhood) which has exactly the right air of decay about it. What starts as a casual nighttime stroll that should take Chris only a few blocks out of his way leads him directly into a labyrinth without exit. It’s another important theme in Noir. A single misstep, a wrong turn off the beaten path, precipitates disaster. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The city in Noir is always a dark, dangerous and corrupt place, virtually synonymous with wickedness and promiscuity. It casts its net to draw the innocent into dark alleyways, cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. And no maps are being sold here. You’re on your own.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Scarlet Stree</b>t, as so many other 40s Noirs, was shot entirely on the sound stage. This artificiality may lack authenticity, but it doesn’t matter at all. Terrence Rafferty writes in his NYTimes article <i>Noir and the City: Dark, Dangerous, Corrupt and Sexy</i>: “What the studio-bound Noirs sacrifice in authenticity, they make up in a heightened claustrophobia.” The characters in these films exist in a confined, closed-in world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Foster Hirsch calls it the fabricated city in his book <i>The Dark Side of the Screen</i>. These studio-created cities deliberately lacked the fullness and density of the real world. As in any good Noir (indeed any good movie) there is a co-relation between environment and crucial elements of the film. Shown usually at night, the studio city is a rain-slicked netherworld, eerily deserted, full of shadows and menace, providing the perfect backdrop for stories of entrapment, loneliness and isolation. They could be straight out of an Edward Hopper painting. These cities have no connection to the real world and their maze-like sets have no visible exit, thus making the protagonist and the viewer feel boxed in. The sound stage city is a microcosmos that contains actions and emotions to a confined setting offering no escape from danger. In <b>Scarlet Street </b>cinematographer Milton Krasner’s Expressionistic lighting hems in the characters with walls of shadows.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Painting is the only thing that brings Chris joy. Art is his escape mechanism, his creative and emotional outlet. His childlike view of the world becomes more than evident in his two-dimensional paintings which can be filed appropriately under “naive art”. As he says, his depictions on canvas emanate from pure feeling. “No one ever taught me how to draw, so I just put a line around what I feel when I look at things”. What makes Chris’s art brilliant is the same thing that makes him a born sucker. He sees what isn’t there. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lang comes precariously close to belaboring the point that Chris has “a little trouble with perspective”. A painting without perspective lacks depth, and Chris lacks the depth of character to see the truth about Kitty. He’s not the only one though. No character in this movie has any insight. Kitty and Johnny certainly don’t have any, they’re just working angles. The only one who isn’t lacking perspective is the director who shows us every facet of a perverted power game.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">At home Chris is forced to paint in the tiny bathroom because it’s the only place his wife allows. She doesn’t want his amateurish doodlings to clutter up the house. So he moves them to the apartment he’s renting for Kitty. Both Kitty and Johnny think Sunday painter Chris is a rich and successful artist whose paintings go for $50,000 a pop, a notion Chris never bothers to correct. It sounds better than “I’m a cashier”. They have dollar signs in their eyes and see their chance for a big payday. As if a free pad weren’t enough, Kitty starts passing his paintings off as her own. With dizzying success. She becomes a sensation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That girl is not only gold-digging, she’s strip-mining. So unselfish and servile is Chris that he’s glad for her. Love - or lust - is a mind-altering narcotic. He agrees to keep doing the paintings and having Kitty sign them. He even compares it to them getting married but with him taking her name! By stealing his art they essentially steal his soul. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Chris only wants one thing, that she allow him to paint her portrait. Her sarcastic answer? “Sure, and you can start right now,” as she hands him a bottle of nail polish so he can paint her toenails. “They’ll be masterpieces”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If many Noir protagonists exist in moral limbo between good and evil, this can’t be said about Kitty and her swain Johnny. Kitty is Joan at her flooziest best. Alluring and mysterious, she wears some fabulous clothes. She may look like a classy dame, but the veneer is thin at best. Her affections are negotiable, for adequate renumeration. Everything about her is the promise of sex. Her tight-fitting dresses, her strappy sandals, the way she lounges languorously on the sofa. She slinks more than she moves. To Chris she passes herself off as a struggling and lonely actress who’s just looking for a break. Nothing is easier than taking advantage of Chris’s quixotic and completely misplaced notions of chivalry. Poor little Kitty is just soooo helpless. A damsel in distress whose plight can make the angels weep. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“I can’t afford to pay my rent. Oh forget it. I shouldn’t have told you….I couldn’t take anything from you…no, no I couldn’t! I’ve never taken money from a man and I’m not going to now.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Good grief, if he buys that line, he must be out of his mind. Sob stories, no tramp can do without them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So pure of heart is Chris that he really believes all the lies Kitty tells no matter how obviously thick she lays it on. When he first meets Kitty, he doesn’t bother to ask what a nice girl like her was doing in a dubious part of town like this, and why she would then go to have a drink with him in a grubby basement dive. There’s never been an easier mark for a con. Virtue has always been an irresistible temptation to every crook. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Kitty doesn’t really have to do anything to get money out of Chris, just dangle the promise of sex in front of him. She doesn’t even need to deliver on that promise. It’s interesting to note that again his relationship to Kitty will remain unconsummated. His love and the affair is really just a sad, lonely man’s delusion. No sugar daddy ever got himself such a lousy quid pro quo deal. </span>In Noir everyone is out for himself but the cruelest punishment is reserved for the trusting.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There is a casual cruelty about Kitty. She doesn’t for one second consider the feelings of Chris. All her thoughts are focused on her lover Johnny. Johnny for his part keeps his girl Kitty on a short leash through threats and slaps that she can’t seem to get enough of. She loves him despite the abuse. Scratch that, because of it. She just comes back for more. Love’s a battle field. She despises Chris for the single reason that he’s nice to her. </span></div>
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“If he were mean or vicious or if he’d bawl me out or something, I’d like him better.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Johnny holds Kitty in a sexual thrall. “I don’t know why I’m so crazy about you,” she says. He replies with a smirk “Oh, yes, you do.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To top it all off, Kitty is a vulgar slob, a trait she carefully hides from Chris as he sees her as a helpless innocent. She isn’t improving the dumpy digs she lives in by letting dirty dishes pile up in the sink and spitting grape seeds around the place. Classy. But wait, there’s more! Saying she’s bone-idle is an understatement. Aptly nicknamed Lazy Legs by Johnny, she’s tried modeling for a living but really, getting to work on time is just such a drag.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Kitty’s girlfriend Millie has Johnny pegged alright. He’s pimping his girl out. “He’s turned you into a tramp”, Millie says. In the opening scene Johnny slaps Kitty around and shakes her down for money.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Johnny urges Kitty to use her “charms” to milk unsuspecting cash cows and it’s clear that means more for Kitty than flashing her suitors nothing but a coy little smile.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She doesn’t have too many compunctions about earning her money on her back. She knows how to use what she’s got to get a lot more. Her reluctance is purely perfunctory and the floozy’s feint at good-girl morality doesn’t fly with Johnny: “You’ve been kissed before”, he smirks. Kitty doesn’t demur. It’s comforting for a girl to know that she couldn’t possibly sink any lower.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoFaZ5p0LcKOmHNsGy6pxe01x7Eh-paPXiAELz5HTZOnEwebXFHyT7jqmSHV-mqCdzYWdZwZbfDQVuV0jQLNI6ldIpepy_JDns440bW7CPXrKGRXvp_yBxqaafwO4YPDBfQy6wjKZ-cwc/s1600/Scarlet3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="640" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoFaZ5p0LcKOmHNsGy6pxe01x7Eh-paPXiAELz5HTZOnEwebXFHyT7jqmSHV-mqCdzYWdZwZbfDQVuV0jQLNI6ldIpepy_JDns440bW7CPXrKGRXvp_yBxqaafwO4YPDBfQy6wjKZ-cwc/s320/Scarlet3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">As mentioned before, the femme fatale is never a working woman, well, honest work that is. Kitty may want more out of life than a filthy fifth floor walk-up, but her indolence and her allergy against hard work prevent her from getting off the couch.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She is the type who would always choose the path of the least resistance. Scamming people is as far as her ambition and her imagination stretches.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We get an interesting twist on the femme fatale here. If Kitty is a manipulative tramp she in turn gets manipulated by her boyfriend. For him she’s just a meal ticket. Kitty wields the femme fatale’s favorite weapon - in fact her only weapon - sex. But so does Johnny. For him their relationship works on the grounds of basic economics. No money, no honey, baby.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The floozy and her pimp. Two cheap chiselers, devoid of humanity. A match made in hell.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lending further amoral support to this already nefarious tale is Duryea, Noir’s favorite slap-happy heel. This picture wouldn’t be what it is without his patented oozing-slime-from-every-pore oiliness. Regular readers of my blog, all five of them, will know that I’m a fan of Duryea. (For more about him hop over to my review of <i>Black Angel</i>.) There was just something fabulously untrustworthy about this scheming arch-louse. A smooth operator with an itchy backhand, Dan knocked ‘em and socked ‘em, and never has he run more true to type than here. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Johnny is a hustler who’s always on the prowl for some dodgy deal or other. A small-time crook out for a really big score. Well, at least he has aspirations. His suits are as loud as his mouth and his cheesy line of patter would make a used car salesman proud. He’s the guy who’d tell you cheerfully he’s in import/export, would you care to ask. One look at him should tell you you can trust this guy as far as you can throw a piano.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">His approach to the law is relaxed. He likes to supplement his non-existent income with blackmail and extortion. “It's only blackmail when you're dumb enough to get caught.” It’s hard to argue with that rationale. And let’s not forget his little sideline as a pimp. Never has a man worked his fingers to the bone less for his hard-chiseled money.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And exactly like his ladylove he’s too greedy and ambitious for the daily grind but too weak and lazy to put in the hours. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If art is like a love affair for Chris, for Johnny and Kitty art means cold hard cash. Art for art’s sake vs. art as commodity. It is interesting to note how readily everybody accepts the lie that Kitty is the painter. It is a clever commentary on art and image, reality and perception, avarice and artistry; incredibly modern and timely in times of Instagram where the most worthless things are effortlessly marketed with a pretty face behind it. Sex sells. It always did. It’s just natural that the beautiful paintings were done by a beautiful woman like Kitty, not a meek and mousy Joe Schmo who is nobody’s idea of a brilliant painter. There’s no doubt to Chris, had he gone to the art gallery with his pictures under his arm, he would have received a contemptuous reception. He knows he’s a failure. With Kitty’s name on it they’re not two-dimensional doodlings, they’re avangarde masterpieces. Painter and painting are the whole package. Kitty has just enough smarts to internalize Chris’s reflections on art and parrot them to the art critics. Art and commerce make the strangest bed fellows, like trollops and pimps.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">One day though Kitty finally goes too far. She spits out her contempt for Chris, that he is no man, that he wouldn’t have the guts to kill anybody. </span></div>
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“How can a man be so dumb? I’ve been waiting to laugh in your face ever since I met you. You're old and ugly and I'm sick of you. sick, sick, sick<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">!”</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">...she says to a man with an icepick in his hand. How many shades of stupid is that? Everybody has his breaking point. Chris stabs Kitty to death with said icepick in an unexpected eruption of brutal violence. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We could say now we didn’t see this coming, Chris being such a meek and submissive man. But the violence was clearly foreshadowed. Chris, at home in his frilly apron, was chopping liver for dinner. His wife cruelly mocks him and he, for the first time ever, menacingly comes towards her with the knife in his hand. Discontent and violence were always lurking in the hidden recesses of his mind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If Lang had let everybody off the hook for their crimes the year before in <i>The Woman in the Window</i>, this time he puts the knife in and twists it slowly. Isn’t it wonderful when Noir leaves you with a warm and fuzzy feeling in the end? <b>Scarlet Stree</b>t leaves no doubt that Lang had a thorough understanding of the term scorched earth policy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The police have enough circumstantial evidence to charge Johnny with Kitty’s murder. Chris doesn’t disabuse them of their notion and Easy Street turns into rough road for Johnny. He's sent to the electric chair and Chris goes free. Many viewers were wondering how the PCA could let an ending like this pass. It’s really quite easy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Every sin carries in itself its own burden of punishment. Lang, raised Catholic, knew this. And so did Joe Breen, also Catholic. It may not be conventional justice, but Lang gives his protagonist plenty of rope to hang himself with.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A reporter covering Johnny’s execution is the one who awakens Chris’s conscience, with a slightly bromidic homily no doubt put in to appease he-who-shall-not-be-named.</span></div>
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"Nobody ever gets away with murder…no-one escapes punishment…The problem just moves right in here (pointing to his heart) where it can never get out…so you go right on punishing yourself. You can’t get away with it. Never…I’d rather have the judge give me the works than do it to myself.”</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Chris has to find out that hell is not a location. Hell is a state of mind. Slowly the ghosts of his victims begin to haunt him. He starts hearing the gloating voices of Kitty and Johnny, their clandestine whispers and their laughter.</span></div>
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”Johnny darling….I’m here baby… Come here, Lazy Legs!…Jeepers, I love you Johnny!… He brought us together, Johnny, forever…See Chris, she loves me…She’s mine, Chris, foreve<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";"><span style="font-size: 15px;">r.”</span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">They are still alive to Chris, there in his head, their taunts forever echoing in his mind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Chris is condemned to wonder the streets of New York for years, like the undead, driven by unrelenting Furies, lost in lunacy. The formerly respected citizen becomes a wretched broken man, sleeping in flop houses and on park benches. He not only loses his mind, but his identity. Chris is forever damned to solitary confinement in the most confining prison cell of all, the darkness of his own mind, in a purgatory of madness and self-flagellation. It’s lonely at the bottom. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Several times Chris tries to confess his crimes to the cops just to make the voices stop, only to be laughed at. Getting away with murder is the worst punishment of them all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s a question though what is tormenting him exactly. Is it his guilt over killing his victims or is it that he can’t eradicate their voices and thus can’t eradicate their memory? Is it forgiveness for his crimes he wants or just forgetfulness? We never get an answer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As a director Lang has occasionally been accused of being sadistic and complicit in the tragedies that he bestowed on his protagonists. Chris’s fate could certainly bear out that notion. His punishment is overkill. While it’s true that Lang didn’t flinch from showing the almost unwatchable and this film is very downbeat and depressing, it is not cynical or misanthropic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lang does not turn Chris into an object of ridicule, we only pity him. His degradation is never played for laughs and Lang treats him with a compassion that none of the characters allow him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The final humiliation for Chris is seeing his portrait of Kitty being sold for $10,000 as an important artwork. “Her masterpiece” the gallery owner calls it, not knowing that the dead woman was a cheap little tramp whose interest in painting didn’t extend further than her toenails.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com33tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-90020897333930021012020-02-21T10:51:00.002-08:002020-04-03T12:29:10.015-07:00Raw Deal (1948)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifV1K0ylyhTZPy1xQhOXOikFFQQTZm1WzSq5HXZrhVbeSV-pJn-xPVB6hBHFPkIjQKLJLZO2Jci2CKKNZYKbxQiTBxoGanQsKJ9uHmJGAJKwdq5_k6anARNAspKisbhQALrF-IOfgFctw/s1600/MV5BMTcxNzMzMDU3M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzY0MjE3MjE%2540._V1_SY1000_CR0%252C0%252C531%252C1000_AL_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="531" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifV1K0ylyhTZPy1xQhOXOikFFQQTZm1WzSq5HXZrhVbeSV-pJn-xPVB6hBHFPkIjQKLJLZO2Jci2CKKNZYKbxQiTBxoGanQsKJ9uHmJGAJKwdq5_k6anARNAspKisbhQALrF-IOfgFctw/s320/MV5BMTcxNzMzMDU3M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzY0MjE3MjE%2540._V1_SY1000_CR0%252C0%252C531%252C1000_AL_.jpg" width="169" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">None Shall Escape</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“I want to breathe. That’s why I want out of this place. So I can take a deep breath again.” <i>Joe Sullivan</i></span></blockquote>
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Anthony Mann’s reputation today is primarily based on his Westerns of the 1950s. Yet before Mann reinvented the Western as a psychological landscape as much as a physical one, he honed his skill and dark vision on Poverty Row, stamping his mark on the Noir universe and directing little cheapo gems that rose way above their B-movie limitations thanks to the brilliance of their director and a wizard of a DP.<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Mann left Dark City to light out for the territories he took his Noir sensibilities with him and brought a hard-edged realism to the genre, steering it into bitter and neurotic territory. All his Westerns are essentially Noir on the Range and he created in Jimmy Stewart a Western protagonist who was not only morally ambiguous but near-psychotic, just one step away from being an out and out villain. The psychologically troubled Mann “hero” is always in danger of becoming what he already closely resembles, the Mann villain. This very interesting polarity has its roots in Mann's Noir of the 40s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">John Alton, master of bargain basement brilliance on a buck fifty budget, was the Director of Photography and he could have made any hack director look good. Fortunately he didn’t have to as he worked with Mann. Mann and Alton pooled their resources six times between 1947 and 1950 and to this day are one of the best director-cinematographer dream teams in cinema with style to burn. They naturally went together, like guns and ammo. <b>Raw Deal </b>oozes moody Noir atmosphere conjured up with a 40-Watt lightbulb. Thanks to the cinematography, the strange theremin music and Claire Trevor’s voice-over the entire movie has a hallucinatory and hypnotic quality about it. The characters move through a hazy dreamscape as if they’re in a cold-sweat nightmare. To say Alton illuminated the dark crevices of the human psyche would be misleading, but he revealed them. He once remarked that he wasn’t afraid of the dark, but he could certainly make his audience afraid of it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Both Mann and Alton had learned how to work a tight budget toiling at perpetually underfunded PR outfits. Economy was second nature for them. We do get the occasional matte backdrop and miniature sets but so what? Alton had the special gift to dress up a little cheapo to resemble a major production with cinematic sleight of hand.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">His beautiful Chiaroscuro photography is used as a smokescreen to hide the paltry budget. The result is poetry caught on celluloid. Alton creates a dreamlike twilight world of pure imagination, drawn from stacks of dog-eared pulp fiction magazines, “a nocturnal fantasia of pure pulp…which drew on two decades of fermented hard-boiled tropes”. (Eddie Muller, Noir Alley)</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Raw Deal</b> is a love letter to Noir and every time I watch it I’m in awe. It’s an absolute masterpiece, on every level. Eagle-Lion’s finest hour.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">All Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe), in the big house for robbery, wants is to smell fresh air again and collect the 50G owed to him by gangster Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr), the guy Joe took the rap for. After that it’s destination Panama. Rick has greased some palms to bust him out but of course there’s a double cross. Never give a sucker an even break. Rick wants Joe dead so Joe won’t squeal into the DA’s ear and Rick doesn’t have to cough up all that lovely money. Rick is a bit touchy when it comes to having his plans ruined and figured Joe would have a thousand to one shot at success escaping, given the odds. So many things can go wrong during a prison break. Stray bullets have a nasty habit of hitting people. It’s mathematically solid thinking but the fall guy, lamentably alive, gets further than he’s supposed to, dragnet or not, with the help of his girl Pat Cameron (Claire Trevor) and his case worker and semi-hostage Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt). Rick knows loose ends must be snipped and sends his twitchy in-house torpedo Fantail (John Ireland) to take care of matters. Now Joe has a score to settle…</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Raw Deal </b>has an unusual voice-over narration by Claire Trevor, to my knowledge the only Noir (besides <i>Mildred Pierce</i>) with a female voice-over. It sets itself apart from the regular male voice-over by forgoing any kind of stentorian declarations. Trevor has a wonderfully husky, low-pitched and well-modulated voice. Her melancholy interior monologue resembles a resigned-to-her-fate confessional. Hauntingly disillusioned, almost catatonic, with a world of hurt and desperation in it, her narration puts a spell on the audience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">From the very first second doom, hopelessness and despair resonate strongly in that heart-broken voice. “Today’s the day. Today’s the day. The last day I have to drive up to these gates”. Pat’s voice should be joyous, after all it’s the day she tells Joe that his escape is set. But instinct tells her they’re in existential free-fall already. We see Pat visiting Joe in prison wearing all black with a veil over her face. It looks like she’s going to a funeral. She is, she just doesn’t know it yet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Pat is, if not the moral center, certainly the heart and anchor of the story even though she’s a gangster moll. She’s gone through the hard-knocks school of life. Tough-talking and street-wise, with a bruised heart and dearly paid-for wisdom, she had the bad luck to fall in love with the wrong guy. But underneath that brassy exterior is a lonely, beaten down and scared woman who’s only ever wanted one thing in her life, Joe’s love. “Waiting, waiting, all my life it seems as if I’ve have been waiting for Joe.” She’d wait till hell freezes over. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Pat loves Joe unconditionally to the point of desperation. “I want whatever he wants, up or down, make or break.” That’s the trolley car she’d ride till the end of the line, even if it goes off the yellow brick road into the abyss. Tammy Wynette would be proud of her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Her blind love for Joe literally entraps her though she’s clear-sighted enough to realize it’s built on quicksand. “He’s never really told me he loves me”. </span>Ann is getting under Joe's skin<b>.</b> No desperate devotion on Pat’s side can dampen the sparks that fly between Ann and Joe. It is quite telling that Joe calls Pat his "partner” to Ann’s face, not his girl or his ladylove, and frankly treats her more like a buddy than a lover.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Into the bargain Pat is saddled with another handicap. She’s a tad shopworn and knows her time is running out. Mann and Alton come precariously close to belaboring the point of a race against time. One of Noir’s favorite fetish items, ticking clocks, are everywhere in the movie. Time is precious, it doesn't stop for anyone and most of all time will run out in the end. There is a wonderful scene where Trevor's face is reflected on that of a clock.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">While we can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a femme fatale in Noir, sexy and brooding Dennis O’Keefe<b> </b>is one of Noir’s rarer breeds, the homme fatal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Joe is a bit light in the ethics department. Hard-nosed and brutal, he has no compunction about taking advantage of both women’s desire for him. He’s like Typhoid Mary. What he has is catching. But all’s fair in love and Noir. This time he miscalculated his own emotions though. He falls for Ann as she falls for him. But lust and larceny are a volatile highly combustible combination.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s not too often that Noir renders us with a backstory on one of the protagonists, but we get one here. Growing up poor and in orphanages, Joe is the kind of kid who was born with an eight-ball in his cradle. When he was young he saved other children from a burning house for which he earned a medal. Ann wants to know where that heroic kid went off the rails. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“If you want to know what happened to that kid with the medal, he had to hock it at sixteen. He got hungry.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Joe turned in his boy-scout badge. He saw that no-one can live on good deeds alone. They don’t pay the bills.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“I am from under a rock, a whole pile of ‘em; Corkscrew Alley, Dean’s Orphanage, the famous rock that hits you in the back of the head after you’ve tried to help someone, not to mention that heap I busted out of called the State Pen.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is worth noting that the movie starts and ends on Corkscrew Alley, a metaphor so obvious it risks accusations of banality. It’s the hardscrabble place where life puts you through the meat grinder and you buy your one-way ticket to hell. But as we’ll see there’s just enough humanity in Joe to keep us rooting for him. If Noir doesn’t make us root for the morally corrupt outright, it at least makes us care about the person who’s morally compromised.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ostensibly the films seems to set up the<b> </b>classic dichotomy between the good girl and the bad girl, the Madonna and the whore, who battle it out for the soul of the homme fatal. Before she meets Joe, Ann is “Miss Law and Order”, leading a life of clear-cut simplicity. Good is good and bad is bad. It’s a viewpoint that simplifies life. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But this is as far as the standard good girl-bad girl dynamic goes. Lines get blurred pretty quickly. Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes has to figure out quite fast that her steadfast principles are on shaky moral ground because her attraction to her rehabilitation project makes her willing to walk on the wild side and explore the darker aspects of her character. She may like to delude herself, and Joe, that her interest in him is purely professional, but the innocent act isn’t too convincing. It’s just another way of saying she has the hots for the bad boy who poses a serious threat which excites her. The strong undercurrent of sexual desire between the two is there from the first second.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To help Joe she eventually shoots a man in the back. The shot was not fatal but she’s horrified by what she’s done. Now she has to live with the knowledge that she too has a capacity for violence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Pat may have a checkered past but her only reason for living a life of crime is utter devotion and she’s always there when the spam hits the fan. All she ever wanted was normality. In a way she’s a lot like </span>perpetually pickled ex-moll Gaye Dawn. Pat is no lush but she has the exact same tendency to masochistic self-destruction. She too grew up on Corkscrew Alley and it’s beaten all the fight out of her. Yet despite their animosity Pat is capable of feeling sympathy for Ann: “She, too, is just a dame in love with Joe. And she’s lost.”</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For once the doomed<b> </b>love triangle between Joe, Pat and Ann does not hamper the movie. Their three-way dynamic is the dramatic and emotional core of the movie. Nominally <b>Raw Deal</b> may be a gangsters on the lam/revenge tale but what the movie is really about is the fundamentals: the very nature of love, loyalty and betrayal, and making profound moral (or immoral) decisions. It lends the film an unusual emotional depth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Both Pat and Ann personify two different facets of Joe’s world and more importantly two diametrically opposed forces in his character. Hard-boiled Joe, the tough gangster who answers to nobody, vs. over-easy Joe, the man who could still find redemption and turn his life around.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Pat personifies Joe’s past. Ann is the promise of a fresh start. It is Ann who brings out Joe’s softer side, not Pat. Ann sparks a yearning for his own lost innocence. Ann figures all he needs is the love of a good woman to bring out that heart of gold. Oh dear, that hoary old chestnut again. Women should know better by now. Well, to be honest, we probably do but when did that ever deter us? Girls are silly things.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ann is able to break through Joe’s defenses when she tells him that life dealt her a lousy hand too, though she may not look it. </span></div>
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“Just because I own a car and a tailored suit and my nails are clean, you think I’ve never had to fight?”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is a turning point in their relationship just as an incident that’s seemingly unconnected to the movie's plot yet central to its vision. While hiding out in a farmhouse Joe helps a fellow man, another escaped criminal, to evade the police. It is an act of mercy. But it is an axiom of Noir that the second the Noir hero gets sentimental, or maybe just human, he gets slapped down hard with cold reality. Humanity is a luxury he can’t afford. Going soft is for suckers. Another act of mercy will be Joe’s undoing in the end.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Joe’s main reason for breaking out of jail is his desire to breathe fresh air again, something that was a rare commodity in prison. His longing for a better life has become a relentlessly tormenting nightmare. (There’s also the matter of 50G owed to him by Rick, but it is a secondary reason.) After the escape Joe believes he’s finally free, but Ann sees what he can’t see himself. The cops would never stop breathing down his neck. Joe is still shackled because the most confining prison cell will always be his shady past, his mine-field of a future and the legacy of Corkscrew Alley. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. To quote another Noir: “If you want fresh air, don’t look for it in this town”. You can’t escape Dark City.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Once out of prison, the trio take Noir from the city out on the open road, to crooked byways, lost highways and blind corners. The open road promises unobstructed flight but turns travelers into homeless, transient strangers and desperate fugitives. Unbeknownst to themselves our threesome are on the road to nowhere already because Noir is a world of roadblocks and dead-end alleys. </span><br />
<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is what all sinners on the lam have to understand in the end. Being an outlaw means being an outcast. It means everlasting exile from your fellow men. Always running, always hiding, never being able to go home again. There is no refuge in Wilderness. It may be beautiful and unspoiled but it is as unforgiving and corrosive as the confined prison cell they have fled.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In his Westerns Mann wasn’t interested in showing how the West was won so much as in how the landscapes of the West with their vastness and their harshness psychologically affected his protagonists.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We already get that here. Noir doesn’t need the psychological and aesthetic framework of the city to function. In non-urban noirs, emptiness replaces the claustrophobic and encroaching spaces associated with urban noir. People are stranded in vacant hostile places where life is distilled to the primitive and one law counts: Live and let die.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For a while in the late 40s/early 50s Burr had the field to himself when it came to playing psychos. His intimidating, hulking figure was a staple in Noirs. Rick is almost always photographed from below which makes his burly figure even more frightening. Burr made a career out of playing psychos before he became Perry Mason and kept his nose clean. After changing sides Burr never drifted back to the dark side again, but pre-Mason Burr will always be fondly remembered by any Noir lover as a creep, a sadist, a deviant, a nutjob. You know, all the finer qualities a man can possess.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He wasn’t merely bad, he was despicability personified. Whenever one of his psychos walks into a scene, the other characters and the audience shrink back in instinctive loathing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s something distinctly gardenia-scented about Rick, he likes to live soft and surround himself with luxury (the floral dressing gown, the long cigarette holder, the posh jewelry he wears). A physical coward, he’s the guy who never fights his own fights if he can send out some underling to do his dirty work for him. “You always get somebody else to pull the trigger for you,” remarks Fantail to him.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Rick has strong pyromanic tendencies. Not only does he know his way around a Camel or a Lucky, he puts lighters to more creative uses, like singeing the earlobe of his henchman just because the guy annoyed him. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But most of all <b>Raw Deal</b> is notable for a flame-throwing incident before Lee Marvin became famous for it in <i>The Big Heat</i>. One dipso dame has to learn the hard way that hurling burning cherry jubilees in her face is Rick’s idea of a fun evening. Of course, in accord with Chekhov's dictum that a rifle produced in Act One must be fired by Act Three, Rick comes to a very satisfying end himself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Raw Deal</b> has many devastating moments in it, but the second to last scene in the cabin of the ship waiting to leave for South America must be one of the saddest. Joe and Pat have secured a passage and Joe is saying all the right things to Pat in a cheerless voice about making a better life for themselves in South America, but Pat knows that “every time he kisses me, he’d be kissing Ann”. She knows what Joe doesn’t, that Rick has kidnapped Ann. In the end Pat must face realities. She can’t go off to South America with Joe. Her life with him would be a sham as she’s lost his love, if she ever had it in the first place. And she’s not bad enough to let her rival suffer in the clammy clutches of Rick. So she lets Joe go off to save Ann. The classic lose-lose situation of Noir. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The finale is beautifully staged and shot. In a haze of fog and gun fire, doomed figures dance to their ultimate fate.There is no happy ending for anybody in this film. Joe kills Rick and saves Ann but luck and Joe never had much of a track record. He gets shot for his troubles and dies on the sidewalk, in Ann’s arms. It’s OK with him though. “I got my breath of fresh air. You….” The Noir hero is always just one lucky break away from hitting it big time, and only one unlucky break away from losing it all.</span></div>
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For Pat it’s utter defeat in the end: </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“There’s my Joe in her arms. A kind of happiness on his face. In my heart I know that this is right for Joe. This is what he wanted.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Joe got his redemption, if only in death. Ann has the satisfaction of knowing that Joe dusted up his rusty boy-scout badge to do the right thing. Only Pat is left with absolutely nothing. The world keeps on spinning at the fadeout, she doesn’t end up under a sheet in the morgue but it’s a constant in Noir that even if you survive, you never really win. That's the way life crumbles, cookie-wise. Sometimes surviving means you have to go on living, without hope and in misery. It's the eternal torment of the survivor.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com50tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-65281743905291243732019-12-27T09:19:00.001-08:002020-01-05T11:12:59.111-08:00Follow Me Quietly (1949)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf9NUSfRlUFU34CRQzXKjaCnNaJLosI3CfqGWEsi3Jxf1_lqYWmt0TijC-YLdcmGd14pH_IGn2dPQyEf7IdihgCLVEGXtxrxVUkH5YSDKgc0ZbFR9Km2cfoYkBL9d4pEskUhLRkGCkI9E/s1600/Follow5.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1193" data-original-width="1600" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf9NUSfRlUFU34CRQzXKjaCnNaJLosI3CfqGWEsi3Jxf1_lqYWmt0TijC-YLdcmGd14pH_IGn2dPQyEf7IdihgCLVEGXtxrxVUkH5YSDKgc0ZbFR9Km2cfoYkBL9d4pEskUhLRkGCkI9E/s320/Follow5.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Anatomy of a B movie</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What is a B movie? Books have been written about it, duels have been fought over it. No, not really but you know what I mean. Discussions about the subject can get incredibly heated, one thing leads to another and before you know it people start throwing squeaky little toys at each other. And then it all end in blood and tears. As it is still Christmas and we don’t want that, I’ll try to spare you the pain and come up with something akin to a classification. You’re welcome. I know you’ve been waiting for this with bated breath for eons.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The simplest definition is that B movies were cannon fodder to fill the bottom half of a double bill. They used second (or third and fourth) tier talent, had starvation budgets, barebones sets, crackpot plots, five-day shooting schedules and frequently barely cracked an hour in running time. There’s something to be said for brevity. No detours, no side streets, just a step into the gutter where the sidewalk ends. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Most major studios employed B units and if a hopeful couldn’t make it there, there was always the Gower Gulch </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">where you went to avoid an eviction notice or if the hamburger joint at the corner didn’t need a dishwasher. Perpetually cash-strapped Poverty Row studios provided </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">a refuge for filmmakers who had fallen from grace (Edgar Ulmer) or filmmakers who never got anywhere because they were a dead duck from the get-go (W. Lee Wilder). PR was also the last stop before the glue factory for actors whose star had crashed and burned. The story of Bela Lugosi who had to slum it out of necessity in Ed Wood productions late in his career is one of the most tragic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But really, it isn’t quite so straightforward and artless as all that. What the “B hive” provided, more often than not unintentionally, was a canvas</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"> for pioneering and highly creative directors and cinematographers. It was </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">a training ground for talent on the rise, like the incredibly gifted Anthony Mann who would go on to bigger and better things after his stint at various lower-echelon studios.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">B Units were a sandbox for innovation. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Very often<b> </b>low budget, low oversight and little respect gave the filmmakers a certain artistic freedom, because the studios - and the PCA - wouldn't keep very tight control on a production of such relative unimportance. When low-rent quickie assignments were put into the hands of talented filmmakers, the results were quite often stunning, to probably everybody’s surprise. If no one in the head office cared about the finished product, it stood to reason, then you could do what you wanted so long as you came in on time and on budget. In this anything goes environment where less money equaled less oversight, Noir grew unimpeded by the usual restrictions on style, content and moral turpitude. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It just goes to show that the aesthetics and artistry of a movie do not in the least have to be constrained by a low budget and more importantly low-budget does not have to be an excuse for subpar filmmaking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">B movies may not have any pretensions at high art but that doesn’t mean they deserve t</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">he Golden Turkey Award</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">. B is not a quality judgment but a well-defined production level. In his seminal article <i>Notes on Film Noir</i> Paul Schrader puts the disdain that can often be found for B movies down to “economic snobbery…high-budget trash is considered more worthy of attention than low-budget trash.” Spot on. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Those little films were never critical darlings which is another notch in their favor in my book.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Maybe many Bs were assembly-line products but their directors could be counted on for efficiency, economy and a bit of polish on a tight allowance. They were able to bring the movie in on schedule and on budget. That alone required extraordinary technical skill. And, if the stars were aligned right, these professionals brought style and energy to a product that was expected to have absolutely none.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The<span style="color: red;"> </span>sparseness of the budget forced the producers to use low-key lighting and darkness to hide the lack of sets and a lavish decor, camouflaging the paucity of the production values. Quite often the distinct Noir aesthetics derived directly from simple financial constraints, but a $5 electricity bill was a nice side-effect. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Grand historical epics depended on big budgets for optimal effect, crime dramas and Noirs depended on the tight disciplining constraints of small ones.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Arthur Lyons states in his book <i>Death on the Cheap</i> that </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Film noir was made to order for the Bs…because it required less lighting and smaller casts and usually entailed story lines that required limited-scale sets”. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Noir is by definition a style that epitomizes this phenomenon. B is the spiritual home of Noir. </span>A shadow-filled world for shady characters living in seedy environs just one step away from the gutter. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">At its best the B Hive meant narrative economy and efficient picture-making. Sure, plots were often abstruse, relying heavily on contrivances and coincidences piled on top of one another. Logic often fell by the wayside and the producers expected the audience to swallow six impossible things before breakfast.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"> B has its own rules and rationality doesn’t necessarily come into it.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Still, occasionally these coincidences are so spectacular that the mind boggles. They </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">can jeopardize a B movie’s credibility and in the hands of an incompetent hack they could drive a movie off the cliff. In the hands of an assured director they were shortcuts that allowed a whole lot of story to be crammed into a few reels.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Bs had to have an uncomplicated shorthand. Denied big budgets or luxurious running times they had to kickstart their stories straight into high gear. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">There’s just so much time for character development and navel-gazing when you only have 60 minutes. Messages are happily left to Western Union.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If the viewer thinks these structural weaknesses threaten plausibility, he’d be right…but shouldn’t watch a B movie. Just as in melodrama, these “weaknesses” are features, not flaws. If it’s done smoothly and with panache and style, you’ll hardly notice and there’s no reason why you should care. For me the no-frills approach works perfectly fine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the forties and fifties studios cranked out a seemingly unending series of cheapos to fill out the bottom of double bills. B movies, quite frankly, were the backbone of Hollywood. The town survived on a steady output of these lesser vehicles. While many of these one-hour throwaway products were instantly forgettable, occasionally you make a wonderful flea market find.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Follow Me Quietly</b> was made by RKO, the studio that - much more than any other of the Big Five studios - relied on B pictures to fill its coffers, especially from the 40s on. The studio churned out Western, adventure and crime serials by the bucketload. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">1946 had been an extremely profitable year for RKO but it would soon suffer setbacks. Richard B. Jewell writes in <i>RKO Radio Pictures: A Titan is Born </i>that “executive turnover was in fact the distinguishing feature of [RKO’s] twenty-nine year existence.... RKO’s management was never stable.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In 1948 aviation millionaire/tycoon Howard Hughes - who could charitably be described as eccentric - took over RKO, made himself head honcho and troubles began almost immediately. As studio boss his overpowering ego could never resist meddling in production matters, often demanding extensive changes to scripts. He unfortunately kept the directors he employed on a very short leash instead of trusting them to do their jobs right. He routinely held up promising films for months and even years with re-writes, re-shoots and re-edits causing interminable delays and skyrocketing production costs which drastically affected the studio’s bottom line. During his 7-year tenure, he put the studio through the meat grinder and it suffered massive financial losses due to his controlling and volatile management style. The man was a one-man wrecking crew. But despite this predilection for tampering RKO was able to churn out one good Noir after another, at least for a while, many of them becoming (minor) classics, such as <i>On Dangerous Grounds, Out of the Past, Cry Danger </i>and <i>The Narrow Margin</i>. It was RKO’s B unit that held things together and turned a profit. In the long run nothing though could stop the studio’s steady decline. Hughes was responsible for several expensive flops and as a consequence by the mid-50s RKO was in dire financial strains closing shop in 1957.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It was RKO that gave director Richard<b> </b>Fleischer his start. If we were to ask a group of passionate Film Noir fans to come up with a list of their favorite Noir directors, Fleischer likely wouldn’t be on that list. For no discernible reason Fleischer isn’t as revered as other denizens of Dark City, such as Mann, Ray, Dmytryk, Tourneur, Siodmak, Feist, Ulmer, many of them now considered heavyweights who continue to be celebrated and studied. Fleischer though is responsible for such entertaining time wasters as <i>Bodyguard, The Clay Pigeon </i>and <i>Trapped,</i> and genuine B Noir classics as <i>Armored Car Robbery </i>and <i>The Narrow Margin</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Jason Ney called him “Noir’s forgotten man” in his Noir City Magazine article <i>Richard Fleischer’s RKO years</i>. Fleischer’s directorial career spanned almost 50 years, and maybe it is that he never seemed to have a distinctive signature or that his later A pictures overshadow his early Noir efforts that are worth a second look and more recognition. Fleischer was a solid Noir director who showed occasional flashes of utter brilliance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He himself took the same attitude towards his B pictures as many of his critics. After the success of <i>The Narrow Margin</i>, Fleischer moved on to As and never looked back. In his memoir he shrugs his early efforts off dismissively with a sentence or two. He really shouldn’t have, and his work demonstrates that he could really deliver the goods.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b style="font-family: Helvetica;">Follow </b><b>Me Quietly </b>is a taut economical one-hour police procedural that’s well-paced and nicely photographed. Good old Bosley played the Grinch again, calling the movie </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“... an utterly senseless little thriller is patently nothing more than a convenient one-hour time-killer between performances of the eight-act vaudeville bill.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’m beginning to think Crowther hating a movie should be taken as a ringing endorsement.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Obsessed cop Lt. Harry Grant (William Lundigan) has been hot on the trail of an elusive serial killer known only as The Judge for months without being able to nail him down while the bodies keep piling up. The Judge strangles his victims randomly on rainy nights. He’s motivated by some mixed-up religious sense of purity and sin, punishing “sinners” and meting out justice. Grant’s own lack of success is driving him crazy. The Judge seems to stay just one step ahead of his investigation. Grant is receiving “help” in the shape of Ann Gorman (Dorothy Patrick), intrepid girl reporter for a muck-racking tabloid rag that brings you all the news that’s not fit to print. She’s a pest - though a charming one - and sticks to him like glue which isn’t alleviating his headache.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This movie holds a claim to originality because Grant has the imaginative and slightly creepy idea to construct a life-size faceless dummy of the killer based on the evidence they got, instead of sending out routine bulletin information. It’s an early version of psychological profiling. Through that the cops get a better idea of his size and shape. They use the dummy in the lineup room for witness recognition and take photos of it to show to witnesses. On a side-note, the French movie title is <i>Assassin sans visage, </i>a much more apt title than the original.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If we think now the logic of this plot device is bewildering and hokey we’d be right. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Why would a dummy be any better than a sketch, especially when in many instances they’re just using pictures of it to try to identify the killer?” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">asks Nighthawk quite rightfully in his <i>Noir of the Week </i>review of the film. The entire setup doesn’t bear close inspection. But w</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">ho’s to complain? Not us B movie lovers.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">Fleischer</span> is able to sell this setup as a serious idea and not a hammy plot device and I think he succeeds. If the actors </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">ride roughshod over script absurdities with absolute seriousness and play a goofy script with heartfelt conviction, it usually works.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Or maybe it’s just that my tolerance level for this kind of stuff is very high. I take my doses of B Noir intravenously.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The scenes with the dummy are so effective because they are incredibly creepy even if they should be silly. The dummy is turned into an icon of evil. In the lineup room a sole spotlight illuminates the back of the dummy and we hear a voice asking The Judge questions about his motives. Late at night in his office where he’s working overtime Grant talks to the dummy, who sits with his back to him, pouring out all his frustration with his inability to successfully catch him. Again the scene is not silly, instead it is very eerie and tense. It gets even more unsettling when the dummy - after Grant has left - gets up and leaves! The Judge has sneaked into the police station. It’s never quite clear if this is actually happening in reality or if the audience is supposed to take it metaphorically because Grant is on the verge of cracking as his partner tells him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To quote Nighthawk again: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Fleischer sells the seriousness of this scene, which successfully walks the line between disturbing and unintentionally ridiculous, through creative camerawork and stark lighting on the dummy.”</span></blockquote>
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The reason why the entire movie works is because of the performances of the lead actors who have great chemistry and bring a lot of energy to their performances. Lundigan is a capable and handsome lead in these second-string features and Patrick in a rare lead role shows spunk. Plus we get good supporting performances, especially by Jeff Corey - who could steal the thunder from anybody - as Grant’s sidekick Sgt. Collins.<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">From the beginning the relationship between Grant and Ann is more flirty than professional. The lady is quite tenacious and single-minded in her quest to get what she wants: the inside scoop on a story that would be the making of her as a journalist. She demonstrates her determination by breaking into Harry's apartment at night to wait for him on his sofa, wearing a snazzy evening dress. Well hello…</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">In the</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica";"> </span>end it is her knowledge of pulp magazines that gives Grant the clue to latch on to the mysterious killer who turns out to be a rather mousy Joe Schmo and not a brilliant criminal madman. I’ve seen a few reviews stating that this somehow ruins the movie. I really don’t know why. If I know my serial killers - and granted my knowledge on the subject may be a bit spotty - my guess is that this is much closer to the truth. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Fleischer would later direct the utterly chilling <i>10 Rillington Place,</i> based on the real life case of John Reginald Christie, a nondescript and unassuming man who nevertheless did away with at least eight people. The face of evil </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">is commonplace and ordinary, easily able to blend into a crowd and hide in plain sight.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">As opposed to the current strain of serial killer movies of the last three or four decades which portray the killers as brilliant, charming but tortured prodigies who almost invite the audience to identify with them, <b>Follow Me Quietly</b> does not delve into the workings of the criminal mind. Just as in </span><span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>He Walked By Night </i>(which according to Eddie Muller on Noir Alley inspired <b>Quietly</b>)<i>, </i>we never find out what makes The Judge tick. His motives, as his face, are always in the dark and he remains a cypher. We are in a B quickie and the only explanation we get is from Sgt. Collins: </span></div>
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“I used to know a guy who cut the tails off of cats. He didn’t like cats. The Judge cuts the air out of people. I guess he don’t like people.” </blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s no rational to his killings and the movie doesn’t even try to explain his psyche. Why does The Judge hate “sinners”? Why does he hate rain? Why does he kill? Damned if I know, and I’m sure damned if the producers knew.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Is the movie Noir? The jury is still out on this one. I’d say not really. It’s a police procedural with Noirish elements. It certainly has style to spare and visually fits the bill. We get atmospheric deep, dark shadows, canted angle shots and that almost (pseudo)Freudian attachment to</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"> water found in a lot in Noirs. It creates an aura of menace and mystery.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The Judge only strikes on rainy nights, Grant works through the night with a torrential downpour outside, in the final scene </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The Judge freaks out at the sight of water dripping like rain from holes shot in a pipe by a police machine gun.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The opening scene shows us Ann’s gams as she paces nervously back and forth on a rain-soaked street in front of a grubby dive while waiting for her mark Grant. In a see-through rain coat (slinky!) reminiscent of Joan Bennett’s in <i>Scarlet Street </i>nevertheless.<i> </i>She flicks her cigarette away in a less than classy gesture and enters the dive. The audience could be forgiven for mistaking her for a dubious dame, but we’d be proven wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">The</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica";"> </span>Judge personifies one aspect of Noir, the randomness of fate and death. The people he kills are clearly not evil - despite his declarations to the contrary - and he chooses his victims arbitrarily. He doesn’t discriminate by sex, social station, race or political affiliation. Pure dumb luck decides who lives or dies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The most damning evidence against <b>Quietly </b>as a full-blown Noir though is that alienation, loneliness, darkness and desperate choices Noir characters have to make are completely absent. The movie is very lighthearted despite the subject matter and both main characters are wholesome. Grant’s and Ann’s relationship is sexy and I love their banter but it is without any dark undercurrents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’ve seen a few reviews remarking on the cop/serial killer mirror image subtext. No doubt this notion is in the script which several times identifies Grant and The Judge as two of a kind in their obsessiveness. Grant even once states: “I'm too restless, the rain makes me nervous.” To which his partner replies: “You're getting more like The Judge every day." </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But it is not something that clean-cut Lundigan is capable of selling completely, as Eddie Muller points out in his Noir Alley intro. Grant may be desperate to catch the killer but he’s no defective detective. He’s neither neurotic nor is he close to losing his marbles over an obsession with a stiff like Lt. McPherson. The Noir (anti)hero usually has more traumas than an ER, but Grant is too well-adjusted for that. The inner turmoil and soul-destroying agony eating up the cop is not there. Robert Ryan, Dana Andrews or even Lawrence Tierney would have supplied Grant with an extra layer of twitchy hauntedness. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">In the end, it doesn’t really matter what we call these movies as long as they entertain. One thing is certain, s</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">o often these cheap little films are better than they have any right to be. There’s poetry to be found on the trash heap.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-38218465185799041952019-11-29T12:25:00.002-08:002020-08-28T07:45:08.530-07:00Sunshine Blogger Award<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJl5Nb03jyCbq7Hwhjpc8bNbj8OtdVzPLeGrRY3svn7gkXKoqBVzpX1NA8ZOXQLbasrqniik8NT6AmIZ8h2stBQI-5qPsYenk0bIm_Dck6MnFnJDbgN-uVqnxxpwMkm0wgTHF3gxHJuS8/s1600/Sun.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="360" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJl5Nb03jyCbq7Hwhjpc8bNbj8OtdVzPLeGrRY3svn7gkXKoqBVzpX1NA8ZOXQLbasrqniik8NT6AmIZ8h2stBQI-5qPsYenk0bIm_Dck6MnFnJDbgN-uVqnxxpwMkm0wgTHF3gxHJuS8/s320/Sun.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Paul Batters from <a href="https://silverscreenclassicsblog.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Silver Screen Classics</span></a> has nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award. A big thanks to Paul whose writing I very much respect. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Here are the rules for the Sunshine Blogger Award.</b></span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: "times"; text-align: justify;">Thank the person who nominated you and provide a link to their blog.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times"; text-align: justify;">Answer the eleven questions from the blogger who nominated you.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times"; text-align: justify;">Nominate eleven bloggers.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times"; text-align: justify;">Create eleven new questions for your nominees to answer.</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: "times";"><b>Here are my answers to Paul's question.</b></span><br />
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Which actor or actress who hasn’t received an Oscar do you think deserves one? And for what film?</b></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Edward G. Robinson. With his looks an unlikely box office draw, he carved out a niche for himself in Hollywood and always made his presence felt. He could elevate any movie even if the material was beneath him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He was never even nominated but should have been, at least for <i>The Sea Wolf, Double Indemnity, Key Largo </i>and<i> Scarlet Street.</i></span></div>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Who is your favorite child actor and name a film they were in which you love.</b></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">First, a confession. I hate children in movies. Despicable little twerps. They’re supposed to add the human element, cute and cuddly, but are usually simply precautious, all-knowing, smug, cloying and as such annoying. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I make an exception for Gigi Perreau in <i>Has Anybody Seen My Gal?</i> She was charming and is one of the few children in films I did not actively want to send to have a lobotomy.</span></div>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>If a biopic was made of you during the classic film era (1920s to 1960s), who would you like to play you and why?</b></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lauren Bacall ca. 1946. The Look. Nuff said.</span></div>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Which famous starry couple (of any time and place) would you want as neighbors? </b></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Reel couple: Nick and Nora. Perpetually sloshed and living the high life, they solve mysteries while making marriage look like fun. They not only love each other, but like each other. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Real couple: Frank and Ava, though their constant loud fights probably would get on the neighbors’s nerves very quickly. But the parties at Sinatra’s Twin Palms Estate in Palm Springs must have been fun. Plus I'd get the Rat Pack.</span></div>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Of all the classic monsters, which one do you feel associated with and why?</b></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Unfortunately I have to skip this question. I’m not really into horror/monster movies and can’t think of one.</span></div>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Is there a classic era actor/actress that you have a crush on?</b></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">One?? Darling, what kind of a question is that? What can I say, my heart is big and I have a one-track mind. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Here it goes: Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Paul Newman, Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Richard Widmark (not as Tommy Udo though), Robert Stack, William Holden, Stanley Baker, Clint Eastwood, Rory Calhoun, Steve Cochran, Jason Statham (have to include a modern one) and so many more.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Plus a one-off: Groucho Marx, just for his snarky zingers.</span></div>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>If there was ONE actor or actress (living or deceased) whom you could interview for your blog, who would it be and why would you choose that person?</b></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’m not sure it’s just one but I would love to talk to actors and directors who worked primarily for Poverty Row studios. Nobody set out to work for PR, but many started out there and got stuck. PR meant crackpot plots, haphazardly constructed cardboard sets, no-name actors. Yet these cinematic slums produced many fine pictures. Film critic Dave Kehr wrote in 1990: “A director on Poverty Row labored on films in the absolute certainty that no film critic would see them, no sophisticated public would encounter them, and no financial reward whatever would accrue to their auteurs.” No glory at all, yet they soldiered on.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Peggy Cummins of <i>Gun Crazy</i> fame is the one I’d like to talk to most. Her career in Hollywood unfortunately never took off, but she was in what is now considered one of PR’s greatest classics. When it came out, literally nobody saw the movie. She died in 2017 and was a guest at several Noir festivals where - very belatedly - she finally got at least some recognition. I’d love to know how it was working on the set with Joseph H. Lewis and how it felt to only get recognition decades later.</span></div>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Which film character’s closet would you love to raid? </b></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The question is more, which closet would I not raid. Clothes were fantastic from the 30s to the mid-60s. Grace Kelly’s entire wardrobe in <i>To Catch a Thief </i>and<i> Rear Window</i>, Eleanor Parker’s dresses in <i>The Naked Jungle, </i>Jane Russell’s wardrobe in <i>His Kind of Woman</i>. Kay Francis wore a lot of fab outfits in the 30s. Plus Gilda’s and Kitty Collins’s black dresses.</span></div>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Marry, Kiss, or Kill: Which film character would you marry, which would you share a hot, pre-code kiss with, and which would you kill like a noir anti-hero or villain(ess) with a score to settle? (And why did you pick these 3?) </b></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Marry, that’s not so easy because a lot of my crushes are not the marrying kind, especially the Noir (anti)heroes. I’ll probably go with one of those upright and stalwart Western heroes. John Wayne's character(s) in Ford's Cavalry Trilogy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hot pre-Code kiss: the obvious choice, Clark Gable. But then there’s always Warren William (must be pre-Code William though), the man we hate to love.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Kill: Many villains are bad but also very entertaining, so we need them alive. It would have to be someone truly despicable. I go with Noah Cross from <i>Chinatown, </i>Locky McCormick from <i>Johnny Belinda </i>or Dr. Henry Gordon from <i>Kings Row</i>.</span></div>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Of all the classic film studios, which is your favorite and why?</b></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hard to say. I think I’ll differentiate by genres. For Noir, RKO was great though Howard Hughes did his damnedest to drive the studio into the ground and in the end succeeded. For my second favorite genre - Westerns - Universal International is hard to beat. And Warner Brothers for their fantastic gangster movies.</span></div>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Choose a film where you would love to change the ending. Explain what that change would be and why you would do it. </b></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There are a number of Noirs/crime films out there that frustrate with their code-imposed endings to the point of inducing anger simply because the ending doesn’t at all fit the tone of the movie. Sometimes these tacked-on happy endings are so soapy that they almost drive the movie off the cliff. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Two I can think of are <i>Tomorrow Is Another Day </i>(1951)<i> </i>and<i> The Hunted </i>(1948). Both clearly cried out for a downbeat ending but the studio tacked on a happy one. Both would be minor classics with the bleak vision intact.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>The 11 Nominees for the Sunshine Blogger Award are:</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Many people already have been nominated, so I won’t nominate them again. A few on the list unfortunately don’t seem to update their blogs anymore (or not very often) but they belong on my list nevertheless.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.caftanwoman.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Caftan Woman</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://livius1.wordpress.com/"><span style="color: orange;">Riding the High Country</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://wheredangerlives.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: orange;">Where Danger Lives</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://cinemavensessaysfromthecouch.wordpress.com/"><span style="color: orange;">CineMaven’s Essays from the Couch</span></a></span></div>
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<a href="https://secondsightcinema.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Second Sight Cinema</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.filmnoirarchive.com/"><span style="color: orange;">Film Noir Archive</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://theoldhollywoodgarden.wordpress.com/"><span style="color: orange;">The Old Hollywood Garden</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/"><span style="color: orange;">Ferdy on Films</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.retromoviebuff.com/"><span style="color: orange;">Retro Movie Buff</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://grandoldmovies.wordpress.com/"><span style="color: orange;">Grand Old Movies</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://shadowsandsatin.wordpress.com/"><span style="color: orange;">Shadows and Satin</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Here are my 11 questions for the bloggers (not all original).</b></span></div>
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<li>Is there a movie that didn’t have a sequel but cried out for one?</li>
<li>Who is your favorite movie villain of all times?</li>
<li>Which movie do you think is better than the book it’s based on?</li>
<li>If you could live in a movie, which one would it be?</li>
<li>Dream date with a classic movie star?</li>
<li>Worst miscasting in Hollywood history?</li>
<li>Favorite quote from any movie.</li>
<li>Which film character’s closet would you raid?</li>
<li>Your favorite guilty pleasure movie?</li>
<li>You can hop on a time machine, which era/decade would you go to? And would you go even if there’s only a 50/50 chance of coming back?</li>
<li>What classic song/soundtrack/theme would be the soundtrack of your life?</li>
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Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-47385621983742649702019-10-30T14:10:00.001-07:002019-11-02T09:01:01.717-07:00Hell Bound (1957)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The Times They Are a-Changing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Noir's thorny Road to Perdition was a long and complicated one. Noir has always been a slippery concept and defining it can be very problematic, after all it was a label retrospectively applied. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">The nonexistence of Noir as a production category during its heyday obviously problematizes the history of the genre. W</span>hen did it begin and what was its swan song? To me the general consensus of it lasting from 1941-1958 is capricious. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We could argue now that, like Elvis, Noir never really died. Foster Hirsch does exactly that in his book <i>Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir </i>(p.15 et al.). In the same vein C. Jerry Kutner maintains in his article <i>Beyond the Golden Age: Film Noir Since the ’50s</i> for Bright Lights Journal that “there is no ‘neo-noir’, there is no ‘proto-noir’, there is only Noir”. If we see Noir as a worldview, a mood, a tone and a general feeling of malaise while disregarding the historical context I’d agree with this assessment. As long as there is life on this planet, there will be existential dread, doom, paranoia, obsessive love and despair. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is a different matter when we talk about the Classic Noir cycle. By the late 50s Noir's halcyon days were over and the genre was without a doubt coming to a fork in the road. It’s very hard to nail down exactly when Classic Noir was laid to rest, if it was at all. Some maintain it breathed its last in 1958 in a little Mexican border town helped along by a fat corrupt sheriff, others say it was blown to smithereens in a refinery explosion outside New York in 1959. My brilliant academic research unearthed conclusive evidence for a different scenario (in other words, I had this epiphany after an all-night bender. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it). The last vestiges of Classic Noir hemorrhaged to death one night in the shower of a run-down motel room, its sins washed down the drain forever. We all know the culprit and he can deny the accusations till the cows come home, we know better.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There have been quite a few reported sightings during the 60s and every time people thought they’d buried Noir, every time the coffin stayed empty. But by now Noir’s trajectory had changed. Noir tropes mean nothing when they stray too far from their original message. Noir has always been more than just men in fedoras and dames in fabulous outfits. It was a reflection of its time and as such it is hard to replicate because the historical and societal circumstances that made it possible are not present anymore (WWII and its lingering aftereffects, returning veterans, postwar disillusionment, HUAC, the A bomb and McCarthyism). Nothing happens in a vacuum. Classic Noir loses its soul when it is removed from its time and place in history, and certain historical events are always at the very least subtext in Classic Noir. Paul Schrader wrote in his seminal article <i>Notes on Film Noir</i>: </span></div>
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“You can't pull a style out from its roots and the roots of Film Noir are World War II, German Expressionism, Existentialism and Freud as they were filtered into pop culture."</blockquote>
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Noir needed to be slyly subversive to get its point across. It needed the Code and got its distinctive look and sound when it was skirting censorship rules. By the late 50s the Production Code was eroding, the once-powerful studio system was coming apart at the seams. Independent Producers gained hold and they could - just like Poverty Row Studios - much more easily challenge taboo subjects, because they were less under the microscope of scrutiny by the guardians of morality. Their under-the-radar B-ness and an anything-goes approach often eluded the censors. At the end of the cycle, Noir’s DNA was mutating.<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">On her fabulous website The Last Drive In Jo Gabriel writes in her article <i>Film Noir: Transgression Into the Cultural Cinematic Gutter</i>: </span></div>
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“Film Noir had an inevitable trajectory…the eccentric and often gutsy style of Film Noir had nowhere else to go…but to reach for even more off-beat, deviant, endlessly risky and taboo oriented set of narratives found in the subversive and exploitative cult films of the mid to late 50s through the 60s and into the early 70s.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Spot on. My friend Joe over at Noirsville phrased it like this: </span></div>
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“With nothing really giving some of these directors and producers some parameters, or putting the brakes on, there was no speed limit, they just shot past the limits of contemporary common sense, cultural acceptability and good taste.<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";"><span style="font-size: 15px;">” </span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Films that went too far showing violence would then be classified as horror or thriller, those that went too far depicting sex, drugs and torture were being lumped together as Exploitation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What had happened? The 60s happened, but that is a discussion I will bore you with another time, kids.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As of now it is 1957 and <b>Hell Bound</b> is full of pulpy seedy goodness. Made on a quarter, if not a dime, it has everything a proper B Noir should have. Sexy dames, suggestive situations, good dialogue, harsh violence and a soundtrack by Les Baxter. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Clocking in at under 70 minutes, this low-renter doesn’t overstay its welcome. Director William J. Hole, whose career was largely an undistinguished one, worked almost exclusively in television and Hell Bound was his only Noir. It’s a lurid wallow in the lower depths of American life. So often these little cheapos are better than they have any right to be. Low budget is not a crime until it meets low scriptwriting, bad acting and awful dialogue. And thankfully we don’t get that here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">John Russell plays ruthless Jordan, the mastermind of a surplus narcotics heist worth $2 million from a cargo ship. His plan is as follows: the cargo ship picks up a bogus seaman found adrift as the sole “survivor” of a bogus fishing boat accident. The ship has to be put under quarantine, the seaman steals the drugs and puts them in the coat pocket of an on-the-take diabetic health inspector called in to check up on the “seaman”. A phony nurse, Russell’s girlfriend Jan (Margo Woode), takes the inspector’s coat off the ship and everyone’s happy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Russell just needs a money man to bankroll the operation and finds him in crime boss Harry Quantro (Frank Fenton). He pitches the idea to him, via “infomercial”. It is a strange way to open a movie, but stay with it. Quantro isn’t averse, he is willing to stake the heist under the condition that his girlfriend Paula (June Blair) - who he doesn’t keep around for her brilliant conversation - plays the nurse who will get the drugs off the ship. Quantro needs to keep the tabs on Jordan. The plan goes sideways when Paula genuinely falls in love with unwitting ambulance driver Eddie Mason (a very young Stuart Whitman).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The 40s had been a world of perpetual night where evil lurked in every shadow and around every corner. Maybe it was that by the mid-50s Noir had become aware of itself as an art form, and self-consciously so, that the decade gave way to naturalistic lighting and gritty realism. The cinematography by Carl Guthrie is very good, but it is lacking the characteristic Expressionist play of light and shadows. Often shot in a rather flat style, on the whole late 50s Noir is stripped of much of the visual poetry and elegant stylization that qualified earlier Noirs of the classic period. Now Noir hid in broad daylight. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As camera equipment became lighter, filming was going away from backlots and closed sound stages too. On-location shooting became more and more the norm. <b>Hell Bound</b> showcases many evocative exterior scenes of bleak industrial sites. The film is worth watching alone for the last scene of a chase through the desolate Los Angeles trolley graveyard, one of the most creative shooting locations I have seen. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Hell Bound</b> indisputably has an exploitative angle in the gleeful depiction of brutal and unrestrained violence which isn’t in the least bit cartoonish. The administered beatings look like they really hurt, much more so than in any other films of that era. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We also get a wonderful Grindhouse moment. One of the best scenes in the movie must be the one in the seedy strip joint where a burlesque artiste gives her best for the appreciative audience. This being 1957 we don’t see too much, she teases a lot more than she strips, but nevertheless it is unexpected to see in a mainstream film. It gets better. Her most ardent admirer is a blind (!) dope dealer named Daddy with a penchant for milk who’s doing his business right there at his front-row table! It’s marvelously weird.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Into the bargain, a decided shift in tone could be noticed compared to the 40s. The narrative was less about powerlessness in the face of pre-ordained fate, more about moral corruption of the individual and institutions, with emphasis on personal culpability.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">40s Noir was asking existential questions that its protagonists had no answer to. <b>Hell Bound</b> doesn’t bother with that. There’s no loneliness, despair, existential torment, moral ambiguity and obsession. <b>Hell Bound</b> completely dispenses with the romanticism and sentimentality that was part of 40s Noir and goes straight for violence and cynicism. Though the picture is still recognizable as Noir in the classic style it has a barren, devoid of humanity feeling about it. Like chunks of ice drifting on a river.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Compared to other heist<b> </b>movies like Huston’s <i>The</i> <i>Asphalt Jungle</i> and Kubrick’s <i>The Killing</i>, <b>Hell Bound</b>’s entire philosophy is different. The narrative is not manipulated so that the moviegoer sympathizes and identifies with the criminals.<b> </b>No desperate down-and-out characters who are only looking for a way out populate this picture. No existential dreamers whose longing for a better life spurs them on and who have the audiences’ sympathies all the way. <b>Hell Bound</b> is way too mean-spirited for that.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl8oyYxeexrKcWumS4ysJpPi2VD2z9Yq0-MRCbKSO9Rg6Uo1Wj7XPfvBWHvdZFsIScAteyLdc81FRExNhUQR_eGiXhUsjXQazelUaSNjCy_KVknvqQZ2r1N-UVFoLhEXyt7UPkst2cnN8/s1600/Hell8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="264" data-original-width="576" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl8oyYxeexrKcWumS4ysJpPi2VD2z9Yq0-MRCbKSO9Rg6Uo1Wj7XPfvBWHvdZFsIScAteyLdc81FRExNhUQR_eGiXhUsjXQazelUaSNjCy_KVknvqQZ2r1N-UVFoLhEXyt7UPkst2cnN8/s320/Hell8.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Playboy Playmate January 1957</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s a heist-gone-wrong movie with a difference. Jordan’s robbery is ingeniously planned but when things go sideways it’s not one of Doc Riedenschneider blind accidents that louses up the perfect crime. Frankly it’s sheer stupidity. Thing is, if you want a heist to go off smoothly, don’t surround yourself with a bunch of flunkies from the shallow end of the gene pool who are a liability from the start and sell out for easy money on the drop of a hat.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Jordan's recruits include an deadbeat junkie in constant need of the next fix, an unbalanced health inspector on the verge of a nervous breakdown and a dame who goes soft. What could possibly go wrong with that setup? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Very hunky John Russell is a favorite actor who unfortunately so often was relegated to playing second or third fiddle to other actors, before he became the upright lawman of the West. Amoral, vicious and sadistic, he could be straight out of a Tarantino movie and mixes an overdose of lethal charm with an equal dose of ice-cold menace. He has no redeeming qualities. He isn't driven by any kind of mad desire, especially not for a dame, a dream or a paradise lost. The robbery is a matter of simple economics. That uncut dope is worth about $2 million.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Paula tries her very very best to get cozy with him. She doesn’t get anywhere though it’s not for lack of trying. Disappointed she pouts: </span>“You better see a doctor, Jordan. You’ve got a low blood count.” His chilling answer: “You're wrong, Paula. I’ve got no blood”. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He controls everybody around him through sheer terror. He snuffs the snitch who gave him the plan of the ship’s cargo hold. He beats one of his cronies to a bloody pulp and he has a way with dames too. Paula gets a nasty beating before he knives her. Russell is riveting and simply makes this movie.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIVhKp9pIY_Cr97lDjHAluC9O_xm0K9JH6koJcjDCidg1u2qycLhv3PJTDqzOMkOdPwr-SvRjTATLrAyKWs_Mj_rK1ttz5O0RBOgN0JkUk5u0TTymw_MKDkkAvyaiBFE1SQTU3lUw-qcw/s1600/Hell2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="484" data-original-width="640" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIVhKp9pIY_Cr97lDjHAluC9O_xm0K9JH6koJcjDCidg1u2qycLhv3PJTDqzOMkOdPwr-SvRjTATLrAyKWs_Mj_rK1ttz5O0RBOgN0JkUk5u0TTymw_MKDkkAvyaiBFE1SQTU3lUw-qcw/s320/Hell2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">June Blair makes for a great Paula who looks every luscious inch just exactly what she was: Playboy Playmate of January 1957. She’s as pure as the driven and refreshingly never makes a floozy’s feint at virtue. Literally anybody who wears pants is fair game. The girl can’t help it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She gets a great introduction. Laying in a chair she asks Jordan to help her put her shoes on, incidentally giving him a view up her skirt. As a phony nurse, she doesn’t really know the ins and outs of her supposed profession, but that shouldn't pose any difficulties for her. She knows she has her own qualifications for the job. “There isn’t any part of the anatomy I don’t know, even with my eyes closed”, the lady coos. We believe her. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We get a little bit of shoe fetishism here. Kicking off her shoes means it’s action time for some lucky guy. And Paula seems to be willing to kick her shoes off with alarming frequency. There’s another dame in the movie who does the same with her glasses. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Paula is Noir’s good-bad girl</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">. Once she falls in love, things change. The only jarring note in an otherwise nifty little caper is that Paula survives the knife attack and gets her happy ending. A remnant of those dreaded Code-enforced endings maybe, but it's a minor flaw in an otherwise very entertaining film.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg75zWMHxWja8v93o_gG2pxqRb_iXgf00jHysFxNTUe0OQNH6la9irFJrVEcvzEhiKiQq5cSN0ofez0HbBA29CsR2tVJQeikgzQ8Ou4qXYJB8eIbPxgBAdjbxKNWZ2ujI6sp5guxHADYs/s1600/Hell6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="755" data-original-width="1000" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg75zWMHxWja8v93o_gG2pxqRb_iXgf00jHysFxNTUe0OQNH6la9irFJrVEcvzEhiKiQq5cSN0ofez0HbBA29CsR2tVJQeikgzQ8Ou4qXYJB8eIbPxgBAdjbxKNWZ2ujI6sp5guxHADYs/s320/Hell6.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Apart from that, <b>Hell Bound</b> stays true to the spirit of Noir. In the end it all adds up to nothing. Jordan dies the way he lived, violently. As decommissioned trolleys are waiting for their disposal in the junk yard, so is Jordan. He’s climbed into one of the empty rail cars trying to evade capture, unfortunately a bunch of scrap metal is coming towards his way.</span><br />
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Noir’s appeal is eternal, it lives on in other genres and pictures and many filmmakers owe it a debt that cannot be repaid. Jean-Luc Godard acknowledged this debt and famously dedicated his 1960 movie <i>À bout de souffle/Breathless</i> to Monogram Pictures. As long as there are rotten dames, suckers, desperate men on the run, shyster lawyers, losers without a friend, but with a plan and dames that can’t help loving the wrong man, Noir doesn’t need an epitaph. It doesn’t even have a tombstone yet.</div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-83644755885038099892019-10-07T08:11:00.001-07:002020-05-16T11:40:44.798-07:00Rear Window (1954)<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sorry for having been AWOL for so long. I have officially dusted off my little battered Remington and am reporting back for duty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Virginie over at <a href="https://thewonderfulworldofcinema.wordpress.com/2019/11/10/day-1-the-5th-wonderful-grace-kelly-blogathon/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">The Wonderful World of Cinema</span></a>, Samantha at<a href="https://musingsofaclassicfilmaddict.com/" target="_blank"> <span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="color: orange;">Musings of a Classic Film Addict</span></span> </a>and Emily of<span style="color: orange;"> </span><a href="https://theflapperdamefilm.wordpress.com/2019/11/09/day-1-the-5th-wonderful-grace-kelly-blogathon/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">The Flapper Dame</span> </a>are hosting the 5th Wonderful Grace Kelly Blogathon on November 10-12, 2019. This is my entry.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjopHcrsJwD_pfFXyEhoF8V4IUWcCQ7F4VUfVdlP-95nfPzL6XIn-1QPMV2DFlEmxmBAby9kULwMjhLjaYXZjFoBEZnbV1wWu4W15TVyRDjB5AZKH_wMB_XqSxCO70vfhDk2fTWl1Z_GZw/s1600/Rear21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="999" data-original-width="705" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjopHcrsJwD_pfFXyEhoF8V4IUWcCQ7F4VUfVdlP-95nfPzL6XIn-1QPMV2DFlEmxmBAby9kULwMjhLjaYXZjFoBEZnbV1wWu4W15TVyRDjB5AZKH_wMB_XqSxCO70vfhDk2fTWl1Z_GZw/s320/Rear21.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 15px; text-align: justify;">The Fine Art of Snooping or</span><br />
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"We've become a race of Peeping Toms." <i>Stella</i></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hitchcock<b> </b>and phobias, books have been written about this subject. Authority figures, priests, domineering mothers, teachers, </span>policemen, eggs (!)…in short the man was a bundle of nerves and neuroses. He once stated: “I’m fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn’t make a good suspense film.”<br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica";">A very interesting take on “How to Make a Thriller 101”, but his success obviously proved him right. He reveled in his fears and used them like other people use their special gifts. They gave him a profound understanding of the human psyche.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Michiko Kakutani wrote in her NYTimes review of Peter Ackroyd’s book <i>Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>“</b>The world of menace [Hitchcock] conjured embodies our deepest, most existential fears. Fears …that the universe is irrational, that evil lives around the corner, that ordinary life can be ripped apart at any moment by some random unforeseen event.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Murderous birds, crop dusters, mother-fixated weirdos with knives who don’t let you shower in peace… For Hitchcock the veneer of civilization was just a thin layer beneath which darkness and terror lay. In Noir danger and evil frequently pervert ordinary settings, and so they do in Hitchcock movies. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Is <b>Rear Window</b> Noir? (I must ask this question, after all this is a Noir blog). As opposed to <i>Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt </i>and <i>The Wrong Man, </i><b>Rear Window</b>’s Noir credential are tepid, though Hitchcock was always someone who let darkness infuse his films, even his lightest ones. He was never labeled a Noir director, yet Hitchcock and Noir shared certain sensibilities even if Hitch never really made his home in Dark City. He didn't let himself be confined by cinematic boundaries. At best we could say that Hitchcock used Noir themes as psychological and aesthetic framework. For him, fear, guilt, paranoia, obsession, moral corruption and desperation lurked everywhere. Hitchcock made these themes his own, and ultimately he is one of the very few directors who can lay claim to being their own genre. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Most of his films work perfectly on the surface. <b>Rear Window </b>can be enjoyed as a simple thriller. Ostensibly the movie is one of his most accessible - like that glass of effervescent champagne called <i>To Catch a Thief</i> - but the audience could always rely on a maelstrom of unexpected intrusions to wash away any illusions of safety and normalcy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hitchcock was immensely interested in everything subversive and made no bones about it. With <b>Rear Window</b><i> </i>Hitchcock made a movie about your friendly Neighborhood Watch busybody as hero. What? Spying on people while they go about their private business is bad, bad, bad, right? If Hitchcock had been a tiresome moralist, the film would make it blatantly clear that Jeff is a creep who - with his unproven snooping - ruined the life of a good man. Thankfully Hitch spares us this pap. Hitchcock was a connoisseur of all things marvelously pervy. You name it, he envisioned it. He not only validates Jeff’s paranoia, Jeff is the wheelchaired crusader for justice. The ethics of snooping turned upside down. Kinky. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, Hitchcock could.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Good old Bosley called the movie “not significant” in his NYTimes review. Ooooh, that’s a low blow. How that guy managed to keep his job for 20 plus years is anybody’s guess. A success so richly undeserved. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Naturally Joe Breen got his knickers in a twist about the smuttiness of it all and had his cleaning crew put in overtime. He pontificated that the entire picture had “the flavor of a peep show” (Memo – as quoted in <i>Writing for Hitchcock</i> by Steven DeRosa). Perceptive lad! How did he figure that out? Somebody should have told him that the audience was perfectly capable of taking the 100 proof stuff and not choke on it, even if he couldn’t. But I digress.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Laid up with a broken leg in a hip cast in his small Greenwich Village apartment, professional photographer L.B. “Jeff” Jeffreys (James Stewart) is incapacitated and wheelchair-bound for the next seven weeks. Jeff’s introduction is wonderfully done. While he's asleep in his wheelchair, with one panning shot the camera tells us the story of Jeff’s life. His walls are hung with pictures of his adventurous exploits that take him all over the globe to war zones, disaster areas, exiting sporting events, forrest fires, explosions… Without a word being spoken the audience understands that here is a man who likes to live dangerously, a man who doesn't like to be tied down to an office job.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">While photographing a race car crash he almost became roadkill himself and now he’s a prisoner in his own apartment. All by his lonesome, he’s frankly bored to tears and so gets his kicks looking out his rear window into the courtyard observing the neighbors. One night he sees his neighbor Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) acting extremely suspicious, you know like cleaning huge knives and saws, rubbing down the bathtub walls, going out in the middle of the night in the pouring rain each time carrying a heavy suitcase. His nagging invalid wife seems to be ominously absent from then on. Jeff starts to suspect nefarious goings-ons. He believes the salesman has bumped off his wife. Armed only with binoculars and a telephoto lens, Jeff sets to work. His evidence for murder is shaky at best, but Jeff - like Juror No.8 - is soon able to convince his visiting nurse/self-appointed amateur shrink Stella (Thelma Ritter) and his beautiful fiancée Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Certain themes<b> </b>crop up again and again in Hitchcock's movies. The innocent man accused of a crime he didn’t commit, domineering mothers, chase scenes, the MacGuffin. None of them we get here. We do however get a few others. Ordinary people placed in the line of danger, the most beautiful of all Hitchcock blondes and the very conspicuous elephant in the room, voyeurism, something Hitchcock was more than just a little preoccupied with. <b>Rear Window</b> is the first entry in Hitch's voyeurism trilogy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Roger Ebert stated in his <b>Rear Window </b>review: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“The hero …<i> </i>is trapped in a wheelchair, and we're trapped, too--trapped inside his point of view, inside his lack of freedom and his limited options.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Voyeurism is the act of living your life vicariously…through others, without sharing their problems or pain. Distance and the avoidance of involvement and intimacy characterize the voyeur. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Jeff’s addiction to peeping is born out of boredom. Don't forget kids, idle hands are the devil’s workshop. Spying on his neighbors quickly turns into an obsession that takes up his every waking minute. Stella warns Jeff: </span></div>
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“In NY State the sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse. They got no windows in the work house. You know, in the old days, they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker. Any of those bikini bombshells you're always watching worth a red-hot poker?"</div>
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In <b>Rear Window</b> Hitchcock keeps the touch light throughout. Next time Hitchcock turned Stewart into a voyeur, his addiction would become a crippling neurosis.</div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Jeff studies his neighbors like insects under a magnifying glass. We see fleeting snippets of their lives while they go about their mundane activities. </span>Everybody goes by aliases. In Woolrich’s (much-altered) source story <i>It Had to Be Murder</i> the protagonist says about his neighbors: “I didn’t know their names. I’d never heard their voices.” Hitchcock kept this premise. "The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema”, the director maintained. Here he goes back to his roots. Visuals count, not a word is being spoken.</div>
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Every window tells a story and Jeff is channel-surfing. There is close to expiry date spinster Miss Lonelyhearts who throws dinner parties for imaginary gentleman callers; she likes a bit of booze with her misery and so has been self-medicating with copious amounts of cheap hooch on a regular basis. There is a female sculptor who’s working on a piece called “Hunger” (attention shrinks, here's your chance to shine). There is Miss Torso (Hitch always had a twisted sense of humor) who frolics around in various stages of undress with her considerable assets ever-present and whose apartment resembles a bee-hive where she throws cocktail parties for susceptible suitors (if Jeff is a voyeur she’s his flip side, an exhibitionist). There’s a composer who fears his career is going nowhere and a couple of amorous newlyweds whose honeymoon is over before it has really begun. As always Hitch is quite honest about sex. Without showing us any more than a pulled-down blind, we know the newlyweds are constantly at it and Mrs. Newlywed is quite insatiable.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUZ_eno2Qq3RIaT9OdDyiVjcSvOKDaibC7OK0qA85KIfmtU2C-DM0bX_1Bq7ehdkO25OyN3rCWUsU7PyvbjOgfKAZCOg_zLsPQdleY5VVVX3eb37z9NqhGlgFvcvM6iZ_VbatMK6MQ2mE/s1600/Rear2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUZ_eno2Qq3RIaT9OdDyiVjcSvOKDaibC7OK0qA85KIfmtU2C-DM0bX_1Bq7ehdkO25OyN3rCWUsU7PyvbjOgfKAZCOg_zLsPQdleY5VVVX3eb37z9NqhGlgFvcvM6iZ_VbatMK6MQ2mE/s320/Rear2.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">And of course there is Lars Thorwald with his invalid wife. She makes his life a living hell and would be much better off dead, at least in his estimation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That Jeff does not lose our sympathy is entirely down to Stewart, that icon of American likability and integrity. His image was his get-out-of-jail-free card. It let him spy on sexy Miss Torso and not come off as a creep. Not that one can blame him. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Stewart was a bit of stunt-casting. Before he left Hollywood for active service in 1941, his persona was sincere, boyish, trustworthy. Like a comfortable Saint Bernard. When he came back in 1946, the world had changed, he had changed. Jimmy had toughened up. It started with <i>It’s a Wonderful Life</i> and would be further explored in Anthony Mann’s Westerns. </span><br />
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hitchcock was good at exposing character traits in his actors that neither they nor the audience knew they had. Like he had done twice before with Cary Grant, Hitchcock chipped away at Jimmy's nice side. Hitch cast Stewart four times (<i>Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, Rear Window</i>) and each time he laid bare nuances that turned his image on his ears.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Jeff isn’t mild-mannered and gentle, he is morally compromised, moody, bad-tempered and occasionally downright insulting and we can literally feel his seething frustration of being cooped up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The perspective of the voyeur is by nature a restricted one, for the perpetrator as well as for the audience. We see the world from Jeff's vantage point. We see what he sees, what conclusions he draws we draw. This is so obvious it risks accusations of banality but it bears repeating nevertheless because by now<b> Rear Window</b> has become the textbook example for subjective POV filming. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Jeff spies and so do we and as such we become accessories to his voyeurism. We share his obsession and even identify with it. We know it’s immoral but spying is like the proverbial train wreck. You can’t look away. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The film could be retitled <i>Murder, He Hoped</i>. So obsessed is Jeff that he doesn’t even want to hear of the possibility that Thorwald is innocent when his friend Detective Doyle (Wendell Corey) tells him that Mrs.T. is alive. Doyle committed the cardinal sin. He took away Jeff’s toy and stomped on it. Jeff can no longer indulge in his fantasy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There is the underlying theme of<b> </b>“Love Thy Neighbor”<b> </b>running through the film. The phrase is uttered twice, once by Lisa and once by a woman after her little dog has been killed. She screams:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘neighbors’! Neighbors like each other, speak to each other, care if somebody lives or dies! But none of you do!”</span></blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXX8IMlJZHDggeT89SdrT-aUHQolNrT3tCdE1MkJbrWUKBjOjzrsnFHJPHhqspxKUiYvc3l-GvGsIjP-1NBNPYfpI1A2sAAAUc6X-2pURQ7yIAWri8XJJPMhYVrbc7Eep_9_qkH6kn8AU/s1600/Rear10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="653" data-original-width="974" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXX8IMlJZHDggeT89SdrT-aUHQolNrT3tCdE1MkJbrWUKBjOjzrsnFHJPHhqspxKUiYvc3l-GvGsIjP-1NBNPYfpI1A2sAAAUc6X-2pURQ7yIAWri8XJJPMhYVrbc7Eep_9_qkH6kn8AU/s320/Rear10.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Urbanization has led to a fragmentation of society. People may live in close proximity now but they seem to be more lonely than ever. No man is an island, John Donne said, but the urban jungle seems to belie this assumption.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hitchcock created the entire apartment building true to scale on the Paramount backlot. This is studio-filming at its best. On-location filming may lend an air of<b> </b>authenticity to the proceedings, but artifice can conjure up the perfect background for stories of entrapment, loneliness and isolation. <b>Rear Window</b> is set in a city that shows nothing of the real city and yet it captures the anonymity that characterizes the urban jungle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The sad thing is that Jeff catches most of his neighbors on the raw, never at their best but often in their moments of failure. Ugly arguments, dirty linen washed in public, sadness, desperation, disappointed expectations… It’s not a pretty picture Hitchcock paints of humanity. The contemporary <i>Time Out</i> review maintained: “Hitchcock has nowhere else come so close to pure misanthropy…” I can't quite follow this reasoning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Despite exposing their failings, Hitchcock manages to treat the neighbors with compassion and respect, there’s no doubt he’s sympathetic towards the lonely and damaged. He may show their flaws but he does not condemn and ridicule.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Life in <b>Rear Window </b>is condensed to the backyard and the apartment building. Confined spaces in films always create a microcosmos, containing actions and emotions to a single stage and a restricted environment, while at the same time emphasizing the claustrophobia of a the closed-in space which offers no escape from danger. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Life outside this apartment complex doesn't seem to exist. We only catch the tiniest glimpse of city life through a narrow sliver of alleyway where we see the outside world go by. When characters exit the apartment building, they essentially exit the cinematic stage. Yet this insular microcosmos shows us a cross-section of society that is connected to its wider fabric.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I finally get to Grace Kelly, the one and only, the epitome of Hitch’s cool elegant blonde beauty with her</span> dangerously combustible mix of elegance and sex. Hitchcock’s female ideal was ladylike, sophisticated and untouchable, yet at the same time sensuous and provocative. A snow-covered volcano with a hint of unbridled passion behind the cool facade. So impossibly beautiful is she that she seems unattainable in her desirability.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That Lisa is saved from being “a cold and lonely, lovely work of art” has to do with her humor, loyalty, adventurousness and the amazingly candid desire she reveals for Jeff. She doesn’t waste any time with coyness. She pursues him and proves herself to be one determined girl (I can’t bring myself to call Grace a dame). Lisa is no sleeping beauty who has to be kissed to be awakened. Her passions aren't waiting to be unleashed, they already are. This goddess is quite down to earth.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7fiW4zSGK8LLO68EUjEeEHDgedjMKuFbw0SVWbQ01A-58rbdNt3Tw6bXzXOLSvl0WNovklBPByNPpYhw_XlZSnyuaGMoQN_gJE_7M5pX1RYmiL3Ay_QFQxuiIbZyMasFrV_yN3B0mq38/s1600/Rear6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="353" data-original-width="440" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7fiW4zSGK8LLO68EUjEeEHDgedjMKuFbw0SVWbQ01A-58rbdNt3Tw6bXzXOLSvl0WNovklBPByNPpYhw_XlZSnyuaGMoQN_gJE_7M5pX1RYmiL3Ay_QFQxuiIbZyMasFrV_yN3B0mq38/s320/Rear6.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Her genuine love for Jeff makes her vulnerable. Several times we can feel her very real frustration and pain when Jeff yet again maintains that they are not compatible though she steadfastly - with something akin to masochistic desperation - tries to prove her love for him. She's been auditioning for months for the role of Jeff’s wife, she just goes about it the wrong way, with catered dinners and “previews of coming attractions”. He’s holding one of the most desirable women in the world, who is literally throwing herself at him, at arm’s length! It raises some serious question about his sanity. I’m sure Siggie Freud would have a thing or two to say about it. If Grace Kelly decided to slip into something more comfortable, I doubt any guy would care anymore if some other dude across the yard was cutting up his wife.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She’s "too perfect, too talented, too beautiful and too sophisticated", Jeff laments. Oh dear, the poor man has quite a bear to cross. She wouldn’t survive a day in the jungle. His rugged and nomadic lifestyle could never mesh with her wealthy Park Avenue princess life. He hammers the point home. And hammers, and hammers and hammers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Classic Hollywood could never resist the lure of dime-store Freudianism, and neither apparently can many critics and reviewers. I won’t bore your with the telephoto lens as phallic imagery and the plaster cast as indication of impotence (obviously only temporary). And don’t even get me started on the champagne cork. You can fill in those blanks yourself, kids. Siggie has a lot to answer for. Subtlety? We don’t need no stinkin’ subtlety. We head straight for ham-fisted symbolism. But I’m not playing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Jeff’s desperately trying to make excuses not to marry Lisa because marriage would mean domestication, aka permanent cripplement. Maybe Jeff has the fate of George Bailey in mind, a man who was never able to realize his dreams. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hitch could never resist a little stab at marriage and here he’s almost hacking the institution to pieces. John Fawell writes in his book <i>Hitchcock's Rear Window: The Well-Made Film: </i></span></div>
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“Hitchcock’s films tend to be simultaneously warmly encouraging of traditional values and mischievously anarchistic about these values.” </blockquote>
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He was someone who very much believed in traditional values but at the same time didn’t have too much faith in them. Jeff and his editor are meditating philosophically on the subject of wives.</div>
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Editor: “Jeff, wives don’t nag anymore, they discuss.”<br />
Jeff: “Maybe in a higher rent district they discuss, in my neighborhood they still nag.”</blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Epiphany</td></tr>
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From the sad exploits of Miss Lonelyhearts to the more merry ones of Miss Torso, from non-compatible newlyweds to the worst case scenario, a murderous husband, this is really a story about male-female relationships in the package of a thriller.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Each neighbor is not just a supporting character, but a representation of a possible future for Jeff. No wonder he's commitment-shy. He recognizes patterns when he sees them and doesn’t want to follow the same well-worn paths to doom. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So, what’s a girl to do? Take part in Jeff’s fantasy. The turning point comes when Lisa starts to believe. She enters Thorwald’s apartment to find evidence of murder and in the process almost ends up in the clammy clutches of Thorwald herself. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Jeff finds that incredibly thrilling. Throughout the movie he has felt closer to the people he spies on than to his flesh and blood friends/lover. He finally has Lisa in front of his lens, he sees her in his private home movie! If I were psychoanalytically inclined… no, I’ll be damned if I go there. But having the shrink of his trust on speed dial might be just as well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">My favorite scene in the movie must be Grace going up the ladder to Thorwald’s apartment in evening dress and high heels, with nary a hair out of place. Getting her white pristine gloves even a little bit dirty is not an option! That’s my girl.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She’s a risk-taker, proactive and resourceful. She has been confronted with the worst-case scenario and comes through with flying colors. All of a sudden he sees a whole new woman. The look on his face when the new reality sinks in is priceless. Marrying Lisa doesn’t have to mean settling down to an office job photographing society mavens. He can still go to out-of-the-way places and have adventures, with her in tow. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We have to talk about Mr. Slice ’n Dice<b> </b>and his little shop of horrors. This was Raymond Burr still in his villain phase, and a great villain he made in the 40s and 50s before he became Perry Mason and kept his nose clean.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hitchcock understood that the unsaid and unseen can be more potent than shocking violence. In not showing the murder Hitchcock is uncharacteristically restrained. In contrast to the in-your-face killings in <i>Psycho </i>where Hitchcock, ever the purveyor of good taste, washed any inhibitions down the drain, this murder happens out of sight, behind lowered blinds. Everything is left to the viewer’s imagination. It has to be to keep the viewer guessing. After all it might all be a figment of Jeff’s imagination.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Thorwald remains an enigma throughout. We never find out much about him. He seems to be just a sad little man trapped in an intolerable marriage and is simply puzzled that anyone would care about him and what he has done. “What do you want from me?” he asks Jeff once he confronts him. As he’s looking straight into the camera he’s posing the same question to the audience. He doesn’t get an answer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Another standout is Thelma Ritter. Stella doles out homespun bromides along with Jeff’s daily medicine that might sound trite at first - “When a man and a woman see each other and like each other, they oughta come together, <i>wham</i>, like a couple of taxis on Broadway” - but hit the mark every time. Ritter almost steals the show if it weren’t for Grace Kelly. It’s not possible to steal the spotlight away from Grace.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The ending is maybe a tad soapy. The composer finished his song and it is that same song that stops Miss Lonelyhearts from suicide<i>. </i>Miss<i> </i>Torso welcomes her tubby little soldier boyfriend home. However, on downbeat note the sex-happy honeymooners are starting the whole cycle again, the wife having turned into a nag.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the end we’re back at square one, with a twist. After being pushed out of his window, Jeff ends up like in the beginning, in a wheelchair, now with two legs in a cast. We hope this is not a déjà vu all over again. At least this time his chair is facing inwards.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lisa, dressed in rugged outdoor clothes - as interpreted by <i>Harper’s Bazaar’s </i>fashion department - and looking like the cat that ate the canary, is reclining on the sofa, reading rugged outdoor literature. When she sees that Jeff is sleeping she reaches for her holy book, <i>Harper’s</i>. Many reviewers have suggested that this means their battle is not resolved and will continue. I’ll put a much more positive spin on it. She’s capable of juggling both worlds. Jeff just has to ditch the window-shopping.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-90901515342221617092019-06-23T14:27:00.001-07:002019-07-30T14:46:37.567-07:00Act of Violence (1949)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Tribute to a Bad Man</span></div>
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"What did he tell you? Did he tell you that I'm crippled because of him? Did he tell you about the men that are dead because of him? Did he tell you what happened to them before they died?" <i>Joe Parkson</i></blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">This is as much a movie review as a tribute to Robert Ryan. Directed by Fred Zinnemann for MGM’s B unit, </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Act of Violence</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> is one of those must-see jewels of postwar Noir that nobody wanted to see on its original release. It just patiently waited to be to be rediscovered. Maybe the audience wasn’t quite ready for a story about veterans that is like a wet blanket of despair and anxiety. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">On the surface a straightforward suspenseful cat-and-mouse thriller, there’s a lot going on under the surface. The picture digs deep into dicey moral issues. It takes a harsh and honest look at the effects of postwar trauma in veterans who fought and then were left to their own devices. It manages to confront such themes as betrayal, guilt, courage, cowardice and the situational ethics of men required to survive in wartime. <b>Act of Violence</b> is the anti-companion piece to <i>The Best Years of Their Lives </i>whose drift was much more optimistic as to reintegration of veterans into society.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Classic Noir wouldn't be the same without Robert Ryan’s unforgettable contribution though he rarely ever played a conventional hero. (The same can be said about his Westerns). Appearing in at least ten films that can be called true Noir, Ryan’s towering presence is one of the cornerstones that built the city known as Noirville. Even if not all his films were first rate, his performances always were. There was a darkness in his portrayals that seemed to spring from his inner core and many of his characters gave the impression they lived in perpetual Hell. As an actor he understood the sickness that could live in men’s hearts. I always got the feeling that his characters would like to believe in the goodness of people but only have evidence to the contrary.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ryan played gangsters, racketeers, psychos, mob bosses, corrupt businessmen and similarly prepossessing characters. His protagonists had a hellish temper and a short fuse. If he was miserable he made damn sure everybody else was too. A good beating could convince anybody to see things his way, the hell with the Geneva convention. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He was a hateful killer in <i>Crossfire</i>, a psychotic gangster in <i>The Racket</i>, an ugly racist in <i>Odds Against Tomorrow</i>, an unhinged control freak in <i>Caught</i>, a sadistic cop out of control but redeemed by love in <i>On Dangerous Ground</i>, an unbalanced mob boss in <i>House of Bamboo</i>, a charming bastard in <i>The Naked Spur.</i> Ryan occasionally showed that he could be different. In <i>The Secret Fury </i>he’s<i> </i>an all around nice guy and in <i>The Set-up</i> he’s the underdog scrapping for a shred of dignity. I have a particular fondness for boxing movies and I blame Ryan for this obsession entirely. But whatever he played one wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he ate nails for breakfast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He didn’t shy away from uncomfortable characters. They were seething with suppressed rage - not to say unfathomable wrath - pain, loneliness and a deep self-loathing that seemed almost existential. Ryan fully embraced their tormented and troubled souls and revealed the inner workings of these alienated man who often had unexpectedly hidden depths and complexity. His cynical, misanthropic and bitter men always emotionally engaged the audience and somehow he managed to elicit some sympathy even for his worst characters because they were so absurdly charismatic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">With his steely gaze, contemptuous sneer and menacing stance he could make your blood run cold or give you those goosy-pimply goosebumps. There was a brooding intensity and ferocity about his performances that drew in the audience and occasionally we got a hint of charm and a killer grin which completely drive this girl wild. It is no surprise that women were attracted to him. He possessed a pretty lethal mixture of danger, violence and surprising tenderness. When Ryan goes bad, I go right after him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">During his lifetime he unfortunately never achieved the same (star) status and recognition as his contemporary tough guys Cagney, Bogart or Mitchum.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In reality he was the polar opposite of the characters he played so often. A committed family man, he supported many liberal causes and shunned the Hollywood spotlight. He was at best a reluctant movie star who didn’t play the Hollywood game and this is probably the reason why he never achieved real stardom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Act of Violence’</b>s opening scene packs a punch. We see a mysterious man, Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan), limping down a deserted rain-slicked New York street at midnight, shrouded in deep dark shadows, hobbling up the steps to his dumpy digs, opening a drawer and taking out a loaded gun before boarding a Greyhound bus to LA. His room is bare. No belongings, no personal touches, no interests… except for his mission. On the journey out West he doesn’t close an eye. We know this guy means business. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The bus leaves the dark rainy city and heads to the sunny suburbs of SoCal. There the viewer meets the man Parkson is hunting: Frank Enley (Van Heflin), prosperous building contractor, all around nice guy, devoted family man with a beautiful wife Edith (Janet Leigh), a little boy and a nice house in the suburbs. The unimpeachable pillar of the community. Soon we learn why the guy with the limp is on Enley’s trail. Enley was Parkson’s commanding officer in the army, until they and several others ended up in a Nazi prison camp. There Enley cracked under the pressure. His men wanted to escape but he sold them out to the prison guards for food, a betrayal that cost most of them their lives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Act of Violence</b> is one of the many 40s and 50s Noirs that probed the wartime traumas of returning servicemen. Literally as soon as the war was over and the heroes were home, Noir started producing anti-heroes. The damaged war veteran with a psychological trauma became a staple in crime films of the period. To name just a few: <i>The Blue Dahlia, The Clay Pigeon, High Wall, The Breaking Point, Cornered, Dead Reckoning, Ride the Pink Horse, Nobody Lives Forever, 99 River Street, The Chase, Martha Ivers, Somewhere in the Night, The Crooked Way.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When the war ended a generation of former soldiers found themselves adrift, surrounded by a public who had no idea what they endured and couldn’t share their experiences. They had faced violence and death, seen their buddies maimed and killed and had acquired a capacity for violence that couldn’t simply be switched of. In essence the returning vet was a displaced person who came home to unemployment, troubled marriages, broken dreams and a country that had taken a turn for the noir and changed into alien territory. They had left pieces of themselves behind in places they never wanted to visit in the first place. After being primed to take no prisoners in the violent theaters of war, many found it hard to settle back into peaceful civilian life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Too often people didn’t want to know what soldiers had been through. In a way understandable as postwar society was focused on reconstruction and moving forward. So some of them turned into walking time bombs. The best years of their lives had been spent in hellholes and they weren't about to wait for the Good Life on the installment plan.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Broken in body and mind, servicemen came home desperately trying to forget what couldn't be forgotten. “He’s sick with it”, says Edith to Parkson’s girlfriend Ann about her husband. “They’re both sick with it”, replies Ann.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">War doesn’t end when the peace agreement is signed and besides their physical wounds, many returnees carried heavy psychological baggage. The wounds had only healed superficially, but pick off the scab and it would start bleeding again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It doesn’t take Robert Ryan more than a few minutes to establish a mood of menace and impending violence. Back from the dead and making a beastly nuisance of himself, he’s a man with a gun and a score to settle. He may be on home soil, but this vet is still operating behind enemy lines. He’s out for blood. His hate is the gasoline in his veins, the thought of revenge is the only thing that keeps him alive. We can see it in his eyes. There’s nothing but the single-minded resolution to kill in them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Parkson’s limp is a visual symbol for the psychic scars he drags around with him (Eddie Muller, Noir Alley intro), it’s a reminder of Enley’s betrayal. In the beginning Parkson is clearly painted as the villain, an obsessed mental case straight from the psych ward and we’re frightened for the guy he’s hunting. But in Noir nothing is as it seems. We slowly learn that Parkson’s moral outrage and vigilante tactics are justified.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Johnny came limping home, he couldn’t let go of the past. His life stopped on the day his buddies died. Vince Keenan calls Parkson very aptly “yesterday’s man” in his Noir City Magazine article <i>Ryan’s Vengeful Vet</i>. A man with a past but no future. Noir’s classic alienated loner.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Noir has always been the genre of the disenchanted and no more so than here. One of the best scenes of the movie is Parkson not even sparing one glance for the parade of veterans on Memorial Day. It tells us all we need to know about his war. Here’s a guy with nothing to celebrate. Rosy reminiscences of wartime heroics are not for him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Years of war hadn’t been kind to many soldiers and not every man came back a hero. Enley’s supposedly spotless war record is hiding dark secrets.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">His introduction is completely different. No rain, no darkness, no shadows, no dirty city. When we first meet him it’s a beautiful sunny day in small town Santa Lisa where Enley - revered war hero - is honored by his community for finishing a housing project.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Small town America is always a crucial symbol of healthy life in many Hollywood movies, standing for innocence, simplicity and decency. Not only is Enley the embodiment of the American Dream, he’s also the embodiment of progress, reconstruction and postwar prosperity. He and his construction company are the hope for a new and better tomorrow. Enley himself though stands on extremely weak foundations. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It doesn’t take long for his life to unravel once Parkson appears to undercut the apple-pie wholesomeness. Noir is a genre where danger (or evil) frequently pervert the ordinariness of familiar locations and here they turn a comfortable home into a jail cell. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Coming home early in a panic from a fishing trip after he’s spotted Parkson, Enley closes all the doors in his house, pulls down the blinds, turns off the lights and refuses to answer questions to the confusion of his wife. He’s standing in the dark looking terrified, listening to Parkson sneaking around the house dragging his leg. The sound of limping takes on a second meaning. For Enley it is a rebuke, the sound of his guilt. Parkson is the film’s conscience that won’t stay buried.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Slowly but surely Enley is falling apart and later we see him running through a dark tunnel in the Bunker Hill neighborhood, having flashbacks about his screaming men being slaughtered by the prison guards. It’s interesting to note that the violence in the film is mostly psychological. Parkson and Enley don’t actually meet until the end of the movie and then Parkson doesn’t get a chance to lay a hand on Enley.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Duality is a key feature in this movie. Past vs future, city vs small town, light vs darkness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The happy daytime scenes in Santa Lisa are sunny but once Enley’s sins catch up with him and he leaves his pastoral sanctuary and tries to flee his consequences - in the middle of the night leaving his wife behind - all his scenes take place during shadowy nighttime, within a dark seedy urban netherworld full of whores and thugs that almost swallow him up. But then darkness had been his inevitable destination from the beginning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Enley has managed to bury his guilt deeply in his subconsciousness. When he finally confesses his guilt to Edith, initially he’s trying to justify his actions by saying he betrayed his men to save them, but if that story were any lamer it would walk on crutches.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Do I have to spell it out to you? Do I have to draw you a picture? I was an informer! It doesn’t make any difference why I did it; I betrayed my men! They were dead! The Nazis even paid me a price: they gave me food, and I ate it… I ate it! I hadn’t done it just to save lives…They were dead and I was eating and maybe that’s all I did it for - to save one man. Me. There were six widows. There were ten men dead, and I couldn’t even stop eating. ”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Survivor’s guilt can be a terrible thing. There is a level of self-disgust so deep in these words that we know then that there is only one way out for him in the end.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Here’s another recurring Noir theme. The claims of the<b> </b>past are relentless. "The past is never dead. It isn't even past”, wrote William Faulkner. The past is a debt collector, silently waiting to demand its pound of flesh.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It was a courageous role for an actor to take. Playing a coward and squirming worm isn’t necessarily good for the image.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Zinnemann takes his time to let the viewer know what’s going on. Ambiguity is something no good Noir can do without, and here it is taken to the extreme. The release of information is slow. Motivations and intentions are kept in the dark as long as possible. Sympathies shift and fluctuate constantly. For the first half of the film we just don't know who the hero and who the bad guy is. Is there even a good guy and a bad guy? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Who do we root for? The obsessed guy bent on revenge or the guy who took the easy way and is still running? As always it is not that simple. There is no black and white, no clear cut lines. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“The moral landscape of this film is complex and difficult terrain; and Zinnemann never allowing …us to categorize or pigeonhole his protagonists.” Mark Freeman, <i>Act of Violence, Senses of Cinema</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To Zinnemann’s credit he doesn’t give us pat answers. He offers each man a measure of compassion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If we feel sympathy with Enley at all it is because of his wife and her attempts to understand his crimes. If she loves him there must be some good in him. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Edith symbolizes prewar normalcy. Young, innocent and untouched by the ugliness of war, she is a light in the darkness, assuring her husband of her love even after she knows the whole truth. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Ever since I first knew you, Frank, and up until yesterday, I thought you were the finest, most wonderful man in the world. Now I know that you’re like everybody else. You have faults and weaknesses… that doesn’t mean I don’t love you, or that I don’t want to be your wife—because I do.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Special mention has to go to Mary Astor - looking like someone put her through the wringer - playing over-the-hill street-wise hooker Pat who gives Enley shelter one night after he decides to get plastered and go on the run. She’s hit rock bottom and broke but she gets her kicks, you know. Her desire to make a quick buck mixes nicely with her very real concern for Enley. She’s another one of those wised-up and disillusioned characters that populated Noir. There is an underlying sadness about her because her life has been one big failure. “So you’re unhappy. Relax. No law says you gotta be happy.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For Pat there’s only two kinds of trouble in the world, love trouble or money trouble. In most Noirs that would be spot on. But Enley’s particular predicament lies outside even her quite considerable experience. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For a while Pat and Enley are fellow travelers in the shadowy underworld of Noir. He anaesthetizes his guilty conscience with booze, she introduces him to contract killers. In a drunken stupor Enley promises hitman Johnny - played wonderfully with chilling ice-cold amorality by Barry Kroeger - several thousands to get rid of Parkson. This blurs the line between good guy and bad guy even more. Mr. Nice Guy is willing to stoop so low and hire a hitman to kill his enemy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If there is an out and out villain in this piece it’s neither Enley nor Parkson but the hired killer. Johnny - who sat out the war in a cushy office - is the one who has no qualms whatsoever about his profession; he sees killing not as a moral issue, but as a business. Killing is a job, and a job is a job is a job.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When he emerges from his 80 proof haze and can think straight again, Enley tries to stop Johnny. Which brings us to the showdown at a train station, a finale that plays like a final standoff in a Western.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Some viewers found the ending a bit too pat. It is without a doubt a screen writer’s ending, not a real world one. But I am a sucker for the redemption angle and I don’t subscribe to the notion that every Noir must end in abject misery.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Johnny has come to kill Parkson and Enley finally does the right thing. He takes the bullet which was meant for Parkson. Both Enley and Johnny die in the ensuing car crash. Parkson goes to tell Enley’s widow. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Enley finally finds redemption, if only in death. For Parkson Enley's sacrifice is</span> a spiritual renewal. Like Tosca he can forgive now that his enemy is dead. He can hopefully let go of his hate and regain some of the humanity he had lost. </div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-61763779999780595872019-05-23T08:19:00.001-07:002020-01-20T10:06:09.085-08:00Mildred Pierce (1945)<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ok, guys and dolls, I'm back. Sorry for maintaining radio silence so long, it got busy. With apologies to Erica from<span style="color: orange;"> <a href="https://poppitytalksclassicfilm.wordpress.com/2019/05/10/all-hail-the-queen-the-joan-crawford-queen-of-the-silver-screen-blogathon-has-arrived/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Poppity Talks Classic Film</span></a> </span>and Gabriela from<span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 165, 0);"><span style="color: orange;"> <a href="https://palewriter2.home.blog/2019/05/10/bow-to-the-queen-the-queen-of-the-silver-screen-blogathon-has-arrived/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Pale Writer</span> </a></span>t</span>his is my very belated entry into Joan Crawford: Queen of the Silver Screen Blogathon from May 10 - 12, 2019.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">“It’s a great tragedy that when people hear the name Joan Crawford, first thing they think of is ‘no more wire hangers’. But there is another Joan Crawford people should remember…She really was the ultimate movie star.” </span></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><i>Joan Crawford: The Ultimate Movie Star </i>Documentary 2002</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Love her<i> </i>or hate her, there’s no denying that Joan Crawford was not only the ultimate movie star but a consummate actress and a genuine artist as well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The cult of her personality has so often overshadowed her work and her talent. Somewhere along the line Crawford ceased to be an actress and not only became a Star but an Institution. Then in the end - with her star status faded - a sad caricature. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Crawford playing a self-sacrificing mother in <b>Mildred Pierce</b> is an irony not lost on contemporary audiences and a big chunk of the blame for that can be laid at Christina's </span>infamous<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> book and the subsequent film in which Faye Dunaway played Crawford as camp all down the line, interpreting her as a crazed drag queen and an undiluted mental case. It was i</span>n essence <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">character assassination. Neither book nor film did anybody any favors. Whatever the truth may be, </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Mommie Dearest</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> tainted Joan’s legacy forever and reduced a career that had spanned almost five decades to one dire little unfortunate line. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Crawford’s larger-than-life persona can cloud our judgment of her films because <i>The Crawford Factor</i> often had the tendency to eclipse everything else. How do we define <i>The Crawford Factor</i>? With the elephant test. It’s hard to describe but we know it when we see it. The FABulousness, the gloss, the glamour, the Joan. She</span> may not have been generous to her children, but she was to her audience. A Crawford picture was first and foremost aware of itself as a Crawford picture. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Joan possessed that elusive but essential quality called star power, in spades. Crawford constantly reinvented herself during her long career. The radiant flapper of the 1920s gave way to the determined shop girl on the make of the 30s. By the mid-40s the shop girls were all grown up with children of their own and Crawford morphed into the woman from the wrong side of the tracks who makes good against all odds. After <b>Mildred Pierce</b> she continued to play a variation of that character, a self-sufficient and hard-working woman who neither accepted deprivations nor limitations. Mildred Pierce is the essence of all (later) Crawford roles. If she’s never quite convincing as a down-trodden ordinary housewife, a “common frump”, that’s because she was never completely able to shed that veneer of glamour that she seemed to have been borne with (but wasn’t). But by sheer force of will she could pull it off.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Crawford’s life was the classic Hollywood rags-to-riches story. Born into poverty and relatively uneducated, she knew from an early age that she wanted to BE someone. Her sole desire was to be a Star. She had limitless drive and ambition and tirelessly worked to better herself, until she had eradicated every trace of that unsophisticated poor girl Lucille LeSueur she had once been. Lucille was reborn as Joan, rising like Phoenix from the ashes. Joan created herself, or better the image and persona she presented to the public, carefully cultivated and guarded throughout her entire life. “If you're going to be a star you have to look like a star. I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star.” This was not a woman who was casual about her stardom. The public never got to see anything other than an exquisitely manufactured product. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If this sounds all suspiciously like a plot of one of her movies, that’s because it is. Her films fit her like a glove because they used elements of its star’s life story, blending together her personal and her screen persona. Joan was so good at playing these gritty characters because they came close to who she really was. Crawford took a character and molded it around her own personality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Apart from success there was one more thing Joan craved. Approval. She wanted not only Hollywood but the public to love her. This overpowering need for validation we meet again in the movie. Mildred craves nothing more than the love of her daughter, desperately so.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s no denying that late in her career Joan’s movies steadfastly veered into the campy. By the time <i>Queen Bee</i> rolled around, Crawford was less and less able to reign in her tendency towards ham. She became the Joan so many people now remember her as, the bad punchline on the edge of hysteria with a face like a grotesque kabuki mask, an image that has sadly persisted in the cultural memory. By the 60s she was long past her expiry date but still valiantly plugged away. But now there was a touch of Norma Desmond about her. She couldn’t let go of her glory days. Our girl Joanie put up a good fight to the end but never realized that there comes a time when you have to pack it in.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">With <b>Mildred Pierce</b> Crawford struck gold. Her career had been in freefall after a string of flops in the early 40s and many had written her off as a has-been. She asked MGM to be released from her contract and to her dismay they took her up on the offer and kicked her to the curb in 1943. But Jack Warner saw that there was still life in the old girl. Warner Bros. rescued her and <b>Pierce</b> was Crawford’s celebrated comeback role. It was a resounding box office success and Joan won an Oscar for it. What had promised to be a low point in her career turned out to be a career highlight and prolonged her shelf life by another 15-20 years. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">From then on she stayed in the shadowy back alleys of (quasi)Noir. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">She followed this success up with </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Humoresque </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">(1946), </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Possessed (</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">1947), </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Flamingo Road</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> (1949), </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">The Damned Don’t Cry</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> (1950) and </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Sudden Fear</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> (1952).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Directed by the great and extremely versatile Michael Curtiz for Warner, <b>Mildred Pierce</b> is based on James M. Cain’s eponymous novel which was deemed unfilmable for a long time. Cain had that in common with other pulp writers. Cain’s novels were the kind of stuff that made the PCA and studio executives equally nervous. They were mean and downright dirty. So Joe Breen and his cronies wouldn’t get a conniption, as a concession to the Production Code the novel was overhauled, cleaned up and a murder was added. Though the screenplay took great liberties with the plot, straying from the source material was actually a smart move. The Code doesn’t really work against the movie, and the murder trajects the film straight into Noir territory. Cain’s novel is driven by sexual desire, the film focuses on insatiable ambition due to (non-sexual) obsession. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In a strangely deserted police station housewife and restaurant entrepreneur Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford) is questioned about the shooting of her second husband Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). Several flashbacks tell us Mildred’s life story. After divorcing her first husband Bert (Bruce Bennett) Mildred is in money trouble. To give her snotty daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) all that her heart desires Mildred finds work as a waitress and soon becomes a dizzying business success with the help of good friend Ida Corwin (Eve Arden) and business partner Wally Fay (Jack Carson). To have access to a high society lifestyle Mildred marries Monte…with tragic consequences.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Mildred Pierce </b>has so often been slapped with that dreaded woman’s picture<b> </b>label. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">There’s no doubt that the movie is occasionally feverish, but then these kind of melodramas always are. Absurdities must not only be accepted but embraced, especially when we have top-notch actors who can easily make the story work and smooth over any contrivance on the filmmaker’s part. </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Mildred Pierce</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> is simply a great piece of cinema. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Incidentally the most emotionally draining scenes of the movie are not played for loud effect. Younger daughter Kay dying of pneumonia is a scene beautifully restrained and Crawford leaves the scenery unscathed. In Mildred’s and Veda’s fights we can see the fur fly but it’s kept just this side of histrionic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Clearly <b>Mildred Pierce</b> occupies a cinematic grey space. Noir takes on the woman’s picture, or vice versa. A flashback structure casts a pallor of doom over the picture. The beach house is a modernist dream of split levels, spiral stairs and looming shadows on the wall. The opening sequence is a knockout. The credits - written in the sand - are washed away by the incoming tide to Max Steiner’s fantastic score. Then we hear shots being fired, a man is pumped full of lead, keeling over and gasping with his last breath “Mildred”. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The stylistic means of Noir are used to great atmospheric effect here but we have to look into the soul of the film to see if the psychological underpinnings hold up to genre expectations. And indeed they do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Not only do we find the Noir themes of ruthlessness, selfishness, moral ambiguity, greed, lust, jealousy and dissatisfaction. We also have the most obvious, the elephant in the room: Obsession.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“The trappings of motherhood and pie baking may not seem like the stuff of film noir, but Mildred’s obsession with her older daughter is as perverse and destructive as any man’s enslavement to a femme fatale.” Imogen Sara Smith, Criterion Collection article <i>Mildred Pierce: A Woman’s Work</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Spot on. Obsession does not necessarily have to be sexual to be an unstoppable driving force. Incidentally in the novel the mother-daughter relationship takes on slightly incestuous shadings, something that is definitively not found in the movie though Mildred’s obsession with her daughter is decidedly pathological verging on the sadomasochistic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The driving force of Noir stories is often the urge to escape. From the ordinary, from poverty, from bad relationships, from oneself. In Mildred’s case her aspirations are not for herself but for her daughter. Veda’s greed is Mildred’s motivation and she subordinates all her own wants and needs to Veda’s wishes. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Mildred puts her children above everything, including her marriage. She is one of those women whose nurturing love for her brood drowns out any other feeling. She explains to her husband that the children “come first in this house, before either one of us. Maybe it’s right, maybe it’s wrong, but that’s the way it is.” Bert no doubt is something of a dud and a defeatist, he’s lacking Mildred’s drive and will to succeed but to me it’s no wonder he left. He doesn’t seem to exist for Mildred. He's the one though who is clear-sighted enough to see what Mildred clearly can’t and won’t. That she’s spoiling Veda rotten and thus ruining her character.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Mildred is a protagonist straight from a Greek tragedy. She has a<b> </b>tragic flaw,<b> </b>the character trait that invariably leads to the protagonist’s downfall. Complete blindness to her daughter’s character.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Mildred is the quintessential 40s working girl. She epitomizes the American Dream. A self-made woman who’s not afraid to get her hands dirty, she rises above near poverty to great success by sheer indomitable spirit, hard work and determination without resorting to unethical business practices or compromising herself. She’s the gritty stuff America was built on and is rightly proud of.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Even when she was married to Bert she was always busy, selling cakes and pies to her neighbors out of her kitchen to pay for her daughters’ piano and ballet lessons. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Contrary to popular belief, it must be stressed that Hollywood in general portrayed working women in quite a positive light. Taking a closer look at many 40s movies it’s time to overhaul the preconceived notion that working women played havoc with the ideal of American womanhood.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">"It is often said that men’s discomfort with women’s entry into the workforce during World War II conjured the figure of the femme fatale, which demonized strong, ambitious women. This theory makes no sense, since the femme fatale is never a woman who works or is independent; she is always a woman who uses men to get what she wants, relying on the most traditional feminine wiles. Women who do work, like Mildred and Ida (or like the secretaries played by Ella Raines in <i>Phantom Lady</i> and Lucille Ball in <i>The Dark Corner, </i>or the nightclub performers portrayed by Ida Lupino in <i>The Man I Love</i> and Ann Sheridan in <i>Nora Prentiss</i>) are invariably good eggs, while femmes fatales are like Veda, avaricious gals who would rather cheat and exploit their desirability than work for what they want.” (Smith, ibid.)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I can add a few more movies that subvert the accepted wisdom. Joan Leslie in <i>Born to be Bad, </i>Roz Russel in <i>His Girl Friday, </i>Jane Randolph in <i>Cat People, </i>Ella again in <i>The Web </i>and<i> The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry </i>and Anne Crawford in <i>Bedelia.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I’ve seen so many reviews stating Mildred is punished for being an independent working woman at the end of the movie. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Horsefeathers. This is not a movie about the evils of women in the workplace. Mildred works because she has to, not because she wants to. This is a movie about social ambition and misplaced (mother) love. Her downfall comes about NOT through the disapproval of society but through her own character, her fatal flaw. She, and only she, set herself up for her own failure.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Looking like a luminously beautiful porcelain doll, Veda has the face of an angel and the soul of a cash register. If you look up the word entitlement princess in the dictionary you’ll find a picture of her. Ann Blyth was only 16 verging on 17 when she made the movie and for someone that young she turns in a fantastic and chilling performance. Hell, she turns in a fantastic performance no matter the age. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She must be the youngest femme fatale in film ever, “a femme fatale in bobby socks” (Smith, ibid.). Outwardly so sweet you can literally feel the cavities eating into your teeth, she is really a spider woman whose gossamer light web is woven so delicately that by the time you notice you’re in it it is already too late.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Veda perfectly understands the finer points of psychological warfare. She uses her mother’s love for her against her. Veda’s cruelty is always deliberate, each and every one of her poisonous darts is designed to cause the most pain. A contemptuous user for whom any gift is too shabby, Veda is a bottomless pit of greed and is always working one angle or another because happiness can’t buy her money. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Veda has complete control over her emotions…that’s because she hasn’t any. She can switch on a particular human emotion at will - or at least a good imitation of it. When she notices that a tantrum won’t do the trick, she changes her tactics to declarations of love and tears. “I’ll change, Mother, I promise. I’ll never say mean things to you again.” Would she like a little bit of cheese with her whine?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Considering the fact she’s still a teenager, that little dame is frighteningly knowledgable, about everything. Aided and abetted by her mother’s business partner Wally, Veda marries rich kid Ted Forrester just to take him to the cleaners. Having the marriage annulled shortly after, she extorts a $10,000 check from his mother claiming a fake pregnancy. This isn't cheating, mind you, it’s just skewing the results in her favor. Mildred might smell of grease but Veda knows a thing or two about high-class prostitution. She then proceeds to seduce her mother’s second husband. “There’s something to be said for alligators eating their young.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Class<b> </b>and social status play a big role in the movie and it is Veda who is obsessed with it. She acts like a spoiled heiress despite being an heiress to nothing. Veda is ashamed of her mother’s working class background, her shabby home and her - gasp!- work as a waitress. So bourgeois. Mildred and family may have crossed the railroad tracks, but Veda can still hear the train roar. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The scene where Veda accuses Mildred of “degrading” the family by waitressing is painful to watch for its sheer maliciousness. Veda detests the “smell of grease” on the money from her mother’s restaurants though that doesn’t prevent her from taking the developmental aid anyway while holding the source in contempt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“You think just because you made a little money you can get a new hairdo and some expensive clothes and turn yourself into a lady. But you can’t, because you’ll never be anything but a common frump whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing. With this money I can get away from every rotten, stinking thing that makes me think of this place or you.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She spits out those lines like they’re poison. If Veda is not the most venomous femme fatale in Noir history, she’s definitively a contender.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Veda openly aspires to an aristocratic life in which she lives on wealth she never earned and looks down upon those who do as akin to something the cat dragged in. Oddly enough singing at a grubby waterfront dive for hooting sailors doesn’t seem to bother her. Full speed ahead, Fleet Week. We always knew those singing lessons she took were good for something. </span><br />
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Unfortunately we never get to know the root of Veda’s social ambitions. There is nothing in the film to explain the origins of her attitude. Maybe it was Curtiz’s little stab at California’s post-War burgeoning consumer culture.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the end Veda blames her mother for all her crimes. “It’s your fault I am the way I am”. In a way she’s right, there’s no doubt Mildred is enabling a sociopath. After all, Gods and Goddesses don’t exist until someone builds a temple to them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If ever a dame was itching for a good walloping it’s Veda but I don’t believe Mildred created Frankenstein’s monster. It’s another nature vs nurture debate. I don’t think anything that Mildred could have done would have changed Veda. Neither love, nor understanding, nor setting boundaries, nor discipline would have made any kind of impact on Veda. To paraphrase Lady Gaga, Veda was born that way. There’s a bad seed in her, her venality is all her own. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the book we can assume that Veda may have started out human - maybe - but was warped by Mildred's adulation and attentions. As incarnated in the movie she was simply born without a moral compass.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is one of the few movies where the audience has pity with Crawford, usually not an actress to evoke this emotion. Both trailer and promotional material are misleading to the highest degree and expressively designed to make as little sense as possible. The audience is made to believe Mildred wrecks every life she touches. </span></div>
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“The kind of woman most men want... but shouldn't have!”</div>
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“Loving her was like shaking hands with the devil.”</div>
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“She wasn’t too particular how she got what she wanted.<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 15px;">”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What? Turns out Saint Mildred is not the perpetrator but the victim forever tilting at the windmills of hopeless causes. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Zachary Scott was always best when playing slimy heels and human specimens that are practically slithering, and he certainly doesn’t disappoint here. The moment we see him we know he’s Snidely Whiplash. That’s because he has a pencil-thin mustache. The flat broke offshoot of a once-wealthy Pasadena family, Monte Beragon is a leech, a lounge lizard and a self-confessed sponger with a perpetual cash flow problem. What does he actually do for a living? “I loaf, in a decorative and highly charming manner.” Work, the bane of the freeloading class. He sure sounds like a winner.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The family’s fortunes may be gone but he hasn't lost his sense of entitlement and class conceit. He continues to live in that never never land of ritzy manor houses, polo fields and posh country clubs. The only thing he has left is his spurious charm. And precious little of that. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the beginning Monte lets us think that he may be really in love with Mildred. It’s no wonder she falls for him, he makes her feel desirable again. Soon however Mildred is bankrolling Monte’s high-flying life style. Mildred finally catches on to what he is but marries him anyway, not because she’s still in love with him but because through him she has access to the aristocratic lifestyle Veda craves. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Scott breathes life into a portrayal that could easily have come off as one-dimensional, because Monte is a type who embodies a single defining trait: greed. It is to Scott’s credit that he’s walking the tightrope between that combustible mix of charm and contemptible cad so perfectly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Wally Fay,<b> </b>Mildred’s business partner and frenemy, looks like a well-fed chipper cherub but it would be unwise to underestimate him. He has a knack for one thing: making money. He’s always on the lookout for a quick buck…or a hundred. He’s the one who cooked up the plan to swindle Ted out of $10,000 because he gets a cut of the proceeds. It’s not that Wally is a bad guy, it’s just that he never occupied any moral high ground. On the credit side, he shows genuine concern for Mildred’s well-being - he warns her against Monte - but he’s also a wolf on the prowl and makes at least two passes a week at Mildred which she easily pitches back. He’ll just bide his time with another martini. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In fact he’s a guy who’d naturally sniff around any halfway attractive woman who crosses his path. It’s an automatic reflex with him. He draws the line at damaged goods though. He never falls for Veda. Smart man. He knows a rotten thing when he sees it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Wally lays on that sleazy charm a bit thick but in a likable sort of way. He’s never shy of a wisecrack and never met a bad joke he didn’t like.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">After misappropriating funds to support his lifestyle Monte ruins Mildred's business and Wally is caught with his hand in the cookie jar too, leaving Mildred high and dry. Wally does feel bad about it though. Really. </span></div>
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“I didn’t mean to cut up your business the way I did. Just got started and couldn’t stop. I see an angle, right away I start cutting myself a piece of throat. It’s an instinct. With me being smart is a disease.” </blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">No hard feelings then. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">After Monte’s murder Mildred tries to make Wally the fall guy but somehow I get the feeling he wouldn't hold it against her, what with not being hampered by an over-abundance of conscience himself and all. Wally understands why Mildred had to do it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This must be one of Carson’s best roles and he runs with it. Somehow he makes this guy absolutely likable. Sure, Wally’s a crook and a louse who’d sell his own granny for a quick buck but that’s no reason to hate him. I like him against my better judgment. What better judgement?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The ending is an interesting mix of the sadness, anguish and hope. Veda is charged with murder and Mildred - now financially broke - finally has all her illusions about her daughter shattered. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But both Mildred and Bert are cleared of the murder. Outside the sun begins to rise, peeking though the clouds and maybe - just maybe - there is a better future ahead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The reason why Mildred gets sort of a happy ending and does not have to pay for her “sins” as per Joe Breen’s dictates is because her maternal love, though misguided, was untainted by sin. Mildred’s sacrifices are never portrayed as anything but noble and selfless. The worst the movie - rightfully - can accuse her off is blindness, but it is made very clear that there is no evil in Mildred’s ambition to better herself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So if your mental image of Crawford conjures up visions of a campy old broad with a bias against wire hangers I say get over it. For all her artificiality Crawford had the capacity to show her audience the damaged soul beneath the mannered surface. And she could bulldoze over any script absurdity like nobody's business.</span></div>
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Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-3351359559971988382019-03-24T10:43:00.000-07:002019-03-25T12:14:47.633-07:00All About Eve (1950)<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Crystal over at <a href="https://crystalkalyana.wordpress.com/2019/02/05/announcing-the-fourth-annual-bette-davis-blogathon/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">In The Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood</span></a> is</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> hosting the Fourth Annual Bette </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Davis blogathon on April 5-7, 2019. Here's my (early) entry.</span></div>
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“You're an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common. Also, our contempt for humanity and inability to love, and be loved, insatiable ambition, and talent. We deserve each other.” Addison DeWitt to Eve Harrington</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">At two hours and twenty minutes a movie can feel more like a life sentence than entertainment but this is not the case with <b>All About Eve</b>. Written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz for Fox, the picture is a biliously cynical and biting commentary on theater life specifically and human nature by extension. The project, unsurprisingly, sat untouched for years by studios. Too unflattering was the presentation of show business as a world full of sociopaths, or damn near to it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Films that are like stage plays - with a strong reliance on dialogue and a limited number of sets - can come off as very static and overly verbose, but not when we have a script that is as witty and viciously sharp as this one, with acerbic zingers and prickly little barbs galore. The literary craftsmanship on display is simply a cut above the rest.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Author Sam Staggs described the film as “the bitchiest movie ever made” in his book<i> All About All About Eve. </i>A misguided assessment of a film if I’ve ever seen one. No doubt there’s a lot of scenery-chewing going on in the movie, and it’s Bette who’s doing most of it. The other cast members have to content themselves with chewing the leftovers. Davis was rarely ever a subtle actress but then she believed that “acting should be bigger than life”. I have no problem with that and call her acting broad and blousy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The issue I have with the “bitch reputation" is that it banishes the movie to the camp stratosphere where it definitively does not belong, despite the fact that the film has been like Manna from Heaven for generations of second-rate drag queens from Singapore to Los Angeles who can’t resist the temptation to parody Margo Channing because…Ab Fab! </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Throw into the bargain that poky runt-of-the-litter line about seatbelts and a bumpy night - endlessly parroted as part of the pop culture collective consciousness - and you have a movie that many people lampoon without ever having watched it. Don’t get me wrong, my tastes are low-brow enough to like camp. In fact I adore it. But years of impersonations and spoofs have given this genuine classic - fully deserving of its status - a bad rap, and have made it impossible for many to see it as anything other than an overwrought soap opera.<i> </i>I don’t want to beat a dead caribou to death, but this isn’t Plan 9 from <i>RuPaul's Drag Race</i>. <b>All About Eve</b> elegantly sidesteps those pitfalls.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The plot is quickly told as befits a movie that is more about character motivations and intentions than story. The film opens at an award ceremony where Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) is honored with the coveted Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achievement. The unsuspecting audience is applauding but quite a few are sorely lacking enthusiasm. They’re the ones who know all about Eve. One long flashback tells us the story of how Eve came to be The Golden </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Girl.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The pistol</td></tr>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Stage</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">-struck, sweet and oh so innocent Broadway fan Eve Harrington weasels and slinks her way into the company of famous but aging Broadway star Margo Channing (Bette Davis) - with a sob story to end all sob stories. A sad childhood, a life of drudgery in a brewery, a tragic shot down fighter pilot husband…cue the soft violins. Margo’s perceptive friend and wardrobe mistress Birdie (Thelma Ritter) is the first to sense something the others don’t: "What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end.” Caustic but with real sympathy and friendship for Margo, unfortunately her character falls by the wayside halfway through the movie.</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In no time Eve becomes Margo’s companion and assistant but her devotion soon shows more sinister layers. She immediately goes to work trying to separate Margo from her career, her friends and her fiancé, director Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill). Also along for the ride are playwright Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe) and Lloyd's wife Karen (Celeste Holm), Margo's best friend. It's only a</span>cid-tongued theater critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) who catches on to Eve and takes action. Turns out Eve isn’t the only shark in the tank.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Eve is a frightening case study in sociopathy if there ever was one. So sweet, so humble, so pitiful. Poor little lost lamb. Her wide-eyed innocent act is well-played because innocence is the ultimate master manipulator and can be just as potent a weapon as in-you-face sex. If this were Noir - which it isn’t - there’s no doubt Eve would be called a femme fatale. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She's pure poison dissolved in fluffy and sweet cotton candy. Any shrink would gladly attest her a 10 out of 10 on the psych-o-meter. She’s classic textbook. A compulsive liar, manipulator, user and cheat with no empathy or remorse. She feels entitled to leave a trail of victims in her wake if it suits her needs. Amorality, Miss Harrington knows all about it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Eve wants everything Margo has. Her roles, her star status, her friends. She’ll even take her man, as an afterthought. But it doesn’t end there. It seems Eve wants to morph into Margo, become Margo, not only steal her life but her very soul. “It’s as if she’s studying you”, says Birdie. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Strangely, Eve seems to think she can become a real star by imitation which to me is a premise that does not work. A real star must possess originality. It begs the question though, does Eve even have a personality of her own? Does she have a self? While Margo is all charisma and personality, Eve is not only fake all the way through, she seems to be an empty vessel. She is what people want her to be by taking on an infinite number of roles. The performance of Eve’s life is literally <i>being Eve</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Her scheming is hard to nail down because there’s nothing definite to get hold of, nothing you could put your finger on though cracks show in the facade occasionally. By the time everybody catches on to Eve, it is already too late. Eve has landed the coveted part of Cora and for Eve, sharing isn’t caring. There Can Only Be One.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">One almost has to admire the amount of planning and preparation Eve has done to get her introduction to Margo and gain sympathy. Deliberately dressing in drab and pitiful clothes, Eve signals that a little mouse like her would be no threat to an established star. She had to look the part, not just play it. But this is one little mouse on the prowl. The more Eve gains the upper hand, the more her wardrobe changes to the elegant and expensive. Soon she dresses like Margo’s equal. At Bill’s birthday party, Cinderella is finally wearing her ball gown. And not just any ballgown but one that is almost a carbon copy of Margo’s. A separate article could be written about the costume design.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Eve is in stark contrast to Miss Casswell (Marilyn Monroe). Miss Casswell may be a graduate of “the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts” but she won’t let a little disadvantage like that derail her. Her, erm, business arrangement with producer Max Fabian is - if nothing else - at least refreshingly honest and above board. Everybody knows where they stand. No subterfuge required.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Much has been made of Eve’s sexuality, with many viewers suggesting Eve to be a lesbian. A fairly convincing case could be made for that, with the way she and her female friend ascend the staircase at her boardinghouse tightly hugging and the way Eve extends an invitation to stay overnight to Phoebe. What it comes down to is that it has absolutely no bearing on the movie. I’d go so far as to suggest that Eve is not really interested in sex at all. She no doubt would use sex as leverage - and obviously does so on several occasions - with whoever can promise her the most gain, but it is nothing more than a means to an end. Eve's relationships are based on opportunism, not affection. One thing will always take precedence over her private life - whatever it may be - and that is the applause of an adoring audience - “the waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up”. For that she’d gladly sell her, let’s call it virtue to the highest bidder.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Margo is a woman of a certain age and a midlife crisis in full swing. At the same time vain and full of insecurities, her ego needs constant feeding and that’s where her fiancé Bill and her friends come in. They're supposed to supply her with nonstop unquestioning adoration which is becoming increasingly difficult for them as her prima donna behavior and her temperamental outbursts are becoming harder and harder to take.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Margo can’t stop acting, even after the curtain comes down. She lives and breathes melodrama. Her approach to life is inherently theatrical. It seems she doesn’t know where make-believe ends and reality begins. Margo, just like Eve, isn't living her life, she is<i> performing </i>it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Karen has to throw the painful truth in Margo's face: “Stop being a star...It's about time Margo realized that what's attractive on stage need not necessarily be attractive off</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">.”</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sloshed at the big Four-Oh</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Incidentally <i>Sunset Blvd.</i> came out the same year and both Davis and Gloria Swanson were nominated for an Oscar. Norma Desmond has been teetering on the brink of madness for years, her narcissism is a hermetically sealed bubble that reality can’t puncture anymore. For quite a while the viewer is afraid that Margo may turn into Norma Desmond 2.0 because Margo's vanity is her Achilles heel as well. That’s why Margo is easily swayed by Eve’s devotion in the beginning. Her narcissism doesn’t allow for the possibility that Eve’s idolatry is all an act, after all she is a STAR, and blind adoration is something due a star. Eve - who has a good working knowledge of psychology - knows how to play Margo.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s interesting to note that Margo later despises Eve for what she has done but there’s good reason to assume - though we never get conformation for this - that Eve is Margo’s younger self.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Bill’s birthday party is the night the claws come out. Margo is itching for a cat fight. The air isn’t always rarified in theatrical circles. Two sheets to the wind and working on three after guzzling down a few painfully dry martinis, Margo is in rare form and hyping herself up to an epic hissy fit, uttering THAT line…I’ll be damned if I repeat it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Loudly proclaiming that she detests cheap sentiment, Margo isn’t fooling anybody. She literally wallows in boozy misery and self-pity. Admittedly her scenes here are pretty high on the Richter scale for bitchiness. Not to say she hits it out of the ballpark. It’s loopily enjoyable. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But Margo - for all her egotism - is a realist. In the end she understands that she can’t go on forever playing ingenues and that there comes a time for a changing of the guards. Fame has a short shelf life. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Much has been made of the conflict between marriage and career. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Funny business, a woman’s career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you get back to being a woman.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">...ruminates Margo one night. Of course we could snigger about this sentiment but I consider this tediously revisionist. Eve’s machinations have forced Margo to do one thing: take a good hard look at herself. Life isn’t only about the ambition to be a star, there’s more to it. All the world is not a stage. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Margo has realized that true love is more important that the adoration of a faceless crowd.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Margo turns down the role of Cora, in a way she triumphs over Eve, she refuses to let herself be drawn into another contest and <i>chooses</i> not to be bothered by Eve anymore. She emerges from the battle disheveled but unbowed. Maybe she’s hasn’t found peace yet but she’s finally come to terms with herself. “No more make </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">believe off stage or on.” It's probably the most grown-up thing she's ever done.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">Sympathies fluctuate</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";"> </span>during the entire movie but in the end the scales of sympathy come down in favor of Margo.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">A</span>bout Anne Baxter’s role Roger Ebert wrote: “Eve lacks the presence to be a plausible rival to Margo, but is convincing as the scheming fan.” I’m inclined to agree. Baxter’s babe in the woods act is well played but it’s hard to believe she could be an actress of the caliber to rival Bette Davis, or (presumably) Sarah Siddons for the matter. Eve is a knockoff and as such I have a hard time believing her to be serious competition for Margo. It throws the film slightly off-balance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We never find out if either Margo or Eve have real talent because in a smart twist, <b>All About Eve</b> studiously avoids showing anybody perform on stage, instead using newspaper testimony to describe Margo's and Eve's performances. Mankiewicz confines himself to showing their offstage antics and self-dramatizing. It’s easy to believe that Margo has talent - we sense the artist underneath the Star - but does Mankiewicz want the audience to doubt Eve’s abilities? Of course Addison praises Eve’s performance but then he has ulterior motives. Does Mankiewicz want to make the audience believe that bloodsucking and backstabbing is what really counts? That theater and film is nothing but a Darwinian dog eat dog world?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>All About Eve</b> was the movie that resuscitated Davis’s career which had been on the downward spiral for a couple of years. Many people maintained that Bette didn’t have to act playing Margo, that she was Margo’s mirror image. I’m sure there’s a good deal of truth in it, with one crucial difference. Davis proves that - contrary to Margo - she was not afraid to show her age. Davis didn’t put a premium on vanity. She was 42 at the time of the movie but looks a good ten years older. When we see her first, Margo is positively unglamorous with her hair scraped back and her face smeared with make-up remover. Davis didn’t let herself be defeated by her insecurities, because Davis could rely on her attitude and personality to see her through. To quote Roger Ebert again: “Growing older was a smart career move for Bette Davis whose personality was adult, hard-edged and knowing.” She would prove that even more in the years to come when she didn’t mind looking positively grotesque if the role called for it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Eve can only hope that there’s a painting of her in an attic somewhere that's rapidly aging.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">George Sanders, if he wanted to, could steal the thunder from anybody. Addison DeWitt is New York’s foremost theater critic… by the power he has invested in himself. He’s deliciously wicked. Shrewd, sophisticated and with a penetrating insight into the human condition, he is by far the smartest guy in the room, probably any room he enters. His charm can easily lull people into believing he’s a nice guy. A dangerous miscalculation. He’s somebody on whose bad side nobody wants to be on. Sanders was blessed with a mellifluous voice - like soft silk with a touch of unyielding steel underneath. Everything he said sounded like a sly and not unwelcome insinuation. A poisonous snake, so polite on the surface, so dangerous underneath.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">DeWitt enjoys the power he wields, he likes people to be afraid of him and his goose quill dipped in venom. Eve may have won the Sarah Siddons Award, but Addison deserves the Waldo Lydecker Award for Cutting Wit and Withering Scorn.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He is an agitator, a man who pulls the strings and then sits back and watches with sardonic glee. He’s also a catalyst, someone who brings about a reaction between people without being himself affected. In a way he has detached himself from humanity, he considers himself above the rest. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Addison recognizes in Eve “the mark of a true killer”. That’s why he can talk to her on his own level, “killer to killer”. He admires Eve’s ruthlessness - as long as he can keep her under control.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Eve, so secure in her own arrogance, makes the mistake of underestimating him. He isn’t fooled by her little games, for that he’s too much like her. He slaps her hard across the face, saying:</span></div>
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“Is it possible, even conceivable, that you've confused me with that gang of backward children you play tricks on? That you have the same contempt for me as you have for them? I am nobody's fool. Least of all, yours.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s actually shocking when he drops his guard. An animal lurks under his impervious calm. There’s a world of wounded pride in this little speech. Nobody makes a fool out of Addison DeWitt and puts him in the same category of gullibility as The Great Unwashed, least of all a little upstart of an actress.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For Eve karma’s a bitch. It’s not he who falls into her trap, she falls into his. Addison can sniff out a phony a mile away. He dug up some juicy dirt on her and quickly demolishes the lovely sob story she had manufactured about herself. And then lays down the law.</span></div>
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Addison: I’ve come here to tell you that you will not marry Lloyd or anyone else for that matter because I will not permit it.</div>
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Eve: What have you got to do with it?</div>
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Addison: Everything, because after tonight, you will <i>belong</i> to me.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You can always put that award where your heart ought to be</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Just as with Eve, there have been endless speculations as to Addison’s sexuality. I’ve seen myriads of people vehemently insisting Addison is a coded - or not so coded - gay character but not one has been able to nail down a convincing reason for this assessment. Just because he’s eloquent, suave and sophisticated doesn’t mean he’s gay. Those are rather flimsy arguments, in themselves nothing more than cliches. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When he utters the line “you belong to me” it is not just an exercise in pure power and a show of ownership. Not with that tone in his voice. This is not a gay man talking to his beard. This is not Waldo Lydecker wanting to possess a perfect work of art. This is a man talking to a woman who he wants to, well…let’s keep this family-friendly. It doesn’t take a particularly fertile imagination to guess how this relationship is going to play out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s a very satisfying comeuppance for Eve. With her machinations Eve has lost all her benefactors bar one, and if Addison tires of her it will be the final curtain for Eve. Addison triumphs, as he must have many times before. The devil looks after his own.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The last scene is rightfully a favorite of many viewers. It features neither Margo nor Eve but a new girl, Phoebe (Barbara Bates). She has invaded Eve’s apartment and immediately starts to ingratiate herself with Eve. Phoebe is yet another snake in the grass waiting for her chance to replace the star as soon as she lets her guard down. Posing before a multi-paned mirror, Phoebe puts Eve's cape around her shoulders, holds her Sarah Siddons Award and admires herself. We see infinite replications of Phoebes reflected in the mirrors. Mankiewicz doesn’t go in for the subtle approach here. For every star, there is someone younger and more ambitious in the wings. Past and future, a never-ending cycle of lies and deceit. The many faces of Eve; the many faces of treachery, expanding themselves into infinity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It should be a consolation for Margo. The laws of gravity never fail. Once you’re at the top there’s nowhere else to go but down. Eve will be brought down by Phoebe, as Phoebe will be brought down by yet another young hopeful. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I have seen criticism of the film that calls it “misogynistic” because it paints a bleak portrait of female power games. I says cow patties. Apparently it’s a hanging offense for certain people to suggest that women are anything less than perfect. I've seen enough women who are perfectly happy to use every dirty trick in the book to get where they want to be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The story of treachery, power games and ambition that blinds people is a tale as old as time. It is universal and eternal, it spans centuries, countries, class, race, everything. It will never go out of fashion. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Let’s just hope Hollywood won’t make another sequel in 2019, <i>All About Phoebe. </i>That's just too depressing to think about.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-68556176557824996272019-02-18T09:31:00.002-08:002019-06-02T14:35:25.646-07:00Black Angel (1946)<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Weasel.</span></div>
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''I looked in the mirror and knew with my "puss" and 155-pound weakling body, I couldn't pass for a leading man. I had to be different. I thought the meaner I presented myself, the tougher I was with women, slapping them around in well produced films where evil and death seem to lurk in every nightmare alley and behind every venetian blind in every seedy apartment, I could find a market for my screen characters.” <i>Dan Duryea, Hedda Hopper interview in the 1950s</i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is as much a movie review as it is a tribute to one of Noir’s greatest heels. As we can see from the above quote, Dan Duryea was an actor who knew where his talents and his limitations lay and as such he was able to market himself admirably. With his lanky built, slicked-back blond hair and a distinctive nasal voice it was clear to him he wasn’t really leading man material. He wisely chose a different path.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">One thing the audience could be sure of. They knew they were in for a good time when they saw his name in the opening credits. Duryea played pimps, gangsters, con men, smooth operators, snake charmers, scheming arch-louses, slime balls and varied other unprepossessing characters… he was a happy sinner and made no bones about it. In his movies he was forever on the make - lying, scheming, terrorizing women, all while utilizing the requisite stock-in-trade for his characters, the trifecta of contempt: sneering, smirking and sniveling. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">His characters’s veneer of civilization was thin at the best of times. Mostly remembered - and loved - for playing out and out SOBs (<i>Scarlet Street</i>), he didn’t restrict himself to that. He could play the good, the bad and the in-between. Pathetic oddly needy weaklings (<i>The Great Flamarion </i>and <i>Another Part of the Forrest/The Little Foxes); </i>men who weren’t quite as callous as they thought they were<i> </i>(<i>The Underworld Story</i>); men more sinned against than sinning (<i>Too Late For Tears); </i>or the rotter as a tragic figure as in <i>Criss Cross </i>where he’s doomed because of his soft spot for an even more rotten dame who cared for nobody but herself. He had pathos and was occasionally almost heroic in defeat. Not all of his characters were ruthless, but there was always a moral laxity and ambiguity about them. His ethics were dodgy. Rarely ever did he play straight-arrow guys. When he did, it didn’t go down well with the movie-going public.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He was charismatic and he made the bad guys look good. Even his most outright bastards possessed charm galore (<i>Winchester 73, Ride Clear of Diablo</i>). He never dropped the charm for long because it was the chief weapon in his arsenal. There was always something self-deprecating about him. Here was a guy who had no illusions about himself and didn’t expect other people to have any either. Much as we want to hate the guy we can’t, against our better judgment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s hard to explain how his slithery charm worked so well. Suffice it to say it just did. Maybe it was because even his most outright villains had enough humanity in them that somehow made them sympathetic. Maybe it was because his sneer and contemptuous attitude always seemed to mask inner demons which he couldn’t fight, a pain and suffering he couldn’t alleviate. Or maybe it was that we always get the feeling that Duryea’s characters sense that under all their crookedness they could have been someone better if the cards had been dealt differently. This heel had hidden depth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What sticks mostly in people’s head though is Duryea’s itchy backhand. A New York Times article called him “the heel with the sex appeal”. He sure had a way with dames. Slapper Dan knocked ‘em and socked ‘em, more than any other actor in Hollywood. It became his specialty. He had a hair-trigger temper and could erupt into violence at the slightest provocation. The gentle touch went down well with the ladies. Duryea received bucketloads of mail from adoring female fans.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">By the time <b>Black Angel </b>rolled around, Duryea had determinedly made his mark as the sneering, slap-happy heel…an image that was fast beginning to solidify itself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So it came as a bit of a surprise for the audiences when they got Duryea The Romantic Hero in <b>Black Angel</b>. This is not the Duryea we all love to hate, or hate to love. Eddie Muller mentions in his book <i>Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir</i> that the promotional material for the film specifically pointed out that - surprise! - for once Duryea doesn’t leave his fingermarks all over the dame:</span></div>
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“Something great has happened in Hollywood…Beautiful June Vincent met dangerous Dan Duryea and escaped unscathed. Prolific Dan…touches nary a strand of June’s blonde hair…” </blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Best advertisement I have ever read.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Black Angel</b> may not be a landmark Noir but it’s a highly entertaining and effective psychological thriller/Noir/twisted romantic drama nevertheless. Based on a story by Cornell Woolrich, the movie was directed by Roy William Neill, mostly known for his Sherlock Holmes films. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Woolrich’s stories are not horror stories in the classic sense but everyday tales of horror, filled with existential angst, paranoia and the aura of claustrophobia and entrapment. His appeal as a writer lies not in his often convoluted, messy plots, but in his bleak worldview. His protagonists exist invariably on the razor edge of impending disaster. They spiral down a vortex into a nightmare from which there is no escape. In fact in Woolrich’s works reality and nightmare become interchangeable. Woolrich’s protagonists can try to fight against their ghastly fate but there is nothing like safe passage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The picture barely resembles the Cornell Woolrich novel it’s adapted from. As with most of Woolrich’s stories, the adaptations are not pristine, they’re sanitized. They’re missing the abject Nihilism and desperation of the writer’s vision. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The author had used and reworked the basic plot premise of <b>Black Angel</b> several times, but in 1943 he published the ultimate version as <i>The Black Angel</i>. A wife, here called Alberta Murray, tries to save her philandering husband from execution for the murder of his mistress. Her quest leads her down a path of corruption and destructiveness. She tracks down several men in the victim’s life and destroys them, making her the “black angel” of the title. But her ventures into sordid worlds have made her realize the staleness of her relationship with her husband. She’s fallen in love with one of her victims and has become a different woman. She enjoyed the depths of depravity she had plumbed to.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The PCA couldn’t let that stand. Breen’s sanitation crew got onto the job and consequently Woolrich was not happy with the film version. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The movie dispenses with a lot of sordidness but keeps some twists and turns. It runs on similar lines as<i> Phantom Lady</i>, also based on a Woolrich story. There it is a secretary who’s trying to free the boss she’s in love with, here it is a wife trying to free her husband. Cathy Bennett is the avenging angel, the Girl Friday who has to solve the crime simply because there is no one else to do it. There’s definitively a wartime metaphor trying to get out - men were away fighting so the girls had to take care of business.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Catherine Bennett’s (June Vincent) husband Kirk (John Phillips) has been found guilty of the murder of his mistress Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) and he’s been sentenced to die for it. She was a shantoozy and gold-digger who had been blackmailing him, and many other men on top of that. Catherine is desperate, she can’t believe her husband would commit murder. She finds Mavis's ex-husband Martin Blair (Dan Duryea), an alcoholic songwriter, and begs him to help her clear Kirk as Blair saw a mystery man enter Mavis’s apartment on the evening of her murder. Together they set out to catch the real murderer. Blair agrees to help Catherine track down a brooch he gave to Mavis which it seems the murderer took with him. They reason that if they find the brooch, they find the killer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The trail leads them to shady nightclub impresario Marko (Peter Lorre). His place, Rio’s, was the place of Mavis’s last employment. Catherine and Blair go undercover as a double act. But their search leads them down one blind alley after another.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">June Vincent does her best with a role that doesn’t give her much leeway. She is a proactive heroine, not just a long-suffering wife who sits around moping at home while her cheating husband waits for the chair. The problem is that the film applies a liberal coat of whitewash to Cathy, to the point of blandness. There isn’t even the slightest hint of moral ambiguity about her and that makes her character a bit of a hard sell for me. She’s lamentably wholesome. As we’ve seen with Lucille Ball in<i> The Dark Corner, </i>Lizabeth Scott in <i>Martha Ivers, </i>Susan Hayward in <i>Deadline At Dawn </i>and especially with Ella Rains in <i>Phantom Lady</i>, the good girls of Noir don’t have to be boring. When Ella Rains goes to that questionable jazz club at night to meet Elisha Cook the audience can’t have failed to raise an eyebrow or two. The offbeat vibes in that joint weren’t just the haze from reefers. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cathy never even suffers a moment of doubt. Not about her husband and not about giving in to Blair. She’s Miss Goody-Two-Shoes throughout. She looks fabulous in her evening gowns but she’s so resolutely virtuous that it borders on tedious. Oddly enough it is exactly this virtuousness that brings pain and heartbreak to Blair.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Vincent had a considerably more interesting role as the femme fatale in <i>Shed No Tears</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Black Angel </b>isn’t helped by the presence of John Phillip as Kirk. We wonder why Cathy is so steadfastly loyal to her louse of a spouse. Frankly, this wouldn’t be an issue for me if Kirk had been played by a more charismatic actor. Phillips worked under a slight disadvantage. He had no personality. As it stands he’s simply a charisma vacuum. Yes, sexual attraction works in mysterious ways but Cathy’s overpowering passion for her husband is a tough lozenge to swallow and when she states that there will never be another man for her than Kirk, the audience collectively shake their heads.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Peter Lorre is always good value for the money but here he’s mostly wasted in a stock role. He brings his trademark sleazy “charm” to the table, but he isn’t given enough to do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Broderick Crawford, an unlikely box office hit if there ever was one, is unfortunately relegated to playing barely there fourth banana. He’d do much better in <i>Born Yesterday, Scandal Sheet </i>and<i> All the King’s Men.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Constance Dowling leaves quite an impression in her short scenes as Mavis. She has been supplementing her income with a little blackmail. It’s not a nice thing to do but then, a girl’s gotta make a living too. </span>Mavis likes the good life. Her apartment reeks of garish splendor. Blackmail is a lucrative business. There’s no doubt that Mavis needed killing but it’s a shame she got bumped off so quickly. The film would have been a lot more fun had she stayed around a while longer, just for entertainment purposes. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Dan Duryea is the one who effortlessly carries the movie. A full-time drunk and part-time songwriter, he’s a sympathetic figure and a tormented soul. Blair likes a drink…or ten. Night after night he can be found at his usual watering holes pickling himself in cheap hooch. Day in day out one drunken binge after another, to drown his sorrows. The man is not a sucker or loser per se, it’s just that he can’t curb the drinking habit he acquired because of a rotten dame. Blair is still stuck on his blackmailing cheat of a wife, try as he might he can’t get her out of his head. He wrote the song “Heartbreak” for Mavis which runs like a leitmotif through the entire picture. It’s entirely appropriate. It depicts the duality of romantic idealization and subsequent disillusionment. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Blair is in self-destruct mode. It’s a nuanced and affecting performance on Duryea’s part, almost as good as Ray Milland’s in <i>The</i> <i>Lost Weekend</i>. True alcoholism is something rarely seen in classic film and<b> Black Angel </b>doesn’t sugarcoat anything. Addiction is ugly and Duryea doesn’t shy away from the ugliness. To the film’s credit Blair’s alcoholism is never played for laughs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Duryea’s acting is really outstanding in the sequences where Blair wallows in drunken despair. The night of Mavis’s murder is a blank spot in his memory after one more all-night bender. To the best of his knowledge he slept off his hangover in bed after getting kicked out of Mavis's building by the doorman. When Cathy finds him the next morning he’s still in an 80 proof haze.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He lives in a lousy dump of a boarding house that is in stark contrast to Mavis’s swanky apartment. Blair’s flophouse pad has all the mod cons to be expected of such surroundings. Iron prison bed, peeling plaster where he strikes his matches, hot plate in the corner. The lifestyle of the poor and famous. Whatever aspirations to class he may have had long vanished in this hell on earth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">His friend Joe (Wallace Ford) literally has to nurse him through his drunken comas. Because of his memory lapses he’s dangerous to himself and others, so Joe locks him in his room when he’s on a bender. In<b> Black Angel</b> it’s not fate that Blair has no control over but alcohol and his own inability to cope with it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Blair is an incurable romantic. Reluctantly he agrees to help Cathy but soon finds himself falling in love with her, as she is everything his wife was not. Kind, caring and loyal. <b>Black Angel</b> is just as much Noir as it is romance and a story of (almost) redemption. After Mavis broke his heart he fell deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit of despair and booze but he kept on digging. Along comes Cathy and he thinks this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. He lays off the bottle but he can’t catch a break. Cathy can’t return his affections. Through his love for her he becomes a better man but when she rejects him, he dives right back into the bottle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The movie employs one of 40s Hollywood’s most cherished themes, amnesia, which had its roots in the plight of returning servicemen who came home desperately trying to forget what couldn't be forgotten. The unforgettable refused to let itself be summarily dismissed. Amnesia became a primary Noir metaphor. There was almost an epidemic of movies dealing with the disease. <i>Somewhere in the Night, The Crooked Way, Twelve O’Clock Courage, The Locket, Crack up, The Chase, So Dark the Night, High Wall </i>to name just a few. Protagonists delved deep into their suppressed memories, reliving horrors, picking up the pieces of a broken life and reconstructing the past from scratch. They didn’t always know what they would unearth. The mind had become unchartered territory. Careful. Here be dragons. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It wasn’t always amnesia brought on by horrific war experiences that films focused on. Noir explored a further path using amnesia as a device for alienation and psychological entrapment taken to the extreme, often brought on by shock, other traumatic experiences or addiction, a condition Woolrich was very familiar with. A dark self - an alien doppelgänger - lurked within the protagonist, completely unbeknownst to him. Exorcising the demons of one’s own mind was fraught with terror because you never knew what you might find. Imogen Sara Smith writes in her Noir City Magazine article <i>Lushly Lovesick, Dan Duryea in Black Angel</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“…not only are people incapable of knowing what they’re capable of, they don’t even know what they’ve actually <i>done</i>. They can never be certain of anything, except that things are probably worse than they appear”. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">And indeed they are. Blair stumbles through the entire movie with only the vaguest sense of (un)reality. There’s a great psychedelic scene towards the end of the picture when Blair finally remembers what happened that fateful night. It rivals Phillip Marlowe’s hallucinatory scene of in </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Murder, My Sweet</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">. After yet another all-night bender Blair wakes up in an alcoholic ward. Through the boozy haze of his half-forgotten memory reality surfaces. He finally remembers - in a flashback scene - what the alcoholic blackout had erased from his mind. He killed Mavis. Just when we thought we had it all figured out, events take an unexpected turn, though there are clues throughout, for example the song “Heartbreak” that plays after the murder on the record player.</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In a bleak little bit of irony Blair, who thought he had an alibi due to being locked into his room by his friend, had actually paid the flophouse attendant 25 cents to let him out of the room on the night of the murder. 25 cents decided a woman’s fate. Life is cheap.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As opposed to the novel, Blair turns out to be the black angel, not Catherine. Many viewers thought the ending too implausible and far-fetched - and not unjustifiably so - but it is Noir if anything is in the movie. The cruelty of fate. Here is a man who’s allowed a brief glimpse of hope and the possibility of love. But right around the next corner there’s yet another blind alley with a barred gate at the end. Love is an impossible dream. <i>First You Dream, Then You Die</i> is the title of Francis Nevins’s Woolrich biography. I’m hard-pressed to find a more fitting epitaph for the author’s life, or any of his protagonists for the matter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The ending of course had to adhere to Code conventions. Blair does the right thing and confesses. He chooses self-sacrifice even if he’ll have to die for his crime. Duryea makes the last-minute twist convincing because he’s believable as both a deranged killer and a basically good man.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">However, here’s a thought. It’s interesting and slightly subversive to note that the man who turns out to be the killer in the end would be a better choice of husband for Cathy than Kirk probably ever was.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the Audie Murphy Western <i>Ride Clear of Diablo</i> Duryea utters the interesting line: “If I ever started feeling like a human being, I’d shoot myself.” In <b>Black Angel</b> Duryea acts like a human being, albeit a flawed one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’m not quite sure if Saint Dan sits well with me. He’s very engaging in <b>Black Angel</b> and plays inner turmoil well but I think I’ll have to go watch <i>Scarlet Street</i> now. I prefer my Duryea mean, not mawkish.</span></div>
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Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-56152388207881772312019-01-22T08:25:00.000-08:002019-06-02T14:31:48.567-07:00Double Indemnity (1944)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Maddy over at <a href="https://maddylovesherclassicfilms.wordpress.com/2019/01/20/the-second-remembering-barbara-stanwyck-blogathon-day-one/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Maddy Loves Her Classic Films</span></a> and Crystal of <a href="https://crystalkalyana.wordpress.com/2019/01/20/the-second-remembering-barbara-stanwyck-blogathon-is-here/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">In The Good Old Days Of Classic Hollywood</span></a> are hosting The Second Remembering Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon on January 20-22, 2019. Here's my entry.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money -- and for a woman. I didn't get the money. And I didn't get the woman.” Walter Neff</span></blockquote>
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<b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Double Indemnit</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">y is one of the Essentials. A film that laid down the rules for the genre and set a benchmark for every Noir to come. Flashback structure, sucker who goes over to the dark side for a rotten dame, shadows of Venetian blinds reminiscent of prison bars, adultery, murder for profit, lust, greed, treachery, betrayal, moral corruption, fatalism…all there. Into the bargain the script has an abundance of witty banter copiously laced with acid.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Based on the eponymous novella by James M. Cain, the script was written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler as Cain was under contract to another studio. It was probably just as well as Chandler could write razor-sharp dialogue like nobody’s business. Wilder and Chandler basically deconstructed Cain’s novel and re-wrote it from the ground up. Rarely ever did a dream team of screenwriters get along as badly as Wilder and Chandler. For both by all accounts it was hate at first sight. Chandler was a recovering alcoholic and the story goes that it was his experiences with Wilder that made him fall off the wagon again. Wilder considered Chandler beyond hope in booze department anyway. Details vary, depends who’s telling the story. But Wilder believed that antagonism was good for collaboration. “If two people think alike, it's like two men pulling at one end of a rope. If you are going to collaborate, you need an opponent to bounce things off.” Turns out he was spot on. Together Wilder, the sharpest tack in Tinseltown, and Chandler, the master of the slick double entendre, created something sensational.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cain’s novella was based on the notorious 1927 Snyder/Gray crime in which housewife Ruth Snyder convinced her lover to murder her husband for the insurance money. It was to say the least a clumsy crime, easily found out. In his book Cain smartens up the criminals and the story considerably, infusing it with raw sex, cynicism and his patented bleak world view.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">Most</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";"> </span>studios didn’t want to touch the novel, not only because of dicey subject matters such as lust, adultery and murder but because of the gleeful amorality with which they’re told. Many people expected the movie to fail at the box office. Both MacMurray and Stanwyck were afraid it might ruin their careers. But Wilder proved to be right once again. The film was a box office success and garnered seven Oscar nominations, though winning none.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To no-one’s surprise Joe Breen was breathing down Wilder’s neck and had to put his two cents in: “The general low tone and sordid flavor of this story makes it, in our judgment, thoroughly unacceptable for screen presentation….” He should have kept his spare change. This kind of high praise recommends it not only to any Noir fan nowadays but would practically guarantee contemporary audience’s interest.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Needless to say, Wilder had no problem getting all the salacious points across, making caustic comments about human nature while ostensibly endorsing the Ten Commandments. The screenplay has some nasty touches. The plan for the murder is hatched in the baby food aisle of a supermarket, an image that seems to drive home the banality of evil. The entire movie is an exercise in what I'd call "Breen baiting". Breen just didn’t have the brains to see that <b>Double Indemnity</b> wasn’t a morality play about the punishment the wicked reap for their dirty deeds, but an amusement park ride about the sheer joy of watching the shenanigans of two amoral people almost get away with their crime. Wilder rightfully believed the audience would delight in watching bad people do bad things (Eddie Muller, Noir Alley Intro). The entire picture has a marvelously tawdry feel to it and the intensity of lust is easily conveyed even if we don’t see all the details. There’s more than one way to skin Joe Breen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The movie turned out to be a honey of a great Noir. As always in the best examples of the genre, the audience roots for the morally corrupt. It would have bothered good old Joe. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">The film </span>is told in flashback by doomed protagonist Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), insurance salesman for the Pacific All Risk Insurance Company. He’s bleeding from a gunshot wound and while the lifeblood drains out of him, he confesses - via dictaphone - to his friend and mentor Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), shrewd claims manager at the same company, how and why he became a murderer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It all started when Walter stopped at a client's home one day to renew his auto insurance policy and instead met the client's wife, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). He falls for her like a ton of bricks, they become lovers and Phyllis proposes in a not too subtle move to bump off her louse of a spouse. She would like to take out an accident insurance policy over $50,000 without hubby knowing about it and then rigging the killing so it looks like an accident. The insurance policy even has a double indemnity clause to pay twice the amount if the death is caused by a freak accident.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The plan goes off like a clockwork. Walter kills Dietrichson before he’s supposed to go on a train ride, dumps the body on the train tracks and takes his place on the train to establish an alibi. The police accept the verdict of accidental death, initially. But Keyes doesn’t buy it and one look at Phyllis tells him everything he needs to know. So he goes to work like the good bloodhound he is.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Stanwyck gets one of the most memorable entrances in cinema history. Walter has come to call on Mr. Dietrichson. He’s not at home, but she is, wrapped only in a towel and standing at the top of a staircase, practically naked. It’s what the fashionable woman happens to model when greeting perfect strangers. And that’s a honey of an anklet she’s wearing. It's a piece of jewelry that is marvelously fetishized in the movie. It’s a dead giveaway. It’s the 40s version of the tramp stamp. Walter now has only one thing on his mind, and it’s not insurance policies: </span></div>
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”I was thinking about that dame upstairs and the way she’d looked at me. I wanted to see her again. Close, and without that silly staircase between us.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Husband? What husband? He knows her game, or so he thinks. We get the feeling he’s met his share of desperate housewives before. Just not ones quite so thoroughly efficient when it comes to crime. She’s all dolled up and ready for murder.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Both trade barbs with the ease of longtime pros. Nobody can say "baby" just like Fred Mac</span>Murray. She coos and purrs barely-veiled insinuating come-ons though she makes a floozy’s feint at good-girl morality when Walter puts the moves on her. "There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff." It’s perfunctory at best. Her off-hand seductive attitude makes her innocent act more than unconvincing. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Conniving, manipulative and absolutely evil, she has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Phyllis is the opportunistic minx from <i>Baby Face</i> calcified into ice-cold ruthlessness and irredeemable amorality. Every one of her actions is coldly calculated, from her beach towel entrance to her flirting to her kisses. And everything about her is artificial. Her red lips, her smile… and ooooh that platinum blonde hair, a dodgy wig that many people can’t look past. It’s cheap and obvious but then so is everything about her. She has a touch of trash about her. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">We may</span> safely call her game entrapment, a game she wrote the book on. There’s nothing coy about her. Walter sells insurance, she sells sex. A tramp from a long line of tramps.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Phyllis needs a sucker to commit murder for her so she doesn’t get blood on her mink. The conversation turns to crime surprisingly quickly. Could he help her out a bit? With her heartless and cold husband? He's soooo evil. This would have been most people’s cue to run the other way but there’s one born every minute. Walter can’t get her out of his mind. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“I knew I had ahold of a red hot poker, and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off...I was all twisted up inside and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all, that the hope was too strong, that this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Trouble is knocking at the door, and in Noir this knock is never ignored.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Walter Neff is a successful insurance salesman, a smoothie who would gladly sell a corpse some life insurance. He lives an unattached life, clearly obvious from his spare apartment. He’s been quite content with his life so far but deep down there has been something nagging at him, a barely recognized boredom, a diffuse longing for something more than his mundane existence. He’s been selling insurance to little old ladies for too long. The driving force of many Noir stories is the urge to escape, from oneself, from the ordinary, from responsibility, from one’s failures… Walter is another Noir (anti)hero who feels trapped in the prison of his mediocre existence. Yes, he says he killed Dietrichson for money and a woman but the roots go much deeper than that. There’s nothing so dangerous as ennui. It's </span>death in small doses.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">In his</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";"> </span>confession to Keyes Walter admits that he’s been thinking about how to crook the house for years, long before he ever met Phyllis. Unbeknownst to everybody, he’s been waiting for a bigger payday. And not just that, he realizes that has no compunction about murder at all. Walter didn’t fight the urge to kill because the stakes were $50,000. Plus the life of a man. But that is negotiable. Moral integrity is something that has never really been part of his mental makeup. Ethics are a flexible thing. One gets the feeling that his fall from grace wasn't from a great moral height. Not quite your average upstanding Joe Citizen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There was also the wish to put one over on his friend Keyes, whom he loves but whose stringent work ethics and narrow world-view - that reduces every human emotion to statistical demographics - he rejects, and who has always bragged that nobody could cheat him. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Under Walter’s straight-laced facade a monster has always been lurking. It was just buried deeply under layers of accumulated boredom. Walter is another seeming paragon of virtue that is very believably transformed into a murdereous type. Noir punctures conventional assumptions about human behavior. People aren’t essentially good, in Noir under the right or wrong circumstances everyone was capable of almost anything.<i> If</i> life throws them a doozy of a chance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That’s why he is easy pickings for Phyllis’s recruitment agency. The traditional reading of this film is that Walter is a hapless pawn in the game of an evil woman. It doesn’t stick at all. No doubt, Walter had the hots for Phyllis but that isn’t his incentive for murder. It's his incentive for sex. Crime is his quick fix for mind-numbing boredom and dissatisfaction.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">Walter</span> is no weakling. At one time Phyllis says to Walter: “You planned the whole thing. I only wanted him dead.” There's a lot of truth in it. He masterminded everything. Walter comes up with the plan to kill Mr. Dietrichson, Walter does the actual killing and Walter is the actor on the train. After the murder, Phyllis is incapable of starting the getaway car. Walter has to do it for her. He does so without any difficulty. Without him she would have been caught in a very sticky situation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It really does not bear out the oft-repeated narrative that Phyllis is the dominant force. Walter is a proactive not a passive agent in this whole plot. Phyllis didn’t corrupt him, the seeds of crime were already sown long before he set foot in the Dietrichson house. Phyllis just left the door open a little and he follows her down the honeysuckle path to destruction without looking back.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">For Mac</span>Murray his role was a departure from his image. Mostly utilized as a light comedic actor and folksy nice guy, Wilder saw something in him that he obviously didn’t see himself. Wilder had offered the role to almost every actor in Hollywood. All turned it down, including George Raft who has the dubious distinction of having passed on more choice parts than any other actor in Tinseltown.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">MacMurray’s casting was a revelation and he showed hidden depths in his characterization even he didn’t know he had. MacMurray would sort of reprise his role a few years later in the respectable <b>Double Indemnity </b>knockoff <i>Pushover</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In his review Roger Ebert stated: </span></div>
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“The puzzle of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity …is what these two people really think of one another… with the tough talk and the cold sex play. But they never seem to really like each other all that much, and they don't seem that crazy about the money, either. What are they after?”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ebert is usually much more perceptive. No, they don’t like each other, they use each other. They’re not in love, they’re just in cahoots. They form a mutually beneficial murder society. This is Wilder’s cynicism at its best. There’s definitively primal lust there, but no love or warmth. It’s all hot passion with ice-cold disdain and contempt underneath. This is one love affair that is as cold as the grave.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Phyllis is clearly in it for the payoff. Her husband has lately not been too lucky in his business </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">dealings </span>and the payout from his life insurance would come in incredibly handy. As mentioned in other reviews, the femme fatale is never a working woman. Neither Phyllis, nor any other femme fatale, would ever dirty her hands with anything resembling work. That’s what other people - men - are for, to provide for her comfort. Phyllis is a lazy and languorous blonde who lives in an ornately-furnished oppressive mansion. She considers it a cage but the irony is that she did everything to get into that cage, including nursing her husband’s first wife - to death.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Phyllis is a pathological case. She’s made a career out of murder. It’s really the only “natural” solution for someone like her. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. She’s a woman who’s never felt any healthy emotion in her life. When Walter kills her husband - off-screen - she doesn’t even flinch. In that scene we only see Stanwyck’s face and it is a cold mask that allows itself only the tiniest of smirks. J</span>ust as for Walter, murder is her quick fix for all of life’s problems. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">Whatever lustful </span>passions may have existed between Walter and Phyllis cool off very quickly after the murder. As so often the criminal couple’s relationship turns sour and mutual distrust rears its ugly head. It is the peculiar problem of murderers. They must trust each other, but as each knows the other is capable of murder, trust is impossible. Paranoia, no Noir can do without. Soon they’re thinking of killing each other. Lust and hate can exist in perversely close proximity. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Walter learns that Phyllis has been seeing Nino Zachetti, her step-daughter Lola’s boyfriend, on the side. Walter can finally see the writing on the wall, that he was set up as a fall guy who’d end up on the trash heap. Walter wants out but Phyllis can't let him louse up their perfect crime: “Nobody’s pulling out. We went into this together and we’re coming out at the end together. It’s straight down the line for both of us.” If one falls, so does the other. The “straight down the line” metaphor is used several times in the film. Keyes picks it up too: </span></div>
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“They’ve committed a murder, and it’s not like taking a trolley ride together, where they can get off at different stops. They’re stuck with each other and they’ve got to ride, all the way to the end of the line. And it’s a one-way trip, and the last stop is the cemetery.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Little by little Walter feels the heavy pall of doom: “Suddenly it came over me that everything would go wrong…I couldn’t hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.” He knows his future is all used up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Walter goes to have it out with Phyllis. She is a split second quicker and shoots Walter, though only wounding him. And then she has her two seconds of soppy remorse…if we believe her. </span></div>
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“I never loved you Walter. Not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart… I used you, just as you said. That’s all you ever meant to me… Until a minute ago, when I couldn’t fire that second shot.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Walter doesn’t buy it either. Like Bart has to kill Laurie at the end of <i>Gun Crazy</i>, Walter needs to kill Phyllis simply because she would go on killing remorselessly. Strangely enough, he kills her because he still has a conscience. He lets her have it pointblank. “Goodbye, baby.” Man that was cold. Even Phyllis can’t gamble against the house forever and win.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">There</span> are really no healthy relationships in this film, bar one. The Dietrichson home resembles the inside of a Sub-Zero refrigerator. Daughter Lola hates her life with her family and lies to her father continually about her no-good boyfriend. The Dietrichson family dynamics aren’t happy. Sylvia Harvey writes in her essay <i>Woman’s Place: The Absent Family in Film Noir: “</i>The family home in Double Indemnity is the place where three people who hate each other spend endlessly boring evenings together.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The only positive relationship is between Walter and Keyes. Smart, shrewd and insightful Keyes is the moral center of the movie. He loves his job, cheap cigars, the statistics of murder and suicide and exposing crooked insurance fraudsters. He has a uncanny knack for sniffing out phony claims. His gut feeling - what he calls “the little man” - never fails him. It dawns on him pretty quickly that there’s something fishy about the Dietrichson case. He smells a rat. Or at least the cheap perfume that is splashed all over that Dietrichson file. That Keyes doesn’t come off as uptight or unpleasant is all down to Eddie’s wonderful portrayal. There’s something very lovable about him. Under all his blustering live-wire energy is a deeply forlorn man who, at the end of the day, always drinks alone. Keyes describes the many functions of his job. “An insurance manager is as surgeon, a doctor, a bloodhound; cop, judge, jury and father confessor.” It is perceptive foreshadowing. That is exactly what he’ll be for Walter. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Much has been made of the supposed homosexual undercurrents between Walter and Keyes and Wilder stated that their relationship is the true love story in the movie. In today’s lingo I’d settle for bromance. Keyes functions as a surrogate father for Walter. Love has many faces and not all of them are sexual. What I see here is just genuine affection. But however we want to view it there’s no doubt that the Walter/Keyes relationship has all the sincere warmth and respect that the Walter/Phyllis one is lacking. There is a purity in it that is devoid of any kind of selfishness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">It’s interesting</span> to note that in the end Walter goes back to his office to confess to Keyes instead of running for the border. Richard Schickel suggests in his DVD commentary that Walter almost willfully commits suicide by not taking care of his wound. It’s a good point. He is a broken man who didn’t quite understand the depth which people can sink to. Walter can’t bear the shame of having let his friend down. And for what? Absolutely nothing. Walter needs Keyes’s absolution. And Keyes, the father confessor, grants it. Walter has been lighting Keyes's cigars all during the movie, and now as last act of friendship Keyes lights Walter’s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The ending is incredibly moving and recaptures some of the humanity that had been absent from the movie so far. There is nothing but sadness in Keyes’s face after he’s heard Walter’s confession. Walter’s betrayal cut him to the quick. Walter spells it out for Keyes. </span></div>
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Walter: "Know why you couldn't figure this one, Keyes? I'll tell ya. Because the guy you were looking for was too close – right across the desk from you."<br />
Keyes: "Closer than that, Walter.”<br />
Walter: “I love you too.<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard; font-size: small; text-align: start;">”</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A beautiful tribute. Walter was always his blind spot. Keyes once investigated the dame he wanted to marry but neglects to do the same with his friend. The real tragedy of this film is that Keyes cannot dismiss Walter the way he dismissed all the other frauds and fakes. With Walter's death a part of him died too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">At the end of the day there’s no insurance for an agent who planned his own downfall. Walter wasn't smarter than the rest, he was just a little taller. </span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com58tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-38983403204605459612018-12-21T07:53:00.002-08:002019-06-02T14:36:36.061-07:00The Killers (1946)<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Maddy over at <span style="color: orange;"><a href="https://maddylovesherclassicfilms.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/announcing-the-ava-gardner-blogathon/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Maddy Loves Her Classic Films</span></a> </span>is hosting the Ava Gardner Blogathon on December 23 and 24, 2018. Here's my entry.</span></div>
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"If there's one thing in this world I hate, it's a double-crossing dame.” Big Jim Colfax</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Produced by Mark Hellinger’s production company and directed by one of Noir’s greatest directors Robert Siodmak, <b>The Killers </b>was a huge success upon release. Siodmak was one of Hollywood’s many European émigré directors. When he came to Hollywood he was absorbed by the studio system which was fine with him. He wanted to belong. His contemporaries often dismissed Siodmak as just another B director capable of nothing more than churning out solid studio assignments. For every Noir aficionado though he is one of the primary architects of the genre and his output in it is unparalleled. The man had a distinctly Noir vision.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(73, 73, 73);">Producer Hellinger was a former Broadway columnist/news reporter turned independent film producer. He was t</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">he embodiment of the hard-living, hard-drinking journalist so often seen in classic movies. Unfortunately his lifestyle caught up with him pretty quickly and he died at the young age of 44 after the release of <i>Brute Force</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In every way <b>The Killers</b> is textbook Noir. It’s genre perfect. We can draw up a checklist and tick off every point. Themes of obsession, betrayal, disillusionment, greed, death and futility, all wrapped up neatly with a “double cross to end all double crosses”. Check.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Flashback structure, check. Expressionist cinematography, check. Sucker who goes off the straight and narrow for a rotten dame. A heist gone wrong. A past that doesn’t let go. Inescapable fate that leads to death. Check, check, check.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">From a contemporary point of view the movie may tread overly familiar ground. So many Noir tropes </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">have now become part of the everyday cinematic lexicon. <b>The Killers</b> has</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> a setup straight out of "Let's make a Film Noir”. But the ingredients are still fresh because they’re served straight up, the right way. With no ice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The opening of the movie sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. Two hitmen - Al and Max (Charles McGraw and William Conrad) - walk into a diner. There the joke ends. They haven’t come for ham and eggs. They’ve come to fulfill a contract on a gas station attendant, the strangely unresisting victim Ole “The Swede” Anderson (Burt Lancaster). Ole’s insurance beneficiary for $2500 is an old chambermaid, Queenie, who saved him from suicide years ago, and insurance investigator Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien) gets curious. </span></div>
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“This isn’t a two-for-a-nickel shooting. Two professional killers show up in a small town and put the blast on a filling station attendant. A nobody…Why?<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";"><span style="font-size: 15px;">” </span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And </span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">why did the aforementioned nobody not try to run but passively accept his death</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">? These questions haunt Reardon. He wants to know what happened to this man who had “8 slugs in him, nearly tore him in half.” He goes to work with the help of Lt. Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene), Ole’s old boyhood pal.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Turns out the Swede was involved in a factory payroll holdup where the money was never recovered. After his career as a prizefighter was cut short due to a hand injury Ole got in with the wrong crowd, Big Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker) and his gang consisting of thugs Dum Dum (Jack Lambert) and Blinky Franklin (Jeff Corey). Ole works the numbers racket for Colfax. And he falls for Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner), the boss’s girl, hard. Kitty convinces Swede to double cross Colfax, take the money and run so they can be together. The stakes are high in this game but of course the dame is low. Kitty pulls a fast one and clears out…with the money. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">Now Ole is in hiding but Colfax has a long memory.</span> He never closes a book. He wants Ole dead and he has friends in low places who can make that happen.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>The Killers</b> is based on Hemingway’s 1927 minimalist short story of the same name<i>.</i> It’s barebones, without much plot, stripped of any unnecessary embellishment and only about ten pages long. Two gunmen are looking for a man named Ole Anderson. It is never explained who wants him killed, what he did or why he waits fatalistically for his death. Nothing is spelled out, nothing is resolved. Short stories never tell a journey, they only capture a brief moment in time. They’re a slice of life, or in this case a slice of death. Hemingway’s short story is a to-the-point redux of his bleak vision of life, delivering the perfect blueprint for Noir.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Though the film is billed on the poster as <i>Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, </i>the story it tells is not his. His story accounts only for the first 10 plus minutes of the picture which is faithful to Papa as far as dialogue and setup go. Hemingway’s story ends with the murder of the Swede and left it at that. The script takes it from there and delivers. It gives us the backstory Hemingway refused to supply.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Siodmak’s opening shot is an homage to Edward Hopper’s painting<b> </b><i>Nighthawks</i>. Siodmak literally translated in onto film but it’s interesting to note that Hopper himself had been inspired by Hemingway’s original short story he had read in <i>Scribner’s Magazine. </i>A nice piece of cross-pollination.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>The Killers</b> has a splintered<b> </b>narrative structure with eleven flashbacks. Some viewers found the storyline convoluted but it’s anything but. The flashbacks are told with precision and logic and never loose focus. It must be said though that this is not a movie for 21st century attention deficit crowd. Put that phone down and stay with it, or you’ll miss a lot.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A flashback structure locks in a picture’s downbeat ending and the audience is cognizant of impending doom from the start. This is part and parcel of Noir’s fatalistic spirit. Usually the flashback is told by the ill-fated protagonist himself before he dies. Here the Swede is killed right in the beginning of the movie so others must tell his story. The mystery unfolds through the testimony of several witnesses who all contribute a part of the puzzle until Reardon has a whole. He fights for the guy who can't fight for himself anymore.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>The Killers</b> is a psychological exploration into the mind and motivation of a man who simply gave up on life. It<b> </b>was Burt Lancaster's screen debut, and he gives a strong performance playing a weak character. Lancaster’s screen image hadn’t solidified yet and his usual swagger and bravado are noticeably absent. This is Burt Lancaster before he became Burt Lancaster.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ole’s introduction is interesting. Lying apathetically in bed in the dark, waiting for death to knock on the door, he barely moves or raises his voice when his friend Nick comes to warn him about the hitmen. He makes no move to save himself. The dialogue of that scene is worth quoting in its entirety</span>.</div>
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Swede: There’s nothing I can do.<br />
Nick: I could tell you what they look like.<br />
Swede: I don't want to know what they're like. Thanks for coming.<br />
Nick: Don't you want me to go and see the police?<br />
Swede: No. That wouldn't do any good.<br />
Nick: Isn't there something I could do?<br />
Swede: There ain't anything to do.<br />
Nick: Couldn't you get out of town?<br />
Swede: No. I'm through with all that running around.<br />
Nick: Why do they wanna kill you?<br />
Swede: I did something wrong - once.</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When we see Ole’s face it is expressionless, he’s detached to the point of numbness. Completely unresisting, he faces his killers stoically and without panic. He doesn’t fight or beg or run. He has no fight left in him. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Reardon and Lubinsky visit dying gang member Blinky in the hospital, the doctor assesses his situation dryly: “He's dead now, except he's breathing.” So is the Swede but that’s about to be fixed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Al and Max enter his room Ole is not only willing but absolutely eager to die. To Hemingway scholars this attitude is known as heroic fatalism. It is the dignified acceptance of one's circumstances in the face of impending disaster including death.<b> </b>A Hemingway man must be able to look his own mortality straight in the eye with honor and dignity. He realizes that life is essentially meaningless and that trying to outrun death is in essence futile. Ole Anderson embodies this attitude in its purest distillation. Hemingway did not consider this attitude a defeat. On the contrary, he saw it as an act of courage. And not only courage but as the last <i>conscious</i> decision a man has left whose life has lost its purpose and direction. Death as catharsis. For everybody who doesn't subscribe to this Nihilist philosophy </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">it’s simply valuing your life at zero by committing suicide.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The Noir (anti)hero never travels light, he always has a heavy burden to carry. In Ole’s case his burden is his past and Fate demands that this debt be paid. Ole gives only a cryptic explanation of his predicament - “I did something wrong, once” - but in Noir one mistake is all it takes. There are no second chances. The Swede double-crossed his cronies and absconded with the loot. In the Noir universe nobody gets away with that. That appointment with death must be kept. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sucker, patsy, dupe, perfect victim. Choose one, or all for Ole. Not a bright boy, not a bright boy at all. On the contrary, Ole is frankly dumb as a box of rocks. For Kitty he goes down Loser’s Lane and never looks back. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is a strange role for Lancaster to play. There is something disturbingly masochistic about his character. It’s a striking contrast to his impressive physicality. Ole looks like a tough but he’s a poky little puppy, not hardboiled but over-easy. A step away from Lennie Small. Frankly it's a sorry sight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Of course there’s a dame to blame. Her name is Kitty Collins. She makes Ole lose his moral compass. So besotted is Ole with Kitty that he - out of misplaced chivalry - doesn’t hesitate to take the rap for her when she’s caught holding stolen jewelry. It earns him a three year stretch. She doesn’t even visit him in prison.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Once Kitty gave him a green scarf with golden harps on it and he holds onto it for dear life. It functions as a substitute for her. If he can’t have Kitty at least he can have her scarf.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ole’s former cell mate Charleston - who has spent half of his life in the clink and doesn’t want to go back - tries to make him think straight: “Want a word of advice? Stop listening to those golden harps, they’ll land you in a lot of trouble.” Ole doesn’t listen. When trouble comes knocking on the door the Noir protagonist embraces it whole-heartedly, running into disaster with arms and eyes wide open.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Ole’s illusions are finally stripped away, he has nothing left to live for. </span>Lee Marvin remarks in the 1964 remake: “The only man who's not afraid to die is the one who's dead already”. Ole projected all his dreams and ideals of romance on the wrong dame. He died on the day she walked out on him. Dixon Steele’s quote from<i> In a Lonely Place</i> could be Ole’s epitaph: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” But Kitty’s was just the last in a long line of betrayals. Ole’s fate is foreshadowed in the scene where he takes a relentless beating in the ring in his last fight. He’s unable to fight back. He’s down and out, way down. And he’ll never get back up again because he doesn't have the brains to see he's being taken for a ride by everybody. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the end the audience understands what Swede meant by his cryptic words to Queenie: “Charleston was right.” He shouldn’t have listened to those golden harps and trusted a rotten dame. The mistake Ole made once was not only absconding with the loot of a robbery - he doesn’t regret that at all - it was being a sentimental fool.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s nothing in this world we love more than a double-crossing dame and Ava is one of the best. She is at the height of her beauty in this movie, a liquid-eyed, pure as the driven vixen who’s devious, manipulative and up there with the most evil two or three-timing dames.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She’s introduced posing artfully at a piano, in that black dress, conscious of her power. Her enigmatic smile is as obvious as Phyllis Dietrichson’s ankle bracelet and just as hard to ignore. It hits Ole like a mule. She sings her lovely siren song <i>The More I Know Of Love</i>. She knows a lot about that - or what counts for it in Noir - to the detriment of every man in sight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Her name is very appropriate. She is like a slinky cat, graceful, playful and coquettish. In one scene she's literally lolling around like a kitten on the bed and Ole’s eyes almost pop out of his head. She also goes to the Green Cat Bar and has a glass of milk. Meow. But t</span>his is one black kitten that is bad luck for everybody who crosses her path.<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Kitty is one of Noir’s most masked femme fatales. Nobody sees how evil she is until it is too late. She hides her rottenness better than any other deadly dame I’ve seen. On the surface she has a certain helpless appeal, “enacting a charade of feminine sweetness and frailty” (Imogen Sara Smith, Criterion Collection article <i>Fatal Women and the Fate of Women</i>). All smoke and mirrors but prize sucker that Ole is he falls right for it. She hates brutality, she purrs. “I couldn’t bare to see the man I really care about hurt”. Too cute for words. She then proceeds to do exactly that. Her soft demeanor hides an interior of steel. She’s intoxicating. Unfortunately she’s also just plain toxic. “Such women play the damsel in distress to appeal to men’s chivalry—as Kitty turns on the tears, getting Swede to take the rap for her when she’s caught with stolen jewelry.” (Smith, ibid.) A man taking the fall for her is incidentally something that Kitty takes as her rightful due. She looks out for No.1.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A slinky little kitten</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Kitty’s ultimate goal is comfort. All she sees is dollar signs and she’d take any guy to the cleaners just for that. It’s interesting to note that the femme fatale is never a working woman. And why should she be as long as there are suckers who can foot the bill? </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">All play and no work makes Kitty a happy girl.</span><br />
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She even gives Ole the obligatory I’m-no-good-speech full well knowing the guy doesn’t care. ”I'm poison, Swede, to myself and everybody around me”. Her utter selfishness is fully revealed in the last scene when she crouches over her dying husband - Big Jim who she's been working with all along - demanding that he falsely exonerate her with his last breath. <span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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“Jim! Jim! Tell them I didn't know anything…Say, 'Kitty is innocent. I swear, Kitty is innocent.' Say it, Jim, say it! It'll save me if you do.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It earns her one of the best rebukes I’ve ever heard: “Don’t ask a dying man to lie his soul into hell.” </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Kitty always got away by letting others take the blame for her. Finally the last of her nine lives has expired.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>The Killers</b> is a movie that is rich with fascinating characterizations and protagonist. The characters are not only plot devices to move the story along, they have a life of their own.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s Lilly (Virginia Christine), Ole’s former sort-of girlfriend, who knows the ship has sailed the second Ole lays eyes on Kitty. She takes it like a real trouper. Her bone-dry reaction is to switch her order from ginger ale to hard liquor: “I’ve changed my mind. You can sweeten it now”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s Jack Lambert who - together with Jack Elam, Marc Lawrence, Elisha Cook or William Tellman - invariably got called up for duty when Hollywood needed a tough hood. Whatever Lambert played he always looked as if he’d do odd jobs for the mob.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Edward Hopper</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Edmund O’Brien - a vastly underrated actor - is an interesting (second) lead and foil for Lancaster. This role was tailor made for him. He had an everyman appeal and was easy to identify with. I’ve seen him described as a low-rent Sam Spade, but to me there’s nothing low-rent about him. Reardon is the guy who’s trying to make sense of Poisonville’s most twisted motivations. Far removed from the regular Noir sucker, Reardon is not a man tainted or tempted. He provides the incorruptible and rational center of the film. His humor keeps him from becoming too uptight. You’ve got to love a man who has his priorities straight. In the middle of a possible gunfight, he orders a steak sandwich and a beer. He’s smart enough not to let Kitty’s charm bamboozle him though she tries. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Reardon needs to understand why a man would simply submit to his own murder. Reardon’s boss Kenyon isn’t interested in solving a puzzle or recovering the money from the payroll robbery. After Reardon has solved the case his boss comments sarcastically: </span></div>
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“Owing to your splendid efforts the basic rate of The Atlantic Casualty Company – as of 1947 – will probably drop one-tenth of a cent.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Thanks, Boss. The $250,000 of the bank roll heist were simply peanuts for Kenyon. A nice little offhand commentary on the insurance business.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Kudos have to go to<b> </b>McGraw and Conrad as the hitmen. Two wise-cracking but lethal jokers with a decidedly off-beat and clammy charm, they’re bickering over pork, apple sauce and mashed potatoes in the diner while viciously taunting and terrorizing the occupants and shattering any sense of security this little backwater ever had. It’s a Vaudeville routine gone sour, their wit hovers somewhere between perverse sadism and Absurd Theater. They have nothing but contempt for their fellow men. They don’t even try to be inconspicuous and keep a low profile when they come to town to kill the Swede, they literally take over the greasy spoon and state with complete impunity that they intend to murder him when he comes in for dinner. Like emissaries from another world, they’ve come to collect a debt. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">As always in the best Noirs in the end it was all for nothing. What’s the moral of Noir? Suckers don't stand a chance. Life is an exercise in futility. Ole didn’t get the money and he didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-83608930888660289492018-12-03T09:03:00.001-08:002018-12-16T09:56:35.281-08:00Niagara (1953)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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“Obviously ignoring the idea that there are Seven Wonders of the World, Twentieth Century-Fox has discovered two more and enhanced them with Technicolor in Niagara…For the producers are making full use of both the grandeur of the Falls and its adjacent areas as well as the grandeur that is Marilyn Monroe.”</div>
<span style="text-align: justify;"><i>A.H. Weiler, NYTimes January 22, 1953</i></span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">In a similar fashion, the trailer starts like this: “A raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control! Niagara! And Marilyn Monroe!”</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Neither review nor </span>trailer were exaggerating. It’s hard to figure out who’s more magnificent. The mighty Niagara Falls with their unstoppable power or Marilyn with her uncontrollable passion. Two forces of nature. Directed for Fox by Henry Hathaway, <b>Niagara </b>was made first and foremost to promote the studio’s fastest rising star Marilyn. And she turned in a star-making performance. The poster for the movie is one of the best I’ve ever seen hitting home its message none too subtly. It depicts a larger-than-life Marilyn seductively draped across the cascading Falls with the water flowing over her scantily-clad body.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Niagara</b> is gorgeously vibrant candy color Noir with visuals that literally jump off the screen. T</span>he heightened idealization of Technicolor makes this movie look sensational.<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> There’s no reason why Noir has to be in black and white. Eddie Muller stated that Noir is a state of mind and I couldn't agree more. Marilyn Ferdinand of the wonderful blog </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Ferdy on Films</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> put it like this: “Technicolor in the right hands fits noir like a blood-stained glove”. Color works perfectly within the framework of Noir. It can paint a world as black as the darkest night. Evil doesn’t need dark alleyways to flourish, it can lurk in bright daylight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Niagara</b> is a movie where the darkness is interior. Inside the mind of a woman with murder in her heart and inside the mind of a man with shell-shock who’s completely shut in by his misery.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The picture is another Noir beyond the Mean Streets of Megalopolis. No snazzy nightclubs, seedy roadside motels, gambling dens and beatings in dark back alleys. Instead we get beautiful sights, wide-open spaces and nice simple clean cabins with a magnificent view of the Falls. Niagara is a happy spot for lovers and honeymooners.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The Falls play an important role in the unfolding events. Big parts of the movie come off like an advertisement for holiday makers as the attractions of Niagara Falls—the Maid of the Mist, the Cave in the Winds etc.—are prominently displayed including signs so we know what’s what. Joseph MacDonald was the cinematographer and he doesn’t just capture the majesty of the landscape for its own sake. In Noir - as indeed in most genres - there is always a co-relation between environment and crucial elements of the film. The landscape not only sets the stage for the players to interact and play out the drama. Niagara’s beautiful attractions become essential to the plot. A setting turned into a character, a landscape turned into a metaphor.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Before passengers go on the Maid of the Mist they have to leave their shoes behind. This plot point will later become relevant in the identification of a corpse. The Falls themselves with their swirling mists and choppy waters are an image for the destructive power of out-of-control and sometimes murderous passions that nothing can stop. Fittingly we see Rose and her lover kissing passionately under the Falls.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The story is barely more than routine. Young sexy wife wants to do away with aging hubby. Name all of the movies which <b>Niagara </b>pilfers elements from and the usual suspects are all there. In fact I expected the postman to ring twice to pick up his slightly stale plot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Belated honeymooners Polly (Jean Peters) and Ray Cutler (Casey Adams/Max Showalter) - Mr. and Mrs. Everyman - arrive at their Niagara Falls cabin only to find that Rose (Marilyn Monroe) and George Loomis (Joseph Cotten) have not vacated their cabin. Polly soon discovers that Rose isn’t the devoted wife she pretends to be. She has a boyfriend on the side. She’s bored with her life, her husband, her marriage. Rose and her lover boy Patrick (Richard Allan) are planning to kill George and make it look like suicide. Another one of Noir’s ironclad plan. What could possibly go wrong? Just when they think they’ve covered all the bases the plan goes sideways. It is Patrick who gets killed, in self-defense. Now George is on the lam and he still has a score to settle with Rose. He finally tracks her down in a bell tower.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Niagara</b> isn’t the best thriller I have ever seen. The romantic drama is less than spectacular which has a lot to do with the fact that Rose’s scenes with lover boy are fairly underdeveloped and leave something to be desired. Their relationship is never fully explored. If the movie has a weakness it’s Richard Allan who was an ill-advised casting decisions. He’s a charisma-free zone. It’s no wonder he never had much of a career. Yet none of that really matters. Two stars in this picture do is the heavy lifting, Technicolor and Marilyn. They’re the glue that hold the movie together.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Niagara </b>so often gets slapped with that fuzzy and tired blanket label Hitcockian. I don’t quite agree with it myself, unless you consider every good thriller Hitchcock-inspired. <b>Niagara </b>has a blonde but not Hitchcock’s preferred icy-cool patrician goddess. The suspense is there but Hitchcock’s psychological complexity is missing as is his deliciously twisted perversity - always so latently obvious (not an oxymoron) in his films. It was the Voodoo that he did so well. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The bell tower scene however would have done Hitchcock proud and he must have at least taken a little peak at it before he made <i>Vertigo. </i>The visuals are simply breathtaking. Indeed, Technicolor can produce Noir shadows too. In this scene the colors are ever so slightly desaturated. When George finally has Rose cornered the shadows let the tower appear like a prison cell.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><i>The dark roots of Hollywood’s most famous platinum blonde bombshell</i>.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Even nowadays most people would be able to put a name to a photo of Marilyn Monroe though they may have never seen any of her movies. She is synonymous with the term sex symbol. The ditzy, flouncy and bouncy nitwit, for all her obvious assets oddly innocent and vulnerable, she was and still is the most iconic blonde bombshell the world has ever seen. Most of her films were comedies where she - without even wanting to - simply sets the hearts of the entire male population on fire with her guileless exhibitionism. (I say hearts because I’m trying to be delicate). She was seemingly unaware of her sex appeal and oblivious to her own potent effect though as any woman can tell you it takes a lot of strategic planning to be so oblivious. Lorelei Lee or Pola Debevoise were manipulative but essentially good-natured. There was a certain lovable goofiness about them. In Marilyn’s comedies she played her persona for laughs. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Yet before her screen image solidified into the naive temptress there was a different Marilyn, one we’ve never seen before and sadly would never see again. The Marilyn of Noir where her sex appeal was much more dangerous. In <i>Don’t Bother to Knock</i> she plays a mentally disturbed babysitter. She’s psycho Marilyn, the blonde bombshell’s evil twin sister. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">With <b>Niagara</b> Marilyn gained entry into the Bad Girls’ Club. Here she isn’t hampered by the knowledge that she is <i>Marilyn</i>, the naive sexpot. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Rose Loomis isn’t a cuddly sex kitten (not that there’s anything wrong with it), she’s all grown-up in every way. In a deliciously slutty turn she’s introduced laying in bed smoking, wearing nothing but that impossibly bright red lipstick, writhing seductively under the sheets, legs apart. This is an image as boldly sexual as anything she’s ever done in her career. Her glow leaves no doubt as to what must have transpired not too long ago. The post-coital cigarette is another giveaway. I’m a bit surprised Joe Breen and his holy crusaders against wickedness let this one slide. Rose puts the cigarette out when she hears her husband come in and pretends to be asleep so she doesn’t have to deal with him. He most certainly wasn’t the lucky guy. Rose despises her husband and withholds sex. She changes her mind about that only once, on the morning he’s supposed to be murdered. Sexual favors are supposed to get him into a compliant mood.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A similar erotically-charged scene occurs when at an impromptu party at the hotel Rose requests her favorite record <i>Kiss</i> to be played. The song reminds her of her lover. The way she sits there enraptured and sings along Rose is clearly wrapped up in some steamy memories of lover boy. Not surprisingly her husband storms out of the room and breaks the record with his bare hands in a fit of fury. He knows she doesn’t put on that show for him. The tune will play a role again a bit later. The bell tower is supposed to play it as the agreed signal between Rose and Patrick that the deed has been done. When Rose hears the bells she walks away smiling wickedly. Little does she know the murder didn’t quite go as planned.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I have to take a little detour here and talk about Marilyn’s outfits. They’re not just to die but to kill for. There is that dress. You know which one I mean. THAT dress. THAT fuchsia dress. Yes, it needs and deserves its own introduction. It’s the sexy dress to end all sexy dresses. It’s a law unto itself. Of course you have to know how to wear a dress like that. Marilyn does. As Polly says: “For a dress like that, you’ve got to start laying plans when you’re about thirteen.” To paraphrase Paul Newman, this is the kind of dress you wear when you want to wake up in the morning and smile.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There is also THAT red lipstick which always stays on. In bed, in the shower, even in hospital in a coma! That boys and girls is determination I admire.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">No matter what you think about Monroe, her persona or her acting, there’s no denying that she was one of the sexiest women ever. The way she sashays, wiggles and jiggles her way through the movie is something to behold. Like Jell-O on springs! In fact <b>Niagara</b> is the film usually credited with the birth of THE WALK. As Ray says when Rose walks by: “Get out the firehose.” But it’s hard to put out the fire when she’s constantly adding fuel. Rose is a woman on a mission and her every intention is in her walk, her smile and her body.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Considering she was <i>the</i> sexual icon of her day, the studio unfortunately never again tapped into her talent to play a Thoroughly Rotten Dame.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Because she is so absolutely gorgeous we can’t believe she as bad as she at first seems. A definite miscalculation. She comes with a little twist though. Rose is undoubtedly calculating and duplicitous but she’s not just out for herself. Sex is not merely a means to an end. Rose isn’t looking for a disposable sucker to bump off her husband so she doesn’t get blood on her mink. Here is one femme fatale who is purely and solely motivated by lust. Not greed, not power, not money, but simply sexual desire. She can barely control her own libido. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to believe that Rose would always go where the boys are. That’s how she gets her kicks. One has to see the look of naked lust on her face when she meets her lover in the souvenir shop. Her lover in turn is so besotted that he’d commit murder for her.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In most Noirs, the femme fatale<i> </i>uses sex to gain power or wealth. In <b>Niagara</b>, sex isn’t a tool to get something else. It’s the crux of the matter. Rose herself is firmly caught in the web. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Though George is supposedly the mentally unbalanced half of the couple, there is something vaguely unsettling about Rose’s single-minded pursuit of sex.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Rose possesses another trait necessary to the femme fatale. On top of looks she possesses cunning reasoning. Rose is a dangerous woman who has at least enough brains to concoct a plan to murder her husband and involve the Cutlers as unknowing witnesses in her little charade to paint her husband as unstable. It is necessary for the suicide ruse to come off. Ray and Polly are like pawns in her game. When George breaks the <i>Kiss</i> record, the Cutlers empathize with Rose, assuming she’s in danger of becoming a victim to her husband’s volatile temper, but she’s far more in control of the situation than they suspect. It’s just all part of the setup. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Still, in the end we do feel sorry for her when George kills her simply because she was such an intensely alive creature who was desperately grasping at</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">As</span> for people who say Marilyn was not an actress, well they’re probably right. The jury is still out. I never considered her much of an actress myself. In <b>Niagara</b> she uses the same tricks in the book that she always does. The wide-eyed innocent come-hither look, the breathy little girl voice, the half-opened mouth. It’s just this time around they have a darker undercurrent. Marilyn’s greatest achievement on film was being Marilyn.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If this sounds like a slight it isn’t meant to be in the least. The jury - that would be me - has decreed that it’s absolutely beside the point if she was a good actress or not. She plays certain roles very well because they fit her like a glove. There are many actors who have a limited range, but within that range they are unbeatable. Just as Joan Crawford had roles taylor-made to suit her persona and image, so did Marilyn. If the role suited her she was very effective and instinctively and naturally knew what to do. She didn’t so much seem to play a role but live it. On screen she just IS. Her sheer magnetism beats great acting every time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Many people have bemoaned the fact that Monroe’s sexuality was exploited. Cow patties I says. I settle for showcased. Beautiful people are always “exploited”. It comes with the territory. Here Rose’s entire demeanor and her in-your-face sexuality demonstrate her effect on men. Her physical attributes express her character.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Monroe exits the movie about two thirds of the way through and her absence causes a problem. The movie loses some steam however the exiting climax makes up for it later.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">One wonders how Rose and George ever ended up together. They’re the perfect picture of a dysfunctional marriage. We only get to know that George rescued her from a life as a waitress in a crummy little joint. George Loomis is a wreck of a man, a failed sheep farmer who was sent home from Korea with battle fatigue and spent some time in a mental hospital for soldiers. Unfortunately the PTSD aspect of the story is never further explored as it very likely would have been just a few years earlier. One wonders though where most of his battles were fought, on the battlefield or closer to home.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">After he came home from Korea he went wrong though somehow it's easy to believe he’s the type who would always draw the short straw. A perfect patsy. Another Noir sucker who is a hapless pawn in the game of an evil woman until he turns the tables.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cotten conveys a sense of utter weariness and desperation very well. H</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">e’s a guy who’s hit rock bottom and he’s not likely to go much farther up because all he has is his own sense of inadequacy. We simply have to feel sorry for him in his brooding unhappiness and bitterness. </span>He’s trying to battle his demons but somehow he can’t stop himself. He can’t control his love and in the end he can’t control his hate.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">George is entrapped by his misery, loneliness and fury. It’s a prison he cannot escape from because the most confining prison cell is the darkness of one’s own mind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The opening sequence features a nihilist voice-over by Cotten that is quickly dropped right after. Traipsing around early in the morning at 5 am George is visiting the Falls but he has no idea why. It is as if they were calling to him. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Why should the Falls drag me down here at five o'clock in the morning? To show me how big they are and how small I am? To remind me they can get along without any help?” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Right away there is the implication of serious mental problems. The magnificent Falls contrast sharply with his insignificance but their tumultuous restlessness resonates within him. Later he will tell Polly something about love and marriage using the metaphor of the Falls:</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">“You’re young. You’re in love. Well, I’ll give you a warning. Don’t let it get out of hand like those falls out there…Did you ever see the river up above the falls? It’s calm and easy, and you throw in a log, it just floats around. Let it move a little further down and it gets going faster, hits some rocks, and in a minute it's in the lower rapids, and nothing in the world -including God himself can keep it from going over the edge.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">It is no surprise that in the end he goes over the Falls to his death. Once he’s killed the thing he loved the most, there’s nowhere else for him to go. “I loved you Rose, you know that.”</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Jean Peters as Polly actually has more screen time than Monroe. She’s no slouch in the looks department herself, but it’s hard to compete with Monroe. Peters has a thankless role. She’s supposed to be “the plain one” and I find it admirable that she actually took the role. Anne Baxter turned it down because she didn’t want to compete with Monroe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ray and Polly are the normal couple, they're the foil for Rose and George. Polly - though “just” a housewife - is levelheaded and gutsy and would deserve a better husband than Ray. The guy is clearly punching above his weight. Polly tries to be a friend to George but he’s beyond help.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That Peters herself could be very sexy she would show with her next movie <i>Pickup on South Street</i>. In her own words, playing the siren didn’t come naturally to her and she always credited Monroe with showing her the ropes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Now for the negatives. Just one actually but it’s the elephant in the room. Eager beaver Max Showalter, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and cornier than an Orville Redenbacher factory. As an actor he’s a blunt object. He’s more irritating than a persistent rash in a very delicate place. He takes books on his honeymoon and goes on fishing trips with his boss. The ultimate company man. Anything for a raise, sir!</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s never quite clear if this portrayal of bungling dopiness is all Showalter’s doing or if there was intent on the producers’s part. But as Billy Wilder’s frequent collaborator Charles Bracket was one of the screen writers/producers on the film, there’s a good chance the little stab at corporatism was intentional.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I wouldn’t call <b>Niagara</b> a bona fide classic but it’s incredibly watchable despite its shortcomings.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-12251264851260326242018-11-08T10:07:00.000-08:002018-12-11T18:02:14.123-08:00Waterloo Bridge (1940)<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(49, 49, 49); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">In commemoration of Armistice Day, Maddy over at<span style="color: orange;"> <a href="https://maddylovesherclassicfilms.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/announcing-the-world-war-one-on-film-blogathon/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Maddy Loves Her Classic Films</span></a></span> is hosting the World War I blogathon. My entry is mostly about the 1940s version of <b>Waterloo Bridge</b> though I’d like to draw some comparison to the 1931 version.</span></div>
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“I loved you, I've never loved anyone else. I never shall, that's the truth Roy, I never shall.” Myra Lester</blockquote>
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<b style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Waterloo Bridge</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> is based on the eponymous 1930 play by Robert E. Sherwood, made into a pre-Code movie the following year by James Whale for Universal. In 1940 MGM gave it the gloss treatment with big stars Vivien Leigh, Robert Taylor and direction by Mervyn LeRoy. MGM banked on Leigh’s and Taylor’s star power. They banked right. The chemistry between the star-crossed lovers is wonderful though Leigh originally wanted her husband Olivier to play the role. But it all worked out for the best. Taylor and Leigh got on very well on the set and both later cited </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Waterloo Bridge </b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">as their personal favorite. Though Leigh is fantastic in the role, this is not a one-woman show. Leigh and Taylor are aided and abetted by a great supporting cast.</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg lovingly recreated a wonderfully dewy, shimmering and ethereal London on the MGM backlot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Many insults could be hurled at <b>Waterloo Bridge</b>. Yes it's a weepy, yes it’s overly sentimental, yes I promise you will need that entire box of Kleenex, but in the hands of talented actors the film manages not to drown in cloying soap suds. It evades the pitfalls of nauseating Hallmark Channel sappiness (with apologies to Hallmark Channel fans). It is an incredibly affecting and haunting movie that reflects on love, loss, unnecessary suffering and bittersweet memories that shape people forever. I’ll be damned if it isn’t mesmerizing even to viewers who usually don’t care for melodrama. <b>Waterloo Bridge</b> doesn’t apologize for its overt romanticism and it is its genuinely-felt sentiment that makes the movie virtually bullet-proof. It entirely succeeds at what it’s setting out to do. Stun the viewer into wondrous awe. It has lost nothing of its power.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The story is told in flashbacks by a grey-haired distinguished looking Taylor who is reminiscing about love found and lost. It is clear from that moment that we don’t have to get our hopes up for a happy ending. The tragic denouement is telegraphed a mile away. Another war romance condemned to failure, over before it ever really began. The mood is melancholy and somber throughout. The film is steeped in doom. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The date is September 3, 1939 and Germany has just declared war. On the eve of his deployment to France, Scotsman Colonel Roy Cronin (Robert Taylor) - on his way to Waterloo Station to join the troops - stops at Waterloo Bridge where over 20 years earlier a chance meeting changed his life forever. He met the love of his life - ballerina Myra Lester (Vivien Leigh) - during an air raid. A whirlwind romance follows. It quickly becomes clear that both are meant for each other. Roy has his orders to leave the next day to the front and Myra doesn’t for one minute believe that they will see each other again. Against the explicit order of her tyrannical dance instructor Mme. Olga Kirowa (Maria Ouspenskaya) - who believes that ballet and love do not mix - Myra meets Roy for dinner. They want to get married but there’s a law prohibiting marriages after 3pm and Roy must catch his troop train. Mme. Kirowa has no compunction about summarily firing Myra for insubordination. "War is no excuse for indecorum.” Her best friend Kitty (Virginia Field) lays into Madame and shares Myra’s fate. Quickly they find themselves broke and hungry. Mistakenly the newspapers list Roy as being killed in action, a soul-crushing blow for Myra. She gets sick and has to pay medical bills. She and Kitty see no other way than turn to prostitution. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Unexpectedly Roy comes back and wants to pick up where they left off. Those terrible years in the trenches were nothing but a bad dream. Now that he’s home he can focus on beauty and happiness. He introduces Myra to his family. For a little while Myra believes that she can wipe the slate clean and that her fairy tale may still come true. Roy’s family welcomes her with open arms but all throughout this dream-come-true Myra feels that she is not good enough and may sully the honor of Roy's family and regiment with their marriage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Certain implausibilities in the plot don’t bear close inspection. Robert Taylor doesn’t fool anyone as a Scotsman. Thankfully he’s not even trying to put on a dodgy British/Scottish accent. And buying Taylor as an Edwardian aristocrat would require a suspension of disbelief of cosmic proportions. He’s thoroughly all-American middle class.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Continuing down this tiresomely nit-picky path, albeit set during WWI, the costumes and hairstyles of the actresses are clearly contemporary 1940. How can Myra and Roy fall in love to fast? Why the hell does Myra make the stupid decision not to tell her future mother-in-law why she is so upset in the restaurant? One word from her would have changed her fate.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">Answer: we wouldn’t have a compelling movie otherwise. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Giving a hoot about these little bumps is what we were put in this world to rise above.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Many decisions of the protagonists only make sense in the very special universe melodrama operates in where contrivances and coincidences are not weaknesses but part and parcel of the genre. Complaining about far-fetched circumstances in melodramas is like objecting to the lack of realism in an abstract painting. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Robert Taylor, impossibly handsome and dashing, turns in a very sensitive performance. For most of his career he was seldom accused of being a great actor. I think he</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> got an unfairly bad rap.</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> He was always a pro and here puts his whole heart into his role and treats it with real respect. What Taylor had in spades was screen presence, that certain magic that tops - to me at least - an Oscar-worthy performance every time. Taylor developed into an if not brilliant, then at least very competent actor whose later roles were a far cry from his early pretty boy ones. For someone who’s by many considered not an actor at all he turned in many good performances.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Roy’s attitude towards life is an almost over-confident and optimistic one. He embraces life to the fullest, he loves the excitement of being alive. Roy simply knows he’ll make it through the war alive because now that he has found his love there is no way he can die. The gods must, simply must be on his side. They couldn’t be so cruel and take happiness away from him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This being a romance, the unsavory aspects of war stay in the background. The audience doesn't see the unspeakable carnage of the Great War, no shell-shocked men broken in mind and body coming home to a world forever changed. The film focuses on the gallantry of the young men - Roy thinks there’s a certain amount of excitement in war - and that it is perfectly fine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Still, that innocence is lost forever is made blatantly clear through Myra’s fate, a stand-in for innocence lost on a much grander scale. War makes its own rules and nothing would ever be the same after 1918.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Waterloo Bridge</b> was Leigh’s follow-up movie to <i>Gone With the Wind</i>. Myra Lester is a far cry from little Miss Rich Bitch Scarlett O’Hara, the role that had catapulted Leigh to superstardom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Leigh was a marvelous actress and her performance here is flawless. She glows with an inner radiance that is unearthly and elevates the art of suffering to new heights. She effortlessly goes from young innocent who’s even mistaken for a school girl to brassy tramp plying the oldest profession in the world back to a woman who hopes to be reborn through love.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Myra’s attitude towards life is quite different from Roy’s. Much less confident, delicate and fragile, she’s very young and very innocent. She is quite fatalistic and doesn’t believe that people are necessarily in control of their destiny. Not having been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, Myra knows that life doesn't always work out the way you plan and to expect too much will only lead to dashed expectations. A rose-colored belief in a happy ending won’t automatically make it so. War means short-lived happiness, parting, hardship, death. Myra’s fatalism has deep roots. There seems to be an underlying maybe not even consciously-realized belief in Murphy’s Law: everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In fact Roy remarks on the fact that someone so young should be so defeatist. Myra considers Roy an incurable romantic. It is as if Myra thinks too much happiness is tempting fate, the gods may strike her down for it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Out of sheer desperation Myra and Kitty turn to prostitution. Of course the 40s version had to bow to the dictates of Joe’s Purity Squad. This being post-Code the matter is only obliquely referenced. The word prostitute is never uttered. It doesn’t need to be unless the viewer is purposely obtuse. The ‘40s version may be more sanitized than the earlier one, but as we all know, any screen writer worth his salt was able to circumvent the pesky confines of the Code and make the subject blatantly clear. The Code really doesn’t work against this version. It in no way hampers the impact of the story. The entire subject matter is handled with subtle allusions while at the same time leaving no doubt as to what’s going on. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The way it is conveyed that Kitty has become a prostitute is well-handled. Coming home in the early hours one morning, Kitty - all tarted up - encounters a beat cop…and hesitates in her tracks. She doesn’t want to be picked up for streetwalking. Then before she enters her own flat she wipes off her too-liberally applied lipstick. With a few quick strokes, the audience understands perfectly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is most important to note that nowhere does the movie feel compelled to condemn or look down upon the choices Myra and Kitty have to make. The script takes a remarkably compassionate and lenient view. The audience feels nothing but sympathy. There is a telling bit of dialogue by a defiant Kitty about a world in upheaval and her wish to go on living no matter how. Myra believes Kitty is walking the streets to support her:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“No I didn't! I'd a done it anyhow. C'est La Guerre. No jobs. No boys who want to marry you. Only men who want to kill a few hours, 'cause they know it may be their last…We're young and it's good to live. Even the life I'm leading! Though, God knows - I've heard them call it the easiest way. I wonder where they thought up that little phrase? I know one thing. It couldn't have been a woman.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Not only does she justify prostitution as a means of support, she also emphatically denies that this is an easy way to make a living.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Special mention has to go to Virginia Field as Kitty - the BFF we all want to have. She should have at least got an Oscar nod as Best Supporting Actress for it. Kitty’s character is a bit anachronistic, she seems to be in the wrong movie. She’s not so much a girl from the 1910s, instead she oozes 40s street-wise dame attitude. Before being a ballerina she used to be a chorus girl - at that time considered barely a step up from a prostitute - and has more grit and worldliness than Myra. Loyal and without self-pity in the beginning she takes it upon herself to take care of her more innocent friend and earn money for both of them. Being a prostitute hasn’t cost her her humanity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is rigid Madame Kirowa - a portrait of rectitude etched in acid - with her hard-and-fast rules towards romance who comes off as thoroughly unappealing and judgmental. She calls Myra a “camp follower” who should be in another profession than dancing for nothing more scandalous than one evening out to dinner with an officer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’ve seen many reviews that blame “society” (eternally ill-defined terminology of course) and the English class system for Myra’s suicide. One review even called the movie a tragic story of class struggle. I’ll spare you that interpretation. This is not a film about class warfare. This is what happens when people let preconceived notions and ideology write their reviews. Apart from Mme. Kirowa LeRoy portrays every character with sympathy and understanding. Everybody proves to be far more tolerant and open-minded than we might expect, almost too much so. Our expectations about the behavior of the supposedly of so stuffy and class-conscious British society are completely disappointed. If we expect stereotypes, we don’t get them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Running true to aristocratic form, both Roy’s mother and his uncle the Duke should at least look down on Myra, for being a dancer and for being of a much lower social class. The Duke however doesn’t believe in "correct marriages”, for him marrying outside his class might bring fresh blood into the family. He also dismisses many of his peers as people with "limited social ideas.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Roy’s mother </span>(Lucile Watson) <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">is willing to receive Myra with open arms, even after their initial failed meeting. When Myra finally gathers enough courage to tell her what she had to do to survive the war Lady Margaret professes sympathy with her. She doesn’t want Myra to rush off and leave Roy without even giving him a chance to understand.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Roy doesn't judge either, his love is blind. He only wants Myra to reverse her decision. He can acknowledge that civilians had to do things to survive that they would never have thought about in peacetime. War damaged those left behind too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Myra simply can’t tell Roy what she has become. She cannot come to terms with her situation and feels beyond redemption. So she sees only one way out. She steps in front of an oncoming army truck. Myra is no Scarlett who’d simply tough it out. She’d rather perish.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is Myra’s own defeatist attitude - her belief in her own inadequacy - that is her downfall in the end. Not society, not class conceit and not her fiancé’s family. The great tragedy is that Myra had been forgiven, her sacrifice was unnecessary. In a way Myra’s fate is a self-fulfilling prophecy because somehow deep down she never really believed in that happy ending.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Waterloo Bridge</b> is a film full of memorable scenes. Kitty and Roy searching for Myra in every dirty dive in London. Myra crossing Waterloo Bridge contemplating how to earn money and knowing full well she cannot rely on the kindness of strangers. Suddenly she hears the voice of a man behind her </span>propositioning her<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> - unseen to the audience. She accepts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Myra going to Waterloo Station one evening on the prowl for nightly customers, in a cheap satin dress, with a stone-hard face and a coquettish smile for the men descending from the troop train…when unexpectedly Roy comes back from the dead. Every emotion is in Leigh’s face. Shock, happiness, disbelief, desperation, shame. LeRoy was a veteran of Silent films and this is how he has Leigh play it. Back to the basics. Norma Desmond was right. They didn’t need dialogue. They had faces.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Of course one of the best scenes ever to make it on film - any film - is the dinner at the Candlelight Club. The orchestra plays <i>Auld Lang Syne, </i>the Farewell Waltz, in memory of absent friends and lovers. The melody weaves itself through the entire film. It is to this song that Myra and Roy share their first dance and kiss while each musician in the orchestra plays his piece and then extinguishes the candles beside him in a poignant symbol of farewell until there is nothing but darkness left. 'Til they meet again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Much is made of the comparison with the 1931 version. For many the ’31 version is superior, for me the later version wins hands down though I’m a pre-Code fan. The MGM version has all the gloss, lavish production values, polish, perfect set designs and incredible cinematography we’ve come to expect from the studio. And for once polish beats gritty realism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The ’31 film isn’t helped by a fairly unsophisticated performance by Kent Douglas as Roy who was not the most charismatic actor on the Universal roster though he is serviceable. Mae Clarke is very good as Myra but not in the same league as Leigh either looks or acting-wise. Occasionally both actors slide into t</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">he overly declamatory acting style of the early talkie era.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">From the opening radio announcement to a stunned and silent crowd that war has been declared, to an aged Robert Taylor standing on Waterloo Bridge fingering the good-luck charm Myra once gave him, the 1940 version has an emotional wallop that can’t be beat. The bookending of the story with yet another war to end all wars can’t have failed to strike a chord with contemporary audiences.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Where the pre-Code version should score is with a hard edge. After all I’d heard about it I expected the early version to be unapologetically frank. For a pre-Code film I found it unusually subdued and restrained. Here too the world prostitute is never uttered. Salaciousness is suspiciously absent except for one scene in the beginning showing the </span>scantily-clad <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">dancers's dressing room antics. There are no happy sinners in this pre-Code, just a bitter former chorus girl trying to get by.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Astonishingly the pre-Code version puts a lot more emphasis on class-consciousness than the 40s version. Roy’s mother can see what her son evidently cannot, that there is a huge chasm between Myra and the Cronins. She makes it absolutely clear that there can and should be no future for Myra and her son. Mother can acknowledge Myra’s intrinsic goodness but that doesn’t mean she could ever overlook the stigma of Myra’s profession. Glenn Ericsson wrote a review for the TCM site where he strangely states about Myra’s predicament:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Sherwood's play and the 1931 version examine this injustice [Myra being considered a fallen woman] and make a plea for understanding; MGM's version simply accepts it as The Way Things Must Be. Roy's Mother (Lucile Watson) clearly has great affection for her future daughter-in-law yet offers no encouraging words when Myra reveals the truth -- a piece of clever screenwriting, considering that nobody ever states anything directly. Myra is damaged goods, so "case closed” …MGM’s <i>Waterloo Bridge</i> reinforces a harsh status quo: <i>"He must never know!”</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In fact it is the other way around. In the pre-Code Mrs. Cronin - gentle, smiling but nevertheless cruel - leaves no doubt that Myra can under no circumstances marry her son.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s hard to decide which ending is the more pitiful. In the pre-Code Myra’s situation with Roy has been happily dissolved when a bomb goes off next to her and kills her. The ending is almost Noirish. Just when we think all’s well that ends well, fate steps in. The utter randomness and arbitrariness of death.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I don’t want to belabor the point, but the 1940s version is fantastic. It is one of Hollywood’s greatest tragic love stories, full of self-inflicted suffering and what ifs that will forever remain unanswered. Maybe to be of lasting endurance a love story has to be tragic, at least on film. A “what could have been” is often more powerful than the realization of it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Waterloo Bridge</b> is a film for the history books, well, at least my history book.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-76690633732547315572018-10-09T09:07:00.000-07:002018-10-30T17:21:55.823-07:00Roadblock (1951)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“You’re a nice guy, Honest Joe, but you’re not in the right league. I’m aiming for the World Series.” Diane</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Roadblock</b> is a fair to middling offering in the Noir canon, made on a dime by Harold Daniels for RKO. Daniels's career was a largely undistinguished one and healthy helpings of schlock and camp were his meal ticket. <b>Roadblock</b> is a no-frills B movie without many subtleties, </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">paint-by-numbers</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> but moderately entertaining nevertheless. As we’ve seen with<i> The Narrow Margin</i> a shoestring budget does not have to equate unspectacular filmmaking but unfortunately <b>Roadblock</b> is hampered with a script that doesn’t add up and Daniels was not the man to rise above mediocre material. The dialogue is quite good but not even Nicholas Musuraca’s cinematography is up to par.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Roadblock</b>’s plot line follows the well-known Noir trajectory. A straight-arrow insurance investigator crosses over to the dark side because of his love for a rotten dame. If you think you’ve seen it all before you’d be right. You have. Many times. And better. This film has all the classic Noir ingredients and obviously pilfers bits and pieces from more well-known films, such as <i>Double Indemnity.</i> It also borrows - very unconvincingly - stock footage of a car accident from <i>High Sierra</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The best thing about the picture are the opening and closing sequences, the middle not so much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The movie starts off with a bang. A man witnesses a deadly shooting and is taken hostage by the killer. The witness admits he’s on the run from the law and is willing to offer the loot from his bank robbery in exchange for his life. At the hiding place all of a sudden the “murder victim” shows up, alive and kicking. It was all a setup. Insurance investigators “Honest” Joe Peters (Charles McGraw) and his partner Harry Miller (Louis Jean Heydt) faked the deadly shooting to scare the bank robber into showing them where the stolen money was hidden. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Interestingly our first impression of Honest Joe is that he’s a violent thug. In the end he will be just that and the “murder” foreshadows Joe’s descent into crime. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Unfortunately soon the movie takes a nosedive. On his way back to LA Joe meets Diane (Joan Dixon) at the airport. Passing herself of as his Mrs. Diane cons the airline attendant into selling her a plane ticket for half price. And then seats herself right next to Joe on the plane, acting as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Joe is angry and calls her a chiseler who takes him for a soft touch. But Diane knows a sucker when she sees one. She knows his anger is just a front and she has him hooked already.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Joe is drawn to the dame like a homing pigeon the minute he claps eyes on her, but she makes it abundantly clear that she’s an expensive plaything. She has ambitions way above his pay grade. That thing between them would never work out because mink and ermine don’t come cheap and you can’t buy those goodies on a measly $350 a month insurance investigator salary. Apart from that she’s the personal property of mobster Kendall Webb (Lowell Gilmore) who slithers around with reptilian grace and who can and gladly does supply her with the finer things in life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Happiness can't buy you money shrugs the dame and Joe takes this to heart. To offer gold-digger Diane the lifestyle she is accustomed to, he comes up with a plan to rob the mail train for a million dollar cash shipment. His partner in crime: Diane’s cast-off sugar daddy Webb. Bit awkward but not a bad idea really. Then all of a sudden the movie goes sideways. Diane changes her mind. She doesn’t want money anymore, she just wants Joe. How touching. So the two get married.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Diane wants him to call off the mail robbery but it’s too late for Joe. The mob won’t cancel the job. After the deed Joe and his partner Harry are assigned to investigate the crime. Very soon Harry puts two and two together and sees that Joe was the inside man on the robbery. Joe’s not the only one who’s good at his job. The noose quickly tightens around his neck.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">McGraw plays it differently here and maybe that’s what doesn’t sit well with me. McGraw could play both sides of the law, tough cop or tough gangster. Either way, it was deeply unwise to mess with him. But the emphasis was always on tough. What he couldn’t really play was suckers pining for a no-good dame. It’s out of character. He of the granite jaw and gravelly voice starts out as the guy we all know and love, a gruff and uncompromising insurance investigator who doesn’t stop at much to get his man. Then almost out of the blue he abandons his principles.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Mobster Webb says to him: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“It took reform school and several jails to built my character, but you’ve been square all your life. Now suddenly you decide to steal.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Perceptive. Joe going bad after so many years of rectitude just doesn't add up. His descent into crime is too abrupt and so is Diane’s change of heart. This being a B movie with a runtime of 73 minutes this picture - like so many of its kind - </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">had to have an uncomplicated shorthand, it had to kick its story straight into high gear. B movies rarely had the luxury to dwell on their protagonists’s inner lives and struggles. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">But Joe’s epiphany comes too sudden. This is the first serious hiccup in the film.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Of course in Noir the hero goes bad for a dame. In many of the genre's films it is suggested that beneath a character’s virtuous façade obsessiveness, irrationality and violence were lying in wait the whole time. In Noir </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">crime is not an aberration but a temptation lurking in every heart. Anyone, in the right or wrong circumstances, was capable of almost anything. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Suddenly formerly upright Noir characters cross the line and see what they’re really capable of. Once the floodgates open, there’s no turning back.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But for this setup to work there must be an antihero who suffers the torment of the damned while deciding to go bad for a dame. We don’t get that here. The transition from incorruptible investigator to criminal is too abrupt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Another aspect of Joe’s character is unfortunately not explored. How much pushing did it really take? Joe seems to take to crime like a duck to water. He may have been calculating the odds his entire life, we never find out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Joan Dixon - one of Howard Hughes’s protégés whose career never amounted to much - is very alluring and beautiful as Diane though without a doubt an actress of limited range. But she handles her role of icy temptress very well. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Diane is thoroughly efficient. She’s not so much gold-digging as strip-mining and very</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> good at separating men from their hard-earned money. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">She knows the effect she has on men.</span></div>
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Diane: “One day you'll want something really expensive which you won't be able to afford on a detective's salary.”<br />
Joe: "Like what?"<br />
Diane: "Like me"</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Here we run into hiccup No. 2, the character of Diane. Eddie Muller called her “an intriguing spin on the standard issue femme fatale” in his Noir Alley introduction. For once I can’t agree with him. Diane and Phyllis D aren’t exactly sisters under the mink and that’s the problem. Her transformation from gold-digger to loving wife who renounces her gold-digging ways again comes too fast and is not quite believable. Right when Joe decides to risk it all in a harebrained get-rich-quick theme and win the love of Diane, she blows her femme fatale credentials to bits and pieces and decides she loves Joe for his beautiful, upstanding and unblemished soul despite his sadly anemic bank account. This twist feels false as it doesn't operate as a natural part of the overall narrative. The movie wants to have us believe that Joe breaks bad and Diane breaks good, all out of gooey love. It’s regrettably treacly. It stretches credibility to the max. Their change is never really explained. Character development is sorely lacking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">DVD Savant Glenn Erickson is right when he says Diane’s character is almost unplayable. There seem to be several Dianes. Diane No.1 makes it clear she’s an expensive plaything and belittles, lures and rebuffs Joe because she considers him a square; Diane No.2 does a 180 after getting sloshed and crying into her martini at a bar for five minutes because it’s Christmas (!), renouncing a life of luxury to turn into a happy newlywed overnight. Did she get a lobotomy?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">From then on too much time is spent on the happiness of the young couple and as such the pacing was off. This is a crime movie, I wanted to shout at the screen. It’s supposed to be mean and nasty. Some people liked the twist on the femme fatale trope, I like my Noirs dark.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In a way </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Noir’s irony comes into play. Joe really didn’t need to commit the crime to win Diane. However o</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">ne interesting question remains. How creditable is Diane’s change? Webb is a bit more clear-sighted than Joe and warns him. Once the bloom of first love wears off, she’ll go right back to her old ways. “Once a girl gets the feeling of mink around her shoulders, she doesn’t forget it.” And my guess is deep down Joe is well aware of the fact. After all there’s the letter from another cast-off rich lover in Texas that she’s kept and who she occasionally mentions to Joe.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrpMGFQIRkyNYTn7TXOD8yLZGMrGCrYe4-ijao2FqzmpfGRV21JiMt5gu0Pyg7EgXLGUDBpCaXdW0NVEN8iUYefzLIKoGnnvBJhcOyBt45zaWOqBLMynioP6nFFH9OOfGiqcKd_MfVjm8/s1600/Roadblock11.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1217" data-original-width="1600" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrpMGFQIRkyNYTn7TXOD8yLZGMrGCrYe4-ijao2FqzmpfGRV21JiMt5gu0Pyg7EgXLGUDBpCaXdW0NVEN8iUYefzLIKoGnnvBJhcOyBt45zaWOqBLMynioP6nFFH9OOfGiqcKd_MfVjm8/s320/Roadblock11.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the end the movie is not entirely successful. Still, it has its moments. The last scene with a high-speed chase through the dry LA riverbeds - one of the first to be filmed there - is very good. We’re almost waiting for the giant ants to pop up. They don’t, they hadn’t hatched yet. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is where the roadblock comes in, the dead-end marker indicating the end of the line. A none too subtle metaphor for Joe’s failed life that has reached the point of no return. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The last scene is pure Noir and almost redeems the movie. The cops kill Joe in a shootout. After crying a few crocodile tears over his dead body, Diane simply and almost dismissively walks away from the scene where her husband has just been gunned down without looking back, presumably right back to that guy in Texas who still wants to marry her. I guess I’m just a cynic.</span></div>
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Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-76887023060064943662018-09-25T10:01:00.001-07:002019-01-10T12:13:49.223-08:00Split Second (1953)<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1guVjvF7f-jEqO6lvorBCuzHuGv6L0IXZ5gUgc3Xo1P9sbG6aP0meowqY_PmBI6UTjSDsQdwgkKz3P-j1rm4zVfWJqlV_H0cmEN5TO0Z3tdDw8IOCHSyVWoC8ZuSnsuReDgTEB7O0JwE/s1600/Split6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1guVjvF7f-jEqO6lvorBCuzHuGv6L0IXZ5gUgc3Xo1P9sbG6aP0meowqY_PmBI6UTjSDsQdwgkKz3P-j1rm4zVfWJqlV_H0cmEN5TO0Z3tdDw8IOCHSyVWoC8ZuSnsuReDgTEB7O0JwE/s320/Split6.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><i>The Petrified Forest</i> meets Atomic Noir.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This Atomic Age movie is one the 50s best thrillers you've probably never heard of. A few years ago I saw it the first time and I’ve been singing its praises ever since. <b>Split Second </b>was the directorial debut of Dick Powell and it’s a very solid first outing. Unfortunately he followed this movie up with the camp fest <i>The Conqueror</i> which would later cost him and about 90 other crew members their lives through cancer. Clocking in at 85 minutes<b> Split Second</b> is a fast-paced little gem. It doesn’t boast any A list stars, but it doesn’t need to. The ensemble cast plays very well together. Keith Andes, an actor who didn’t leave a big impression on me in other productions, is in top form here. In fact everybody is in top form, the performances are good across the board. Especially Stephen McNally, an always solid actor who occasionally turned in inspired performances. The whole movie is incredibly watchable despite occasional shortcomings.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Split Second </b>belongs to the Cold War era of Film Noir where a newly awakened fear of the nuclear bomb was seeping into the national conscience. The genre shifted away from cynicism, anti heroes and deadly dames to display Cold War anxieties. The bomb was a dark threat looming menacingly in the background, a threat that shaped American culture in the postwar years. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">A possible apocalypse was hanging over everybody’s lives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">For a short while after WWII nuclear power</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";"> </span>was promoted as the epitome of technical progress. There existed the overly optimistic belief that it would only be used in positive and peaceful ways, such as for scientific progress in medicine. Oh ye of misguided faith. The "atomic dream" fell quickly short of what was promised because the technology entailed a range of obvious snags, among them the slight dangers of a nuclear meltdown.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Until 1949 the US had been in sole possession of the atomic bomb. When the Soviets exploded one of their own the same year, the arms race between the two superpowers was on. Once the Soviets had their A-bomb, President Truman announced an accelerated program to build a hydrogen bomb. The first one was tested in 1952. Not to be outdone a few months later, in 1953, the Soviets successfully tested their first H-bomb. Dangers were becoming very clear very fast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">One of <i>Newsweek’s</i> bright lads saw the writing on the wall quite plainly when he wrote what many people were already fearing: </span></div>
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“All the reports and all the statistics added up to one grim conclusion: In an atomic attack, the front would be everywhere. Every home, every factory, every school might be the target. Nobody would be secure in the H-bomb age”.</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Limited warfare had become a thing of the past. Nuclear power had the capability to obliterate everything with the push of a button.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The 50s are so often called a time of paranoia, but it is not fair. Paranoia is an irrational fear based on no concrete evidence that the fears are true, but the threat of nuclear destruction was not only ever-present, complete annihilation was a very real possibility.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The age of atomic power also saw the rise of civil defense, the training of civilians to be prepared in the event of an attack. The public was urged to build fallout shelters and children practiced “duck and cover” exercises regularly in school. These exercises now seem quite laughable but it should not be forgotten - based on scientific data available at the time - </span>that the blast from an atomic bomb was considered the worst part. The radiation threat, the after-effect, was downplayed because it wasn’t fully understood yet. We know now that this is not true and that there are no antidotes against radioactive poisoning. </div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">It would take a few more years for people to note that </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">the government policy of civil defense and preparedness was useless and ridiculous. <i>The Twilight Zone</i> episode <i>The Shelter</i> (1961) offered criticism of the fallout shelter obsession, and then along came <i>Dr. Strangelove</i>. But that is a whole nother story as they say. By the time the latter production rolled around most people were well aware that there wouldn't be another day to follow if the bomb went off. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">F</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">rom 1951-1962 the Nevada desert became the stomping ground for nuclear Government boffins who ran above-ground tests of atomic weapons which by the way is simply taken as a given in the movie without any moral judgment. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">In the uninhabited desert area everybody could do their dirty work unmolested.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Atomic blast as entertainment</td></tr>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">The Atomic Age was </span>marked by the strange duality of fear and fascination, by the belief in the good of nuclear science and the real dangers it included.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">On the one hand people were living on the razor’s edge, afraid that everything could be over any second. On the other hand the Atomic Age proved to be a fertile inspiration for art, culture, design and entertainment. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The atomic craze eventually expanded to include tourism. The Nevada test site was roughly 65 miles from Las Vegas which was already an attractive tourist destination. “Dawn parties” were held at casinos where visitors would stay up to see the above-ground tests in the morning. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s interesting to note that a radio announcer addresses his listeners at some time in the movie: </span></div>
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“We’ll try to give you ample warning so that you can get to your roofs and watch the flash from the explosion.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Weapons of mass destruction as exiting entertainment. In hindsight we can snicker but this would be revisionist and unfair. As already mentioned, the effects of a radioactive fallout and the resulting contamination were simply not wholly understood at the time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It would take the sci-fi genre to fully exploit the fears and ramifications of nuclear bombs. Political commentary was often left to sci-fi/horror movies that would feature mightily pissed off mutant creatures created by nuclear testing, for example <i>Them!, Attack of the Crab Monsters</i> and <i>It Came from Beneath the Sea. </i></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">These little movies served in their own humble way as a warning voice not to mess about with nature.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Two of the first cautionary sci-fi movies were <i>The Day the Earth Stood Still </i>and <i>The Thing from Another World</i>, which had contrasting views of first contact. While the former had a peaceful and benign race of aliens urging humans to control their use of nuclear power, the latter's angry title creature killed scientists in the Arctic. The film ended with the now-immortal words "Watch the skies!”, suggesting an interplanetary Cold War.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The dark world of noir had always been an ideal atmosphere to showcase fears and obsessions. As opposed to 50s sci-fi, e</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">arly 50s atomic Noir dealt with the dangers of nuclear power and radiation on a personal scale. It was the 60s end-of-the-world scenarios that took the </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">sledgehammer approach with their message-pushing</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> that nuclear power could only lead to complete destruction. In <b>Split Second </b>the A-bomb is only used as a background threat for a handful of people, not as a device to wipe out all of mankind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Split Second</b> is a thriller that doesn’t need any giant mutant creatures and no commies either to frighten, only a bomb about to go off at 0600 in the morning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Larry Fleming (Keith Andes), a reporter assigned to cover the latest atom bomb test blast in the Nevada desert, is yanked off the case when a bigger one comes along. He takes it philosophically: “Well, if you’ve seen one atom bomb, you’ve seen them all.” Murderer Sam Hurley (Stephen McNally) and his partner Bart Moore (Paul Kelly) - with a bullet in his gut courtesy of a prison guard - have busted out of prison and are on the loose. Their mute partner Dummy (!) (Frank De Kova) is waiting for them with a getaway car. Dummy has one passion in life, atomic superhero comics.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The fugitives decide to take the road less traveled, to a ghost town situated in the middle of a testing site where they want to hole up. As insurance, Hurley picks up a varied lot of hostages on the way. Apart from Larry there is tough-talking but soft-hearted Dottie Vail (Jan Sterling), a showgirl out of a job and out of money; Kay Garven (Alexis Smith), rich, spoiled, unfaithful and good-for-nothing doctor's wife on a cozy little weekend trip with a guy who’s not her husband, Arthur Ashton (Robert Paige). Then there is old prospector Asa (Arthur Hunnicutt) who’s been hiding out in the ghost town since WWI and simply stumbles onto the scene. Comic relief was an inescapable and often annoying fact of 40s and 50s movies but Asa thankfully stays just this side of outright irritating. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hurley thinks they’re safe in the ghost town as the area has already been cleared of people for the bomb test. This is when things get rather sticky. He didn’t know about the pesky bomb, but Hurley is convinced that he and Bart can make their getaway before the explosion at dawn though their hostages know they’re likely to be left behind in the blast zone. It’s the age-old suspense situation: will they or won't they get out in time? One of Noir’s favorite fetish items - the ticking clock - plays a big role, reminding us that time is precious and slipping away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Bart needs medical attention, pronto. Asa doesn’t see the need for a doctor for Bart. Where he comes from - the past - they<b> </b>used to dig out bullets with broken beer bottles, no anesthesia required. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hurley though insists on calling Kay’s estranged doctor husband Neal (Richard Egan). Either he comes to the rescue of Bart or else his wife will require a lot of medical attention too. Everybody’s nerves are a little shaky and they’re getting shakier by the minute.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The premise of the (desert) hostage drama is nothing new but it always works. Parallels to <i>The Petrified Forest </i>and<i> Key Largo </i>are of course purely incidental. We know the setup but t</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">here’s no reason why Powell couldn’t put his own spin on a well-worn storyline.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Of course the forced confinement and hours of waiting give the characters ample time to talk, argue, navel gaze and ponder their fates. Confined spaces always create a microcosmos, containing the action to a single stage and a restricted environment. Here it is an old saloon where the feeling of claustrophobia is strong and the </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">closed-in space offers no escape from danger. Fear strips away all pretensions and people start to show their real selves. They either grow above themselves or break under the pressure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Split Second </b>has one or two little - OK, OK big - potholes and implausibilities that don’t bear close inspection, the most glaring one being the ending. How does Hurley think to get away in the end with all the roadblocks? How does Dr. Garven get through them in the first place? Security seems to be a bit lax. Oh, and who the hell leaves hunky Richard Egan for Robert Paige?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’ll let all that slide. That’s what selective vision is for. Works like magic every time too, trust me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Just as <i>Ace in the Hole</i>, <b>Split Second</b> is another Noir beyond the City. The city in general provides a psychological and aesthetic framework for Noir but Noir is not inseparable from this environment. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Dangerous ground can lie beneath your feet anywhere. Here we get a</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"><b> </b>hot and dusty desert ghost town.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> The desert is a place defined by absence. T</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">he absence of water, vegetation, nourishment, infrastructure and life. It represents desolation, barrenness and death. Civilization doesn’t count for much in this setting. T</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">he illusory protection of society is stripped away and people are left to their own devices, left to fight for themselves. In a place like this it is the law of the strongest that counts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Western ghost towns were former boomtowns that marked failed communities. When business - AKA the lure of quick money - dried up, the towns died. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">After WWII a different kind of ghost towns - now called dummy villages - were built for one special purpose only. As atomic test sites.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What we have here is a nice clash between the old and the new. The ghost town - aptly named Lost Hope City - doesn’t only symbolize a failed community but also foreshadows a city destroyed by an atom blast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A terrifying new future has suddenly become present. It is as if our protagonists have walked right into one of Dummy’s atomic superhero comic books.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Keith Andes is good as Fleming. With an easy charm and a clear head, he knows they can only bide their time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">McNally turns in a great performance as sexy, dangerous and wound a bit too tight Sam Hurley, a ticking time bomb himself. Blasting away a gas station attendant, he makes a bad impression from the first and doesn’t improve on acquaintance. Murder and mayhem, it’s what he does the best. Interestingly he is a war veteran but one with a cold contempt for heroes and probably everyone else. He may have lost his humanity but not his wit and sarcasm. Larry asks him: “How many men have you killed?”, which Hurley smugly answers with: “Legally or illegally?”. Apparently he’s racked up quite a body count. Against the weapons of mass destructions sanctioned by the government though Sam Hurley seems just a measly small-timer. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Unfortunately the aspect the psychologically damaged war veteran is not further explored and we never find out how Hurley became the man he is. He has a knack for getting under everybody’s skin. He riles up Arthur because he knows exactly Arthur doesn’t stand a chance against him. He knows that Kay is easy prey and takes full advantage of it and when her husband comes to her help Hurley tells him with a smirk: “She decided not to depend on you entirely.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Only with Bart a real bond of friendship connects him. He has at least one meaningful relationship in his life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">From the first Kay<b> </b>is fascinated by the killer and makes it abundantly clear, even in front of her new boyfriend. “I’ve never met anyone like him”, she coos. Arthur is somehow lacking in the excitement department compared to the bad boy. Kay is a girl who covers all the bases, with commendable thoroughness. She’s running hot and cold like a cheap faucet with every guy who she thinks can offer her the most. Kay wants Arthur to play the hero and challenge Hurley.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> A surefire way to get yourself killed</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">. Arthur doesn’t even live to regret his poor decision of taking up with Kay. He gets a blast from Hurley’s .38 for his troubles. Arthur loses his life for a dame who’s worth exactly nothing. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Then Kay throws herself at Hurley with literally all she’s got, partly out of sexual attraction, partly out of fear of dying. She’s only too happy to go to the kitchen with Hurley, to make some coffee of course. With typical 50s subtlety when it comes to sexual content - a subtlety that is more like a sledgehammer to the jaw - the producers let us know what happened. We don’t know how long they’re in the kitchen, we don’t see what’s happening but when Kay emerges she looks a bit worse for wear. Hair out of place and make-up smudged.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the end Hurley doesn’t want to take her along. He is no fool and knows a rotten thing when he sees it: “You’re a real bad dame…nobody could depend on you for ten minutes.” Smart guy. We almost cheer for him then. She’s such a piece of work not even a psychopath wants her. It’s the night of bad choices for Kay.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">After that snub she tries it on with her husband again who’s come to her rescue, not because he’s still in love with her but because he’s that kind of guy. But she’ll trample on anyone to get out alive.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So often relegated to glamour roles, Alexis Smith brings a lot to the table. She is able to display panic and hysteria mixed with a strong attraction to Hurley very convincingly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Dottie is the product of the slums of Pittsburgh, with a father who pickled himself in cheap hooch every night and a not so happy hooker for a mother. In the beginning she can’t come up with the money to pay for her food at the diner. But she doesn’t tell the diner owner that before a guy walks into the diner who will be sure to pay the 50 cents she owes. If we think she’s going to be the bad girl now, we’d be mistaken. She’s a down-on-her-luck good time girl, no-nonsense but kindhearted and gets some of the best dialogue in the film. Sterling plays street-wise but vulnerable very well. Under her tough exterior she hides a certain sadness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She’s learned how to handle herself. Of course Hurley tries it on with Dottie too but she’s not so easy. </span></div>
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"Now look, mister. You can use that tone on the Pasadena divorce case in there. I've cut my teeth on tougher guys than you.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But she’s also not stupid enough to antagonize Hurley completely. She knows how that would end.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The World of Tomorrow</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The ending is to me as as good as <i>Kiss Me Deadly</i>. The film ends literally with a bang. The bomb goes off, preceded by a screaming siren…one hour before the scheduled time because the jokers at the military incident room thought it was a good idea. In a last-ditch effort to save herself Kay jumps into the car with Sam and Bart. They’re trying to drive out of the danger zone while leaving the others behind. Regrettably they drive off in the wrong direction towards the bomb. Their car gets vaporized. </span></div>
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And now we get another chunk of implausibility. Asa knows an old mine shaft just outside the town where the others find shelter to hide out. Talk about deus ex machina. Why didn’t he say this before? Never mind. When the survivors emerge after the blast, Neal Garven says grimly in a chilling assessment of the situation: "Well, let's take a look at the world of tomorrow." All they see is a charred wasteland with the smoking ruins of the town and a mushroom cloud rising in the background. It hits home.</div>
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The ending is supposed to be a happy one for our troupe though clearly knowing what we do now it wouldn’t be. Radiation is going to get them 10 years down the road. You can run but you can’t hide.<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Still, even without full knowledge, this must have been a very eerie scene for contemporary viewers and one which must have struck a chord. The doom loomed large on the horizon.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><b>Split Second </b>doesn’t need mutant creatures to be a horror movie. Reality does just fine.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-48349752563893067642018-09-05T11:31:00.000-07:002019-03-04T20:56:13.684-08:00The Third Man (1949)<div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Maddy over at<span style="color: #f6b26b;"><a href="https://maddylovesherclassicfilms.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"> </a></span></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(255, 169, 59); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><a href="https://maddylovesherclassicfilms.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #f6b26b;">Maddy Loves Her Classic Films<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span></span></a></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">is hosting </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">the Joseph Cotten Blogathon on September 5-7, 2018. At the risk of belaboring the obvious and saying what others have said before me and better, here’s my entry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm… I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market...Now the city is divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power: the American, the British, the Russian and the French…Good fellows on the whole, did their best you know. Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities. Bombed about a bit.” Prologue</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Directed by the now shamefully underrated Carol Reed at the height of his power, <b>The Third Man</b> is that rare breed of film where everything comes together to form a little miracle. The direction by Reed is brilliant, the script by Graham Greene is brilliant, the cinematography is brilliant, the acting is…you get the drift.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: "helvetica";"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The prologue - spoken by Reed as omniscient narrator in a very off-hand and chummy manner - plunges the audience right into the grim realities of a story unfolding with bone-dry wit, sly humor and shrewd insights into the intricacies of East-West relations, which incidentally are purely Greene’s. In a subtle note of irony, the narrator himself is a dodgy black marketeer, part of the flotsam and jetsam that comes in the wake of vanished empires and conquering armies.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Mostly shot on location in Vienna - one the first British films to do so - the film has an </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">authenticity about it that captures the appalling disarray of a Europe scarred by a war. No studio set could ever convey the destruction caused by relentless bombing resulting in </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">rubble-strewn streets, crumbling buildings and gaping holes in the ground. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a thing of the past. Not even an echo of its former glory reverberates in the picture, we only see the remnants of a world and a way of life utterly destroyed.</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Reed made one key decision early – there would be no Strauss, no waltzes in his film. That Vienna, the Vienna which could imagine itself at the centre of Europe, was gone for good. Reed’s Vienna is a crooked city, a city shot with tilted angles, a city in which the cobbled streets are wet and glistening as if from melted snow; a city in which a few beams of light cut through deep darkness, in which the shadows are all exaggerated. … for Greene Vienna was a no-man’s land, a city on the edge in which the old values were in ruins, a city with no future” (</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">Peter Wollen “Riff-raff Realism”, BFI magazine <i>Sight and Sound </i>April 1998) </span></blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Amateurs...they can't stay the course</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Vienna had been stripped of its elegance and splendor. What remained was decadence and rot, with a fatalistic and defeated attitude blanketing the city. Postwar morality was complicated, muddled to </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">obscurity</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">. The notions of good and evil didn’t mean much in the face of simple survival. “I’ve done things that seemed unthinkable before the war,” says one character in the story and it seems to be true for everybody. War changes all notions of acceptable behavior.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In <b>The Third Man</b> Vienna is a place of utter confusion, marked by its maze of alleyways, tunnels and strange staircases. A damaged city that mirrored the troubled inner lives of its inhabitants.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As many have noted, Vienna itself is a character in the story. The picture has a firmly-rooted sense of place. As a</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">n Allied-occupied city, </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Vienna was under the control of the four occupying powers Britain, US, France and Russia. Still trying to shrug off a post-war hangover, the city was now a border-zone stuck between East and West on the eve of another war, a cold one this time. Europe was a continent at the crossroads. Cooperation between victors already politically divided rose barely above frosty formality. It was a bitter reminder for people still celebrating victory that not all was well in the world. Like Germany, Austria was a country in limbo and in chaos, not knowing what the future would bring and which way it would go. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A precarious political environment like that could only produce bleak and desperate films and was a fertile ground for the so-colled <i>Trümmerfilme</i> (1945-50), “rubble films” - named that for obvious reasons - set amongst the ruins of postwar cities (Berlin, Vienna, Rome). Rubble films dealt with the war, Nazism, anti-Semitism and the dire conditions of the postwar period (<i>The Murderers Are Among Us, Germany, Year Zero, In Those Days</i>). If these films are Noir by generally-accepted genre standards is a moot point. They are that by their very nature, with a heart of deepest darkness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>The Third Man</b> however transcends the Noir genre. It transcends the genre of the thriller too. It defies categorization. It is not just an exercise in bleakness with razor-sharp dialogue and lots of dark humor, it’s a</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);"> film about </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">loyalty, betrayal, love, loss, the nature of evil and </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">making profound moral decisions.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">The movie is a masterclass on style and atmosphere. In fact the cinematography is so good you could hang every frame as picture on the wall. Expressionist </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">lighting,</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> evocative shadows, rain-slicked cobblestone streets, the constant echo of footsteps in the dark and the slanting light from apartments create an atmosphere of sinister menace. Wide-angle and close-up shots distort faces into the grotesque, most notably Harry’s sketchy cronies. Faces that always look watchful and guarded, afraid to give too much away, to say the wrong things. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What stands out most though are the constant canted camera angles, more than I have seen in any other movie. They suggest a world perpetually off-kilter, confused and out-of-joint. Nothing in Vienna is on the level.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The famous zither score - composed and performed by Anton Karas - reinforces the narrative’s irony hovering between playfulness and melancholy. It is authentically Viennese. It’s the music you hear in the city’s cheerful <i>Heurigenlokalen, </i>wine bars. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">The plot centers on </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), Our Man in Vienna, a two-bit hack writer of dime-store Westerns with titles such as <i>T</i></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);"><i>he</i> <i>Lone Rider of Santa Fe </i>and <i>Death at Double X Ranch.</i></span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> He arrives in occupied Vienna at the invitation of his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) only to find that Harry has been killed in a hit-and-run accident. When Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) of the International Police informs him that Lime was a black market racketeer responsible for the death of many people, Holly is unbelieving. He thinks Calloway is trying to frame his friend for trading cigarettes for eggs, like everybody else in the city. Holly starts questioning Harry’s strange associates and his lover Anna (Alida Valli) and soon finds holes in the accident story. Apparently there was a third man on the accident scene, conveniently dropped from most eye witness statements. Trying to piece together the narrative, Holly starts to hit the streets of Vienna hell-bent on busting the case wide open. It’s the single worst idea of his life. Turns out reports of Harry’s death have been greatly exaggerated and he is everything Calloway says. What’s more, as Harry’s friend Calloway expects Holly’s help in bringing Harry down.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sgt. Paine contemplating the folly of Holly</td></tr>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Holly is outraged. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">His best mate nowadays is the bottle, well, right after Harry who he considers the best friend a man ever had. </span></div>
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Calloway: “That sounds like a cheap novelette.”</div>
<span style="text-align: justify;">Holly: “Well, I write cheap novelettes.”</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s one of the few times Holly’s grasp of facts is spot-on. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Naive, pure of heart and guileless, h</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">is perspective on life has been simplified to match the structure of the pulp Westerns he writes. Holly prefers moral clarity, a clear line drawn in the sand, the basic distinction between good and bad never in doubt. Obviously sensibilities from another time and place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Holly sees himself as the upright Western hero fighting with good cheer for truth and justice and the downtrodden, in this case his childhood friend who he hasn’t seen in years. Mixing fact and fiction, Holly sees cheap plots and conspiracies everywhere. "The lone rider has his best friend shot unlawfully by a sheriff. The story is how this lone rider hunted the sheriff down." In his imagination Harry is the victim of unfair persecution by the corrupt Sheriff Calloway.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To confound the fish out of water even more, there is a constant stream of deliberately untranslated German that reinforces Holly’s sense of being a stranger in a strange land and adds to his bewilderment. Along with the audience he has to figure out what is going on. To his credit, director Reed played fair. Every crucial bit of information is translated for Holly and the viewer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Unfortunately Holly doesn’t have any self-awareness. He doesn’t seem to understand that his innocent blundering can be dangerous <i>for other people. </i>Occasionally only one step away from impersonating Inspector Clouseau, </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">Holly doesn’t </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">remotely have the mental equipment or the moral unscrupulousness to survive the snake pit he's jumped into. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">He’s lacking the jadedness and cynicism of men who have been through a long and hard war. It is quite telling that we never find out what Holly did during those years. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The film plays with the cliches of pulp fiction but turns them into something much more serious. Westerns may be useful moral guides in certain places but Vienna after the War was not one of them. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">It’s a setting that embodies complexities far beyond Holly’s simplistic mindset. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">With his quixotic notions of fairness and morality Holly - the proverbial Noir sucker - is no match for a real Noir villain, or the morass</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> of a new </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">postwar world </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">where hell is up and heaven is down.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Adding an indispensable contrast of hard-headed reality is Major Calloway, played by </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Trevor Howard<b> </b>in one of his tough guy roles. Howard - “It’s Calloway, not Callahan. I’m English, not Irish” - is the epitome of cool here and almost walks away with the movie. A <i>BFI screenonline</i> article no less stated that Calloway has no sympathy for Holly at all, exploits his naiveté and is “a cold, stern authority-figure who lacks warmth and humor”. What were they smoking? Calloway is a man who’s seen it all but hasn’t lost his humanity. He’s hard-bitten enough to look evil in the eye and not flinch. If he’s not all warm and fuzzy that comes with the territory. With his </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">sardonic humor and </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">a voice that drips acid</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> he’s a much-needed dose of vinegar. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Exasperated beyond belief by Holly giving him constant headaches with his naive bungling, Calloway wonders how a wooly little lamb like him got lost in the slaughterhouse. There is an underlying gruff kindness and compassion in him. Like a good father, he encourages Holly to leave town to shield him from the worst of reality. He also tries to help Anna as much as he can, but the damsel doesn’t want to be saved. “Death’s at the bottom of everything”, says Calloway. Nobody can argue with him. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As a British army officer Calloway, who's been in Vienna for a while, can't be bushwhacked. “This isn’t Santa Fe, I’m not a sheriff, and you aren’t a cowboy”, he says to Holly after Holly accuses him of framing his friend.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But a sheriff is exactly what he is. There’s a certain lawless frontier mindset galloping rampant in the occupied territory. Vienna is the postwar European version of the Wild Wild West - a decidedly unromanticized one though - where law is just an impediment to profit. Calloway is the man who’s trying to clean up Dodge and keep at least some semblance of peace and order. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Much has been made of Holly as the ugly American who goes abroad blithely blundering through a foreign city and poking his nose where it doesn’t belong. Dana Polan - who I usually agree with - calls him “a small, little man. A failure...he’s a buffoon from beginning to end” in his DVD commentary. And Tony Gilroy does the same when he says: “He’s just a shabby character all around...he’s just a slug.” What? I think those critics give Holly a raw deal. He is the film’s moral core even if he is clumsy and has trouble connecting the dots. He has one thing going for him: a sense of right or wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cotten’s acting throughout the movie is commendable, it is subtle and nuanced. He has to be bereaved, silly, stupefied and heroic at the same time. Holly Martins is not a flashy role and quite selflessly Cotten leaves the (acting) glory to Welles, a man with an enormous screen presence and magnetism. Cotten too had screen presence but never the overpowering personality of Welles. An underrated actor who made it all look so easy.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The movie may be named for Harry Lime but it’s interesting to note that h</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">e appears only three times in the movie with a screen time that totals about 10 minutes, speaking only in the ferris wheel scene. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Welles at the time came fairly cheap. Though his name still had marquee value, Welles had fallen from grace and wasn't bankable anymore. A bucketload of commercial failures - amongst them <i>Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai </i>and<i> Macbeth - </i>had seen to that. He exiled himself to Europe. He was hired by Reed but proved to be elusive and had to be literally chased all over the continent so he would show up on the set. For many of his shots a stand-in had to be used - including the famous reveal - with a close-up shot of Welles done later at Shepperton Studios in London. He also refused to film his last scene in the sewers of Vienna for hygienic reasons forcing Reed to built a stage at Shepperton. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Welles was someone who occasionally had the tendency to over-act shamelessly. Thankfully, here he reigns himself in and gives a subtle performance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He doesn’t show up until after the one-hour mark yet Lime’s personality dominates the movie even in his absence. In fact his absence is the invisible force that drives the plot. Everyone in this film is defined by his relationship to Harry. He gets one of cinema’s greatest entrances, materializing out of nothing when the tension has been built up. Welles called Harry Lime a star role: “They talk about you for an hour and then you show up. All you have to do is ride.” And steal the thunder from everybody else in the bargain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Harry not only lives in the shadows but in a shadow world, in his own little fiefdom. Underground, surreptitiously out if sight and out of reach of conventional justice. The sewers are part of his fiefdom. Black marketers </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">frequently used them as they allowed fairly free travel between sectors while bypassing the checkpoints above ground. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Lime finally appears - given away by a cat with a lousy taste in humans - it is like an apparition. There is an almost child-like, impish and very seductive smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes. His playful personality invites the audience to dismiss all the accusations against Lime’s character right away. A grave error in judgment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Harry is not just embroiled in run-of-the-mill shady business dealings. He stole penicillin from hospitals, diluted it and sold it back on the black market. This adulterated penicillin crippled and deformed children and “the lucky children died, the unlucky ones went off their heads.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">High up in a ferris wheel cabin - in every sense of the word looking down on humanity - Harry explains to Holly his philosophy with utter callousness and nonchalance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs - it's the same thing.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For Harry evil has to get credit for the good it often spreads in its wake though Harry just gets down to the important basics. His reasons for murder are purely economic. Always ready with a glib insouciance, there’s not a shred of conscience in him. Other people's lives do not matter. He’s a sick little puppy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That we can’t hate Welles is simply due to his brilliance, he manages to almost capsize the film with his charisma. And that’s the trouble with Harry. Lime is one of the most likable crooks we have ever encountered. He should be locked up in the psych ward as a nut job, instead he comes off as a little rascal. To quote another movie: “The Devil is most dangerous when he’s being pleasant”. The Devil gets the best lines too, delivered with attractive and self-deprecating irony. Sociopathy as charming quirk. The face of evil is utterly banal, almost benign, a metaphor for the moral breakdown of Europe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Harry has simply made his peace with the devil. He has consciously embraced evil, as a necessity, as a means to an end.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He is a man who casts a long shadow, in every way. His friend admires him, his cronies worship him and his lover remains faithful to him even after his “death”. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In one of his more lucid moments Holly notices: “Harry is laughing at fools like us all the time” and he’s right. Harry has always been a parasite. Holly in his naiveté just took it as youthful exuberance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Nothing in this film is as it appears. Character motivations are in the dark, there are false identities, mixed-up names and double and triple crosses galore. </span>The beauty of this movie is that it studiously avoids to give us clear answers, one-dimensional interpretations or an easy way out. The third man turned out to be Harry Lime but Harry was nothing more than an illusion.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We are puzzled by Anna’s unwavering loyalty to him. Anna is from Czechoslovakia, a Soviet-held territory, living in the Western Zones on a forged passport that Harry procured for her. The Russians know it and would love to “repatriate” her. A death sentence by any other name. Repatriation by the Soviets meant labor camps or execution.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For Harry she’s just a means to an end. When the need arises, he uses her as a bargaining chip and sells her out to the Russians so they will further harbor him in their sector.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The first time we see Anna she’s on stage acting in a comedy. “I don’t play tragedy” she says. A blatant lie. She is one of the most melancholy and fatalistic heroines I have ever seen on film. Anna asks nothing of life. She knows dreams and hopes don’t stand a chance in this world. She seems to be in a near-constant catatonic state. She’s not just quiet and reserved, it is as if she has emotionally shut down after what she’s been through. Some critics took this for woodenness on the actress’s part but I think Valli plays it exactly right. She showed the same kind of mystery and impassiveness in <i>The Paradine Case</i>. There is a quality of stillness about her that can barely hide strong undercurrents of emotions. She never tells us - or Holly - what she did to survive the war but we can take a good guess. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">It’s all there in her world-weary attitude. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">In a way her loyalty </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">to Harry is touching and commendable but there’s also the point that she’s loyal to a psychopath. Even when she finds out what he’s done, she stands by him, choosing love over humanity. “A person doesn’t change because you find out more about him” she says which is of course absolute nonsense. It seems Anna tries to separate Harry’s personal nature - his essence so to say - from his actions as if both have nothing to do with each other. Her whole-hearted acceptance of Harry’s evil makes her a collaborator. In fact it’s monstrous.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Many have criticized Holly for betraying his friend in the end. What those critics seem to forget is that Harry - before Holly “betrayed” him - had already betrayed everybody he ever came in contact with. Holly at least can critically reflect on friendship as a virtue and reject it if the price for it is too high. Being a friend does not have to mean sanctioning everything a friend does.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">In the end the woolly</span> little lamb becomes Harry’s nemesis and executioner. Holly is very reluctant to rat out his friend but the point of no return comes when Calloway makes Holly look at the effects of the diluted penicillin in the hospital. He finally agrees to be Calloway’s “dumb decoy duck” and help catch his friend. It is his duty to humanity, though it is nothing he can ever feel good about.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Calloway and his men finally close in on Harry and corner him in the city’s cavernous sewer system. In what is a bit of obvious symbolism, Harry is equated with a rat, hence the sewer. We see closeups of Lime's sweaty face, desperatly looking for a way out. In this instance we feel sympathy with the devil - now a hunted man - because the camera presents him as such, chased through long, echoing and empty sewer vistas. After he’s shot, his fingers grasp through a grating for freedom - it’s futile though, there is no escape. Mortally wounded, Harry nods to Holly, pleading for a quick release. It is Holly’s last act of friendship. He betrayed Harry out of duty and killed him out of kindness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Holly’s cowboy innocence is forever lost, laid to rest in the sewers of Vienna with the mercy killing of his friend. This is what’s called a moral minefield. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The film comes full circle and ends as it began: in a cemetery at Harry’s funeral. Autumn leaves are falling, always a sign for sadness and the ending of a life-cycle, in this case Holly’s and Anna’s relationship. Holly waits for Anna and his happy end at the end of a long road expecting her to forgive. But he’s tilting at the windmills of hopeless love. She simply walks past Holly without even sparing him a glimpse, her judgment of what she considers his betrayal. "They have a name for faces like that”. She takes loyalty to the point of self-destruction.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The end of the affair that never began</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And once more Holly has to face the harsh truth that life isn't one of his Westerns: sometimes doing the right thing doesn’t make things better and killing the bad guy isn’t the end of it. Harry is dead, the past is dead but there is no future for Holly and Anna. Holly had good intentions and he did the right thing but Mae West knew it all along. Goodness has nothing to do with it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What remains is an achingly sad ending with a solitary figure on an empty road whose victory does't count for much. It just cost him everything. His friend, his love, his simple world-view and his innocence. Maybe Holly has gained some wisdom, some understanding beyond the world of his novelettes, but that is cold comfort.</span></div>
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Roger Ebert phrased it perfectly: “<b>The Third Man</b> is like the exhausted aftermath of <i>Casablanca</i>…<i>Casablanca</i> is bathed in the hope of victory…” <b>The Third Man </b>is bathed in bitter disillusionment. The world doesn’t make any heroes outside of Holly’s stories anymore.</div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-88704881163351505892018-08-12T18:12:00.000-07:002019-03-06T18:21:38.291-08:00Ace in the Hole (1951)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">“I’m in the boat, you’re in the water. Now let me see you swim.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Right after the critical and commercial success of</span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> Sunset Blvd. </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Wilder turned his scathing view to the exploitation of the news media. He had given his home studio Paramount nothing but successes so far though </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Sunset Blvd.</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> ruffled a few feathers in Tinseltown. This time around Wilder didn’t limit his criticism to Hollywood but cast his net much wider. </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Ace in the Hole</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> is a bitter and poisonous story with a clinically unflinching outlook on mankind’s basest behaviors. Where </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Sunset Blvd. </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">failed - that is ruin Wilder’s career - </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Ace in the Hole</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> almost succeeded. Now regarded as a great classic, the picture was a critical and commercial failure at its initial release and sparked the outrage of Hollywood big shots, columnists and the Great Unwashed alike. Bosley Crowther of course did his customary hit job on the movie, sprinkling his review with darling little nuggets of wisdom: </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">“Mr. Wilder has let imagination so fully take command of his yarn that it presents not only a distortion of journalistic practice but something of a dramatic grotesque…disgusting and shocking to observe”. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">He - like most critics - considered himself a newspaperman and as such within the target range of Wilder’s criticism. I’ve seen </span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Ace</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> described as satire several times but it’s anything but. It’s simply an accurate representation of reality.</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Wilder’s vision of a media which gleefully exploits the agonies of a dying man just because it’s hot copy is unrelentingly grim and unrelentingly unrelenting. The movie is not only prophetic but it’s more important than ever. It was a harbinger of things to come in relation to today's 24/7 tabloid journalism, disaster tourism, fake news, Twitter soundbites and all-important ratings. But Wilder went a step further. He did not only accuse the media of being driven solely by greed, he doesn’t spare the general public either. Wilder implicated literally everybody in the crime. With the arrival of hundreds of onlookers - who come to see the spectacle and turn the misfortune of another into a Big Carnival, the film’s alternate title - Wilder shouts out to the world that Everybody Is Evil, Dirty and Morally Bankrupt. Just the ticket to make them come and see your movie. Nobody likes to be told they’re blood-sucking leeches. Graham Daseler put it like this in his review <i>Evil Under the Sun: Ace in the Hole:</i> “You can skewer the press and the politicians and even the movie business, as Wilder had in <i>Sunset Boulevard</i>, and get away with it, but you can’t bite the hand that feeds you.” That’s a surefire way to lose an audience. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Wilder doubtlessly went for the sledgehammer approach with <b>Ace</b>. He liked to push buttons, envelopes and everything else and always had a propensity for cynicism but even for Billy Wilder, this movie is pretty Billy Wilder.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The failure of <b>Ace in the Hole</b> truly stung Wilder. He considered it the best picture he ever made. He learned a valuable lesson though. A picture needs a measure of humanism at the core. Following the disaster, he softened his films with some humor and heart.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><i>Noir beyond the City</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Far from the Mean Streets of Gotham or Megalopolis - where life should be safe, peaceful and calm - we find the Mean Outbacks of Rural Noir.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There is no doubt that Noir and the City have a symbiotic relationship and go hand in hand, most of the time. The city provides a psychological and aesthetic framework for Noir. But a gritty urban setting does not have to be the defining boundary of the genre. Noir can exist perfectly fine outside this particular environment. In Noir’s less-traveled hinterlands evil can hide too. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">t lurks even in the pristine heart of nature. In the mountains, in the deserts and in the forests where inhospitable wilderness offers nothing but a place to die and life is distilled to the primitive. <i>Gun Crazy,</i> <i>They Live By Night, The Postman Always Rings Twice</i>, <i>The Hitch-Hiker</i>, <i>Pitfall</i>, <i>On Dangerous Ground, The Prowler </i>and<i> Moonrise </i>weaken the argument of <i>The Asphalt Jungle</i>: that the city itself is the corrupting force, that if people only stayed in pastoral backwaters they would never turn to crime.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">The barren and dry grounds of the blisteringly hot New Mexico desert don’t offer a tranquil retreat. Instead they prove to be the perfect backdrop for a picture about greed and corruption. It is true that Noir’s protagonists</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> quite often simply transport their city mentality to a rural setting, thus bringing Poisonville and Hate Street to the country. Tatum - the man from the city - acts as a catalyst but the evil was in Escudero long before he came. It barely needed an incentive.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Ace in the Hole </b>is Noir through and through even though it dispenses with femmes fatales, gangsters, chiaroscuro lighting and Fate. Instead there is a sense of futility, desperation, entrapment - literally and figuratively - and a darkness of vision that is almost unparalleled. Molly Haskell wrote in her Criterion Collection article<i> Ace in the Hole:</i> <i>Noir in Broad Daylight</i>: “The noir is interior—inside a mountain tunnel where a man is trapped and suffocating, and inside the mind of a reporter rotting from accumulated layers of self-induced moral grime.” <b>Ace in the Hole</b> is daytime Noir.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><i>Stuck in sun-baked Siberia</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Kirk Douglas plays disgraced newspaper reporter Chuck Tatum who - due to some unsavory misdeeds - was run out of several towns and now has to work for a small-town Albuquerque newspaper, the <i>Albuquerque Sun Bulletin</i> headed by Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall). It’s the ninth circle of hell for Tatum</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">.</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> One fine day he stumbles across Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) trapped alive in a cave that collapsed on him. In a bid to milk the story for all it's worth and get himself back into the Big League, Tatum engineers a scenario to keep the man trapped for as long as possible creating a media circus in the process. Throw into the mix Minosa’s money-grabbing and hateful wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) who’s not in the least cut up about her husband’s ordeal, and we have a powder keg waiting to explode.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Douglas was an actor who considered subtlety a waste of time. He gleefully chews off vast lumps of scenery and spits them out again. He - like Joan Crawford and Burt Lancaster - went in for the Bette Davis school of acting who maintained that “Acting should be bigger than life.” I like subtle performances but I adore Douglas’s larger than life and over the top theatricals that are incredibly entertaining. Here he is at the top of his game. Snarling, blustering, threatening and full of furious energy and ferocious determination Douglas commands the screen entirely. And he’s not afraid to show the audience something else: seediness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Tatum used to be a hot shot reporter back East but boozed himself out of every job. After being fired from 11 newspapers for reasons including - but not limited to - lying, cheating, provoking a libel suit and fooling around with the boss’s wife - the big papers aren’t interested in him anymore, there’s too much dirt on him.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">Now </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">he’s washed-up and scraping the bottom of the barrel but he keeps on digging. The guy coulda been a contender, it’s just his greed and amorality - in a word his personality - get in the way.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Noir is the genre of last chances and Albuquerque is Tatum’s last chance. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Tatum is the Noir (anti)hero in exile, a man on the run who can’t escape his past. He’s on the run from his mistakes, his responsibilities and from himself. But he’ll be in the money again, of course he will. He just forgets one thing. There’s no place to hide. Robert Mitchum put it perfectly in<i> When Strangers Marry</i>: “Places are all alike, but you can’t run away from yourself”. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The coffin lid has already closed on Tatum, he just doesn’t know it yet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">His shenanigans got him a lousy reputation, a reputation he somehow relishes though. Why else would he brag about his exploits and misdeeds in the big city to Boot? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To get out of this backwater he needs real news, hard news. Unfortunately for Tatum a year goes by without anything materializing. He’s nearly suffocating with boredom. The big chance comes when Boot sends Tatum and impressionable gopher/assistant photographer Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur) to cover a rattle snake hunt. Careful: heavy-handed symbolism here!</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"I wish I could coin 'em like that"</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Tatum must be one of Douglas’s most unsavory characters, and that’s saying something. From the way he swaggers into the <i>Sun Bulletin</i>, lights a match on the return key of an employee’s typewriter and yells to see the boss, Tatum exudes a brash and aggressive confidence. He acts as if he owns the place. Hovering between arrogance and desperation, he pitches his services as a reporter to Boot for $50 a week telling him he’s worth $250. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><i>Never let facts get in the way of a good story</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He may be immodest but he has a point. He does know all the angles. He gives Herbie and the audience a lesson on how to make a compelling story out of even the most trivial event, like the aforementioned rattle snake hunt: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Give me just 50 of them loose in Albuquerque…the whole town in panic, deserted streets, barricaded houses…50 killers on the prowl…one by one they start hunting them down, they get 10, 20…they get 40, 45, 49…where’s the last rattler? In a kindergarten, in a church, in a crowded elevator? Where? Stashed away in my desk drawer…the story is good for another three days…when I’m good and ready we can come out with a big extra: Sun Bulletin snags No. 50”. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">From that moment on we know with absolute certainty that Tatum doesn’t play by the rules. This is not the first time he has cooked up his own story. Boot has his motto - TELL THE TRUTH - embroidered and framed several times on the newspaper premises. It’s the paper’s guiding ethics and for someone like Tatum this is a rather quaint notion. It smacks of utter naiveté. Tatum needs ethics like he needs the plague. He puts his own spin on the little bromide, he literally embroiders the truth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s something else he believes in: “I can handle big news, little news and if there’s no news I’ll go out and bite a dog.” That’s what he’ll do with Minosa. If the big story will not come to Tatum, then Tatum must go and create the big story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The cave Leo is trapped in is an ancient Indian burial ground where he prowled around to steal some artifacts for selling at his trading post. To the Navajos the dwelling is known as the “Mountain of the Seven Vultures”. Tatum doesn’t see the irony he only sees the story before his eyes. “Curse of the old Indian chief, white man half buried by old Indian spirits. What will they do? Will they spare him? Will they crush him?” He finally hit the jackpot. When a guy like Tatum smells blood, he won’t let off.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><i>“Bad news sells best, cause good news is no news.”</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For maximum possible impact Tatum needs disaster. When Herbie says they shouldn’t hope for a tragedy Tatum replies: “I don’t wish for anything. I don’t make things happen, I just write about them.” We know for a fact that this is not true. The engineer in charge of Minosa’s rescue declares that all that would be needed to get Minosa out is strengthening the walls of the cave and the job would be done in about 18 hours - but that wouldn’t give Tatum his story. So he contemplates what would happen if rescue workers were to delay the rescue for a couple of days.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is here that Tatum’s utter ruthlessness really comes out. He suggest drilling a hole from the top of the mountain to extract the trapped man which is an unnecessarily slow process of several days. Damn a man’s life, full speed ahead. He brokers a deal with corrupt Sheriff Gus Kretzer (Ray Teal) to let him have his way and keep other reporters away. Tragedy equals opportunity. Leo Minosa may be barely alive, but the entrepreneurial spirit certainly is. Kretzer is up for re-election and if he plays his cards right there’ll be a “hero of the hour” headline in it for him. For Tatum there may be a Pulitzer Price in the offing. For Lorraine it means cold hard cash so she plays along. Minosa's health is rapidly deteriorating. But that is no reason to close the cash register. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><i>Print the legend</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Tatum quits the <i>Sun Bulletin</i> and sells his daily updates directly to his ex-boss in NYC.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">"I'm on my way back to the top, and if it takes a deal with a crooked sheriff, that's all right with me! And if I have to fancy it up with an Indian curse and a brokenhearted wife for Leo, then that's all right too!"</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The idea of the Fourth Estate as a guardian of truth and justice is a big joke to Tatum, because for him the story is always more important than the truth. The courageous reporter, the grieving wife, the dutiful sheriff…all lies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><i>The Big Carnival’s in town</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Then another joyous event occurs. A vacationing family - the Federbers, “Mr. and Mrs. America” as Tatum calls them - stop at the trading post after reading about it in the morning edition of the <i>Sun Bulletin. </i>They alter their vacation plans just to have a look at a death watch.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A veritable mob soon descends on Escudero like locusts, with Tatum controlling the entire story beginning to end. The area becomes a tourist attraction complete with amusement park rides, concession stands and a tacky theme song. Busloads of people come from far and wide. One man’s agonizing and miserable death in a dirty hole becomes a raucous party for the onlookers. The public as bottom-feeding leeches whose human interest is nothing but a front for morbid scandal-mongering.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Some viewers were wondering why everybody lets Tatum run the whole show. The answer is easy. The guy is a force of nature with plenty of swaggering confidence and animal charisma. Everyone is seduced by it, even the paper’s old-maidenish secretary who giggles and simpers every time Tatum talks to her. He comes off as the coolest of cats. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Tatum is a master manipulator. Fear and/or the promise of glory, money and fame are great motivators to make people play his game. Herbie has a bad case of hero worship and even Boot, who sees through Tatum right away and should know better, still gives him a job. With Lorraine he bets on her sexual desire for him. Even if she hates him for being smarter than she is, she still has the hots for him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Tatum may be a liar and a bastard, but he’s also a mover and shaker, someone who makes things happen. <b>Ace in the Hole</b> doesn’t have a femme fatale, instead we get an homme fatal. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He’s in a league of his own when it comes to unscrupulousness and selfishness. He has no illusions about himself, he embraces his rotten nature wholeheartedly and doesn’t wallow in self-pity. There wouldn’t be anything remotely likable about him if he weren't played by Douglas. Somehow Douglas makes this huckster unforgettable and almost likable. He's compulsively watchable even if he is loathsome.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Tatum acts like a director - and a dictator - on a film set. He sets out a blueprint, creates a story, drums up publicity, devises characters for his charade and makes them dance to his tune: when Lorraine doesn’t want to play the grief-stricken wife, he slaps her hard twice and tells her not to wipe away the tears. They’re useful for his story. It’s no way to treat a lady but then she’s no lady.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Jan Sterling’s bottle-blonde pouting floozy Lorraine is a hard-nosed dame with a spine of steel and the soul of a cash register. She’s pure unadulterated vitriol. Another exile from the big city who wanted more out of life than being stuck in the middle of Nowhere, NM toiling away in a dusty curio shop/diner. Her life’s been one big disappointment. She considered Minosa her ticket out of a bad job as a dime-a-dance girl. When they met Leo told her he had 160 acres of land and a big business. He just neglected to tell her it’s a 160 acres of Badlands and a shop that doesn’t generate any money. Lorraine is a gold digger who didn’t strike it rich when she married the wrong guy. Now she’s dangerous because her ambitions were thwarted.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The first shot of her sums up her whole character in one quick stroke. Standing at the mouth of the cave her husband is trapped in, she follows the rescue operation with a look of contemptuous boredom while sucking on a cigarette. For Leo the dirty freezing cave is a warmer place than his marriage ever was, though mercifully he never has to find that out. It’s quite ironic that the only time Minosa is of any use to Lorraine is when he’s dying. Then he brings in the dough.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Minosa isn’t the only one who’s buried alive. Wilder comes precariously close to belaboring the theme of entrapment and suffocation. Leo wants out of the hole, Tatum wants out of the boonies, Lorraine wants out of her marriage and Escudero. Back to the big city, to glamour, to freedom. When she hears about her husband’s accident, her first reaction is to clean out the last measly $11 bucks from the cash register, hop on a Greyhound and make a run for it. Tatum can’t let her leave, he needs Lorraine for the grief-stricken and devoted wife act. The more tearful the better. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><i>The high cost of dying</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Get this, there’s three of us buried here, Leo, me and you. We all want to get out and we’re going to… You saw those people, a couple of squares, but to me they’re Mr. and Mrs. America…they’ll eat it up, the story and the hamburgers…there’s gonna be real dough in that cash register by tonight.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That is what Lorraine likes to hear. She gets the hang of the game pretty quickly. The charges for a photo at the carnival/accident sight go up from nothing to a dollar pretty quickly. Anything for a buck. Tatum and Lorraine are two kindred spirits who’ve found each other.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lorraine isn’t fooled though: “Much you care about Leo. I’m on to you. You’re working for a newspaper; all you want is something you can print.” She calls Tatum a twenty minute hard-boiled egg but only lags a couple of minutes behind herself. She is his female mirror image that sometimes even disgusts Tatum who sees too much of himself in her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Tatum wants her to go to mass and pray for her husband’s rescue. That’s a big joke to her. Her refusal supplies her with one of the movie’s best lines: “I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I always considered Sterling an underrated actress. One of the 50s quintessential B girls, she delivers a gutsy portrayal. Sneering, tawdry and coarse, she’s the ultimate what’s-in-it-for-me? type of dame. A floozy to give all floozies a bad name. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sterling plays her role with relish, absolutely unapologetic and callous to the bitter end. When the crowds disperse after Minosa’s death she’s only interested in trying to hitch a ride of out </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Escudero.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">There’s </span>nobody to root for in this movie. Wilder doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Minosa’s parents are nice people but they’re also completely ineffectual, doing nothing but praying and wringing hands. Minosa himself, </span>besotted with a cheap tramp of a wife, is a poor gullible schlub and simpleton who never amounted to anything and who robs graves for a living. Wilder doesn’t treat him with too much sympathy. He never evokes more than condescending pity. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The <i>Bulletin’s</i> editor Boot<b> </b>is the antithesis to Tatum, an idealistic, honest and kind man but he’s no match for Tatum’s force of character.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Frankly, no-one comes out of this movie looking good. Not even Herbie. He picked the wrong role model and let the promise of glory corrupt him. He loses his innate goodness and innocence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">At best people are thoughtless and inefficient, at worst downright nasty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">With his high-handedness Tatum eventually digs his own grave. When he tries to choke Lorraine with a cheap fur scarf Leo bought for her she stabs him with scissors. He’s a dead man walking now. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The great thing about <b>Ace</b> is that the ending is so ambiguous. Viewers seem to be divided in their opinion if Tatum repents in the end and sees the error of his ways, or not. I’m in the second camp. This would reek of convention the movie thus far completely avoided. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When it becomes apparent that Minosa will not survive the rescue operation, Tatum is in a jam. After all, as he said, when you sell people a human interest story you must sell them the happy ending too. There is utter self-disgust, guilt and shame in Tatum’s face when he tells the crowd about Leo’s death. That is completely believable. It would be hard to believe he wouldn’t feel anything after Leo’s death. I can’t see the leopard change his spots though. Back in his room Tatum calls his boss in NY. Maybe for the first time ever he wants to tell the truth. That he and Sheriff Kretzer “murdered” Leo with their callousness. This is the last, the only story he has left. He must tell it. It would be a Tatum exclusive. But nobody wants to hear the truth!</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaBKTqU6KseNN3iNXUxZg9SnQzn20U0qe0exwQ6JhAAz09s6lBPay85yg1p4Lgi7q5V7wh10nVMqtOfRi7s08MIowjuLwagyG4K2mYe_IOlKRbC-Ad-Aghw391_9Cj1Dns8IiHYsxCmWo/s1600/Ace21.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1168" data-original-width="1600" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaBKTqU6KseNN3iNXUxZg9SnQzn20U0qe0exwQ6JhAAz09s6lBPay85yg1p4Lgi7q5V7wh10nVMqtOfRi7s08MIowjuLwagyG4K2mYe_IOlKRbC-Ad-Aghw391_9Cj1Dns8IiHYsxCmWo/s320/Ace21.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Tatum ends up back in the offices of the <i>Sun Bulletin</i> right where he started. He collapses dead to the floor, in one of the best cinematic death scenes I have ever seen. His grand schemes failed, he isn’t even worth $50 anymore. We can have him for nothing now because that’s all he has left.</span></div>
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It’s interesting to note that neither Lorraine nor Sheriff Kretzner pay for their sins. They just go their way and are likely better off than they were before.<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Leo’s death is already yesterday’s news. Without fanfare the county fair is over and the crowds go home. Only garbage remains behind. (Symbolism alert again!)</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Wilder’s cynical vision and message survive unsoftened even if Tatum felt some kind of remorse before he died. Wilder simply did what the little embroidered homily said: he told the truth, the way he saw it. And the truth is at least 50 shades of black.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-31506284200221692742018-07-24T13:17:00.002-07:002018-08-07T14:17:10.198-07:00Nora Prentiss (1947)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT83SpzxsgqHzME2gY08Rp8KAmIrsuOmLYvwgr8zHwJVxeLC0gfPG6G4JqX57SIfDO0C-AF3-5GQybfTOQEWSmSILn4awOATodmT7xnrdGnK-ChDY47DZg1vdNA-FaxBBCQ8mH7pQOYOQ/s1600/Nora.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT83SpzxsgqHzME2gY08Rp8KAmIrsuOmLYvwgr8zHwJVxeLC0gfPG6G4JqX57SIfDO0C-AF3-5GQybfTOQEWSmSILn4awOATodmT7xnrdGnK-ChDY47DZg1vdNA-FaxBBCQ8mH7pQOYOQ/s320/Nora.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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Doctor Talbot was a respected member of the community<br />
He lived in the same house on the same street<br />
Year after year<br />
Every one admired him, looked up to him<br />
But then something happened, he did something</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Directed by Vincent Sherman for Warner Bros., <b>Nora Prentiss</b> gets slapped with the dreaded woman’s picture label on a regular basis. As Sherman proved with other movies such as<i> The Damned Don’t Cry </i>and <i>Old Acquaintance</i>, this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Nora Prentiss</b> is a hybrid movie with two distinctly different parts. In the first half it’s a love story/melodrama with soap so sudsy we may be afraid to drown in the bathtub. Had it stayed this path, the entire movie could easily have turned into a weepie deluxe but thankfully it is spared this fate in the second half. After the one hour mark the movie finally takes a nosedive into Noir territory.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The best thing about <b>Nora Prentiss</b> is undoubtedly Ann Sheridan, the Oomph Girl. It was a moniker she reportedly despised but I don’t see the reason for this. Nothing wrong with a bit of oomph - or lots of it - especially when Sheridan could back it up with some acting skills on top of that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The tale of a doctor whose obsession with a nightclub singer destroys his life plays out via flashback. The film opens with a criminal in jail waiting for trial. We don't see his face and he refuses to answer questions, but we hear him thinking about the charges as he recounts his story. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Plot absurdities abound, the film is riddled with chunks of implausibilities the size of a meteor. That in itself doesn’t bother me at all. I have selective vision that can easily ignore these bumps in the road. The fundamental problem is that the picture is hampered by a 111 minute run time. The pace lags like a clueless party guest who has overstayed his welcome. The elements for a crackerjack Noir are all there, they’re just buried in a script that needed tightening up badly. 90 minutes would have been sufficient. This criticism aside the film has a lot to recommend it though it is never as engaging as it could be.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oomph</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Dangerous liaisons have a tendency to go bad occasionally but it would be hard to top this utter disaster. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Stuffy and uptight San Francisco Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith) is a man who seems to have it all. A good job, the perfect picket fence house, the perfect wife and two perfect kids. About his wife there is an air of mildewy respectability and perpetual reproach. She insists on a firmly regimented home life and Talbot is supposed to conduct himself properly, always. He is painfully precise in everything he does. He has a pencil-thin mustache and even that is painfully precise. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He meets beautiful nightclub singer Nora Prentiss (Ann Sheridan) one evening when she is slightly hurt in a car accident outside his office. He treats her in his practice - after hours. From that moment on his life will never be the same. “After hours” becomes a habit. She does something to him and his stale life. Soon his infatuation with Nora turns to full-blown obsession. Talbot intends to ask his wife for a divorce but Fate steps in. A patient dies of a heart attack in his office. Talbot sees his chance to start a new life. He fakes his own death by putting the corpse in his car, setting it on fire and driving it over a cliff. Being officially dead now Talbot can start a new life under a new name. All is fair in love and Noir. Talbot hightails it to New York with Nora telling her nothing except that he’s waiting for his divorce to go through. Talbot should have watched more Noirs. Then he may have been aware of the fact that life has a way of throwing a monkey wrench into the best-laid plans…</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Nora Prentiss </b>is an atypical Noir because<b> </b>Nora isn't your typical femme fatale. She is without a doubt introduced as such in the doctor’s office. Nora isn’t hurt too badly, she’s fine and starts to flirt provocatively with the good doctor the second she enters his office, lighting a cigarette, rolling down her stockings, showing off her legs and giving him come-hither looks. Her bare legs unnerve him greatly which amuses her </span>to no end<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">. One thing is certain, Nora is an alien life form Talbot has never encountered before. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If this were a typical Noir we’d know exactly how this setup would play out. Nora would be a voracious man-eater who’d plot the downfall of the poor sap. But this movie doesn’t play by the book. Our assumptions about Nora’s character are completely off. It soon becomes clear that Nora is not a lethal lovely. A nightclub singer - what else? - she’s been kicked around her entire life and has had enough of it. She’s a sassy and wise-cracking dame whose knowledge of the world has come at a high price. She may be a dame with a slightly dubious past but as she states with righteous indignation: “I may not have been handled with care, but I’m not shopworn.” We believe her. This is not a girl who’s been </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">diligently working her way to the top one sugar daddy at a time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Nora’s character is refreshingly different and surprises the viewer. Her tough dame attitude doesn't give any clue that she really has a heart of gold. There’s more to her than wisecracks. She’s actually kind and not interested in wrecking a man’s life. She’s looking for a ring on the finger. Talbot is different from all the other guys she meets - he’s shy for once and treats her nicely - and she truly falls in love with him. She has principles too. When Talbot doesn’t want to divorce his wife, she’s willing to break the affair off and leave town for a new start.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">She knows how affairs usually play out</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">. Being the other woman is always a raw deal that comes to nothing in the end, at least for the other woman.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">What she unfortunately doesn’t see is that there is already a nice guy waiting in the wings for her, her boss and Talbot's romantic rival Phil Dinardo (Robert </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Alda). He’s another character who has more depth to him than originally indicated. He’s not Noir’s typical shifty nightclub owner with likely Mob connections, he’s sincere in his love for Nora and turns out a steadfast and loyal friend to her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Nora is a lonely woman whose rosy dreams of stardom in the big city didn’t pan out. Now she’s stuck in a concrete jungle that is indifferent to the plight of its inhabitants. The line ”It's a big city and there's nobody to know whether you're alive or dead, and very few people who care" is spoken by doomed heart patient Bailey. It’ll prove true for him and everybody else. Faceless anonymity and hostile isolation characterize the urban jungle. Crowds of people can </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">barely hide the loneliness of the city dwellers. The jungle simply swallows them all up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Though the movie is called<b> Nora Prentiss</b>, it is actually Dr. Talbot who is the main protagonist. This is his story. If Nora rejects the femme fatale label, Talbot behaves absolutely true to type. If ever a sucker went down Loser’s Lane, it’s Talbot. Nora’s flirting should have been Talbot’s cue to get her out of his practice. But in Noir warning signs go unheeded, red flags are there to be ignored. When trouble comes knocking at the door, the Noir hero embraces it whole-heartedly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Talbot is a sap who loses everything over an obsession with a woman. He’s a man with a debilitating midlife crisis from which there is no way out. He wants to give up everything to be with Nora and not surprisingly, giving up everything leaves him with nothing in the end. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s just one problem. The movie suffers from a dire </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">lack of a strong lead. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Dull-as-dishwater Kent Smith is just as damnably dull as his name implies. He is by no means a bad or incompetent actor - in fact he’s anything but - he simply lacks screen presence and charisma which makes the heated romance between him and Nora </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">feel more like a lukewarm glass of milk before bedtime.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A different actor could have elevated this role to something more. Smith can’t make the movie his own. As a romantic hero he doesn’t cut it. It’s very hard to see what a girl like Nora would see in this guy. Yes, opposites attract but that’s a lot of opposite here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Nora Prentiss</b> shows us the dangers of routine. Talbot leads a mind-numbingly boring and monotonous existence. His daily schedule never varies. Nora says she sets her clock by his comings and goings. For about 16 years he’s shown up for work at his doctor’s office at 9 am in the morning, treats his patients and then heads home at six o'clock to a suburban dream, or nightmare. In the bit of free time he has, he visits the same friends and has to listen to his killjoy of a wife Lucy berating him for being five minutes late for breakfast. Lucy is the type of wife that’s simply itching to be cheated on. Only once do we see a different woman beneath the facade. Lucy covers up for Richard who completely forgot his daughter’s 16th birthday because he was out carousing with Nora. There must have been a time when Lucy was not the regimental drill sergeant. Unfortunately that time is long gone.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">A theme we find in many Noirs is that </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">domesticity leads to restlessness and dissatisfaction. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">The amour fou </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">is set in direct contrast to the domestic life, aka marriage, which is portrayed as so stultifying and repressive that even crime looks attractive to those trapped in it. The state of marriage in Noir often seems absolutely horrific; at best a kind of stupefied boredom, at worst a seething, barely controlled mutual loathing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Until Fate steps in. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">It’s a</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> moment that occurs in Noir with startling regularity. A guy meets an attractive woman by chance or fate and his life goes down the drain. The second Nora steps into his office, Talbot’s fate is practically sealed. A mild-mannered uptight guy like him is really no match for a tough dame. He would be easy pickings for any femme fatale.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It must be stressed however that his downfall comes not from her wiles but from Talbot's own bad decisions. Nora doesn’t need to wreck his home, he does that all by himself. He’s in self-destruct mode and it’s been a long time coming. The magnitude of his stupidity seems to know no bounds. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Once in NY with Nora, Talbot’s</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> behavior gets ever more erratic. He barely wants to venture out of his hotel room. He can’t run the risk of being recognized by former acquaintances. He becomes a paranoid recluse. He acts exactly like what he has become: a fugitive from justice. On top of that, he’s increasingly jealous and unjustly suspects Nora of cheating on him with Phil Dinardo. Soaking himself in booze, unshaven and unkempt he looks like a wild man. He’s on the road to nowhere, he just hasn’t taken it in yet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The hotel room scenes have an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. Talbot is literally and figuratively closed in. He’s entrapped by his crime, his lies and his suspicions. A prisoner of his own bad choices. At this time it’s very hard to feel any kind of sympathy with Talbot. He gets himself into the muck deeper and deeper for purely selfish reasons.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s an interesting<b> </b>doppelgänger motive going on. The first time at Nora’s nightclub Talbot doesn’t use his real name but goes by the alias of "Robert Thompson” instead. Talbot can make himself believe that it’s not the good doctor who’s going off the straight and narrow but a different man - an alter ego - who has nothing to do with Talbot. Later the death of his patient provides him with a completely new alternate identity. He literally buries the past to rise like Phoenix from the Ashes as a new man.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">A double - a dark alter ego - lurks just beneath the surface of the most ordinary individuals. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Righteous and stable paragons of duty and responsibility are seamlessly but believably transformed into completely different people,</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> all suggesting that anyone, in the right or wrong circumstances, was capable of almost anything (<i>Pushover, Decoy, Pitfall</i>). </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">In Noir having an upright character just means that the protagonist has never encountered temptation,</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><i> </i></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><i>the</i> temptation that would reveal how unreliable his noble principles were all along.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s interesting to note that Nora knows nothing of how far Talbot was willing to go to keep her. Nora finally makes him tell her why he acts so furtively. When he does she </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">decides to stay with him anyway. This is no love and run. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">She really cares for him, for whatever reason.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">His fingerprints are found on the can of gasoline which he used to set his car on fire. And those prints now belong to “Robert Thompson”, his alter ego, who has been arrested in NY for attacking Dinardo. Talbot is arrested and tried for his own murder! Talk about Poetic Injustice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The ending is what makes this film worthwhile to me even if it is bizarre and farfetched. Talbot stoically goes to trial and is sentenced to death never uttering a word in his defense. When Nora wants to speak up he insists that she keep quiet about his real identity. The last meeting between Nora and Talbot is a whopper. It is here that Smith really shines. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">Talbot tells Nora in prison: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">”I’m no good to possibly anybody…I could never prove my innocence. They would never believe me…Besides, I am guilty of killing a man. I killed Richard Talbot. ”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">We finally do feel sympathy with him. He knows he can't run away from himself. The past will always haunt him.</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> There simply couldn’t be a life for him after the trial even if he was acquitted. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">At last he thinks of his family again. He wants to spare them the disgrace of his crimes and let them - and the public - keep him in mind the way they knew him, as a kind and decent man. If he came back from the dead he would only ruin his family’s lives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I am not sure if the ending was Code-imposed but it is harsh even by Noir standards. Dying in the electric chair is Talbot’s punishment for his transgressions. Living with what has happened to her lover and not being able to speak up is Nora’s. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">It’s the stuff nightmares are made of. It is as Noir as it gets, bleak and devastating.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Nora: “You can’t ask me to go on living remembering I could have saved you and I didn’t."</span></blockquote>
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Talbot: “If I could die remembering that, you can live remembering it.”</blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 15px; text-align: justify;">Nora Prentiss is a diamond in the rough that could have been a real gem, had the producers cut about 20 minutes out of it.</span>Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-18804652967867180752018-07-03T10:29:00.000-07:002019-01-10T07:33:56.837-08:00Notorious (1946)<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Maddy over at <a href="https://maddylovesherclassicfilms.wordpress.com/"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(255, 165, 1); color: #ffa501;">Maddy Loves Her Classic Films </span></a>is hosting the Second Annual Alfred Hitchcock Blogathon on July 6 and 7, 2018. Here's my entry.</span></div>
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"Mother . . . I am married to an American agent”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s very hard to choose a favorite Hitchcock film - too many to choose from - but <b>Notorious</b> is certainly in my top 5. Hitchcock loved spy yarns and this one is filled with undercover spies, evil Nazis and a nuclear threat.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As in so many of his films Hitchcock used a MacGuffin to drive the plot along. MacGuffin was Hitchcock’s name for the story element that both the protagonists and the audience are concerned about though the nature of the item is incidental and of no direct plot relevance. It is a fabricated cause but nonetheless the reason everything happens. It could be a roll of microfilm, stolen documents, Hitler’s embalmed corpse…Here it turns out to be uranium and it’s at least somewhat of importance. <b>Notorious</b> was released within months of the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ultimately the MacGuffin though is nothing but a contrivance that allows a much more important story to play out. The espionage activities are a pretext for a twisted love story. Suspense and adventure merely provide the narrative backdrop for the question: Is love possible?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The jury is still debating whether <b>Notorious</b> is Noir or not. To me it is more a romantic spy intrigue with a little helping of Noir on the side. The film has some Noir elements, but the parts don't add up to full-fledged Noir. It has a femme fatale but one who accepts her assignment rather unwillingly. It has a sense of entrapment and alienation and the occasional Noir visual, but also a happy ending. Hitchcock made at least three movies that could be called straightforward Noir before he literally washed classic Noir down the drain with <i>Psycho. </i>Why care about semantics when <b>Notorious</b> is one of Hitchcock’s most elegant, polished and sophisticated films, full of emotional and moral complexity. Hitchcock - the ultimate auteur - is simply his own genre.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Notorious</b> is that rare animal, the perfect film where you wouldn’t want to change a thing. This film has so many layers. It works perfectly on the surface as a suspenseful thriller, but pick up some stones and dig a little deeper and all kinds </span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">of kinky overtones, undertones and everything-in-between-tones may come out.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";"> </span>The notorious Mr. Hitchcock threw a wicked little arsenal of deliciously twisted issues at the audience, to this day with ardent fervor psycho-analyzed to death by those who seem to be in need of a good shrink themselves. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) - daughter of a convicted Nazi collaborator - is recruited by American agent Devlin (Cary Grant) and his boss Prescott (Louis Calhern) to infiltrate a circle of her father’s Nazi friends now living in South America. The spy ring is led by Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) who once loved Alicia and is still carrying a torch for her. Alicia’s well-known and notorious reputation for drinking, partying and apparent promiscuity would seem to make her the perfect pawn for this Mata Hari assignment. Alicia, though in love with Devlin, accepts and succeeds admiringly. She soon becomes Mrs. Sebastian. Her new husband however finds her out and his coldly calculating mother suggests poisoning Alicia slowly. She knows that it is of the utmost importance that Alicia’s death appear natural so as not to attract the attention of their Nazi cronies who’d be simply overjoyed to find out that one of their own slipped up and married an American spy. It wouldn’t bode well for their long-term health. The Boys from Brazil don’t mess around with people who fall off the wagon as one of their own, poor Emil Hupka, had to find out to his detriment when he couldn’t keep the vintages of some wine labels straight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Notorious </b>is the anatomy of a love affair. Sexy, cynical and smoldering with a frank eroticism that burns up the screen, the affair is painstakingly dissected by the director for the audience’s pleasure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Who says Hitch couldn’t do romance? Sure, the romance has a faintly perverse tinge to it but then it’s Hitchcock. The story doesn’t whitewash the darker aspects of love. No doubt there is something distinctly sado-masochistic about it. Only two people who love each other so madly could hurt each other so deeply. The French title of the film is <i>Les enchaînés </i>(The Chained Ones) which hits the nail on the head.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is an adult romance. Grant is a rather dark and cold romantic hero and Bergman a neurotic boozy playgirl. The bastard and the whore. The joys of young love…ain’t they grand?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Notorious</b> is crammed with risqué sexual innuendo aplenty, of course handled with sly subtlety to get around the pesky Production Code. There is nothing coy or bashful in Hitchcock’s dealings with sex. It’s at the same time hidden and blatantly out in the open. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s enough sizzling chemistry between the two leads to blow up a small country. The relationship between Alicia and Devlin carries an enormous erotic charge from the outset. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The film boasts one of the most famous and longest kissing scenes in movie history </span><span style="color: black; font-kerning: none;"></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">that must have got the PCA all lathered up.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";"> </span>It made a mockery of the Production Code which forbade a kiss lasting longer than three seconds. So Hitchcock had Bergman and Grant alternate kissing with dialogue while never leaving one another's arms. Kiss for two seconds, break, talk, nibble and start again, until Hitchcock had his three minutes of extensive and steamy smooching. Joe Breen must have been laid up with a head cold the day this movie passed the board of censors.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Some viewers bemoaned the fact that Alicia and Devlin fall in love out of the blue. That’s not true at all if we just pay attention. From the outset the movie is peppered with more or less subtle hints about their attraction. The look Devlin gives Alicia as she leans across him in the plane descending into Rio is hard to ignore.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hitchcock’s ideal woman had a hidden, not an in-your-face, sexuality. What intrigued Hitchcock was the hint of unbridled passion behind the cool facade, a pristine exterior that would mask startling depths of passion. In his own words he preferred “the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom”. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_z-__w-NwAI-62xeW9QFb8t3lXsMQdpEM3JaGoQ1EmAFtVE0oRc2b8_6iQtGcZfaZMQyNKLZQ5YCkRy5s0hYmqQe-vbTZcoYjs1Rra8dEbH_-P2NJUMYeqeGQTofbdXenYRx1Qz5aAsU/s1600/Notorious16.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="536" data-original-width="711" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_z-__w-NwAI-62xeW9QFb8t3lXsMQdpEM3JaGoQ1EmAFtVE0oRc2b8_6iQtGcZfaZMQyNKLZQ5YCkRy5s0hYmqQe-vbTZcoYjs1Rra8dEbH_-P2NJUMYeqeGQTofbdXenYRx1Qz5aAsU/s320/Notorious16.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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The choice of Ingrid Bergman for the role was inspired. Obviously, In contrast to his later heroines, Bergman is not a cool blond but a warm brunette. It is of no importance. What is crucial is that she fits the type perfectly. She’s at the same time sensuous, provocative, demure, fragile, vulnerable and oddly innocent. <span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There was always something angelic about Bergman, no matter if she was playing saints or sinners, virgins or whores. She does a good job of arousing the noble and the carnal at the same time. We simply know Alicia is a good person and sincere in her love for Devlin, not because she is Alicia Huberman but because she’s Ingrid, the Divine. Bergman’s aura is the reason why the setup works. Even if Alicia is as pure as the driven, one feels oddly crude calling her a dame. Hitchcock came up with a great variation on the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold theme.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Whatever we want to call Alicia - perpetually sloshed good-time girl, lady of easy virtue and ill repute, tramp - it’s perfectly clear to herself that she lost that “heart full of daisies and buttercups” a long time ago.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy she’s wrecked with guilt and she punishes herself for her father’s transgressions. “When I found out about him, I just went to pot. I didn’t care what happened to me.” She is full of self-loathing and so in a self-destructive move she tries to drown her sorrows in a haze of booze and bitterness. Everything looks better through the bottom of a whisky glass. On top of that she chooses her bed mates indiscriminately and is looking for kicks in all the wrong places.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Her tainted moral reputation has her looked upon with distaste and distrust by her spy masters but nevertheless makes her an incredibly useful tool for them. A woman like her wouldn’t mind being the honeytrap for a Nazi. Men fall in love with her left and right, the list of her conquests is long so why not one more? The Intelligence Agency who wants to recruit her (unnamed but presumably the OSS) comes off as callously opportunistic. They may be on the sight of right, but their morality is elastic and they have no scruples sending an untrained civilian into the line of fire. They look down on Alicia’s promiscuity while exploiting it at the same time. She’s the very definition of collateral damage. If she lives or dies is none of their concern.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7sMg5gf2mLZWst8M6TqxEOa2fHXn55A9VCxH7hv6wzSI571hHw4QPwUo6_0bU0yYnQvQzqgHjR_HpuYywK1tqeyBRYj1KBZc8wq-S9qZce1kzkB4I57dVxCNTPHBpo9NF8B_u5J1TDhQ/s1600/Notorious7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="620" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7sMg5gf2mLZWst8M6TqxEOa2fHXn55A9VCxH7hv6wzSI571hHw4QPwUo6_0bU0yYnQvQzqgHjR_HpuYywK1tqeyBRYj1KBZc8wq-S9qZce1kzkB4I57dVxCNTPHBpo9NF8B_u5J1TDhQ/s320/Notorious7.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hitchcock giving us all the angles</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Alicia plays along though she is a very reluctant femme fatale. She doesn’t relish her assignment but is willing to go above and beyond the call of duty and sleep with a Nazi to purge the guilt she feels on behalf of her Nazi father. Her desire to clear her name and her reputation is great. Prostituting herself is her chance at redemption.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Alicia is simply deeply lonely and insecure. And - most importantly - she’s fallen in love with Devlin. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cary Grant’s introduction is wonderfully staged. He’s a gate-crasher at one of Alicia’s wild parties and at first we don’t see his face, we only see the back of his head while he sits in his chair, stoically watching. He’s a man in the shadows. T.R. Devlin, international man of mystery. His intentions and motivations are yet in the dark.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In a stroke of brilliance, Hitchcock subverted Grant’s romantic nice-guy on-screen persona - as he had done before in <i>Suspicion. </i>He saw a darkness beneath the handsome facade. Even the name, Devlin, suggests devil. Devlin mixes a big dose of cold ruthlessness with an even bigger dose of lethal charm and sex appeal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Devlin has fallen for Alicia too but doesn’t quite trust her because of her notorious reputation. He’s willing to give it a try though when his superiors drop the bomb. Alicia is to seduce Sebastian. Devlin’s boss Prescott kept the true nature of Alicia’s assignment from Devlin who’s shocked. So is Alicia when she receives the news of her proposed mission: “Do you want me to take the job?” she asks anxiously. For Devlin it’s a love test. He refuses to respond frankly. Devlin wants Alicia to say no to the job because it would mean she loves him though at the same time she’d pass up the chance to right a wrong. If she says yes to the mission, she’s a patriot but she’d still be the old Alicia who’ll never change her ways. “Once a tramp, always a tramp”. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Alicia wants Devlin to forbid her to even think about prostituting herself, explicitly telling his superiors so. Something grand along the lines of: </span></div>
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“How dare you gentlemen suggest that Alicia Huberman, the new Miss Huberman, be submitted to so ugly a fate”.</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Alicia considers herself reborn through love - not without some irony.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Devlin doesn’t speak up he pushes her into sleeping with the enemy. He derides her for her loose morals though he basically threw her to the wolfs. He hates himself for loving a promiscuous lush as Alicia clearly sees: </span></div>
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“You're sore because you've fallen for a little drunk you tamed in Miami and you don't like it…in love with someone who isn't worth even wasting the words on."</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">One is reminded of Groucho Marx who refused to join a club that would have him as a member. Devlin simply cannot allow himself to show his vulnerably - not altogether unjustifiably.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpVbrKz00VKIYYoS1rZSMfVY6WE455N6nmeUkggOdr373ukTNsGa4J_71e7_R2h6jDG3DT34fkhNHJ0P5kYEJZ6zLzPoT-DdRzsSlPgEiciaHWkAQtmLYoSMVPQDrw5YFCAlpfSGJhVAs/s1600/Notorious6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" data-original-height="456" data-original-width="620" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpVbrKz00VKIYYoS1rZSMfVY6WE455N6nmeUkggOdr373ukTNsGa4J_71e7_R2h6jDG3DT34fkhNHJ0P5kYEJZ6zLzPoT-DdRzsSlPgEiciaHWkAQtmLYoSMVPQDrw5YFCAlpfSGJhVAs/s320/Notorious6.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">To get back at him Alicia throws her love affair with Sebastian in his face. “You can add Sebastian to my list of playmates”. In times of crisis she does what she always does, hit the bottle. Their relationship crashes and burns, at least for a while.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The audience is never in doubt that both are sincere in their feelings, but this is Hitch showing the bomb on the bus without letting any of the passengers know about it. The couple’s love story would fall now under the heading of “it’s complicated”. They have more issues than a newsstand. A good smack on the head would do both of them a world of good. Maybe somebody should have paged Dr. Constance Petersen to stage an intervention.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hitchcock almost hits us over the head with the main theme of this movie, distrust and betrayal. Devlin feels betrayed by Alicia. Alicia feels betrayed by Devlin and by her father. Sebastian is betrayed by Alicia, Sebastian’s mother believes that Alicia has betrayed her Nazi father by refusing to testify on his behalf and she feels betrayed by her son's marriage to Alicia.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Spelled out like this it all sounds like a silly over-baked Victorian melodrama with ludicrous plot contrivances. Thankfully the picture elegantly transcends those pitfalls and that has to do with a first class cast who play with great subtlety and understatement. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">Alicia Huberman is one of Bergman’s best and most sensual roles and she runs with it. She is believably trampy, loving, patriotic, frightened and grows throughout the movie.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hitchcock saw female vulnerability as a powerful dramatic device and liked to place his heroines into situations of great danger. He’s right, it works like magic every time. <b>Notorious</b> is The Perils of Alicia. Hitchcock is so often glibly called “mysogenistic”, a criticism I find as stale as ten day old bread. It is simply a dogmatic knee-jerk reaction of people who see everything through the lens of their own ideological framework and are incapable of digging a little deeper because that would require some independent thought. Hitchcock was much more nuanced and broad-minded than this.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh54Su98sVuvs5lathXEKasRy325VHkltCH_umyfpskwjZ_Oc7eaIZV9ZY81Xkw9mJSyhUt6fOUVkT5uDHOnXDC_5Gr4xy3q__bYULMTgIwIn6FJ_h8WlZj6eItMBK6xdII7j7UsHLdZZ8/s1600/Notorious5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" data-original-height="356" data-original-width="644" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh54Su98sVuvs5lathXEKasRy325VHkltCH_umyfpskwjZ_Oc7eaIZV9ZY81Xkw9mJSyhUt6fOUVkT5uDHOnXDC_5Gr4xy3q__bYULMTgIwIn6FJ_h8WlZj6eItMBK6xdII7j7UsHLdZZ8/s320/Notorious5.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Notorious</b> - and thus Hitchcock - take a remarkably compassionate and nonjudgmental view of Alicia’s predicament. The Lady may be a tramp but she also risks her life for her country as Devlin points out and a checkered past doesn’t change that. Not once does the audience feel compelled to condemn her for what she has to do. The depiction of her suffering is entirely devoid of disrespect. Instead it generates sympathy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hitchcock gives us a heroine who blatantly sleeps with a man she despises in order to win the love of another man. And for Hitchcock it’s alright.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As John Fawell in his essay <i>Torturing Women and Mocking Men: Hitchcock's Rear Window</i> writes, there is a "tendency in Hitchcock's films to be deeply empathic to women and often hostile to the men and critical of their treatment of women”. We’d simply like to give Devlin a kick for being such an oaf.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Devlin’s superiors call </span>Alicia’s character <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">into question Hitchcock, through Devlin, calls into question theirs: </span></div>
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“Miss Huberman is first, last, and always not a lady. She may be risking her life, but when it comes to being a lady, she doesn’t hold a candle to your wife, sitting in Washington, playing bridge with three other ladies of great honor and virtue.”</blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the end, Alicia does not have to pay for her “sins” because Hitchcock doesn’t need his heroine to be chaste, virginal and respectable. He can simply acknowledge her courage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The third wheel on the wagon of this love triangle is Claude Rains who oozed charm and savoir fair no matter what he was playing. He always added that undefinable touch of class to any movie he was in.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s interesting that Hitchcock - one year after the War - portrays the Nazi as gallant, kind and in love - at least in the beginning - and Devlin almost as the villain, cold and dismissive. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The audience feels sympathy with the devil because Rains gives his character a deep humanity. Sebastian is a condemned man because of his love for Alicia. Out of self-preservation he has to kill what he loves the most but then her betrayal cut him to the quick.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Unfortunately he is also dominated by his mother. It cannot be ignored that Sebastian, when things don't work out, seeks counsel in his mother’s bedroom.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1qUe6iT66E2DfIy07X7IkPEgoPd7R-ZcRHO9gFoDlh3lz5_t0eDBMamK0aOiIgcEr6Mcs63jv3tEIYu7ivX-OJXofdQ1enhHmgynh_8uwepYP3-mo3ClpWuaMdO09gYT4IIirhJNVBnk/s1600/Notorious20.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1203" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1qUe6iT66E2DfIy07X7IkPEgoPd7R-ZcRHO9gFoDlh3lz5_t0eDBMamK0aOiIgcEr6Mcs63jv3tEIYu7ivX-OJXofdQ1enhHmgynh_8uwepYP3-mo3ClpWuaMdO09gYT4IIirhJNVBnk/s320/Notorious20.png" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">A special mention has to go to Madame Konstantin for her brilliant portrayal<b> </b>as Sebastian’s mother. She’s the Wicked Witch of the West, the Mother from Hell. It is a twisted unhealthy quasi-incestuous bond that binds them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The mother-dominated son was one of Hitchcock’s favorite themes and seems to have been drawn from his own life as Hitchcock had ambivalent feelings about his own mother. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Behind the scenes Madame Sebastian pulls the strings in the house. It is interesting to note that it is her who holds the keys to every room in the house. This right should belong to the wife. Unobtrusively, she always sits by, completely undisturbed by any feelings, forever doing needlepoint. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Like a spider in her web, weaving a web of lies and deceit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She is a vulture, a monster who eats her young, if only figuratively. She hates Alicia from the first. “You’ve always been jealous of any woman I’ve shown any interest in” says her son who’s still tied to her apron strings. Norman Bates could have told her that a son is a poor substitute for a lover. With the demure hairstyle of a milkmaid, the look and demeanor of an Iron Maiden and a decidedly clammy charm she is in a league of her own when it comes to creepy. She is a portrait of selfless devotion…etched in acid. When she say encouragingly to her son after she's found out Alicia is a spy: “We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity, for a time” it gives the audience a warm and fuzzy feeling. With a mother like her Sebastian doesn’t need enemies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Presumably only once her son rebelled against her dominance by marrying Alicia. Mama isn’t happy. She suspects Alicia of infidelity though not of spying. But Sebastian comes running right back to Mama when things go south. In robe and slippers he goes to his mother’s bedroom to confess with utter dejection: “I need your help”. His entire crushing defeat is in that one line. Mother triumphs again. She was right about Alicia. Absolutely imperturbable she reaches for her cigarette case, takes one out and lets it dangle loosely between her lips. It is a moment of utter crassness and vulgarity, in stark contrast to the airs she gives herself when around people. It sums up her character with just one stroke. With chilling ruthlessness she decrees that Alicia must die, slowly by poison. Sebastian agrees. Her son has come to his senses and transferred his devotion back to Mother. He has finally come back to her, back to where he belongs…under her thumb.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Literally in the last second Devlin comes to the rescue of his damsel. After their fight he thought for a while that Alicia had relapsed into alcoholism again, but he realizes that Alicia was sick, not drunk and makes his way to her room where he finds her drugged and almost unconscious in her bed. Slowly descending the grand staircase toward freedom, Sebastian and his mother are powerless to stop them. They cannot give themselves away. Devlin gets Alicia out of the house into the car while Sebastian desperately tries to appease his conspirators. He then begs Devlin take him with them. But Devlin has locked the car door. Interestingly enough, Sebastian is perfectly happy in that moment to throw his Mother under the bus by leaving her behind with his partners. Sebastian’s crony Eric, finding holes in Sebastian’s explanation that Alicia is off to the hospital, knows that something is wrong. Sternly he calls him back: “Alex, will you come in, please? I wish to talk to you.” Such an innocent sentence imbued with such chilling menace. Sebastian has no other choice than to go back in, knowing full well he will never come out alive. He has nowhere to go and, with a terrible finality, closes the door behind himself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Love can be a poison - for Sebastian it means doom - or the antidote. Devlin saying “I love you” to Alicia gives her the strength in the end to get out of the mansion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For Devlin and Alicia redemption is possible. For Hitchcock - always the romantic - love does conquer all. </span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-43408302510041270212018-06-08T12:31:00.002-07:002019-03-18T17:32:54.882-07:00Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">“Always remember: Don't be a sucker.” Rocky Sullivan</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I thought I’d take a time out from gloomy and depressing Noirs where everybody dies in the end to write about something more upbeat and uplifting. Why not a gangster movie? ... Oh wait. Seems I just can’t stay away from gloomy and depressing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Directed by Michael Curtiz for Warner Bros., <b>Angels with Dirty Faces</b> is tough gangster film that doesn’t neglect social issues of the day. In typical Warner Bros. fashion the picture wasn’t just entertainment, it tried to convey a message as well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As every filmmaker knew it wasn’t easy to put social commentary into films while Joe Breen was looking over your shoulder. Yet, whilst trying to appease the PCA director Michael Curtiz managed to get his message across. And though the Production Code required a moral ending for once it was not a handicap that drove the movie off the cliff in the last act.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Angels </b>benefits from layers and ambiguity as any good movie does. Characters, motivations and issues are not at all clear-cut and many scenes in the movie are up to interpretation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The 1930s was a time of great change for American society. In 1929, the bottom fell out of the global economy and the Wall Street Crash ushered in the Great Depression. It bankrupted thousands of people, prompting mass unemployment and years of hardship. Formerly prosperous citizens were plunged into lives of poverty and despair. People began to realize that the ideal of The American Dream was perhaps not as realistic as they had once been led to believe. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">On top of that the 18th Amendment kicked off one of the most harebrained moral crusades in human history, Prohibition (1920-1933). It was supposed to eliminate drunkenness, crime and other social evils but not surprisingly it backfired spectacularly. The very law whose aim was to enforce morality upon society would in essence to do the very opposite. It turned ordinary people into law-breakers and encouraged more people to drink than ever. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But more than anything people became cynical not only of an inept Government that did nothing to alleviate people’s hardship but of any kind of authority. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Desperate times called for desperate measures. A new type of hero was emerging. Gangsters became the ultimate rebels who refused to accept Depression-imposed deprivations. Obstacles placed in their way they just blasted to bits with rapid machine gun fire. They elbowed their way to the top using the allied rackets of bootlegging, gambling and prostitution. Gangsters were the ultimate self-made men and admiration for the self-made man is something embedded in the American psyche. Gangsters lived the American Dream. So what if their Dream was skewed because it was as pure as the driven, that was better than living in some dreary tenement with peeling plaster on $30 a week. Virtue - that was becoming increasingly clear - was not its own reward. Virtue’s reward was a miserable life in the slums.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is often taken for granted that Depression era audiences went to the movies to see escapist fare to distract them from their own hard existence. This is not entirely true. Despite MGM’s and Paramount’s best efforts to the contrary, a new mood of gritty realism surfaced in Hollywood that matched the grimness of the times. M</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">ost Depression films were grounded in the social realities of the day. It was important for </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">the common people to see that there were others out there struggling just as hard as they were. </span>Audiences loved seeing the gangster stick it to The Man.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Gangsters blazed their way into the cities and the movie theaters.<b> </b>Of course they found themselves in hot water with the censors practically from the start. By necessity the studios had to sell their product to the public as a morality tale to keep Joe Breen happy. But the allure and glamour of crime and lawlessness were barely hidden under a thin veneer of put-upon moral outrage in the shape of prefaces and disclaimers that didn’t sound too convincing. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Despite the purported moral message, the gangster’s life was shown in all its glory… as long as he dutifully breathed his last in a dirty gutter when the credits rolled. Maybe crime didn’t pay in the end, but until then the gangster had a damn good time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When the PCA finally started to crack down and strictly enforce the stipulations of the Production Code in June 1934, the gangster movie lost its bite and went into a sharp decline. It was hard for a self-respecting gangster out there if he had to fight the Production Code as well as other gangsters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Like <i>The Roaring Twenties</i>,<i> </i><b>Angels with Dirty Faces</b> is really a nostalgia piece. Released at the dawn of a new decade, this Post-Code movie came decidedly late to the party. Times were changing and the days of the gangster were numbered. Prohibition had long been repealed, the Depression was almost over and another war was looming on the horizon. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Angels with Dirty Faces</b> is Warner returning to its roots while at the same time doing penance for past transgressions. The “crime does not pay” homily in the beginning can be dispensed with, the movie drives that point home with a vengeance in the last scene.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As a true Warner movie, <b>Angels</b> doesn’t shy away from grittiness. The studio had always had a working-class aesthetic.<b> </b>The cramped and dirty reality of New York City’s slums comes to life vividly. Overcrowded tenements, laundry hanging out in the streets, people who obviously haven’t had a bath in weeks … this is what reality looked like even if artifice had to stand in for it. The movie is studio filmmaking at its best.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The story begins in the 1920s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, with two boyhood chums - angels with dirty faces - Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) and Jerry Connolly (Pat O’Brien) trying to break into a freight railroad car to steal some fountain pens. This prologue section not only establishes the bond between the two boys, but also the differences between them. Rocky is a born trouble maker. He’s the instigator of the robbery, he’s the one who already takes things that do not belong to him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The robbery goes wrong, Rocky is caught while Jerry escapes. Insisting on taking the rap, Rocky is sent to reformatory school and his life spirals out of control. He sinks deeper and deeper into a life of crime. For the next fifteen years he’s constantly in and out of the clink, making a name for himself as gangster. He then returns to his old neighborhood where he meets Jerry again who’s become a priest. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Rocky also still has a score to settle with former friend and crooked lawyer Frazier (Humphrey Bogart) who owes him 100G because once again Rocky took one for the team. Frazier tries to double-cross him, he even sends the hit squad after Rocky, but Rocky is too smart. He muscles his way into Frazier’s organization.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To no-one’s surprise Cagney is phenomenal in his role. It earned him an Oscar nomination. Rocky is at the same time cocky, brash, menacing, violent, funny and full of confidence and swagger. There was always an incredible intensity and vitality about Cagney and though he was a little guy, he seemed larger-than-life. Rocky loves the money, power and glamour the gangster lifestyle affords him. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A gang of local kids - the Dead End Kids - adopt Rocky as their mentor. They’re gangster wannabes with a bad case of hero-worship. The Dead End Kids were fairly big stars at the time but they are the only jarring note in an otherwise perfect film. Their antics are often too intrusive. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cagney charms the audience effortlessly. You simply can’t resist him. The guy is like a blunt force trauma to the head.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As opposed to Cagney’s other gangster portrayals, there is a core of humanity in Rocky Sullivan. He has redeeming qualities. We know this guy means business when we see him ruthlessly dealing with fellow gangsters but there’s another side to him. Rocky clearly has one weak spot - his care for others. He’s unwaveringly loyal to his childhood friend Jerry. He also shows tenderness in the brief romantic interludes with Ann Sheridan.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Rocky comes back to his old neighborhood after 15 years, it is as if the exiled has returned home. He’s looking for sanctuary and a place to belong, something he never had. It’s just that Rocky wants it both ways. He doesn’t want to leave his old life behind. Rocky wants to compartmentalize his life — on the one hand he wants to be friends with Father Jerry and support his ministry while on the other hand he’s loath to turn over a new leaf and give up the perks of his gangster life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The movie makes no bones about stating that once you’re in the mills of the judicial system, you won’t be able to catch a break ever again. Reform school didn’t reform Rocky, it just put him through the ringer and should have instead been called Prep School for Crimes and Other Misdemeanors. Once he’s out, Rocky embarks on a life of crime and graduates from petty larceny to manslaughter and racketeering pretty quickly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is Warner putting in their two cents in the nature vs. nurture debate, laying the blame for Rocky’s descent (or ascent) into crime squarely on poverty, social dysfunction and an ineffectual judicial system. "Society is to blame” is a very Depression-era view. We find it too in <i>The Public Enemy </i>and <i>Dead End </i>(again with the Dead End Kids) which clearly espoused none too subtly the thesis that the environment shapes a person’s character and is to be held responsible for any kind of antisocial behavior. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If this is 100% true is debatable. Rocky goes back to crime over and over again every time he gets released and it’s clearly not because of desperation. Between stints in prison he lives the high life because he loves it. We don’t see a man who desperately wants to go straight and is thwarted. Rocky is simply a career criminal who’s not cut out for civilian life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For Curtiz though there’s another crucial factor in a person’s life. Pure dumb luck. Or, from Father Jerry’s standpoint, there but for the Grace of God go I. Rocky and Jerry share a history and societal DNA, so how can they turn out so differently? Life dealt them both an equally lousy hand. In the film’s final line Father Jerry addresses exactly this point. </span></div>
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“All right, fellas… let’s go and say a prayer for a boy who couldn’t run as fast as I could.”</blockquote>
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It all boils down to one fact. By getting away Jerry was given the opportunity to right his wrongs while Rocky couldn’t run fast enough on the day it counted most and was put through the system which set him off on his course. The line between saint and sinner is a fine, and undoubtably, arbitrary one.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What would have happened had their roles been reversed? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Pat O’Brien has the rather thankless task of making moral uprightness at least marginally bearable. S</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">hining paragons of virtue can be hard to take but h</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">e acquits himself quite well. Of course he’s lacking the excitement of Rocky, but then again that is the point. The voice of righteousness is by necessity boring. His speechifying is occasionally heavy-handed though he keeps it just this side of too patronizing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Jerry still has enormous affection for his old friend, but he also has no illusions about him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Jerry knows he’s nowhere near as compelling to the kids as Rocky. “Whatever I teach them, you show me up. You show them the easiest way is with a racket or a gun.” He warns Rocky that he won’t let these angels with dirty faces get corrupted by crime. So far their dirtiness is only on the surface, the grime still can be washed away. An all-out media crusade to stop Rocky and other assorted riffraff is Jerry’s idea of fighting back but when has preaching ever helped?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ann Sheridan plays Cagney’s love interest but her character is underdeveloped as her role was supposed to be much bigger initially. It is interesting to note though that before Rocky comes back Laury was married to a crook who met his end in a shoot-out with the cops. For a smart and nice girl, she sure knows how to pick ‘em.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The remarkably staged shootout near the end packs a punch, even today. It is fantastically filmed. Outnumbered and outgunned, Rocky makes his last stand against the entire police department in an old factory, bombarded by tear gas and machine gun fire. For the viewer it is very important to keep in mind that Rocky here is shown as a man who doesn’t know fear. He defiantly laughs in the face of danger. In most gangster movies this scene would have been the climax, and a good one it would have been too, with Rocky going out in a blaze of glory. Not so here. The movie bothers to go a little further.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Nobody who’s ever seen the ending<b> </b>will ever forget it. It is one of the best ever to come out of Hollywood and unparalleled in any gangster movie. Rocky is eventually captured, can’t beat the murder charges and is sentenced to the chair. Father Jerry goes to see him in prison and makes a desperate plea: Rocky has to pretend to “turn yellow” on the long march to the electric chair. He’s supposed to plead for mercy while he's dragged to the electric chair. If the kids know that Rocky died a coward, they will be disillusioned and may stop hero-worshipping him. Cagney incredulously refuses and wonders how his best friend can ask him to pretend to go out like a coward and throw away his reputation, his pride and his courage which is all that he has left. But Jerry wants Rocky to do the right thing for once in his life and show a different sort of courage. “The kind that only you and I and God know about. I want you to let them down. They’ve got to despise your memory.” Jerry knows he cannot save Rocky, but he may be able to save the angels with dirty faces. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Rocky starts off on his “last mile”, still unbowed and defiant to the last, even punching a guard. Then when he enters the chamber, Rocky breaks down. His blood-curdling, gut-wrenching screams when he’s dragged to the electric chair - supposedly refusing to die like a man - are truly horrifying.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The question if Rocky actually turns coward in his last minutes has been much discussed. It's pointless though as film historian Dana Polan points out in his DVD commentary. Just before Rocky enters the chamber we see a close-up of his face and there is nothing but grim and steely determination on it. That look signifies that the courage is still there at the end. After everything we’ve learned about Rocky, right up to the final moments before he enters the chamber, the logical conclusion can only be that he pleads for mercy only in response to Jerry’s request. Looking at his face, this is not a man who’s about to fall apart, this is a man who's finally doing the right thing. Rocky trades his reputation as a gangster for salvation - his own and the kids’. Talk about a sucker.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cagney famously said he played the scene ambiguously so the viewer could decide for himself. But that doesn’t wash.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For the film to work Rocky cannot turn coward in the end. Rocky needs to be redeemed and the only way this is possible is by giving Jerry his headline: "Rocky Dies Yellow.” Having him truly be a coward would invalidate everything Rocky stood for.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is one of the few times where the Production Code worked in the movie’s favor. It is incredibly subversive. Curtiz abided by the Code that evil must be punished, but Rocky was grand and heroic even in death. He kept his self-respect - even if only he and Jerry know it - AND he did the right thing. Curtiz had it both ways. The audience never feels that Rocky deserves his fate though the Code wants to make us believe it. We still love the guy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Curtiz also undercuts the principles of the Code when he lets Jerry take a path that should go against his clerical ethics. Jerry lies to the kids. For a priest this is still considered a sin, even if he did it for a good cause. But his reasons are still self-serving.</span></div>
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Even in death Rocky was larger than life and we all know guys like him don’t die, they just go home.</div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-55590379275391519952018-05-29T12:36:00.002-07:002018-06-08T20:24:40.485-07:00The Amazing Mr. X (1948)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Made for humble Eagle Lion by the fairly obscure Bernard Vorhaus, <b>The Amazing Mr. X </b>is also known under the more apt but rather generic title <i>The Spiritualist. </i>The original title is schlocky,<i> </i>the cover art even more so. But don’t let that fool you. Despite these shortcomings the movie is a tad more sophisticated than we may expect.<i> </i><b>The Amazing Mr. X</b> is a unique and slightly loony hybrid of genres. Though it starts like a horror movie, the picture’s dynamic changes pretty quickly. It is in fact part Gothic, part horror, part Noir, part fantastic thriller and part cynical reflection on the gullibility of desperate people. The movie can’t be pigeonholed but these mismatched elements come together amazingly well. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For the longest time only available as a mediocre quasi-bootleg copy, the film has finally been rescued from public domain hell by Columbia and given the full restoration treatment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Whatever we choose to call it, I found the film utterly haunting. Some reviewers called it a turkey but I don’t see the reason for it. It all comes together beautifully. No doubt it’s occasionally over-baked and feverish, and there’s a few implausible chunks of plot for the viewer to either swallow or choke on. But those are features not flaws. There is something beautifully sorrowful and melancholy about it, in no small measure helped by Alexander Laszlo’s lush score, with support by two of Chopin’s soulful Nocturnes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What puts this movie heads and shoulders above other B movies of its kind (e.g. <i>The Inner Sanctum</i> Series) is the moody atmosphere created by cinematographer John Alton who was<b> </b>hired to add a touch of class and magic to the proceedings. Alton was the master of shadows, darkness and gloomy nights </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">where the headlights could hardly reach beyond the end of a cigarette butt.<b> </b></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">He imbues the film with a misty and unearthly glow, making the most of the seaside setting. The wild water of the ocean, the relentless crashing waves, windswept beaches and the hazy moonlight steep the movie in a dreamy aura filled with haunting images and a phantasmal mood that mirror the torrent of emotions experienced by those who can’t let go of the past because the dead still have a claim upon them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The movie has some lovely little unexpected touches here and there. A tip of the hat has to go to private eye Hoffman<b> </b>(Harry B. Mendoza) who's not your run-of-the-mill PI. The actor who played Hoffman was actually a real magician and he makes good use of his sleight of hand abilities in the film. He knows the tricks of the trade and has made it his mission in life to expose phony psychics. Hoffman is always looking for someone’s card up the sleeve. When he begins to produce an endless stream of cigars while keeping up an effortless conversation, it’s a little gem. Hoffman is just a bit part, but it adds so much to the film.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We also get a little nod to Edgar Allan Poe in the shape of a cool little black Raven (who may be a crow) who is very attached to his master Alexis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Christine Faber (Lynn Bari), a young widow, lost her husband Paul two years ago in a car accident. She lives in a seaside cliff-top mansion and one night starts to hear voices in the dark. It is as if the sea outside her window is calling her name. Christine believes her husband is attempting to communicate with her from beyond the grave. She is rattled and goes for a stroll on the beach where she runs into a dark, suave and debonair stranger, self-professed medium Alexis (Turhan Bey). He convinces her that he can communicate with Paul’s spirit though her new finance Martin (Richard Carlson) is more than skeptical. Soon Christine’s much younger sister Janet (Cathy O’Donnell) falls under Alexis’ spell and all of a sudden, Paul comes back from the dead. That’s something Alexis hasn’t counted on. It seems he has raised more spirits than he can command. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Turhan Bey - an actor previously unknown to me - is perfect as<b> </b>Alexis.<b> </b>He’s a sham spiritualist who targets desperate grief-stricken people - well-heeled of course - haunted by their memories of loved ones lost. He has the phony spook racket down to a science. At his residence, he has created a spellbinding setup of ghostly shenanigans. It resembles a carnival fun house with secret passageways, two-way mirrors, crystal balls, trap-door cabinets, strange projections, automatic doors and marvelous set decorations including a large image of a "third eye”. During his dramatic séances disembodied heads and hands fly around magically. Playing up the theatrical angle, Alexis seems to live in the metaphysical realm of shadows and spirits, far removed from earthly wants and desires.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Alexis’ clairvoyance stuns his clients. Somehow, mysteriously he knows about their background and is able to read and pinpoint their innermost thoughts, fears and dreams.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To Christine’s surprise and shock, he knows things a stranger could not possibly know, details about Paul’s death in a burning car and her new fiancé’s little idiosyncrasies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Alexis’ success is easy to explain. He’s a charming and charismatic charlatan with the carefully cultivated image of a mystic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He understands psychology 101 and knows how to push the right buttons. His strongest ally is his victims’ desperation and romanticism. He has a penetrating insight into the human psyche and and tells his clients exactly what they want to hear. A skilled magician can easily fool those who want to be fooled. Gullibility is a weakness easily preyed upon. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He doesn’t neglect the practical side though. He plants his accomplice Emily into his targets’ houses as a maid so she can feed him all the information he needs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s something of the Svengali about Alexis. He quite smartly wets people’s appetites and then leaves them dangling wanting to know more. "I cannot tell you how I know these things...but it hardly matters, does it? Since we're not going to meet again…”, he says to Christine. And she’s hooked.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is to Bey’s credit that his Alexis doesn’t end up as a one-note caricature. He’s a well-rounded character with more depth in him than even he thought possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Two years after Paul’s death, Christine is still shuttered in her grief and can’t let go of his memory. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Some reviewers have called her character a bit dim for falling so easily for a fraud, but for me she’s simply emotionally unbalanced and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She’s easily duped by Alexis’ apparent clairvoyance simply because she so desperately wants to believe that Paul is alive. Lynn Bari, so often the evil temptress, turns in a likable and sensitive performance as a woman who doesn’t know if she’s going crazy or being haunted by a ghost. </span><br />
<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is an exploration of the classic Noir theme of a person’s desperate desire to recover a lost past. The presence is too bleak a place for Christine. The past is where happiness lies, or so she thinks. It will turn out to be an impossible dream with bitter consequences.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Nowhere is the past’s controlling influence more evident than in Paul’s towering portrait that looms large in the living room. Life-sized portraits play a big role in many (Noir) films (most notably <i>Laura, Scarlet Street, The Lodger, The Two Mrs. Carrolls</i>) and there’s always something unsettling about them, especially when the subject in the picture is dead. These portraits are like ghosts from another time. They're a way for the dead to keep an eternal watch, and - more importantly - a hold over the living from the beyond. Their eyes follow us around, sometimes questioning, sometimes reproachful, sometimes daring but never ignored. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Paul’s portrait dominates the room, yet </span>Christine’s immortal beloved is not a soothing but a menacing presence. Paul’s gaze is fierce and gripping. When Christine accepts Martin’s engagement ring, Paul is literally there between them starring at them disapprovingly. Christine can’t let go of the past, and the portrait won’t let go of Christine.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_snvyND2LrcKMbdnpqBIzqr-b19salDsYl_pkIo6HtngxOobUW9lCr3Y20bP5C5MIHtZkzaaqS0EDfHUedWQLpFShy1ZYjm1mr5UZqODj1NXU2DfnOKVlNb5O-qzt9wayqFLyXWjAlQE/s1600/Amazing17.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1243" data-original-width="1600" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_snvyND2LrcKMbdnpqBIzqr-b19salDsYl_pkIo6HtngxOobUW9lCr3Y20bP5C5MIHtZkzaaqS0EDfHUedWQLpFShy1ZYjm1mr5UZqODj1NXU2DfnOKVlNb5O-qzt9wayqFLyXWjAlQE/s320/Amazing17.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Christine sister, Janet, is at first only too keen on exposing Alexis as a fraud and rescuing her sister from his clutches. But it’s not long until she falls under the smooth operator’s spell. He’s not above laying the smarmy charm on really thick. Her common sense goes right out of the window.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There is a case of serious sibling rivalry on display. Christine, the elder, basically brought her young sister up. There don’t seem to be any parents in the picture. Janet confesses when she was younger she was jealous of her older sister because every man was only paying attention to her. The short but very telling opening scene can easily be missed. The shadow of Janet advances on Christine's turned back, and in her hand is something that could be mistaken for a gun. It turns out to be a hairbrush, but it gives us a clue about their future relationship.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Alexis holds both both women in a thrall though in different ways, and their rivalry comes to a head when Janet falls for Alexis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">All seems to be going swimmingly for Alexis, nonetheless there’s one thing that didn’t figure in his plans. Paul didn’t shuffle off this mortal coil years ago. At a séance at Alexis’ house he materializes out of nothing and no-one is more surprised than Alexis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Alexis’ deception turns out to be far from the cruelest, he has nothing on Paul’s devilish machinations. Paul’s plan is to bring his wife to commit suicide by literally driving her crazy with drugs and then luring her to the cliffs expecting her to fall or jump to a watery grave. That would free the way for Alexis to marry Janet and all three of them could live happily ever after off Christine’s considerable fortune. If Alexis doesn’t want to go along with his machinations, well, there’s always a cell </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">waiting for him at the state pen. The police would be immensely interested in his dubious séances. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">The dead who don’t stay dead make a beastly nuisance of themselves.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But Alexis doesn’t play. He may be a fraud who tries to squeeze as much money out of gullible suckers as possible, but there’s a line he doesn’t cross and that’s murder.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s interesting that the guy we think in the first half is the bad guy is replaced by one who is much more sinister and truly despicable. It changes the horror movie dynamics of the plot into something decidedly mundane. Murder for cold hard cash. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Christine has to wake up to a harsh truth. Her past was a lie. Paul was never the wonderful husband she took him to be, but a gold-digging Bluebeard with a habit of bumping off wives for their inheritance. When the dead return, they not only defile their own image and memorial, they are a source of utter terror.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the end Alexis is not beyond redemption and not quite the scoundrel he - and others - thought him to be. He saves Christine when she tumbles down the cliffs and ultimately takes a bullet for Janet when Paul wants to shoot her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Of course the ending is Code-imposed, both Alexis and Paul must die, though it also becomes clear that before life can go on ghosts and illusions - both imagined and real - must be laid to rest. Christine can only be free if her fool's paradise is destroyed. Her whole past was a construct of wishes and rose-colored memories. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Before he dies Alexis admits to Janet who he's come to love: </span></div>
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"Don't cling to the past. I lived by feeding people's desire to escape the present, but you can't escape for long.” </blockquote>
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Life is in the present. Alexis doesn't want Janet to make the same mistake as her sister. The dead must lie in their graves, easy or not.</div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><b>The Amazing Mr. X</b> is an incredibly watchable movie despite its occasional shortcomings and certain indisputably campy interludes.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-74270807518487389892018-05-15T15:30:00.002-07:002018-09-12T14:51:33.811-07:00The Asphalt Jungle (1950)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheFhLUsngCkMG3SP-UB3aXMtQAaAtygSNNXF1vTUD8eP18bbL65F3rQeNMvKC0gSq27jt_WD8xmeIKS96gLBvK9pW0pbrZb_fCfbuiqr_ZPVoWi4YGS7tz3HSTvkMnxhmHub8bc0e9RdM/s1600/Asphalt18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1334" data-original-width="858" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheFhLUsngCkMG3SP-UB3aXMtQAaAtygSNNXF1vTUD8eP18bbL65F3rQeNMvKC0gSq27jt_WD8xmeIKS96gLBvK9pW0pbrZb_fCfbuiqr_ZPVoWi4YGS7tz3HSTvkMnxhmHub8bc0e9RdM/s320/Asphalt18.jpg" width="205" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Put in hours and hours of planning. Figure everything down to the last detail. Then what? Burglar alarms start going off all over the place for no sensible reason. A gun fires of its own accord and a man is shot. And a broken down old cop, no good for anything but chasing kids, has to trip over us. Blind accident. What can you do against blind accidents?" Doc Riedenschneider</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>The Asphalt Jungle </b>was directed by the great John Huston for MGM, a studio whose bread and butter were lightweight musicals and wholesome fare. Louis B. Mayer hated the movie, saying “I wouldn’t cross the street to see garbage like that”. Most people begged to differ. By 1950 even MGM had to acknowledge the sign of the times in a changing postwar world. Socially-conscious Dore Schary was about to take over the studio as Mayer had become the lion in winter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>The Asphalt Jungle</b> is atypical Noir insofar as there are no femmes fatales, no private eyes, no constantly wise-cracking tough guys here. Make no mistake though, this caper movie is as bleak as they come. It has doom written all over it and from the beginning we know how this is going to end. There's a feeling of utter desolation about it.</span><br />
<span style="font-kerning: none;">The best crime films and Noirs always manage to transcend the constraining parameters of their genre and dig below the surface. <b>Jungle</b> is serious drama about postwar disillusionment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Just released from jail, criminal mastermind Doc Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) is already putting the next perfect heist into action. He just needs the help of some local crooks. Low-rent bookie Cobby (Marc Lawrence) sets him up with crooked lawyer Alonzo Emmerich, played with deliciously smarmy relish by Louis Calhern. He’s the money man who’s supposed to bankroll the operation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">They hire “hoodlum” Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) as the muscle for the job, hunchbacked diner owner Gus Minissi (James Whitmore) as the getaway driver and Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) as the safecracker. Unbeknownst to them, Emmerich is hatching a double-cross with his henchman Bob Brannom (Brad Dexter). Married Emmerich plans to take the loot and skip town with his mistress Angela Phinlay (Marilyn Monroe in her breakout role). At first all goes according to plan, but things start to unravel fairly quickly. Poor Ciavelli catches a bullet in a freak accident and the cops are onto them almost at once. Dix kills Brannom in self-defense, Emmerich has to dispose of the body and the police start to ask inconvenient questions. From then on it’s all downhill. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>The Asphalt Jungle</b> is usually credited as the movie that launched the Noir sub-genre of the caper film and it set the template for all the ones to follow (<i>The Killing, Rififi, </i></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(49, 49, 49);"><i>The Thomas Crown Affair, </i></span><span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>The Italian Job, Ocean’s 11</i>).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The picture is divided into three Acts. Act One: gathering of the team; Act Two: planning and execution of the heist; Act Three: the aftermath and fall-out, with each member’s human failing becoming more and more evident.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Jungle</b> was a critical success. An excerpt from <i>Variety’</i>s film review reads:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"> “An audience will quite easily pull for the crooks in their execution of the million-dollar jewelry theft around which the plot is built.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This statement puts the finger right on the pulse of the problem. Heist movies are expressly designed to defy the Code’s suggestion that “the sympathy of the audience shall never be on the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” They manipulate the moviegoer into sympathizing and even identifying with the criminals. But pulling for the crooks was a big no-no under the Production Code.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(49, 49, 49);">Huston flaunted that Code mightily. In <b>Jungle </b>he gives us</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> destitute characters who are complex and deeply human. Huston doesn't judge his characters in regards to morals but presents them as they are, as people whose backstories are worth knowing. The criminals are NOT the dregs of society - murderers, psychos and amoral thugs - as so often portrayed in other movies. They’re normal people who just happen to steal for a living. After all, as Steve Cochran said, a guy has to make a living some way, even if he is a gangster.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Eddie Muller put it like this: </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">“</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">These crooks were humanized, not demonized.… They're not hostile hoods looking for a way to wield power, they're disgruntled city dwellers driven to score some breathing room.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Huston’s felons don’t have lofty aspirations. Ciavelli doesn't crave a penthouse or fancy cars; he wants enough money to move his family out of a tenement. Doc dreams of retiring to Mexico where he can ogle pretty girls to his heart’s content. Dix needs money fast to pay off his gambling debts before he can buy back the beloved family horse ranch in Kentucky that was lost during the Depression. Dix’s girl Doll (Jean Hagen) just wants him, unconditionally. Gus would do anything for Dix because Dix doesn’t treat him - a cripple - like a pariah.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s crooked lawyer Emmerich who puts it eloquently with uncanny insight: "</span>Crime is simply a left-handed form of human endeavor". He insists that criminals are perfectly normal people. "There's nothing so different about them”. It is "respectable citizen" Emmerich who'll turn out to be the real rat.</div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Only one note rings false in the movie but that’s not Huston’s fault. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">The PCA was miffed that <b>Jungle</b> featured a dirty cop and they made Huston </span>put in the obligatory “crime does not pay” sermon as a concession to the Production Code. Huston added a scene in which John McIntire's blowhard and preachy Police Commissioner Hardy drones on about the crooks’ viciousness and the cops’ righteousness…lest we forget who’s who. </div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Still, Huston would get the last laugh. Hardy comes off as an unpleasant prick. He calls Dix “a hardened criminal…a man without human feeling or mercy”, but the audience knows that this is not true. Everything we see on the screen flies in the face of that assessment. The crooks may not have much in common beyond an opportunity that’s too good to pass up, but they look out for each other. They</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> have a sense of honor, they live by a code. They don’t betray their friends.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Huston stayed within the confines of the Code while really giving it the finger.</span><br />
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“If you want fresh air, don’t look for it in this town!”<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The film opens with a shot of a bleak and decayed urban environment, a smog-choked nameless Midwestern city. Empty desolate streets, abandoned run-down factories and stores, rubble-covered back alleys… It may be 1950, but from the looks of it this town never recovered from the Depression, never made it out of the past. Postwar prosperity has passed this place by. Only the breadlines are missing. It's like</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 16px;"> a</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 16px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">Mad Max Universe, only cops and robbers roam the streets.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is no shiny metropolis, it's a city where opportunity is slim and poverty is a given. It produces an environment ripe for criminal activity. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In Noir the city is (in general) a Great Foul Place that pollutes people. It is full of sin, corruption and temptation. </span>Since the beginning of the 20th century, the urban sprawl was steamrolling over the country's rural roots and the Depression devastated rural America. People migrated to the city in search for work and became exposed to the dark side of the urban jungle. Many people yearned for the idyllic past that likely never was.<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Country settings are the counterpoint to this city corruption. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Dix believes h</span>e would never have become a crook if his father hadn't lost the farm. <span style="font-kerning: none;">The bucolic life is salvation. That’s how Dix sees it. I</span>t will cleanse him of what he has become. "First thing I'm gonna do is take a bath in the creek and wash this city dirt off me," he tells Doll. Doll flinches slightly at the words because she knows she’s part of the city grime.<br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">In <b>Jungle</b> the protagonists have a deep longing for a better life which is the driving force for their actions.</span><br />
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">A strong sentimental streak runs through the movie. For such a notoriously unsentimental genre, strangely enough there is a hidden - and often not so hidden - romanticism in many Noirs. A</span> nostalgic yearning for something important that one once possessed. And no risk is too big to chase after the rainbow to recapture it.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lamentably, the best-laid plans of mice and gangsters go up in smoke. The heist goes wrong. And not just any heist but THE heist, the last big one that should have set the gang up for life. As so often in Noir, the one last shot at salvation leads to ruin. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The execution should have been watertight but the devil is in the details. One little slip-up during the robbery sets in motion the domino effect that brings the gang down. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The invisible puppet master of the universe is pulling the strings again. Call it what you want. Destiny, kismet, chance, monkey wrench, blind accident or Fate. It is inescapable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The vast (supporting) cast is marvelous across the board and delivers fully fleshed-out nuanced performances. Everyone is fatally flawed and/or burdened with a personal weakness that will trip them up. The great thing is that Huston afforded each character a measure of compassion, no matter how corrupt they are. Even Emmerich.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Safe-cracker Louis Ciavelli’s<b> </b>motivations are easiest to understand, he’s the most sympathetic of the group. He needs to feed his family.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hunchback Gus<b> </b>is a misfit, but is loyal to a fault to the few friends he has. He’d do anything for Dix.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">Dix</span><b style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica;"> </b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";">is obsessed with reclaiming his family’s horse farm in Kentucky. Unfortunately he simply can’t</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "helvetica";"> </span>kick the habit of betting on horses and losing. So he sticks up small businesses to get out of the red again. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He used to be a different man once, in a galaxy far far away. </span>Dix's passion for the past - when life was beautiful and good - is strong, even if the past was never as idyllic as remembered. The past is a fantasy, an idealized utopia. Doc sees that much more clearly than Dix: “You can always go home but when you do…it’s nothing”.<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">His sort-of girlfriend Doll loves him beyond reason, but he can’t return her devotion as his entire life is fixated on that farm. Going back will cleanse him of the corruption of the city, and that’s why he can’t look towards a future. But Kentucky was a lifetime ago.</span><br />
<span style="font-kerning: none;">The problem is Dix fails to be honest and look within himself. He doesn't want to take responsibility for his shortcomings, the way Doc does. It's easier just to blame the City.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Doll is a showgirl out of a job, broke and with no place to go. She has some of the most moving and poignant scenes in the film and her pathetic desperation is hard to watch at times. She clings to her romantic illusion that Dix loves her as much as she loves him. Another useless pipe dream.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Though Hayden and Calhern got top billing, for me it is Sam Jaffe who steals the show. Smart, educated and methodical, Doc Riedenschneider is an aging criminal mastermind, just out of prison after a seven-year stretch. Doesn’t matter. He has planning heists down to a science so he goes right back to it. This time around it's a meticulously plotted million-dollar jewel heist. Not a tough guy by any means, he still shows remarkable calm and professionalism under pressure when confronted with setbacks. When Emmerich’s muscle pulls a gun on him, he’s cool as a cucumber. He can keep his mind on the job and not lose his nerves. Most of the time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s just one thing: Doc has a fatal weakness for ogling young girls. This will be his downfall. It is to Jaffe’s credit that his Doc does not in the least come off as a dirty old man. His Old World manners and refinement simply make him an absolute charmer. Doc is class through and through, as opposed to Emmerich who Doc sees right through.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the end it’s Doc who ends up with most of the jewels. But they’re worthless now, the jewels are too hot and no one dares fence them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Doc’s downfall is the most ironic and avoidable. On his way out of town he stops at a roadside bar where a pretty teenager jives to the jukebox. It’s the best scene in the film. Her dance is sexy and mesmerizing. So far Doc has taken every hurdle, his goal is nearly achieved. Now he wastes valuable time indulging his passion. It seals his fate. The cops close in quickly and all is over for Doc.</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(49, 49, 49);"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He takes it stoically and philosophically, even asking the cops for a (post-coital) cigar! Doc has long ago acknowledged his weakness and now calmly accepts his fate when he knows that it is his own fatal flaw that brought him down. He’s a pro, better luck next time. It simply wasn’t his night. But the audience can be sure that Doc savored every second in that dive bar. For him, it was worth it. "One way or another, we all work for our vice."</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Alonzo Emmerich is the corrupt lawyer whose entire life is a fraud. Presenting himself as an urbane, sophisticated and rich man who has it all, in reality he’s simply broke and desperate for money. He’s lived way beyond his means (“Every time I turn around it costs thousands of dollars…ten thousand here, ten thousand there”) and it cleaned him out. But he likes the good life, including expensive hobby Angela who has him wrapped around her little finger. Emmerich’s sterling reputation comes in handy when he wants to cheat people. With little in the way of a conscience, he’s not above resorting to crime and he takes to it like a duck to water. If he has to double-cross his partners and maybe kill them, so be it. His fall is the lowest because he used to be at the top. When the game is up and his life comes crashing down, he cowardly shoots himself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is only fitting that the film that opened with a desolate urban jungle closes on a vision of the green, green grass of home. A mortally wounded and hallucinating Dix </span>- a dead man walking - finally makes it to the Promised Land. He dies in his field of dreams surrounded by horses who come to nuzzle him. He’s back home where he belongs…in the past. It’s poetic and cruel at the same time.</div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Ultimately it was all for nothing. Nobody actually got what they wanted. The jungle swallowed them all up. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Nobody walks away unscathed and nobody walks out forgetting what has just happened. Even if you survive, you don’t win. That holds true for even the most minor characters. Emmerich's sick wife will find out what her husband really was, Mrs. Ciavelli has to raise her child alone, Doll has lost the man she loves.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">At the end of heist movies there’s always a sense of waste and futility, never more so than here. To paraphrase another movie, t</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">he future is a blind alley with a big barred gate at the end.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-57345467784247997612018-05-04T14:23:00.000-07:002018-06-06T16:29:18.430-07:00Highway 301 (1950)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWOo81xuuIC0MNW_OPbAF-gywDLpo-i_Lh3hG42abFXV_SPBdgyA_kkg11Y4r5IVHmalKQy1hdE47KvPDNzqJostZZd0BvVutXVz7wXiTgPV-3OWGpoe1DggrYZmowXjRKNp_Xsty-XGk/s1600/3013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="841" data-original-width="580" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWOo81xuuIC0MNW_OPbAF-gywDLpo-i_Lh3hG42abFXV_SPBdgyA_kkg11Y4r5IVHmalKQy1hdE47KvPDNzqJostZZd0BvVutXVz7wXiTgPV-3OWGpoe1DggrYZmowXjRKNp_Xsty-XGk/s320/3013.jpg" width="220" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Highway 301</b> was directed by Andrew L. Stone for Warner Bros. It’s a a fast-paced little crime movie with tight direction, barely any filler shots and a certain polish to it. This is no bottom-of-the-barrel Poverty Row production.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Not too surprisingly, notorious NYTimes film critic Bosley Crowther got himself all lathered up about the picture. He hated it and called it a “cheap gangster melodrama” and a “straight exercise in low sadism”. A <i>Film Noir of the Week</i> reviewer called Bosley Crowther a “high-toned windbag” in his <i>The Big Steal </i>review, an assessment I tend to agree with. Bosley missed the mark on this one, as he so often did.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The plot is simple. The movie is about a gang of bank and payroll robbers led by vicious and trigger-happy George Legenza (Steve Cochran). They’re known by the bland moniker the Tri-State Gang because they pull heists in three states. Legenza just busted his way out of the State Pen - probably the psych ward - and now returns happily to a life of crime. Cochran is at his nasty and brutal best. Everybody who stands in his way is dispatched immediately and efficiently.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Up till now, Legenza and his gang have rather been small-time. All this is about to change however with the last big heist, THE heist that’s supposed to be the retirement fund. Unfortunately the holdup goes wrong when the spoils turn out to be nothing more than cut money, on its way to Washington for burning. Legenza is angry and just for revenge he shoots the inside man on the job. Somebody has to be held responsible for the mess-up. But this heist has finally given the police some clues to work with.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Highway 301</b> was made by Warner Bros., whose house special in the 30s had been gangsters with tommy guns. The picture is a throwback to Warner’s roots. It is gangster movie mixed with docu-drama plus the occasional Noirish touch. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Stylistically <b>301</b> is plenty Noir, even if its soul isn’t. Noir here is used mostly for atmospheric effect, with realism and a healthy dose of brutality thrown in.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The 30s gangster movie had always been sold to the public as a morality tale. “Crime does not pay, boys and girls!” Wink, wink. But contrary to its purported message, Warner showed the gangster life in all its glory… while ostensibly wagging a finger at crime. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(49, 49, 49);">Hoodlums could gleefully wallow in the cesspool of humanity as long as they got theirs in the end. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Eddie Bartlett, Rocky Sullivan and Rico were hell raisers who shot their way to the top and lived it up high style just to draw their last in a dirty gutter in the end. The truth however was, the gangsters’ lives looked pretty nice. Fast cars, even faster women and money to blow in swanky nightclubs seemed vastly more alluring than living on $40 a week in a shabby tenement. Gangsters lived it up while the rest of the country was starving. It all sounded too seductive. Crime doesn’t pay. Really, I think there are those who’d disagree with that. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(49, 49, 49);">Dying in a hail of machine gun fire was a small price to pay for some fun.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As opposed to the traditional gangster movie, <b>Highway 301</b> shows the lives of the Tri-State Gang members in a very un-romanticized way. There’s hardly any glamour to be found in their cramped digs, cheap motels and second-rate nightclubs. Those guys aren’t on their way to the top, they’re on the road to nowhere. The audience had to know from the start that crime didn't get you anything.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The 50s </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">favored stories that praised the forces of authority in their fearless struggle against enemies of society and the state. There’s usually a clear-cut distinction between good guys and bad guys. Focus is on a broader social canvas. Exposing evil like communism and organized crime was important. The stentorian lecture at the start of so many 50s crime dramas - that </span>Classic Noir had spared us - drove this point home with a vengeance. </div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(49, 49, 49);">In fact, <b>301</b> doesn’t feature any Classic</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> Noir themes, but one. No suckers or troubled souls who go over to the dark side out of desperation or lust and obsession can be found here. Legenza’s motivations are straightforward and prosaic: money. Killing is strictly business, absolutely detached and unemotional, it </span>doesn’t affect him one way or the other. He’d make the perfect hitman.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s no complexity in the plot and no depth and ambivalence in the characters either. The movie goes straight for violence and action. I’m OK with that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Of course we do get the moralistic sermon at the beginning warning us against moral turpitude. Apparently, the audience needed to be scared straight before the hoods could get their sticky paws on them. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">“Crime is an empty career” is one of the platitudes spouted by a humorless flatfoot who’s preaching from the pulpit here.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><b>301</b>’s </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">public service announcement to keep on the straight and narrow </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">is delivered by no less than three real governors! These blowhards </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">assure us with a completely straight face that this movie could actually stop some juvie from turning to a life of crime. It goes something like this: “Kids, this movie, THIS MOVIE, saved me from a life of crime. It will SAVE YOU TOO!”</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s a howler. J. Edgar has a lot to answer for.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Mercifully, it’s short. Just pretend the first four minutes are all a bad dream. Because once the cringe stops, we’re finally on track to a mean and sadistic little flick that the censors slept through. Old Bosley was right, the flick is sadistic, but he said it like it’s a bad thing.<b> 301</b> is plenty entertaining.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The picture is Cochran’s show. An extremely good-looking man, Cochran was also a good actor who never got his due. Cochran had an air of easy violence and sexual menace about him which practically predestined him to play tough guys or scumbag psychos. But he was perfectly believable playing against type in <i>Tomorrow is Another Day</i> as naive man-child who has to learn the ways of the world. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">His real-life escapades could easily outshine his on-screen antics. He certainly lived fast and died fairly young. His amorous exploits are the stuff of legend. He was a heavy drinker and was involved in a number of highly-publicized brawls and fights. Run-ins with the law were a common occurrence. Somehow I get the feeling that he loved his bad boy image more than anything. In the 60s, his lifestyle was catching up with him and led to his premature death at 48. Details about it are bizarre and mysterious. He hired an all-girl crew - who knew nothing about sailing - for a trip from Acapulco to Costa Rica. Three weeks later his body was found. Cochran had been dead for ten days and his body was badly decomposed. The women claimed they had been adrift at sea. The official cause of death was ruled to be a lung infection. Make of that what you will.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Legenza’s personality dominates the gang and Cochran’s performance dominates the movie. He’s in top form as an ice-cold and terrifying psycho without a conscience. Legenza doesn’t believe in taking prisoners. His method of dealing with people who don’t see things his way are rather direct and well, final. He won’t be crossed or disobeyed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Oddly enough, the gangsters have their women with them when they’re “working”. Not a smart move. The only one who doesn’t mess things up is Mary Simms (Virginia Grey). Grey deserves honorable mention as wife of a gang member. She’s wise to what is going on, but doesn’t care. Her portable radio is all that’s important to her. Grey was an actress who was usually relegated to supporting roles as nice best friend, betrayed girlfriend or faithful wife. Here she gets to be amoral. As long as the money keeps coming in, she’s fine with whatever her man does. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Women cause a lot of problems in <b>301 </b>(don't they always), but for Legenza it’s nothing that a 9 millimeter couldn’t take care of. When his latest squeeze Madeleine gets plastered, she starts to shoot her mouth off. But it’s clear to her she’s said too much for once. In a very suspenseful sequence she tries to escape, but there is no escape. “Going someplace, sweetie?” Legenza gloats when he catches up with her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He guns her down in brightly-lit nighttime in front of an elevator attendant, sending her tumbling down the stairs. Legenza knows the witness won’t talk.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lee Fontaine (Gaby André), a French-Canadian girl newly-married to one of Legenza’s underlings, is another headache for him. Lee married her husband after a very short courtship and has no idea what he and his friends are up to. She is naive and very much in love, but she’s not stupid. She catches on soon enough, and after her husband is shot, Lee too tries to escape.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In another suspenseful sequence, Legenza stalks Lee through night-time Richmond. We can see real terror here. Lee knows she’s trapped and realizes she is utterly alone and helpless. Finally she manages to catch a cab, just to realize the driver is Legenza…who puts a bullet into her at point-blank range.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This scene is shot beautifully with evocative shadows on empty streets and high heels clicking on rain-slicked pavement. Warner’s backlot stood in for the streets of Richmond, VA. It's a little lesson in Noir. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Miraculously - too miraculously - Lee survives and will cause some more trouble for Legenza. She just won’t die. In true Noir tradition, it’s a woman who is Cochran’s downfall, just in a different way this time. Legenza goes to the hospital where she’s lying to clean up some unfinished business. He doesn’t smell a rat. Of course the cops are there and it all ends in a shootout. Legenza is dying on the train tracks, riddled with bullets, watching the speeding train come closer. It packs a punch.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A nice little movie, worth seeking out.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4797087968104121636.post-35659135879386575212018-04-24T14:13:00.001-07:002018-05-02T18:00:01.408-07:00Private Hell 36 (1954)<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Maddy over at<span style="color: #f6b26b;"> </span></span><a href="https://maddylovesherclassicfilms.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #ffc072; font-family: "helvetica"; text-decoration: underline;">Maddy Loves Her Classic Films</span> </a> is hosting the Ida Lupino Centenary Blogathon on May 12, 2018. Here's my entry. </div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><b>Private Hell 36</b> is an early directing effort by Don Siegel. It was produced by The Filmakers, the independent production company founded by Ida Lupino - who also co-wrote the script for the movie - and husband No. 2 Collier Young. Lupino was one of the first female directors in American cinema who liked to direct socially conscious low-budget movies. The Filmakers were responsible for little gems such as <i>The Hitch-Hiker, Outrage</i> and <i>The Bigamist</i>. Young and Lupino had divorced by 1951, but were still working together professionally. In 1955 the company’s days were numbered and <b>Private Hell</b> was one of their last films.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Private Hell</b> is a dirty cop Noir, the sub-genre that became so popular in the 50s. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Jack Farnham (Howard Duff) and Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran) investigate a robbery with the reluctant help of Lilli Marlowe (Ida Lupino), a nightclub singer who received a hot $50 bill as a tip from a customer. Lilli goes straight to Bruner’s head but it’s clear to him a cop’s salary can’t keep her in style. When Farnham and Bruner finally find their suspect, he tries to run but is killed in the ensuing car chase. Convenient for the cops, he had the stolen money with him and Bruner decides there and then to keep a good portion of it. Farnham is shocked but reluctantly looks the other way. The two stash the money in a trailer park, unit No. 36. </span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">From then it’s all downhill. Bruner wants to take the money and run to Mexico with Lilli. Farnham is tormented with self-disgust. Distrust starts to erode their relationship and the former friends and partners start circling each other like wild cats. On top of that their Captain is getting suspicious and it seems the thief’s partner wants his share of the dough too. It’s just a matter of time until they turn on each other.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The plot is barely more than routine and the picture has a bit of a ramshackle structure. The movie starts and ends with a bang - Bruner foiling a drug store burglary and a shootout in the trailer park respectively - but it drags considerably in the middle, especially during the racetrack scenes when the cops and Lilli are looking for the robbery suspect. <b>Private Hell</b> could maybe be called negligible were it not for the sizzling chemistry between Lupino and Cochran that could easily set a house on fire. Lupino was actually married to co-star Howard Duff at the time. Not that you’d notice. Lupino’s and Cochran’s scenes together are electric and their verbal sparring makes the movie.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ida</span><span style="font-family: "verdana"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><b> </b></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Lupino was an actress who simply and naturally belonged to the world of Noir. Though an extremely versatile actress who played everything from emotionally fragile innocents, waifs, women in jeopardy and damsels in distress, it is her hard-luck dames I remember the most and she was never better than when she was playing bad girls. Sexy, sultry, world-weary, looking for a guy with money and a way out, Lilli is a tad shopworn. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Her dialogue drips with tough-gal sarcasm. She works in a low-class gin joint where the veneer of class is thin at best. Neither Lilli nor the joint have any Vegas aspirations. There she sings for her supper, and maybe does something more. A cheap dame whose tastes run to the expensive and who likes her men to be big spenders. Lilli’s eyes become as big as saucers when she notices a shiny diamond bracelet on the arm of another woman. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She’s good at separating men from their hard-earned money. She takes $50 tips from strangers and we wonder for what? So does Bruner. “I have a lovely voice. I sang <i>Smoke Gets in Your Eyes</i> five times. He was loaded”, says she. It’s as good an explanation as any. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Bruner can finally throw some money around, she doesn’t ask too many prying questions where this sudden windfall comes from. She really doesn’t want to know. To preserve the niceties she decides that it’s from a rich uncle who just died. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lilli changes her mind about her money-grasping ways in the end and has a few seconds of mushy remorse. She tells Bruner in their last scene together that she doesn't need the money to be happy, but it’s doubtful if she’s sincere or not. Her denial isn’t too convincing and Cochran doesn't seem to buy it either. So he goes to get the money.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I have to take a little detour here and talk about Lupino the singer. She played songbirds three times in her career and should have played them more often. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">With startling regularity nightclub singers pop up in Noir. There’s just something about them. Tough dames with bruised hearts and dearly paid-for wisdom who’ve seen and heard it all, but still hang on to their hopes. Something in their demeanor suggests a kindred spirit to the Noir hero. Not always a clear-headed assessment on the part of the guy. So often be loses is head…and sometimes his life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lilli - just like most of her sisters -</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> isn’t the best singer and she knows it. Her voice is like a cheap shot of bourbon with another bourbon chaser. It tells of years of</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> lonely nights, desire, regret, heartbreak…or maybe just of three packs a day and the aforementioned cheap booze straight up on a nightly basis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But that’s not what’s drawing the crowd anyway. She’s got something else that all the boys want. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">She sings for the lonely and sells dreams. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">And the boys can always fool themselves into believing that the shantoozy on the stage is singing just for them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lupino’s rendition of <i>One For My Baby</i> in <i>Road House</i> is spectacular. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">In a haze of nicotine she mesmerizes everybody. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">It never ceases to amaze me how someone whose voice could charitably be described as limited could be such an effective singer. "She does more without a voice than anybody I've ever heard", says Celeste Holm about her singing in<i> Road House </i>and it's true here too. She speaks her lines more than she sings them and it is quite astonishing what she could do with a strapless dress and a few shrugs of her bare shoulders. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As Petey Brown in <i>The Man I Love</i> she was dubbed by Peg </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(50, 51, 51);">La Centra, but there’s no doubt - though Lupino doesn’t sing herself - </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">she’s lived and breathed every line of her songs of heartbreak and late night regret.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Steve </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Cochran has enough screen presence for several actors. Bruner starts out as an honest cop, though he clearly always had a propensity for recklessness and callousness. When a fellow cop gets killed he just shrugs it off. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to believe that his entire life he’s been calculating the odds. Somehow it’s doubtful that he ever was a paragon of duty. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Because of a dame he goes off the straight and narrow, and in the end he wouldn’t even stick at shooting his partner. In true Noir fashion it is suggested that under the right or wrong circumstances anybody can cross the line and show himself to be capable of almost anything. I’d say Bruner’s dark alter ego was always his true character that up to then had simply never been explored.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cochran was one of Noir’s sexiest actors and managed to make seedy, sleazy brutes utterly irresistible. With a rough and roguish charm, he leers at Lilly like a hungry wolf the second they meet. He may be a rotter, but he’s the kind of guy you wouldn’t mind sinking into the gutter with cause you know it would be a fun ride. Just the way he ties and unties the straps on Lilli’s halter dress is enough to drive a girl wild, I’m telling you. The temperature gets a lot hotter in the room every time he appears on the screen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cochran may have risen above B actor status, had it not been for his out-of-control private life which had "bad boy" written all over it. Apparently Siegel had a hard time keeping Cochran - and the rest of the crew - sober on the set.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Howard Duff<b> </b>has the most thankless role in the movie, the guilt-stricken good guy full of self-loathing. Farnham can’t bring himself to go against the blue wall of silence. I never considered Duff the most charismatic actor and his pained righteousness and weakness make him hard to like.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There’s some funny risqué banter in the movie hinting at the relationship between Cochran and Duff.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Sometimes I wonder why we go steady,” Farnham says to Bruner, to which Bruner replies, “Because I’m irresistible.” Later, when the robbery tears them apart, Lupino wonders: “You two having a lovers’ spat?” A fellow cop refers to Farnham as Bruner’s boyfriend, and when Bruner has to leave Lilli to meet Farnham, she says: “This is the first time I’ve ever lost a man to another man.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In this movie it seems strangely out of place. Nothing in their relationship suggests lavender-tinted leanings, so why the hints? The only reason I can think of is that this kind of talk links the partners to countless Noir couples whose relationship turns sour turn when distrust enters the picture.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Private Hell</b> juxtaposes Farnham’s<b> </b>suburban white picket fence life with the rotten little world of Lupino and Cochran. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Domesticity is nothing Bruner or Lilli want. “Rice is for eating, not throwing,” Lilli notes. Bruner replies, “That’s how I feel. We’re a lot alike, Lilli.” The two worlds clash at a dinner party at Farnham’s house where Bruner and Lilli seem completely out of place. A wild party would be more up their alley.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Still, I don’t see the movie as another cynical meditation on the American Dream, a film criticism that so often is an utterly trite cliche in itself. Farnham and his wife Francey don’t live a suburban nightmare, they are happy in their lives, before Farnham lets himself get corrupted. And there’s a lot more to Francey than just being a housewife. She can accept Lilli for what she is and doesn’t pass judgment on her because her morals aren’t quite up to standard.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It's Farnham who wants nothing more to do with Bruner but their lives are inextricably linked. When Francey wants to show off their baby, he angrily refuses. He doesn’t want his child tainted with the presence of Bruner, the reminder of his own sin. So he guzzles down booze to anesthetize his guilty conscience. His silence eats him up inside. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The symbolism of unit No. 36 is none too subtle of course. The stashed loot in the trailer and their shared guilt poisons both men's lives and their relationships, with each other and with their women, and so becomes their private hell.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Well...what am I supposed to think now?</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The ending, as so often, is a copout and feels tacked-on. Bruner gets shot and the Police Captain simply seems to forget about about Farnham’s complicity in the crime and lets him off. It’s all tied up too neatly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The real crime in the end is that we don’t find out what becomes of Lilli but it’s easy to guess. Another affair that went nowhere, another piece of hard-won wisdom, but she’ll just shrug her shoulders and go back to that gin joint to sing for her next supper without missing a beat. One For My Baby and One More For The Road. What’s the use of crying?</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In Noir, even if you survive you never really win.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The picture has a lot to recommend it but it falls just short of little gem status.</span></div>
Margot Shelbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06580855468061590981noreply@blogger.com12