Month: June 2013

Memento (2000): The Days of Future Past

Memento (2000)

A brain injury leaves a young man with no short term memory. He can’t make new memories remembering the present for only a limited time, and then his memory reverts to the self that knows only past memories at the time of the trauma, an horrific event that consumes every waking moment in his eternal present.  He uses tattoos on his body and Polaroid snapshots with captions as aides-memoires to his reason for being: to track down and avenge the rape and murder of his wife. Mementos that he recalls not in time but as memories of an indeterminate past. Each day he awakens to the baleful necessity of reconstructing the present.

Christopher Nolan’s clever and gripping noir thriller Memento takes the noir convention of the flashback and builds the film’s narrative as one long extended backward exposition that deconstructs what has gone before – yet deepens the mystery of the how and the why.

Some critics quibble that this central conceit is clumsy, that the chopping up of events and segues between scenes are too contrived and lack narrative cohesion.  This is to miss the forest for the trees.  As viewers we are active in the construction of the narrative and are privileged voyeurs who – unlike the protagonist – can inform the present from the future past. We think the hapless protagonist is stuck in the present and must re-learn where he is at each lapse of memory. But is he?

The revelation is that beyond memory, life for sanity’s sake cannot be borne without a narrative. Life without a purpose or end is not living. So the protagonist of Memento must destroy memories as well as preserve them. He is trapped in a vortex that has the same purpose but a different trajectory each time that purpose is achieved. A creative destruction that can end only in death, real or virtual. Virtual in that if he can longer act, through incarceration or incapacity, he can no longer reinvent the past to give the present meaning.

Nirvana is hell not liberation.

 

Film Noir Motifs: The Automobile

The modern metropolis cannot be imagined without the automobile. Along with the skyscraper, teeming streets of humanity, and barely functioning decrepit mass transit, the automobile defines the noir city. Dark deeds, heists, police pursuits, escapes, betrayals, and death all happen in and around cars – the darker and wetter the streets the better to deliver justice or not. Wailing sirens, screeching tyres, and the crack of gunshots from and into car windows mark out the celestial territory of film noir.

The Killers

Behind Green Lights

The Bodyguard

The Big Combo

The Crooked Way

Slaughter on 10th Avenue

Side Street

Side Street

The People Against O'Hara

The People Against O'Hara

The People Against O'Hara

Odds Against Tomorrow

Nora Prentiss

No Man of Her Own

No Man of Her Own

Kiss Me Deadly

House on 92nd Street

High Wall

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Detour

Crimson Kimono

Crime Wave

Born To Kil

Border Incindent

Odd Man Out (1947): Dark Yet Glistening

In 1949 British director Carol Reed and Australian born cinematographer Robert Krasker made The Third Man. One of the great films of the 1940s and a signal film noir. Two years earlier the pair worked together on Odd Man Out.  While Odd Man Out is less widely known, the film is of sufficient stature to rank as an essential film noir.

In Odd Man Out Reed and Krasker reveal the nocturnal soul of the regional city of Belfast, a port and industrial town in Northern Ireland, as they did to greater acclaim the more urbane environs of post-war Vienna in The Third Man. A dark fatalism imbues both films, which are concerned with a police hunt for a criminal. Each protagonist is drawn with a certain ambivalence, and both men are loved by a woman who sees past their crimes. These scenarios have an engaging cavalcade of characters as in a true human comedy, yet it is the antagonism of love and friendship on the one hand, and the imperatives of conscience on the other, that matter. In The Third Man, the dilemma is whether loyalty out of passion is stronger and more genuine than the loyalty of friendship, where the object of affection is without scruples and commits despicable acts.  Harry Lime is an engaging rogue but his crimes are immoral and motivated by greed. Odd Man Out however presents us with a protagonist whose morality is more problematic.

In the opening scenes of Odd Man Out the leader of an IRA cell played by James Mason is shot and wounded during a heist to raise cash, and in the struggle to escape, he shoots and kills a cashier.  The rest of the story follows his desperate attempts to reach a safe house where the young woman who loves him is waiting. He engages in not only this physical struggle but also with an agonising remorse at having taken a life. Here the film meanders a bit while a clutch of humanity is caught up in the pursuit.  Betrayal, avarice, and spirituality are all given a place, but it is altogether too much like preaching, and some odd humour jars even though it is a barbed portrayal of greed and artistic pretensions.  The poetry here is in the dark yet glistening visuals as we follow Mason on his path through the city at night and in the rain.

The inevitable dénouement has a tragic pathos that echoes not so much film noir but more the fatalism of French poetic realism.  If we are charitable the ending is a homage to Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937), and if we are not so inclined it harkens unmistakably to the motifs and mise-en-scène of that film.

Mason beautifully inhabits his role in a strong physical sense where his words are few and often soliloquies.  As the girl who loves him, Kathleen Ryan is a commanding presence – her quiet stoicism masks a deep passion and devotion. A woman straight from a novel by Simone de Beauvoir. Her actions sharply mark her as an existential hero, so much so that the closing scenes achieve a different resonance than in Pépé le Moko.

One of the great films noir and, to quote Peter Bradshaw from the UK Guardian, “an eccentric masterpiece”.

The Thief (1952): Silence is golden

The Thief (1952)

The independently made cold-war thriller The Thief covers familiar terrain in a novel way. Sight and sound are heightened by a central conceit that I won’t reveal. Composer Herschel Burke Gilbert’s dramatic and insistent score – which garnered an Oscar nomination – is more than up to a big task.

A nuclear scientist in Washington is leaking secrets to the enemy. When the story opens he is clearly having second thoughts. Whether his entrapment is motivated by money or ideology is not central to the film’s concerns, which early on focuses on the mechanics of the treachery. After a mishap blows the breach wide-open the hapless spy is on the run. Here the film goes out on the streets of  Washington and – in the final scenes – New York City.

A middle-aged greying Ray Milland delivers in a demanding role where demeanour must convey the mood. He is as strong as in The Lost Weekend (1945) and then some. Milland’s performance, and the brilliant noir photography of Sam Leavitt and taut direction of Clarence Greene (who had a hand in the script and produced) elevate the film despite a threadbare plot to a certain greatness. The tension is held throughout and your adrenalin levels are continually pushed to the max. The redemptive resolution is weak but countered by the sheer visual poetry of the closing scenes.

The Thief (1952)

The film noir motif  of entrapment is the dramatic core and delivers one of the movie’s strongest scenes. Milland is holed-up in a decrepit NY tenement with the FBI closing-in while he waits for the next signal from his handlers of his escape plan.  The camera looks down from the ceiling of the tenement room at Milland pacing frantically from wall to wall like a rat in a trap. The only window faces a brick wall. This solitary desolation harkens back to earlier in the story when Milland is shown walking the prison-like corridors of  his place of work.

This is a film noir so sex lays its claim to attention. Milland’s scientist is a loner who has lived and worked in isolation, and his sexual repression is revealed through a tease that is both brutal and unnerving. As he desperately waits for a telephone call in the corridor of the tenement ever on the edge of hysteria, he encounters the occupant of the room opposite, a young woman that makes “alligators look tame”.  Then TV actress Rita Gam plays this girl with consummate sleaze, delivering perhaps the hottest come-on of the classic noir cycle.

A must-see study of entrapment on steroids.

The Thief (1952)

Cinematic Cities: New York 1952

The Thief (1952)

The Thief (1952): Direction –  Russell Rouse  |  Cinematography – Sam Leavitt

 

The Burglar (1957): The last b-movie?

The Burglar (1957)

One of the few films where David Goodis adapted his own novel for the screen, The Burglar is a brooding story where decency is a ‘dark passage’ to destruction.

A flashback provides the back story of an abandoned boy brought up by a kindly thief who adopts him, and apprentices him to the ‘trade’.  The adoptive father is killed in an abortive heist when the boy’s first mistake on the job triggers an alarm. The dead man has previously extracted from the boy the promise that if something happens to the father, he will look after his young daughter. The story pivots on this obligation and the complications that ensue when the burglar the boy has grown up to be steals a valuable necklace – aided by the girl and a motley crew of accomplices.

Dan Duryea is the thief and Jayne Mansfield is the child-woman under his wing, who is otherwise employed in the kitchen or casing heists. Duryea delivers in a role where what is not expressed is where the action is. The limitations of Mansfield in an early role render her believable as a simple girl struggling to make sense of the life she has fallen into, and her ambivalent relationship with Duryea, who is tormented by his warring paternal obligations and the underlying attraction they have for each other.  In the noir universe such dilemmas are always resolved at a cost.

A crooked cop is involved in that denouement, which is telegraphed after an interlude where Duryea hooks up with a women in a bar, played at first as a tough dame but then with real pathos by Martha Vickers.  There is a rare for noir tenderness in the scenes that follow when these two damaged souls open up to each other. This night of refuge is followed by a brutal betrayal the next day, and here a jarring plot hole almost pushes the scenario off-course, but it quickly swerves back onto the road to nowhere.

The film’s budget was only US$90,000 and perhaps was one of the last b-movies delivered of the signature gritty realism of Columbia Pictures.  But the picture has a patina that belies it’s budget, with truly accomplished cinematography from DP Don Malkames, and taut editing and elegant direction from first-time director Paul Wendkos. All carrying a stunning wide-screen realist austerity from a deep focus on-the-streets ambience.

A worthy valedictory to the b-movie.