An early effort from director Joseph H. Lewis is a quintessential b-movie filmed in 3 weeks on a studio back-lot for less than 200 grand…
An early effort from director Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy and The Big Combo) So Dark the Night is a quintessential b-movie filmed in 3 weeks on a studio back-lot for less than 200 grand. A psycho-melodrama if you will that explores the split personality as psychosis with the alien-self as doppelgänger. The movie is of interest not so much for the premise or the plot, but as a showcase for how routine material can be made exceptional by a talented director. Lewis had a French village convincingly manufactured on an old studio set. He even managed to send a camera to Paris to film some ‘scenic’ shots for the opening credits. Revealing the major story elements risks giving too much away. What I can say is that the plot concerns a famed Paris bachelor-detective who confronts love and mayhem in a small rural village after he is sent there on r&r. While the lead role would have worked nicely for Peter Lorre, ex-pat Austro/Hungarian character actor Steven Geray actor does try hard as the love-lorne detective.
Lewis uses windows and mirrors to excellent effect in his mise-en-scène, and elegant camera angles and staging to render compositions that create visual interest throughout. Indeed, the whole affair could have played as a silent movie while retaining the suitably melodramatic score from Hugo Friedhofer. This is both a strength and a weakness. The fascination a young woman feels for the Parisian glamour symbolically evoked by close-ups of the shining chrome on an automobile, and expressive close-ups on faces, work well. But certain pivotal scenes featuring rather forced averted gazes come across as hackneyed.
Herman Melville is the master of cool, but as in reality cool masking a nihilist vacuum. Stylistically Melville’s noirs have a formal perfection, and rank as great cinema. And nihilism is as valid a world view as any other. Whether it is worthwhile is debateable of course. As a personal philosophy I find it destructive and largely a cop-out. It seems to say that meaninglessness justifies anything, by denying the possibility of the individual finding value in living. Nihilism is a kind of death in life and is the easiest response to existence. You have no responsibility and no need to explore and justify your choices. This is where Sartre and existentialism take us somewhere beyond the cold denial of meaning. We can see this dialectic by comparing Bob le Flambuer with Dassin’s Rififi, also set in Paris the year before, both about aging hoods, and both worlds apart.
Bob “the High-roller” Montagné is a midnight gambler living his nights out in the gambling dives of Pigalle. A reformed hood he has been straight for 20 years until a run of bad luck leaves him hard-up. A heist seems the way out, and as is the way of heists in the noir world, things don’t go to plan. The ending is downbeat and not so down-beat: the death of a protégé quickly forgotten, and the closing pathos reserved solely for Bob’s abandoned American convertible parked along a deserted stretch of beach in the South of France. A rabid misogyny propels the plot with the blame for things going wrong clearly down to the stupidity of a young harlot and the vicious revenge of an ambitious housewife.
The first 10 minutes are a tour-de-force with a doco-style introduction to the streets and denizens of Pigalle in the early morning after the night before. This technical brilliance is sustained through to the end. It is the cynical resolution and less-than-human dynamics that lose favour in my eyes.
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
Director: Lewis Milestone
Writers: Robert Rossen (screenplay), John Patrick and Robert Riskin (story)
Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Kirk Douglas, Van Heflin and Lizabeth Scott
Cinematographer: Victor Milner
Art Direction: Hans Dreier and John Meehan
Score: Miklós Rózsa
With these credentials you are bound to be presented with elegant entertainment, and this is exactly what you get. A gloomy, moody, melodramatic, and misanthropic gothic noir set in a company town that harbours a dark secret. A murder and a serpentine psychopathology played out in a domestic viper’s nest where fear and hatred do battle across the sexes, fuelled by evil avarice, guilt and alcohol.
Complicity in the death of an innocent man tethered by moral weakness are the essential story elements interpreted with real wit by Barbara Stanwyck, Kirk Douglas (in his first role), Van Heflin, and Lizabeth Scott.
Somewhere in the Night (1946)
In Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Somewhere in the Night an amnesiac war vet travels to LA to find his identity – and trouble. John Hodiak and Richard Conte star with the disarmingNancy Guild. Hodiak and Conte are rather wooden and leave the screen for Guild and the supporting players to serve up really engaging portrayals. While the byzantine plot is not without its moments and to a degree intriguing, the presentation is sometimes flat and takes a bit too long to pan out.
Mankiewicz who also wrote the screenplay gives us some very juicy characters. Guild who looks like Ella Raines and has as much charm, is truly engaging as the cabaret singer who is “nuts” about vet Hodiak. Her smitten boss Conte is forlorn but offers to help his rival. Lloyd Nolan is good as a benevolent cop with a savvy sense of humour. The final line in the picture is spoken by him and is as cute a piece of satire as you will hear in any noir. Indeed, the dialog is peppered with film references, and the best lines are delivered by some obscure bit players with panache.
Viennese refugee Fritz Kortner is a delight as a Euro-villain in the mould of Sidney Greenstreet’s Mr Gutman. His last words in the movie are corny but the delivery is a scream: “The jig is up.” Obscure bit-player Margo Woode is enchanting as a b-girl in cahoots with Kortner. Her first encounter with Hodiak at his LA hotel is all sex and cheap perfume, and she pulls it off beautifully! Later she crackles when she fights against being the fall-girl for Kortner – again a la Gutman. Amongst the earnestness of Hodiak and Conte, and the high-jinks of the bit-players, there is a damned serious interlude with another obscure actress Josephine Hutchinson as a lonely spinster.
In Irving Rapper’s 1946 dark melodrama Deception (1946) Bette Davis is no longer young and as fiery as in pictures past but she still packs a mean punch. Her co-star Claude Raines chews up the scenery and dominates as a vain and vindictive lover. Though Bette gets to plug him in the end. Apparently during production Davis was so scared of Raines stealing the picture, she had the ending changed so that she literally put matters to rest. Director Rapper was reported as not being too happy with this change, but to my mind the scenario’s trajectory points to nothing less.
The story revolves around a passionate love triangle with the other co-star Paul Henreid. Raines has been ‘mentoring’ struggling émigré pianist Davis and things change when her lost lover and cellist Henreid turns up. These creative types set to it with a vengeance, with Davis establishing her own tragic entrapment by lies and an obsessive distrust of Raines, who plays at the homme-fatale. An impressive modern classical score by Erich Wolfgang Kor is used to wonderful effect.
Deception is a strange film with a metropolitan gothic ambience. Quite avant-garde for a Hollywood soapie of the period, with inventive low angles and expressionist lighting deftly overcoming set-bound constraints. Amazingly, Davis later admitted that Raines made the picture! The direction is certainly elegant and the collaboration with ace DP Ernest Heller and Art Director Anton Grot produced masterly monochrome visuals ranging from the sumptuous almost decadent elegance of Raines’ palatial home to the stark modernist lines of Davis’ NY loft apartment. This apartment has the city as a brooding backdrop exposed by a massive window running the length of a wall of the tenement.
A must-see noir melodrama. Check out these other frames from the movie.
Another book on film noir directors. Do we need another? Arguably rather we need more books on film noir screenwriters, cinematographers, and composers. That said, a new book on film noir is almost always worth reading, and this goes for Alain Silver’s and James Ursini’s latest editorial effort.
Film Noir: The Directors a book of nearly 500 pages covers 28 directors and is loaded with over 500 images, mostly production stills and on-location shots of directors at work. Contributions come from the editors and a wide-range of writers, with a strong leaning toward academics. Each chapter focuses on a director with a short bio, a noir filmography, and an analysis of each of their noirs. There are very few actual frames and this is disappointing.
Most names you would expect are included: Robert Aldrich, John Brahm, Jules Dassin, André de Toth, Edward Dmytryk, John Farrow, Felix Feist, Samuel Fuller, Henry Hathaway, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Joseph Losey, Ida Lupino, Anthony Mann, Max Ophuls, Gerd Oswald, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Don Siegel, Robert Siodmak, Jacques Tourneur, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and Robert
But there are major omissions which I find hard to fathom: auteurs like Abraham Polonsky, Robert Rossen, Richard Fleischer, Vincent Sherman, Rudolph Mate, and Phil Karlson, spring to mind. The editors acknowledge there are omissions in their Introduction, and put them down to a rather cryptic rationale “the best directors are not necessarily the best examples”, and they don’t elaborate. The result is that a number of seminal and important films noir are not included in this otherwise comprehensive compendium.
In a book about directors one shouldn’t complain of that focus, but despite acknowledging the contributions of writers there is a tendency in the essays to conflate story elements as the work of the director. Certainly many noir directors were closely involved in the development of scripts, but the contribution of the scenarist demands greater recognition. Equally the contributions of the cinematographer and the composer in major noirs were integral to the output, with a director’s better movies often made in collaboration with a particular DP or with the aid of a great score.
After recently viewing Felix Feist’s The Threat (1949), in this post I have chosen to look at the chapter on that director by noir writer and blogger Jake Hinkson. Hinkson offers analyses of Feist’s four noir films:
Hinkson’s writing is rather flat, in keeping I suppose with the book’s academic slant. He reads rather too much into these movies which are solid b’s and, apart from The Man Who Cheated Himself, not highly distinguished. Tellingly Feist was said to see himself not as an artist or craftsman, but as a story-teller as related by his son in an interview with Hinkson.
The Threat (1949)
Hinkson uses the concept of POV (point of view) as a fair (but less then revelatory) approach in studying the dynamics of the noir protagonist’s interaction with the other characters in these films. In doing so Hinkson confuses the story told by the script with the director’s rendering of the playbook, by talking about a character’s POV as both a visual device and as an element of the story. While Hinkson is aiming to highlight how the director uses mis-en-scene to give visual cues to the dominance of the protagonist in each of the movies under discussion, the character’s actions are largely self-evident. (It is also hard to reconcile Hinkson’s focus on an aggressive protagonist with concluding his essay by saying that Feist consistently portrayed “weak-willed male protagonists”.) In any event it is the screenplay that determines this and Feist wrote the scenario for only one of these pictures, The Devil Thumbs a Ride, which was based on the 1937 novel by Robert C. Du Soe. I am happy with Hinkson’s solid treatment of that movie, though it is the strength of Lawrence Tierney’s perverse characterisation as the bad guy that distinguishes it from other b’s of the period.
Hinkson’s reading of The Man Who Cheated Himself, which I consider Feist’s best noir, is problematic. Oddly, Hinkson sees it as Feist’s weakest noir. In this film Feist goes beyond the confines of the b-picture and presents an overt moral ambivalence and a complex conflicted protagonist. Hinkson considers that Feist fails to convince the viewer of Lee J. Cobb’s infatuation with wealthy socialite Jane Wyman. He describes her as “sexless” and asserts “that Feist has a characteristic lack of interest in eroticism”. To the contrary, I think Wyatt is great in her role as the selfish society dame getting her kicks with an aging cop. Her narcissism and predatory sexuality are there – just not delivered with a sledgehammer. Ironically Hinkson later in his review of Tomorrow Is Another Day describes the relationship of the two lovers on the lam as an “amour-fou”. (Incidentally Hinkson fails to acknowledge that this amour-fou develops into a stable almost banal domestic intimacy that precipitates the protagonists’ redemption. In The Devil Thumbs a Ride there is also a strong sexual undercurrent with one of the abducted woman attracted to the violent Tierney.)
The Threat (1949) is an interesting screener. A vicious killer and gang-boss played by chronic bad-guy Charles McGraw breaks out of prison and hatches an elaborate plan to high-tail it to an isolated air-strip in the California desert where an accomplice will fly him out of the country. For vengeance and insurance he abducts the cop and the DA who put him in stir, and the ex-girlfriend of his plane-flying accomplice. (He thinks the dame sold him out to the cops.)
What is interesting is that McGraw’s protagonist is ruthlessly intelligent, hatching a wily ruse to get him past police road-blocks. Immediately after the break he repairs to a neat suburban home to lay low while he abducts his captives and readies his trip to the desert in a removalist’s van. Hinkson does a good job of dissecting the structure of Feist’s direction and his use of mis-en-scene. Although he incorrectly describes the staging hide-out as a “flop house”, and thereby misses a pivotal symbolic element.
McGraw holds the whole thing together and the scenario plays out in a decidedly subversive way. McGraw fails only because of chance after persistently outwitting the cops and the machinations of his hostages when they get the jump on him. His dénouement is one of retribution and driven by very primal instincts.
I hope to review other chapters in the coming months.
Henry Hathaway’s 1945 film The House on 92nd Street for 20th Century Fox was the first of the doco-noirs that presaged the gritty realism of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City in 1948…
Henry Hathaway’s 1945 film The House on 92nd Street for 20th Century Fox was the first of the documentary-noirs that presaged the gritty realism of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City in 1948.
Although the story of the FBI’s breaking-up of a Nazi spy-ring isn’t strictly noir, it has all the elements of the police-procedural that ushered in a shift in the classic noir cycle from the early 1950s: documentary footage with a news-reel feel, stentorian narration, and a rousing musical score. All elements driven towards the portrayal of a great US institution “implacably” committed to the defense of American freedoms and the destruction of internal threats.
Based on a true case, the producer had full access to FBI surveillance footage and to FBI establishments and staff, and the opening scenes feature J. Edgar Hoover working at his desk. Wisely director Hathaway chose to shoot in actual New York City locales, and his DP Norbert Brodine delivered NY in compelling deep focus. Interesting also is the highlighting of then cutting-edge technology used in the pursuit of the spies: including a punch-card reading computer finding a finger-print match, and spectrography enlisted to identify the brand of lipstick found in a suspect’s ashtray. The whole affair balances real drama with a solemn purpose that has you engrossed.
What I found particularly fascinating was the adroit expressionism of the tense finale, which is clearly evident in the following frames from the movie. You sometimes find art in the strangest places.
“I am going to destroy him. Take his brain apart and show him the pieces.”
“Psychoanalysis has furnished the detective film with many features of a noir psychology. To begin with, it has underlined the irrational character of criminal motivation: the gangster is a neurotic whose behavior can be fully understood only in utilitarian terms; aggressiveness, sadism, and masochism are self-serving; the interest in, or love of, money is often only a cover for libidinal fixation or infantile conflict. This, moreover, is the argument of the first explicitly psychoanalytic film, Blind Alley, adeptly directed by Charles Vidor: a gang boss hunted by the police hides out with his mistress and some of his men in a psychiatrist’s house in the country. A hideous nightmare (depicted in negative in the film) prevents him from relaxing. The doctor gains his confidence and manages, despite the usual resistances, to link the dream to a secret from his childhood. The gangster, freed from his complex, has no more need to kill and will be gunned down by a policeman. Under the title The Dark Past, Rudolph Mate directed a remake of the film in 1943.
Let’s think back to the dramatic motif of the ambivalence of feelings: in such an individual, sadism is openly twinned with masochism, sympathy masks hostility, etc. The importance of this trait in the definition of film noir has often been remarked. In the end, there’s a certain cynicism in the views of Freud that accords well with the moral decor of the series. Psychiatry no longer believes in traditionally defined good or evil. It knows that criminal behavior patterns often hide self-destructive reactions or guilt complexes, while moral conscience (the superego) is linked to the instincts it represses by means of an entire network of complicity.
Thus the ambience of this “depth psychology,” as the Germans put it, with its ambiguous or secret meanings, its infantile background, is transposed in the enigmatic situations of film noir, in imbroglios of intentions and of traps whose ultimate meaning remains remote and appears to recede indefinitely.”
– A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941-1953) by Raymond Borde & Etienne Chaumeton, pp 19-20
In 1955 when Borde and Chaumeton published their seminal survey of American film noir it is reasonable to assume they had not seen Boris Ingster’s The Stranger on the Third Floor (RKO 1940), considered by many as the first film noir of the classic cycle, but they had seen King Vidor’s Blind Alley (Columbia 1939). Indeed Blind Alley breaks the new ground otherwise credited to Ingster’s film: criminal behavior presented as psychosis and the use of expressionist dreams and flashback to find meaning in the past.
The “gang boss” in Bind Alley, a just-escaped con who kills without compunction or remorse, is played with convincing manic menace and infantile frenzy by veteran tough-guy Chester Morris. The scenario is played out in the lake-side home of a compassionate shrink, where Morris and his gang hold the occupants hostage while waiting for a boat across the lake. Think of Key Largo out-of The Petrified Forest. Ann Dvorak adds a strange level-headed yet lunatic loyalty as the killer’s moll. The shrink played with an unnerving pipe-smoking Walter Pidgeon-like affability by the ultimate nice-guy Ralph Bellamy, ups the ante, after a tragic killing at the house, when he resolves to psychoanalyse the hood: “I am going to destroy him. Take his brain apart and show him the pieces.”
The screenplay is quite adept in the time allowed – 59 minutes – in holding the tension with a thriller arc, while the shrink does his brain work. We even get a nice line-drawing explication of the unconscious, and an ironic opening scene with the shrink lecturing college students on the thin line between normality and psychosis. The dream and its motifs are intriguing and deftly drawn, with a sure trajectory to the final denouement, which has us feeling unomfortably ambivalent about the villain’s fate.
What is the connection with 13 East Street an undistinguished b-movie from across the Pond? Essentially the subversiveness of film noir. Where our moral compass is hijacked by scenarios and characterisations that bring a perverse pathos and empathy to bear on our feelings for the ‘bad guys’. In 13 East Street a London cop goes undercover to nab a heist-gang. While this movie is no Raw Deal and does not have any ambitions beyond similar police procedurals of the period, it does manage to have us rooting for the crooks.
The cop executes a fake jewel heist, is nabbed, imprisoned with a member of the gang. A friendship develops. Then they break-out and the cop is introduced to and joins the gang. The boss is a Yank and gives the erstwhile cop a fair shake in the face of hostility from another gang-member. The boss’s moll is hot and has melting eyes for the cop. They hatch a double-cross. A triple-cross really as the cop has his own agenda. The cop feels nothing for the girl, a charming cheeky gamin, who has your heart from the get-go, and is played by a b-stalwart of the period, Sandra Dorne, a rather classier forerunner to Diana Dors. By the end you have a certain contempt for the self-satisfied cop and sincerely hope that two-timing broad got away.
John Alton’s cosmic framing for the opening and closing scenes of The People Against O’Hara (1951) – an otherwise average noir – are tantalising glimpses into what could have been…
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