Tony D'Ambra

The Cinematic City: “the meaning is in the shadows”

When Strangers Marry (aka Betrayed 1944)
King Bros/Monogram 67 mins
Director: William Castle
Cinematography: Ira Morgan
Score: Dimitri Tiomkin

“as When Strangers Marry illustrates, it is precisely through the triggering of sensations that film noir speaks most eloquently. A mode of signification that privileges connotation over the denotative, cause-and-effect logic of linear narrative, the highly-wrought noir aesthetic ensures that the ‘meaning’ of the noir city is not to be found in the narrative’s surface details but in its shadows, in the intangibles of tone and mood.” – Frank Krutnik, ‘Something More Than Night’, The Cinematic City (ed David B. Clarke), p 98-99

When Strangers Marry, made by the King Brothers, an independent production team signed to Monogram, was shot in ten days for under $50,000 and marketed as a “nervous A”. But Monogram could not get a percentage deal and the movie opened as a b, doing good business and garnering critical praise. James Agee said of the movie: “I have seldom, for years now, seen one hour so energetically and sensibly used in a film. Bits of it, indeed, gave me a heart-lifted sense of delight in real performance and perception and ambition which I have rarely known in any film context since my own mind, and that of moving-picture making, were both sufficiently young”.

Noir Comic Moments #4: The philosopher hood

Not even Jimmy Cagney can save Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950) from a deserved obscurity. In this over-rated picture Cagney is a vicious hood getting established in a new town after a violent prison break. The absurd plot moves at a glacial pace, and would almost work as a parody if it wasn’t for the brutal and wanton violence. Cagney looks tired and bored, as you would expect from a 51yo playing a 37yo, while Barbara Payton is ok as the girl he deceives. There are cops as stupid as they are bent, a gay shyster lawyer with a black body-builder houseboy, and a dizzy rich dame who falls for Cagney, while he is shacked-up with Payton, the sister of a young prisoner killed during the breakout. One of the more absurd scenes is the rich girl’s daddy bursting into the bedroom of the newly-married couple sound asleep in separate beds, with Cagney in silk pyjamas and as meek as a lamb.

A labored late gangster movie wrongly seen as a noir by some perhaps from its use of flashback.

There is a weird interlude where Cagney and an accomplice visit a ‘reformed’ hood to get wise on where he can find a ’good lawyer’. The former hood is now ‘respectable’ and moonlights as a lecturer on “the key to cosmic consciousness” – no kidding. After shaking down the barker for the name he wants, Cagney picks-up the rich girl who is a loyal follower, by begging a lift in her hot-rod. You can’t help but laugh out loud.

Five Star Final (1931): Down with the bosses!

The great Edward G. Robinson is the hard-boiled editor of a big-city tabloid. The owner of the paper comes up with the idea of boosting circulation by pursuing a lurid expose on the fate of a woman convicted of a crime of passion 10 years earlier, with tragic consequences. Directed by the distinguished Mervyn LeRoy, Five Star Final is an early Warner ‘social protest’ movie, and the sort of movie that epitomises the pre-Code talkies: sharp dialog, sexual innuendo, irreverent satire, and social criticism. While the picture is marred by the stagy treatment of the melodrama involving the family destroyed by the tragedy that ensues, the immensity of the tragedy and its putrid genesis sustain a powerful and still relevant narrative. Boris Karloff is a hoot as an amoral ‘undercover’ reporter: Edward G. calls him “the most blasphemous thing I’ve ever seen”.

But is it a film noir? I think there are sufficient noir elements to sustain a strong case: the theme of the corrupt brutality of ‘business’, individual entrapment, the futility of trying to escape a dark past, and a downbeat ending.

The final three minutes are brilliant.

The Subversive Truth of Noir: The Breaking Point (1950)

The final image of The Breaking Point (1950), a great John Garfield film directed by Michael Curtiz, and to my mind infinitely superior to a film it is often compared to, Howard Kawk’s over-rated To Have and Have Not (1944), is the most poignant and subversive image in all of noir. The death of a decent black man is of no consequence: his despairing boy ignored and left to discover the fate of his father alone – completely alone.

The Origins of Noir: The Case for the Policier

“Renoir’s second talkie, La Nuit du carrefour (1932)— my all-time favorite French noir, and the sexiest movie he ever made… his edgy adaptation of Georges Simenon’s Maigret at the Crossroads, filmed in a foggy suburb that vibrates with off-screen sounds and a mysterious Danish heroine (Winna Winifried), cries out for discovery.” – Jonathon Rosenbaum

In 1931 Georges Simenon’s crime novel La Nuit du Carrefour was published by the French pulp magazine Police Magazine:

In 1932 Jean Renoir in his second film adapted the story for the screen:

La Pantera Negra (Mexico 2010): The Black Panther

Featured this month at the Edinburgh International Film Festival: “Dishevelled private eye Nico Beamonte’s latest case comes from God himself – possibly. He wants Nico to find the mysterious Black Panther. But who, or what, is the Black Panther? And what has this got to do with a cryogenically frozen Mariachi singer and a 1950s flying saucer? Surrealism, Mexican-style – as if film noir had collided with props left over from a Ray Harryhausen film.”

Not Dark Yet: “Cancel my subscription to the resurrection”

Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
– Bob Dylan – Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music

It was getting dark. I turned on the bed-side lamp and hit the bed a dead weight. Closed my tired desparate eyes. Or that’s how they looked in the fly-specked-mirror in the fetid washroom down the hall. I had splashed water on my face, but I was still bothered by the heat, which hung over me like a sordid blanket. Is this what death is like, or a cold clammy fog in which you are forever lost?

I must have slept or did I? The slatted light from the flashing red neon sign outside was making crazy patterns on the ceiling. Discordant jazz notes drifted in through the open window from a bar down in the street. A woman was wailing now. Somewhere in this flophouse. Her no-doubt bloated weeping eyes blackened by fear and habitual abuse. A door slammed and not long after heavy footfalls lumbered down the stairs outside. She stopped her lament. The band was no longer playing. It got quiet. The silence broken occasionally by car-tyres swishing on the wet asphalt.

The bed was stale and hard, but it was kind of bracing, a distraction from the heat. It was dark now and the room flashed in and out of a red glow adrift in some parallel universe. Where was I? Who was I? Who cared? I switched on the radio. A long dead Jim Morrison was singing. “When the music’s over, turn out the light”. Dead 40 long years? How old was I then? How alive? How real? Don’t ask where the years have gone.

I was scared. Always had been. What’s it like to be comfortable in your skin? To never see the chaos and the terror just beyond. As empty and lost as I feel? Who cares? Another futility to add to the deck.

I had drifted somewhere and woke with a start. The pillow was soaked and my shirt collar awash with a cold sweat. I needed a drink. I grabbed the half-empty Tequila bottle and took a shot. It burned with a fragrance sweet as my mother’s smile. I was tired of waiting. Why didn’t they come now and put an end to it. My hands shook as I lit a cigarette. My last? I watched the lingering smoke snake towards the window. Is this how your soul finally escapes? Slowly and reluctantly before it dissolves into the big night? I turned off the lamp. “Cancel my subscription to the resurrection.”

The Aesthetics of the B-Noir: Follow Me Quietly (RKO 1949)

Follow Me Quietly is a an RKO b-noir directed by Richard Fleischer from a story by Anthony Mann, who legend has it was also involved in the direction. Fliescher directed a number of b’s for RKO, including Bodyguard (1948), Trapped (1949), The Clay Pigeon (1949), Armored Car Robbery (1950), His Kind of Woman (1951uncredited), and The Narrow Margin (1952).

At 60 minutes Follow Me Quietly packs a powerful punch. In an unusual story, an obsessed cop chases down a serial killer, who in notes left at the murder scene refers to himself as ‘the judge’. Sharp dialog peppered with irony and sardonic humor adds significantly to the entertainment quotient. A solid b-cast does well and the story is deftly propelled by the screenplay to a climactic shoot-out on an industrial site. With the able assistance of DP Robert De Grasse (Crack-Up (1946), Bodyguard (1948), and The Clay Pigeon (1949)), Fliescher fashions wonderfully expressionistic expository scenes that are quintessentially noir. Highlights are scenes where the obsessed cop ‘talks’ to a facsimile dummy of the suspect, and the interrogation of a suspect in a dark police station. The tight editing by Oscar-winning editor Elmo Williams adds to the pace and the effectiveness of the shoot-out sequence.

I have chosen Follow Me Quietly to illustrate the aesthetics of the b-movie, as the essential features of the category are clearly evident and skilfully executed. The essential features of a b-movie are a small budget and a tight production schedule. These constraints necessitated second-string players and real demands on the director to deliver on time and on budget. For these reasons b-movies were used as a training ground for the film-making team. The renowned French director, Jean Renoir, who spent time in Hollywood in the 1940s – his last Hollywood picture was the cerebral noir The Woman On the Beach (1947) – in a 1954 interview said: “Don’t go thinking that I despise “B” pictures; in general I like them better than big, pretentious psychological films, they’re much more fun. When I happen to go to the movies in America, I go see “B” pictures. First of all, they are an expression of the great technical quality of Hollywood. Because, to make a good western in a week, the way they do at Monogram, starting Monday and finishing Saturday, believe me, that requires extraordinary technical ability; and detective stories are done with the same speed. I also think that “B” pictures are often better than important films because they are made so fast that the filmmaker obviously has total freedom; they don’t have time to watch over him”.

What then are the the aesthetics of a b-movie? With the assistance of the Schirmer Encyclopedia Of Film (2007), we can identify these traits as being determined by two essential constraints:

A low budget, and
A short shooting schedule

which meant the length of the picture did not usually exceed 60-70 minutes, and this in turn imposed a further constraint.

These constraints dictated the film-making techniques the director of a b-movie routinely used to deliver a picture:

Overt exposition: through (overwrought) dialog and voice-over; montage; collages of newspaper headlines; radio broadcasts and news
Production efficiencies: cheap sets; day-for-night shooting; use of stock footage; repeated shots; rear-screen projection
Shooting techniques: dialog scenes filmed by framing all players; tracking shots kept to a minimum (giving a static quality); avoidance of retakes (with the risk of wooden performances, and in thrillers, poor choreography of fight scenes).

In Follow Me Quietly we can see these constraints and techniques exemplified.

For economy, the opening credits are displayed over the opening scene, which is highly expressionistic. The legs of a young woman in high heels are seen pacing the pavement in the rain at night – she is wearing a transparent raincoat. After the credits have finished the camera moves up to show her in full profile: she is smoking and it is revealed she is pacing in front of a bar. She flicks the cigarette away with a very déclassé gesture and enters the bar. A dubious moral tone has been established. As it turns out, the woman is not a b-girl, but a reporter for a sleazy tabloid ‘true crimes’ magazine – I wonder if she is wearing the same raincoat worn by Joan Bennett in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1946)?

Soon, the history of the case and the lead cop’s obsession are related through some labored dialog between the cop, his buddy, and their boss at the latest crime scene. This scene is typical of the movie’s dialog scenes: the players are all within the frame and facing or partly facing the stationary camera. Schirmer describes this approach as follows: “rather than shooting dialogue as a series of complex shot/reverse shot combinations (shooting over the shoulder of one actor, then the other), which requires multiple set-ups, relighting, and time in the editing room to assemble the footage, B directors would cut corners. Dialogue scenes were often filmed by framing all of the actors together facing each other, but turned slightly toward the camera. The conversation unfolds in a single, extended shot— effectively eliminating the time necessary for additional set-ups and the editing needed to achieve shot/reverse shot combinations. Moving camera shots were usually kept to a minimum because of the expense and time needed to mount them. As a result of these factors, the majority of B movies have a relatively static quality.”

Follow Me Quietly uses a few basic internal sets, which are mostly darkly lit. Stock footage of suspects being rounded up and police cars in traffic are used throughout. One scene of cop cars speeding towards the camera and delivering suspects to a police station I have seen in at least three other RKO features, and as late as Joseph. Lewis’ 1955 noir The Big Combo.

There is a wonderfully done montage of shots depicting the deployment of cops in the manhunt triggered by a shot of a police photographer taking a photo of the facsimile dummy of ‘the judge’, cutting to scenes of the mass production and distribution of the photo, then cops and squad-cars hitting the streets, and finally suspects being apprehended and hauled into a line-up.

There are other examples in the movie, but I will leave it to readers to explore them when they get a chance to watch this very entertaining and well-made noir.

Cinematic Cities: “We all live in the city”

Jim Morrison - The Lords and The New Creatures.jpg — Jim Morrison, 'The Lords: Notes on Vision' from The Lords and New Creatures (Simon Shuster 1969) p.12

Une Si Jolie Petite Plage (France 1949): Iron in the soul

Une Si Jolie Petite Plage (Such a Pretty Little Beach France 1949) (91 mins)
Released as Riptide in USA in 1951

Screenplay by Jacques Sigurd
Directed by Yves Allegret
Cinematography by Henri Alekan
Original Music by Maurice Thiriet

Produced by Emile Darbon

Pierre . . . . . Gerard Philipe
Marthe . . . . . Madeleine Robinson
Landlady . . . . . Jane Marken
Mrs. Cullier . . . . . Mona Dol
Fred . . . . . Jean Servais
Commercial Traveler . . . . . Julian Carette
Garage Owner . . . . . Andre Valmy
Orphan Boy . . . . . Gabriel Gobin

Jacques Sigurd, one of the last to come to “scenario and dialogue,” teamed up with Yves Allégret. Together, they bequeathed the French cinema some of its blackest masterpieces: Dêdée D’Anvers, Manèges, Une Si Jolie Petite Plage, Les Miracles N’Ont Lieu Qu’une Fois, La Jeune Folle.

– Francois Truffaut

A country priest on some banal errand cycles past a man walking in the rain to his doom, and then waves to a pair of village matrons, as relevant and as useful to the other rain-soaked pedestrian as the umbrellas held by the two women.

Savage irony, withering subversion, and desolation mark the rain-sodden angst of a young man’s end.

What is respectable is rotten, beauty masks filth; the melancholy song of a plaintive chanteuse from a record is a conspiracy of decadence and low greed. Eve is a woman of a certain age in mourning with a hunger for youthful sex and a penchant for cheap sentimentality. Lucifer is a lyricist and stool-pigeon in a grubby search for the jewels of a dead woman. Respectability is a travelling salesman who buys postcards of cemetery monuments for his son’s collection.

Truth and beauty are not poetry, but the simple and unaffected concern of one troubled soul for another. A woman caressing the brow of a condemned man in a desolate shack on the beach of perdition. The eve of the last day, two men work on a car, a murderer helping a mechanic, both strangers yet angelic comrades.

Solidarity meeting fate head-on. A last desperate attempt by the killer to redeem the child he was before and still is – lost in the sordid machinations and cruel exploitation of bourgeois hypocrisy.

The apotheosis of poetic realism and film noir, not on the dark streets of Los Angeles, but in a decrepit consumptive ville on the French coast. This is the true trajectory of noir released from the shackles of the studio enterprise: treacherous mud and dull clouds leading to a desolate beach of lost youth. Death the only escape – sur une si jolie petite plage.

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