Tony D'Ambra

Dead Peasants…

Some Dead Peasant Policy Holders. From Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

In the United States many large corporations take out secret ‘dead peasant’ or ‘dead janitor’ life insurance over the lives of rank-and-file workers for a tax-free payout on the death of an employee. Insurers have sold millions of these policies to companies such as Dow Chemical and others. Michael Moore in his documentary film, Capitalism: A Love Story, recounts the story of one young middle-manager who died of cancer, and whose employer received a payout exceeding US$1.5 million. His widow learned of this when the payout letter was mailed to her by mistake.

In Moore’s film no-one was aware of the origin of the term ‘dead peasant’. As I was watching the film, Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel, Dead Souls, came immedately to mind. In Gogol’s novel, a savage social satire of pre-revolutionary Russia, the protagonist, Chichikov, an aspiring bourgeois con-artist, has hatched a get-rich scheme. His plan is to ingratiate himself with landowners and buy dead serfs, dead souls.

At the time the Russian government taxed landowners based on how many serfs they ‘owned’, as determined by the most recent census. As census were infrequent, landowners often had to pay taxes on dead serfs.

Once Chichikov had accumulated enough dead souls, his plan was to make massive borrowings against these phantom assets.

Sound familiar? How about if we substitute sub-prime mortgages for dead serfs?

Similarly, at times of war, there is no shortage of criminals and the unscrupulous who will seek to line their own pockets through corruption and profiteering.

Two films noir I have reviewed here at FilmsNoir.Net use war racketeering as plot elements. In April last year there was Allotment Wives (1945), the story of a woman who uses her social status and ill-gotten wealth to front a bigamy racket where women marry multiple GIs during WW2 to skim the allotment support paid by the Defense Dept to spouses of men on active duty. Last week I looked at Ride the Pink Horse (1947), where a disillusioned war vet wants to blackmail a war racketeer using a check made out to a crooked govt. official signed by the hood.

In Ride the Pink Horse, the hood when cornered at the end tries to talk his way clear by appealing to the vet’s bitter resentments. This spiel resonates just as strongly today and the argument has power because it is sadly still true: [the short clip of a few minutes has been removed by YouTube after NBC Universal claimed a breach of copyright].

Ride the Pink Horse (1947): A heart full of soul

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose… “

Universal International Pictures
Director: Robert Montgomery
Cinematography: Russell Metty
Cast:
Robert Montgomery as Lucky Gagin
Thomas Gomez (AAN) as Pancho
Wanda Hendrix as Pila
Andrea King as Marjorie Lundeen
Fred Clark as Frank Hugo
Art Smith as Bill Retz
Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, and Joan Harrison
Based on the novel Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes (New York, 1946)
Music: Frank Skinner

A bitter disillusioned WW2 vet, Lucky Gagin, arrives in a New Mexico town aiming to blackmail a high-stakes racketeer, and with the help of two locals and a federal agent, he finds more than he bargained for. From the wistfully up-beat Latino rhythm that accompanies the opening credits over a desert vista, you know this movie will take you places beyond noir. This is a film imbued with a deep humanity so rare and moving that you don’t want it to end – the final scene of departure is wrenchingly personal – ‘so long? ah is a sad word, but you make me happy if is not too long’.

The great script from Ben Hecht, elegant direction by star Robert Montgomery, and accomplished photography from DP Russell Metty, are suffused with an aching regret for the loss of a better simpler world, tempered with an idealism and optimistic faith in the integrity and wisdom of ordinary people . The cast is very strong with impressive turns by all the major players. An 18-yo Wanda Hendrix is beguiling as a young peasant girl on her first visit to a big town, who attaches herself to Gagin, and Gomez is superb as Pancho, the poor merry-go-round operator who befriends Gagin.

They don’t make movies like this any more. As John Fawell says in his book , THE HIDDEN ART OF HOLLYWOOD: In Defense of the Studio Era Film (2008): “Hollywood aimed at idealism, it’s true, but its idealism is subsumed under its larger aesthetic of understatement. The best Hollywood directors thought of idealism as they did of sex and violence, all potent ingredients that needed to be doled out carefully. And they had the sense that idealism, to be effective, had to give room to a certain degree of pessimism.” (p 111).

Cinematic Cities: New York blues in the night

Blues in the Night (1941) … a very young Elia Kazan as a dizzy jazz clarinetist
Director Anatole Litvak | DP Ernest Haller

Film Noir and the Portrait

Laura (1944)

I recently started reading a ‘heavy’ tome by feminist academic Susan Felleman, Art in the Cinematic Imagination (University of Texas Press, 2006), and found her discussion of the portrait as a central motif in certain films noir worth sharing.

The portraits, too inert and non narrative to realistically inspire such identification within a realist scenario, threaten the viewer with awareness of the magic of the mimetic and narrative devices employed by the film itself to engage him or her. This is very much a danger in a number of movies in which the portrait assumes a more explicit role and is incorporated into narratives whose realism is strained by, if not abandoned to, psychological or supernatural treatment of mortal desire. In Otto Preminger’s Laura and Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window, both from 1944, the male protagonists fall in love with portraits of beautiful women. In Laura, it is ambiguous, at first, when Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews) falls asleep beneath the portrait of Laura (Gene Tierney)—his desire for which has been established—and then awakens to the ‘‘real’’ Laura, presumed dead, whether or not he is dreaming. This ambiguity is a function, as [scholar] Reynold Humphries has indicated, of the uncanny: ‘‘The irruption of Laura the woman into the privileged space of Laura the portrait is not just a question of a return from the dead but rather of a return of the repressed.’’ Humphries aptly relates this to the even more explicit scenario of The Woman in the Window, in which the entire narrative, stemming from Professor Wanley’s fascination with the portrait, is revealed—only finally—as a dream: a dream in which mortal terror and death are conceived as the inevitable outcome of his desire.

Film noir’s peculiar amalgam of sexual angst,morbidity, and the portrait may well find its apogee in another Fritz Lang film, Scarlet Street (1945), in the painfully ironic scene in which the defeated and dispossessed portraitist (Edward G.Robinson) witnesses the sale of what might be called his ‘‘self-portrait as femme fatale,’’ that is, the portrait Chris painted of Kitty ( Joan Bennett) that was exhibited as her self-portrait. The cadaverous image of the woman who stole his meager self-respect, along with the authorship of the painting, and whom he murdered in a fit of sexual jealousy, is borne, funereally, out of the gallery and past the painter, as he shuffles past in a schizophrenic oblivion. The pathological possibilities of mimesis and its subject-object confusions reach so fevered a pitch in Scarlet Street that it’s hard to imagine a sicker scenario…” (pp 17-18).

On reading this passage, the thought came to me, and I don’t claim that I am the first to have had this ‘revelation’, that in Laura, Detective McPherson doesn’t actually wake-up to be greeted by the living Laura but dreams what he subconsciously desires – that Laura is not dead but alive. To this ambiguity challenged by necromancy, add Felleman’s bizarre description of “[his ]self-portrait as femme fatale”!

Love or something like it…

Down city streets at night looking for love, or something like it. A squalid chance for momentary bliss.

Love or something like it.

Under the lurid glow of neon planets, in a firmament of gasolean fumes and hard luck. The pavement meets my empty gaze and tiny stars of mica shine in an inverted gray sky. My shoes shuffle and drag me on to nowhere. This is my universe. All the shadows are mine. Not strangers nor intimate friends, but sordid extensions of my damned to hell soul.

The soft laughter of a woman somewhere off in another universe a stab to the heart. Whispers and intimacy I ache for and never have. For others. Not for me the easy familiarity of a life worth living. Somewhere not alone, not broken, not sad beyond sadness.

My shoes sill shuffle dragging me nowhere.

New on DVD: Bad Girls of Film Noir

Sony has released a new twin DVD-set of 8 b-girl movies from the Columbia vaults titled Bad Girls of Film Noir. Mostly pot-boilers, but Night Editor is a must-have cult noir.

Volume 1

Evelyne Keys
The Killer That Stalked New York (1950) directed by Earl McEnvoy

Lizabeth Scott
Two of A Kind (1951) directed by Henry Levin
Bad for Each Other (1953) directed by Irvin Rapper

Gloria Grahame
The Glass Wall (1953) directed by Maxwell Shane

Volume 2

Cleo Moore
Night Editor (1946) directed by Henry Levin
One Girl’s Confession (1953) directed by Hugo Haas
Over-Exposed (1956) directed by Lewis Seiler

Ida Lupino/Cleo Moore/JanSterling/Audrey Totter
Women’s Prison (1956) directed by Lewis Seiler

Cornell Woolrich: The shadows come from within

I was left alone there a long time. I could see, all right, and know the things about me. My car was there at the curb, glistening in the dark, with a thin ripple of wet orange paint running down its hood in one place where the light from the doorway struck out at it. A ripple that never moved, and yet was warped and liquid as running ripples are. I even shifted once, from where she had left me standing, and moved over to it, and stood up close beside it, my hands pressing down tight upon the top of the door, as if I were unsteady and needed something to cling to in order to remain upright. My head inclined, as if peering intently at the upholstery of the seat backs.

Yes, the car was real, it was there. My hands could feel it, my eyes could see it, I had but to touch a button to make light shoot out of it, light that no shadows could withstand; but yet the shadows had the best of it, it was powerless to rive this pall that blanketed the eyes that looked at it, the mind that considered it. It could not take me out of the shade, it was I who had brought it into the shade with me; its powers of contrast were lost, it became one with the other Gothic shadows about me. For the shadows came from within, and so anything they fell upon was shadowed. Just as if you front your eyes with a piece of smoked glass, the most sparkling sunlight will become somber.

Each unto himself has his own world that he looks out upon, and though someone else were to stand on the very selfsame inch of ground your feet were placed upon, guided by chalk marks, he would not see the same things you did. There would have been two different views there, not just one. Or is there any world at all, I wondered, out there before us as we look upon it; may it not be inside, behind the eyes, and out front nothing, just a blank infinite? But madness lurked along that trail, and I quickly turned aside.

– Cornell Woolrich, Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945)

Summary Reviews: The Amazing Mr X meets Phantom Lady

Phantom Lady (1944)
Loyal secretary Ella Raines desperately tries to save her innocent boss from the gallows. Woody Bredell’s moody noir photography and an orgasmic jazz jam session add jive to Siodmak’s otherwise lack-luster direction. Franchot Tone is convincing as a closet psychopath. Elisha Cook Jr’s turn as a sleazy jazz drummer is anarchic, but Raines’ impersonation of a gum-chewing floozy is just embarrassing. Based on a Cornell Woolrich novel.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Manipulative NY celebrity columnist enlists sleazy publicist to destroy his younger sister’s suitor. As bracing as vinegar and cold as ice. Ambition stripped of all pretense. Great chemistry between Burt Lancaster as the sinister chat columnist and Tony Curtis as the ruthless publicist. DP James Wong Howe’s sharpest picture: the streets of Manhattan have never looked so real.

The Amazing Mr. X (1948)
A crooked clairvoyant manipulates a widow who believes her dead husband is back. A brilliant gothic satire with humor, poetry, and panache. John Alton’s expressionist lensing, Bernard Vorhaus’ fluid direction, and an ace Alex Laszlo score deliver top-flight entertainment.

Railroaded (1947)
John Ireland is great as a savage hood who frames an innocent guy for murder. Anthony Mann’s poverty-row pulp-b is very noir, cut with acid, and photographed in the deafening blaze of gun-fire. Very entertaining.

Raw Deal (1948)
A tragic love triangle very reminiscent of Marcel Carne’s Port of Shadows has to be one of the great noirs. A sublime film from director Anthony Mann and DP John Alton, with a knockout cast in a strong story stunningly rendered as expressionist art. The portrayals by Dennis O’Keefe, Claire Trevor, Marsha Hunt, and John Ireland are career bests. Poetic voice-overs by Claire Trevor are beautifully enhanced by Paul Sawtell’s eerie scoring.

Obsession (1948 UK)
A macabre and sardonic melodrama. Psychopath shrink plans perfect murder. Taut direction from Edward Dmytryk with a Nino Rota score! Gruesome and disturbing.

Private Hell 36 (1954)
A flat crooked cop flic from Don Siegel. Ida Lupino, who co-wrote the screenplay, and Steve Cochran make it interesting.

Pursued (1947)
Noir western from Raoul Walsh. Robert Mitchum is trapped by a dark dimly discerned past. Solid but inferior to the moody western Blood on The Moon (1948), also starring Mitchum. Story is far-fetched and the actions of the protagonists seem un-convincing.

Strange Illusion (1945)
A truly bizarre Hamlet remake. Edgar Ulmer turns a PRC-b into a camp expressionist noir of foul villains with a knockout finale. Jimmy Lydon, remember Henry Aldrich, plays Hamlet to Warren Williams’ Claudius, who is a bit of a lecher and is not past feeling-up teenage girls in swimming pools!

The Long Night (1947)
A war vet is under siege in a tenement after killing a romantic rival. An RKO Henry Fonda vehicle from Anatole Litvak plays as melodrama with a strong supporting cast. Barbara Bel Geddes is interesting as the love interest, but Vincent Price as the rival is too rococo and out-of-place. Me, I’m stuck on the luscious Ann Dvorak, a straight-up dame who falls for Fonda. John Wexley’s script over-reaches on the social criticism angle.

W R Burnett: Master of noir imagery

From W.R. Burnett’s novel The Asphalt Jungle (1949). Notice how often the adjective ‘black’ is used.

Dix made no comment and sat looking off across the wide black river,
which moved sluggishly southward between its steep cement
embankments toward its faraway union with the Mississippi.
There was no moon, but the sky was cloudless and a handful of bright
stars, diamond points of bluish light, glittered coldly over the tall
buildings on the far shore. The houses along the embankment were
almost all dark, but here and there a window showed light and cast
golden zigzag reflections onto the shiny black pavement of the river. A
slow, damp wind was blowing, carrying a smell of deep water.
Late as it was, traffic was fairly heavy on the big, three-lane bridge.
Suddenly a siren wail rose from the darkness of the far shore, and in a
moment a prowl car passed them, going back at high speed toward
the hilly slums of the Camden Square district.

_____________________

A dark, blustery night had settled down like a cowl over the huge,
sprawling Midwestern city by the river. A mist-like rain blew between
the tall buildings at intervals, wetting the streets and pavements and
turning them into black, fun-house mirrors that reflected in grotesque
distortions the street lights and neon signs.

The big downtown bridges arched off across the wide, black river into
the void, the far shore blotted out by the misty rain; and gusts of wind,
carrying stray newspapers, blew up the almost deserted boulevards,
whistling faintly along the building fronts and moaning at the
intersections. Empty surface cars, and buses with misted windows,
trundled slowly through the downtown section. Except for taxis and
prowl cars, there was no traffic.

River Boulevard, wide as a plaza and with its parkways and arched,
orange street lights stretching off into the misty horizon in diminishing
perspective, was as deserted as if a plague had swept the streets
clean. The traffic lights changed with automatic precision, but there
were no cars to heed or disobey them. Far down the boulevard, in the
supper-club section of the city, elaborately glittering neon signs
flashed off and on to emptiness. The night city, like a wound-up toy,
went about its business with mechanical efficiency, regardless of man.

_____________________

Dix sat up with a start and looked about him as if he’d never seen this
place before—never heard of it even. He had an uneasy feeling that he had
been lifted up in the night by unknown hands and carried to
this place of exile, this alien city with its canyons of masonry and its
unpredictable and ugly ways—far from home, far from sense and
meaning, far from any resting place.

_____________________

They were living very close to the river now, and all night long they
could hear the tugs moaning as they slid downstream pulling the
big coal barges; and sometimes, when it was exceptionally quiet,
they could hear the waves, stirred by the passage of the heavyladen
barges, washing and slapping against the old wharves at the
foot of Front Street. Through their one window they could see the
Lackawanna Street Bridge arching off toward the tall buildings of
the downtown area across the river. In the daytime the bridge was
huge, gray, and misty-looking; at night it was nothing but a long,
brilliant garland of yellow lights, duplicated upside down in the
black water.

_____________________

They cleared the suburb at last, and huge factories and warehouses
began to loom along their route. A light mist started to fall, making little
pinkish haloes about the street lights. For a while they skirted a
railroad embankment, and a freight train passed them going toward
town, and they heard the lonely, off-key ringing of the crossing-bells.
At last they pulled clear of the giant warehouses, the factories, the big
viaducts arching up out of the mists to nowhere, and came out into a
wide, flat, sparsely settled area, with a few poor, frame houses
grouped along cracked and weed-bordered sidewalks.

The mist turned to a drizzle, and the wet asphalt shone like black
glass, palely reflecting the widely separated street lights. A cold
wind began to blow, and Riemenschneider huddled down into his
big overcoat.

Chandler on Cain: “Proust in greasy overalls”

“RAYMOND CHANDLER ” LOS ANGELES TIMES

Raymond Chandler wrote his publisher Alfred Knopf in February 1943:

I hope the day will come when I don’t have to ride around on Hammett and James Cain, like an organ grinder’s monkey. Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain—faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things but because they do it in a dirty way.

– Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler, 1978, p101)

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