Author: Tony D'Ambra

James Naremore in his introduction to the English translation of the seminal book on film noir by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, ‘A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953’, surveys the contribution of the Surrealist critique of cinema, and posits that “at certain moments, even in ordinary genre film or grade-B productions, [cinema] could involuntarily throw off bizarre images, strange juxtapositions, erotic plays of light and shadow on human bodies, thus providing an opportunity for the audience to break free of repressive plot conventions and indulge in private fantasies.”

More fully Naremore says:

The best account of the Surrealist fascination with cinema as a whole can be found in Paul Hammond’s witty, perceptive introduction to ‘The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema’… Hammond, who is also the translator of this edition of Panorama, reminds us that during the years immediately after the First World War, the original Surrealists used movies as an instrument for the overthrow of bourgeois taste and the desublimation of everyday life. Engaging In what Hammond describes as “an extremely Romantic project” and an “inspired salvage operation,” [André] Breton and his associates would randomly pop in and out of fleapit theaters for brief periods of time, sampling the imagery and writing lyrical essays about their experiences. Like everyone in the historical avant-garde, they were captivated by modernity, but they particularly relished the cinema because it was so productive of the “marvelous” and so like a waking dream. Willfully disrupting narrative continuities, they savored the cinematic mise-en-scene, which functioned as a springboard for their poetic imagination; and out of the practice they developed what Louis Aragon called a “synthetic” criticism designed to emphasize the latent, often libidinal implications of individual shots or short scenes. Even when cinema became too expensive for Breton’s style of serial viewing, it remained the fetishistic medium par excellence. At certain moments, even in ordinary genre films or grade-B productions, it could involuntarily throw off bizarre images, strange juxtapositions, and erotic plays of light and shadow on human bodies, thus providing an opportunity for the audience to break free of repressive plot conventions and indulge in private fantasies.

Naked Alibi an unpretentious b-movie from late in the classic noir cycle has just such a surreal quality. Whether from the cheapness of the production, the bizarre plot, or the literal darkness of much of the film, the picture is not so much a banal pastiche of noir motifs and set pieces, but an oneiric hallucination where characters from other films noir assemble onto a movie lot by some perverse twist of fate, and play out an adventure that makes as much sense as Luis Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or.

Made by a bunch of stringers – bar the great Russell Metty who lensed – the movie holds a strange fascination. Shot in the flat TV-style that emerged in the 50s there is little to recommend the picture as a cinematic effort – though Metty and director Jerry Hopper do hit some scenes out of the park, thanks to a peppering of classic film noir lighting and framing, and a theatrical final shootout across rooftops.

Stars Sterling Hayden and Gloria Grahame each wander in from some other set, Hayden perhaps taking a breather from Crime Wave and Grahame on the loose from Human Desire. Hayden is a cop who is fired after he pursues a model-citizen played by Gene Barry for the killing of the three cops – Barry has an angelic wife and a baby in a crib. The big surprise is Barry, who later made it big on TV as Bat Masterson. As the villain leading a truly bizarre Jeckyll & Hyde existence as a small-town baker – in one scene he is shown in his store icing a cake! – who falls foul of the law after he is picked up as drunk and disorderly, he leaves Hayden and Grahame behind in a wake of attitude and booze. But the motive for the killings is so flimsy you can’t understand why Hayden doesn’t give it up, tailing the suspect until Barry can’t take it any more and leaves town to “calm his nerves”. Apparently the baker takes regular business trips on his own, so the wife and kid are left behind. The plot is moot on why a baker would need to make business trips. Anyway.

Hayden pursues Barry down to a Mexican border town where Barry is revealed as a chronic drunk and mean racketeer, after Grahame is shown flashing a lot of flesh as a chanteuse in a cheap dive. It turns out Barry is Grahame’s long-lost boyfriend. Barry’s reunion with Grahame is particularly sordid and sexually charged. A classic triangle ensues. One thing leads to another, and Hayden gets his man on ice and Grahame checks out in Hayden’s arms after stopping two bullets from Barry’s gun in a low-rent reprise from Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat from the year before.

Take with a lot of booze.

 

“If this were serious drama one might complain that what makes Johnny [Eager] tick remains a mystery, that lovely students of sociology aren’t apt to embark on discussion with a parolee on Cyrano de Bergerac’s apostrophe to a kiss. But as pure melodrama Johnny Eager moves at a turbulent tempo. Mr. Taylor and Miss Turner strike sparks in their distraught love affair. Van Heflin provides a sardonic portrait of Johnny’s Boswell, full of long words and fancy quotations.”

–  Theodore Strauss, New York Times (1942)

A confoundingly entertaining pastiche the 1942 MGM gangster melodrama Johnny Eager has Robert Taylor and Lana Turner as star-crossed lovers, with Van Heflin as a drunkard and consigliore to Taylor’s titular mob boss.  Heflin received a richly-deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role.

An unashamedly contrived scenario by John Lee Mahin from a story by James Edward Grant has Johnny the conniving gangster find redemption too late and with a belly full of lead.  There are queer overtones as Heflin holds the dying Taylor in his arms whose last words wax nostalgic for the ‘figurative mountains’ they never climbed together.

Emeritus director Mervyn LeRoy fashions a faux silk purse that has you believing the absurd coincidences and machinations which propel the flatly presented narrative to an out-of-left-field hiatus of beguiling expressionist cred. Much is owed to veteran DP Harold Rosson whose masterful lighting of the final sequence on dark city streets elevates the affair to something more than the sum of what has come before.  Taylor and Turner, who are inspired to break-out of their corn-fed roles with the able assistance of Heflin and a motley crew of craven hoods, deliver a mesmerising operatic finale, closed by a wonderfully ironic final frame that is pure cinema.

Based on William Keating’s autobiography, “The Man Who Rocked the Boat’, which chronicles his experiences as an Assistant DA in NYC in the 1950s, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue has Keating fighting corruption and union racketeering on the waterfront as he pursues a murder prosecution.  A straight union organiser has been gunned down after refusing to bend to the demands of racketeers, and the DA’s office must build a case in the face of witness intimidation.

Richard Egan in a straight-up effort plays Keating.  Jan Sterling is good as the victim’s wife, and a young Walter Matthau impresses as a racketeer defending his turf.  With the support of crime drama heavies Dan Duryea as a wily defence attorney, and Charles McGraw as an unorthodox cop, there is enough talent on show to hold your interest.  With these names and a good story you would think the producers had the makings of a solid noir.  What you get though is a second-rank police procedural with no real tension and about as noir as Liberace.  This did not stop the film featuring at Noir City 2012.  Overall, there is a derivative feel to the scenario, which borrows from but never matches the intelligence and power of On the Waterfront.

While not to be confused with the Richard Rodgers’ musical ballet from Rodgers and Hart’s 1936 Broadway musical comedy ‘On Your Toes’, Rodger’s music is used in the score, and to good dramatic effect.  Indeed, it is the jazzy musical arrangement by Herschel Burke Gilbert in the opening scenes that hits the spot.

The opening titles are superimposed over the prelude to the hit, a stunning sequence that is sadly a false dawn, with the rest of the picture playing out at a plodding pace.  We see the perps drive from the waterfront to a tenement for the hit.  There is a wonderful gestalt at work with the contributions of composer Gilbert, DP Fred Jackman Jr., editor Russell F. Schoengarth, and director Arnold Laven, who  together create one of the most arresting sequences in a Hollywood crime movie ever.  These scenes are beautifully paced and edited, shot from a plethora of angles, including elegant aerial and tracking shots, and from inside the car – all perfectly lit.  You just want the titles to get the hell out of the way!

 

Robert Siodmak’s Christmas Holiday starts off conventionally on Christmas Eve with the graduation of an army lieutenant at an army base.  Back at barracks to pack for the Christmas holidays before shipping out overseas to join the war effort, he gets a dear john telegram from the girl he hoped to marry in Frisco the day after Christmas. He still boards his flight ready to have it out with her.  But bad weather forces the plane to land in New Orleans for passengers to wait out the wind and the rain at a hotel.  The conventional is instantly jettisoned. We now enter a dark surreal world animated by suppressed taboos and violence contained within a strange subterranean universe.  Siodmak proceeds to smash genre conventions by unleashing a wild expressionist ambience that has you appalled yet enthralled.  Full of bizarre surprises like Gene Kelly as an homme-fatale!

At the hotel bar our lieutenant is befriended by a bored local newspaper reporter who is a bit of lush.  The reporter takes the soldier to a bordello to see if a local fixer can get him to Frisco faster, and if not, for a good time.  A band is playing and a sour-faced ‘hostess’ steps up to the stage and sings a sultry number motionless and deadpan – but with a voice to die for. Enter Deanna Durbin totally against type. The madame at the reporter’s suggestion has Deanna keep the soldier company while the increasingly drunk reporter goes to the office to be paid his weekly ‘honorarium’.  The reporter passes out, but not before he gives the madame an invitation to midnight mass to pass on to the lieutenant. The soldier wants to take a raincheck, but strangely the singer begs that he take her.  At the cathedral the melodrama goes into over-drive with the girl collapsing into a crying fit.  Later at an all night diner the girl reveals her current employment is a kind of escape and punishment for her husband having being convicted of murder. The rest of the scenario then plays out as a lurid story of obsession, guilt, and entrapment via a series of disjunctive flashbacks, with the dénouement played out in the darkly lit madame’s office.

Never mind the melodrama and the absurd script – by Herman J. Mankiewicz of Citizen Kane fame no less.  Siodmak subverts melodrama tropes with a series of brilliant set pieces that take your breath away.  Classical music, brilliant lighting, a meticulous mise-en-scène, the deadpan Durban visage, and the use of monumental spaces filmed with sweeping tracking and crane shots, and in deep focus – church, concert hall, and the expansive lobbies of the hotel and the brothel rendered in sublime majesty – each with an achingly intimate counterpoint – by a perverse alchemy forging a visual cornucopia that fully realizes a chemistry with DP Woody Bredell that Phantom Lady (1944) only hints at.

A lurid, crazy, and weird, yet totally compelling phantasmagoria that transcends banal genre imperatives. The crescendo of saintly escape into the black abyss of the clearing night sky revealed by departing clouds in the final scene eclipses the ending of Criss-Cross (1949).

Essential.

Strange Impersonation, a 1946 programmer from Republic Pictures is a weird confection that has you engaged throughout. An early Anthony Mann effort, the picture uses its 68 minutes with economy to tell a lurid story of blackmail, deceit, and attempted murder, where the dames hold all the cards.

A dark female trio calls the shots in a scenario that becomes more preposterous with each frame. Based on a story by Ann Wington, who also penned the original story for Mann’s The Great Flamarion from the year before, the film uses a framing device that noir aficionados will not fail to recognise early on, and to a degree may limit their enjoyment of a rather juicy tale of revenge that – without the cop-out framing – resolves itself with a rather dark twist. Mann does a respectable job with few flourishes, and only towards the end does he start to reveal his potential for noir lighting and expressionist angles.

A female chemist in a pharmaceutical company is working on a new anaesthetic, and decides to test it on herself outside-hours, aided by her female assistance, who has eyes for the chemist’s fiancé. In a melodramatic turn of events arson precipitates a double-cross worthy of the most demonic femme fatale, which then using a formula involving blackmail, an accidental death, and plastic surgery, leads on to a mission of deceit and revenge, which comes unstuck with a dark devilish irony. The male cast is by the board, while three b-actresses deliver the real goods. The chemist played by Brenda Marshall starts off demure and serious – she wears oversized glasses to press the point – but when the melodrama kicks in a darker self takes over and she is now not only of ambivalent virtue but decidedly hotter. Hillary Brooke is excellent as the two-timing assistant cum femme-fatale, and Ruth Ford (Lady Gangster 1942) is decidedly seedy as a low-life blackmailer who takes on more than she can handle.

Great fun.