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The Mask of Dimitrios (1944): A journey of dark oriental intrigue

The Mask of Dimitrios (1944)

In the early thriller novels of Englishman, Eric Ambler, the typical Ambler hero is a timid everyman who becomes unwittingly embroiled in a nefarious and dangerous caper where he discovers guile and courage he never thought he had. In this Hollywood adaptation of Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios), Peter Lorre is that everyman. A writer of murder mysteries who has never seen a dead body. His efforts to deal with this lapse embroil him in an adventure across the Levant in search of the story of a dead man.

His at first unwelcome accomplice is for all appearances a genteel Englishman who laments the lack of kindness in the world. No prizes for guessing there is more to this gentility when you learn the gentlemen is Mr Sydney Greenstreet. There is serious magic in this pairing as these two men enter into a pact. The story is secondary here. You are are along for the ride. Faye Emerson pops up as a world-weary cabaret-owner who may know something, but again the thrill is in her languor and Dietrich-like visage. Add to this heady mix a Turkish dancer in exotic garb and a cigarette hanging from her lips as she gyrates centre-stage.

The Mask of Dimitrios exemplifies the golden years of Hollywood. Great acting talent, high production values, and dialog that celebrates language and intelligent repartee. Zachary Scott as a suave villain, and the wonderful Steven Geray as a hapless dupe, add immense value.

Director Jean Negulesco and DP Arthur Edeson create an ambience of dark oriental intrigue aided beautifully by an evocative score from Adolf Deutsch, with impressive art direction from Ted Smith and voluptuous set decoration courtesy of Walter Tilford.

You must join this intrepid pair on their journey of intrigue.

A Warner Archive DVD Release

New York: Scenes from The Window (1949) Then and Now

The Window (1949) was filmed on the streets of New York, and challenges Jule’s Dassin’s The Naked City (1948) as the first documentary-style noir. The Window was actually completed two months before The Naked City in January 1948.

Noir aficionado and film-maker Ray Ottulich visited New York recently, and he has kindly allowed me to publish his photographs of locales used in The Window matched to actual frames from the movie. This is the second post featuring locale shots from Ray. The first in October last year featured Robert Wise’s classic film noir Odds Against Tomorrow, which was shot on location in New York City and in the Hudson river town of Hudson, NY.

Mister Buddwing (1966): A neo-realist astringency

Mister Buddwing is a late monochrome portrait of amnesia played out in almost surreal fashion on New York City streets. There is only a tenuous connection with noir, and this relates more to the loss of identity trope than a broader concern with alienation in the modern metropolis.

James Garner wakes up in Central Park with amnesia. The only clues to his identity are a couple of pills, a phone number scrawled on a slip of paper, a train timetable, and an engraved cygnet ring. He is well-dressed in a suit and tie, and well-polished brogues. The opening scenes are from the protagonist’s POV, as in Dark Passage and The Lady in the Lake, until Garner sees himself reflected in a glass door. Embarking on a search for his identity he rings the telephone number and begins a day and night spent traversing the city and encountering a series of women he strangely mistakes for a woman called Grace. Meantime he gives himself the moniker of “Sam Buddwing”. The encounters and the city’s streetscapes grab your attention. Overall the script is uneven with the overarching story weaker and less convincing than the episodic vignettes that propel the action. It is these episodes that entertain, with some rally sharp absurdist humor, and great cameos from the actresses who variously portray the women Sam pursues.

The film is best described as a crazy dream disturbed by waking moments of lucidity and lapses into banality. Garner as Sam has a certain charm but his less than stellar performance means the heavy load is carried by the other players. The first encounter is with the scruffy dame who answers Sam’s phone-call, played nicely by an ageing Angela Lansbury, who “puts out” offering the guy coffee, a hug, and some lucre; and sends him on his way. A hungry Sam then has an hilarious breakfast with the Jewish owner of a hash-house. Followed by a taxi-ride – a deftly written and sharp New York cabbie vignette – with Sam pursuing a female college student (Katharine Ross), who he thinks is his wife Grace. This interlude is the weakest with an overly long and overwrought fantasy sequence, but is redeemed by a coda that brings together a menagerie of Greenwich Village types; a hapless cop, nascent hipsters and beats, a gay guy, and a vagrant who thinks he is God – “really Kooksville”. Sam then hooks up with a quirky young off-broadway actress payed beautifully by Suzanne Pleshette. She breathes real life into the picture at this point with her beauty, her charm, and her street-smarts. While the fantasy episode this woman provokes tends to melodrama, Pleshette invests the sequence with a real pathos. Finally, Sam encounters a wealthy lush who likes to slum it in taxis, played with relish and boozy charm by a blonde Jean Simmons. The best scene in the picture then follows when Garner and the blonde crash a high-stakes crap game in a low-rent gambling den. This is a darkly-lit bravura sequence where the camera of DP Ellesworth Fredericks goes into contortions. The bit-players do a sterling job in creating the emotion and rising delirium of being on a roll.

The movie has received a bad rap from critics, including a withering review in the New York Times on its release. There are deep flaws, yes. The direction could have been tauter and the screenplay less melodramatic – the final scene is overly cliched and a let-down. But what director Delbert Mann and cameraman Fredericks have done is created a memorable portrait of a great city with both its grandeur and its desolation, together with a cavalcade of worthy denizens that give a real flavour of the zeitgeist. There is certainly also a high degree of elegance and craft in the intelligent use of close-ups, tracking, aerial, and low-angle shots that command and sustain visual interest. The outside deep-focus scenes have a neo-realist astringency and sad beauty, and many compositions linger in the memory. An edgy minimalist jazz score by Kenyon Hopkins adds a nice contemporary feel.

A must-see portrait of New York on the cusp of the Swinging Sixties, which follows in the tradition of films like The Naked City, Odds Against Tomorrow, and Sweet Smell of Success.

Thanks to Cigar Joe for the heads up on this recent Warner Archive DVD release.

Slightly Scarlet (1956): No surprises

slightly-scarlet-1956

The Museum of Modern Art in New York over the last month has held a retrospective of films by Hollywood producer, director, and writer Allan Dwan. His career spanned over 40 years beginning with silent movies in the 1920s and ending with his last film in 1961. It is only since the early 70s that Dwan has attracted the interest of film scholars. It is debatable whether he has auteur status, though he seems to have had certain mannerisms in his late output. Signature stylistics include the use of bright primary colors in his technicolor work, the placement and tracking of actors within the frame to delineate attachments, jealousies, and conflicts, and the use of phallic motifs and the like.

You can see all these elements in the 1956 film, Slightly Scarlet, an overwrought gangster movie, based on a novel by James M. Cain. The ambitious lieutenant of a gambling racketeer contrives his elevation to boss of the outfit, while setting up a favour bank with a pliant cop and a crusading mayor. Add two gorgeous redheads to the mix and you have the makings of a pot-boiler. Some critics give the picture film noir status. I don’t buy it. There is an homme-fatale, crime, sex, corruption, and greed. Yet these elements don’t gel into a recognisable noir. It is more a revenge chronicle filmed in lurid color not in shadows. DP John Alton is given little to work with as the scenes tend to be stagey, though he manages to create a malevolent atmosphere through shadow artifice and areas of black from under-exposing some internal scenes. Dwan’s use of gaudy colors is visually tiring but rendered to good effect in filming the racketeer’s opulant bungalow and the interior of a beach house, where Dwan theatrically stages the violent scenes that end the picture. Indeed, he places the protagonists in the living area and on a staircase, mapping out the dynamics of the final resolution of the conflicts that have propelled them to the inevitable bloody confrontation.

A plodding pace and no surprises however make for a dull 100 minutes. Only Rhonda Fleming in short shorts, tight skirts, and pointy brassiere is (very) distracting. John Payne is ok only as the ambitious hood, and Arlene Dahl as Fleming’s slutty kleptomaniac sister completes the triangle.

The Way You Wanted Me (Finland 1944): Pretty little angel eyes

The Way You Wanted Me (1944)

“Sellaisena kuin sinä minut halusit” (original title)

A dark frenzied tale of a fallen woman, The Way You Wanted Me careens across roads of melodrama at the speed of light. From an idyllic first love on a rural island to the hell of Helsinki bars and bordellos. From youthful abandon in the sun to a night of decrepit darkness, a young woman’s journey to perdition is one of relentless betrayal by men and by fate.

We know Maija’s destiny from the first. An ageing peroxide hooker ravaged by booze and by hurt treads the rotten wharves of Helsinki for tricks. Layering rouge on her lips she drops lipstick and compact, and peers down into the fetid hole of her existence. Cut to a young girl picking petals off a daisy – the game of young love. Her seaman lover returns to ecstatic gambols in the fields and sweet love-making in her bed. A family feud intervenes and the boy betrays her love. Her sin in the village cannot be borne. Now a maid in a wealthy household in the city. Seduced and abandoned in the next frame. On the streets with no money and a baby to feed. Crying on a park bench a gentle procurer takes her in. Cheap booze, cigarettes, and lecherous old men her new domain. A gentle customer saves her, takes her in, loves and cares for mother and child. This redemptive ménage is soon destroyed also. Back to the booze and cigarettes. And the terrible twists continue. All telegraphed by a grotesquely emotional score of sweeping highs and dramatic lows. The girl’s own mother a dark angel in village garb who by her appearances and admonitions heralds more darkness to come. The heroine cries a lonely lament in a resplendent church in awe of the fenestred gaze of Jesus. His compassion is for others and she collapses at the alter of her own sinfulness. The final scene. The flashback is over. She leans down to retrieve her tools of trade, and completes her make-up. One last attempt at deliverance when she admonishes a beginner to quit the trade. Kicking away horse droppings on the ground she wearily trudges up a gang-plank for another sordid assignation below deck.

A film noir? Decidedly. Hyper-expressionism and a tragedy played out in dark nights of the soul. Flashback and a down-beat ending. But not just these elements, more the parasitic fatalism that feeds on each new betrayal and degradation.

High melodrama from one of the masters. Director and writer Teuvo Tulio produced a string of melodramas in the 30s and 40s. Former Village Voice film writer J.Doberman beautifully encapsulates the Tulio ethos of movie-making in this extract from a piece on a retrospective of four Tulio films in New York in 2009 – this excellent article should be read in its entirety:

“At once arty and artless, stark and fulsome, Cine Tulio is characterized by an exaggerated emotional intensity and an equally primal lack of self-consciousness. Here is a filmmaker indifferent to mismatches, shamelessly dependent on musical cues, and hopelessly addicted to blunt metaphors. Robust open-air photography alternates with morbid studio expressionism. Healthy eroticism merges with punitive Puritanism—both are equally natural in Tulio’s stormy universe. His movies are desperate and insistent, sometimes clumsy but never less than forceful. Tulio’s strenuous lyricism allows the objective correlative to run wild: Verdant fields in super-abundant close-up segue to shots of raging rivers or low-angle figures framed against buttermilk skies.”

So it is in the gestalt that Tulio captures your attention. In an almost hallucinatory jump universe akin to wild dreams. What the surrealists were doing 20 years before in fashioning narratives by stringing disparate scenes into dreams of oneiric fantasy.

Yet, what makes The Way You Wanted Me so compelling is the depth and sincerity of the central performance by Marie-Louise Fock as Maija. She is in almost every scene and all other scenes are about her. An actress who, from what I have been able to garner, only ever appeared in this film. She inhabits the role with a veracity and intensity that overcomes the scenario’s tendency to bathos. Her eyes are deeply expressive of all her inner turmoil and the angst of her struggle for survival. Survival and no more.

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

The People Against O'Hara

Odds Against Tomorrow

Nora Prentiss

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 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.

Cinematic Cities: New York 1952

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

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