Articles – Page 14 – FilmsNoir.Net

Hôtel du Nord (France 1938): Arletty as femme noir

Marcel Carne’s Hotel Du Nord is seen as part of a trilogy that encompasses two other of his films from the 1930s: Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows 1938) and Le jour se lève (Daybreak 1939). These films represent what has been termed ‘poetic realism’, a gritty fatalistic French cycle of films seen as a precursor of the classic film noir cycle, with a male protagonist failing dismally to escape a dark past with a doomed romantic entanglement. Unlike the other two movies, Hotel du Nord is not based on a script from Carne’s famed collaborator, Jacques Prévert, but by scenarist Jean Aurenche, which some critics see as a weakness. The film has on the surface a lighter touch, and much of the dialog crackles with simple humanity, jokes and good-natured innuendo. But there are deeper layers of meaning, and these come from the screenplay.

The scenario revolves around the daily dramas of a not-so-grande hotel in downtown Paris. Amongst others, of principal interest for me are the indomitable Arletty as a b-girl shacked up with a hood, played by Louis Jouvet with world-weary elegance, who is in hiding after ratting on an accomplice. The story revolves around a botched suicide pact between a pair of young lovers, and the dénouement is driven by the arrival of Jouvet’s framed accomplice out for revenge. The whole affair plays out in front of the real Hotel du Nord and in a magnificent studio lot, complete with a canal, bridges, trams, village shops, and the Hotel, conceived by art director, Alexandre Trauner, who also worked on Carne’s masterpiece, Les enfant du Paradis (1945). Maurice Jaubert’s deeply romantic and evocative score completes the scene.

Aurenche’s script and Carne’s mis-en-scene develop a duality: the generosity and humanity of daily life versus the dark flip-side of angst, cowardice, and cruelty. Goodness nurtures healing and reconciliation, while falsity and lies breed suffering and terrible revenge. When the hood Jouvet declares his love for a young woman and failed-suicide, Renée, he proposes as ‘Robert’, the man he was before he became a criminal and who then took on another bi-polar identity to hide from his pursuer – love demands purity of intent and the grace he desperately seeks to recover – fate however, has other ideas. Jouvert as the squealer ‘Paulo’ was a shy bumbling petty-crook scared of blood, and now in hiding as ‘Monsieur Edmond’ he is a severe dandy who kills chickens for local housewives by strangling them with his bare hands. Arletty’s whore Raymonde is engaging, tolerant, and sharp, with a seeming heart of gold. But her final revenge as spurned lover is a dark act of treachery.

Raymonde survives without regrets between the sheets of a more compliant lover, Robert’s ultimate self-abnegation is absurd rather than tragic, and the final reconciliation of the young lovers in the closing scene is more fantasy than real. As dark as any noir.

Raymond Chandler: True Noir

“Yet the darkest of Chandler now appears clean-cut. Chandler evoked the spirit of noir through mood-setting and language, not cheap graphic gore. Now work that is hailed as ‘dark’ often seems close to putrid, almost unreadable…”
– Mick Hume, ‘Watching the Detectives’, AIR Magazine, March 2010, p18.

Last Friday marked the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s death. The passing of the man who wrote detective stories with poetic prose like this, “The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find”, from The High Window (1942).

Today most noir fiction reads like Spillane on crack. Many so-called noir writers are misappropriating noir by depicting violence, including sexual violence, so graphically you wonder who is the real psychopath.

I am reminded of these lines in Chandler’s Playback, where Marlowe narrates: “I picked a paperback off the table and made a pretense of reading it. It was about some private eye whose idea of a hot scene was a dead naked woman hanging from the shower rail with the marks of torture on her… I threw the paperback into the wastebasket, not having a garbage can handy at the moment.”

Cinematic Cities: Jersey City

99 River Street (1953) Pulp poetry…
Director Phil Karlson | DP Franz Planer

All that Glitters is Gold

“The night was all around, soft and quiet.
The white moonlight was cold and clear,
like the justice we dream of but don’t find.”

Another hard luck story
Everyone’s heard them
Not many know them
Stories trodden deep down in the cracks of pavements filled with humanity’s grime
Along with the indifference and neglect that clog the dark arteries of the city’s lost soul
Dark streets cursed havens for ghostly apparitions in the shadows cast by baleful stars
High atop lamp-posts

“more die of heartache”
He knew
I know
We had a life – once

Before they took it and sold it for a quick buck
Those who own the day and make the night hell
Those who make the “hard” decisions – hard for us not for them
Those who hold all life cheap but their own

Like death – thieves in the night they steal your dreams and hock them for a fountain pen

All that glitters is gold

Summary Reviews: No Escape

Caught (1949) Max Ophuls renders the most elegant and romantic noir melodrama you will ever see. Robert Ryan, Barbara Bel Geddes and James Mason are superb in a toxic triangle of entrapment and maniacal control. Ryan is a rich nuerotic who marries Bel Geddes to prove he can, and Mason is the doctor committed to social justice who falls for her. An effective morality tale delivers a subversive plot with the integrity of commitment combating the perverting nature of greed: opulence and decency fight it out in a young woman’s soul. We can forgive the contrived resolution.

Escape (UK 1948) A hidden gem of a thriller directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz starring Rex Harrison and Peggy Cummins. Moody noir photography on fog-laden moors at night, the use of flashback, and the dire consequences of a chance encounter give it a noir dimension. Harrison is great as a toff prison escapee and Peggy Cummins (Gun Crazy) is cute as a button as an upper-class girl who falls for Harrison a la The 39 Steps.

I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951) Abraham Polonksy’s last script before the HUAC blacklist destroyed his career. A solid drama about the NY garment business, directed by Michael Gordon and starring Susan Hayward, Dan Dailey, and George Sanders. A soft ending mars an otherwise acid critique of naked ambition and the American dream.

Night Editor (1946) A sexually charged cult noir starring the queen of b-movies Janis Carter as a rotten rich dame who double-crosses her cop lover in a story exposing the lurid morals that sometimes accompany privilege. The dialog is heavy with sexual metaphors and the repartee ‘hard-boiled’. One scene where Carter begs to see the bashed body of young woman is one of the most explicit portrayals of sexual psychosis in any noir. The atmosphere created by director Henry Levin and DPs Burnett Guffey and Philip Tannura is dark and claustrophobic. Solid entertainment and downright fun to watch. The only weakness is the framing of the story inside a wider newspaper at night theme and the feel-good ending – the movie was a pilot for a movie series which did not proceed.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) Edward G Robinson is magnificent as a man trapped by an accursed gift. Redemption is a zero sum game. A moody and deeply unsettling film based on the Cornell Woolrich novel. The deeply intelligent script by Jonathan Latimer and Barré Lyndon is more subtle and superior to Woolrich’s novel, and showcases the richness to be found in many b-movies.

Double Feature: Young Man with a Horn and A Lady Without Passport

I like to think here at FilmsNoir.Net, readers are made aware of movies that are under the radar and do not fit established categories, genres or movie lists. Many such films were made by major studios on modest budgets and while not likely to make best-of listings or have major genre standing, they are pictures that are good entertainment made with craft and discipline, and sometimes with special elements that reward the discerning viewer.

Two such films were made in 1950 and, while having noir aspects, are largely entertainment features made memorable by facets that have been largely ignored by film reviewers and other writers on film.

Young Man with a Horn from Warner Bros. was directed by Michael Curtiz, and Joseph H.Lewis directed A Lady Without Passport which was produced by MGM.

Each of these films is special in its own way.

Young Man with a Horn is loosely based on the biography of jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderdecke: the story of how a lonely kid in L.A. learns the trumpet from a black musician, who becomes his close friend and mentor. His shift to New York in pursuit of a career is the stuff of melodrama; young guy makes good, marries the wrong woman and abandons his friends, and after tragedy finds a kind of redemption. There is great jazz played by Hoagey Charmichael and Harry James, nice songs from a young Doris Day, solid acting from Kirk Douglas in the lead, Lauren Bacall as the wife, Junco Hernandez as the black trumpeter, and Charmichael as Douglas’ piano-playing buddy. Competent direction by Curtiz and inspired cinematography from DP Ted McCord also add value. Of particular interest is Baccall’s acid performance as the neurotic wife.

But the real strength of the film is in the script by Carl Foreman (who during filming of his script for High Noon in 1951 appeared at HUAC and was later blacklisted by Hollywood studio bosses). Redemption for the young man with the horn comes from a realisation that a great artist’s obsession with his craft is not the only requirement for artistic fulfilment – it cannot come from a sterile wedding of player and instrument but ultimately from a deeper maturity which comes from embracing human relationships and commitment – a responsibility to and for others.

The tragic aspect of the story lends a true pathos to the melodrama, and the prominence given to the black father-figure in a film of this era is a revelation. Here we have a powerful expression of the personal and the social filmed with empathy and commitment.

A Lady Without Passport is ostensibly a police procedural, one of the many that began to emerge in the early 1950’s as the noir cycle began to explore other directions, after the success of on-the-street exposés such as Jules Dassin’s The Naked City. Director Joseph H. Lewis made his seminal noir, Gun Crazy, in 1950, and as the noir cycle began to decline, he directed perhaps the best 50s noir, The Big Combo, in 1955. These two classic films noir established Lewis’ reputation as an innovative and iconoclastic film maker. In A Lady Without Passport he has a more prosaic script, but together with his DP Paul Vogel and a romantic score from David Raksin, he brings to the project a wonderful transforming elegance to a fairly routine story. Also unusually for Lewis, in this movie, violence is handled with restraint, but not without originality.

A U.S immigration agent played by John Hodiak is sent to Cuba to investigate the murder in New York of an illegal alien, and uncovers a people-smuggling racket run by a suave villain played by George Macready. The agent falls for a Viennese refugee played with understated angst by 35-yo Hedy Lamarr, who was then entering the decline of her career. There is romance, humour, intrigue and sensuality – the stuff of a minor Casablanca, but filmed with a casual elegance that enthralls as well as entertains. The charm of pre-revolutionary Havana is rendered with a calm detachment and the sympathetic portrayal of Latin life is boisterous yet respectful.

Much has been written of the bank robbery scene in Gun Crazy shot from within the getaway car, but equally arresting is a long take for the opening scene of A Lady Without Passport from inside a taxi. While less tense the shot is more fluid when compared with the Gun Crazy take. Indeed, Lewis in A Lady Without Passport displays the élan of Max Ophuls, with his camera often on the move, and zooming, turning and panning, as well as placed at unusual angles. In one scene an exotic cabaret dancer is filmed by placing the camera at a low angle near the floor so that the viewer is in the position of voyeur, looking up at the dancer’s legs and hips as she dances. A particularly stunning scene towards the end shows the crash of a plane and a violent killing as seen from the cockpit of a government plane that was in pursuit, with a running commentary radioed to base by the pilot. This technique gives a strong documentary feel to the whole scene and a sense of stricken helplessness. The dénouement in a foggy swamp is very reminiscent of Gun Crazy, and what it lacks in tension is made up in the artistry of the photography.

The picture’s final scene has the government agent make a radical re-statement that is sufficiently subversive to underline the human element of the story free of any romantic allusions.

Two fine Hollywood movies.

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).

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.

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