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The Long Wait (1954): Tie Me Up And Kiss Me Deadly

The Long Wait (1954)

Anthony Quinn as an amnesiac who is wanted for murder? You got him in The Long Wait, and not one but four femmes noir. Three blondes and a brunette. All leggy and not backward in coming forward.
This violent and brutal flick has Mickey Spillane all over it. The second Spillane novel to be filmed in Hollywood – after I, The Jury (1953) – The Long Wait takes pulp fiction down to a new level. A preposterous plot with more holes than a pair of fishnet nylons itches a perversely compelling pastiche of noir tropes: amnesia, corruption in high places, crooked cops, frame-ups, violence, duplicitous dames, and sex. But no Mike Hammer. Our protagonist is strictly an amateur. But that doesn’t make him any less able to dizzy the dames nor prove his innocence – even if the key to the frame is patently absurd.

Quinn is a hunk and knows it. His kisses and clinches are not for the faint-hearted. He beds the first girl to show an interest. In fact, she picks him up. A frank come-on and cut to her apartment, where after a shower she is ready for the bout naked under her wrap. You get the picture.

Despite a strange incoherence and lackadaisical direction from Brit Victor Saville, the talented lensing of Franz Planer sustains visual interest, with suitably dark lighting and expressionist flourishes.

This brings us to the climax which melds sex and violent entrapment into an amazing expressionist sequence involving a spot-light and deft crane shots. Quinn is tied-up in a chair and a girl called Venus trussed on the floor is being goaded by the bad guy to crawl to Quinn for one last kiss. The resolution is neat and unexpected. One of those rare moments when you are left open-mouthed before the craft and audacity of what you have just seen. Totally weird.

Two New Books on Film Noir: Movie #3,500 and counting, or is enough enough?

They stopped making films noir 50 years ago, yet the books on film noir keep on coming. The study of film noir is career-defining for many academics and noir pundits, and the selling of all those books and scholarly treatises must rake in the readies.

But sorry guys I am starting to get cynical about this plethora of prognostications and chatter about film noir. Let me tell you why. I will have to follow some currents and eddies but indulge me.

A new film noir encyclopedia has just been published, and I have been privileged to preview the galleys on-line. ‘A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir: The Essential Reference Guide’ by prolific film author John Grant, is a 512 page behemoth that boasts capsule reviews of over 3,500 films. As you would guess the net has been cast far and wide to get this tally, with the publisher’s blurb telling me that the book covers “3,500 movie entries, including not only classic US film noirs from the 1940s through 1960s, but also modern manifestations like neonoirs and erotic thrillers. Films from every continent (except Antarctica)”.

I doubt even Eddie Muller has seen this many noirs, and my current list is only a bit more than 300. So I will have to take Grant at his word. Flipping through the book on my iPad, I see all the essential noirs are there, and Grant gets the stories right – something Silver & Ward in their pioneering effort, The Film Noir Encyclopedia, achieve only occasionally in their longer and rather overwrought entries. One thing Grant does do is avoid spoilers and this is definitely welcome. His entries for the more important movies are longer, and provide some background and snippets on a movie’s aesthetics. At US$50 it is a pricey but useful reference.

I just don’t believe there are that many noirs! Let’s be honest. Most b-movies were b-movies: cheap and nasty. There are no doubt some forgotten gems still to be discovered, but not that many surely. If you want a more manageable program of films that you can actually get hold of savour my list of essential films noir.

Hot on the heels of Grant’s book is a new academic treatise edited by UK academics Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson, ‘A Companion to Film Noir’, presenting a new range of essays from the usual suspects from both sides of the Pond, and prefaced with an introduction by James Naremore. If you thought Grant’s book was beyond your budget, then this number is strictly for the birds at just below US$180 for the hardcover and US$160 for the Kindle e-book. No prizes for guessing that mere mortals don’t get a review copy. But the publisher Wiley has made the Introduction and a chapter titled ‘The Ambience of Film Noir’ available free on-line here.

A segue that may justify my increasing suspicion that we have an overload of books on film noir. In the introduction to Grant’s book he makes reference to the seminal film journal article in 1946 by French critic and existential intellectual Nino Frank, in which Frank coined the expression ‘film noir’. That year a backlog of Hollywood product hit Paris screens. (During the Nazi Occupation of France from 1941 to 1945 American films were banned). Frank was struck by the darkness and ambience of a clutch of films that were radically different from Hollywood’s pre-war output. The films Frank wrote about were The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), and The Lost Weekend (1945). Wanting to know more about Frank I started searching for references to his writing on film noir, and thanks to Google, I discovered a web site devoted to Nino Frank which hosts an excellent paper on just what was written and discussed in Paris in 1946. Frank’s original article appeared in the French film journal L’Ecran français on 28 August, 1946, and he wrote a follow-up article in another French film journal La Revue du Cinéma in November of that year.

The paper is comprehensive, providing a detailed history with citations. What struck me was that the intellectual ferment in Paris in 1946 produced a synthesis and comprehension of film noir that has hardly been added to since by the myriad books and journal articles that have appeared in the wake of Frank’s first distillation. I commend readers to the paper titled ‘Nino Frank and the Fascination of Noir’ available here, and best of all it is free.

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.

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

Cinematic Cities: New York 1952

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

The PI as Anarchist

sam-spade

PI’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are outsiders, loners, whose chivalry is not esteemed let alone recognised, and it is sure as hell doesn’t pay well. Men who eke out their existence on the periphery, up against the rank underbelly of that rapacious beast, the modern metropolis. For the purveyors of the American Dream they are losers. Yet they are mythic.

In a recently published essay on the myth of the cowboy, the late British historian and Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, draws a parallel between “Gary Cooper at high noon” and Sam Spade. A worthy comparison.

“Individualist anarchism had two faces. For the rich and powerful it represents the superiority of profit over law and state. Not just because law and the state can be bought, but because even when they can’t, they have no moral legitimacy compared to selfishness and profit. For those who have neither wealth nor power, it represents independence, and the little man’s right to make himself respected and show what he can do. I don’t think it was an accident that the ideal-typical cowboy hero of the classic invented west was a loner, not beholden to anyone; nor, I think, that money was not important for him… In a way the loner lent himself to imaginary self-identification just because he was a loner. To be Gary Cooper at high noon or Sam Spade, you just have to imagine you are one man.”

– Source: An extract from Eric Hobsbawm’s final book Fractured Times published by The Guardian as ‘The Myth of the Cowboy‘

“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun”

The famous pensée of Jean-Luc Godard about girls, guns, and movies is perhaps too glib, and in film noir, not really the case. While in classic noir, we certainly had women and guns, femme-fatales were more likely to be closer to 30 than 20 in years, and rarely held a gun let alone shoot one. A femme-fatale was usually adept at having a love-struck sap do the shooting for her.

Though there were occasions when a dame pulled a gun and used it.

The French have a name for it: noir

PI Philip Marlowe has the poet’s eye for the softer edges of existence while enmeshed in the hard reality of greed, corruption, and criminal passions. The smell of places, dirt and dust, smog, rain, the sun on baking asphalt, the twilight that has no sunlight lit by dull incandescent bulbs that throw shadows in bars where angst is held at bay for as long as a shot of booze does its job. A respite from the desperate loneliness of men and women in big cities where ethical conduct and loyalty are not rewarded but ridiculed, and get you into trouble, and deep. You give up on true relationships and, well, love, it just doesn’t bare thinking about.

“I watched the cab out of sight. I went back up the steps and into the bedroom and pulled the bed to pieces and remade it. There was a long dark hair on one of the pillows. There was a lump of lead at the pit of my stomach. The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase a for everything and they are always right. To say good-bye is to die a little.”

– [Raymond Chandler, ‘The Long Goodbye’]

Film Noir FAQ: A great new book on Film Noir

Film Noir FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Hollywood’s Golden Age of Dames, Detectives, and Danger (Applause 2013) by David J. Hogan is a great new paperback book on Hollywood noir covering the classic cycle from the 40s and 50s. A hefty tome it weighs in at 420 pages and covers around 200 movies. Author Hogan’s prose is snappy and engaging. His down-to-earth Introduction gets you hooked from the get-go. Noir icon Lizabeth Scott has provided a short but razor-sharp note on the contents page.

The book has seven chapters and a bonus section on neo-noir. Each chapter has a theme, with titles like ‘The War Between Men and Women’ and ‘The Best Laid-Plans’. Within each chapter Hogan reviews a selection of films illustrating the chosen theme, and includes sidebars titled ‘Case Files’ throughout that feature mini-bios of important names in the noir universe.

What I particularly like is the way Hogan approaches the films under discussion. He avoids spoilers by eschewing laboured plot outlines. His concerns are thematic, and his focus is on the cinematic experience, with due consideration to not only the stars and directors, but to the writers, cinematographers, and other artisans that were involved in a film’s production. Hogan also aptly quotes dialog from some of the movies, and shares a lot of background on the making of many of the films.

The book is sparingly illustrated in monochrome – what other color would you want for a book on film noir? – but the chosen frames, stills, and posters are well-chosen and of excellent quality.

While Hogan has a narrower definition of the film noir cannon than some, all the motifs and the essential films are there.

The Film Noir FAQ is must for any film noir fan, and is a great primer for those who want a fast-track to a fuller appreciation of film noir. At US$22.99 the book is a ‘big steal’.

The book can be purchased on-line from Amazon and the publisher. Amazon at the time of writing has only three copies left at the special price of US$13.45.