Articles – Page 22 – FilmsNoir.Net

White Heat (1949): Fission Noir

Story of a psychotic hood with an Oedipus complex
(1949 Warner Bros. Directed by Raoul Walsh 114 mins)

Cinematography by Sid Hickox
Screenplay by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts from a story by Virginia Kellogg
Original Music by Max Steiner
Art Direction by Edward Carrere

Starring:
James Cagney – Arthur ‘Cody’ Jarrett
Virginia Mayo – Verna Jarrett
Edmond O’Brien – Vic Pardo – alias for undecover cop Fallon
Margaret Wycherly – Ma Jarrett

Film Noir Filmographies:
Raoul Walsh: They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra (1941)
Sid Hickox: To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Possessed (1947),
Dark Passage (1947)
Virginia Kellogg: T-Men (1947) (story), Caged (1950) (screenplay)
Edward Carrere: Dial M for Murder (1954), I Died a Thousand Times (1955),
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

“White Heat = Scarface + Psycho” – Time Out

“The most gruesome aggregation of brutalities ever presented under the guise of entertainment” – Cue

“In the hurtling tabloid tradition of the gangster movies of the thirties, but its matter-of-fact violence is a new post-war style” – Time

“a wild and exciting picture of mayhem and madness” – Life

“an incendiary performance by James Cagney” – The Rough Guide to Film Noir

“Cagney is an epileptic and a borderline psychotic, and the cinema has rarely gone this for in a description of a true Oedipus” – A Panorama of American Film Noir (1955)

“Cagney… seems to incarnate the unstable explosive energies set loose by atomic fission” – Andrew Spicer in Film Noir

“A tragic grandeur… is achieved and culminates in Cody’s delirious and explosive self-immolation atop a metallic pyre” – Film Noir: An Encyclopaedic Reference

From the daring and brutally violent train robbery that opens the film, this gangster flick has a relentless trajectory that ends only with the incendiary finale-de-resistance. Director, Raoul Walsh, and cinematographer, Sid Hickox, have produced one of the tautest and most electric thrillers ever to emanate from Hollywood, which together with the nuanced screenplay, has the spectator strapped into an emotional strait-jacket that is released only in the final explosive frames.

Jimmy Cagney as the criminal psychotic Cody Jarrett dominates the screen in a bravura performance that is as dynamic as it is intense. Edmond O’Brien as the undercover cop Fallon, is no match for Cagney, and appears flat and almost irrelevant. Cody’s razor-sharp intelligence, and unflinching decisiveness and brutality propel the action – Fallon and the other cops can only follow in his wake. Virginia Mayo is well-cast as Cody’s slatternly wife, and is as cheap and conniving as any gangster’s mole before or since. Only Ma Jarrett matches her in evil guile.

The film-making team conspires to hold you not only in awe of Cody but also to perversely empathize with him. Strange to say he is the only genuine character in the motley crew organised for the final disastrous heist. Even Fallon comes off looking lifeless and less than honorable. The mise-en-scene is calculated to subvert your moral compass. Cody is decisive and acts without hesitation or qualm, while Fallon’s actions are reactive and ponderous. When Fallon tries to sneak out of the gang’s hide-out on the eve of the heist to alert his superiors, he is way-laid and has to concoct a story about wanting to hook-up with his ‘wife’ for the night, as Cody talks intimately and almost poetically to him of his grief for his dead mother, and how he was just ‘talking’ to her when wandering in the brush outside.

In the final shoot-out Cody is pinned atop a gas storage silo at an LA refinery, while Fallon from a safe distance takes pot-shots at him with a sniper’s rifle. Cody won’t go down, and only when he wildly shoots his pistol into the silo is his fate finally sealed. Fallon looks far less heroic…

The Ghost Ship (1943): Noir at Sea

The mad captain of a coastal freighter terrorises a rookie 3rd officer
(1952 RKO. Produced by Val Lewton and directed by Mark Robson 69 mins)

Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca
Screenplay by Donald Henderson Clarke from a story by Leo Mittler
Original Music by Roy Webb
Art Direction by Albert S. D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller

Starring:
Richard Dix – Captain Will Stone
Russell Wade – Tom Merriam, 3rd Officer
Skelton Knaggs – Finn, the mute crewman

CAPTAIN:
I’ll explain now. I told you you
had no right to kill the moth. That
its safety did not depend on you.
But I have the right to do what I
want with the men because their
safety does depend on me.
I stand ready any hour of the day
or night to give my life for their
safety and the safety of this
vessel — because I do, I have
certain rights of risk over them.
Do you understand?

At the outset, you should be aware that contrary to the expectations conjured by the film’s lurid poster, there are no nubile woman and no ghosts in this movie. Indeed, there are no women on the ship when it is at sea, where most of the action occurs. The only woman that has a significant role is a plain and very proper middle-aged spinster carrying a torch for the captain, who visits the ship in port.

A strange film, The Ghost Ship, was out of circulation for 50 years shortly after its initial release due to a plagiarism suit. Produced by Val Lewton’s horror unit at RKO, it is not a horror movie but a psychodrama with a strong atmosphere of entrapment. The production team of the magnificent The Seventh Victim made earlier in the same year transferred directly to this picture. The actual story is simple and as most of the action occurs on a set, cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca, has few opportunities to bring a deeper focus to the action, though set-bound lighting and fog are used to good effect.

The film is dominated by actor Richard Dix, who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Cimarron (1931), winner of the Best Picture Oscar that year. He was a big box-office draw at RKO during the 30s appearing in mystery thrillers, pot-boilers, westerns and program fillers, and appeared in the “Whistler” series of mystery films at Columbia in the mid-40s. His portrayal of the insane Captain Will Stone is masterfully understated. Bit-player Russell Wade is believable as the rookie, a role he specialised in. A suitably mysterious turn by Skelton Knaggs as Finn, the mute crewman whose dark voice-over narration adds a gothic dimension to proceedings, provides depth and a mystic counterpoint to the very real menace of the mad Captain. Finn is not just a chorus to the action as he has a pivotal role in the climactic resolution. Quite another mystery is why his contribution went uncredited.

The arc of the film is the cat-and-mouse game between the captain and his 3rd officer, who has no escape as he is trapped on the ship commanded by his pursuer. The terror of the 3rd officer’s entrapment is brilliantly portrayed in his cabin one night when each sound is ominous, and the sinister crescendo progressively pushes him further and further into a paralytic terror.

The calm exterior of the captain has the rest of the crew fooled, and the young man’s isolation is desperate, with the claustrophobic tension sustained right into the brutal climax.

A film you might think is slight immediately after viewing, subconsciously insinuates itself into your memory. A must see movie.

FINN (voice-over narration):
The man is dead. The waters of the
sea are open to us. With his blood
we have bought passage. There will
be the agony of dying and another
death before we come to land again.
Men’s lives are the red coin thrown
into the sea so that we may come
and go across the waters.

On Dangerous Ground (1951): “You get so you don’t trust anybody”

A city cop battling inner demons is sent up-state to ‘Siberia’
to assist in a man-hunt after bashing one too many suspects
(1952 RKO. Directed by Nicholas Ray 82 mins)

Cinematography by George E. Diskant
Screenplay by A.I. Bezzerides & Nicholas Ray from the
Gerald Butler novel ‘Mad with Much Heart”
Original Music by Bernard Herrmann
Art Direction by Albert S. D’Agostino and Ralph Berger

Starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino

On Dangerous Ground is visually stunning and without a wasted frame or line of dialog. Director Nicholas Ray with the support of a talented team of film-makers has wrought a melodramatic noir with a dark beauty and haunting characterisations. Leads Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino are so deeply immersed in their roles that they remain in your memory as real people inhabiting a white and craggy landscape steeped in a tragedy redeemed only by sacrifice and human compassion.

Ryan’s Jim Wilson is a cop, a sad loner with a seething anger that has it origins in loneliness and an existential despair that is directed against the low-lifes who inhabit the dark city streets he patrols nightly with his two partners. Wilson is keen and tough, but is starting to lose control and his violent methods have got him into trouble. He is sent up-state to help out on a local murder investigation by his captain, and told to sort himself out. The action moves from the dark city streets to the high snow country where Wilson joins the man-hunt for the savage killer of a school-girl. After a sighting of the suspect in the snow, Wilson and the girl’s enraged father give chase, and track the attacker to a lonely home in the mountains, where a young blind woman, Mary (Lupino), lives with her disturbed adolescent brother.

The story and its resolution traverse a dramatic arc that moves from the blackness and confinement of city streets and tenements to the expansive whiteness of the snow country. The noir motif of stark chiaroscuro lighting is transformed into a metaphor for a liberation from confinement to openness; from personal isolation and distrust to reaching out to the other with trust; from despair, hatred, and self-loathing to hope, compassion and love.

German Expressionism: Not Orthochrome Nor Panchromatic

Nosferatu (1922)

Following my recent posts on German expressionism and its influence on film noir, I came across something interesting. While recognising that the expressionist classics of the early 1920s had more than a chiaroscuro look to define their imagery, this characteristic is cited as the most relevant connection with Hollywood noir of the 40s and 50s.

Before the mid-1920s film stock was ‘colour-blind’ as it did not absorb the tones between light and dark, so the processed images had very stark contrast. It was not until 1924-25, with the appearance of first Orthochrome and then the superior Panchromatic films, that the processed film could render a broad spectrum of grey tones.

This begs the question: was German expressionist chiaroscuro more a result of technical limitation than a creative initiative?

A Touch of Evil (1958): “the rich baroque and the decadent gothic”

The Parallax View: Smart Words About Cinema blog has today published a brilliant review of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958): Touch of Evil: Crossing the Line by Robert C. Cumbow. This essay is the best on this problematic film that I have read.

I was particularly struck by Cumbow’s analysis of the famous opening take:

“In establishing this matrix of border crossings, Touch of Evil’s celebrated opening shot… [in order] …To see why the opening shot is cinematically, stylistically, and thematically necessary, we need only consider how the opening sequence would seem if the opening were not a single take, but a series of briefer shots edited together. The sequence’s – and the film’s – whole concept of time and space would be irretrievably damaged. For if there were cuts between the time a shadowy figure puts the bomb into the car and the time it explodes, we would not know how long the bomb had been ticking, or how long it took the car to get from that parking garage to the border. Nor would we know how far it was from one place to another. And an understanding of the geography of that border town is as crucial to Touch of Evil as is its treatment of the time frame within which the events occur.”

Concidentally, this morning I started re-reading V.F. Perkins’ book, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Penguin, London, 1972), and on reading Cumbow’s essay later in the day, I immediately recalled this telling passage from the book where Perkins discusses the long take in the context of Andre Bazin’s critique of montage as the basis of film theory: “Directors like jean Renoir, Orson Welles, and William Wyler had to a large extent renounced editing effects in order to explore the dramatic possibilities of an uninterrupted continuity in pace and time.“.

The tension of the long fluid opening shot in Touch of Evil would perhaps also have been lost if the shot was broken-up by editing.

Blood on the Moon (1948): Quintessential Noir Western

A drifter becomes embroiled in a violent dispute between an Arizona cattle rancher and local homesteaders. (1948 RKO. Directed by Robert Wise 88 mins)

Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca
Screenplay by Lillie Hayward and Luke Short (adaptation of his novel “Gunman’s Chance”)
Film Editing by Samuel E. Beetley
Art Direction by Albert S. D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller
Original Music by Roy Webb
Starring Robert Mitchum, Barbara Bel Geddes, and Robert Preston
Filmed on location in Arizona and the RKO Ranch California
Robert Wise also directed: The Set-Up (1949) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

“A bevy of late ’40s RKO talent, including ace cameraman Nick Musuraca, combine to make an intriguing noir Western. A complex tale of duplicity and split loyalties is played out against a noir backdrop of low-ceilinged bars and rain-soaked windswept darkness. Mitchum delivers his customarily immaculate, stoned performance as a reluctant hired gun duped into heading a trumped-up homesteaders’ revolt, and Bel Geddes plays the spunky cowgirl who engages him in erotic gun-play.” – By NA for the Time Out Film Guide

Blood on the Moon: what a great title for a noir western from a dream RKO film noir team! Steven H. Scheuer in his Movies on TV guide rates this movie as only 2½ out of 4 stars, but his terse write-off, to my mind perversely establishes its noir credentials: “Murky, violent, post-war western”.

The film weaves a classic noir scenario into a western with all the motifs of the genre: the mysterious drifter with divided loyalties, the virginal rancher’s daughter in britches, the conniving proto-gangster, the crooked Indian-Reservation agent, hired-guns, shout-outs, bar-room brawls, and the Arizona backdrop, while organically integrating the noir elements of the redeemed noir protagonist, doom-laden atmospherics, outbursts of violence, and vengeance into the story.

Mitchum as the drifter is classic Mitchum, and Barbara Bel Geddes truly engaging as the rancher’s younger daughter, with Robert Preston delivering a competent bad-guy, who in a neat twist is the homme-fatale to the rancher’s older daughter. The wonderful Walter Brennan is great as an old homesteader, who as an active protagonist personifies the moral underpinnings of the story and its resolution.

But the movie belongs to director Wise and cinematographer Musuruca. From the opening frame of the drifter’s silhouette riding over a mountain pass in driving rain in the day’s gloaming, you know you are in noir territory. The night-for-night scenes use available light and sharp contrasts to develop the dark themes of violence and betrayal, with interior scenes using key lighting and disturbing angular shots to establish risk and menace. The daylight scenes are filmed in classic western-style with deep focus and from higher angles. There is a brilliantly filmed cattle stampede at night in the middle of the film, that has to be text-book. The score from Roy Webb adapts seamlessly from the dramatic to elegiac scenes of the lone horseman on the plain.

The Seventh Victim (1943): “And all my pleasures are like yesterdays”

A young woman travels to New York to find her older sister after she stops paying her tuition fees, and discovers a satanic cult is threatening her sister’s life.
(1943 RKO. A Val Lewton production directed by Mark Robson 71 mins)

Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca
Story and Screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen and Charles O’Neal
Art Direction by Albert S. D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller
Original Music by Roy Webb

After Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), and Leopard Man (1943), the head of the low-budget horror production unit at RKO, Val Lewton, could not afford the services of Jacques Tourneur, who had been promoted by RKO to a-production, and he gave Mark Robson, who had edited those earlier movies, hist first directing job with The Seventh Victim, a simply stunning film that out-classes Lewton’s earlier productions.

I cannot express the power of this movie better than Chris Auty from London’s Time Out Film Guide:

What other movie opens with Satanism in Greenwich Village, twists into urban paranoia, and climaxes with a suicide? Val Lewton, Russian emigré workaholic, fantasist, was one of the mavericks of Forties’ Hollywood, a man who produced (never directed) a group of intelligent and offbeat chillers for next-to-nothing at RKO. All bear his personal stamp: dime-store cinema transformed by ‘literary’ scripts, ingenious design, shadowy visuals, brooding melancholy, and a tight rein over the direction. The Seventh Victim is his masterpiece, a brooding melodrama built around a group of Satanists. The bizarre plot involves an orphan (Hunter) searching for her death-crazy sister (Brooks), but also carries a strong lesbian theme, and survives some uneven cameos; the whole thing is held together by a remarkably effective mix of menace and metaphysics – half noir, half Gothic.

The opening frame of the film, a close-up of a stained-glass window in a gothic school building, establishes the mood of foreboding:

Knowledge of three further lines in Donne’s sonnet enrich our experience of this film:

I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste

“Despair behind, and death before doth cast”: the specter of existential terror haunts this film, where it is the angst of an empty existence that terrorises – not the super-natural. The noir motif of inescapable doom is developed as strongly if not more so than any other Hollywood film of the period.

Jacqueline Gould, a stunning dark beauty is not comfortable with existence: “I’ve always wanted to die – always.” Life nauseates her and in her desperation joins a Satanic cult, and when she re-cants and seeks to abandon the group, she is marked for death. But she wants death on her terms, not theirs. She is the classic existential protagonist:

I can’t say I feel relieved or satisfied; just the opposite, I am crushed. Only my goal is reached: I know what I wanted to know; I have understood all that has happened to me… The Nausea has not left me and I don’t believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I. – Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea (1938).

After a brilliantly filmed chase through dark city streets, Jacqueline escapes an assassin from the cult, and reaches the tenement building where she is staying with her sister. She trudges wearily up to to the fist landing, then meets Mimi, an ill young woman, who lives in an apartment next to an empty apartment that Jacqueline has rented but never lived in, in which resides a terrible secret. The scene is strongly evoked by the very literate script:

NIGHT

Jacqueline, still running, comes into the scene and goes up the steps. She opens the front door and lets herself in.

INT. UPPER STAIRS – HALLWAY – NIGHT

The gas light has been turned down so that there is only a tiny flame to illuminate the hall. The draft in the hallway stirs this little flame and the shadows move with it. Jacqueline comes up the stairs. Now that she can be seen more closely, it can be seen also that she is exhausted, her eyes wild, her hair in disorder. She almost staggers as she reaches the landing and goes slowly supporting herself on the banisters, toward Mary’s door. Her way brings her past Room #7, the room with the noose. For a moment she stands weakly staring at the door, then goes on. She has reached Mary’s room, has crossed the narrow hallway and her hand is almost on the knob when Mimi’s door opens and Mimi, white night-gowned, comes out into the eerie gas light. Jacqueline looks at her face which is distorted and horrible in the moving shadows and flickering light. She stifles a scream. The other girl is also frightened. The two stand staring at each other for a moment.

JACQUELINE: (weakly) Who are you?

MIMI: I’m Mimi — I’m dying.

JACQUELINE: No!

MIMI: Yes. It’s been quiet, oh ever so quiet. I hardly move, yet it keeps coming all the time – closer and closer. I rest and rest and yet I am dying.

JACQUELINE: And you don’t want to die. I’ve always wanted to die – always.

MIMI: I’m afraid.

Jacqueline shakes her head.

MIMI (CONT’D): I’m tired of being afraid – of waiting.

JACQUELINE: Why wait?

MIMI: (with sudden determination) I’m not going to wait. I’m going out – laugh, dance – do all the things I used to do.

JACQUELINE: And then?

MIMI: I don’t know.

JACQUELINE: (very softly end almost with envy) You will die.

But Mimi has already turned back into her room. Jacqueline stands watching until the light snaps on in Mimi’s room and then the door closing, plunges the hall into weird half light again. In this semi-darkness, she turns away from Mary’s door and walks down the hall toward room #7. She opens the door and goes in.

This slide-show attests to the cinematic mastery of a film that displays the brilliant gestalt achieved by a team of talented film-makers:

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Gambling House (1950): Obscure Gem

After small-time hood, Mike Fury (aka Furioni) beats a rap for a murder committed by a crooked casino-boss, he has to collect from the capo who welshes on the deal, and fight deportation as an undesirable alien. (1950 RKO. Directed by Ted Tetzlaff 80 mins)

Apart from leads Victor Mature and Wiliam Bendix, the only other strong film noir connection for Gambling House, is Roy Webb’s soundtrack. With a plot broadly similar to Mature’s earlier Kiss of Death (1947), this is a tight thriller-melodrama with nicely-integrated social and romance angles. Mature is charming as the reforming hood, Bendix dependable as the casino-operater, and Terry Moore truly engaging as the love interest.

The cinematography and art direction have a gritty noir look with deep-focus New York location shooting. The direction is tight with not a false step for the full 80 minutes.

The cast is entirely convincing, and the post-war migration and citizenship themes are handled simply at a personal level with a moving sincerity, and without grand-standing.

An engaging picture which has an immediacy that belies its age.

The Noir Night

Have you ever lain awake at night and wondered why you like films noir?

In my case I have come to the realisation that is the look of noir that has me hooked. No matter how good a film noir, I feel let down if it doesn’t look noir: the mystery and angst of dark city streets are buried deep within me.

When I was a kid in the early 60s in Sydney, I slept in a room above my parent’s store along a main drag, and if I couldn’t sleep I stared mesmerised at the shafts of light from car headlights flashing across my darkened ceiling, lost in the anguished mysteries that invade your psyche late at night.

My old man had a beat-up pickup truck for the store, which was also the family car. A sister of my mother lived way across the other side of the city, and after visiting her we returned home late at night driving through the glitz of Broadway and Kings Cross, and then on to the darker streets of the inner suburbs, with me sitting out in the truck’s tray and my parents and younger brother in the cab. The moody city streets were mine and each corner and door-way had an immediate mystery to ponder…

They Won’t Believe Me (1947): Guilt by Intention

A man on trial for murder takes the witness stand in his own defense (1947 RKO. Directed by Irving Pichel Screenplay by Johnathon Latimer 95 mins original b&w version)

Nobody Believes Me does not have a high profile, but it is an intriguing melodrama with a strong noir sensibility, that deserves wider respect.

Don’t look for noir photography, erotic tension, or sustained violence. There is the use of flashback in the narrative and the plot involves several ironic twists, but it is the role of fate that is the fulcrum. Half-way though the film, in a single day, the two protagonists for probably the first time in their lives each makes a profoundly redemptive decision so that in the words of the poet George Seferis: “we found our life was a mistake, and we changed our life”, but fate intervenes, and the window to a new life together is irrevocably slammed shut.

The resolution is heavily Jesuitical: culpability and punishment accrue to a malevolent intention as well as the act itself.

Highly recommended.

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