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The new killers… Take you down… Rat-a-tat-tat…
The new killers
Take you down
Rat-a-tat-tat
Sprouting punk poetry 2nd-hand
Morrissey & Welles
Fools with guns
Cloaked in affectation
Made-up angst
The new executioners
Tarantino’s clowns
Jackboots
And hoods for faces
Fake Existential cred
MP3’s for souls
Kill for kicks
Does an image contain a story? Or is it an instant in chaos that has no more substances than the crystals fixed on fading paper or in the pixels that exist only as long as an electric current flows?
Is a photograph ever true or real?
Does an image contain a story? Or is it an instant in chaos that has no more substance than the crystals fixed on fading paper or in the pixels that exist only as long as an electric current flows?
Does it have no more substance than the viewer? Is it a memory? Or is it simply a crack in the future past of some cosmic consciousness?
The weird story of a deranged con-artist and killer who marries into a wealthy San Francisco family, while told in the third person, reveals the thoughts and motivations of the central character, an attractive 30-something divorcee…
Born to Kill is based on the book ‘Deadlier than the Male‘, the only novel of American writer James Gunn, who wrote the book in 1943 at the age of 23. Little is known of Gunn ‘s life, and he remains a tantalizing mystery. The novel is like no other noir fiction. The weird story of a deranged con-artist and killer who marries into a wealthy San Francisco family, while told in the third person, reveals the thoughts and motivations of the central character, an attractive 30-something divorcee, Helen Brent. In a review in 2008 of the re-issue of the book by Black Mask Publishing, British academic Robin Durie said of the novel:
It’s very hard to imagine the almost hallucinatory events of the novel translating to the big screen in 1947 [in Born to Kill] – although it’s just about possible to imagine John Waters or David Lynch making some headway with it. It’s also possible that Claude Chabrol might have fancied having a go at turning it into a movie, based on his admiration for the book: “It has a freely developed plot and an absolutely extraordinary tone, pushing each scene towards a violent, ironic and macabre paroxysm…an unexpected dimension, a poetic depth… Of course, nothing like this has ever been written before. The parody is wildly inconsistent, but Deleuze is surely right when he says that, by this means, Gunn creates directions in the real which are wholly new.” … At the same time, Chabrol is correct in his capturing of the intensity of the rhythm of Gunn’s writing. Each chapter builds – or perhaps better, meanders – towards, or into, extraordinary points of what are, in effect, bifurcations. It is as if the novel is following those bifurcating pathways described by Borges.”
In 1947 RKO had a go and commissioned Eve Greene and Richard Macaulay to develop a script, with Robert Wise directing. A solid cast was assembled, and the result was a ripe melodrama that retained an aura of the novel’s strangeness. The film succeeds on the powerhouse performance of Claire Trevor as the divorcee, and (to a lesser extent) the almost dead-pan portrayal of the homicidal psycho by chronic bad-boy Lawrence Tierney. Trevor chews up the scenery with her vitriol and seething passion. A character in the movie describes her biblically: “I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets. And he who falls beneath her spell has need of God’s mercy.” Esther Howard, Walter Slezak, and Elisha Cook Jr. add value in supporting roles. Director Wise and DP Robert De Grasse take a back-seat and let Trevor’s nervous energy and sexual hunger drive the narrative. The camera and mis-en-scene literally make way for her as she struts across the screen, and Paul Sawtell’s score captures the histrionic undertow beautifully.
Recommended.
THIS IS NEW YORK Skyscraper Champion of the World where the Slickers and Know-It-Alls peddle gold bricks to each other and where Truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye…
THIS IS NEW YORK Skyscraper Champion of the World where the Slickers and Know-It-Alls peddle gold bricks to each other and where Truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye… – Nothing Sacred (1937) | Script by Ben Hecht
While reviewing the positive reviews and box office listing at Movie Review Intelligence…
“But I’m not going to end up
On the rocks in the river
like my brother…
I wanted to find Leo,
to see him once more.
It was morning by then, dawn,
And naturally
I was feeling very bad there
As I went down there.
I just kept going
down and down there.
It was like going down
to the bottom of the world
To find my brother.
I found my brother’s body
at the bottom there,
Where they had thrown it away
on the rocks by the river,
Like an old, dirty rag
nobody wants.
He was dead,
And I felt
I had killed him.
I turned back
to give myself up to hall,
Because if a man’s life
can be lived so long
And come out this way-
Like rubbish-
Then something was horrible
And had to be ended
one way or another,
And I decided to help.”
While reviewing the positive reviews stats and box office receipts at the US site Movie Review Intelligence I realised the continuing failure of American contemporary cinema in producing quality movies that attract a wide audience. Sure sentimentality and fantasy are well represented and popular, but where is the cinema that challenges the contemporary reality – unemployment, inequality, reactionary politics, war, the environment, the fall-out from the financial crisis? Not from Hollywood. Cinema if it is to be relevant must confront as well as engage. And where is the film criticism that explores the smaller films and their success or failure as social documents not just as cinema?
Look at these figures for instance. The US box-office for Tree of Life after 6 months is US$13.3M. A bold film yes, a great film yes, an essential film yes. A film that speaks to a broad audience a resounding no. The US box for the independent-produced Margin Call with a 75pct positive rating after two months US$5.2M – a flawed film but at least an attempt to understand the genesis of the financial crisis in human terms. But the critics praise was in filmic terms solely not as an historical document or as social criticism. Where is the film critic interested or qualified to discuss these failings? Nowhere in the mainstream media nor the blogosphere for sure.
You can learn more and find a stronger committed critique of American values and the social and economic structures in the gritty b-dramas of 30s Hollywood and 40s film noir. There is something to be said for living in the past.
Pity the poor film noir blogger who has to sit through some pretty lousey movies for completeness sake. Hugo Haas’ Pickup is such a film…
Pity the poor film noir blogger who has to sit through some pretty lousey movies for completeness sake. Hugo Haas’ Pickup is such a film with a silly derivative plot about an alleged gum-chewing femme-fatale trying to get her hands on the savings of a lonely widowed railway worker. The trash equivalent of The Postman Always Rings Twice has the story end with the dame blowing a raspberry and the hero cuddling a puppy. Seriously.
But there is still mileage in such dross for academics and the organisers of film noir retrospectives. Silver and Ward in ‘Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference’ talk about the re-assertion of patriarchy in their discussion of the film, and the blurb from the Noir City X has the publicist gushing: “A simple but supremely smarmy slice of sleaze from 1950’s sex-noir auteur Hugo Haas. He plays (as usual) an older man in thrall to a young hottie who spends all her time trying to murder him for what little money he has. A timeless tale, made unforgettable by the Amazon in the bullet-bra, slinging sass for all she’s worth—Beverly (Wicked Woman) Michaels! “
You were warned.
Film critic Jonathon Rosenbaum in this quote is speaking of cinema generally and referring to a particular a movie that is not a film noir, but to me Rosenbaum refines the essence of noir…
Film critic Jonathon Rosenbaum in this quote is speaking of cinema generally and referring to a particular a movie that is not a film noir, but to me Rosenbaum has refined the essence of noir from an image redolent of film noir streetscapes [my emphasis]:
In the final scene of ECLIPSE (1962)my favorite Antonioni feature, and the one that concludes the loose trilogy started by L’AVVENTURA and LA NOTTE a lingering over an urban street corner while night begins to fall, effected through montage rather than an extended take, becomes one of the most terrifying poems in modern cinema simply through its complex poetry of absence. The lead couple in this film, played by Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, have previously planned to meet at this corner, in front of a building site. (Another building site figures in the opening sequence of L’AVVENTURA.) The unexplained fact that neither character shows up is perturbing, but because their affair has been more frivolous that serious, it hardly accounts for the overall feeling of desolation and even terror in this sequence.
It’s almost as if Antonioni has extracted the essence of the everyday street life that serves as background throughout the picture, and once we’re presented with this essence in its undiluted form, it suddenly threatens and oppresses us. The implication here (and in every Antonioni narrative) is that behind every story there’s a place and an absence, a mystery and a profound uncertainty, waiting like a vampire at every moment to emerge and take over, to stop the story dead in its tracks. And if we combine this place and absence, this mystery and uncertainty into a single, irreducible entity, what we have is the modern world itself the place where all of us live, and which most stories are designed to protect us from.
Jonathon Rosenbaum – Chicago Reader, 9 April 1993
The iconic Bradbury Building in Los Angeles is the scene of the climax in Rudolph Maté’s 1950 noir D.O.A and Ridley Scott’s cult sci-fi thriller Blade Runner (1983)…
The iconic Bradbury Building in Los Angeles is the scene of the climax in Rudolph Maté’s 1950 noir D.O.A and in Ridley Scott’s cult sci-fi thriller Blade Runner (1983). Doomed Frank Bigelow in D.O.A is metaphorically as committed in vengefully hunting down his cosmic creator as the replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner.
a noir car
American films noir from the classic cycle have essentially the same narrative structure as other Hollywood movies, and that the entertainment value of a movie lies in the delicate balancing of pleasure and anxiety.
Yesterday I started reading Frank Krutnik’s ‘In a Lonely Street: Film noir, genre, masculinity’ (2001), a book which explores the film noir narrative structure as a defining element with a focus on movies of the 1940s. Early on Krutnik argues that American films noir from the classic cycle have essentially the same narrative structure as other Hollywood movies, and that the entertainment value of a Hollywood movie lies in the delicate balancing of pleasure and anxiety. Krutnik says that “In submitting to an engagement with the fictional process, the spectator offers in exchange not just money (at the box-office) but also a psychical/emotional investment.” (p 5)
For me anxiety and the more prevalent downbeat resolution of the narrative in film noir are the defining aspects.
Krutnik outlines the classic Hollywood narrative in these terms: a crisis or destabilizing event occurs that is resolved by an heterosexual male to impress and win a passive female. (Any over-simplification is to my account.) Where noir diverges is that the male is typically an anti-hero, the female not passive and many times the protagonist. The latest movie I have watched nicely illustrates this.
A Dangerous Profession an RKO b from 1949 is an undistinguished crime movie competently made and well-acted. A former cop turned bail bondsman is asked to bail out a guy charged with a heist and the killing of a cop, and who is the husband of a former lover, and he lets his infatuation take-over. The woman is attractive and we are not sure she can be trusted, but she does little anyway. The protagonist has to sort things out after the husband jumps bail and is murdered. He solves the mystery, apprehends the crooks, and gets the girl. Order is re-established. Some have classified this movie as noir, which it clearly isn’t. A film noir would probe the psychology of the protagonists and perhaps uses expressionist stylistics to represent mood and character. There would certainly be a degree of ambiguity as to the morality of the players and their motivations, and there would more than likely be a downbeat ending or a resolution that came at a significant cost. A good example is The Big Sleep (1946) .
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