Category: Films

“I don’t do much business with preachers”

Ray Milland is Lucifer, alias Nick Beal ‘Agent’, who, with the help of b-girl Audrey Totter goes shopping for the soul of honest DA and aspiring governer Thomas Mitchell.  Add to the mix smart direction from John Farrow, a killer script from Jonathon Latimer, superb noir lensing by Lionel Lindon, and a haunting score from Franz Waxman. Garnish with a bespectacled George Macready cast against type as a reverend running a boy’s club, and you have a thoroughly entertaining melodrama. Milland dominates as Beelzebub in a sharp suit and rakish fedora. He slaps, ices, insinuates, and connives a swathe through the earnest life of Joseph Foster DA, after with his help Foster naively cuts a legal corner in nailing a hood.  The mis-en-scene is canny, and particularly inspired is the use of a seedy wharf-side bar as Nick’s ‘office.’ The only weakness is the bible-saves ending, though Nick is left free to disappear into a harbor fog to corrupt other souls.

The story offers an intriguing twist to the noir punishment and redemption motifs.  Nick has a written contract for the DA’s soul – vetted  as enforceable by his global legal team – which will only be triggered if when-push-comes-to-shove Foster does the right thing by a public mea-culpa and renouncing of his ill-gotten gains.  A wily trap indeed.   The jaws snap shut at the instant of redemption. But a noir ending would have had the hapless DA disappearing into the fog en-route to the Island of Almas Perdidas.

The noir city in all its desperate foreboding: a dancing sign flashes in an angel’s face.  An angel innocent and afraid yet ventures into the seething labyrinth with a stranger, her husband, running from capture into the city of entrapment.

You trust no-one, fear the worst, and blunder from one dead-end into another.  Dark faces and sharp dressers in sinister doorways.  Share a cab with a bawling waif, a dying woman on borrowed time, and a suspicious driver.  Stop! Get out!  Onto dark streets, smoke-filled dives, cafés on the edge of purgatory, and hellish rooms for rent.  A young girl in pig-tails as likely to betray you as the mother with arms folded in menace then her cold hand out for payment in advance.  Nowhere left to run.  The rented room a cell you can’t leave.

“I didn’t do it.” You believe him, why did he run?

They find you anyway, and take him away.

Where to now? The loyal ex, the nice guy you rejected with his pipe and his dog. He’ll know. Back to the hotel.  A letter sent too early, an echo of another to be sent, waiting for you.  What does it mean? Turn around fast. The street is a long way down. Run.  The beau doesn’t, it’s all cool. Packs his bag, stuffs an envelope, and mails it at the lift-well while the inquisitive cop isn’t looking.  He can’t sweat it though, he panics, it all falls down, and the new letter bursts open with the truth.

Cry Danger, a Dick Powell vehicle from RKO, is a flaccid affair with no tension and labored humor. Powell plays ‘Rocky’ Malloy, a guy with a past just released from a life stretch after 5 years in the can, thanks to the better-late-than-never testimony of a vet with a wooden leg and a drink problem. Back in LA he shacks up in a trailer park to shake down the hood that framed him. A novel twist at the end can’t save the show.

Rookie director Robert Parrish is to blame: the pacing is sluggish and you keep waiting for something to happen. There is no atmosphere and it all plays out like a too long second-rate 50s TV police drama. A sorry example of how not to make a noir. Powell and Rhonda Fleming, as the love interest, are wasted, as is DP Joe Biroc, who never really gets a chance to insinuate some LA darkness into the mix. The promise of the opening scene when we see Powell arriving by train is never realised after being immediately negated by the absurd use of rear-screen projection shots for scenes outside the railway station. There is a noirish shot of Powell entering a bar at night, but it is all technique and no soul.

Overrated and dull.

The final image of The Breaking Point (1950), a great John Garfield film directed by Michael Curtiz, and to my mind infinitely superior to a film it is often compared to,  Howard Kawk’s over-rated To Have and Have Not (1944), is the most poignant and subversive image in all of noir.  The death of a decent black man is of no consequence:  his despairing boy ignored and left to discover the fate of his father alone – completely alone.

Follow Me Quietly is a an RKO b-noir directed by Richard Fleischer from a story by Anthony Mann, who legend has it was also involved in the direction.  Fliescher directed a number of b’s for RKO, including Bodyguard (1948),  Trapped (1949),  The Clay Pigeon (1949),  Armored Car Robbery (1950), His Kind of Woman (1951uncredited), and  The Narrow Margin (1952).

At 60 minutes Follow Me Quietly packs a powerful punch. In an unusual story, an obsessed cop chases down a serial killer, who in notes left at the murder scene refers to himself  as ‘the judge’.  Sharp dialog  peppered with irony and sardonic humor adds significantly to the entertainment quotient.  A solid b-cast does well and the story is deftly propelled by the screenplay to a climactic shoot-out on an industrial site.  With the able assistance of DP Robert De Grasse (Crack-Up (1946), Bodyguard (1948), and The Clay Pigeon (1949)), Fliescher fashions wonderfully expressionistic expository scenes that are quintessentially noir. Highlights are scenes where the obsessed cop ‘talks’ to a facsimile dummy of the suspect,  and the interrogation of a suspect in a dark police station.  The tight editing by Oscar-winning editor Elmo Williams adds to the pace and the effectiveness of the shoot-out sequence.

I have chosen Follow Me Quietly to illustrate the aesthetics of the b-movie, as the essential features of the category are clearly evident and skilfully executed. The essential features of a b-movie are a small budget and a tight production schedule.  These constraints necessitated second-string players and real demands on the director to deliver on time and on budget.  For these reasons b-movies were used as a training ground for the film-making team.  The renowned French director, Jean Renoir, who spent time in Hollywood in the 1940s – his last Hollywood picture was the cerebral noir The Woman On the Beach (1947) – in a 1954  interview said: “Don’t go thinking that I despise “B” pictures; in general I like them better than big, pretentious psychological films, they’re much more fun. When I happen to go to the movies in America, I go see “B” pictures. First of all, they are an expression of the great technical quality of Hollywood. Because, to make a good western in a week, the way they do at Monogram, starting Monday and finishing Saturday, believe me, that requires extraordinary technical ability; and detective stories are done with the same speed. I also think that “B” pictures are often better than important films because they are made so fast that the filmmaker obviously has total freedom; they don’t have time to watch over him”.

What then are the the aesthetics of  a b-movie?  With the assistance of the Schirmer Encyclopedia Of Film (2007), we can identify these traits as being determined by two essential constraints:

1. A low budget, and
2. A short shooting schedule

which meant the length of the picture did not usually exceed 60-70 minutes, and this in turn imposed a further constraint.

These constraints dictated the film-making techniques the director of a b-movie routinely used to deliver a picture:

• Overt exposition: through (overwrought) dialog and voice-over; montage; collages of newspaper headlines; radio broadcasts and news
• Production efficiencies: cheap sets; day-for-night shooting; use of stock footage; repeated shots; rear-screen projection
• Shooting techniques: dialog scenes filmed by framing all players; tracking shots kept to a minimum (giving a static quality); avoidance of retakes (with the risk of wooden performances, and in thrillers, poor choreography of fight scenes).

In Follow Me Quietly we can see these constraints and techniques exemplified.

For economy, the opening credits are displayed over the opening scene, which is highly expressionistic. The legs of a young  woman in high heels are seen pacing the pavement in the rain at night – she is wearing a transparent raincoat.  After the credits have finished the camera moves up to show her in full profile: she is smoking and it is revealed she is pacing in front of a bar.  She flicks the cigarette away with a very déclassé gesture and enters the bar.  A dubious moral tone has been established.  As it turns out, the woman is not a b-girl, but a reporter for a sleazy tabloid ‘true crimes’ magazine – I wonder if she is wearing the same raincoat worn by Joan Bennett in Fritz Lang’s  Scarlet Street (1946)?

Soon, the history of the case and the lead cop’s obsession are related through some labored dialog between the cop, his buddy, and their boss at the latest crime scene.  This scene is typical of the movie’s dialog scenes: the players are all within the frame and facing or partly facing the stationary camera.  Schirmer describes this approach as follows: “rather than shooting dialogue as a series of complex shot/reverse shot combinations (shooting over the shoulder of one actor, then the other), which requires multiple set-ups, relighting, and time in the editing room to assemble the footage, B directors would cut corners.  Dialogue scenes were often filmed by framing all of the actors together facing each other, but turned slightly toward the camera. The conversation unfolds in a single, extended shot— effectively eliminating the time necessary for additional set-ups and the editing needed to achieve shot/reverse shot combinations. Moving camera shots were usually kept to a minimum because of the expense and time needed to mount them.  As a result of these factors, the majority of B movies have a relatively static quality.”

Follow Me Quietly uses a few basic internal sets, which are mostly darkly lit.  Stock footage of suspects being rounded up and police cars in traffic are used throughout. One scene of  cop cars speeding towards the camera and delivering suspects to a police station I have seen in at least three other RKO features, and as  late as Joseph.  Lewis’  1955 noir  The Big Combo.

There is a wonderfully done montage of shots depicting the deployment of cops in the manhunt triggered by a shot of a police photographer taking a photo of  the facsimile dummy of  ‘the judge’, cutting to scenes of the mass production and distribution of  the photo, then cops and  squad-cars hitting the streets, and finally suspects being apprehended and hauled into a line-up.

There are other examples in the movie, but I will leave it to readers to explore them when they get a chance to watch this very entertaining and well-made noir.