Category: Films

Panic In the Streets (1950): Neo-Realist Noir

Panic In The Streets (1950)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Local authorities track down violent hoods infected with a virulent infection.

Panic In the Streets (1950) is an interesting documentary-style noir set on the docks of New Orleans: a fast-paced on-the-streets thriller with little time or inclination for deep characterisation. The movie picked up the Venice International prize in 1950, and an Oscar for Best Writing in 1951. Tautly directed by Kazan and with strong street cred: the climax on a ship’s mooring rope is elegantly metaphoric.

Richard Widmark is cast against (then) type as the local health official pushing the cops to track down the killers of an illegal alien who has infected the hoods with pneumonic plague. Paul Douglas is well-cast as the reluctant cop who heads the police task force. Jack Palance and Zero Mostel are strong as the hoods, with a certain tension between them: Palance is focused and brutal, while Mostel is nervous and obsequious. Cinematographer, Joe MacDonald, who did similar work in The Dark Corner (1946), has filmed the night scenes with moody noir atmospherics.

Panic In The Streets (1950)

Given Kazan’s tendency for emotional distance and the cinema-verite approach, there is a strong social dimension to the picture. The working people in the docks milieu distrust the cops and are uncooperative, and the cops and local bureaucrats are reluctant partners. The mood is of dysfunction and the trajectory is that it is only the doggedness of Widmark and Douglas that saves the day.

All this points to Kazan’s complexity and contradictions. While those on the edge of criminal society are fairly portrayed, there is the feeling that they are stubborn and boorish, and need to be bullied by authority. At the same time, public institutions are seen at logger-heads and can only function effectively if commandeered by strong personalities.

Conventionally, Widmark and Douglas develop a grudging respect for each other and by the end of the story are friends. Strangely, this relationship for me is the core of the film, and comes not only from what happens on the screen, but also from a backward almost nostalgic perspective. Both these actors invest their roles with an essential integrity: they are not perfect, struggle financially, and their personal lives have their share of bewilderment and angst, but they are thoroughly decent men doing tough jobs, for lousy pay, and little social recognition or thanks. These guys inhabit a lost black and white world of simpler times when normal lives seemed to have greater decency. Perhaps also this perception is colored for me by Paul Douglas, a wonderful actor who always came across as a totally solid guy that you would love to have as your friend.

Panic In The Streets (1950)

Double Indemnity: The Unseen Ending

Double Indemnity (1944)

The final draft of the screenplay of Double Indemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler in the Motion Picture Academy Library in Los Angeles – download from here – includes a final prison execution chamber scene and a line of dialog that was spoken by Walter Neff, just after he said “I love you.” to Barton Keyes. With sirens wailing in the background, Neff says: “At the end of that trolley line, just as I get off, you be there to say good bye. Will you, Keyes?” The story then shifts to the execution.

This sequence was filmed but cut (by the studio?) from the production release.

Double Indemnity (1944)

James Naremore in his 1998 book on film noir, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, offers this penetrating analysis and critique:

… the execution described in the longest version of the script greatly increases our sympathy for Walter, all the while raising questions about the criminality of the state. It also provides a tragic recognition scene for Keyes, who is shaken out of his moral complacency. This last point is especially important, because Keyes functions as a representative of the insurance company. Although he approaches his work with the intuitive flair of an artist and the intellectual intensity of a scientist, he remains a loyal agent of industrial rationality—a talented bureaucrat who, in effect, has helped to create the office building, the drive-in restaurant, the supermarket, and all the other landmarks of modern Los Angeles that the film relentlessly criticizes… One of the many virtues of Wilder’s original ending is that this complex, brilliantly acted character would have been made to confront his inner demon and to experience poetic justice. Keyes would have been brought face-to-face with the culminating instance of instrumental reason, the “end of the line” for industrial culture: the California gas chamber… For the original version of Double Indemnity, Paramount built an exact replica of the [San Quentin]  gas chamber, depicting it as a modern, sanitized apparatus for administering official death sentences. At considerable expense, Wilder photographed the step-by-step procedure of execution, emphasizing its coldly mechanical efficiency. There was no blood, no agonized screaming, and, for once in the movie, almost no dialogue. Much of the sequence was shot from Walter’s point of view, looking through glass windows at the spectators outside the chamber—an angle creating a subtle parallel between the chamber and the “dark room” of a movie theater. When the fatal pellets dropped, clouds of gas obscured the windows, and we could barely make out Keyes standing amid the witnesses, turning his head away. Soon afterward, a doctor entered the chamber to pronounce Walter dead. According to the script, the original film ended as follows:

… All the witnesses have now left except Keyes, who stares, shocked and tragic, beyond the door. The guard goes to him and touches his arm, indicating to him that he must leave. Keyes glances for the last time towards the gas chamber and slowly moves to go out. CORRIDOR OUTSIDE THE DEATH CHAMBER CAMERA SHOOTING IN THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR AT KEYES , who is just turning to leave. Keyes comes slowly out into the dark, narrow corridor. His hat is on his head now, his overcoat is pulled around him loosely. He walks like an old man. He takes eight or ten steps, then mechanically reaches a cigar out of his vest pocket and puts it in his mouth. His hands, in the now familiar gesture, begin to pat his pockets for matches. Suddenly he stops, with a look of horror on his face. He stands rigid, pressing hand against his heart. He takes the cigar out of his mouth and goes slowly on toward the door, CAMERA PANNING with him. When he has almost reached the door, the guard stationed there throws it wide, and a blaze of sunlight comes in from the open prison yard outside. Keyes slowly walks out into the sunshine, a forlorn and lonely man.

Until someone rescues this scene from the Paramount vaults, we will never know if it is superior to the current version, and even then there may be room for debate. One thing, however, is clear: Keyes’s lonely walk out of the prison would have thrown a shadow over everything that preceded it. It was not until Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole that Wilder would produce such a savage critique of modernity. Although the released version of his famous thriller remains an iconoclastic satire that challenges the censors, it is a lighter entertainment than the original and a much easier product for Hollywood to market. (According to the Paramount press book, photographs of Barbara Stanwyck in her wig and tight sweater were circulated to American soldiers overseas, and Edward G. Robinson’s performance enabled the studio to obtain a tie-in from the Cigar Institute of America.) No matter how much we admire the film that was exhibited in 1944, the form of cinema that the French described as noir is probably better exemplified by another Double Indemnity, which we have yet to see.

The rare (Spanish?) poster featured at the top of this post features a rendering of Neff from the gas chamber scene. Note also the nightmarish imagery which has a definite surrealist quality, making this perhaps one of the most intriguing film noir posters ever. I am unsure of its origin or the artist. Perhaps a reader of filmsnoir.net can help in tracing its origin? The signature seems to be “Lopez Riem”?

Night And the City (1950): A Near Perfect Noir

Night And the City 1950Night and the city.
The night is tonight, tomorrow night…
or any night.
The city is London.

This anonymous voice-over introduces Jules Dassin‘s Night and the City (1950), which has to be one of the great noirs: a near-perfect work.

Dassin crafted a mesmerising study of thwarted ambition and tawdry betrayal into a dark existential journey of the human soul, played out in the dives and night-clubs of post-war London fashioned as the quintessential noir city. This is not a b-movie, the production values are high, and Dassin has total command of his mise-en-scene.

But the achievement is not Dassin’s alone. There is also a literate script by Jo Eisinger, wonderful expressionist photography from Mutts Greenbaum, who cut his teeth in the German silent cinema, and deeply moving portrayals by the major players. Richard Widmark’s performance is frenetic and real, and the soft counterpoint of an achingly elegant turn by Gene Tierney as his girl, transubstantiate Harry’s demise into the stuff of tragedy. Each supporting role is vividly drawn by an excellent ensemble cast.

You know Harry Fabian is doomed from the start: a dreamer of wrong dreams and sympathetically amoral, he is no match for fate and the immoral traffickers of wrestlers and cheap champagne, who plot his destruction. He is a hustler yes, but not in the same league as the big guys, the “businessmen” whose greed has no bounds and whose actions are never tempered by remorse. Harry thinks he knows all the angles, but he is not ruthless enough for that.

Harry. Harry.
You could have
been anything.
Anything.
You had brains…
ambition.
You worked harder
than any 10 men.

But the wrong things.
Always the wrong things.

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Jules Dassin (1911-2008): Rebel With a Cause

Night And the City 1950
Richard Widmark in Night and The City (1950)

Jules Dassin, one of the great noir directors, died in Athens overnight.

Born in Middletown, Connecticut in 1911, Dassin’s ground-breaking noirs of the late 1940’s rank among the great films noir:

Brute Force (1947)
The Naked City (1948)
Thieves’ Highway (1949)

A committed leftist, Dassin was blacklisted by the HUAC and left the US before the final cut of Thieves Highway was made. In London he made in 1950 Night and the City, another classic noir starring Richard Widmark, in perhaps his best dramatic role.

In Europe, Dassins’ attempts to work as a director were vengefully thwarted by Hollywood mogules until 1955, when penniless and in despair he was offered Du rififi chez les hommes (1955) [“Rififi”], which he crafted into the greatest french noir of the 50’s. Dassin also played the Italian safe-cracker in the picture. The movie, which featured the legendary 32 minute heist scene filmed in almost total silence, desevedly won him the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where he met his second wife, the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, who died in 1994.

An interesting Salo.com interview with the 89-yo Dassin in August 2000 by Michael Sragow offers some background on Dassin’s attitudes to his early noir work.

Check out my reviews of Thieves’ Highway, Rififi and Night And the City.

His major noir releases are available as Criterion DVDs, and these essays on the Criterion web-site are elegant dissertations on Dassins’ artistry:

Brute Force: Screws and Proles by Michael Atkinson Here we are in the dark territories again, the republic of bitternesses and bile known as noir, squaring our jaws against an amoral universe and roaming the rain-wet, lightless American City as if it were a circle of the inferno where backstabbers, goldbricks, and unfortunates march in closed patterns and puzzle >>>

The Naked City: New York Plays Itself by Luc Sante In 1945 Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, a canny and gifted tabloid newspaper photographer, did something unprecedented: he assembled some of his best shots, of corpses and fires and arrests and crowds and spectacles, and made them into a book, published in hardcover—this at a time when photography books were still >>>

Night and the City: In the Labyrinth by Paul Arthur Within film noir’s unparalleled roster of resonant titles—Kiss of Death, Out of the Past, Where Danger Lives, to name three—none is more emblematic or iconographically cogent than Night and the City. Juxtaposing two of noir’s essential, virtually ontological qualities, the title of Jules Dassin’s underrated elegy for a self-annihilating hustler reminds >>>

Rififi: Love Made Invisible by Jamie Hook In 1955, Jules Dassin, an American director in exile in Paris, made this flat-out perfect piece of cinema. The film came as a redemption for Dassin: a one-time promising young director cranking out B-movies under an MGM contract (“They were awful. It was just plain unhappiness and embarrassment,” he later said >>>

Thieves Highway: Dangerous Fruit by Michael Sragow Like the movie’s rattletrap trucks lurching down the highway as they carry way-too-heavy loads, the characters in Jules Dassin’s brilliantly volatile Thieves’ Highway struggle under psychological and moral baggage until they can lay their burdens down. Working from a novel and script by A.I. Bezzerides, Dassin made this swift, fluid melodrama >>>

Blast Of Silence (1961): Hidden Noir

Blast Of Silence (1961): Hidden Noir

Criterion Confessions blog has an interesting review of a recent DVD release of Blast of Silence, a little known low-budget independent production from Allen Baron made in 1961:

There are films with more polish than Blast of Silence, but that’s okay. In some ways, the unsanded corners of this film put the boot into old film noir and how the bad guys were prettied up. Inside Frank Bono’s head, we hear about hate and pain and the things a man can’t escape, film noir concepts that weren’t always given those blunt terms. Shot as it was, Allen Baron’s movie brings the struggle to life, illustrating the need to get ahead and to get the filthy jobs done. The fact that Baron and Merrill and the rest got theirs done, putting together a one-two punch of a film, is illustration enough of what that means.

Stranger on The Third Floor (1940): The Noir Dream-Scape

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)The wrong guy is convicted of a murder…

Generally viewed as the first film noir, Stranger on the Third Floor, an RKO b-movie of only 64 minutes is a landmark film in a number of respects. The influence of a new generation of European expatriates and of German expressionism in the genesis of film noir is clearly evident. The screenplay is by Austro-Hungarian, Frank Partos, the director is Latvian émigré Boris Ingster, and photography is by the cult noir cinematographer, Italian-born Nicholas Musuraca.

With b-actors as leads, John McGuire as the reporter Mike Ward, and Margaret Tallichet, as his girl-friend Jane, the movie is propelled by the intelligence of the script, the strength of the direction and cinematography, and excellent turns by Peter Lorre as the Stranger and Elisha Cook Jr. as the taxi-driver accused of murder.

Between the cheesy opening and closing scenes is a tight claustrophobic thriller, where fear and paranoia is deftly portrayed both in reality and oneiristically. The nightmare sequence in this picture has to be the best dream-scape ever produced by Hollywood.

Here we have the strongest evidence supporting the thesis set out in the seminal book on film noir, A Panorama of American Film Noir, published in France in 1955, by authors Borde and Chaumeton, that films noir appeared with the emergence of a wider awareness of psychoanalysis and its motifs in America in the early 1940’s. Their analyses of their canon of the first big three post-war noirs, are centred on the films’ dream-like qualities and the emergence of protagonists with pronounced psychoses: The Big Sleep (1945), Gilda (1946), and The Lady From Shanghai (1947).

Ironically, Stranger on the Third Floor is not even mentioned by Borde and Chaumeton.

In this proto-noir, we see explored the role of the subconscious, where reporter Mike, whose testimony sways the jury, starts to question the guilt of the condemned taxi-driver, after his girl-friend Jane tells him she has a feeling that the jury has condemned an innocent man. This doubt then feeds into Mike’s paranoia about the mysterious stranger he encounters in his boarding house, and a guilt-fuelled nightmare about the fate of an obnoxious neighbor where his own sanity is put on trial.

Ingster and Musucara, and associate art director, Albert D’Agostini, as in all the great b-noirs, use set-bound budget constraints as brilliant artifice. The Caligari-like sets and the necessary noir lighting make the dream sequence profoundly surreal and compelling. The climax towards the end of the film on a tenement street set late at night builds and sustains the fear and tension in a way that even in a big-budget movie would be hard to emulate.

This picture is a revelation and is testimony to the greatness of the b-movies of the classic noir cycle. The following slideshow of frames from the movie are compelling artefacts of themselves.

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Panic In The Streets (1950) Free On-Line

Panic In The Streets (1950)

A public domain copy of this classic noir from Elia Kazan is available from the Internet Archive. The blurb on the site is worth quoting in full:

One night in the New Orleans slums, vicious hoodlum Blackie (Jack Palance) and his friends kill an illegal immigrant who won too much in a card game. Next morning, Dr. Clint Reed (Richard Widmark-this time not seen pushing little old ladies in wheelchairs down the stairs) of the Public Health Service confirms the dead man had pneumonic plague. To prevent a catastrophic epidemic, Clint must find and inoculate the killers and their associates, with the reluctant aid of police captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas), despite official skepticism, and in total secrecy, lest panic empty the city. Can a doctor turn detective? He has 48 hours to try. Spellbinding

The Maltese Falcon (1941): Love in Noir

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The Maltese Falcon: others may argue about its place in the film noir canon, but none can question its greatness.

Sam Spade is fully the creation of Dashiell Hammett and his book informs the film totally. What John Huston and his ensemble cast did was to make the story forever theirs. Having seen the movie, one cannot imagine any of the characters as other than the players that portray them. This picture is a defining moment in film history. The Maltese Falcon takes us beyond what is on the screen into a nether world of desparate love, existential angst, mystery, and the pain of irredeemable loss.

Spade is the quintessential noir protagonist: a loner on the edge of polite society, sorely tempted to transgress but declines and is neither saved nor redeemed.

Brigid will never make up the years she will lose in prison, and Sam will never recover from the necessary betrayal of their love. For Sam and Brigid are truly lovers. Sam was not seduced. Brigid is not a femme-fatale: she manipulates Sam, but never seeks to have him act as her surrogate. Together they discover the desperate emptiness of their lives. She true to her nature can’t comprehend how he can send her down if he loves her. He can’t fathom her lying while knowing she loves him.

The famous ad-lib by Bogart on the leaden black bird at the end says it all … the stuff that dreams are made of.

The Glass Key: Mercury Radio Production (1939)

Orson Welles

Thanks to a pointer to the Mercury Theater on the Air site from Lloydville of mardecortesbaja.com.

Amongst many broadcasts from this famous Orson Welles radio-play project, is a 1939 radio adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Glass Key, which was adapted for the screen in 1935 and again in 1942.

You can download an MP3 of the original broadcast from the Mercury Theater on the Air site.

In the Valley of Elah (2007): Responsibility and Chaos

What is Film Noir? There as many answers as there are noir movies.

I consider a film for posting to FilmsNoir.Net only some time after a recent viewing. I want the film to return to my memory on its own terms, and when this happens, it is more often than not, a response to what I describe as the picture’s noir sensibility. This sensibility must have a redemptive focus for me to value a film, whether redemption is achieved or not. This is what the great films noir have in common: a profoundly and deeply human response to the chaos and random contingency at the edge of existence.

It is with this in mind that I am posting on the recent release: In The Valley of Elah (2007). On the surface it is a police procedural framed against US soldiers returning from the Iraq war. On a deeper level it is an exploration of contingencies and responsibility.

Three crimes: the heinous unnecessary invasion of Iraq, the brutal killing of a child by a US humvee on the streets of Baghdad, and the gruesome murder of a returning soldier on the outskirts of an American army town, bring chaos to the life of a father, who no longer understands his son or his country and its institutions. Everything including the American flag is upside-down.

This film is the true heritage of film noir, not banal and unredeemably violent films such as No Country For Old Men.

In The Valley of Elah (2007)