Category: Films

The independently made cold-war thriller The Thief covers familiar terrain in a novel way. Sight and sound are heightened by a central conceit that I won’t reveal. Composer Herschel Burke Gilbert’s dramatic and insistent score – which garnered an Oscar nomination – is more than up to a big task.

A nuclear scientist in Washington is leaking secrets to the enemy. When the story opens he is clearly having second thoughts. Whether his entrapment is motivated by money or ideology is not central to the film’s concerns, which early on focuses on the mechanics of the treachery. After a mishap blows the breach wide-open the hapless spy is on the run. Here the film goes out on the streets of  Washington and – in the final scenes – New York City.

A middle-aged greying Ray Milland delivers in a demanding role where demeanour must convey the mood. He is as strong as in The Lost Weekend (1945) and then some. Milland’s performance, and the brilliant noir photography of Sam Leavitt and taut direction of Clarence Greene (who had a hand in the script and produced) elevate the film despite a threadbare plot to a certain greatness. The tension is held throughout and your adrenalin levels are continually pushed to the max. The redemptive resolution is weak but countered by the sheer visual poetry of the closing scenes.

The film noir motif  of entrapment is the dramatic core and delivers one of the movie’s strongest scenes. Milland is holed-up in a decrepit NY tenement with the FBI closing-in while he waits for the next signal from his handlers of his escape plan.  The camera looks down from the ceiling of the tenement room at Milland pacing frantically from wall to wall like a rat in a trap. The only window faces a brick wall. This solitary desolation harkens back to earlier in the story when Milland is shown walking the prison-like corridors of  his place of work.

This is a film noir so sex lays its claim to attention. Milland’s scientist is a loner who has lived and worked in isolation, and his sexual repression is revealed through a tease that is both brutal and unnerving. As he desperately waits for a telephone call in the corridor of the tenement ever on the edge of hysteria, he encounters the occupant of the room opposite, a young woman that makes “alligators look tame”.  Then TV actress Rita Gam plays this girl with consummate sleaze, delivering perhaps the hottest come-on of the classic noir cycle.

A must-see study of entrapment on steroids.

One of the few films where David Goodis adapted his own novel for the screen, The Burglar is a brooding story where decency is a ‘dark passage’ to destruction.

A flashback provides the back story of an abandoned boy brought up by a kindly thief who adopts him, and apprentices him to the ‘trade’.  The adoptive father is killed in an abortive heist when the boy’s first mistake on the job triggers an alarm. The dead man has previously extracted from the boy the promise that if something happens to the father, he will look after his young daughter. The story pivots on this obligation and the complications that ensue when the burglar the boy has grown up to be steals a valuable necklace – aided by the girl and a motley crew of accomplices.

Dan Duryea is the thief and Jayne Mansfield is the child-woman under his wing, who is otherwise employed in the kitchen or casing heists. Duryea delivers in a role where what is not expressed is where the action is. The limitations of Mansfield in an early role render her believable as a simple girl struggling to make sense of the life she has fallen into, and her ambivalent relationship with Duryea, who is tormented by his warring paternal obligations and the underlying attraction they have for each other.  In the noir universe such dilemmas are always resolved at a cost.

A crooked cop is involved in that denouement, which is telegraphed after an interlude where Duryea hooks up with a women in a bar, played at first as a tough dame but then with real pathos by Martha Vickers.  There is a rare for noir tenderness in the scenes that follow when these two damaged souls open up to each other. This night of refuge is followed by a brutal betrayal the next day, and here a jarring plot hole almost pushes the scenario off-course, but it quickly swerves back onto the road to nowhere.

The film’s budget was only US$90,000 and perhaps was one of the last b-movies delivered of the signature gritty realism of Columbia Pictures.  But the picture has a patina that belies it’s budget, with truly accomplished cinematography from DP Don Malkames, and taut editing and elegant direction from first-time director Paul Wendkos. All carrying a stunning wide-screen realist austerity from a deep focus on-the-streets ambience.

A worthy valedictory to the b-movie.

 

Pre-code Hollywood was frank about sex, and women were more than appendages to male heroics.  Though the male gaze ensured these dames were hot and not just adventurous.

While the Paramount adaptation of William Faulkner’s trash novel ‘Sanctuary’ took a while to get made, when it hit the screen the studio didn’t cut corners nor dolly things up. The Story of Temple Drake is all of 71 minutes and not surprisingly coherent story-telling is a casualty, yet the lurid plot is handled with a compelling economy and frankness, strongly abetted by the suitably dark lensing of Karl Struss, whose expressionist lighting of horrendous close-ups insinuates a decadent menace into the melodrama.

Temple Drake is a cheap little rich-girl from the South, who likes slumming with drunken lechers driving fast cars. One night she comes a cropper when her latest partner in sleaze crashes his roadster. After seeking help at a decrepit mansion they are abducted by a sinister gang of bootleggers.  The drunken beau is dumped, the girl raped, and then shanghaied to a bordello.  Is she a willing accomplice to her degradation? The scenario is ambivalent and you have to live with your doubts.

Wide-eyed and gorgeous, a not so young Miriam Hopkins brings a simmering sexuality to her portrayal of a woman whose lurid appetites are kept in check by a veneer of respectability – and a genuine awareness of her tendency to self-destruct.  For all her baseness, she has a moral centre that only needs to be coerced into action. Trouble is on both occasions she aids her own demise. First by killing, and then into making an admission of guilt that has severe consequences.

While Temple Drake is no femme-fatale and her actions are reactive, she cannily prefigures those hard dames that were let loose less than a decade later.

This notorious pre-coder is essential viewing.

 

 

Jigsaw is a rollicking thriller so camp you forgive the preposterous plot and thank the heavens for bringing it your way. A weirder movie you could not imagine. Franchot Tone is a NY special prosecutor pursuing a murky underground hate group with tentacles in the highest echelons of the city’s elite government and business circles. Tone’s delicious turn has shades of his acerbically ironic portrayal of a PI in the excellent I Love Trouble from the year before.

But the dames steal the picture. Winifred Lenihan, an actress who only ever appeared in this movie and another obscure picture from 1931, is a delight as a middle-aged socialite with a hidden agenda, while another stringer Jean Wallace (Kiss Me Deadly) has you enthralled as a sexy – and intelligent – blonde cabaret singer with sinister connections.

Jigsaw in more ways than one. The only movie made by production company Tower Pictures Inc., this b-picture was made by a bunch of journeymen, who through the quirky finger of fate came together to pack into 77 minutes an entertainment set in a Manhattan so darkly baroque, it seems almost self-consciously noir. From the opening panoramic shots of an isolated city street to the seamless and exciting climax in a darkened art gallery at night, impenetrable shadows haunt the streetscape of a city almost subterranean in its ambience. Add out-of-left field tracking shots that harken to the craft of Max Ophuls, director Fletcher Markle, who co-wrote the screenplay, and his DP Don Malkames, fashion a mise-en-scene of real panache. The script is both corny and intelligent, with a disarming amorality. A crusading journalist killed by the bad-guys is still warm when Tone makes a move on the widow who is also more hot than cold.

To add to the puzzle, you have a bunch of A-listers in uncredited bit parts. Names like Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Marsha Hunt, Burgess Meredith, and Everett Sloane.

It takes a while to get moving, but once it kicks in, look out. A must-see.

In 1950 New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was “disturbed” and “depressed” by Highway 301, a dark gangster flick from Warner Bros.  He was emphatic in his dismissal: “the whole thing, concocted and directed by Andrew Stone, is a straight exercise in low sadism”.  Glen Erikson in his review of the DVD, described the relentlessly violent trajectory thus: “Imagine White Heat shorn of its rich characterizations and reduced to little more than its basic violent content: no complexity, just action and suspense scenes”.

Get it? A police procedural stripped back to its unardorned essence: violent hoods on the rampage. In deep focus and on the streets of  L.A.

In the way of the burgeoning police procedurals of the 1950’s, the movie is prefaced by homilies from not one but three State governors, each attesting to the veracity of the story and the lessons it holds for those contemplating similar escapades. The Tri-State Gang led by a remorseless “pretty boy” killer played menacingly by Steve Cochran, are heist specialists who find time to have settled relationships with women. One is even married to a totally amoral yet passive woman – unnervingly portrayed by Virginia Grey. A dame not offended by her better-half’s style of life, and who finds solace on those long  lonely nights with a portable radio that goes with her everywhere. Cochran early on dispatches his talkative erstwhile girlfriend by shooting her in the back.  He then latches on to the French Canadian girlfriend of another member of the gang, after he checks out when a heist goes wrong. Trouble is “Frenchy” finds out too late the trap she has fallen into. There is real terror here, and most strongly delivered in an extended sequence where Cochran pursues the girl on dark city streets after she tries to cut loose. The gang is eventually picked-off  by the law in increasingly bloody encounters.

Don’t look for ambivalence or redemption. This is a brutal modern take on the police procedural: uncanny in that the picture sets off rather than ends the late cycle segue on film noir.

James Naremore in his introduction to the English translation of the seminal book on film noir by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, ‘A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953’, surveys the contribution of the Surrealist critique of cinema, and posits that “at certain moments, even in ordinary genre film or grade-B productions, [cinema] could involuntarily throw off bizarre images, strange juxtapositions, erotic plays of light and shadow on human bodies, thus providing an opportunity for the audience to break free of repressive plot conventions and indulge in private fantasies.”

More fully Naremore says:

The best account of the Surrealist fascination with cinema as a whole can be found in Paul Hammond’s witty, perceptive introduction to ‘The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema’… Hammond, who is also the translator of this edition of Panorama, reminds us that during the years immediately after the First World War, the original Surrealists used movies as an instrument for the overthrow of bourgeois taste and the desublimation of everyday life. Engaging In what Hammond describes as “an extremely Romantic project” and an “inspired salvage operation,” [André] Breton and his associates would randomly pop in and out of fleapit theaters for brief periods of time, sampling the imagery and writing lyrical essays about their experiences. Like everyone in the historical avant-garde, they were captivated by modernity, but they particularly relished the cinema because it was so productive of the “marvelous” and so like a waking dream. Willfully disrupting narrative continuities, they savored the cinematic mise-en-scene, which functioned as a springboard for their poetic imagination; and out of the practice they developed what Louis Aragon called a “synthetic” criticism designed to emphasize the latent, often libidinal implications of individual shots or short scenes. Even when cinema became too expensive for Breton’s style of serial viewing, it remained the fetishistic medium par excellence. At certain moments, even in ordinary genre films or grade-B productions, it could involuntarily throw off bizarre images, strange juxtapositions, and erotic plays of light and shadow on human bodies, thus providing an opportunity for the audience to break free of repressive plot conventions and indulge in private fantasies.

Naked Alibi an unpretentious b-movie from late in the classic noir cycle has just such a surreal quality. Whether from the cheapness of the production, the bizarre plot, or the literal darkness of much of the film, the picture is not so much a banal pastiche of noir motifs and set pieces, but an oneiric hallucination where characters from other films noir assemble onto a movie lot by some perverse twist of fate, and play out an adventure that makes as much sense as Luis Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or.

Made by a bunch of stringers – bar the great Russell Metty who lensed – the movie holds a strange fascination. Shot in the flat TV-style that emerged in the 50s there is little to recommend the picture as a cinematic effort – though Metty and director Jerry Hopper do hit some scenes out of the park, thanks to a peppering of classic film noir lighting and framing, and a theatrical final shootout across rooftops.

Stars Sterling Hayden and Gloria Grahame each wander in from some other set, Hayden perhaps taking a breather from Crime Wave and Grahame on the loose from Human Desire. Hayden is a cop who is fired after he pursues a model-citizen played by Gene Barry for the killing of the three cops – Barry has an angelic wife and a baby in a crib. The big surprise is Barry, who later made it big on TV as Bat Masterson. As the villain leading a truly bizarre Jeckyll & Hyde existence as a small-town baker – in one scene he is shown in his store icing a cake! – who falls foul of the law after he is picked up as drunk and disorderly, he leaves Hayden and Grahame behind in a wake of attitude and booze. But the motive for the killings is so flimsy you can’t understand why Hayden doesn’t give it up, tailing the suspect until Barry can’t take it any more and leaves town to “calm his nerves”. Apparently the baker takes regular business trips on his own, so the wife and kid are left behind. The plot is moot on why a baker would need to make business trips. Anyway.

Hayden pursues Barry down to a Mexican border town where Barry is revealed as a chronic drunk and mean racketeer, after Grahame is shown flashing a lot of flesh as a chanteuse in a cheap dive. It turns out Barry is Grahame’s long-lost boyfriend. Barry’s reunion with Grahame is particularly sordid and sexually charged. A classic triangle ensues. One thing leads to another, and Hayden gets his man on ice and Grahame checks out in Hayden’s arms after stopping two bullets from Barry’s gun in a low-rent reprise from Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat from the year before.

Take with a lot of booze.