Category: Films

Rouben Mamoulian’s classic 1931 expressionist gangster flick from 1931 City Streets was based on a treatment by Dashiell Hammett.

It is not so much Mamoulian’s inventive camera angles and breakthrough use of voice-over in a Hollywood talkie, or the consummate chiaroscuro lensing by DP Lee Garmes, or the hard-boiled patter from scenarist Oliver H.P. Garrett, that distinguish the movie as an early noir, but Hammett’s off-beat story and characterizations.

Fernando F. Croce in his expressive (undated) capsule review at cinepassion.org  nicely renders the film’s mood: “From beer to ocean, from metropolis to nature on a speeding buggy, that’s the surrealism at play here, Dashiell Hammett’s. Trucks as they roar over the camera and the tinkling of bottles at the distillery figure in the opening city symphony, promptly added is the pugnacious refrain (“No hard feelings?”) which, followed by a handshake, becomes the kiss of death. Gangland baby (Sylvia Sidney) and naïve cowpoke (Gary Cooper) at the fairgrounds, sharpshooters in love navigating through symbols (crashing waves, caged and stuffed birds, porcelain cats). Taught to keep mum, she’s caught getting rid of the gun after dad (Guy Kibbee) bumps off a fellow hoodlum (the police station reappears in Le Doulos) and ends up behind bars; inside, Sidney vows to leave the racket while outside Cooper embraces bootlegging for The Big Fellow (Paul Lukas). “The Law don’t look so good when it works both ways, uh?” Rouben Mamoulian’s take on American crime is a European one akin to Sternberg’s, tough and dreamlike: An underworld party is literally punctured with some nasty business involving a fork (a band playing “Happy Days Are Here Again” swiftly covers it up), yet the idea of an unfolding murder measured in the ash of a cigar might be out of Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète. The high-angled view of the checkered-floor mansion gives it a de Hooch perspective, the low-angled view of prison walls and windows slants them toward Brutalist architecture. The heroine’s inner monologue in the cell is an elaboration of Hitchcock (Murder!), who in turn elaborated Mamoulian’s overlapping close-ups of Cooper and Sidney (dolly-in, dissolve, dolly-out) for The Wrong Man’s crucial revelation. Quite the wry gangster sonata, with a vengeful moll (Wynne Gibson) and a car chase on the edge of the abyss setting the stage for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”  [The  1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was Mamoulian’s next picture.]

Both The New York Times and Variety in 1931 gave the movie a strong endorsement, but it was an unnamed staff writer in a review in the April 27, 1931 issue of  TIME Magazine that had the prescience to see the makings of a new kind of American cinema:

City Streets (Paramount). Critics may some day, examining the gangster films of 1931, find them significant as perpetuations of a culture which the more self- conscious art-expressions of the day have rejected. For here, in realistic terms, brutalized in content and set going at a breathless pace, are stories and people that are Victor Hugo’s stepchildren, many of them highly likeable and articulated with fine ingenuity. In this picture, why does Sylvia Sidney tie her arm in a black sling when her father telephones her to meet him on the corner “if she has to break her arm to get there”? She could have hidden the pistol he handed her in her handbag, but instead she hid it in the sling—for romance, for Victor Hugo, immortal originator of gangster fiction. It seems right for her to wear the sling. It seems right that her father, Guy Kibbee, should be a genial, bald-headed Irishman, fond of rococo furniture, comic strips and a pet canary called Jackie. How much more fiendish—because more human—he seems when, going out for the evening’s beer-running and murdering, he says mournfully: “Jackie ain’t sung a tune all day!”

Other good details—Wynne Gibson shooting “The Big Feller,” gang boss, in the back, throwing in the pistol and locking the door of the room in which The Big Feller is alone with Miss Sidney; the derby hat of a murdered beer-runner, with his gilt initials prominent in the crown, floating down a city river; the closing episode in which the gangsters who were going to take Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney for a ride are themselves taken for a ride. The story is made valid by such details and is no less properly in the Hugo tradition if several of its episodes are entirely incredible, the plot tenuous. When the action makes orderly headway it is concerned with the difficulties that oppose the happiness of Miss Sidney and Gary Cooper, who works in a shooting gallery but later becomes a beer runner. Typical shot: Guy Kibbee murdering a friend while he shakes hands with him.

The term film noir was first coined by French reviewer Nino Frank when the end of the wartime embargo brought five 1944 Hollywood films – The Woman in the Window, Laura, Phantom Lady, Double Indemnity, and Murder, My Sweet – to Paris in the same week in 1946.

A neat little noir from director John Berry, who also had a hand in the script by Allen Rivkin, which was adapted from a story by John Klorer.  Cheap blonde Claire (Audrey Totter) leaves meek and earnest hubby Warren (Richard Basehart) for a Malibu-type with dough.  The boyfriend ends up on ice, with hubby framed for the murder. Sardonic hulk and investigating cop Lt. Bonnabel (Barry Sullivan) plays with Claire to fish out the killer.  There is nice support from William Conrad as Sullivan’s buddy, and Cyd Charisse as a very good girl.

You just have to relish Totter – she is the devil in no disguise.  In an early scene Claire is having a piece of strawberry pie with cream at the counter of a drug store and is eyeing an advert for a mink in a magazine – hubby the night druggist at the other end of the store is slaving over mortar & pestle to keep her in a style of life she doesn’t desire – when she is picked up.  Even a b-girl would have held out a bit – the exchange is pure sleaze:

Stunning, isn’t it?

On her.
It’d look better on you.
Think so, huh?
Yeah.
Thanks, that’s nice.
And I got something nice to talk about.
So?
Yeah. Wanna hear more?
Where you parked?
Around the corner. Gray sedan.

In Silver & Ward’s ‘Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference’ (1992), Claire is described as a “classic femme fatale, a woman who drives men to the brink of disaster merely on a whim”.  I dispute the contention that Claire is a femme-fatale.  Sure she is mean and manipulative, and uses sex to get what she wants – “Hey, what’s better than money?” – but she does not use men as surrogates.  She is quite capable of doing whatever needs to be done to achieve her sordid ends on her own.  This said, there is a simply brilliant scene the next morning after Claire’s escapade with the gray sedan, that portrays a reversal of sex roles so potent it has to rank as one of the best expositions in noir of the femme-noir as ball-breaker.

Hubby returns to their apartment in the morning after ending his night shift.  Anxiously hoping against hope he finds Claire asleep in the marital bed – and is fooled into thinking she has spent an innocent night at home.  His mood lifts and he makes her breakfast – the toast is burnt – and tells her he has a surprise.  The next scene cuts to the couple in their car – Warren is driving – as it pulls up to a new bungalow in a raw housing estate [my reconstruction]:

Claire (annoyed): What are you stopping here for?

Warren (happily opening the car door): Look. Isn’t that a beauty?

Claire (combing her hair and staring into the mirror of her compact): Are you kidding?

Warren (abashed but still in good humor): Gee, it would be wonderful to live out here, darling. Fresh air, room to entertain. It’s great for kids.

Claire (petulant): You wanna know something? I think it’s a miserable spot. It’s 30 minutes from nowhere.

Warren (exasperated): I thought this was what you wanted. What do you think I took the night shift for?  Saving and doing without so we’d have enough money to do this.

Claire: We still don’t have enough.

Warren: The FHA even approved the loan.

Claire: Fine. Let them live here.

Warren gets out of the car and walks toward the house singing its praises… “Darling, at least look at it”.  Meanwhile Claire shifts into the driver’s seat, she is wearing a plain dark top and flannel pants.  She starts sounding the car horn loudly, closes the driver’s door, and starts the engine: “You comin?”.

Warren turns back mortified, while Claire revs the engine like a young punk, the exhaust fumes confronting Warren as he walks behind the car before getting into the passenger’s seat.

Graham Greene, who wrote the source novel and worked on the screenplay of perhaps the greatest British noir, Brighton Rock (1947), scripted the British hard-boiled crime thriller The Green Cockatoo (aka ‘Four Dark Hours’ or ‘Race Gang’).  After the movie was screened at the 43rd New York Film Festival in September 2005, Keith Uhlich of Slant, wrote: “Director William Cameron Menzies, an award-winning production designer, grounds The Green Cockatoo in expressionist shadows that anticipate Carol Reed’s The Third Man (the ne plus ultra of Greene’s cinema output) and the writer himself is evident via the piece’s sense of a veiled, yet inescapable moral outcome with which each character must deal.” Hal Erickson in the All Movie Guide says of the film: “Filmed in 1937, the British Four Dark Hours wasn’t generally released until 1940, and then only after several minutes’ running time had been shaved off. The existing 65-minute version stars John Mills, uncharacteristically cast as a Soho song and dance man. When Mills’ racketeer brother Robert Newton is murdered, Mills takes it upon himself to track down and punish the killers. Rene Ray, the girl who was with Newton when he died, helps Mills in his vengeful task”. Bosley Crowther in the NY Times in 1947: “With all its disintegration, though, [The Green Cockatoo] is still better melodramatic fare than is usually dished out to the patient Rialto audiences… An unknown here, Rene Ray, is very attractive as a wide-eyed country girl unwittingly involved in the Soho proceedings”. Film writer for The Guardian, Andrew Pulver, wrote in 2008 that the movie “has a similar [to film noir] commitment to the boiled-down essentials of the crime genre”.  Max Green, who later lensed Night and the City (1950) for Jules Dassin, is DP and the film’s score was one of the first from Miklós Rózsa.

I found The Green Cockatoo an entertaining ‘curio’ (to paraphrase Pulver).  While there are elements that point to noir, the picture is more a melodramatic thriller.  A Soho seediness to the affair is enhanced by the very cheapness of the production.  Most of the action plays out during a London night after a young provincial ingenue arrives on a midnight train from the sticks and has a chance encounter.  The darkened sets have a definite moodiness.  A night scene introducing the Soho night-club, ‘The Green Cockatoo’, around which the action pivots,  has an accomplished mis-en-scene.  We see a couple stroll past a copper on the beat who walks up to a b-girl holding up a lamp-post in front of the club – the bobby stares the girl down and she moves on.

There is a lot of action packed into just over an hour, but the plot relies on  a touch too many contrivances and misunderstandings.  There is a nice chemistry between Mills and Ray, who is quite beguiling, with some nice patter and cute innuendo.  A number of scenes are played for laughs, which adds a pastiche quality.  Indeed, scenes at a plush hideout with a butler, played beautifully by Frank Atkinson, are laugh-out-loud funny.  This said, the pastiche factor detracts overall, and it is jarring to hear English characters using very unlikely expressions such as ‘guys’ and ‘dames’.  Though the Hollywood influence is obvious, there are no guns, only flick-knives.

Max Green’s lensing is most deserving of praise, and these shots from the picture attest to its expressionist elements:

An interesting historical artifact, and worth seeking out.  Not on DVD.