Tag: film noir

Samuel Fuller amazingly does not receive significant attention from most film writers, even though the substance of the passing tangential references to his oeuvre that are made, belie the lack of interest. Andrew Spicer says of Fuller in his book, Film Noir, when reviewing the course of noir post-Touch of Evil (and I dispute the b-film-maker appellation):

“…there was an ‘underground’ culture that retained film noir as a critical cultural form. This underground tradition included… b-film-maker Samuel Fuller with Underworld USA (1961), Shock Corridor (1963) and the Naked Kiss (1964) [that]… attacked the beneficence of American capitalism and the sanctity of the suburban family, keeping alive a habit of irony, scepticism, absurdity and dark existentialism.”

Mark Cousins refers to Fuller only once in his The Story of Film, and then only when introducing 1920s cinema:

The primitive film-making of the early 1910s with its simple shots, raw frontal acting and rapid action, un-moderated by the expectations of the middle classes, was disappearing. Like a humpback whale it went deep underwater. There would be rumours of sightings in 1950s America in melodramas such as Johnny Guitar (1953), and in the films of Samuel Fuller.

Fuller’s pulp melodramas are akin to guerrilla attacks on established certainties.  In Underworld USA, where the rackets are under the spotlight, we have a fast and furious battle where the alienated existential anti-hero Tolly Devlin, driven initially by revenge finds a kind of redemption in a squalid death in the same back alley where the genesis of his dark vengeance is rooted.  The women in his life find a new meaning and purpose in their lives: “We’ve got to finish the job for Tolly – or he died for nothing!”.  Fear is overcome by courage.  In  Fuller’s noirs, it is the influence of strong women that hold the ethical and moral center. Tolly finds what he never knew existed in the b-girl Cuddles – love and giving of one’s self without reservation or guile to another.  In each of the other Fuller noirs reviewed on FilmsNoir.Net, The Crimson Kimono (1959), The Naked Kiss (1964), and Pickup On South Street (1953), women hold the key to redemption.

The cast is superb, with Cliff Robertson’s performance as Tolly as nuanced as it could be, and Dolores Dorn as Cuddles steals the picture, with a simplicity and integrity that is matched by few more successful actresses.  The roller-coaster score by George Duning is a brilliant accompaniment seamlessly flowing from a dramatic crescendo underscoring the adrenalin-fuelled action on the screen to a plaintive but subdued  jazz motif that echoes the pathos that ensues.

“The old master, now a slave to television, has turned out another Hitchcock-and-bull story in which the mystery is not so much who done it as who cares.”
– Time (16 June 1958)

“Brilliant but despicably cynical view of human obsession… The bleakness is perhaps a little hard to swallow, but there’s no denying that this is the director at the very peak of his powers, while Novak is a revelation. Slow but totally compelling.” – Time Out

I will win no friends with this review.

Vertigo is technically brilliant. Hitchcock has consummate command of his mise-en-scene and knows how to fill a wide screen, with San Francisco artfully rendered using a fresh and elegant palette. Bernard Herrmann’s score is brilliantly moody and asynchronous.

But the contrived and far-fetched plot, heavy-handed symbolism, and Hitchcock’s signature detachment-cum-contempt for his protagonists, make the whole affair rather bleak and alienating. The first half is so slow it undermines the mystery of the strange woman portrayed by Kim Novak. This shot of James Stewart after having followed her car around the same city block more than once, expresses my impatience precisely.

Hitchcock wallpapers the inside of a restaurant so garishly red in Stewart’s first encounter with the young woman he has been asked to tail, that it comes across as ham-fisted: danger danger alarm alarm sex sex. Then there is the atrocious portrait of a dead woman that inexplicably has pride of place in a public art gallery.

The cartoon nightmare sequence that is the immediate prelude to Stewart’s descent into catatonia feels imposed and artificial, as does the inexplicable flashing of a blue light over him as he slips into his disturbed dream.  We then move to a scene in an institution where his mental breakdown is confirmed, and then a fast-forward in a jump cut to a released and supposedly ‘recovered’ Stewart wandering the streets manically obsessed with the specter of a dead woman. Towards the end the proceedings start to fall apart. An unbelievably chance encounter on the streets of San Francisco between Stewart and a young sales assistant stretches credulity past a reasonable limit.

The movie has a gothic noir look and feel, so it is no surprise that some writers see Vertigo as a film noir. I suppose you could say that there is a femme-fatale and the themes of obsession, betrayal, and criminality support this view. Andrew Spicer in his book Film Noir (2002) sees Vertigo as “the most profound of noir’s exploration of psycho-sexual dislocation”. Personally, I think Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo (1955) is a better picture where these motifs are rendered with more economy, elegance, wit, and empathy.

Story of a psychotic hood with an Oedipus complex
(1949 Warner Bros. Directed by Raoul Walsh 114 mins)

Cinematography by Sid Hickox
Screenplay by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts from a story by Virginia Kellogg
Original Music by Max Steiner
Art Direction by Edward Carrere

Starring:
James Cagney – Arthur ‘Cody’ Jarrett
Virginia Mayo – Verna Jarrett
Edmond O’Brien – Vic Pardo – alias for undecover cop Fallon
Margaret Wycherly – Ma Jarrett

Film Noir Filmographies:
Raoul Walsh: They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra (1941)
Sid Hickox: To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Possessed (1947),
Dark Passage (1947)
Virginia Kellogg: T-Men (1947) (story), Caged (1950) (screenplay)
Edward Carrere: Dial M for Murder (1954), I Died a Thousand Times (1955),
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

“White Heat = Scarface + Psycho” – Time Out

“The most gruesome aggregation of brutalities ever presented under the guise of entertainment” – Cue

“In the hurtling tabloid tradition of the gangster movies of the thirties, but its matter-of-fact violence is a new post-war style” – Time

“a wild and exciting picture of mayhem and madness” – Life

“an incendiary performance by James Cagney” – The Rough Guide to Film Noir

“Cagney is an epileptic and a borderline psychotic, and the cinema has rarely gone this for in a description of a true Oedipus” – A Panorama of American Film Noir (1955)

“Cagney… seems to incarnate the unstable explosive energies set loose by atomic fission” – Andrew Spicer in Film Noir

“A tragic grandeur… is achieved and culminates in Cody’s delirious and explosive self-immolation atop a metallic pyre” – Film Noir: An Encyclopaedic Reference

From the daring and brutally violent train robbery that opens the film, this gangster flick has a relentless trajectory that ends only with the incendiary finale-de-resistance. Director, Raoul Walsh, and cinematographer, Sid Hickox, have produced one of the tautest and most electric thrillers ever to emanate from Hollywood, which together with the nuanced screenplay, has the spectator strapped into an emotional strait-jacket that is released only in the final explosive frames.

Jimmy Cagney as the criminal psychotic Cody Jarrett dominates the screen in a bravura performance that is as dynamic as it is intense. Edmond O’Brien as the undercover cop Fallon, is no match for Cagney, and appears flat and almost irrelevant. Cody’s razor-sharp intelligence, and unflinching decisiveness and brutality propel the action – Fallon and the other cops can only follow in his wake. Virginia Mayo is well-cast as Cody’s slatternly wife, and is as cheap and conniving as any gangster’s mole before or since. Only Ma Jarrett matches her in evil guile.

The film-making team conspires to hold you not only in awe of Cody but also to perversely empathize with him. Strange to say he is the only genuine character in the motley crew organised for the final disastrous heist. Even Fallon comes off looking lifeless and less than honorable. The mise-en-scene is calculated to subvert your moral compass. Cody is decisive and acts without hesitation or qualm, while Fallon’s actions are reactive and ponderous. When Fallon tries to sneak out of the gang’s hide-out on the eve of the heist to alert his superiors, he is way-laid and has to concoct a story about wanting to hook-up with his ‘wife’ for the night, as Cody talks intimately and almost poetically to him of his grief for his dead mother, and how he was just ‘talking’ to her when wandering in the brush outside.

In the final shoot-out Cody is pinned atop a gas storage silo at an LA refinery, while Fallon from a safe distance takes pot-shots at him with a sniper’s rifle. Cody won’t go down, and only when he wildly shoots his pistol into the silo is his fate finally sealed. Fallon looks far less heroic…