Catching up, Part Two: Films Noir

I’m about halfway through Warner’s new noir set (their fourth), and I have to say that it’s just the bee’s knees. There might have been some worry because, save They Live By Night (and maybe the Don Siegel-Robert Mitchum mash-up The Big Steal), there are no heavy-hitters. No wonder it comes with ten features (a fucking steal even at the full $60 listing price). But each film has either been really, very good or flat-out blown me away, no less because I knew so little about them. Who knew Fred Zinnemann, the tasteful workhorse of High Noon, Oklahoma! and A Man For All Seasons, was capable of a knotty great like Act of Violence?

I’ve been plowing through them, so let’s keep this appropriately short:

Crime Wave (1954, André de Toth) Never seen de Toth before, but based on this one, no less than House of Wax is already near the top of my Queue. Cheap, stark and stripped-down, it’s shot mostly in single takes featuring lots of harsh lighting and blocked perspectives, giving it a kind of exaggerated doc-like feel. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Nouvelle Vague bowed before it. Gene Nelson, best known as a hoofer (in Oklahoma!, for one), is suitably intense, though his innate decency - combined with the ruthlessness with which Sterling Hayden (awesome, as ever) pursues him -- grows wearying even over the (tight) 74 minutes. Ending either disappointingly pat or unique -- can’t decide. B+

Where Danger Lives (1950, John Farrow) Farrow was a Roman Catholic convert, and it shows: Robert Mitchum’s sweet-natured doctor descends into a nightmare just at the thought of bedding Faith Domergue, and that’s before he even knows she’s married. Like D.O.A. (haven’t seen), this movie has such a great hook and it really doesn’t spoil it. Essentially, Mitchum is thonked over the head by Dommergue’s older husband Claude Rains (who just murders his one scene) and spends the rest of the movie becoming increasingly woozy from his concussion, all the while going from swanky urban life to desolate Nowhere America. The climactic long take - e, like those in Children of Men, all the more impressive because you don’t realize they’re long takes till you’re well into them - is a doozy, but so is one bit of shot-reverse-shot that, at the end, is revealed to have both characters looking in different places. A-

Act of Violence (1949, Fred Zinnemann) As with the above, great existential/philosophical plot not remotely screwed up. Doesn’t even take the easy route with the ending. Van Heflin, after the obscure spag western The Ruthless Four, quickly becoming a favorite. A-

Side Street (1949, Anthony Mann) Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell back again. It’s no They Live By Night, though by design: O’Donnell is very much in the background, with more focus on the supporting characters. But she’s essential, since she and Granger have a bond that is childlike and so deeply affecting that all they have to do is swap puppy dog eyes and I tear up. (Too bad Granger couldn’t always act with her.) Above all, one of the great NYC movies, with one of the all-time best punchlines: “Made in Hollywood.” B+

Tension (1949, John Berry) Audrey Totter was the best part of Robert Montgomery’s apocalyptically wrongheaded Lady in the Lake stab, and she’s about as great here as a chilly fatale, essentially playing Marie Windsor to Richard Basehart’s Elisha Cook, Jr. in Kubrick’s The Killing. Abandoning Basehart in the second half in favor of Barry Sullivan’s dic -- the narrator inserting himself into the story as a third variable, as it were -- is a ballsy move. Sadly, I didn’t fully come along, no less because Sullivan’s smugness upended the whole enterprise. We know he’ll succeed, whereas we at least have our doubts about Basehart. Totter’s bulging eyes compensate mucho. B

Decoy (1946, Jack Bernhard) The real cheapie so far -- produced by Poverty Row annex Monogram - and a sufficiently twisty, resourceful one. Jean Gillie is an anomaly in noir -- a Brit whose cool detachment masks not fragility but a complete lack of compassion or selflessness. (Great tagline: "She Treats Men the Way They've Been Treating Women For Years!") When she cackles madly at the end, it’s just earth shattering. I can see how people would read about this for years without seeing it, and could even delude themselves into not being completely disappointed. But it’s a touch too plot-heavy for my tastes and noble old Edward Norris is a bit of a drag. Awesome touch: POV shot of a guy inside a working gas chamber. B+

Still to Go: Mystery Street, Illegal, /They Live By Night/, /The Big Steal/

Catching Up, Part One: What Do You Call Italian-Made Westerns Shot in Spain?

Heat and a move back downtown have kept me from the old K.B., but I've been more screening-happy, if anything. Lest I get more ruthlessly behind, let's take this one in-bold bit at a time:

"Beyond Leone" Spaghetti Western Fest @ I-House
Everyone's an expert on Sergio Leone, but are there filmmakers or even individual films just as worthy? Possibly not, but this cavalcade -- picked by the great collector Harry Guero, of Exhumed Films -- was revealing all the same. The most eye-opening stuff was, not pejoratively, the oodles of trailers. Exploitation films make for the best adverts, as they tend to be nothing more than recycled bits and stars. Hence the reams of Lee Van Cleef vehicles, which find him cast as everything from heroes to villains to a badly-toupéed injun. (Il bruto, if you need know, hails from Jersey.) As with the fake trailers from Grindhouse, seeing the full thing would almost be superfluous -- they could never live up to the shorn-down version. Should trailer-makers be held on the same pedestal as filmmakers? Discuss.

As for the six features themselves, they were an understandable mixed bag. Even the two movies featuring the "Man With No Name" ripoff character Sartana spanned from entertainingly lurid (1970's If You Meet Sartana Pray For Your Death) to stiff to the point of lifeless (1971's Django Challenges Sartana, essentially a spag western "vs" pic). The Wild Bunch-esque Five Man Army -- released the same year, so who knows if rip-off charges are in order -- features Peter Graves, a fat guy, a Japanese guy, a Mexican bandito and another old guy milking the Mexican Revolution via some of the longest set pieces this side of a Melville heist pic, albeit without the rigor. They wind up fighting alongside the peasants, whereas the leads in 1971's amazingly-titled (aka Heads I Kill You, Tails You're Dead! They Call Me Hallelujah (aka, Heads You're Dead, Tails I Kill You -- for some reason I like this title more) continue to happily play for only themselves; not sure what to make of the wisecracking Eastwoodesque star (George Hilton) teaming up with the Russian Kossack dude. (Fuck the Cold War!)

The regrettably spotty Day of Anger -- with bandit Lee Van Cleef, as directed by Leone protégé Tonino Valerii (My Name is Nobody), training a gawky kid on how to be a selfish baddie -- was paired with the series' sole eye-opener: 1968's The Ruthless Four. What bugs me about my liking it so is that it was the most traditionally American of the fest's offerings. Most spag westerns, at least the ones I've seen, tend to revel in bad-ass amorality, rejecting both the classical moral greyness of classic westerns and the bitter, revisionist history stylings of the westerns being made in America at the same time. (Your Peckinpahs, Hellmans, Little Big Man, The Hired Hand, etc.) The Ruthless Four, meanwhile, is a pretty spot-on imitation Anthony Mann -- well-plotted, with dark themes and a slew of unlikeable but (for the most part) human characters.

An ancient, near-death Van Heflin plays a gold prospector whose partner turns on him in the opening scene. Heflin acts quick and winds up having to detonate his mine, which he's been digging out for months, with said backstabber still in there. Hoping to return with a boy he helped raise (Hilton again), he winds up taking on two more men in addition: Gilbert Roland as a former partner who he accidentally (or not) helped put behind bars; and no less than Klaus Kinski, as a pale, effete, vampiric man of mystery who "helped" Hilton (who's not so trustworthy after all) after Heflin and he parted ways. (Kinski's performance at times seems like a dry run for his and Herzog's Nosferatu.) So no one trusts anyone, each person has ulterior motives and there's gold to be had.

So rare is The Ruthless Four that the (faded, dominantly red) print was in 1.33 rather than its alleged 'scope*, so I can't say how Mannish director Giorgio Capitani's compromised frames are. (The editing is fine, though, particularly during a leftfield shoot-out at the halfway mark.) This leaves it transfixing as pure drama, and the film is rarely less than captivating, its four-way battle of wills sometimes reminiscent of Mann's genius The Naked Spur. Sure, it's no masterpiece, but a reddish, sliced-up print is far less than it deserves.

To come: Hiroshi Teshigahara, Pedro Costa, The Bourne Fucking Ultimatum

* If you haven't seen what people did before the days of digitally-abled pan-and-scan, then ye gods are you in for a treat. The framing is usually centered; if the director and/or cinematographer wished to, I don't know, spice things up a bit, then the solution is to simply cut to a different section of the frame. As you can imagine, this is all kinds of jarring, with people sometimes "moved" a mere couple inches so we can someone who'd be left out entirely because he's been staged at the extreme right or left. Disparage P&S as much as you want, at least sudden, unsightly pans are better than sudden, jarring cuts.

A Breach in Breach

As with Keanu Reeves, Andie Macdowell and the version of Mark Wahlberg that’s straight and boring, a lot of seemingly intelligent filmmakers have an unhealthy affinity for Ryan Phillippe. I like Billy Ray’s approach to docudrama. In both this and Shattered Glass, he combines an unmistakable intelligence with a willingness to find empathy in real people not worthy of them. But he cast Phillippe as his lead, and the movie, by and large, just goes down with him. I don’t mean that as a glib joke. Phillippe literally opens up a conceptual black hole in the movie. Chris Cooper’s Robert Hanssen – the FBI agent who sold secrets to the Soviet Union for some 25 years – is built up time and again as the slyest crony on the block, capable of shaking down the best of Soviet spies and generally impossible to, um, breach. The film finds him fooled into trusting Phillippe’s newbie Eric O’Neill, essentially making Phillippe an actor playing an actor. And since Phillippe can’t act his way out of a plastic bag, neither can O’Neill, lending a surreality to Hanssen’s downfall. He can hang with Soviet spies but he can’t catch a guy who can’t even sell a line? Hanssen’s a fascinating enough subject to keep Breach worthwhile, and Ray even works a thoughtful dissection on the meaning of trust: the film manages to express Hanssen’s pain over being deceived without making him into some fallen hero. It even manages to deal with his hardcore, nutty Opus Dei faith without resorting to easy yuks. But despite the top billing, the movie belongs not to Cooper but to Phillippe, and Phillippe fails at even playing the bland eye at the center of the much more showy storm. B-

How I Spent My Memorial Day Weekend

I did a lot of non-cinema activities over the three day weekend. (Actually, four day, since I didn’t work on Friday, either.) I got food and drinks with people on a couple occasions. I finally played Wii. I visited friends I haven’t seen in ages. I went to an MD party where, on three separate occasions, groups of us left the hordes to go play basketball and some made-up wiffle ball thingamajig. I lost a game of Pig to an 11 year old.

But as far as this blog cares, I plowed through ten movies. Apart from catching William Friedkin’s partly awesome Bug and going to a long-awaited Alejandro Jodorowosky double feature (which I'll go into later), the holiday siege was all about catching up with DVDs I either bought recently or needed to ship back to NetFlix.

Let’s do this shit.

In his NYT DVD column a couple weeks back, Dave Kehr went mad for Canyon Passage (1947, B+), a western from the French-born Jacques Tourneur, who’s best known for Out of the Past and being the prize horse in Val Lewton’s stable of directors (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Leopard Man). I initially skimmed the rave, so I wasn’t sure what made Kehr so frothy. I couldn’t quite place what it was till late in. For the longest time, it seemed like just a case of humanism. In short, this is a western without any clear-cut baddies or goodies -- where the “hero” is kinda sketchy, where his best friend has a dishonorable streak, where whatever villains there turn out to not be so evil. It’s easy to overrate these things. I know I have.

But there’s no reason to overrate Canyon Passage, because it’s not humanistic -- it’s realistic. Dana Andrews plays a taciturn, tough guy businessman as he returns to remote, developing town of Jacksonville, OR. There, he gets embroiled in a series of events, ranging from romantic triangles, vigilantism and an Injun siege. Plot isn’t Canyon Passage’s strong suit, and that’s just fine -- Tourneur’s after the rhythm and textures of his town, which is open enough to include both hothead Lloyd Bridges and wandering minstrel (er, fiddle-player) Hoagy Carmichael.

Its appeal can be best summarized by a comparison someone made on Kehr’s blog to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, to which Canyon Passage is like a grandfather. (I was going to say prototype, but that feels condescending.) Though Jacques Tourneur possesses little of Robert Altman’s wise-acred cynicism, the two films share a need to debunk western tropes, and to establish a feel for how communities try to find a balance. There are many moods in Canyon Passage; a typical passage finds Tourneur working up a lather with a cabin-raising party, only to stroll off with Brian Donlevy’s banker and Susan Hayward's longtime-g.f. as the former remarks, crankily, “There’s so much of this world we’re missing.” The film doesn’t have anything like McCabe’s devastating arc, but that may be because I haven’t found it yet amongst the riches. I can’t wait to start watching Canyon Passage for the rest of my life.

Paired on the same disc with Canyon Passage was King Vidor’s 1936 docudrama The Texas Rangers (1936, B), so why not? Luckily, it’s very ‘30s -- fast-paced, quick-witted, clever, not much for bloat and, for the most part, fairly unsentimental. Fred MacMurray and Jackie Oakie may eventually turn into noble heroes worthy of statues, but not before logging time as vile, snickering bandits who, upon being recruited into the fold, initially try to use their power for their own needs. Had this been made a decade later, it would have been grandiose and bloodless. But it wasn’t made a decade later.

Kehr’s Canyon Passage gushing aside, the real eye-opener for me was Sam Fuller’s Fixed Bayonets! (1951; A-), which I had always assumed was somewhere in the middle of its director’s oeuvre. Oh my, no. This is Fuller on all cylinders, mixing high octane incident and troop repartee even more effectively (arguably, I guess) than he did with The Steel Helmet and The Big Red One, with which it shares similar concerns (Richard Basehart plays a weak-willed gunman who freezes when he has a perfect shot). Moreover, it projects a more affecting dissection of how war is fought -- the ethics of survival; the need for working with blinders; killing as a job the need for fun and banter amidst the horror. Did Béla Tarr rip off the nighttime tracking shot, with each character lapsing into narration before the climax, for Sátántangó?

I also saw Fuller’s Hell and High Water (1954, B), which, like Fixed Bayonets!, was released just in time for our war-themed holiday. Apparently this was purely for-hire, the studio asking Fuller to test out the new cinemascope frame on a submarine set. But it’s still pretty good. Reuniting with his Pickup on South Street director, Richard Widmark is awesomely sour as a sub commander, and Fuller manages a couple bits of purple prose. (The opening credits feature a mushroom cloud.) It’s a lot fatter than a Fuller should be, which is to say, really, that it strikes equilibrium between Fuller and The System. Gene Evans is totally wasted, though, which is sad. Aside: Godard must have been homaging this one’s red-filter scenes in Pierrot le fou’s party sequence (which featured Fuller). That’s so like Godard.


The less said about Let’s Go to Prison (2006, C), the better. Bob Odenkirk, how could you? Subversive but almost never funny, it reconfirmed my suspicion that the whole The State/Reno 911 troop, members of whom wrote it, just aren’t funny, and prone to wasting promising subjects. It also reconfirmed my suspicion that Dax Shepard is kinda awesome. With this, Zathura and Idiocracy, me and Dax are three for three. Dare I rent Employee of the Month? (A: I daren’t.)

Lastly, I finished up my Mario Bava Box Set (or “Bava Box,” as the top lid reads). I haven’t yet written about Bava, the famed Italian genre director, but the Box -- which includes five, rather randomly selected ‘60s works, including Black Sunday and the ur-giallo The Girl Who Knew Too Much -- makes him come off like the missing link between the minimalist horror of Val Lewton and the baroque gore of Dario Argento.

The Lewton comparison aside, Bava hasn'talways much for subtext, but he’s a whiz with resourceful, striking and transporting mise-en-scène. Black Sunday (1961) -- in which Barbara Steele’s executed Satanist threatens to take over another, more innocent Barbara Steele -- always seems on the verge of sneaking in some feminist statement, but whiffs in the end. That’s okay -- it looks fucking great. Kill, Baby...Kill! (1966) comes awfully, frustratingly close to being a rich portrait of man snuffing burgeoning female sexuality. That’s okay, too -- it looks even fucking greater. (I love how the opening fifteen minutes of this film have a cheap, faded auburn sheen, while the rest of it is one of the most overly-colorful films this side of a Vincente Minnelli musical. Dig the OCD staircase shot, above.) Thematically, Knives of the Avenger is the richest, taking Shane and turning it into a swords and sandals epic starring a guilt-ridden knife-thrower. But it’s also not as fun, slightly deficient in the action category.

None of this, by the way, is meant as a diss on Bava, who’s clearly one of the great technical directors -- a master of color, B&W shades, camera movement and mood. Bring on the one with the vampire aliens.