All posts by NotesonFilm1

About NotesonFilm1

Spanish Canadian working in the UK. Former film journalist. Lecturer in Film Studies. Podcast with Michael Glass on cinema at https://eavesdroppingatthemovies.com/ and also a series of conversations with artists and intellectuals on their work at https://josearroyoinconversationwith.com/

IL GRANDE RACKET/ THE BIG RACKET (Enzo G. Castellari, 1976)

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Saw Enzo G. Castellari’s IL GRANDE RACKET/ THE BIG RACKET last night, my first POLIZIOTTESCHI – originally a disdainful term, like SPAGHETTI WESTERN – to describe popular homegrown crime films influenced but seen as derivative of American Crime movies. This one is about racketeers brutally extorting small businesses around the Piazza Navona with some very evocative on-location shooting.

The film is beautifully shot by Marcelo Maclocchi, one of those ‘every frame a painting’ type of movie, but also one where this type of aesthetic is least likely to find a home, a bombastic action movie, crude in characterisation, with melodramatic situations taken to loopy heights ( see the nun in the car bit). The contrast between the artistry involved in creating the look and movement and the crudeness in the writing of ‘themes’ and character is quite startling.

This would rank quite high in my list of most violent movies I’ve seen, not because of what it shows, we’ve seen it all before — and much more graphically — but because of the relish with which it acknowledges moral and psychological violence and punctuates scenes with their transgression. It’s a film in which it’s not enough to rob, kill, rape and pillage, you’ve then also got to see the relish with which the goons urinate on their victims as relatives watch.

How to Agitate a Mob:

Clearly influenced by DIRTY HARRY and DEATH WISH, it was accused of being fascist when first released. It is about a cop (Fabio Testi) so frustrated in his work by corrupt higher ups that he enlists the victims of the racketeers to fight gangs (there’s a bit of THE DIRTY DOZEN in this as well). I think the politics are a bit more complex than this (there is a scene of horrors an unruly mob may inflict when manipulated by gangsters). It’s also seen as a reflection of the YEARS OF LEAD in Italy, that period of gang wars and kidnappings in the 70s where it seemed to some that Italy was becoming a failed state and again, though it would be too simple to see it as pure reflection there are definitely elements of that context that feed into the film and are interestingly mediated by the narrative.

The reason to see it now is that it’s thrilling to see both for the way it stages action and for the way it films it. The action scenes are super and must be amongst the most beautiful and thrilling every filmed.  Characters are often shot through something, framed in the background, always in movement to or away from the camera, as stuntmen do incredible things over-head or on the side, actions and their effects immanently evoked, a clear sense of what’s at stake in each deadly beat.

THE FAMOUS CAR ROLLOVER SCENE:

Other things that caught my eye: Vincent Gardenia is wonderful as a jovial gangster and lightens up every scene he’s in; one of gangsters is a woman played by Marcella Michelangel, even more evil and chilling than Mercedes McCambridge in TOUCH OF EVIL; her character doesn’t just want to watch, she wants to do. Lastly, and superficially, has a crime film ever featured as many gorgeous men as this one?

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK/ La Mariée était en noir (François Truffaut, 1968)

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Saw Truffaut’s THE BRIDE WORE BLACK yesterday, a clear homage to Hitchcock in many ways but without any of the visual precision or flair one would normally expect of either filmmaker. I’m puzzled by this film. It’s a very enjoyable watch — according to Truffaut, an exercise in plot based on a novel by Cornell Woollrich — and it definitely works on that level. Plus, there’s Jeanne Moreau, impassive and beautiful, floating around the film killing men in a series of modish Pierre Cardin dresses – only in black or white or a combination thereof, as if wearing that moment of transition from bride to widow, from hope to despair. She’s the bride whose husband was killed on the steps of the church minutes after their marriage. Those responsible are a bunch of bored laddish middle-class messieurs out drinking, having fun and playing irresponsibly with guns. The shooting was an accident. But they’re going to pay. She sees her life as forever ruined, is out to kill each and every one of them – and does. Someone might make a case for the film being feminist. Truffaut himself does, tentatively, in one of the extras in the blu-ray . The film definitely ‘sides’ with the Jeanne Moreau character. All the men are on the make, even at their own engagement parties. They each objectify and try to make out with the widow – who has no compulsions telling them how boorish they are before killing them. But the film seems to revel more in the men’s attempts at seduction – it’s so at one with a particular playboy ideology of the time, at least a French variant – that it fails to convey the moral urgency in Moreau’s actions much less the fun in her revenge. For a Hitchcock homage favouring plot, it’s a film curiously lacking in suspense. Bernard Herrman did the score. Truffaut argued with Raould Coutard about the cinematography and use of colour, and one only has to see the film to see why they would; it’s at best unremarkable (and I dislike all those zooms, no less annoying for then being so characteristic). It was critically panned but a big success on its initial release, and both are perfectly understandable now. What isn’t is the current critical elevation.

José Arroyo

The Mob (Robert Parrish, 1951)

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It took Broderick Crawford almost twenty years to become a star, with his Oscar-winning performance in ALL THE KING’S MEN (Robert Rossen, 1949). He then had a smash hit as the rich brute trying to corrupt Washington into doing his bidding in BORN YESTERDAY opposite William Holden and Judy Holliday (Cukor, 1950). THE MOB (Robert Parrish, 1951) is a programmer, but it was also a hit.

The advertising tried to ally it with THE KILLERS (Siodmak, 1946), which aside from its connection to crime and gangsters, I don’t quite see. The film is based on Ferguson Findley’s anti-corruption thriller, WATERFRONT and ON THE WATERFRONT (Kazan, 1954) might be a more apt comparison, at least up to a point.

 

Broderick Crawford plays a cop who lets a cop-killer escape at the very beginning of the film and is then charged with infiltrating the mob that runs various scams from the port in order to find the killer and smash the gang. THE MOB is not an A-film but Joseph Walker, the cinematographer who did such brilliant work for Capra and Hawks, makes it look smashing (see above). It’s got some crackling dialogue with contemporary references,–  ‘only gophers and communists go underground’; and its snappily edited and flows well. It’s got disguises, trick doors and even an ingenious ultraviolet gizmo designed to follow cars unobserved, elements that would only gain in popularity as the 50’s advanced.

Ernest Borgnine characteristically plays a union thug. Charles Bronson, uncredited, has a few lines as a dock worker (see below)

José Arroyo

THE WEB (Michael Gordon, 1947)

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The last of the films in my UNIVERSAL NOIR #1 box-set, and it made me wonder what the selection process was: are they the best Universal had to offer? Are some choices mere padding?  Are some meant to be representative samples, rather than the best of? Are others illustration of genre outliers that help define the central corpus? Re-releasing these films on blu-ray gives them a new life so there’s something at stake in the choices.

Recounting plot:

I raise these questions because THE WEB is almost a quintessential programmer, a standard crime film in which a rich industrialist (Vincent Price) scams a million dollars, kills his associates and tries to frame his secretary (Ella Raines) and her soon to be boyfriend (Edmond O’Brien) for the murder, only to be foiled by a detective who’s much brighter than he looks (William Bendix). It’s got some snappy dialogue and an attractive, second-string cast, though only Vincent Price is given enough to shine with.

A shot:

Visually, there’s an attempt to bring some flair (a shot that begins with contrasting close-up of two pianists playing, then mirrored in a piano and descending onto the subjects in a night-club scene — see above) and there’s a lovely edit with the sound of a gunshot over-taken by a truck discharging pebbles but is otherwise undistinguished (see below).

A cut:

There’s not much suspense EITHER as a third of the way through, in a hypothetical, the villain gives away the plot (see first. clip at the very top). All that remains is to catch him with enough to indict. William Bendix, with what comes pretty close to a deux ex-machina, takes care of it. An enjoyable if unimpressive watch; and, of course, one does need a sense of the norm before discussing whatever is better or worse, so far from useless viewing.

José Arroyo

Abandoned (Joseph M. Newman, 1949)

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Many of the great cinematographers of the classic period were filming programmers by the late 40’s, here it’s Billy Daniels, doing superb work in what must have been tight circumstances for ABANDONED, a lurid tale of a woman (Gail Storm) who goes looking for her sister and the baby she’s recently given birth to only to find her sister’s dead and the baby sold by a gangland ring that traffics in newborns. It’s got an attractive cast (Dennis O’Keefe, Jeff Chandler) of which I particularly liked Marjorie Rimbaud as the grand dame ringleader and Raymond Burr as a double-crossing detective who evokes a strangely powerful combination of the porcine and the epicene that is right at home in this noir setting. The film is beautifully lit in classic noir style but also attempts a documentary or at least ‘educational’ springboard to the narrative. Thus we get a very amusing explanation of what a police stakeout is, perhaps the first and last time that appeared in a crime film:

The definition of a ‘Stakeout’:

 

The more noir dimensions of the visuals:

José Arroyo

NAKED ALIBI (Jerry Hopper, 1954)

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Is Al Willis (Gene Barry) a humble baker or a gangland psychopath? Is Chief Inspector Joe Conroy (Sterling Hayden) condoning police brutality or is he merely doing his job? Marianna (Gloria Grahame), a girl who gets hit and might like it, will be the key to the solution.

A girl who gets hit and might like it:

 

Gloria Grahame’s introduction in the film, lip-synching to Jo Anne Greer’s rendition of  Cole Porter’s ‘Ace in the Hole,’ is sublime: external desirability as an evocation of sexual alienation; the body a sad, desultory last-chance exchange mechanism; each shimmy a tired indication that there really is no way out; another of the already innumerable reason why Grahame is such an essential figure in noir.

Gloria Grahame Intro

NAKED ALIBI  is beautifully lit by the great Russell Metty, so that light and its absence becomes an additional layer of signification into what the actors, dialogue and framing are already evoking; beautiful, bleak, expressive. It was partly shot in Tijuana and director Jerry Hopper intelligently weaves in the physical and metaphorical dimensions of a’ border-town’ into the story.

Russell Metty lighting:

Windows and Mirrors as Framing:

Hayden is lanky, cool, with a very expressive body but minimal facial movement, and eyes suggesting that he’s seen it all and nothing he’s seen is nice. The police ‘win’ of course, but only On the surface. This is a film where there’s a victory but one without victors: no one really wins. At the end, Joe Conroy, having already lost much, walks under a lamp-post and into a dark, dark night. Alone.

Chuck Connors, even taller than Hayden, appears in an early role:

The Indicator disk has also has a superb ten minute film demonstrating what it is a cinematographer does, featuring Karl Struss, who shot Murnau’s SUNRISE and many other films. Billy Wilder briefly appears on-set.

José Arroyo

Larceny (George Sherman, 1948)

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Joan Caulfield gets an Orry-Kelly wardrobe but Shelley Winters gets all the best lines…and the reviews. When Winters was doing the rounds of talk shows in the 80s, hawking her biography and commenting on what a sex bomb she’d been in her films…I don’t think I quite believed her. Sure, she flashed a couple of pictures but I’d known her my whole life as…well, other people. But here she is in LARCENY, the first film in which she got star billing, as the sultry femme fatale who can’t keep her mitts off John Payne –no woman in this film can but it’s a bigger mistake for Shelley as she’s meant to be Dan Duryea’s girl, never a good idea in the movies. I’ve spliced together all her scenes – under 14 minutes. She’s got some archetypal hard-boiled dialogue, so recognisable it must have carried a hint of parody even then, and endlessly quotable now.  Had the film been better, she’d have become a queer icon earlier (or perhaps she was…even as early as this?

I’ve edited together all of her scenes in the film, under 14 minutes, so those interested might see: she’s fantastic!

José Arroyo

DEPORTED (Robert Siodmak 1950)

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In 1949 Robert Siodmak returned to Europe to film DEPORTED. It’s loosely inspired by the story of Lucky Luciano, whose deportation back to Italy in 1946 had been head-line news nationwide. Jeff Chadler plays Vittorio Mario Sparducci aka Vic Smith, fresh out of a five-year jail sentence for a $100, 000 heist and deported to his home-town in Italy. His loving family receives a cable from the American Embassy, mistake him for a big shot connected to the government, and celebrates him as a local boy made good. He in turn falls in love with the place, his family and the local countess (Märtá Toren).  But complications arise. A former associate believes he’s due half of the heist money and follows him to Italy. Vic dreams up a scam where he’ll import$100,000 worth of food and medical supplies through a charity run by the countess, steal it from the warehouse, and make even more money by selling it on the black market. Lots of double crosses ensue and love gets in the way.

 

Was Siodmak influenced by neo-realism? The film is shot on-location in Italy. All the shots taking place in real locations, teeming with people, evoking a very particular time, place, and way of life. They are beautifully staged and gorgeous to see. The film enters more familiar noir territory, clearly filmed in sound-stages, for the final double-cross; and that’s lovely also. The main problem with the film is that it inevitably whitewashes a notorious crook and avoids dealing with the darker and more unsavoury aspects of his character and career, though to his credit, Siodmak does his best to downplay the sentimentality whilst doing his best to inject some humour, romance, and sentiment. The leads are perhaps not the big stars Siodmak hoped for but they’re both very effective, particularly Chandler.

The film’s style of shooting does evoke, directly and indirectly, a particular structure of feeling of the period, at least as seen from a US perspective: that Marshall-plan aid from America, the want and scrambling for food and supplies by the locals, the can-do to make-do attitude one sees in the Italian cinema of this period; and is the best reason to see this film now. A marvellous giddy village dance is one of the highlights.

Aside from a brief return to Hollywood to film THE CRIMSON PIRATE with Burt Lancaster, Siodmak would largely remain in Europe for the rest of his career, one which would continue for at least another twenty years.

José Arroyo

 

Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner, 1958).

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In America it seems you never really get that house you hope for. If you keep at your job, it’ll take you at least 23 years to pay off that 28,000 and you might as well die; If you become a contract killer…well, no contract killer survives to the end of a 1958 film. This is an influential one. In an introduction to the Powerhouse Indicator blu-ray, Martin Scorsese talks of how he wanted to include an excerpt in MEAN STREETS; how the Robert De Niro exercise bits in TAXI DRIVER were inspired by this film; how years later he hired Irving Lerner, its director, to oversee the editing of NEW YORK, NEW YORK; and how later than that, for THE DEPARTED, they looked at this film in relation to perhaps using a single instrument score like the zither in THE THIRD MAN or the guitar score by Perry Botkin in MURDER BY CONTRACT.

 

A film that seems effortlessly cool: the pace, the stillness and warmth of Vince Edwards’ face and the soft low tone of his voice in contrast to his deeds. MURDER BY CONTRACT is noteworthy for its narrative inventiveness with the passage of time; the elliptical way it communicates without showing; the sparseness of the images, often in close-up, often framed so characters’ faces are off-screen. There’s an existential dimension to the film as well, pre-dating THE GODFATHER; murder’s not personal, it’s just business to Claude. He doesn’t believe in the supernatural; he gets no kicks out of crime; he contains his emotions; he’s methodical, systematic, thinks and takes his time; he feels hot or cold, hungry or not, but no guilt and no remorse; he likes to take responsibility for his actions and likes his work well done. He just does the deed and adds up the figures that will buy him his home. Oh yes, he likes to be warned if the contract’s for a woman: he charges double for that.

 

A B film, shot in only seven days, but a marvellous one, beautifully photographed by Lucien Ballard

José Arroyo

Tight Spot (Phil Karlson, 1955)

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Ginger Rogers returns to the type of ‘Anytime Annie’ role that first got her noticed in the early thirties. Vince Striker, the cop played by Brian Keith, describes her as ‘smart talking, brassy, third class citizen’. But Ginger’s now on her third decade of stardom, so even though we first see her doing laundry in jail, she’s got the type of manicured nails that would make Barbra Streisand proud decades later; and this being Ginger in the 50s, her character’s a product of her environment, which here means a good girl who’s been accompanied by the wrong men but never so far as to do anything ‘cheap’; she’s been jailed for being a chump rather than for being guilty of anything.

Fingernails

She plays Sherry Conley, the only person left who can finger mob boss Benjamin Costain (Lorne Green) and get him kicked out of the country as an ‘undesirable alien’. Edward G. Robinson is the D.A who hopes to convince her. Brian Keith is the love interest as the cop who’s charged with protecting her. It’s a film worth seeing for its brilliant cast. Robinson and Keith are old dependables but it’s lovely to see Ginger play so broad and brass and Lorne Greene surprises (and makes one think of what all those years playing Pa in Bonanza might have deprived us of).

noir

The film itself hovers between comedy (mainly at the beginning) and noir (near the end). It takes very cheap shots at television with the camera repeatedly cutting to what’s on television (hair lotion commercials, hillbilly music, fund-raising marathons) followed by the characters derision of the content (‘television should be so good that when you close your eyes it sounds like the radio’). The recent House of Unamerican Activities Hearings are also everywhere evident in the narrative: the film begins with Ginger in jail telling a new inmate, ‘never volunteer for ‘nuting’ and ends with her convinced that it’s everyone’s responsibility – a well-worn word throughout the narrative – to point the finger and inform.

Television:

Ostensibly inspired by the strong-arm tactics used to get Virginia Hill to testify against Bugsy Siegel. Based on Leonard Kantor’s 1953 Broadway play, DEAD PIGEON, which took place entirely in a hotel room, and which the film opens up with a chase scene at the beginning, a court-room scene at the end, and by designing the hotel so that it’s at angles where one sees the various rooms, the windows looking outside, and the doorways at angles so one can see the hotel corridor. An ingenious use of mirrors enhances the view into the different spaces.

Spaces

 

An uneven film that progressively turns up the tension, becomes increasingly more interesting, visually and narratively, as it goes long, with a wise-cracking and rousing finale in the courtroom scene at he finale. I ended up liking it.

 

An Act of Murder (Michael Gordon, 1948)

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An example of the fluidity of noir as a term. ACT OF MURDER is a domestic melodrama which would have been marketed as a ‘serious’ film on difficult moral and ethical issues: is mercy killing acceptable even if a dear one is terminal and in unbearable pain? Should intentions be a consideration when applying the law, by whom and to what extent? It’s the themes and the ‘seriousness’ of treatment that would have drawn in Fredric March and Florence Eldridge to star. They’d subsequently perform Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE and O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT on Broadway in the 50s to great acclaim as one of America’s great couples of the theatres (the Lunts being the only rivals).

 

March plays Calvin Cooke, a judge who applies the law literally and harshly. His daughter (Geraldine Brooks) is about to be engaged to a lawyer (Edmond O’Brien) with a different, more liberal interpretation and understanding. Cooke’s convictions are put to the test when, after celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary, the wife he still loves is diagnosed with a terminal illness whose ending will be accompanied by horrifying pain, currently untreatable. When he sees the pain she’s in, he decides to put an end to further reoccurrences by crashing his car in the hopes of killing her and himself. She dies. He turns himself in with every expectation of having the law applied to himself as he has applied it to others. But his daughter’s fiancé steps in to offer an unsolicited and unwelcome defence that nonetheless saves his neck, and converts him to the point of view the film hopes to convince the audience of: that intentions and individual circumstances matter.

An absorbing, efficient melodrama that in the last twenty minutes develops into a court-room drama, very well-acted throughout but ultimately unconvincing. The famous Universal Courthouse set was built for this film. The gap between the film’s ambitions and its achievements can be seen in the funhouse sequence, clearly influenced by Welles’ A LADY FROM SHANGAHI but not a patch on it. Based on a novel by Ernst Lothar.

In Conversation with Richard Layne on YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND (Tate Modern)

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I talk to Richard Layne on ‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’, currently on at Tate Modern. You might recognise Richard from our podcast, THINKING ALOUD ABOUT FILM. What you might not know is that he is a long-time fan of Yoko Ono and one of the most knowledgeable people on her work as an artist and performer. In this podcast, Richard, compares this exhibition, billed as ‘the largest ever undertaken in the UK’ on the work of Yoko Ono, and compares it to the many others he’s attended. We talk of how he became a fan, her various types of work, the performance art, the conceptual art, her books of instructions, the connection to Fluxus. We also touch on her collaborations with some of the key figures of mid-twentieth century art (John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, John Lennon) and  how her work prefigures that of contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovíc. Our conversation broadly follows the flow of the exhibition itself, so I’ve included photographs from the exhibition in the blog so the listener might more clearly follow the points of conversation. Richard is very illuminating on why Yoko Ono is one of those figures that keep getting re-discovered periodically, on her extensive influence in various domains of art, from the gallery to punk, and on how she is a wonderful conduit to chance meetings with The Pet Shop Boys.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may  also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

José Arroyo

 

 

THE LINEUP (Don Siegel, 1958)

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THE LINEUP (Don Siegel, 1958)

 

The best of the noirs I’ve been seeing recently. It starts with an exciting set-piece – a driver steals someone’s suitcase from the port; the police chase him; and he ends up killed. It starts great and it doesn’t let up. The premise is that a gang is using innocent tourists returning from Hong Kong by ship to smuggle heroin by hiding the powder in their belongings (dolls, statues, silverware handles). Like many of the crime films of the period, the film makes great use of its on-location shooting. It’s a thrill just to see the San Francisco of this period. But Siegel does more with this. It’s like his characters are always caught on the edge of some barrier or some praecipe; highways made for freedom become dead-ends; aquariums where one is meant to gaze though glass prisons end up imprisoning; the wheelchair-bound are pushed to fly on air; steam that’s meant to revive and relax becomes a cover for death; etc. The choice of shots, camera movement, angle; everything seems economic, purposeful, meaningful; beautiful to see and exciting to watch. There’s a terrific mirror shot of murder in the mansion scene. Eli Wallach is a great psycho killer, simultaneously controlled and unhinged. Robert Keith is his more cerebral partner in crime. Perhaps one of the earliest spinoffs from radio  (1950-53), then to TV (54-60); with the film coming out in the midst of its run. The ad-line was ‘Too Hot…Too Big…for TV’.

 

The Mirror Shot:

José Arroyo

LADY ON A TRAIN ( Charles David, 1945)

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A light-hearted, slightly spoofy, detective story. The tone is somewhat in the vein of Simon Templar – sophisticated, elegant, tongue-in-cheek — hardly a surprise as the film is written by Lesley Charteris, who also wrote The Saint. The film begins with Deanna Durbin, playing a San Francisco heiress on her way to New York by train, who looks up from her detective novel and her box of chocolate, and witnesses a murder being committed as the train speeds by, a detail Agatha Christie must have taken note of, as that’s how her 4.50 FROM PADDINGTON begins.

As with CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (Robert Siodmak, 1944) this is a concerted effort to expand Deanna’s persona and her audience, also set at Christmas. She’s surround by a great cast (Ralph Bellamy, Dan Duryea, Allan Jenkins, Edward Everett Horton), beautifully lit by  Woody Bredell, and gets to sing three very famous songs songs in a low slow style that sounds lovely (‘Silent Night’, ‘Give Me A Little Kiss’,  ‘Day and Night’). She doesn’t quite swing but she’s no longer singing opera either. She wears a striking array of hats, dresses (by Howard Greer), hairdos and jewels ( and I see there are still entire Pinterest pages devoted to these).

The question is ‘what is this film doing in a noir box set’? The answer, I suppose, is that it’s instructive in that so many of the situations and the lighting are those one expects from noir, but the tone and moral world are so different as to turn the film into something else.

Deanna Durbin is very charismatic; she looks smashing, and sings great. But the character as written is very thoughtless of others and her charm has a bullying quality that slightly brings to mind Shirley Temple. The screen brags at the very top are a selection of her outfits and hairdos but also , immediately above, some archetypally noir imagery from the film. Lastly, it sometimes seems all a man needs to be imaged a villain is to carry a cat.

José Arroyo

THE SLEEPING CITY (George Sherman, 1950),

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THE SLEEPING CITY (George Sherman, 1950), starts off with Doctors being killed at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. What’s the cause? It turns out the poor Doctors, only being paid 50 dollars a month, are prey to a narcotics ring run from the hospital. They’re seduced into playing the horses for a quick win but quickly fall into debt and are then blackmailed into providing ‘the white stuff.’ Today’s British hospitals better watch out. The film’s title is a clear reference to Jules Dassin’s earlier THE NAKED CITY (1948), and like the earlier film, features great on-location shooting, in this case of the hospital itself and its surroundings.

Impressive on-location shooting (ending in drama) from the beginnng:

 

and similar, rhyming, scene at the end: 

Almost exactly half-way through the film (a nurse (Coleen Gray) and a detective passing as a doctor (Richard Conte) go out to have a cigarette and the nurse says, ‘Blemishes are hid by night and every fault forgiven. The world should live by night. The dark draws people together. They can feel the need for each other. But the world gives the night to the sick. Keeps for itself daylight but lets men look into faces filled with fear and hatred. Are you filled with fear and hatred’?

The film is so potent, it’s preceded by Richard Conte as himself addressing the audience directly and telling us that what we’re about to see is fiction and that Bellevue and all its staff are upstanding citizens at the forefront of science. The film itself tells a more complicated story, hinted at by being framed by an actor playing a detective passing himself off as an intern, with all the ethical and moral dilemmas that places him in. I hadn’t really registered Coleen Gray before and she’s extraordinarily beautiful and effective here . I also loved Richard Taber as Pops Ware, the lowly, old elevator ‘boy’/ drug lord who brings a whole class dimension into the narrative.

There’s a superb drug montage:

 

and as you can see from these images, a wonderful noir feel to the whole narrative:

 

From the great Arrow box-set

José Arroyo

 

Five Against The House (Phil Karlson, 1955)

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Freshly traumatised Korean vets, bored at college and itching to get on with life, attempt a heist at the famous Harold’s Club Casino in Reno. Guy Madison, past the first bloom of youth but still gorgeous, stars. One of the most beautiful film stars in history, Gore Vidal’ favourite, he was also one of the stiffest, awkward and ill at ease. It amused me that the trailer advertises him as ‘Photoplay’s most promising actor of 1955’, over a decade after he made his first splash in SINCE YOU WENT AWAY (1944). It took him a long time to be promising and he never got good.

He comes particularly badly here as his antagonist is one of the most skilled and natural actors of this period, Brian Keith; and also in that his love interest is Kim Novak at her peak; beautiful, mysterious, weaving a spell of enchantment and hurt; her voluptuous body and beautiful face wrapped up moving as if through a cloud of sadness and melancholy. I can’t think of another movie star whose sex appeal is so intertwined with her sadness.  An undistinguished heist film but of interest for several reasons:

  1. The on-location shooting, now of historical interest.
  1. I was particularly fascinated by what must have seemed futuristic parking.
  1. Kim Novak’s star entrance, one of two lovely numbers she does in the film with a soft voice to a slow beat.
  1. A chance to see some of America’s best supporting actors at work, particularly Brian Keith and William Conrad.

I don’t want to make any great claims on its behalf, but I enjoyed it.

José Arroyo

 

Singapore (John Brahm, 1947)

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A bit of tosh set in Singapore during WWII. It’s got pearl smuggling, Japanese invasion, amnesia and uses voice-over narration and super noir lighting to tell its story:

It also makes great use of Nancio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed’s ‘Temptation’:

‘You came,
I was alone,
I should have known,
you were temptation!’

Fred MacMurray and Ava Gardner star and Ava, at the height of her beauty, gets a superb star intro:

The film is also notable for its queer coding. Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon set a certain pathway for gay male representation: mincing, duplicitous, smelling of gardenias, charming but deadly. In Singapore, George Lloyd follows in his footsteps, the coding is less explicit, as is the effect. But the message remains clear.

 

Part of the great Universal Noir #2 box set from Indicator.

 

José Arroyo

 

Tony Curtis in Six Bridges to Cross (Joseph Pevney, 1955)

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Anyone wanting to understand why Tony Curtis was such a big star might be interested in SIX BRIDGES TO CROSS, where he plays Jerry Florea, a handsome gangster who pulls off a 2.5 million heist, so breezy and charming that he keeps straight-laced cop George Nader on-side in spite of umpteenth convictions. Sal Mineo, in his first film appearance, plays the younger version of Jerry; and it’s hard to choose which actor is the more charismatic or charming. This is the brilliant moment in the film where one transitions into the other. The New York Times, whilst damming Curtis’ performance, ‘Mr. Curtis, of course, shoulders most of the picture.Far from depicting a formidable criminal master mind, the actor’s progressive, bubbling boyishness knocks the biggest hole in a film already full of them. Those who recall his best performance to date, that of the deaf-mute boxer in “Flesh and Fury,” also under Mr. Pevney’s direction, may wonder if he was encouraged or merely allowed,’ nonetheless conceded that, ‘At least Mr. Curtis’ strutting, million-dollar appearance, in a melodrama purporting to abhor crime, drew plenty of appreciative chuckles from yesterday morning’s customers’.’The film also features superb on-location shooting in Boston by the great William Daniels. From the excellent Arrow box-set which includes an illuminating video essay by Jon Towlson on Daniels’ lighting.

José Arroyo

The Delinquents/ Los delincuentes

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Yesterday I went to see The Delinquents/ Los delincuentes, a new and quite divisive film from Rodrigo Moreno: some people love it and find it an existential exploration of the concept of freedom, so salient in Argentina today; others find its almost three-hour length and meandering narrative an unsupportable bore. I liked it very much. An accountant in a bank (Daniel Elías) calculates that he can steal double the money he would make working until he retires and only have to do three and half years in prison. Is the jail-time worth his freedom? He’s only working so he can afford his rent, his work clothes the odd toy and a measly 15-day vacation. Can he steal back his life? It’s significant that his boss in the bank is played by the same actor who plays the capo, Germán de Silva. One gets him to submit through one set of norms, the other gets inmates to beat him up. In order for the heist to work, the robber has to implicate a colleague (Esteban Bigliardi) in order to hold the money for him until his release, at which point they’ll split the winnings. The film operates within a whole series of doublings (two distinct people have the signature, the protagonists are called Morán and Román, Román meets a Ramón, are they in love with Morna or Norma?); Bresson’s L’argent is quoted liberally. The film meanders to appreciate horses, landscapes, the look of flowers and the flowering of sage; poetry is read and blues is played; it’s romantic and sexy and uninterested in a propulsive narrative. Yet, one also feels that everything one sees is a result of consideration and choice. The characters are good, kind, and almost sweet. A very different kind of heist film. My first impulse when leaving the cinema was that I had enjoyed the experience but didn’t quite get it – there were so many references to the current situation in Argentina through graffiti and poetry; I often genuinely didn’t know where the narrative would take us next – but was eager to get home, read the reviews and find out more.

 

It’s on at the Mockingbird for the rest of the week and I recommend.

Hugo Fregonese’s Apenas un delincuente, very different in style is nonetheless a clear inspiration.

 

José Arroyo

FRENCH FILM NOIR box set from Kino Lober

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I find myself without the time needed to write, as I’d eventually like to, on the films in this magnificent box set from Kino Lober, so for now I’d just like to draw attention to it.

 

Three crime films from the late 50:

 

LE ROUGE EST MIS/ SPEAKING OF MURDER (Gilles Grangier, 1957) is about small-time hoods in Paris who use a garage as a front for their heists. Jean Gabin – every shrug, gesture, look, bit of business both a delight in itself and a component of characterisation – is the gang-leader. Lino Ventura is the muscle; Annie Girardot, the two-timing tramp. There’s an early and very sympathetic appearance of a gay man arrested for soliciting who appears to give Gabin a message from his brother and Gabin insists he accept a tip so he can buy himself a handbag (It’s a lot more sympathetic than it sounds). I loved the tone and the dialogue, and most of all the on-location shooting, now very evocative. Based on a novel by Auguste Le Breton (Rififi, Raffia sur la chnouf, Bob Le Flambeur, Le clan des Siciliens and many others)

LE DOS AU MUR/ BACK TO THE WALL(Édouard Molinaro, 1958)

 

A man (Gérard Oury) arrives at a crime scene, picks up a body, carries it out of the building, and covers it in cement in a factory wall. A tour de force 17-minute sequence done practically without dialogue. Once the coast is clear, the voice-over takes us into flashback to show us what led to it. Jeanne Moreau’s cheating on her husband with a young actor; the husband begins to write her anonymous blackmail letters. It doesn’t end well. Moreau is so expressive I was tempted to do endless gifs so as to contain the marvellous and minute changes in feeling expressed by her features as the camera dollies into her close-ups. (Based on a novel by Frédéric Dard)

WITNESS IN THE CITY/ UN TÉMOIN DANS LA VILLE (Édouard Molinaro,1959)

 

I only knew Èdouard Molinaro from his 70s comedies with Louis de Funès and The Cage aux folles films; and the two films in this box set are a revelation. WITNESS IN THE CITY is a truly great film. It begins with a man throwing a woman from a train. He’s taken to court but freed for lack of evidence. That’s not good enough for the husband (Lino Ventura) who finds him and kills him. But as he leaves the house, he bumps into a cab driver, a possible witness. The rest of the film is about Lino Ventura, with his wrestler’s body and impassive face, hunting down the cab driver. It’s mainly set at night. Much is filmed on location, so we see the bars, cafés, nightclubs, cab stands of Paris in the late 50s as well as the people who operate from there. It’s gorgeously filmed by the great Henri Decaë so that the shift in shadows across a face or a street become suspense on their own. A discovery that has made me keen to know more about Molinaro.

Also, Claude Sautet was the 1st AD on Back to the Wall and Jacques Deray on Witness in the City, so all kinds of genealogical interest as well.

There are no extras but for trailers but who needs them when the flms themselves are so great?

José Arroyo