Tag Archives: Don Siegel

A Note on the Roaring Twenties (RAoul Walsh, 1939)

September 28, 2026UncategorizedDon Siegel, James Cagney, montage, Raoul Walsh, The Gangster Film, The Roaring TwentiesNotesonFilm1

Aside from one of the greatest endings in all film history, two things stood out in my latest viewing of THE ROARING TWENTIES (Raoul Walsh, 1939), in a gorgeous 4K Digital Restoration at the BFI. One was thematic: when Cagney, Bogart et all return from fighting WWI, they’re pretty much sneered at, lose their jobs, treated as chumps. And this made me wonder if, except for WWII, this has ever been thus in the US’s treatment of its war vets: lots of sanctimonious ‘thank you for your service’ on the surface but ‘enjoy the streets sucker’ in reality. The other was the poetry and intensity of the montage created by Don Siegel to evoke the effects of the Wall Street Crash, the melting skyscrapers particularly impactful. It’s gorgeous. I loved the intensity of feeling without the sentimentality that is such a marker of Raoul Walsh (and of 1930s cinema in general) and is personified here by Gladys George as Panama Smith, street gutter glitter, rueful, down to earth; there’s something in the performing of all the supporting cast, everyone seemingly conscious that they’re in showbiz and have to entertain, so they all attempt and succeed in being believable as the characters they play, but adding little twirls, an inflection, a move of the eyes, vocal and physical embroidery with which to delight the audience. And of course, at the centre of it all Cagney, immense throughout, displacing air, crackling with life, bringing humanity into the darkened theatre, long after everyone involved in this movie, one of the all-time great gangster films, has died. A terrific experience, made more poignant by realising that it explicitly sets out at the beginning to construct a work of memory of one period (Mark Hellinger’s opening narration), the film itself operating as a marker of another, and all its many generation of viewers carrying yet at least one other within them.

José Arroyo

Homophobia and Homophilia in unexpected places

October 13, 2024UncategorizedConvoy, Don Siegel, Homophilia, Homophobia, Riot in Cell Block 11, Sam PeckinpahNotesonFilm1

I’m watching Don Siegel’s RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11 (1954) for the first time, thinking how great it is, how the issues regarding prisons have hardly changed since it was first released, how superb it looks….and then you come to the inevitable homophobic moment and the heart sinks. According to the film, gay men should be separated from ‘normal’ prisoners and placed with the ‘nuts’ and ‘looneys’ into a separate psycho ward, bringing to mind Trin T Min-ha’s phrase that there’s a ‘third world in every first world and vice versa’. I do think the scene reflects the times and some reference to homosexuality is probably inevitable in a prison film. But I think that it is also a mark against the film.

CONVOY (Sam Peckinpah, 1978) surprised me. I’d avoided it upon its first release thinking it a sub SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT rip-off but was encouraged to see it recently when Dîna Iordanova described it as being about civil disobedience and protest, which it is. And unlike the experience with RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11, I was delighted by this bit, a joke I suppose, but one countering some of the dominant stereotypes of its time, at least outside gay porn.

THE LINEUP (Don Siegel, 1958)

April 3, 2024Uncategorizedbased on tv, Don Siegel, Eli Wallach, noir, Robert Keith, The LineupNotesonFilm1

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

Thinking Aloud About Film: The Killers (1946 & 1964)

July 14, 2023UncategorizedBurt Lancaster, Casssandra Moore, Don Siegel, Eddie uller, Film Foundation Screenings, Hemingway, Imogen Sara Smith, Lee Marvin, Martin Scorsese, Restorations, Robert Siodmak, TarkovskyNotesonFilm1

In the podcast we compare the two films, a noir and a neo-noir, the 46 version made stars of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. We then compare both to the Tarkovsky 1956 student version of the film, what they use of the Hemingway short story, and what needed to be invented as background. We discuss why the 1946 continues to fascinate through its Citizen Kane style investigatory structure, its use of music, Woody Bredell’s textured, expressive cinematography, and its depiction of a man driven to death by his love of a woman who constantly lies and who the film shows as unknowable. We discuss the two versions of the 1964 Killers (José prefers the widescreen rather than the 1.33), the casting of the major characters, including Ronald Reagan, and a certain attitudinal cool that the film embodies and evokes.

Many thanks once more to the Film Foundation for making available two gorgeous restorations of the 1946 and 1964 versions of The Killers. It was a real pleasure to be able to see them side by side and we’re also very appreciative of all the support documents that the film foundation provides, including very illuminating interviews with Eddie Muller, Imogen Sara Smith and Cassandra Moore and which you can explore here:

https://delphiquest.com/film-foundation/restoration-screening-room/

The podcast may be listened to here: