DVD – Page 4 – R. Emmet Sweeney

LONELY RODEO: THE LUSTY MEN (1952)

February 20, 2020December 21, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 14, 2014

The Lusty Men is haunted by the Great Depression. It’s about economic displacement, wandering the countryside to make a buck at podunk rodeos, and where the dream of owning a home seems forever out of reach. As with most Hollywood studio projects, The Lusty Men was built out of compromise and circumstance, starting as a Life magazine article on the rodeo by Claude Stanush, and turning into a largely improvised character study by director Nicholas Ray and star Robert Mitchum. In between were a series of scripts, the first by David Dortort, and the second by Horace McCoy, who had made his name writing about Depression desperation, most famously in his novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? None of them satisfied Ray or producers Jerry Wald and Norman Krasna, so they often worked without a screenplay. It is a vulnerably acted film, as Ray teases out the fragility in Mitchum and co-stars Arthur Kennedy and Susan Hayward. It is a love triangle of sorts, but one enacted with complete honesty and forthrightness. The question is between the stability of Arthur Kennedy or the soulfulness of Mitchum, and while aesthetically it’s an easy decision (Mitchum has never been so beautiful), for characters raised dirt poor it’s a heart-wrenching choice. The Lusty Men, recently restored on 35mm by Warner Brothers, The Film Foundation and the Nicholas Ray Foundation, has finally been released on DVD by the Warner Archive (it also airs 11/4 at 1:30PM on TCM). Ever since the restored print screened at the New York Film Festival last year, I was patiently awaiting a Blu-ray release, but this will have to do. Luckily the DVD is in fine shape, aside from the beat-up archival rodeo footage which sets the stage for the drama to come.

The producing team of Jerry Wald and Norman Krasna had a distribution deal with Howard Hughes’ RKO to make sixty films in under six years, according Bernard Eisenschitz’s essential Nicholas Ray: An American Journey. The Hollywood Reporter called it “The biggest independent transaction in industry history”. They made four: Behave Yourself! (’51), The Blue Veil (’51), Clash By Night (’52) and The Lusty Men. Hughes’ legendary indecision led to projects dragging on for years. One of these was the comedy thriller Macao (’52), credited to director Josef Von Sternberg, but much of it was re-shot by Mel Ferrer and Nicholas Ray, who telegraphed Sternberg to gain his permission for the re-shoots. Sternberg responded, “I’m here in New Jersey with my rose garden, I’m close to Wall Street and my art gallery. Go ahead.” Unhappy with the results, Sternberg later told Kevin Brownlow: “Nicholas Ray is an idiot. He did terrible things to Macao.”

But Ray was in Howard Hughes’ good graces for that carpenter job, and Wald and Krasna considered him for the director on Clash By Night, since Ray was acquaintances with writer Clifford Odets from their Group Theater days. But they also needed someone to take on the Cowpoke project (later re-titled to The Lusty Men), as Robert Parrish had bowed out after seeing the Dortort script, and Wald/Krasna failed to lure Raoul Walsh or Anthony Mann. The job was Ray’s, and he threw himself into the research that Stanush provided. Eisenschitz lists “50 pages on ‘Western dialogue and colloquialisms’, 75 on ‘drought and grass problems’, 120 on ‘general research, ranching and rodeo’, plus a collection of notes…on the modern cowboy.”

The opening sequence consists of archival footage of a small town parade, followed by the local fair rodeo. These sections are scratched up, possibly from old newsreel footage, and then it cuts in to Robert Mitchum perched above a bronco, read to hang on for eight seconds. It’s a brash intrusion of the mythic into the mundane, but Ray immediately cuts to an insert of Mitchum’s hand being tied to the bronc’s hide, an image attending to the technique of the rodeo rider’s art. That cut is an example of the simplicity and clarity in which Ray and his collaborators combined the everyday and the dramatic. The story is also simple. Wes (Arthur Kennedy) and Louise (Susan Hayward) Merritt are saving up money to buy a house. Wes works on a ranch, but is lured into the rodeo by Jeff McCloud (Mitchum), a former champion rider who agrees to train Wes for a cut of any profits he might win. Wes quickly becomes a star, and his dream of home fades. Louise continues to desire that stability more than ever, and can no longer stand to endure the rodeo’s constant near-death experiences. So as Wes and Louise distance themselves, Jeff inserts himself into the gap, seeing in Louise an alternate path not taken, a safe harbor in his self-destructive life. Louise has to make some kind of choice.

There is a lot of choreography in the frame to establish their shifting relationships. Early on they invite Jeff to dinner. Afterward is the clean-up, with Louise cleaning, Wes sitting on the counter and drying, while Jeff standing coyly in a corner with a mug of coffee, undomesticated and alluring. This arrangement is repeated outside, with Wes seated on a fence, Jeff standing, and Louise pitched in between. Wes looks like a kid, and Jeff a man. Cinematographer Lee Garmes sets up the flashiest version of this composition, with Louise seated in her vehicle while Jeff and Wes are reflected in the windshield. This all sets up the dramatic arc of their characters, as each goes through a different kind of maturation. Mitchum claimed that Ray didn’t give him any marks to hit. In his usual self-deprecating manner, he described their working relationship: ”

Well, you know, a lot of directors will give you the marks. When I act, I come in and say: what page is it and where are the marks? While the director is talking to the other actors, I check out the marks, and I hit ‘em. But Nick is a fellow who likes to discuss the scenes with the actors, what they mean, what my background was…. So while he would talk to me about those things, I’d be looking for my marks. He would usually end up these speeches by saying, And also, improvise. But I couldn’t improvise the marks. Since Nick usually told the cameraman to be on the actor who had listened the most when he was telling them about their background, about Stanislavsky and those people, a lot of times I wasn’t in the scene…

So maybe it was Ray and Kennedy improvising Wes always being seated, but it’s clear much of the film was worked out on the fly, scene by scene. Since they didn’t know where they were going, each sequence has a lived-in feel. This is epitomized in the melancholy sequence when Jeff visits his old broken down family home. He crawls underneath the eaves and pulls out his childhood toys – a dime paperback, a gun, and a tobacco tin that holds two nickels. In this silent act of remembrance a whole childhood flashes by, and an outline of the man we see on-screen, enacting the Wild West fantasies he had as a kid, fantasies that wear poorly on a man pushing 40. While fondling these talismans, he is rousted by the current owner, a crusty old loner (Burt Mustin, making his film debut at age sixty-seven) who visibly softens when he hears it’s the McCloud boy. They commiserate on their lives of solitude before Jeff departs, two generations of men too frightened to settle down, build a family, share anything of themselves. While Wes learns something of humility over the course of the film, Jeff develops empathy. Having been a direct man all his life in pushing the world away, he is just as straightforward in embracing it. The close-up of Susan Hayward when Jeff declares his feelings is one of trembling astonishment. It is one of the glories of the cinema. Her lips part slightly, as if ready to throw off her ordered life. But she is a practical woman, and a poor one, and there are other things to consider.

ANIME GOES WEST: MAGIC BOY (1959)

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July 29, 2014

In the 1950s Hiroshi Okawa wanted to make Toei Company the Disney of Asia. Toei had already become a prolific producer of jidaigeki (period drama) movies, focusing on cheaply made programmers to fill out double and triple bills. They made 104 features in 1954 alone. Toei president Okawa had grander designs, and acquired the animation company Nichido in 1956 in the hopes of competing in the international cartoon market. Toei followed the Disney formula of selecting local fables and fairy tales for adaptation, and adding on a menagerie of cute animals. They also followed the Disney edict of making only one film per year. In a test of the receptivity of the U.S. market, they released their first three films there in 1961, all through different distributors. Their first animated feature was The Tale of the White Serpent (1958), an iteration of the Chinese folktale “Legend of the White Snake”. It was dubbed and released in the U.S. as Panda and the Magic Serpent by the independent Globe Pictures. The first Japanese anime to receive substantial stateside distribution was Magic Boy, completed in Japan in 1959 and released by MGM in ’61. Alakazam the Great (1960) was released stateside by exploitation experts American International Pictures. The overseas theatrical experiment failed, though Toei’s animation wing would start a pipeline into U.S. television, becoming a staple on Saturday afternoon matinees. Now the Warner Archive has given the U.S. version of Magic Boy its first DVD release, allowing us to examine part of Okawa’s grand plan (it also airs on TCM on Monday, October 6th at 3AM).

The story of Magic Boy is an archetypal hero’s journey. Sasuke and his sister Oye live in rural harmony with a parade of adorable woodland creatures until a witch and her enthralled goons terrorize the countryside. Sasuke leaves the hearth to train with Hakuun, a renowned wise man and teacher of magic. After rigorous training montages, Sasuke has to rescue his sister from the evil clutches of the shape shifting demoness witch. Any rough details in the Japanese original are sanded down in the generic U.S. version, with each character given one attribute and chirpy vocal tone. Though if the plot is simple to the point of inanity, the images thrum with vibrant color and life. Sasuke is an annoying little moppet, but the landscapes he inhabits shift from the pretty, delicate watercolor of his wooded home to the pulsating hellish reds of the witch’s domain. The artists really go to work on the witch, who can transform into a giant sea lizard and appears in Sasuke’s nightmares as a fire-breathing wraith, as the abstracted backgrounds pulsate around her.

The senior staff at Nichido at the time they were acquired by Toei were Yasuji Mori and Akira Daikubara, who had the unenviable task of rapidly ramping up the size of the Toei Animation department so they could complete a full length feature. In the Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2, Helen McCarthy writes that the lack of experienced animators “created opportunities for other artists, like painter Koji Fukiya (1898 – 1979).” Fukiya drew lushly romantic photos for girls’ magazines like Shojo Gaho (Girls’ Illustrated) and Shojo Kurabu (Girls’ Club), detoured in Paris for a failed attempt at “fine” art, and ended his career as an illustrator for children’s books (for more on Fukiya see this fascinating article). His elongated, dreamy figures became the house style at Toei after Fukiya made the original designs for their short Dreaming Boy in 1958. His influence shows up in the design of the witch, who has a snake-like fluidity, and the Modigliani-necked Oye, who could have been plucked from one of Fukiya’s magazine covers.

If Fukiya was the elder statesman, the young firebrand was Yasuo Otsuka, who would later mentor Studio Ghibli legend Hayao Miyazaki. In order to get the job at Toei, he had to pass the animation test: draw a man striking a steel hammer against a spike, in five frames. Otsuka would be animation director for the first time on the seminal The Little Norse Prince (1968), which was Studio Ghibli standby Isao Takahata’s directorial debut, and on which Miyazaki was an assistant animator . Otsuka’s early style tended towards naturalism, and his images of a skeleton in Magic Boy were considered unintentionally funny because of how realistic they were looked in the fantastical world of the movie. He would later move on to a more malleable style, what he called “constructed realism”. He used frame rate modulation to heighten a specific action. Where Disney would use 1 frame of film for 1 animation cell, Otsuka would use three frames for one cell to add weight to movements, as detailed in this post by Daniel Thomas MacInnes.

Though highly recommended by both the trades (the Independent Exhibitors’ Film Bulletin wrote: “Delightful Japanese cartoon fantasy in color. Will entertain youngsters and many of their elders”) and the newspapers (The New York Times : “Walt Disney has no cause for abdication or even alarm. But he can jolly well move over and make room.”), Hiroshi Okawa’s plans for world theatrical domination never materialized. Toei would, however, became a dominant force in animation in Japan, thanks to the amazing influx of talent required by Okawa’s gamble.

TALL IN THE SADDLE: CLINT WALKER IN FORT DOBBS AND YELLOWSTONE KELLY

February 20, 2020June 17, 2022 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

July 8, 2014

In the late 1950s Warner Brothers was using their television properties to create stars on the cheap. One of them was Clint Walker, a former merchant marine and deputy sheriff whose freakish physique and down home sincerity carried the TV Western Cheyenne to high ratings. A March 1958 issue of Screenland checks off his measurements as if he were a prize heifer: “It’s safe to say he is the biggest man in cowboy movies. He stands six-feet-six, with an 18-inch neck, a 38-inch waist and hips so slim that he can hardly keep his gun belt up.” Signed to a seven year contract by WB in 1955 at $175 a week, Walker began chafing at his rock bottom salary, even when it was bumped to $500 (he walked off the show to protest in ’59). To placate their brooding star, WB cast him in two big screen Westerns, both directed by Gordon Douglas and scripted by Burt Kennedy (and available on DVD through the Warner Archive): Fort Dobbs (1958) and Yellowstone Kelly (1959) (they would make a third in 1961, Gold of the Seven Saints). They are lonesome works, with Walker playing an outsider plying his trade at the edges of society. In Fort Dobbs he’s a wanted murderer, while in Yellowstone Kelly he’s an individualist scout and trapper mocked by the Army brass for his sympathy towards Native Americans.

Kennedy wrote the stories for the Budd Boetticher-Rudolph Scott “Ranown cycle” of Westerns, in which the majority of violence is psychological. Fort Dobbs retains the spirit of those Boetticher films, a three-person battle of resentments between Walker, Brian Keith and Virginia Mayo. The ever-reliable Gordon Douglas keeps the focal points of the triangle shifting in the frame, and makes the dramatic Utah desert-scape constrict around its characters. The near wordless opener depicts Gar Davis (Clint Walker) storming into a house to kill a man offscreen. Douglas keeps the camera outside, the only indication of violence a broken window and the sound of a gunshot. Gar then gallops away from the posse forming to catch him, and dresses a corpse in his clothes to throw them off the scent. The desert is a repository of dead things, which is why Gar seems genuinely surprised to find a working farm out there, operated by Celia (Mayo) and her son Chad (Richard Eyer). Knowing the Comanche are on a push to drive white settlers out, he agrees to lead them to safety at the titular Fort Dobbs. Along the way Gar runs into Clett (Keith), a black market gun seller. They were old running buddies turned sour, with a history of distrust between them. Celia is led to believe Gar had killed her husband, while Clett has less than respectable designs on Celia. The whole miserable group troupes through the dirt with eyes implanted in the back of their heads. Douglas emphasizes the act of looking through POV shots through Gar’s eyes, as well as in a remarkable reaction shot from Mayo, gazing at a shirtless Gar as he cleans his gun. An unruly mix of lust, hatred and confusion flickers through her eyes. Walker is improbably good looking, but what makes him compelling is his unwavering sincerity. He delivers his lines as straight as his ramrod posture, without modulation or any kind of visible performance. With Clint, what you see is what you get, and that’s very reassuring, almost calming. He didn’t make enough films to develop a persona beyond this, like how Marion Morrison was able to workshop “John Wayne” in all those Republic B-Westerns, but what’s there is clear and true.

Wayne and John Ford were once attached to make Yellowstone Kelly. They passed, and it fell down the bureaucratic ladder to Douglas and Walker, who turned in a fine-grained epic on a budget. The studio was attracted to the story of Western trapper and Indian scout Luther Sage Kelly because of an advertisement in Variety. According to Susan Compo’s biography of Warren Oates, A Wild Life, an ad centered around Kelly ran for U.S. Savings Bonds in early 1956 with the tagline, “His calling card had claws on it.” WB registered the title Yellowstone Kelly in February of ’56. In Burt Kennedy’s script Kelly (Walker), along with his assistant Anse Harper (Edward Byrnes) get caught up in an inter-Sioux feud when they nurse a young Arapaho woman, Wahleeah (Andrea Martin), back to health. Both the Sioux chief (John Russell) and his young charge Sayapi (Ray Danton) wish to have Wahleeah as their wife. Kelly has to return her or he’ll lose access to Sioux land for his trapping. And when a power hungry army captain attempts to push the Sioux off their land, the love quadrangle turns into a war.

While the land in Fort Dobbs is a deathtrap, in Yellowstone Kelly it’s fertile, lush, and Kelly’s sole source of sustenance. The Technicolor cinematography by Carl Guthrie is rich and viridescent – bursting with life. Walker’s red felt shirt emblazons itself on the screen. The plot is one of revivification, of Kelly’s soul and Wahleeah’s body. Kelly is a loner and a bit of a nihilist, becoming skeptical of all forms of society as he lives like a monk in the Western mountains. He finds peace in work and solitude, successfully repressing needs for human contact. It is the persistent annoyance of Harper asking for a job that begins to open Kelly up to human interaction, and it is the sarcastic, flirtatious Wahleeah who re-introduces him to the possibility of love. An intelligent matching of landscape, plot and theme, Yellowstone Kelly is top notch filmmaking.

For WB, it was yet another attempt to milk their stars while they were still cheap and on their initial contracts. The film is thick with TV stars. Edward Byrnes had made his name as “Kookie” on 77 Sunset Strip, while John Russell was the lawman on Lawman. Along with maximizing their low-money contract players, using TV actors was an attempt to lure back the crowds who had abandoned film for the antenna. In an August 1958 issue of Motion Picture News, ,future New York Times film critic Vincent Canby thought these small-screen names “may well bring out to theaters that part of the so-called ‘lost’ audience which has been lost because of TV Westerns and action dramas.” Using the full force of their marketing power, WB sent Walker and Byrnes on a nationwide in-person tour, calling the two leads “Warners’ traveling salesmen.” The tactic was successful, as by all accounts the film took in healthy profits. It didn’t turn into big screen superstardom for Walker, who remained a bankable TV actor and occasional film lead. But his Westerns for Gordon Douglas should secure Walker’s legacy as one of the genre’s finest strapping soft-spoken heroes.

FATHER AND SON: THE WATCHMAKER OF ST. PAUL (1974)

February 20, 2020February 20, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

July 1, 2014

The last outpost of the retail cinephile shrine Kim’s Video is shutting down this year. I made one last pilgrimage to its lower east side redoubt in NYC to experience the disappearing pleasure of browsing. The simpleminded algorithms at Amazon and Netflix want to give you more of the same, regurgitating films from the same genre, actor or director. What they miss is the pleasure of turning down an aisle and entering a different world. I had no title in mind when walking in, only knowing I needed to make one last purchase before Kim’s was replaced by an upscale frogurt shop or whatever. At first I pawed the BFI DVD of E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly (1929), the raucous silent starring Anna May Wong. Netflix’s “More like Piccadilly” section offered random unrelated silents, from Chaplin to Pickford, while Amazon’s slightly more helpful recommendations were a Wong biography and a few of her films on public domain DVD. At Kim’s, in the Region 2 DVD section, I stumbled upon Bertrand Tavernier’s debut feature The Watchmaker of St. Paul (1974, aka The Clockmaker). I have had Tavernier idly on the mind for a few years, as I have much admired his last two features (The Princess of Montpensier and The French Minister) while being mostly unacquainted with his earlier work. Thus I gently placed Piccadilly on the shelf, and brought The Watchmaker of St. Paul to the knowledgeable cashier, who had seen a screening of the film at Anthology Film Archives, though seemed underwhelmed. The clerks at Kim’s had a reputation for being snotty, but I’ve always found them to be remarkably informed and helpful – though perhaps they could spot that I was one of their own grubby tribe.

Born in Lyon, France in 1941, Bertrand Tavernier was a movie-mad youth who soaked up projector rays in repertory houses, preferring the American Westerns and melodramas of William Wellman, Delmer Daves, and other unsung Hollywood directors. A writer for his student paper, he interviewed Jean-Pierre Melville, who was so impressed with Tavernier that he hired him to be his assistant director on Leon Morin, Priest (1961), which let him drop law school for cinema. Tavernier called Melville his “godfather in film.”:

He would give me an appointment, and he’d show up four hours late. Then he’d arrive in his big convertible Cadillac, with electric windows, and driving through Paris telling stories about the French underground, the resistance, showing you where famous gangsters had been killed. He’d take me to dinner, take me to films, and he’d keep me up all night, because Melville could not sleep.

Melville re-assigned Tavernier from assistant director to press agent, a job in which he went on to promote numerous members of the French New Wave on the films of Godard, Chabrol and Varda, among others. He spent years learning the business as a publicist and as a critic. Starting around 1960 he began contributing regularly to Positif and Cahiers du Cinema, a run I would dearly like to see translated into English, if this bibliography is any way accurate. He would go on to write comprehensive tomes on Hollywood, first with Jean-Pierre Coursodon in 50 ans de cinéma américain (never translated into English) and his massive book of director interviews Amis américains (ditto).

In an interview included on the Optimum DVD I purchased, Tavernier said he waited until 1974 to make his debut feature because he “needed to learn about life.” His first project would be an adaptation of the Georges Simenon novel The Watchmaker of Everton (1954). It tells the story of a habitually-minded watchmaker in a small town in New York State whose son is suddenly wanted for murder. In a 1974 interview Tavernier claimed that the novel had grabbed his attention with the father’s line, “I stand behind my son”, during a murder trial. Despite their estranged and non-communicative relationship, the strange familial bond forces the father to veer out of his etched path and express his emotions. At this time Tavernier was a loosely affiliated member of the OCI (Organisation Communiste Internationaliste), and reconfigures the plot to express contemporary political concerns. He would quit the organisation by 1976, fed up by the Stalinist factions “rigid and totally reactionary rules”. The Watchmaker of St. Paul changes Simenon’s murder victim from an anonymous motorist to a thuggish factory manager who may have abused the son’s girlfriend. The son is then used as a political tool by both the publicity machines of the left and right, though the boy’s act ultimately seems to be one of less of politics than of passion. The story’s focus is on how the father Michel Descombes (Philippe Noiret) processes his son Bernard’s act, and how he comes to “stand by” him, despite the emotional gulf that separates them. The film also stands as a documentary of Lyon in 1974, the film being shot on the streets and inside the courtrooms of Tavernier’s home city. It is distinctly an insider’s view of town, focusing on the side streets and alleyways that one treasures of home, the places not shared by the wider city at large.

Tavernier is a committed progressive, but he often look into the past for aesthetic inspiration. He hired Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche to write the screenplay for The Watchmaker of St. Paul, two of the central figures in France’s 1940s-1950s “cinema of quality” that Truffaut eviscerated in his “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” broadside, in which he said Aurenche and Bost “have made the works they adapt insipid”. With the rise of the New Wave, the duo of Aurenche and Bost (Forbidden Games) had stopped receiving work in features. Tavernier claims he was making no point in hiring them, just that they were the best men for the job. His decision was also based on his experience as a press agent, when he decided he would “avoid all the people who were fashionable”, since they were so busy they could devote little time to each project. The generation gap between Tavernier and the two screenwriters would match that of the father and son, and that tension would be appropriate for the material. It would also fit a line Billy Wilder had told him, that the “screenwriter should be the minister of opposition.” Each line should be a battle. Bost passed away soon after The Watchmaker, but Aurenche would go on to be Tavernier’s minister of opposition on three more films.

The Watchmaker of St. Paul is an intricate, multi-layered and tactile thing. It is anchored by Philippe Noiret, who made the film possible. His presence attracted funding, and he cut his salary in half to lower the budget. When Tavernier asked him later on why he chose to help, Noiret responded, “I gave you my word.” As the father in Watchmaker, Noiret is not that upright and just. Noiret plays Descombes as a watchful outsider, taking seats at ends of tables and joining conversations instead of starting them. He prefers to circulate than to be centered, and Noiret emphasizes the character’s ungainliness and uncertainty. He says very little, and usually regrets what he does say. His opposite number is the investigator Guilboud (Jean Rochefort), a dashing, drily witty intellectual who offers a self-satisfied smile when he correctly attributes a quote by Paul Claudel. Guilboud is nevertheless attracted to Descombes for the insights he may have into the opaque actions of the younger generation. Each older man is baffled by the rhetoric of revolt. Guilboud sees it as a fad, or a phase – burning cars as the fashionable new thing. Descombes comes to a deeper understanding, or at least a detente, with his preternaturally calm Bernard. He is sickened by Guilboud’s condescension, disheartened by the manipulations of the legal system, and suffused with love. Descombes stands by his son.

ON THE ROAD: DUST BE MY DESTINY (1939)

February 19, 2020February 19, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

June 24, 2014

Though it was made in 1939, Dust Be My Destiny has the feel of a Warner Brothers production at the turn of the decade, with its story of a railroad tramp framed for murder. The recession of 1937-’38 had renewed fears of economic collapse, which made the old anxieties new again. John Garfield was getting increasingly frustrated at the roles he was being provided in his WB contract, as he was continually typecast as an ex-con or criminal type who is inevitably redeemed. The character of Joe Bell in Dust Be My Destiny varies little from the template, which led Garfield to begin refusing roles, and he was punished with suspensions by the studio. The part of Bell was originally intended for James Cagney, and Garfield had become slotted as a kind of shadow Cagney, a pugnacious battler for the working class. Garfield’s politics certainly lined up with the political sentiments, but the material, he felt, was weak. Fellow lefty Robert Rossen adapted the screenplay for Dust Be My Destiny, but studio interference shifted a story intended as an anti-authoritarian Bonnie & Clyde-type tale into a conventional melodramatic romance. The failure of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937) gave WB executives pause, causing the material from Jerome Odlum’s novel to be massaged into an unrecognizable shape. Dust Be My Destiny is a curious artifact in John Garfield’s brief, brilliant career, and is now available to view on DVD from the Warner Archive.

Warner Brothers head-of-production Hal Wallis was plugged into the development of the story even as Odlum was still completing his novel. Having written Each Dawn I Die, which was already in production at the studio (with Cagney in the lead), made Odlum a briefly in-demand presence at WB. In an interoffice memo sent to Wallis, the matter of the ending was apparently under negotiation even before the book was published:

As Odlum sees the story at the present time, he is aiming towards killing off Joe, the principal character, at the end. He feels he can do this in a tear-jerking manner. On the other hand, if you do not want the principal character killed off, and want to end the story with everybody happy, he feels he can do something about it at this stage.

While I don’t know how Odlum’s novel ended, happiness wins the day in the feature version. Seton I. Miller was brought in to rewrite the ending, which is a mash-up of seeming every popular genre of the day outside of Westerns. It starts out as a prison drama, as Joe Bell is incarcerated for a murder he did not commit. It shifts to a hobo train-hopping picture after Bell is cleared of the crime and he has to bum around for money. Then it becomes a prison farm movie after he’s busted for vagrancy, where he falls for the warden’s daughter Mabel (Priscilla Lane). And it even finds time to become a jailbreak flick, a muckraking newspaper drama, and a courtroom thriller. The result is a film-by-committee that never settles on a particular tone, and one in which any social relevance is drowned in plot twists.

The remarkable thing is that it remains watchable, thanks to the ace production team working on the feature. Max Steiner provides his usual rousing score, James Wong Howe pulls off some modest tracking shots as well as angelic close-ups of the brooding Garfield. The hobo sections are the most effective, the majority taking place on a storm-swept evening when Howe can play with low lighting. It is also where Ward Bond pops up as a short-fused stickup man who fingers Joe to the cops as a member of his gang, a lie out of spite. The spitefulness comes from a train car brawl, and one wonders how eager the two political opposites (Bond was a rabid conservative) were ready to beg off stuntmen and go after each other for real. For what it’s worth, the punches look stiff.

It is also the only time when the film captures the early ’30s WB spirit, of a certain authenticity in how working people walked and talked. There is so much static speechifying in the film it becomes a series of monologues that grind the film to a halt. Things only pick up with a succession of energetic turns by supporting players, including a Frank McHugh as a hustling theater impresario and Alan Hale as an avuncular newspaper editor. Their sheer warmth invigorates the film when the script is flagging, but they are not on-screen enough to sustain this unusual enterprise. Even film critics, those rather closed-minded fuddy duddys, were seeing how Garfield was being misused. In the New York Times, Frank S. Nugent opened his review of Dust Be My Destiny by describing John Garfield as the “official gall-and-wormwood taster for the Warners”. His lack of quality material was becoming a story, and Garfield would battle WB until his contract ran out in 1946, when he joined up with the independent Enterprise Productions, which released an inflammatory group of nine films (including Force of Evil ) before folding under the accusatory eye of HUAC. And Dust Be My Destiny led him there.

MOVIN’ ON UP: ALICE ADAMS (1935)

February 18, 2020February 18, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

May 27, 2014

The careers of Katharine Hepburn and George Stevens were forever altered by the flip of a coin. Hepburn and producer Pandro S. Berman had acquired the rights to make a film version of Booth Tarkington’s 1921 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Alice Adams for RKO. In an oft-repeated, possibly apocryphal story, they had whittled their choice of directors down to two: William Wyler and George Stevens. The coin ended up in Stevens’ favor. The film would snap Hepburn’s box-office losing streak and net her a Best Actress nomination, while the heretofore unknown Stevens would become an A-list director for decades to come. The movie, which Warner Archive has re-issued on DVD, is a bittersweet portrait of a restless Middle American girl, a working class busybody who yearns to become a sophisticated debutante and is mocked for her efforts. The patrician Hepburn is cast against type as an everyday gal, and she delivers a charmingly gawky performance of a girl masking her insecurities with constant patter and twirlingly nervous fingers. Stevens keeps everything grounded in his patient, unassuming 1930s style, capturing Alice’s many humiliations and recoveries in a slow-burning rubato tempo.

Alice Adams was first made into a film in 1923, directed by Rowland V. Lee and produced by King Vidor. Pandro S. Berman brought it back in ’35, with the country still reeling from the Depression. Centering a film on a financially-strapped small-town family probably felt like good business at the time. Hepburn was eager to adapt such a prestigious book, and tried hard to connect with the material: “I particularly liked my character in Alice Adams. It reminded me of the way small-minded people treated my mother, shunning her and us children, not because they thought we weren’t good enough, but because they thought we thought that we were too good.” Hepburn certainly needed help in conveying a “common” touch, which is why she leaned towards Stevens as her director. Wyler was born in France, and Stevens had more of the small town upbringing to lend to the production. His attitude was, “I had this wonderful book, and all I had to do was not to ruin it.”

Alice Adams is forced to wear last year’s dress and wilted violets instead of fresh roses and a new gown from Paris. Her beloved father Virgil (Fred Stone) is a lifelong clerk and current invalid, with no prospects for advancement into the middle class. So Alice has little hope in attracting her upper crust crush Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray), until he asks her for a dance, and becomes smitten.

Her family becomes a constant source of embarrassment, with her degenerate gambler brother Walter (Frank Albertson) shooting craps with the help, while her Dad doesn’t know how to put on a suit. The whole film spins off of these class tensions, which Stevens sets up in the opening scene. Alice is introduced exiting a five-and-dime store with a new egg-shaped compact. She quickly scoots out of the exit and settles next to the doorway of an expensive jewelry shop. It is there she stops and examines her purchase, as if it were the height of luxury. The sequence begins on store marquees, which blare, “South Renford: The Town With a Future”, as if it were a place with no future only a recent time before. If the economy is on the upswing it left the Adams family behind. Alice dreams of high society, but is formulating other means of escape from South Renford. She tells her Dad that she wants to become an actress – which he immediately laughs off. South Renford has a future, but not for women. She also holds idle thoughts of becoming a secretary, at one point climbing the stairs for a training school. But then she is waylaid by Arthur, who commences wooing.

Alice’s whole life is a performance, pretending to be a member of the upper class, adding airs to her speech and walking as if on a runway. She is, essentially, faking it until she makes it. Her affectations can be hilarious, which Stevens facilitates in the two major set-pieces in the film. The first is at a grand ball, which she forces her brother to escort her to in a rickety Model T. She has become adept at hiding her low culture signifiers, so she forces Walter to park outside, so they walk through the rain to the entrance. She walks with rubberized springs in her step, and she has a endless defenses against being alone. She lures the local nerd into a dance, and then plops herself down next to an unattended dowager as if they were close relations. All of her physical and psychological might is pressed into seeming to be happy and popular. Stevens exposes the ruse in one revealing long shot, in which she sits alone, holding her hanky over the adjoining chair, as if her beau were steps away, and not just imaginary.

The other masterful sequence occurs when Alice can no longer avoid inviting Arthur over for dinner. On a sweltering hot day, her parents organize what they believe to be a high society dinner – although their knowledge of said society expired a few decades earlier. It consists of a parade of humiliations that Larry David would cringe to include in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The menu is filled with scalding hot items, making everyone break out in the sweats. They hire a maid for the occasion (Hattie McDaniel in an early role), who could care less about the proceedings. The film repeatedly associates blacks with the lower classes. When Alice walks out of the five-and-dime at the beginning, a black family precedes her. Walter shoots dice with black servants at the ball, which is a major source of embarrassment. She even says he could write a book about the “darkies” because of it. For Alice, racism is an attitude she takes on whenever she is trying to impress Arthur, to be part of the upper echelon. In 1935 this would be a wise course to take. McDaniel, hired at the last minute, is ill-prepared for the dinner. Her character is the virulent stereotype of the lazy black laborer, but McDaniel is able to shape it into something more subversive. With her incessant gum chewing and side-eye, she’s not moving slow because she’s lazy, but that she does not give a shit about these absurd white people.

The ending of Alice Adams was a major point of contention between Stevens and Berman, but as usual, the studio won out. Stevens desired that the movie end like the book, with Alice entering business school to support her family, after her relationship with Arthur falls apart. In a memo Stevens wrote, “Finishing with Alice going to business college rounds out her character in that…she has learned to stand alone and not depend on public approval, men or social acceptance.” This would have added some steel to Alice’s character, who remains lost in a fog of her own dreams of stardom. Berman felt strongly that a romantic ending was necessary, since she is such a romantic character. That is the ending on-screen, and it is almost sadder than Stevens’ intended scenario. She has fallen in love, yes, but with her quicksilver nature how long will it last? She will remain uneducated and stuck in South Renford, without a future.

BEHIND BARS: THE BIG HOUSE (1930)

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May 13, 2014

Any movie in which a hardened inmate slams his tin cup against a cafeteria table and agitates for revolt can trace its roots back to The Big House, the film that popularized the prison riot movie. A sensation in 1930, it paired slam-bang action with a social conscience to attract both audiences and Academy voters. The Oscar-winning script by Frances Marion (the first woman to win the “Writing” award), railed against overpopulation in the unnamed jail, which teems with resentments and untapped violence. Hit and run society boy Kent (Robert Montgomery) is thrown into a cell with machine gun murderer Butch (Wallace Beery) and prolific thief Morgan (Chester Morris). Butch is scheming an escape, Morgan is waiting for parole, and Kent is trying to stay alive, and might snitch on his roommates to insure it. It was up and coming director George W. Hill’s first sound feature, after the huge silent success of Tell it to the Marines (1926), and it features bold off-screen sonic experiments as well as awkwardly static scenes of dialogue exposition. It ends in an overwhelming fusillade of gunfire, an aural assault that might make Michael Mann blush, that netted it the Best Sound Recording Oscar.

The Warner Archive has released The Big House in a fascinating two-disc set, featuring Hill’s English language feature, as well as two foreign-language versions (French and Spanish) that were shot for international release (it was also made in German, but that variant is not included). In order to take advantage of the booming worldwide market, studios would hire completely different casts and crews to shoot the script in multiple languages, using the existing sets, and sometimes even the shot lists, of the English original. The director of the French version of The Big House was Paul Fejos, the restless Hungarian-American innovator who made the miraculous proto-neo-realist Lonesome (1928) at Universal, and who was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the film business. He would eventually retire from movies and divert his interest in people to becoming the president for the Wenner-Grenn Foundation for Anthropological Research. Fejos’ Big House shows few of his visual gifts, as he was tasked with rushing through dialogue scenes, while the more elaborate tracking shots were simply imported from the English version. In many ways it’s even stuffier than George Hill’s Big House, a document of Fejos giving up on Hollywood. What charm the Fejos version does have derives from Charles Boyer, who plays Morgan in the French version, adding a smooth sophistication to the character whom Chester Morris plays as a simple street tough.

Prison riots were a major story in 1929, with huge uprisings occurring across the country, from Colorado to New York. President Hoover launched an investigation into its causes. George Hill believed a major problem was mixing hardened criminals with first-time offenders, and wrote a 27-page story treatment called The Reign of Terror: A Story of Crime and Punishment. Irving Thalberg liked the idea, and assigned Hill’s friend Frances Marion to help him work out an outline for a script (they enjoyed their work together and married soon after production in 1930). The potentially controversial subject was cleared with the Hays Office, who provided Marion and Hill with an “expert”, one P.W. Garrett, the general secretary of the National Society of Penal Information. Marion wanted more than second-hand information, however, and arranged to receive a tour of San Quentin. In her biography of Marion, Cari Beauchamp quotes her as feeling she was an object of “repressed ridicule” in the male-dominated institution. She trudged ahead anyway, and was inspired to cast the comedian Roscoe Ates when she met a stuttering inmate in the prison garden.

Hill was personally invested in the material, and was intent on presenting a starkly realistic portrait of prison life. It is strongest in its earlier stages, when its emphasis is on the procedural day-to-day of the jail. The movie begins with the processing of Kent, the wilted playboy convicted for a ten-year stretch for a New Year’s Eve hit and run. In head-on, planimetric compositions, Kent is poked and prodded and set on the assembly line from man to number. He gets his mug shot, is measured for clothes, and is spit out as another faceless inmate, just another pair of gray pants and plodding shoes trudging in circles, which is the image that runs underneath the title. Kent’s final initiation is a walk up a spiral staircase to his room, which the camera follows in an rising crane shot. It’s one that Fejos would probably scoff at, after the 50ft camera crane he constructed for Broadway (’29), but Hill’s is effective in its own modest way, Kent’s rise up the stairs sealing his fall from grace.

The strongest impact in The Big House is felt through the sound, whether its Wallace Beery thundering against the “swill” he’s forced to eat at meal times (a scene memorably parodied in Naked Gun 33 1/3), or the metronome of marching feet that morphs into that of machine guns at the film’s close. The most experimental use of sound occurs in solitary, or the “dungeon”, as its called in the movie. After Morgan is denied parole for a crime he didn’t commit, he is shoved into a cell, right next door to Butch. After the door seals him in, the camera does not cut to the interior. Instead it stays on the darkened hallway with no human activity. No words are spoken for fifteen seconds, the image a silent tomb. Then Butch bellows “Hello!”, and begins a bull session with Morgan, the camera remaining in the static hallway. For two minutes the camera doesn’t move, nor is an actor shown. All of the action is off-screen and in the viewer’s head. It’s a challenging gesture, and one only possible in the early days of sound, when the status quo had yet to be defined.

The Paul Fejos version is exactly the same in almost every particular. The only freedom Fejos seems to have been given is the ability to position actors in the frame, as even the camera positions are nearly identical. Fejos recalled little of the project: “Possibly the only interesting thing in it was that I imported for Big House an actor who afterwards became quite a potentate in Hollywood – Charles Boyer.” Boyer gives a more dashing rendition of Morgan, more of a witty Lubitsch thief than the working class thug that Hill elicited from Morris. Morris recalled Hill’s requests for unadorned performance: “If someone overacted, he had the scene done over, scoffing, ‘You did that like a New York actor.’ His technique was like Spencer Tracy’s – underacting.”

Both Fejos and Hill were not long for Hollywood. After Fejos was denied the directing job on All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, directed by Lewis Milestone), he lost interest in dealing with the studio machine, and his fortunes dwindled respectively. His unfond memories: “I found Hollywood phony. I found everything artificial. I found the people impossible . . . writers—so-called writers—utterly unintelligent, utterly uneducated, stupid hacks.” He wanted to return closer to the world, without interference, and he did so in his few films abroad, including the Austrian production Ray of Sunshine (1933). He eventually ditched artifice altogether to study anthropology. He stopped making films in 1941 to study his new obsession, which he later taught at Yale, Stanford and Columbia, and became the president of the Wenner-Grenn Foundation for Anthropological Research. George W. Hill had no such second life. His alcoholism busted up the marriage to Frances Marion, and sabotaged his work. After he suffered a concussion and cracked ribs in a car accident, he sunk into a depression. He died at the age of 39 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

BAD GIRL IN BANGOR: HEDY LAMARR IN EDGAR G. ULMER’S THE STRANGE WOMAN (1946)

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May 6, 2014

The name Edgar G. Ulmer elicits images of the dusty roads of Detour and the empty pockets of its Poverty Row producers. He was a prolific purveyor of B-movie jolts, used to finding creative solutions to monetary limitations, but on occasion he was called up by the big studio boys, where the budgets were the least of his concerns. For The Strange Woman, out on a decent-looking DVD from the public domain label Film Chest, it was the leading studio gal Hedy Lamarr who gave him the opportunity. The Strange Woman was a salacious 1941 hit novel by Ben Ames Williams (who later wrote Leave Her to Heaven) about a poor, power hungry small-town beauty. Lamarr thought it provided an opportunity to, “do something other than merely be a clotheshorse or look pretty. I have always wanted to do character parts, and this gives me the chance I have been waiting for so long.” So she formed a production company, Mars Film Corp., with producer Jack Chertok, and secured distribution through United Artists. Lamarr met Ulmer on the set of The Wife of Monte Cristo (1946), when she was visiting her then-husband and lead actor John Loder. Ulmer and Lamarr had both trained with Max Reinhardt, and perhaps this slender bond led her to select him as the director. Their collaboration was combative and tense, though The Strange Woman ended up a modest box office success, with a reported $2.8 million in ticket sales. Unusually frank about how Lamarr’s character uses sex to get ahead, The Strange Woman is a nineteenth century variation on the pre-code jaw-dropper Baby Face (1933), in which Barbara Stanwyck climbs the corporate ladder on her back.

Lamarr plays Jenny Hager, the ill-bred daughter of a drunk who notices she can get away with all kinds of mischief simply by flapping her eyelids. Growing up in an abusive household in Bangor, Maine, she uses her sob story and abundant physical charms to marry the old, rich merchant Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockhart). He is but the first stepping stone on her will to power, as she next swivels her hypno-eyes onto Isaiah’s son Ephraim (Louis Hayward), a shy academic she used to torture as a child. Through her canny business sense and manipulative wiles, she pits Ephraim against Isaiah, in a grab to secure the family business all for herself. The Poster family is just her bank account – for physical pleasure she is set on seducing John Evered (a miscast, aw shucks George Sanders), the strapping manager of the Poster logging operation. He is engaged to Jenny’s best, and only, friend Meg, but it’s of no concern to her. Jenny is only interested in her own immediate pleasure, regardless of the cost to those around her. She is a seductive sociopath.

Used to week-long schedules and miniscule budgets while at PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), The Strange Woman offered Ulmer a months long shooting schedule, with elaborate sets and an experienced cinematographer in Lucien Andriot (The Big Trail), who had just finished working with Jean Renoir on Diary of a Chambermaid. The movie is centered around Hedy Lamarr’s face, which exudes a feral restlessness. It is a quality Ulmer went to great lengths to elicit. In his new critical study of Ulmer, A Filmmaker at the Margins, Noah Isenberg writes that Ulmer “purportedly used his baton to lash her ankles, whenever she missed a cue, trying as best he could to make her act like a tigress.” Edgar’s wife Shirley simply stated that “He really didn’t like her.” Whatever his personal animus toward Lamarr, it pushed her towards a performance of bold animal aggression, her eyes darting about like a cat distracted by a laser pointer. Occasionally the effort becomes visible, a labored intensity, but for the most part it’s raw and carnal – the kind of “character” acting she hadn’t been allowed to do since she came to Hollywood.

Most of Ulmer’s effort seems to have gone into Lamarr’s performance, as the rest of the film is an effective but indistinguishable bit of invisible Hollywood craftsmanship. There is a concerted effort to identify Jenny with nature. In her childhood scenes she is shown playfully drowning Ephraim in a creek, her dainty foot pushing his head underwater. Later she urges Ephraim to attack his father during a whitewater rafting trip, while she secures John’s lust during a thunderstorm. These are thoughtfully laid out metaphors of her inhumanity, but they fail to convey the mad energy of her character. Instead they are distanced and coolly objective, a nature doc of a sociopath in the wild. This approach drains the film of energy, as the shoot seemed to do to Ulmer, who did not recall the film fondly, calling it “very difficult”.

Isenberg reports that there were re-shoots of the childhood Jenny scenes ordered by executive producer Hunt Stromberg, which were directed by Douglas Sirk. At PRC they only cared about the film being on time and under budget, but here he had no control. Lamarr was the driving artistic force in the film, and while The Strange Woman may not be one of Ulmer’s crowning moments, it contains one of Lamarr’s boldest and strangest performances, freed of the demands of being a clotheshorse. She is a man-devouring force of nature, and once you are in her domain, there is no escaping her.

THE OUTSIDERS: MONGO’S BACK IN TOWN (1971) AND LIFEGUARD (1976)

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March 18, 2014

Joe Don Baker is introduced in Mongo’s Back in Town getting off a bus in San Pedro, a scar still pulsing on his left temple. In Lifeguard, Rick (Sam Elliott) strolls in a tight white t-shirt and shades to his perch on a Santa Monica Bay beach. Each is an act of refusal. The hitman Mongo is intent on destroying himself and his hometown, while the thirty-something Rick has rejected bourgeois career building in favor of life as a beach bum. Mongo’s Back in Town is a hard-boiled noir made for TV, first broadcast on CBS in 1971 (now available on DVD). Lifeguard is a relaxed Paramount character study that moves with the sunburnt sloth one feels after a long day at the beach, and is available on DVD from the Warner Archive. Though they exist in vastly different genres, both aim for a kind of stasis, one in which its people prefer to watch than move.

Mongo’s Back in Town was adapted from a novel by E. Richard Johnson, a convicted murderer and armed robber who spent most of his life in Minnesota State Prison. He won the 1968 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his debut novel Silver Street, and Mongo was his equally well-received follow up. He wrote seven books in four years of imprisonment before escaping, succumbing to drug addiction, and getting recaptured. The terse teleplay by Herman Miller (Coogan’s Bluff) feels very faithful to Johnson’s book in its bleak and withholding nature. The basic story is straightforward but willfully opaque in its details. Mongo is called home by his estranged brother Mike (Charles Cioffi) to knock off one of his rivals. The reasons are murky, cloaked in brief, diversionary bits of dialogue. The film reveals its intentions with its opening sequence, six minutes of wordless action that introduces the characters.

Joe Don Baker arrives in town with nothing, not even an overcoat to protect him from the sheets of rain. He smashes the cheap knick knacks being sold by a blind peddler. The camera then follows the peddler, who enters a rundown strip club. As the floor is scrubbed by a little person in the extreme foreground, the peddler whispers a message to Mike that we cannot hear. Mike then climbs the staircase into his upstairs apartment. Upon opening the door to his bedroom, a deck of cards set up like dominos tumble down in a line to his wife Angel’s (Anne Francis) feet. It’s a willfully strange sequence, one portraying the city as a network of criminality laid down at the feet of Angel. Whether this sequence was orchestrated by director Marvin J. Chomsky, DP Archie R. Dalzell or producer Bob Banner, it’s an effectively disorienting way to set up the knotty plot to come.

The countervailing forces are the investigating detectives, played with exhausted Kojakery by Telly Savalas and a callow Martin Sheen (sporting the same pompadour as in Badlands (’73). Lieutenant Tolstad (Savalas) is burnt out from working this scummy precinct, represented in exteriors of dive bars, peep shows and strip clubs. He seems as nihilistic as Mongo, who flicks lit matches at his brother and picks up runaway coal miner’s daughter Vikki (Sally Field) at a diner, only to cruelly play with her emotions. In the triangulated climax, Vikki is torn between these two used up men, her face tensed up, staring at the phone booth that could call Tolstad, and at the club doors that Mongo is about to bust out of. In the end, like all of the characters in this strange, bitter little film, she chooses apathy. Fate decides for her, as it did for E. Richard Johnson.

Lifeguard is an altogether more optimistic enterprise, based on the summers screenwriter Ron Koslow spent at southern California beaches. Rick (Sam Elliott) is an aging well-tanned lothario, closing in on a decade-long career as a lifeguard. While all his old friends have become salesman of insurance or luxury cars, he still spends his days at the beach and his nights with stewardesses. He has successfully avoided the responsibilities and stresses of adult life, content with staring at the ocean instead of his bank account. His apartment is a bachelor pad par excellence, festooned with surf posters and shag carpet, while he spends his free time on the highway in his Corvette Stingray. His parents fret about when he will settle down and stop wasting his life. An old friend offers him a job at his Porsche dealership, while he meets his old flame Cathy (Anne Archer) at the high school reunion, at which he’s embarrassed to admit his profession hasn’t changed since graduation.

In an interview archived at the Director’s Guild of America, Petrie bemoaned the marketing of Lifeguard, the poster depicting big bosomed bimbos flanking a caricature of Elliott, as if it were another Porky’s. It was a modest success, netting $505,000 in profits, though it did not launch Elliott’s career as a leading man, deserving though he was. Disregard the bad taste marketing and the schmaltzy score, as Lifeguard is an understated and wise film about the rejection of adulthood. Director Daniel Petrie lets the story develop its own shaggy tempo, and elicits a grounded, engaging performance from Elliott. He exudes a bodily calm, his gestures an extension of his surfer-Buddhist ethos.

Cathy is a recent divorcee and bourgeois striver, eager to envelop him in luxury goods. The other woman in his life is Wendy (Kathleen Quinlan), a 17-year-old girl and fellow outcast, eager to escape her bickering parents and live on the beach with Rick. She is a vision of the youth and freedom he cherishes, though he realizes it is only an image. He can only achieve the lifestyle he seeks in solitude. So he ends where he began, aging alone at his lifeguard post, scanning the ocean for signs of life and death.

RAFT NOIR: NOCTURNE (1946) AND RED LIGHT (1949)

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March 4, 2014

George Raft started out on his toes, dubbed the “The Fastest Charleston Dancer” in a 1925 issue of Variety. That agility never quite carried over to the big screen, but the maniacal focus did. Note that he was the “fastest”, not the most graceful or technically sound. He was there to get a job done quickly. He became a star as a hired goon in Scarface (1932), obsessively flipping that coin of his. It was a bit of business director Howard Hawks requested Raft to master, so he did with machine-like efficiency, reflecting the soullessness of his killer. With this breakout role, and his real-life palling around with mobsters (he counted Bugsy Siegel as a friend), Raft was typecast as a gangster, whereupon he became one of the most popular actors of the 1930s. As the 40s progressed his star began to dim, and he took on projects that might shake up his persona, including two films noir that Warner Archive has just released on DVD: Nocturne (1946) and Red Light (1949). Both are flawed, fascinating works in which Raft’s deliberate style is adapted to ostensibly heroic ends. One expects one of Raft’s Lieutenants or vengeful brothers to go full sociopath, but they remain stubbornly on the straight and narrow.

The advertising plays up Raft’s psychopathic persona – “Raft on a Rampage!” – though in the film he is more of a mild-mannered obsessive. Nocturne was producer Joan Harrison’s first assignment at RKO. A former secretary for Alfred Hitchcock, she eventually became one of his closest collaborators as a screenwriter (Rebecca, Suspicion) and a producer (Alfred Hitchcock Presents). One of the only female producers in Hollywood, she started her production career auspiciously with two Robert Siodmak films for Universal (Phantom Lady and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry). The director was prolific B-director Edwin L. Marin (he is credited with four other features in 1946), with a script by pulp novelist Jonathan Latimer, who would later pen the noir staples The Big Clock and Alias Nick Beal.

A composer and notorious lothario is found dead in his Hollywood Hills home, and looks very much like a suicide. The only clue is an unfinished composition called “Nocturne”, dedicated to “Dolores”. The lead investigator is ready to close the case as a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but Lieutenant Joe Warne (Raft) refuses to let it go, intent on proving it as murder. He pursues the case with an obsessiveness that threatens his job security, as he oversteps any number of departmental codes. Warne proceeds anyway, convinced that one of the victim’s many girlfriends, all of whom he nicknamed “Dolores”, might hold the secret to his demise. It’s a role that puts Raft on the right side of the law, but makes use of his persona of cold calculation. Raft, never the most charismatic performer, here seems to embrace a minimalist, utilitarian kind of performance. He speaks in low monotonal bursts, anticipating the impersonal “just the facts ma’am” approach of Dragnet which would appear five years later.

Latimer’s script doesn’t have the staccato tempo of the show, depending instead on repetitive plotting in which Warne tracks down the women from the many portraits in the composer’s home. These scenes border on the tedious, even though Latimer does have a gift for dialogue (“You can never depend on girls named Dolores”). Raft still intrigues, though, by his refusal to emote. It’s something of an anti-performance.

Director Marin is equally anonymous, but pulls off one brilliant shot in the opening. It begins with a mockup of the Hollywood Hills, with a miniature cliff-side cantilevered mansion set off against a matte of the skyline. The camera cranes slowly towards the house, rear projection depicting the back of a man at his piano. The shot continues into the living room via an invisible matching cut as the camera crosses the threshold, from special effect artifice to what passes as reality. The movement continues in a semi-circle around the pianist, settling below him, and revealing a woman hidden in shadow on a couch in the far background. The shot travels miles of diegetic space in a minute, the kind of faked mobility that David Fincher achieves through CG means in his snaking air vent shots in Panic Room.

Red Light has more of a talent pedigree behind it, with Roy Del Ruth as producer/director and frequent John Ford cinematographer Bert Glennon (Stagecoach, Wagon Master). Even the second unit had talent, with Robert Aldrich as its Assistant Director. I know Del Ruth only from his Warner Brothers pre-codes, so seeing “Roy Del Ruth Productions” slapped at the head of the credits had me expecting something snappy. It starts with a bang, as inmates Raymond Burr and Harry Morgan plot to kill a priest while inside a flickering prison projection booth, but it ends as a rather lugubrious exercise in divine intervention. It was to be the last of three films for Roy Del Ruth Productions, following the cheerier It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947) and The Babe Ruth Story (1948). At this point Raft was deep into the downswing of his career, and battling to reframe himself as something of a hero. Compared to Nocturne he is downright chipper here (he even smiles!), playing the vengeful brother of the murdered priest.

Again it’s in the form of a procedural, as Raft believes that his brother wrote the name of the killer in the Gideon Bible in his hotel room. It has gone missing, and Raft tracks down every other occupant of the room in search of it. One of them is Virginia Mayo, who is, “about as chummy as Leo Durocher with an umpire”, according to a hotel clerk. Raft wants an eye for an eye, but Del Ruth and screenwriter George Callahan have a curious interpretation of the bible. They interpret the “Vengeance is Mine” of Romans 12:19 to mean that if you require your enemies to suffer a violent death, you should lower your weapon because God will kill him off for you.

It’s a bizarre interpretation of the text, and the final third of the movie comes under the sway of this activist, Old Testament God. Up until that point it is a conventional policier, enlivened by Raft’s engaged performance and Glennon’s grandiose chiaroscuro. This is a dark movie, as Glennon experiments with all manner of shadowy shapes. There are company logos splayed on walls, ceiling fans dissecting diner patrons and a chain link fence imprisoning a face about to confront death. Every shot has some dark shape indicating doom. This reaches its manic peak on the runway of a blinking neon 24-Hour Service billboard, on which the deciding shootout takes place. Constantly flickering between light and dark, Raft battles with his conscience on whether to plug Burr or let God sort him out. He opts for the latter, and ends in the light. But Raft’s career excelled in the shadows, in maniacs and coin-flipping brutes. His career continued to sputter, and by the end of the 1950s he was playing off his old bad-guy rep as a greeter at a Cuban casino operated by Meyer Lansky.