On Gilda, and How Rita Hayworth Could Redeem My Shawshank Any Time She Wanted (Yeah, I Said it, What's It To Ya?)

Rita Hayworth once famously said, "Every man I have ever known has fallen in love with Gilda and awakened with me."  For the life of me, I cannot figure out what could possibly be wrong about doing either one of those things, at any time.  Yeah, yeah, I get what Hayworth was trying to say - the whole 'nobody is as perfect as the characters on the screen' (she is also quoted as saying, "No one can be Gilda 24 hours a day.") - but even so, falling in love with a movie character, especially that particular movie character, is more than quite understandable, and waking up with Margarita Carmen Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth, aka The Love Goddess, would be a big ole 'must' on the to do list of any healthy patriotic red blooded American boy.

But we are not here to talk about personal cinephiliac fantasies (though I must admit to having one hell of a hard time getting certain images out of my head as I type this), we are here to talk about Charles Vidor's 1946 noir/melodrama hybrid masterpiece Gilda, and how its star, in what has become, and rightfully so, known as her signature role, Rita Hayworth put the ooh into ooh la la.  Sure, Hayworth made films prior to Gilda, and she was already thought of as a sexpot of the silver screen well before 1946 - just take a look at her roles in Blood and Sand, You'll Never Get Rich and Cover Girl - and she was a already a pin-up favourite as well (second only to Betty Grable in the minds of WWII G.I.'s), but there is something about Gilda that just drives a man, not only to the brink of insanity, but right over the veritable edge.  From Hayworth's introduction in the film, about a half hour in, as she tosses her head and mane of red (even in black and white) locks, and looks not into the camera, nor around it, but through the damned thing, to her show-stopping, half-striptease (just barely getting past the censors I am sure) rendition of "Put the Blame on Mame", the copper-topped bombshell is the very epitome of the kind of girl that no matter how hard you try - and co-star Glenn Ford does try his damnedest - you just know she is the one to whom you will eventually and quite inevitably give in and succumb.

As far as the film itself goes, it is quite the unique little nugget.  Playing at several genres at once, Gilda is not quite all the way a film noir, nor is it fully a proper melodrama.  It plays at thriller and musical too, but never fully falls prey to either of those categorizations either.  Mostly, to avoid confusion I suppose, it is labeled as noir, but even though it does have many of the requisite qualities for such a classification, as I said earlier, it never goes all the way into that territory.   Perhaps the most obvious reason for its stopping short is the fact that Hayworth's supposed femme fatale, in many ways the quintessential of the breed, ends up being not all that fatale after all.  Well, at least not in the way many of her ilk end up being.  But this by no means is to infer that Gilda is not the kind of woman some hapless man would not kill, or even die for.  Ford's Johnny Farrell just isn't as stupid as some of his fellow hapless male compatriots.  But why quibble over technicalities?  Let us just enjoy this magnificent film for what it is - a masterpiece.  And this is a word I do not use lightly.  And this is also all in spite of, to call a spade a spade, as it were, Charles Vidor being the kind of man who will never go down in history as a great director.  An auteur for the ages he is not.  The rest of Vidor's oeuvre, though some of it quite enjoyable (Love Me or Leave Me, The Joker is Wild, Cover Girl), leaves quite a bit to be desired.  Gilda is his one and only truly great film, and even though it is filled with stunning cinematography, courtesy of Rudolph Maté (some of the best of the era actually, almost comparable to Orson Welles and Gregg Toland's work), it is great not because of Vidor (at least not fully), but because of...yeah, you guessed it - Miss Rita Hayworth.

I may sound like a broken record here, but there is no denying such obvious facts.  Rita Hayworth not only breathed life into the tragic title character, but she stole that breath not just from all the men in her on-screen life, or even just those men in her off-screen life (which includes both Orson Welles and a real life prince), but also from all of those, myself whole-heartedly included, who have watched her up there on that aforementioned silver screen.  Let's not put the blame on Mame boys, let's put it on Rita. She wasn't nicknamed The Love Goddess for nuthin' after all.  Hell, even one of the many (many and many more) stories on how and when the Margarita was invented, gives credit to Hayworth.  Granted, the story of a bartender naming a drink after a certain young dancing girl down Mexico way, may very well be apocryphal - in fact it most certainly is just legend and nothing more - but that doesn't necessarily stop it from being quite believable.  I mean, what man wouldn't want to name something, anything, after Rita Hayworth?  But I am getting off subject again.  I am supposed be talking about Gilda, and about Rita Hayworth as Gilda, the gold digger with the heart of gold, but those dyed red locks (the genes of her Latin father actually gave her natural black hair) and that come-hither gaze she gives to both Glenn Ford and those of us watching her, tend to distract from whatever we may be discussing.  But since we do not seem to be able to go on in a reasonable, undistracted way, about the film Gilda, I suppose we should just end it all right here and now.  So please let me end on a quote from Rita herself, "All I wanted was just what everyone else wants, you know, to be loved."  You got it baby.

The Wild & Rollickin' Good Times of Joseph H. Lewis' Whirlwind On the Run Romance-cum-Film Noir B-Flick Masterpiece Gun Crazy

Jean Luc Godard famously said that all you need for a good movie is a girl and a gun.  For all we know, the Nouvelle Vague director was imagining Joseph H. Lewis' 1950 B-Picture, Gun Crazy, when he spoke these words.  It would make more than perfect sense if he were, especially considering he and his compatriots' love of American film noir.  I suppose though, that in the case of Gun Crazy, one could give top billing to the gun, not the girl.  Yes, the girl, played by blonde hot-to-trot, flash-in-the-pan Irish actress Peggy Cummins, is your quintessential femme fatale, and it was her genre-specific wiles that caused bad boy to be Bart (lead John Dall) to take up a life of robbing banks and running from the law, but really it is the gun, or in this case the many guns, that make both of these characters go all wobbly in the lower middle.  Sam Adams of the Philadelphia City Paper wrote of the film, "The codes of the time prevented Lewis from being explicit about the extent to which their fast-blooming romance is fueled by their mutual love of weaponry, but when Cummins' six-gun dangles provocatively as she gasses up their jalopy, it's clear what really fills their collective tank."  I think that pretty much says it all - but let's go on anyway.

After a prologue featuring Russ Tamblyn as a teenaged Bart, made to explain the character's unnatural and inevitably tragic attraction to guns, Bart, now played by Dall, meets up with Cummins' Annie Laurie Starr at a sideshow carnival.  Cummins, dressed in the most wet dream inducing of cowgirl outfits, replete with skin tight pants and dangling gun belt, goes mano y mano with Dall's smitten young man on the stage of her shilled marksmanship show.  As these two take William Tell shots at each other, their fingers fondling their revolvers, their lusting eyes glistening with obvious desire, we become acutely aware that these two people want to shoot more than just guns at each other.  With innuendo somehow getting past the censors of the day (though I am sure they could have gone even further if the code had not still been in effect), this run amok romp of guns and guns and more "guns," was pure sex.  Of course, when the director, in an interview in Cult Films by Danny Peary, explains his directions as thus:  "I told John, 'Your cock's never been so hard,' and I told Peggy, 'You're a female dog in heat, and you want him. But don't let him have it in a hurry. Keep him waiting.' That's exactly how I talked to them and I turned them loose. I didn't have to give them more directions." how could this not be a film that was pure (censors willing) sex?

Since its initial release, the film, which not so incidentally was scripted by the then blacklisted Dalton Trumbo whose name was eventually and rightfully re-added to the credits many years later, has become a cult favourite.  Its most important influence would be upon Arthur Penn, who took what Lewis did in Gun Crazy, and ripped it to glorious pieces in his code-shattering 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde.  Appropriately so, since the latter film is the story of a pair of real life bank robbers (and sexually charged gun enthusiasts) upon whom Gun Crazy was loosely based on in the first place.   Lewis' original 1950 film lent a lot to Penn's iconic sixties film.  Its use of on location shooting and improvised dialogue, much of the film seemingly (and brilliantly) made up on the spot (in order to give it more of a frenzied realism, the bank robbing scene was shot without the knowledge of any of the passersby on the scene), were huge influences on Penn, and for that matter many other filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, who has made allusions to the film on more than one filmic occasion, and of course the aforementioned French New Wavers, especially Godard who used it as a template for much of his debut Breathless. 

Dall and Cummins would never have the kind of film career one could call breakthrough or even overly successful.  Dall, known primarily for his stage work, had back to back successes with this film and Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, where he played Farley Granger's more cool minded partner in crime.  Still though, this was more than what the curvy Cummins is known for.  Gun Crazy was Cummins only truly significant film work, and she has lived in the United Kingdom in contented retirement since 1961.  But the impact these two made in a film like Gun Crazy will live on forever.  After all, gun crazed as a boy or not, what red-blooded American lad could successfully fend off the advances, or even want to, of someone like Peggy Cummins' Annie Laurie Starr, no matter how tragic one knows the end circumstances to inevitably be?  After all, the film has an alternate title of Deadly is the Female, so none of Cummins' alluringly deadly come-hitherness should come as any surprise.  I suppose, in the end, Godard was right about needing just a girl and a gun to make a movie - and Joseph H. Lewis makes one hell of a B-flick, pop art motion picture out of these two things.  Oh, and a whole lot of sexual tension to boot.

Another Contest, Another Good Time

Well, here's how the story goes.  Earlier this Summer I came across a website called FilmClassics, and saw that they hosted a regular series of contests.  So, I went and entered said contest.  My mission (should I decide to accept it - and I did) was to write a review on any classic screwball comedy.  My choice was the little known Barbara Stanwyck vehicle, The Mad Miss Manton.  The piece I wrote really wasn't one of the best things I have ever written, but enter it I did.  To make a long story short, I won said contest and received a snazzy, shiny gold cyber-ribbon which I have placed on the sidebar of this very site.

Cut to earlier today.  My contribution to FilmClassics new review contest, this time on classic film noir (my choice was Detour, and I am much happier with this entry than the last aforementioned screwball entry) was named the winner.  A close race indeed (102 votes to 98 were the top two totals - and let's face it, the voting of course, sadly enough, just comes down to who has the most friends willing to click on the vote button) but squeak it out I did. Of course winning is not the important thing as they say.  Watching and writing about the films is what it is all about.  Winning is just incidental I suppose.  And speaking of writing about films, my entry can be read HERE.  As for my stalwart close competition, it was from a young woman (seventeen I think) named Rianna over at Frankly, My Dear (her piece can be read HERE). From what I read - she does a very nice piece on the genre as a whole - she definitely has a thirst for learning about film history (how many teenagers are into movies from the 1930's and 1940's? Bravo for her!) and will probably grow into quite the film nerd as she ages - and take it from this 44 year old film nerd, there is certainly nothing wrong with that.

Anyway, my new snazzy cyber-ribbon has been placed in the sidebar (a larger version placed at the end of this post) and I await the next review contest at FilmClassics.  For this next contest I will probably write a piece, but enter it "out of competition" (in other words, post it at my site with a mention and link to the contest) in an attempt to give the growing film knowledge of others a chance to bloom.  This may seem a somewhat arrogant and/or egotistical thing to do (and knowing me, it probably is on some level) but is truly meant as a benevolent gesture on my part, as I want those still just getting into cinema (and the love thereof) to be able to compete without some old fuddy-duddy who has spent the majority of his adult life watching and studying film mucking up the works.  Anyway, I wish great luck and good fortune (and all that proverbial jazz) to all those who enter the future contests at FilmClassics.  And to Rianna - keep up the classic film watching no matter how much it perplexes your less enthusiastic peers.  That's it for now.

Looks Like I'm in Another Damn Contest -- How About That?

It would seem the fine folks over at FilmClassics are holding another review writing contest.  FilmClassics held a contest earlier in the Summer, with the subject of classic screwball comedy.  I wrote a piece on the relatively little-known Stanwyck/Fonda film The Mad Miss Manton.  Well guess what?  In a battle to the finish I came up victorious and received a snazzy, shiny banner to post on my blog (it hangs proudly in the sidebar as we speak).  

The subject this time around is classic film noir, so hearing this, loving the noir genre and being a rather competitive person in nature (and wanting another snazzy gold ribbon for my blog), yours truly has decided to enter said contest.  My piece this time around is on that most classic of B-pictures, Detour, directed by the indomitable Edgar G. Ulmer and starring the sultry Ann Savage and her dumb-luck patsy Tom Neal.  I have three competitors this time around and in the fairness of disclosure (or whatever you want to call it) I would like to give the links for these other three.  They are (in no particular order): Anatomy of a Film Noir at Frankly, My Dear; Ministry of Fear at In the Mood; Sunset Blvd. at Forever Classics.  Who says I am not fair?

Anyway, you can read my Review Contest Entry Post and let me know what you think by clicking on the button at the end of said post, which will take you to the contest site where one can then vote.  You can also jump to FilmClassics right now (where you will find links to both mine and my adversary's reviews - and to be fair, please do read all four) and vote as well.  I suppose the main point one should take away from this is to vote vote vote.  Vote early and vote often.  Actually you can only vote once per IP address, but you get the idea. 
 

The Dark and Sinister Goings-on Inside Edgar G. Ulmer's Radically Cheap B-Movie Cult Classic Film Noir Detour

The following is my humble contribution to Film Classics Film Noir Review Contest.  And as fair warning, there may be spoilers ahead, for those who care about such things - ye have been warned.

Made in 1945, on the most extreme of low budgets by B-master Edgar G. Ulmer and released by the Producers Releasing Company (PRC), a member of what in Hollywood was called the "Poverty Row" group of B-studios (these studios were often only in business for a few years and were mainly known for making cheap westerns, gangster films and serials), Detour may have been a tiny tiny film (and short, as was usually the case with "Poverty Row" films, at just 68 minutes) but to this day, 66 years later, it is still considered one of the greatest film noirs ever made.  Roger Ebert has said of the film, "This movie from Hollywood's Poverty Row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it."  The film has truly become one of the most classic of B-pictures.

The film is the story of Al Roberts, a jaded beer hall piano player (he has unfulfilled dreams of being a concert pianist) played by Tom Neal in his only role worthy of remembrance, who decides to hitchhike cross-country to California to be reunited with his semi-estranged girlfriend.  Along the way Al is picked up by a cocksure and obviously wealthy man by the name of Haskell.  A bit later Haskell dies (we never do find out how or why but we do know it was not foul play) and Al, in an act of desperation and knowing he could never explain such a thing to the police, ditches the body, steals Haskell's clothes, money and I.D. and speeds off in the dead man's car.  Now on the run, this will of course lead to Al's downfall, and this inevitable downfall (it is a film noir after all) is helped along when he picks up a disheveled young woman while posing as Haskell.   This disheveled (and obviously bad news) young woman is Vera, played by the sultry and quite psychotic Ann Savage.  Vera knows Haskell and therefore knows that Al is not Haskell and blackmails him into doing what she wants - and of course that can only spell trouble.

Vera tells Al that is to impersonate Haskell in order to get the inheritance the dead man is about to receive from his soon-to-be dead father.  Despite Vera's blackmail attempt Al refuses to along with her plan and the two fight in the Hollywood apartment they are now renting.  In the most infamous scene in the film, Al accidentally strangles Vera with a telephone cord and once again will go on the run.  Since the production code was still fully in force in Hollywood in 1945, Ulmer was not allowed to let his murderer - even an accidental one like Al - get away with his crime, so the film's not-so-intrepid protagonist is arrested in the final scene.  This ending, with its moody atmospheric sense of doom, is one of the things that make an otherwise cheaply made motion picture a classic of film noir cinema.  In their book, "The Devil Thumbs a Ride & Other Unforgettable Films", authors Edward Gorman and Dow Mossman say of the film, "...Detour remains a masterpiece of its kind. There have been hundreds of better movies, but none with the feel for doom portrayed by ... Ulmer. The random universe Stephen Crane warned us about—the berserk cosmic impulse that causes earthquakes and famine and AIDS—is nowhere better depicted than in the scene where Tom Neal stands by the roadside, soaking in the midnight rain, feeling for the first time the noose drawing tighter and tighter around his neck."  And this is what makes the film last.

Now the film does have a certain reputation that perhaps it does not deserve.  The famous, and quite apocryphal story of the film's production (propagated by Ulmer's own late-life assertions) claims that Detour was made with just $20,000 and in a mere six days (even the above Ebert quote says as much on the latter).  Truth be told it was probably closer to $100,000 with a shooting schedule of 28 days, but that would have been the norm for the day on "Poverty Row", so that isn't a very interesting hard luck tale to tell - and if Ulmer was anything it was an eccentric character who would build up his life and career further than it actually ever went.  Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in a part that is now the modern day Czech Republic) and making a bit of a splash in 1934 with The Black Cat for Universal (the first of eight films that would team horror icons Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff), Ulmer's career never really took off as many of his fellow European ex-pats careers did when they too fled their warring countries to make it in Hollywood.

Ulmer had previously worked as assistants to many of these same great directors - Murnau, Siodmak, Wilder and Zinnemann among them - before hitting it (temporarily) big in the U.S.  He claims to have worked with Fritz Lang on both Metropolis and M, but this is most likely just more tall-tale telling on an aging Ulmer's behalf.  When the director made The Black Cat for Universal (an actual big-name studio at the time - and that studio's biggest box office hit of the year) and showed the striking visual style he had obviously learned from the German Expressionist cinema of 1920's Germany, he was surely on his way to bigger and better things - much like the aforementioned contemporary ex-pats like Wilder and Siodmak.  Ulmer, however, had begun an affair with the wife of independent producer Max Alexander, nephew of Universal studio head Carl Laemmle. Shirley Alexander's divorce and subsequent marriage to Ulmer led to his being exiled from the major Hollywood studios. Ulmer would spend most of his directorial career making B movies at Poverty Row production houses.  Ulmer's only film of note after this would be of course, Detour. 

As for the stars of Detour, neither Tom Neal nor Ann Savage would ever become big names in the business.  Savage's Vera in the film would be described as "vicious and predatory" and "very sexually aggressive."  Savage herself would be described, by critic Barry Norman, as "sultry and sexy... a feline film noir star at its finest."  Director Wim Wenders called Savage's performance "30 years ahead of it's time."  Savage would play other roles, many of them femme fatales like in Detour, but she would never reach the stars as they say.  Neal's career would be even less than Savage's.  The most interesting anecdote one can muster up about Neal is that he shot his wife in the back of the head and was in jail for six years before being released less than a year before his eventual death in 1972.  Ulmer also died in 1972 and would never see the revival of his film noir that took place in the late 1970's.  Savage would actually tour with the film, helping both the film's reputation and her own.  Savage would later make a guest appearance on the TV show Saved by the Bell, and her final performance would come in 2007, when she was cast in Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg as the director's mother.

Listed among the first group of films to be historically preserved in the National Film Registry (the only B-picture among these first films) Detour may have been a cheaply made toss-off by a fly-by-night studio, and directed by a persona non grata director (though a director with great visual talent who was unfairly blackballed), and the film may be full of flaws (at least flaws from a strictly technical filmmaking standpoint), but that doesn't mean it isn't a great and tragic film noir indeed.  Documentarian Erol Morris claims it as his favourite film and says of it, "It has an unparalleled quality of despair, totally unrelieved by hope."  A hot, lurid, cheap (and I mean that as an attribute not a hindrance) film noir that rises above its supposed Poverty Row station to be (and I said it before and I will say it again) one of the best damn film noirs in the history of cinema.

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Criterion Critiques w/ Alex DeLarge

What follows is the first in what will be a regular series of reviews on the always wonderful, and quite indispensable Criterion Collection, written by our special guest reviewer Alex DeLarge of the Korova Theatre.

KISS ME DEADLY (Robert Aldrich, 1955)

Released on Criterion blu-ray 6/21/2011, spine #568

Mike Hammer is as hard and lean as a railroad spike driven into concrete, seduced by mystery and a dark poem of remembrance. Director Robert Aldrich's debut is a brutish noir transformed by cloak and dagger thrills, an explosive algorithm of cold war ethics. Aldrich turns the genre upside-down like the opening credits (read from bottom to top!), a cinematic excursion where a femme fatale whispers a nuclear polemic.

Mike Hammer lives in the subconscious, the penumbra of the Id, always racing like a jaguar towards the fulfillment of his pleasure principle. He is the prototypical anti-hero, dressed to kill with a temper to match, raping women with only a sideways glance. But Hammer is soon made impotent, victim of a faceless "they" who seek the great "whats’it", his good deeds never seeming to go unpunished. He is forced to pick up a voluptuous hitchhiker and soon embroiled in a thermonuclear winter of discontent, and stalks the nightmarish truth for his own vengeful purposes, an ignoble purpose of National insecurities. A whispered epitaph becomes a steel key, a violent travelogue that leads to an irradiated treasure locked away, ashes and brimstone of the new atomic age.

Aldrich captures the film with skewed angles and a creeping malaise, as men in black consume the night with a biblical fury, summoned by a government bureaucracy to stand guard like demonic sentinels, harbingers of a world without hope: these are men who are much worse than the petty evils of Mike Hammer. Aldrich utilizes film noir gumshoe tropes but advances a scientific element, a Periodic Chart to fuel this explosive admixture. In this monochrome world, no one is pure but an amalgam of intents and desires, prostituting themselves to the highest bidder. The film ends with Hammer and his moll fleeing into the crashing surf while the world burns down.

Final Grade: (A)

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About Alex: "To state things plainly is the function of journalism; Alex writes fugitive reviews, allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and allegory, and by leaving things out, he allows the reader the privilege of creating along with him." Alex can be found hidden deep within the dark confines of his home theatre watching films, organizing his blu-ray and dvd collection and updating his blogs. Please visit the Korova Theatre and Hammer & Thongs to see what’s on his mind.

My Quest to See the 1000 Greatest: Laura (1944)

Laura is #580 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films

Screened 02/01/11 on DVD

Ranked #310 on TSPDT

*There be spoilers ahead for those who care about such things.

Otto Preminger's Laura is not your typical film noir - if it even is a film noir at all.  The main difference from others of its so-called genre, is in the form of its requisite femme fatale.    This titular fatale is played by the drop-dead gorgeous Gene Tierney in the role that would make her a star, but that is not the odd part (how could the lovely eye-piercing Miss Tierney be considered the odd part of anything!?).  The oddity comes in the fact that Miss Tierney's Laura is actually first seen as the portrait of a dead woman.  A dead woman that haunts Dana Andrews' police detective while he is investigating her murder.   Whether it is the allure of her portrait drawing Andrews in (and how can Tierney do anything but draw you in!?) or perhaps something much more sinister, only the tale of the film will tell.

Neither Andrews nor Tierney were at the height of their eventual popularity in 1944, though they were both in the early stages of stardom (he in The Ox-Bow Incident, and to a lesser degree, Ball of Fire and she, a somewhat bigger name, hence her top billing, in The Shanghai Gesture and Heaven Can Wait), but this film made sure that changed for both of them, for the better.  I suppose neither can really be considered a great actor (though not many can do cold and calculating bitch better than Tierney) but both are nearly always fun to watch - Andrews for his sly smile and kinda slimy bad boys and Tierney for her luscious lips and conniving bad girls (a thing that would come through in both of them even when they were playing good).

As for Preminger, he too was on the cusp of greatness when he made Laura - even if that greatness seemed like just an offshoot (at the time) of what Hitchcock was already doing for nearly two decades by this point.  Preminger weaves this - let's go ahead and say it, Hitchcockian - web of lies and deceit with a rather broad series of strokes, but it all comes together in a fascinating way.  Preminger would go on to make greater films (Anatomy of a Murder, Advise and Consent, Bonjour Tristesse) but in this early - and somewhat silly - film noir, we could already see those things of greatness yet to come.

Now contrary to some of the allusions I have made above, I actually quite enjoyed Laura.  Sure, it's silly and rather overly-complicated (yet deceptively simplistic) but some of the nuances Preminger puts into his direction, and the fun one gets from watching Tierney and Andrews (as well as a young buck Vincent Price - also more and enjoyable-to-watch actor than actually a great actor) make for an intriguing film.  The silly pretension of it all, the rather comical last-minute rescue from the o-so-obvious "surprise" villain, Price's hamming it up, Andrews' rather lackluster desire for our intrepid "dead girl".  It is all quite ridiculous (other noirs perhaps have some of the same silliness, but the great ones manage to outweigh such with the gravity of their respective situations) but it is still a lot of fun.  In fact the silly pretension and actors' hamming make it even more enjoyable for me (think about that for a while!).

Laura, instead of reaching the grand heights of a Double Indemnity or an Out of the Past or a Big Sleep, is in that same realm as The Woman in the Window, The Hitch-Hiker, Detour, Scarlet Street, The Big Heat, D.O.A., Kansas City Confidential and all those other good (but, not too good) noirs of the era.  It is surely a film I would watch again and again (it is THAT fun - even Godard paid homage to it through Jean-Pierre Leaud's toy-tinkling thug in Made in U.S.A.) and a film that would make my own personal Top 1000 (to reference the reason behind this post).  Perhaps I seem a bit too critical of the film (looking back I suppose I am) but after all is said and done, Laura is no sillier (and no worse) than many of its mid-level genre compatriots (a genre, incidentally that is one of my favourites - high, mid or even low level).

I suppose, above and beyond the somewhat contrived plot, the reason I like Laura as much as I do, is because of it being, at its very basest core, a movie about obsession.  Whether it is Dana Andrews' detective, Clifton Webb's cocksure yet charming gadfly or Price's notorious womanizer and money hound, Preminger's film verily drips with obsession - and who doesn't love a film about obsession!

 

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

ed. note: This was meant to be my contribution to the great For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon, co-hosted by those great and lovely dames of classic cinema bloggerdom,  Ferdy on Film and Self-Styled Siren, but a combination of someone else already tackling the same movie for the same Blogathon and just good old fashioned procrastination (my archnemesis and worst bad habit) I come up a day late and a dollar short as they say.  Nonetheless, here is my day late and dollar short contribution anyway.  And no matter the day and time, you can still donate to this very worthy cause HERE.  I will have another donation link at the end of the post (in case you forget), but for now, here is my (unofficial and out-of-competition) contribution to For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon.

Oh yeah, and there are spoilers ahead, so proceed with caution.
 

One could (and many have) argue the validity of Stranger on the Third Floor being the ostensible first Film Noir - the Noir Patient X if you will - but its use of chiaroscuro cinematography, German Expressionism (which is where Noir was truly born - visually speaking that is) and psychological self-torture, as well as its being the story of a man wrongly convicted, make a damn fine argument for, rather than against such a claim. 

Directed by Latvian-born (actually the Russian Empire at the time) Boris Ingster, and starring John McGuire as the aforementioned self-tortured, wrongly-convicted man, Stranger on the Third Floor starts out as what appears to be a standard crime drama - a young, recently engaged, aspiring reporter gets his "big break" (and first by-line) by covering a murder trial that he is also the key witness in (really not sure how the whole conflict of interest thing never seems to get in the way) - that quickly deepens into a psychological mind fuck of a movie.  Questions of whether the man on trial (the ubiquitous Elisha Cook Jr.) is actually innocent or not - he was seen over the dead body but is never seen actually killing the victim - and the ramifications of such possibilities begin to eat away at our main character.
 

This is where the film takes a sudden turn into Noir territory, as Ingster changes the whole demeanor of the movie.  Beginning an inner dialogue , McGuire's Mike Ward is tortured with the thought that he may have helped put an innocent man in the electric chair.  This is also the place where the titular stranger makes his first appearance.  Played by Peter Lorre, at his disheveled creepiest (and, due to contract specifications at RKO, receiving top billing for a role that is achingly short and consists of only a quick handful of lines), this quiet stranger is seen skulking around Mike's building, where another murder is about to be discovered by our intrepid hero.

Spinning out of control, Mike begins to have nightmares about what could and would happen once the police are notified of his discovery.  Just like poor Elisha Cook Jr. (eternally the hapless loser) earlier on, who was convicted on mere circumstantial evidence, Mike begins to think back on things he has said in the past about his neighbor, the murder victim.  He becomes tortured by these thoughts and dreams and nightmares - all filmed with the most Noirish of flair, shadows and light intermingling to seemingly sever its characters trapped inside the film.  If this ain't Noir baby, I don't know what is.

Climaxing in a lackadaisical flurry of imminent danger - Lorre's unnamed stranger calmly going after Mike's fiancée, played by the striking, though rather bland actress Margaret Tallichet (then wife of William Wyler and less than a year away from early, baby-induced retirement at age twenty-seven) once she finds his secret out - Ingster's film may be a bit on the hurried side (the B-picture coming in at just 64 minutes) and doesn't really have time for much unnecessary plot points, but still manages to get its point across with a certain, shall we say Noirish, flair.
 

It is really the middle of the film - Mike's nightmares come to life in sharply define shadow and light play (photography heavy in that all-too-important chiaroscuro style) - where Ingster shines.  His beginning is mere middling set-up and his final coda - where a now free Elisha Cook Jr. grins his rather off-putting grin (creepier than Lorre's perhaps) and offers Mike and his soon-to-be bride a ride in his cab, seeming to show no hard feelings toward the man who helped almost electrocute his ass - is pure studio-demanded cheese (though one could make a case for Cook's embittered ex-con driving his passengers off a cliff and ending his and their misery, but that would be mere speculation).

It is this expressionistic centerpiece of Ingster's film that gives it the power (both visually and emotionally) it needs to have to become the thing it has become - the first Film Noir (well, the first American Film Noir) in cinematic history.  Taking the aforementioned German influences and weaving it with early sound crime drama and filming it with as much stylistic dread as one can muster in these dark shadowy moments, Stranger on the Third Floor (one of only three films ever directed by Ingster - he would later be a prominent TV producer), along with other early Noir such as The Maltese Falcon and This Gun For Hire, helped to usher in a whole new genre of cinema.  A genre that, along with the Western, is this cinephile's favourite.

My Quest To See the 1000 Greatest: Blood Simple. (1984)

Blood Simple. is #574 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films 

Screened 09/08/10 on DVD at Midtown Cinema

Ranked #626 on TSPDT

*this is one in a series of catch-up reviews in my aforementioned quest (which should explain the rather old screening date above).
 

Blood Simple (according to Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest): a term used to describe the addled, fearful mindset of people after a prolonged immersion in violent situations.  "This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simple like the natives." 

In a sort of reverse mentality, it is not until I have seen numbers two through fourteen of the Coen Brothers oeuvre, that I finally go back and watch number one.  Number one of course, being the neo-noir thriller Blood Simple.  Starring John Getz, Frances McDormand (who would become Joel Coen's wife during filming, and is still such today, some twenty-seven years later) and Dan Hedaya as the requisite love triangle with the equally requisite tragic ending (at least for two of them), the Coens had fashioned a fun, if not quite all that unique, film noir in their first turn out of the gate.  

With obvious nods to such past noir (or noirish films) as Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Strangers on a Train and The Ladykillers (which the Coens' would eventually remake, albeit poorly so) brothers Joel and Ethan do a (for lack of a better term) bang-up job with this film.  Perhaps it is not in the upper echelon of the brother's aforementioned oeuvre (when compared to the work they would turn in later on in their career - and are still handing in to this day) but is certainly an aspiring directorial debut, full of an obvious love and knowledge of film history, as well the beginning stages of that strange, almost bewildering style (combined with the style of the noir they are imitating) that will become the brothers' hallmark throughout their career.

The movie surely has some great scenes hinged throughout the production, including both an hilarious scene in which a dead man just refuses to stay dead, instead choosing to crawl down an almost empty highway in a stylistic moment that will come to define the Coens' as filmmakers (become, as I stated earlier, their hallmark, if you will), and a phenomenal freak-out finale that should be considered among the very best of its kind, and the movie is definitely one of the better of the neo-noir movement of the eighties, and M. Emmet Walsh gives what is probably the best, and most sinister, performance of his career as the snake-oiled, hired hit-man (another requisite noir factor).

In the annals of film history, Blood Simple. (and yes, the period is supposed to be there) should go down as one of the best examples of neo-noir out there as well as an audacious start to a long (and sometimes uneven) career.  To further illustrate the importance of this directorial debut, one need only look at Zhang Yimou's Chinese remake of the film, the giddily named (but not very good) A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop.  Not only does Zhang do his own game of reversal, by remaking an American film in Asia, but he whole-heartedly announces it as the proudest (and strangest) of remakes right there on the poster.  The film's legacy is assured.

Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952)

When one sits down and watches Phil Karlson's Kansas City Confidential for the first time (as this critic did just the other night) one wonders why they had never crossed paths with such a film years ago.  Tough and gritty, as any good film noir should be, but not as slick as many in the genre, Karlson's 1952 film (which was the film that catapulted the director to...well, to mid-level respectability at least) nonetheless is a taut thriller full of everything the genre held so dear.  Granted, Karlson's film doesn't have the usually ubiquitous femme fatale (the only female role here is simply a nice girl who falls for the protag) but it does have the tension, the fear, the danger that goes with what a good noir should be.

Coming at the near tail-end of the world of film noir, Kansas City Confidential (which ironically or not, takes place mostly in the sweaty heat of Mexico - K.C. becoming but a memory about twenty minutes in) does what Karlson does best as a director - efficient, tough guy drama with a left hook that comes out of a literal nowhere.  Playing as some sort of Tarantino precursor (Q.T., with his self-mocking mantra of "I steal from every movie ever made" had to have seen this film at some point in his early cinephiliac days) Kansas City Confidential is the story of an elaborately-staged armed robbery where its three thugs-for-hire wear masks so not to reveal their identities to one another (Reservoir Dogs had fake names such as Mr. Orange, Mr. Blonde and Mr. Pink in place of the masks, but the reasoning, if not the motif, is the same). 

Known only to the big boss (he too wears a mask so his underlings cannot finger him) the three hoodlums are told to take it on the lam until the heat dies down.  Meanwhile Joe, a hapless ex-con, played by rough and tumble John Payne (in the essential anti-hero role), is framed for the crime and after his release (on lack of evidence, which still doesn't stop the police brutality that comes his way) he too takes it on the lam, but with the goal of finding who framed him, and theoretically making them pay in that rather blunt and brutal noirish manner.  Eventually the criminals are all called together (along with Joe tagging along in what he mistakenly believes to be incognito) for the final payoff, but of course no one is shooting a straight deal here.

Tersely written (as was the usual M.O. for most noir since they were usually B-pictures with very low budgets - even at MGM, where this one was made) and succinctly acted by all (Lee Van Cleef, a leering snake-eyed rogue more than a decade before being dubbed 'Angel Eyes' and jittery, shaky, pop-eyed Jack Elam are fascinatingly nuanced in two of their earliest roles), Kansas City Confidential may not belong in that realm of great (and predictably listed) noirs such as The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, but with its bravura tagline of "Exploding! Like a gun in your face!", Karlson's underrated film noir, doing exactly as it says (Karlson's action would never have any sort of lead-in, just suddenly it would explode, and just as suddenly it would cease) is still one of the better noirs ever made.