CMBA Hitchcock Blogathon: The Wrong Man (1956)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Alfred Hitchcock


The opening shot of The Wrong Man, in which Alfred Hitchcock makes his customary appearance, immediately lets us know this is not going to be a typical Hitchcock film. Not only does Hitchcock come right out and say so, addressing the audience directly just as he did in his television series, but the shot itself, with an unidentifiable Hitchcock walking onto a dark sound stage lighted in extreme chiaroscuro, emphasizes how different this is going to be from the escapist fare we expect from this director. Even though Hitchcock was closely identified with movies of suspense, he clearly liked a change of pace now and then, for he regularly dabbled in other genres than the suspense film—Gothic romance (Rebecca), courtroom drama (The Paradine Case), whimsical black comedy (The Trouble with Harry), screwball comedy (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), toward the end of his career edging ever closer to the outright horror genre (Psycho and The Birds). Although elements of film noir can be detected in Strangers on a Train (1950) and I Confess (1953), the opening shot of The Wrong Man announces in the strongest visual terms that this movie is going to be Hitchcock's deepest—and bleakest—foray into the territory of film noir.

The Wrong Man deals with a subject Hitchcock returned to time and again during his more than fifty years of filmmaking—the wrongfully accused man desperately trying to prove his innocence before it is too late. This time around, as Hitchcock points out in his introduction, the film is based on an actual case, and he adjusts his typical approach, where the gravity of the situation is tempered by a sense of whimsy and the certainty that in the end all will turn out well, to reflect the seriousness of the story's origins. Here he doesn't set out to entertain by placing us in a situation where we know, just as when we step onto a ride at a carnival, that for the duration this may be a frightening experience but it's all for fun and the ride will eventually end and we can return to the normality of ordinary life. Instead he sets out to give us a sense of danger so convincing that for once we question whether the movie really will have a happy ending.

The main character is Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda), a musician at the Stork Club in New York City. The film's opening passage establishes that apart from his job, Manny's life is pretty ordinary. After finishing work in the small hours of the morning, he returns home on the subway, checks on his two young sons, safely asleep in their bedroom, then goes upstairs, where he finds his wife Rose (Vera Miles) still waiting up. She can't sleep because she is having problems with her teeth and is worried about the cost of the dental work she needs. During this scene Manny and Rose have an exchange that tells us a lot about them. Manny tells Rose not to worry, that they will find a way to pay the dentist: "I think we're pretty lucky people mostly." Rose responds with her own concerns: "Sometimes I'm so frightened waiting up for you to come home at night." These two statements not only limn their basic personalities—Manny the optimist and Rose less confident and more than a bit phobic—but also foreshadow the way each will react to the disaster about to happen to them.

When Manny goes to the insurance company the next day to borrow against Rose's life insurance policy, three clerks in the office are certain he is the man who has twice robbed the office, and the nightmare begins. Picked up by the police, the naive Manny meekly cooperates with the detectives, trusting their reassuring platitudes: "It's nothing for an innocent man to worry about. . . . If you haven't done anything, you have nothing to fear." But Manny is positively identified not only as the robber of the insurance company but also as the culprit in a whole series of armed robberies. Manny is never advised of his rights or offered a lawyer, and the entire process is riddled with procedural flaws that invite misidentification and which today would never be allowed, but the movie takes place in 1953, and we have to believe that such practices were the norm then.

The remainder of the first half of the movie concentrates on Manny's arrest, incarceration, and arraignment, and in depicting this the film is truly harrowing in a way Hitchcock's lighter examples of this kind of movie never are. That this more serious treatment of the subject is never heavy-handed or overly pointed makes it all the more unnerving and all the easier for us to identify with the ordeal of the hapless Manny. At the station, as Manny is booked and locked up, the atmosphere is utterly mundane and muted, completely lacking the melodramatics of many station house movies of the time. This section of the film reaches its peak after Manny is locked in the cell. As he looks around the cell, shots of his face, with Fonda's expression subtly registering a stunned feeling of dislocation, alternate with close-ups of the physical details of the cell. There is no dialogue, no interior monologue, no background noise of any kind after the cell door slams, only the quietly sinister music of Bernard Herrmann suggesting the nightmarish unreality of the experience, as close to the mood of a story by Kafka as I've ever seen on film.

After Manny's arraignment and his release on bail (his brother-in-law manages to raise the money), the second half of the movie deals with the aftermath of the arrest, including meetings with his lawyer (Anthony Quayle), futile attempts to establish alibis for the two dates the insurance office was robbed, and finally the trial. Gradually the focus shifts more toward Rose and the effect the experience is having on her. Lacking the resilience of Manny, she slowly begins to unravel. During the meetings with the lawyer, you can see her becoming more distracted and withdrawn. When their last chance at establishing an alibi fails, she loses all hope, breaking down in hysterics. Her insomnia and loss of appetite soon progress to irrational feelings of guilt and paranoia. From blaming herself ("I've let you down, Manny. I haven't been a good wife."), she begins to question whether Manny is really innocent ("How do I know you're not guilty?"), and it becomes clear she is in a severe depressive state. Her breakdown suddenly culminates in a brief but electrifying sequence in their bedroom, shot and edited in the kinetic, fragmented style of the shower scene in Psycho, in which Rose completely loses control, repulses Manny's attempts to comfort her, and lashes out at him with a hairbrush, breaking a mirror and lacerating his forehead. Finally, Manny has no choice but to hospitalize his wife.

In his commentary on The Wrong Man, Richard Schickel notes how many references there are in the film to Manny's Catholicism. (As those familiar with Hitchcock know, he was raised as a Roman Catholic and educated in a Jesuit school.) That's certainly an accurate observation by Schickel. When Manny is booked, the desk sergeant gives his rosary back to him to keep in his cell. During the trial, he is repeatedly shown clutching the rosary under the table where he is seated in the courtroom. But perhaps the most noteworthy reference to Manny's Catholicism happens in the climactic scene of the film, one of the few times besides the scene between Manny and Rose in the bedroom that Hitchcock intervenes to heighten the moment with technical embellishment. And a stunning moment it is, the moment that signals the beginning of Manny's redemption.

With the situation at its most hopeless, Manny's mother tells him to pray. Manny goes to his bedroom and, clutching the rosary, stares at a picture of the Sacred Heart while silently mouthing a prayer. Suddenly overlapped with the close-up of Fonda praying is a quite different image—a man in a hat and overcoat, the same as Manny habitually wears, slowly walking down a dark city sidewalk toward the camera (at first I though this was Manny and that I was watching a suspended dissolve to the next scene) until finally his face and Manny's merge. At this point the overlapped image dissolves as the man turns and steps inside a shop. This man, who bears an unmistakable resemblance to Manny without being an exact double, is the real armed robber, and the shopkeepers recognize him. Is this divine intervention, or is it pure chance? In a classic example of dramatic ambiguity, Hitchcock leaves the interpretation of the event completely up to the viewer.

One thing that is never in question, though, is Manny's innocence, and that is due largely to the presence of Henry Fonda in the role. Fonda did on occasion play scoundrels, but normally his entire persona radiated that this was an honorable man, a man of simple and unpretentious integrity. Those words—simple and unpretentious—just about sum up Fonda's elusive acting technique. The decision to cast an actor known for his honesty and his wholly natural Everyman quality, rather than the charismatic movie star type Hitchcock was apt to prefer for his more commercial entertainments, is key to the effectiveness of The Wrong Man. Fonda was a great actor and in his day one of Hollywood's most undervalued, and I can't adequately express my admiration for him or for his incredibly affecting performance here, all the more moving for his skillful underplaying of Manny's alternation between bewilderment and hopefulness. This role brings out the best in Fonda's acting, above all his seemingly effortless ability to merge completely with his character without resorting to actorly gimmicks or mannerisms. You can add his Manny to the long list of his performances during the 1940s and 1950s that should have gotten him an Oscar nomination but didn't.

Then there is Vera Miles as Manny's wife Rose. In "Revenge," the pilot Hitchcock directed for his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, made the year before The Wrong Man, he cast her as a rape victim who comes unhinged as a result of her traumatic experience. It's a fantastic episode, far more elaborately filmed than any other episode of the series or any typical TV episode, and well worth watching for that reason alone. But the most interesting thing about it in relation to this film is how much it almost seems Vera Miles's audition for the part of Rose. As her performance in that TV episode predicts, she portrays Rose's slow disintegration with subtle poignancy. "Vera Miles breaks up in a way that shows how seldom one has seen untheatrical distress," writes David Thomson. "She turns plain and inept." The scene at the end of the film when Manny visits Rose in the hospital and she calmly rejects him ("Nothing can help me. You can go now.") is just heartbreaking. The dreadful misunderstanding about the robberies has been resolved and Manny has his life back, but he has lost the one thing in his life he loved the most.

It's well known that at the time the movie was made, Hitchcock was grooming Vera Miles to replace Grace Kelly as his iconic leading lady. If The Wrong Man has a weakness, it is that the second half of the film dwells just a bit too much on Rose's psychological problems, as Hitchcock shifts his attention more toward her character. I can't help wondering if Hitchcock was becoming a bit too interested in Miles as his intended muse and couldn't resist playing up her part. The story is that Hitchcock's plans for Miles, which included the role of Madeleine/Judy in his next film, Vertigo, had to be scuttled when she became pregnant and that after this the miffed Hitchcock turned his attention elsewhere. But after seeing The Wrong Man, I can't help wondering if Miles might also have had second thoughts about becoming the notoriously controlling Hitchcock's new muse and indeed about being turned into a major star. She continued to work in television and in smaller movie roles for forty more years, although she worked only one more time with Hitchcock, in an unglamorous supporting part in Psycho.

The Wrong Man may be one of Hitchcock's most atypical films, perhaps even his most atypical film. Yet although Hitchcock moves as close as he ever would to the the quasi-documentary realism and noir sensibility of films with a similar subject like Boomerang! or Call Northside 777, he never goes all the way in that direction and certainly makes little attempt to give the illusion of fading into the background as did the Italian neorealist directors like Roberto Rossellini who in part inspired such an approach. Hitchcock's presence—his role as the guiding force behind the film, the authority of his personal stylistic vision, his need to control every detail to elicit a specific response from the audience—is very much in evidence and clearly marks The Wrong Man as a product of The Master, an unusual one certainly, but nevertheless still identifiably a Hitchcock film.

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For more on the Classic Movie Blog Association Hitchcock Blogathon click here. You might also be interested in my Featured Retrospective Post on Hitchcock's Young and Innocent. (See the sidebar.)

Pickpocket (1959) / Classe Tous Risques (1960)

Pickpocket
***^½
Country: France
Director: Robert Bresson

When I took a cinema course in college, the instructor showed the class Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, a film in which a young priest finds himself assigned to a diocese in rural France. He struggles in vain to make a spiritual impression on his thoroughly hateful parishioners, enduring the mental anguish of his failure as he suffers the physical torment of slowly dying from cancer. I understood that Bresson intended the young curate's anguish as an expression of transcending earthly pain and failure to a higher level of spirituality. Yet for me watching the film was a grim, torturous, almost masochistic experience in which the contemplation of suffering became an end in itself. I have never been able to watch this type of movie with any enjoyment, and I felt little desire ever to see another film by Bresson. Reading about his later works like Au Hasard, Balthazar and Mouchette only strengthened this feeling. But when I watched Pickpocket recently, I found it a rewarding, if predictably somber, experience.

The main character in Pickpocket is a young man named Michel (Martin La Salle, who resembles the young Montgomery Clift). Unemployed, disaffected, but apparently well educated, he lives a solitary, bleak, and impoverished life in a grungy one-room apartment in Paris. One day in the Métro, he observes someone picking the pocket of a fellow passenger and decides to give it a try. Encouraged by the success of his first attempt, he continues. But he's not a professional and is soon arrested. The police don't have enough evidence to press charges, though, and an inspector who recognizes that Michel is no ordinary petty criminal releases him. The two strike up a curious relationship as friendly adversaries in which the inspector tries to convince Michel that crime is not a valid way of life, while Michel tries to convince him that some people are by nature above the law. It's hard to say whether Michel's attraction to thievery arises from practical necessity or really is a philosophical stance; there is probably a bit of each in it. In either case, there is plainly more than a little defiance and self-centeredness in Michel's personality.

Things get really interesting when Michel attracts the attention of a pair of professional pickpockets who then recruit him to work as a third member of their team and teach him the tricks of the trade. At this point the film becomes a fascinating semi-documentary on the techniques of pickpocketing, culminating in a brilliant sequence in which Bresson temporarily abandons his minimalist filmmaking style, which consists largely of lengthy conversations alternating with contemplative shots of his actors' faces, to illustrate the three men at work in a train station. Watch the following clip to admire Bresson's ability to advance the narrative solely through masterful framing and editing. I don't think you'll ever feel safe in a large crowd again.



Running only seventy-five minutes, Pickpocket has the compression of a short story, concentrating exclusively on Michel and eschewing any narrative embroidery like subplots, its only embellishment the stately music of Lully. Michel is given virtually no backstory, expresses few emotions, has no strong emotional attachments, and dwells almost obsessively on a single idea, the Nietzschean one that the concepts of good and evil are relative and do not apply universally to everyone. Bresson preferred to use non-professional actors, and the passive, slightly wooden acting of Martin La Salle seems wholly congruent with the anomie of the character he plays. Nothing in the film is in the least glamorized, and that includes Bresson's direction, which is devoid of cinematic gimmickry or artistic pretension. This austerity of style combined with an emphasis on ideas over action and emotion gives Pickpocket a kind of surface purity. The film has a quality that is difficult to put into words, but if pressed, I would say it seems in some way turned inward upon itself. This introspective quality in Bresson's work seems to be what most strongly appeals to his admirers, and Pickpocket presents it with what I take to be rather greater palatability than most of his films. Only the upbeat ending, which somehow doesn't ring true, keeps me from giving the film a full **** rating.


Classe Tous Risques
***^½
Country: France-Italy
Director: Claude Sautet

Sautet's Classe Tous Risques, released only one year after Pickpocket, is in many ways its polar opposite—a visceral, noirish crime thriller to Bresson's cerebral meditation on crime and punishment, the yang to Bresson's yin. In Sautet's film, Lino Ventura plays Abel Davos, a career criminal who has already been condemned to death in absentia, who has been hired along with his partner Raymond to rob a bank courier in Turin before fleeing to France with Abel's family. The robbery is successful, but the proceeds are far less than expected. Their elaborate plans to escape to France end in disaster, with Raymond and Abel's wife being killed in a shootout with police and Abel on the run with his two young sons. Abel has no choice but to seek help from his old criminal cronies in Paris, who send a young man, Eric Stark (Jean-Paul Belmondo, in his first role after his breakthrough performance in Breathless), to help him escape. Along the way, Eric picks up a young actress (Sandra Milo), with whom he begins a relationship. The rest of the film deals with Abel's attempts, aided by Eric, to escape the police.

The film sits squarely in the tradition of French film noir of the 1950s and 1960s, the kind of movie directed by Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Becker and was in fact written by José Giovanni, who also wrote Melville's Le Deuxième Souffle (1966) and Becker's Le Trou (1960), both excellent films I highly recommend. Like many American and French noirs, Classe Tous Risques places great emphasis on the issue of loyalty among a group of criminals, while taking the genre in unusual directions (the most interesting of which is making Abel a family man). Abel's former cronies in Paris are all criminals who have redirected their energies into legitimate businesses and are now members of the law-abiding establishment—one a bar owner, another a hotelier, a third a jeweler (played by Marcel Dalio). One reason they hire the inexperienced Eric to go to the south of France to bring Abel back to Paris is that none of them is willing to take the risk of doing so himself, the first indication of their ambivalence toward their former ally. When the police locate them and press them to betray Abel, they must grapple directly with the conflicting demands of loyalty and self-preservation.

Abel, by contrast, is an idealist for whom the concept of loyalty is absolute, and in the young Eric he finds a man who shares this attitude, in a sense a younger version of himself who becomes his protégé. In this way, the film resembles those Westerns where the hero finds that his ethos has become outdated and that his inability to adapt to changing times dooms him. Of course, from the beginning of the film there is already the strong air of fatalism endemic to the genre—Abel's status as a wanted criminal and condemned man, the unsuccessful heist, the botched escape, the dependence on unreliable allies, his increasing desperation as the police close in.

As Abel, Lino Ventura is flawless. He combines ruthlessness with honor, toughness with sensitivity in the same way as exemplars of this type of role like Humphrey Bogart and Jean Gabin. Ventura's Abel accepts his fate with the stoicism of the classic film noir antihero, while still persisting in his futile attempts to avoid the circumstances ensnaring him, playing the game right up until the end even though there is little doubt of its outcome. Sautet's direction is also admirable. Unlike Melville, he was not a specialist in this type of film, yet he seems perfectly comfortable with the genre. Classe Tous Risques might not be as well known as more familiar examples of similar movies, but it compares favorably with the best of them and is certainly worth seeking out by anyone with an affinity for French film noir of this era.

The Lady from Shanghai (1948)

***
Country: US
Director: Orson Welles

What a dilemma The Lady from Shanghai provokes. Orson Welles is in my directors' pantheon, so I want to like the movie more than I do. Individual parts of it contain moments of great brilliance, originality, and imagination—all the things I admire in Welles. But as a whole the film lacks coherence. The result is that it seems better in retrospect than it does during the actual watching of it. I suppose that's because memory can be selective, focusing on the best things in the movie, whereas while watching it I'm constantly aware of its flaws.

The paradox is that this failure to cohere both is and isn't Welles's fault. His original cut was taken out of his hands, tinkered with for nearly two years by Columbia, and reduced by about an hour before being released. Yet if Welles had shown more artistic self-control and greater ability to follow through on the project—problems that seemed to plague his entire career as a director—maybe the studio powers wouldn't have felt compelled to take the movie away from him and reshape it. Some of Welles's movies managed to withstand such tampering. The Magnificent Ambersons was revised by people who were sympathetic to the elegiac mood he had aimed for and able to preserve that mood more or less intact. Touch of Evil was a brilliant movie in its original release version and improved even further in the 1998 version after being re-edited according to Welles's notes. The Lady from Shanghai was not so fortunate as those two films, and the greatness that comes through so clearly in its best parts must forever remain a potentiality, a frustrating tease to admirers of Welles like me.

The plot of the movie is in the classic film noir mold of the late 1940s. A loner, Michael O'Hara (Welles), an Irish seaman who fought in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists, meets a beautiful, mysterious woman by chance one night in New York. The woman, Elsa Bannister (a rather enervated Rita Hayworth, her normal ardor damped down by her cropped, icy blonde hair), is trapped in an unhappy marriage to an older man (Everett Sloane, who's terrific—alternately sinister and funny). Her husband, a rich, brilliant criminal defense lawyer, has some kind of hold over her and has apparently blackmailed her into marriage. She also believes she's in danger and seeks O'Hara's protection while at the same time obviously coming on to him.

At first he resists her advances then finds himself lured into signing on as a seaman on the yacht (tellingly named the Circe) she and her husband are sailing from New York to San Francisco. Soon he is not only her protector but her lover. To get the money to run away with her, he agrees to a very unlikely scheme proposed by the husband's business partner (Glenn Anders, who with his flamboyant performance manages to steal every scene he's in) that involves O'Hara's helping him fake his suicide. Of course, nothing in the situation is what it seems: the true purpose of the shady scheme is entirely different from what O'Hara has been told, Elsa is just as likely a manipulative opportunist as a helpless victim, and O'Hara is soon set up as a fall guy and framed for murder.

The plot is really just a framework for a series of elaborately photographed and edited set pieces. It's questionable whether the rather conventional plot merits such stylistic exuberance, but I for one am willing to accept this as a way to add visual appeal and the veneer of substance to an intriguing but superficial melodrama. The opening sequence in Central Park and the streets of New York, the beach party in Mexico so reminiscent of the picnic in Citizen Kane, the aquarium scenes, the Chinese opera in Chinatown in San Francisco, the finale at the amusement park Fun House culminating in the famous shoot-out in the Hall of Mirrors—these are all justly renowned and leave an indelible impression.

And yet as I watched, I found myself wanting more. While these set pieces can be enjoyed as eye-catching ends in themselves, I kept craving greater narrative coherence. It's clear that the extensive re-editing and reduction of the film's length weakened it. It has a jumpy, decidedly unfluid feel to it, lurching ungracefully from one segment to the next. This air of fragmentation does nothing for the opaque plot. In its final form, the movie is the Last Year at Marienbad of film noir—arty eye candy with a nearly impenetrable plot. In Marienbad that's just fine because it's the whole point of the film. But The Lady from Shanghai is a conventional mystery, the kind of story that doesn't completely satisfy unless it can untangle its snarled plot and offer a lucid explanation of mystifying events. The surviving version of the movie just doesn't adequately do that.

The astounding Hall of Mirrors finale was perhaps intended as an allusion to the convolutions of the film's plot, and the final shattering of the mirrors to signify the return to order from a state of deception and illusion. But the memory of this sequence most viewers retain is of multiple reflections fragmenting into yet more reflections, not the simple reality of the final images. That is in a way appropriate, for even though its many exhilarating moments give tantalizing glimpses of what might have been had Welles been able to see the film through to completion, in the end The Lady from Shanghai delivers not clarity, but confusion—beautiful confusion, but confusion nevertheless.

Black Angel (1946)

***
Country: US
Director: Roy William Neill

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) was an American author who after writing several unsuccessful literary novels in the 1920s and 30s turned to genre writing and, sometimes publishing under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley, became a prolific writer in the thriller and mystery genres. His eerie, convoluted tales, whose surprise endings were often based on far-fetched psychological premises, proved to be ideal fodder for the movies of the 1940s and early 50s, and according to Wikipedia more screenplays for films noirs (apparently using a pretty broad definition of the term) were adapted from his works than from those of any other writer. As a failed writer of serious literature, he reportedly had little respect for these commercial novels and short stories, considering them little more than potboilers. But he was unquestionably successful at producing them and earned a comfortable living from their sale. Robert Siodmak's early film noir The Phantom Lady was based on one of his novels as was The Leopard Man, one of the Val Lewton horror films. In the late 1960s François Truffaut made two movies adapted from his work, The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid. Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window was an elaboration on Woolrich's short story "It Had to Be Murder."

In 1946 Universal released a nifty little psychological noir called Black Angel, based on Woolrich's 1943 novel of the same title. The film is essentially a murder mystery that centers on the killing of a blackmailing floozie named Mavis Marlowe. The two main characters of the film are a former nightclub singer, Cathy Bennett (June Vincent)—whose husband, Mavis's former lover and one of her blackmail victims, is arrested for the murder, then convicted on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to die—and Mavis's ex-husband, the alcoholic songwriter Martin Blair (Dan Duryea). Cathy is convinced that her husband, whom she still loves even though he was cheating on her with Mavis, is innocent and persuades Martin to join forces with her to find the real murderer. As the execution date draws nearer, the two locate intriguing clues that at first seem to be drawing them closer to the real killer but always end up leading them down blind alleys.

The most promising clues have to do with the shady owner of a nightclub, Marko (Peter Lorre), another of Mavis's blackmail victims. To get more information about Marko, Cathy and Martin audition for, and get, a job performing at Marko's club as a singer and piano accompanist. A great deal of the action takes place at the club, and highlights include their humorous audition—a bizarre touch of black comedy in an otherwise somber movie—a couple of good song performances, some imaginative camera work in the eye-poppingly elaborate nightclub set, and a very suspenseful sequence with Cathy trying to burgle the safe in Marko's private office before he returns.

The cast is uniformly good. The attractive, sweet-natured Vincent is a bit lacking in charisma but still makes a determined heroine and is quite a good singer too. This was the biggest movie role she ever got, but she did a great deal of work in television in the 1950s and 60s. Lorre, of course, is a reliably sinister presence. Broderick Crawford, in one of his first roles after military service in WW II, plays the detective investigating the murder, and his performance is a revelation. He acts with uncharacteristic restraint, giving the quietest, most controlled, and most sympathetic performance I've ever seen by him. This movie makes it clear that Crawford's physique and vocal timbre resulted in typecasting that severely limited the range of characters he was allowed to play. Best of all is Duryea, whose atypically introspective performance is quite affecting. Duryea made a career of playing despicable rats in movies like Scarlet Street and Winchester '73, and he was great in those roles. But this film makes it clear that, like Crawford, he was capable of much more. He succinctly underplays his part and convincingly comes off as a nice guy. He is in a sense the real victim of the movie—a hapless loser whose creativity is stifled by his alcoholism, a man in love first with a woman who despises and exploits him, then as he falls in love with Cathy, with a woman who cannot return his affection.

This was the last film directed by Roy William Neill (he died in 1946), best known for Universal's Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone. Like the best of those movies, Black Angel shows him as a craftsman-like director capable of finding and revealing the strengths and subtleties in his material and especially suited to atmospheric stories of crime and suspense. If he had lived longer, he might well have become one of the more dependable directors of the American noir movement of the late 1940s.

In a Lonely Place (1950)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Nicholas Ray

It's taken me more than one viewing to warm completely to In a Lonely Place. In the film Humphrey Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter who finally gets the chance to work on an adaptation of a best-selling novel. Unfortunately, the novel is clearly trash, and the assignment clearly hack work. Still, it just might jumpstart his failed career. After Dix is wrongfully implicated in the murder of a hatcheck girl from the Hollywood bar he frequents, he begins a romance with Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), a neighbor in the Hollywood bungalow court where he lives, who gives him an alibi but isn't really sure he's innocent. (Grahame, who was married to Nicholas Ray at the time, is quite good in one of her rare lead roles—watch the way emotions subtly register on her face in close-ups.) To complicate matters further, during the war Dix was the commanding officer of the detective investigating the murder (Frank Lovejoy), a man whose contented family life and straightforward view of the world are the opposite of Dix's isolation and tangle of confused attitudes.

I think what initially distanced me from the film is something I now see as one of its prime virtues—that while it contains elements of familiar genres of the time, in the end it doesn't really conform to any one of them. It resembles those pictures like A Star Is Born and Sunset Blvd. that show the unflattering side of Hollywood. Like those films, it depicts life in the motion picture industry as a precarious one where it is too often necessary to sell out to achieve career success, where success can turn to failure with one flop, where those branded as failures are shunned as pariahs. It is a story of postwar alienation, of a man who seems unable to return to civilian life and simply resume where he left off. It is also in part a murder mystery, a police procedural, and one of those films in the Hitchcock/Lang vein that show a falsely accused man trapped in a web of circumstance. It is at the same time the story of an unlikely romance between two people very different from each other. Yet the film never settles completely into any of these predictable genres.

Equally unpredictable and category-defying is Bogart's interpretation of Dix. In the end, though, it is his character that ties all those disparate elements together, for ultimately the movie is a character study of one of the most intricate and compelling men to be found in films of the era, a man whose personal and professional lives have hit bottom and whose greatest obstacle to his way back is himself. Bogart makes the most of the role and delivers one of his most intriguing performances. He seems to bring something of nearly every part he had ever played to Dix. With his sudden rages and explosive aggression, Dix can be as scary as any of Bogart's early gangsters, even though these outbursts are always followed by remorse. Dix is as coldly cynical as Bogart's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, as disappointed and bitter—but still susceptible to the allure of love—as his Rick in Casablanca, at times as caustically witty as his Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. This is a man whose self-loathing is projected onto the entire world around him and whose mistrust of other people approaches the paranoia of Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Yet Dix is not merely a synthesis of Bogart's previous roles, but rather a unique creation that advances Bogey's screen persona further into anguish and ambiguity than he had ever taken it before.

By the end of the movie, most of Dix's problems have sorted themselves out. But the one thing that can't be put right is his relationship with Laurel. His need to control her—his suspicion, possessiveness, and demands for total, unquestioning loyalty—eventually prove too much for her. "Dix doesn't act like a normal person. . . . I'm scared. I don't trust him," she finally admits, realizing the relationship is doomed. Cleared of a murder charge and with his script finally completed, Dix may be a free man with a revived career. But that freedom and success will not be shared. Dix is a man driven by self-destructive inner forces beyond his control, a man destined to be marooned by his own inability to trust others.

Raw Deal (1948)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann

From the mesmerizing opening sequence, it's clear that Raw Deal is something special. A car pulls up to a fortified fence labeled "State Prison" and as the gates open, we hear, over eerie theremin music, Claire Trevor in an ominous voice-over: "This is the day . . . the last time I shall drive up to these gates." As she walks down a long hallway, dressed entirely in black and wearing a black widow's veil, cocooned in silence except for the click of her high-heeled shoes on the floor, she continues, "I don't know which sounds louder—my heels or my heart. It's always like this when I come to see him." The man she has come to visit is her lover, Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe), and very soon he will be escaping from prison to claim his share of the loot from the robbery for which he has been jailed.

The escape from the prison in Oregon has been engineered by a vicious hoodlum named Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr), the man Joe worked for and for whom he has taken the rap. From his headquarters in Corkscrew Alley in San Francisco, Rick has dispatched his henchmen, Fantail (John Ireland) and Spider, to make sure the jailbreak will fail. But Rick's plans to get rid of Joe go awry when Joe takes hostage Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt), the secretary of the lawyer who was arranging a parole for him, and pursued by both the state police and Fantail and Spider, sets off with the two women on an odyssey to San Francisco to find his double-crossing ex-partner, get his money, and leave the country.

Raw Deal is one of several films noirs that director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton made in the late 1940s, and to my mind the best of them, an underappreciated gem that approaches the caliber of the best examples of the genre from this period. Martin Scorsese, in his film A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), cites the Mann-Alton collaborations as notable films of the time, ones that with their distinctive style and visual atmosphere had a huge impact on him as a young moviegoer and later as a film director. On the basis of this movie, I would say that his admiration is clearly justified. For one thing, Raw Deal is a brilliantly edited movie. With its fluid alternation of close-ups, medium shots, and long shots, and its creative combining of sound and image, it is virtually a textbook of film editing. Even more impressive is Alton's photography. Masterfully executed lighting effects, stunning use of deep focus, creative alternation of the static and moving camera, inventive camera placement (with the camera often mounted very low looking sharply up, or very high looking sharply down)—again the film is virtually a textbook of cinematography.

Another virtue of Raw Deal is the way Mann tells the story in such a dynamically visual way. The film contains several standout set pieces. During a stop along the way, at an isolated taxidermy business on the beach in northern California called Grimshaw's, O'Keefe has a long, very physical fight with Ireland in a back room full of stuffed animals, the lengthy scene filmed in near-darkness (above). In a sequence that predates Fritz Lang's The Big Heat by several years, Burr hurls a dish of flaming cognac in the face of a woman in a restaurant after she bumps into him and spills her drink on his jacket. (This is filmed by having Burr appear to toss the flaming liquid directly at the camera—actually probably at a pane of glass in front of the camera.) "She should've been more careful," he says nonchalantly afterward! The movie's finale, a nighttime confrontation and shootout in Corkscrew Alley as Burr watches from a window above, is another stunner. For any fan of American film noir, Raw Deal is simply a must-see.

High Sierra (1941)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Raoul Walsh

In 1936 Humphrey Bogart got a contract at Warner Bros. on the basis of his sizzling performance as the gangster Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. For the next five years Warners couldn't figure out what to do with him, typecasting him as a vicious thug in pictures like Dead End (1937) or giving him roles for which he was clearly unsuited, like the stableman (complete with unsteady Irish brogue) besotted with Bette Davis in Dark Victory (1939). It wasn't until Bogart got the lead in High Sierra (a part he campaigned hard for after several other actors turned it down) that he got a role which allowed him to showcase the paradoxical qualities of toughness and vulnerability in the same character that later became a trademark of his screen persona. The movie made him a star.

In High Sierra Bogart plays Roy "Mad Dog" Earle, a jailed criminal who has seen better days. His former gang boss bribes corrupt officials to pardon Earle so that he can lead one last big heist, a jewel robbery at a swanky mountain resort in California, that will set them up for the rest of their lives. From the beginning, it's clear the plan has big problems. The inside man at the resort (an unrecognizable Cornel Wilde) is clearly unreliable. The two men who are supposed to help Earle in the robbery are rebellious and, worse, at odds over a woman (Ida Lupino) who ends up falling for Earle. And Earle becomes enamored of a handicapped young woman (Joan Leslie) he meets on the way to California who doesn't return his affection but is willing to let him pay for a healing operation before dumping him.

The screenplay was co-written by John Huston. High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, which Huston wrote and directed later the same year and which also starred Bogart, are seminal forerunners of film noir, the genre that dominated American films of the late 1940s and early 1950s and was a huge influence on the French New Wave. These two pictures are the transitional works between the two studio genres that prefigure noir—the gangster movie and the private detective movie—and full-blown film noir of the postwar period. Between them they contain most of the key elements of film noir: a self-sufficient outsider as the movie's hero, criminal activities (High Sierra's focus on a heist anticipates noir masterpieces like The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing as well as countless other examples of the genre from the late 40s and early 50s), treacherous comrades, lurking danger, pervasive cynicism, and external circumstances that lead to a tragic outcome from which there is no escape. Add to the proto-noir sensibility of these two movies the high-contrast Expressionistic look of Citizen Kane, also released in 1941, and a good case could be made that this was the year American film noir was born.

Aside from its importance as a defining moment in Bogart's career and in film noir, High Sierra is tremendously entertaining. Bogart lands on his feet in this movie, and as an actor he never faltered again. (Although plainly the main character, Bogart was second-billed after costar Ida Lupino and even received a lower salary, an indication of his status at Warners at the time and of the studio's uncertainty about him as a leading man. After this picture, he would always receive top billing.) Lupino, whose character, like Bogart's, is at once gutsy and sensitive, expertly conveys these contradictory traits. Like Bogart, she would become a specialist in this kind of role. Raoul Walsh's direction is typically forceful, creating a vivid atmosphere of isolation and doom against the landscapes of the Sierra Nevada. The end of the movie—as Bogart drives higher and higher into the mountains, pursued by the police, and the trap tightens—goes beyond the Production Code stricture that crime must be punished and pushes into the noir concept of a flawed but somehow noble man betrayed by people and by fate.

On Dangerous Ground: A Neglected Masterwork by Nicholas Ray

The American film director Nicholas Ray (1911-1979) was little appreciated during his heyday in Hollywood in the 1950s. But in 1950s France the young movie critics and future filmmakers of the original Cahiers du Cinéma generation revered him as the epitome of the American auteur, the kind of director who managed to transcend the safe impersonality of studio-financed genre pictures and leave on them his own personal stamp. His films were a huge influence on the early directors of the French New Wave. Jean-Luc Godard went so far as to state, "Le cinéma, c'est Nicholas Ray" ("Nicholas Ray is cinema").

Ray's best known films are Rebel Without a Cause (1955), his masterpiece, the movie that made James Dean a star and contains his defining performance as the alienated teenager Jim Stark; the tremendously entertaining Johnny Guitar (1954), Ray's bizarrely stylized, almost Gothic take on the Western; In a Lonely Place (1950), in which Ray revealed the darkest, most sinister side of Hollywood and of Humphrey Bogart (his Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Capt. Queeg in The Caine Mutiny notwithstanding); and Ray's first film, They Live by Night (1949), one of the great films noirs of the late 1940s, a hybrid of romance and fatalism, with its young bank robber and his lover doomed from the beginning, and a clear influence on early French New Wave films as well as the later Bonnie and Clyde. The Criterion release in 2010 of Bigger Than Life (1956), with its brilliant performance by James Mason as a teacher driven to madness by the side effects of a new drug, drew renewed attention to yet another of Ray's best films.

Alongside these movies stands a film of equal merit in Ray's oeuvre, On Dangerous Ground (1952). (It was actually made in 1950 but wasn't released for two years, while RKO tinkered with the film, shortening it by about ten minutes and forcing Ray to shoot a new, more upbeat ending.) This is a movie of more subtle appeal than those better-known works. Quieter, less dense, and less quirky, it nonetheless has many of the same virtues and thematic preoccupations as those films and really should be considered one of Ray's key works.

The main character of On Dangerous Ground is a police detective in an unnamed big city, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan, in one of his rare lead roles, giving one of the very best performances of his impressive career). Like the main characters in so many of Ray's films, Wilson suffers from a profound sense of alienation from other people and from his environment. The opening sequence of the movie emphasizes his status as a loner with little connection to life except through his job. It begins without explanation after dark with a middle-aged man whose wife is helping him strap on a holstered gun under his suit jacket. He then drives to a suburban house where another middle-aged man, watching television with his children, is being helped into a holster and gun by his wife. The scene then switches to a shabby studio apartment where Ryan stands alone before a mirror strapping on his gun and holster and waits for the other two men to pick him up. These three could easily be criminals preparing for a heist. But they aren't: they're a team of police detectives reporting to the precinct before going out on night patrol.

For the next twenty minutes or so, the movie follows them around dark city streets as they look for a pair of criminals. It is soon clear that Wilson is more than just an upholder of the law. He channels all of his hostility and disillusionment into his job. This is a man with such a grudge against the world that he is close to being a brutal sadist—"a gangster with a badge," as his commanding officer describes him at one point. His two colleagues don't approve of his vigilante approach to law enforcement, but they understand how the job has corroded his sense of ethics. "All we ever see is crooks, murderers, stoolies, dames. . . . 'Til you find out it's different, it's kind of a lonely life," explains one of his partners to the other. And that statement exactly foreshadows what will happen during the course of the movie: Wilson will find out that there is more to life than what he experiences daily and by reconnecting to others will reconnect to himself and to the larger world.

After Wilson becomes too violent with a small-time criminal, his chief sees the need to get him out of the way for a while and sends him out of the city and into a remote mountain area to help the sheriff there investigating a killing. At this point the movie shifts gears completely, and it is this sudden change that leads Wilson to his epiphany. The victim of the killing is a young girl, and Wilson soon becomes completely involved not in helping the sheriff apprehend the suspected killer, but in controlling the girl's grief-stricken father, who is determined to track down the murderer himself and kill him. This vigilantism is too much even for Wilson, and he finds himself accompanying the grieving and enraged father to prevent him from carrying out his intentions. The father, Walter Brent, is played by Ward Bond. If you are used to seeing him playing innocuous bit roles or providing cornball comedy relief in John Ford movies, you will be surprised at the malevolence he conveys in this part, as a man driven by the obsessive need for revenge.

When their car runs off a snowy road and overturns, the pair must continue their pursuit of the suspected killer on foot, and this leads them to an isolated ranch where a young blind woman, Mary Malden, lives. The men suspect her of harboring the criminal. Although she denies it, she is sheltering him, and he is her mentally disturbed, possibly autistic, young brother. Mary is played by Ida Lupino, and like Bond she is quite effective here playing against type. There is no abrasiveness or neuroticism—traits that Lupino was expert at conveying—in this character. And it is her gentleness, sensitivity, and caring nature that give Lupino's Beauty the power to tame Ryan's Beast.

Much in Ray's movies is built around the concept of contrast and opposition. Sometimes this is simple interpersonal conflict: between the teenagers and their parents and other adults in Rebel, between Joan Crawford and her nemesis Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar. Sometimes the conflict is more generalized: between Bogart and the Hollywood system in In a Lonely Place, between the criminal young lovers and the law in They Live by Night. In On Dangerous Ground, the main conflict is between people. This conflict, though, is not strictly personal, but rather between personality types and the ways those types view the world.

Andrew Sarris writes that "Robert Ryan [suffers from] disillusion with mankind in On Dangerous Ground," and I would say that is a succinct and accurate summation of Jim Wilson's persona. But Wilson himself seems unaware of the true nature of his discontent, so focused is he on the corruption he witnesses around him. When he returns to his dreary, anonymous apartment after his shift ends, the first thing he does is go to the basin and wash his hands. Then he looks at them in disgust and washes them a second time—this time even more vigorously, as if trying to scrub away all the vileness he has been exposed to for the last several hours. He almost seems to be trying to strip away the contaminated skin from his own hands.

Wilson gains perspective about himself only after he leaves his familiar environment and is exposed to Jim Brent, the murdered girl's father, and Mary Malden, the killer's protective sister. These characters hold a mirror up to Wilson, forcing him to examine himself and consider for the first time what everyone else seems to realize about him—that his dissatisfaction with life is destroying him by creating an impenetrable barrier between him and the rest of the world.

Brent shows Wilson what he might ultimately become if he does not change the course he is on, how hatred, no matter what its origin, can become all-consuming. In Brent he sees someone whose rage is even greater than his own. Recognizing the destructive ugliness of himself reflected and magnified in Malden, he comes to realize that his own brutality makes him little different from those he despises. Instead of needing to be restrained himself, he is called on to become the restraining force on Brent, and this unaccustomed role reveals to him a side of himself of which he has been unaware. He sees that his rage fueled by disillusion can be controlled, indeed must be controlled, if he is not to become the monster he sees in Brent.

Mary also becomes a catalyst that causes Wilson to discover within himself a part of his personality that is new to him. Wilson's rigid, judgmental hostility is contrasted with Mary's gentle passivity and loyalty to her brother. Mary's selflessness and protective behavior show Wilson that it is possible to love something that is flawed. It allows him to accept imperfection and shows him that his intolerance of imperfection in the world around him is really a projection of his self-loathing and inability to accept his own flawed nature. And although Mary is quite independent and capable, she still brings out the protective instinct in Wilson. When he perceives that the beauty and nobility in her are the result of the tempering of her strength with gentleness, he is able to reconcile these opposing parts of his own personality.

Brent makes Wilson realize that his intolerance and lack of self-control are actually signs of weakness, while Mary makes him see that there is strength in tolerance, self-restraint, and empathy. If in classical tragedy the hero is brought down by some kind of imbalance in his personality, an exaggeration of some characteristic in his makeup that throws him off-center, then Wilson is in a way a tragic hero doomed by the excesses of his own nature. Yet despite its dark veneer, On Dangerous Ground is ultimately about tragedy averted, for Wilson's encounters with Brent and Mary cause a kind of balance to be restored within him and permit him to avoid a tragic fate.

As with the three main characters, Ray pursues his preoccupation with contrast and opposition in the settings of the film, and it is in this purely visual element of the movie that Ray shows how truly cinematic is his way of telling a story on film. "Few other directors had such a sense of the effect of locations and interiors on people's lives, or the visual or emotional relationship between indoors and outdoors," writes David Thomson. On Dangerous Ground could serve as an illustration of that statement.

In the opening sequence in which the three detectives gather, Ray uses their homes to tell us important things about them and in particular about Ryan's character, Jim Wilson. One of Wilson's colleagues lives is an apartment with his wife. The other is first seen in his suburban living room watching television with his four children. But the place where Wilson lives forms quite a contrast with the homey environments of his colleagues. For one thing, it is clear that he lives alone. It is also clear that he lives in a rented room in a rooming house; the presence of the wash basin in the room suggests a shared bathroom down the hall. This is a bleak, impersonal place, an ascetic environment inhabited by someone living a solitary existence, like a monk or even a prisoner.

As Wilson and his partners cruise around those city streets at night, we get a clear impression of darkness and squalor. This is archetypal film noir territory—damp urban streets illuminated by dim pools of light from streetlamps and by the garish neon signs of the sleazy bars and flophouses that line them. The buildings densely crowded together and looming over the level of the streets from which they are filmed, along with the cramped interiors of the seedy places Wilson visits searching for criminals, create an atmosphere that feels enclosed and oppressive. Everyone seems to be hemmed in, almost penned up. What a visual and atmospheric contrast the last two-thirds of the movie is, then. As soon as Wilson leaves the city, the film takes on a feeling of openness and space, and the stony, man-made harshness of the city is replaced with soft, flowing, snowy landscapes broken only by the occasional conifer. The perpetual night of the city is replaced here by natural light reflected everywhere.

The extended sequence in which Ryan and Bond pursue the killer on foot through this snowy landscape is one of the most striking in the entire movie. This sequence contains virtually no dialogue or interaction between the two. It is all motion, just the images of their tiny, dark figures, filmed largely in long shot, crossing the vast, white screen. What the sequence does have, though, is the powerful music of Bernard Herrmann, which reaches its peak here, a kind of tone poem of perpetual motion that prefigures Herrmann's later scores for Hitchcock in Vertigo and North by Northwest. This is cinema of absolute simplicity and purity. And every element in these austere landscapes suggests liberation just as strongly as the earlier cityscapes suggested confinement.

Just as striking is the farmhouse Mary Malden lives in, at which Wilson and Brent arrive near dark and end up spending the night. What a contrast this house is to both Wilson's cheerless room in the city and the by-now freezing outdoors. This is a house that wraps its inhabitants in a womb-like atmosphere. Everything about it is warm and cozy: the wood from which it is constructed, the soft light from the oil lamps, the fire burning in an open fireplace, the comfortable furniture. Things that seem a little odd about the house are quickly explained by Mary's blindness. The pot of ivy hanging in the middle of the main room just below the height of her head and immediately in front of a large doorway, the little glass wind chime beside the front door that tinkles in the draft every time the door is opened, the large piece of curved, polished wood near the fireplace—these are all cues to guide the blind woman through the house. This house is a threat-free zone, a place of refuge and security.

In the end, both the environment and the people he meets during his sojourn work their spell on Wilson. He is a man redeemed. The pat ending in which Wilson abruptly turns around on his way back to the city and returns to Mary, who having rejecting him changes her mind—an ending apparently imposed on Ray by the studio—is the only thing in the movie that doesn't quite ring true. But this is a minor quibble. The rest of the movie is a remarkable blend of realistic romanticism and detached cynicism, the exact blend of opposed but complementary attitudes found in Ray's best movies.

Brief Reviews: Film Noir, Am&#233ricain et Fran&#231ais

THE DARK CORNER (1946) ***
If you've ever yearned to see Lucille Ball in a film noir, this movie, directed by Henry Hathaway, will give you the chance. Lucy plays Kathleen Stewart, secretary to a P.I. who has just opened an office in New York City, Brad Galt (Mark Stevens). In no time at all Galt tangles with a crew of weird, menacing characters. One is his former partner, Anthony Jardine, who had Galt framed in San Francisco and sent to prison. Jardine is now a lawyer and one of his clients is Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb), the owner of a ritzy art gallery, whose much younger wife is having an affair with Jardine. We know this because in their first scene together the radio in the background is playing "The More I See You (the More I Want You)." In fact, the movie is filled with ambient sound—music from orchestras or juke boxes heard through open doorways of night clubs and bars or on radios and phonographs in rooms, and street noise of all kinds, including traffic and the rumble of subway trains, heard even through open windows when the action moves indoors. In a moment of bizarre contrast, a lovely version of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo" plays while a brutal murder is taking place.

Galt is framed for the murder of his former partner, and Lucy, who has fallen in love with Galt, must help him find the real killer before the police find him. I love Lucy, but she doesn't seem ideally cast here. She handles with aplomb the wisecracking banter with Galt as she deflects his sexual advances at the beginning of the movie, but after that her character becomes a bit bland and she doesn't really get the chance to shine. Stevens doesn't have enough heft as an actor to put across his cynical lines, which sound like they come directly from a Raymond Chandler novel. They really need somebody more forceful, like Humphrey Bogart. Webb is delightful, spouting arch witticisms like "The enjoyment of art is the only remaining ecstasy that is neither illegal nor immoral" (actually a variation on a quip by Robert Benchley).

But the whole movie has an air of familiarity, from the predictable plot to the well-worn characters, including Webb, channeling his Waldo Lydecker from Laura, and William Bendix, playing a thuggish P.I., who seems to be reprising his role in The Glass Key. One element, though, dominates the movie: Joe MacDonald's astonishing cinematography, a perfect exemplar of the film noir look. I've seldom seen a movie shot with such high-contrast lighting. This is a black-and-white film in the most literal sense, a film with virtually no tonal gradation: the blacks and shadows are as dark, and the whites as bright, as imaginable, with few shades of gray in between. This extreme lighting, along with the use of mirrors and windows as recurring visual motifs, gives the film great visual appeal. One final note: the set decorators should be commended for their audacity in furnishing the Cathcart Gallery. It is as full of art treasures as the National Gallery in London or the Louvre, filled with Rembrandts, Gainsboroughs, Van Goghs, even Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.

BORN TO KILL (1947) ***½
A few months ago, in his blog Maximum Strength Mick, San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle asked his readers what they would present as guest programmers on Turner Classic Movies. I chose four undervalued genre pictures from the studio era, and for my film noir I chose this movie. Directed by Robert Wise in a less genre-influenced style than his later near-classic The Set-Up (which I previously reviewed at The Movie Projector), it nonetheless has several effectively atmospheric sequences, especially one that takes place on a foggy night in a remote area of the dunes at the beach. Despite Wise's restrained direction, the movie's plot and characters unmistakably make it a noir.

It opens in Reno, where Helen Trent (Claire Trevor, in an atypically posh role) is just completing her divorce. On her last night in town, at a casino she encounters a man, Sam Wild (!) (Lawrence Tierney), whose good looks and sexual charisma spark her interest. Little does she know he is a paranoid psychopath dating another resident (Isabel Jewell) of the boarding house where she has been staying and that later that night he will savagely murder both Jewell and the man she has been two-timing him with. When Helen discovers the bodies in the kitchen of the boarding house, she calmly walks around to the front door, enters the house, and calls the train depot to reserve a seat on tomorrow's train to San Francisco, where she lives. Later she explains that she didn't call the police because "it's a lot of bother." Within ten minutes the tone of the movie has been established by the gory double murder, and the corrupt nature of its two main characters clearly revealed by their roles in it. When Wild boldly picks up Helen at the train station the next day and follows her back to San Francisco, we can see where the plot is heading: it is inevitable that these two forces—he all uncontrolled impulse and she all cold calculation—will collide like matter and anti-matter, creating an explosive reaction that after minor detonations along the way will end in mutual annihilation.

Along for the ride is a great supporting cast. Esther Howard, who had small roles in seven films directed by Preston Sturges, plays the blowsy, beer-guzzling landlady of the boarding house in Reno. Walter Slezak plays the sly P.I. she hires to track down the killer. Best of all, Elisha Cook, Jr. plays Wild's best friend, Marty, for five years his roommate and protector. After finding out about the double murder in Reno, he patiently tells Wild, "You can't just go around killin' people when the notion strikes you. It's not feasible" and explains exactly what must be done to avoid getting caught. To say that there is an implicitly homoerotic element to the relationship between these two would be an understatement.

We can predict how the movie will end but not the twists and turns it will take on its way there, and watching the scenario play out to its inevitable end—witnessing the thrust-and-parry relationship between Trevor and Tierney as she attempts to control an essentially anarchic force—provides an hour and a half of immensely satisfying entertainment, especially for lovers of the genre.

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1955) ****
Although nearly unknown in the U.S. until recently, the French director Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) has long been recognized in Europe as a precursor of, and major influence on, the French New Wave. Traces of his style and sensibility are easily recognized in early works by Godard and Truffaut, especially Breathless (which incorporates references to the plot of Bob le Flambeur and even features a cameo by Melville) and Shoot the Piano Player. In fact, a convincing case could be made the Bob le Flambeur is actually the first movie of the New Wave.

This is a heist movie—a type of film considered by many a sub-genre of film noir—in the vein of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing, but I would say that as good as those movies are, Bob le Flambeur is even better. Even though it is a heist movie—the object is the casino at Deauville—the plan for the heist isn't hatched until well into the movie, and the (naturally) unsuccessful heist never actually happens. The movie clearly occupies film noir territory with its almost exclusively nocturnal action; its cast of petty crooks, hustlers, gamblers, and gendarmes who keep tabs on them; and its settings in bars, night clubs, card rooms, race tracks, and casinos both legal and illegal. The whole movie has an aura of life lived on the edge, outside of conventional society and in an atmosphere of risk and unpredictability. Over all hangs an air of fatalism, of men and women driven by internal forces to behave in ways that will inevitably lead to their doom.

Movies of this type invariably have an ensemble cast of colorful characters, but here it is the main character, Bob Montagné, the flambeur or compulsive gambler of the title (he even keeps a one-armed bandit in a small closet in his living room just to amuse himself with), who lifts the story into the stratosphere. As portrayed by Roger Duchesne, Bob is a slick, sophisticated man, a middle-aged ex-con who enjoys the good things in life—a quality wardrobe, a snazzy American Plymouth convertible, and a cool bachelor pad with a loft and picture-window view of the Sacré-Coeur—and maintains his comfortable lifestyle through the tireless pursuit of all sorts of gambling coupled with an unshakable belief in his own good luck. For the first part of the movie, his good fortune always seems to hold. But around midway through, his luck turns and, broke, he is forced to devise the scheme to rob the casino. His plan, so complex and so intricately engineered down to the least detail, clearly indicates a formidable intelligence and organizational ability that channeled into legitimate pursuits would probably have made Bob a very rich businessman.

Melville directs with the flair and personal authority that would later come to be considered hallmarks of the New Wave directors. As well as the conventional flat cuts, dissolves, and fade-out/fade-ins, he revives transitional devices such as iris-ins, iris-outs, horizontal wipes, and at one point even a vertical wipe—just the kind of retro flourishes later used by Truffaut and Godard in their early films. He and his cinematographer, the great Henri Decaë, film the deserted early-morning streets of Paris and the dives frequented by his characters in a near-documentary way that makes the viewer feel like an observer of reality. Melville, who also co-wrote the movie, gives Bob a concisely revealed backstory and places him in situations—such as his avuncular interactions with both Paulo, his young protégé and the son of his former partner-in-crime and Anne, a foolish, uninhibited, but charming teenager living on the streets—that succinctly limn a fully developed, fascinating, and sympathetic character.

In typical noir fashion, the movie ends in irony: waiting for several hours in the casino for the robbery to begin, Bob whiles away the time gambling and manages to win a fortune. He doesn't really need the money any more and feels his self-confidence restored, yet he still carries through with the robbery even though he knows it is destined for failure. I can think of no other movie that so obviously acts as a transition between the American films noirs of the 1940's and early 50's and their offspring, the French New Wave films of the late 1950's and early 60's.

BREATHLESS (1959) ***
After watching this movie—one of the seminal films of the French New Wave—with friends the other night, I asked one (not a cinephile, just an ordinary movie watcher) what he thought of it. His answer: "Merde." I wouldn't go quite that far myself, but I must say that afterward I felt a distinct sense of letdown, a sort of cinematic petite mort. I have to confess that I have never been that fond of Jean-Luc Godard, the film's director. Although I had never seen Breathless before, I have seen several of the movies that immediately followed it. In each of those movies I found some things to like, but with the exception of Weekend (1967) and possibly Contempt (1963), they never struck me as unified works of art or even film narrative. And I always felt that they were keeping me at arm's distance, almost as though Godard was daring the viewer to tolerate his idiosyncrasies.

In Breathless, Godard has an annoying way of taking a stylistic quirk and repeating it ad nauseam. A couple of examples: 1) Those vaunted jump cuts. Exactly what was their purpose? Just to show that he could defy the conventions of film storytelling if he wanted to, as if he could by the power of his ego turn a flaw into a virtue and exhibit his individualism by a refusal to stick to the rules, even when there is a perfectly good reason for the rules? I could understand the cuts that covered major ellipses in the narrative to speed things along, but I found all the small jump cuts (or maybe jumpy cuts would be more accurate), when just a second or so of action was missing, to be distracting. 2) Belmondo's tic of rubbing his lips. Those are magnificent lips—in a way they are the real star of the movie. Is Godard trying to show what a narcissist Michel (the character Belmondo plays) is? The time he did this in front of Patricia's (Jean Seberg) dressing table mirror, I actually thought he was putting on some of her lipstick. These examples beg the question: At what point does novelty become tedium, cleverness become self-indulgence, hommage become pretension? The answer provided by this movie is, around the tenth repetition. But don't worry, you'll get the chance to see this answer confirmed by another ten or so repetitions.

So why watch Breathless? I can offer three reasons (hence the *** rating): 1) The film is historically important. Breathless is—along with The 400 Blows and Hiroshima, Mon Amour—one of the three earliest full-blown examples of the French New Wave, a movement that had tremendous impact on the history of film. 2) Several dazzling extended tracking shots by cinematographer Raoul Coutard, including a 360-degree shot of Seberg circling the room that is repeated a second time, then repeated again with Belmondo circling in the opposite direction. 3) Jean-Paul Belmondo. His performance is as revolutionary as Marlon Brando's in A Streetcar Named Desire—unique, charismatic, and completely riveting. From little more than a sketchy case study of a self-absorbed young man with severe personality disorder, he creates a compelling character. If you can stay with this movie—considered by many Godard's most accessible work—to the end, you might want to seek out more of his films. But as Breathless attests, be prepared to accept the inevitable annoyances and excesses of Godard to enjoy his moments of inspiration.

Brief Reviews

THE SET-UP (1949) ***½
The Set-Up recounts one crucial night in the life of a boxer, Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan). Although the film is steeped in the milieu of the world of professional boxing, that milieu is so deglamorized and so filtered through the film noir look and sensibility that the movie transcends the boxing genre to become one of the key examples of the noir genre of the late 1940's. At 72 minutes, The Set-Up is lean and concentrated. Every detail is selected by director Robert Wise and cinematographer Milton Krasner to create a focused noir ambiance. The film's harshly lit nocturnal underworld is bounded by the dilapidated Paradise City Arena (boxing Wednesdays, wrestling Fridays), the shabby Cozy Hotel where Thompson is staying, a tawdry penny arcade called The Fun Palace, and a seedy night club called Dreamland whose garish dance music can be heard every time the action moves outside or a door or window is opened.

Everyone in the movie is sleazy—the lowlife hustlers huddled in doorways or loitering on the sidewalks, the jaded, corrupt men who work at the arena, the vicious smalltime hoodlum who fixes fights, and especially the grotesques in the audience screaming for blood and mayhem. The boxers are portrayed as pathetic losers who start out as frightened kids and end up as punch-drunk burnouts. Somewhere near the end of this career arc is Stoker Thompson, who after twenty years in the ring is at the age of 35 considered over the hill. The one thing that keeps him going is the illusory belief that he is always just "one shot away" from a really important match that will make his dreams reality.

The climactic bout between Thompson and a much younger boxer that caps the movie—brilliantly staged, photographed by multiple cameras, and edited to emphasize its brutality and arduous physicality—was clearly an influence on Scorsese's Raging Bull. Robert Ryan, in one of his rare starring roles, is uncharacteristically sympathetic, a dreamer who refuses to admit that any chance of success faded long ago, a man who no matter how badly beaten always struggles back to keep on fighting. As he says, "If you're a fighter, you gotta fight." And he keeps right on fighting until the end of the movie, when the relentlessly bleak world he inhabits finally breaks and then discards him.

GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 (1933) ****
In the early 1930's Warner Bros. produced a series of musicals that established their own unique style, a down-to-earth working-class view of show business in keeping with the gritty movies the studio produced in other genres. The typical Warners musical features a story about the practical and financial problems of mounting an elaborate revue-like stage production. The musical highlights are the outlandish and often surreal production numbers of Busby Berkeley set to the songs of Al Dubin and Harry Warren as performed by Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, and Ginger Rogers.

The archetypal Warners musical is often considered to be 42nd Street (1933). But after seeing Gold Diggers of 1933 again recently, I would have to say that it is the better movie. The plot is constructed in such a way that rather than jamming all the production numbers into the last part of the movie as in 42nd Street and the similar Footlight Parade (1933), they are distributed throughout the movie, which opens with "We're in the Money" and concludes with "Forgotten Man," the latter perhaps the apotheosis of all Berkeley's production numbers. This results in a better balance, and more appealing mix, of music and plot. The plot itself adds new elements to the familiar "let's put on a show" story of other Warners musicals. It follows three showgirls as they pursue fame and romance—the innocent Polly (Ruby Keeler), the voluptuous and intelligent Carol (Joan Blondell), and the zany Trixie (a very funny Aline MacMahon, in a role reminiscent of Jack Lemmon's Daphne in Some Like It Hot). When these showgirls tangle with the members of a snobbish Boston family (Dick Powell, Warren William, and Guy Kibbee), it allows for the kind of pointed interaction between the working class and the privileged rich more typical of a Capra comedy.

The Great Depression is an integral part of the movie, both onstage and off, providing a more topical context than the standard Hollywood musical. And while other 1930's musicals are often suggestive, this one—made the year before the Production Code began to be enforced in earnest—is at times downright bawdy. Gold Diggers of 1933 has enough serious elements and enough depth of characterization to give it greater substance than one might expect, but it never forgets that it is primarily an entertainment, and a very lively and thoroughly enjoyable one. Also worth noting are the fluid camerawork of Warners house cinematographer Sol Polito and the eye-catching Art Deco sets of Anton Grot.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955) **½
In the 1950's the director Otto Preminger seemed deliberately to seek projects that challenged the Production Code. In The Moon Is Blue (1954) the offending subject was sex. In the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), an allegation of rape—a crime not supposed to be mentioned by name—played a large part. Advise and Consent (1962) was one of the first mainstream American movies to deal openly with homosexuality. In between these movies, Preminger tackled the taboo subject of heroin addiction in this film, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Because of the film's notoriety and its source material, I anticipated a work of harsh realism and ground-breaking maturity. What I found instead was a subject daring for its time framed in strictly conventional Hollywood terms. The whole movie is filmed on a studio set that represents a city block of a down-and-out Chicago neighborhood. But as impressive as this set is, its resemblance to the real thing is superficial, its squalor relegated to a few suggestive touches.

Frank Sinatra plays Frankie Machine, who has just returned from a jail term and treatment for heroin addiction at the federal facility in Lexington, Kentucky. Faced with the stress of a neurotically possessive paraplegic wife (Eleanor Parker) who is obsessively jealous of a pretty downstairs neighbor (Kim Novak) and whom he doesn't love, and with constant inducements to return to his criminal cronies and resume his use of heroin, he must use all of his willpower to resist falling back into his former life. The casting of Arnold Stang as his best friend, Leonid Kinskey as a quack doctor, Robert Strauss as a petty hoodlum, and Darren McGavin as a heroin dealer makes the atmosphere closer to Damon Runyon than Nelson Algren. The details of his life seem a Hollywood version of sleaze, more imagined than observed. The restrained Novak is surprisingly good, while Parker gives a florid, old-style performance that seems anomalous given the modern subject matter. The melodramatic contrivances of the plot also seem curiously old-fashioned.

One definite plus is the cinematography of Sam Leavitt, whose camera glides elegantly around the set during Preminger's customary long, unedited takes, although in a sense that elegance seems incongruous with the grim nature of the story. Another plus is Elmer Bernstein's hard, brassy jazz score, although its jagged tone unintentionally emphasizes the flaccidity of other elements of the movie. The biggest plus is Frank Sinatra's earnest performance (which deservedly earned him an Oscar nomination), in which he convincingly portrays Frankie's desperation to be strong while battling his own inner weaknesses and external temptations. That performance alone makes the movie worth seeing, but aside from that, don't expect anything remotely resembling realism. This is a purely Hollywood approach to a social milieu the movie clearly doesn't have much understanding of.

PYGMALION (1938) ****
Anyone familiar with My Fair Lady (1964) should take a look at this film version of the play by George Bernard Shaw on which the later musical is based. It is an even better movie. The plot is essentially the same, as is much of the best dialogue—no great surprise, since the adaptation is by Shaw himself. Without interruptions for songs and with its brisker pacing, the wit of the dialogue and the social commentary of the plot are even more pronounced.

Leslie Howard, who co-directed the movie with Anthony Asquith, is splendid as Prof. Henry Higgins, not so effete as Rex Harrison but still a self-centered academic insensitive to the feelings of others. Howard, a trained stage actor, gave many fine dramatic movie performances (The Animal Kingdom, Of Human Bondage, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Petrified Forest, Intermezzo), but I've never seen a better one by him than his comic turn in Pygmalion. As Eliza Dolittle, Wendy Hiller, also a trained stage actress, demonstrates amazing range in an even more demanding role.

As Higgins attempts to transform Eliza from a coarse Cockney flower seller into the simulacrum of a lady, Hiller must show Eliza's innate intelligence and a growing awareness of the artificial nature of class distinction. In the scene where Eliza has tea with the mother of Prof. Higgins, Hiller, playing the scene absolutely deadpan, is riotously funny. When she tells off Higgins for his coldness and lack of response to her feelings, she does so with a fiery spirit reminiscent of the young Katharine Hepburn. And at the end she must show that the experience of a new lifestyle has so altered Eliza that she is riven with confusion and anxiety at no longer having any real identity. All this Hiller does wonderfully in a subtly nuanced performance that is the center of the movie. She expresses all the phases of her character's transformation without ever losing the continuity of the character, convincing us that all of this playing about with social identity and self-presentation is happening to a real person. It is simply an astounding piece of acting. Even if you are thoroughly familiar with My Fair Lady, Pygmalion—with its brilliant balance of entertainment and social satire—is a film not to be missed.