52 Pick Up

This underseen Elmore Leonard-penned project about a prominent LA industrialist blackmailed for his infidelity cruises through the seedy LA crime underworld in the same way Chinatown and other LA-based noir films before it. But as a time capsule of the decade, for better or worse, it’s also burdened with the vulgarities of 1980’s cinema.

Riot in Cell Block 11

Cinematic tough guy Don Siegel first exemplified himself as a director with vision with this razor sharp prison thriller, at once as a first-rate claustrophobic thriller but also as a critique of the inhumane conditions in US prison system at the time.

Shallow Grave

A sublime introduction to a consistently entertaining filmmaker in a genre (contemporary film noir) used by other great filmmakers (Coen Bros, Wachowski Bros – OK, debatable) as their first foray into feature films. With Boyle’s high energy style to burn, John Hodge’s cynical and laceratingly funny script and Ewan McGregor’s career launching first performance, Shallow Grave fits in well with the overachieving quality of other 1990s indie classics like Sex, Lies and Videotape, Hard Eight and Reservoir Dogs.

Shallow Grave (1994) dir. Danny Boyle
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccelston

We can’t help but watch Shallow Grave now without viewing it as a sort of testing ground for this filmmaking team’s more popular, successful and pop-culturally memorable second film, Trainspotting. From the opening first person confessionary voiceover to Leftfield's foot-tapping, head-bobbing club music we know we’re in the head of Danny Boyle and his writing partner, John Hodge. Like the four Edinburgh lads in Trainspotting, writer John Hodge introduces his three leads as a group of self-obsessed, slightly annoying Scottish hipsters whom we come to love for their forthright, don’t give a fuck attitude on life.

Here they’re interviewing prospective flatmates to make a foursome in their spacious top floor apartment complex. McGregor plays a lowly tabloid writer, Alex Law; Kerry Fox is a demure but alluring doctor; and Eccelston plays David a workaholic lawyer. However assholish it may be, we can't help but indentify with the obsessive, condescending critique of the roll call of losers and weirdos showing up to be considered as a flatmate. They eventually find their mate in a handsome, mysterious gentleman whose cool demeanor easily breaks through the wall of insecurity of the threesome. However, it doesn't take long before the trio find him dead of an overdose in his bed. Before they can call the cops they find a briefcase full of money, ready for the taking.

It wouldn't be a movie if they didn't take the money, dismember and bury the body in a ‘shallow grave’, and agree to keep quiet before splitting the cash. Eventually, a pair of Scottish hoodlums come looking for the money, resulting in a violent confrontation, which sends the normally meek David into a psychotic downward spiral into oblivion.

Borrowing the same darkly comic tone of, say, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry, Shallow Grave revels in the despicable. The dismemberment of the body, for instance, like in Hitchcock’s films, makes for an absurdly humorous set piece, starting with the trio shopping for tools in the local hardware store to the completion of the dirty deed, unfortunately randomly assigned to David.

Danny Boyle’s visual panache is front and centre, laying the groundwork for his distinct visual palette of the pre-28 Days Later period of his career. Wideangle lenses and off kilter, portrait-style compositions expressively place his characters as mere pawns in their environment.

In hindsight, Shallow Grave and its characters are a product of their environment, the post-Thatcher world of decay and extreme capitalist individualism and selfishness, a point articulated by Boyle in The Criterion Collection liner notes. There’s no doubt the cruelty enacted on Alex’s character is a comeuppance for the society’s shameless First World hubris.

But this is all periphery to the delightful plot machinations and youthful filmmaking style of Boyle and the bunch, skewering the expectations of stodgy British cinema as much as anything else.

***½

Shallow Grave is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Chinatown

Chinatown (1974) dir. Roman Polanski
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston

****

By Alan Bacchus

Chinatown is a unique Hollywood concoction – a gumshoe thriller in the classic noir genre, but also modern and beguiling. It’s a twister that unravels to reveal a salacious melodrama motivating a big business urban conspiracy.

Jake Gittes is an L.A. private detective in the 1930s. One day a woman named Evelyn Mulray enters his office and hires him to spy on her husband, Hollis Mulray, whom she suspects of cheating. Jake is initially hesitant to take the case, as he honestly explains that she’s better off not knowing because it would cause more pain for her. Mulray is insistent that Jake take the case. Jake follows Mulray around for several days. He discovers he’s the chief engineer of the city’s water department. There’s a major drought in the city of Los Angeles, and Mulray is in the middle of a heated debate about an expensive new dam project. Despite all this, Gittes’ investigation reveals a conspiracy involving the city dumping precious water in secret overnight. Gittes performs his job and captures Mulray’s rendezvous with a young girl. But when Hollis Mulray turns up dead the next day, and a different woman shows up claiming to be the real Evelyn Mulray, Gittes realizes he’s been set up in an elaborate murderous plot.

With his pride and reputation on the line Gittes retraces his steps to uncover the conspiracy. He develops a relationship with the real Evelyn Mulray (Faye Dunaway). Evelyn, a good-looking erudite woman with an emotional detachment to the mysterious goings-on, intrigues Jake and he takes her case to find the other woman who was seeing her husband. No one seems to be telling the truth, not even Evelyn, and as Gittes moves through the city of Los Angeles, the stakes get higher and higher. When he meets Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross (John Huston), who owns the water company, we realize the conspiracy is as personally motivated as it is money-driven. Chinatown’s byzantine plot expands larger as the film moves along becoming a big business conspiracy about the creation of modern-day L.A. and a searing melodrama with operatic plot twists.

I’ve seen the film several times and it still confounds me. The mechanics of the plot, like The Big Sleep, are notoriously difficult to follow. And though I do get lost each time I watch it, I’m comforted by the intermittent expository lines Towne gives Jake to say, which always helps me catch up.

Roman Polanski directs the film to perfection. Nobody has shot Los Angeles better than Polanski and his DOP, John Alonzo. For a film noir, they chose to shoot the film as bright and sunny as possible. Film noirs are traditionally shot in shadows and are under lit to complement the secretive elements of the genre, but Alonzo and Polanski hide nothing from us. They choose to beautify Los Angeles and bathe their characters in the brightest colours. Polanski’s camera follows Gittes very closely the entire film, much of it behind his neck. With a 2.35:1 wide angle frame we are able to see everything Jake sees and still see Jake’s wandering eyes and furrowing brows up close and personal. The handheld work is subtle. It’s so close to everything it becomes part of the action, but without the jerky movements that overtly remind us a camera is there. Sometimes the camera is so close to the actors we can feel it getting in the way. Watch the very end, after the shootout in Chinatown. When Jake and the cops run up to the car and see the damage done, Nicholson actually knocks the camera. It’s unintentional but unobtrusive and natural to the film.

Chinatown never tires. It contains so many indelible characters and situations, an unravelling plot that gets bigger and bigger as it goes along, beautiful locations and a modern quality that continues to resonate today.

Chinatown is available on glorious Blu-ray from Paramount Home Entertainment, the treasure of which is an audio commentary discussion between Robert Towne and David Fincher.

Casablanca

Casablanca (1942) dir. Michael Curtiz
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt

****

By Alan Bacchus

This is my favourite movie of all time, the zenith of Hollywood studio system, a war time romance, pot boiling noir and razor sharp thriller all rolled into one, crafted to perfection with one of the greatest screenplays of all time. It’s also the culmination of the creative skills of one of the great directors of all time, Michael Curtiz, a shamefully unheralded genius, a rare studio-era auteur whose influence spread for decades into the work of pulp masters like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

It was also the launching film for Humphrey Bogart, who, before then, was a primarily a character actor, playing second bill heavies, supporting more notorious thugs like James Cagney. Here Curtiz takes a chance on Bogie as brooding anti-hero and romantic leading man. He plays Rick Blaine, owner of Rick’s a popular club in Casablanca (Morocco) a port city known for exporting anti-Nazi resistence spies. But Rick’s there because he’s escaped his own persecution in other parts of the world, as well as a failed relationship with his former fling. Once burned twice shy, now ‘he sticks his neck out for nobody.’

Then, of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, in walks Isla Lund (Bergman), his former flame with her Residence hero husband Victor Laszlo (Henreid), looking to buy letters of transit which would send them abroad in safety. The Nazi thug Major Strasser (Veidt) and the Casablanca chief of police Capt Renault (Rains) know this and tries to intercept. With Rick in the middle, and torn between his rekindled love affair and his innate desire to fight against oppression, he’s forced to make a crucial decision, leave with Ilsa or give up the letters to Laszlo. This decision,  choose selfishg love, or sacrifice for the good of the world, becomes one of cinema’s great surprise endings.
Plenty of analysis has done on Julius and Philip Epstein’s legendary screenplay. It’s perhaps rivalled only by Chinatown for it’s structural perfection, like the Parthanon of screenplays. Michael Curtiz’s direction is even sharper and to the point. Watch his editing, and punctuation scenes, his brilliant montage scenes and pacing of action. The opening sequence is magnificence, powered by the pulsing Max Steiner score, Curtiz throws us into the fast paced, multi-cultural world of urban Casablanca. Few films kickstart with a better bang than this.

Curtiz's mastery of the visual cinema language is on the level of all the revered masters of the era – Ford, Welles and Hitchcock. His camerawork is unmistakable. The master of the dolly shot, but always motivated  by the movement of his actors. But since Curtiz loved to move his camera, it meant his actors were constantly in motion, criss crossing the frame in the foreground and background to create the elaborate choreography on screen. His lighting represents the best of early studio noir. His use of shadows is a hallmark as well – often framing the shadows of his characters to convey the secretic world of the covert activities.

The awesome new Warner Blu-Ray boxset commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the film is chock full of goodness. In fact before even before I popped in the Blu-Ray of the actual film I watched the accompanying documentary: Michael Curtiz: The Best Director You’ve Never Heard Of. The comprehensive chronicle of his career confirms everything I love about the man, his artistic triumphs as well as his gruff cantankerous personality. The testimonial of Steven Spielberg alone, who owes as much to Curtiz as he does to Ford, is perhaps the greatest compliment to the man.

Casablanca 70th Anniversary Box Set is available on Blu-Ray from Warner Home Entertainment

I also suggest going through Michael Curtiz's great body of work to discover some great films made in the style of Casablanca, such as:

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
The Sea Hawk (1940)
Mildred Pierce (1945)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
The Sea Wolf (1941)
Flamingo Road (1949)
Young Man With a Horn (1950)

The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski (1998) dir. Joel Coen
Starring: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Turturro

***½

By Alan Bacchus

I am one of those viewers who initially dismissed this film upon first viewing and yet grew to appreciate it with age. Why so many critics and regular movie-goers feel the same way is a curious phenomenon. Some talk about the expectations following Fargo, a morose melancholy noir picture vs. Lebowski, a rambling piece of comic fluff designed solely to generate laughs. I’m not sure my expectations had anything to do with it.

Looking back at the film it’s a heavily plotted story, which requires some attention to ‘follow along’ the accidental journey of Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski from being a pot smoking couch potato to a reluctant gumshoe scouring the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles for the answers to the kidnapping of his benefactor’s daughter.

Getting caught up in the abc’s of the plot can certainly distract a viewer from the truly delightful and sublime interactions of the three affable heroes. The Dude, as played by Jeff Bridges, is disarmingly funny. We don’t realize he’s funny because he’s so serious and sure of himself. John Goodman’s character, Walter Sobchak, is a hail fire of rage and intensity peppered with random idiosyncrasies, such as his devotion to Judaism and his post-war trauma rages. And Steve Buscemi is rendered so meek and sympathetic as a willing subject to Walter’s brutality, he ceases to be a character and becomes more of an inanimate comic punching bag.

And yet this trio is so magnificent, their comic timing is as close to perfection as comedy gets. Just watch Goodman’s face, the intensity of his eyes and the commanding presence of his sitting posture. And watch Bridge’s posture, almost always lounging or at an angle in his chair, a champion of the world of his own. And hell, every time Walter says, “Shut the fuck up Donny,” it's hilarious punctuation to every scene.

The Coens throw just about anything they can to keep us off kilter and stimulated with new startling imagery. The introduction of Julianne Moore’s character, Maude, a radical abstract artist flying in on a rope to splatter her latest creation with paint from above, is dreamy fun. And the fantasy sequences exercise those stylish cinematic muscles that lay dormant in Fargo, but rear their head so magnificently here. The bowling sequences beautify the garish working class playground of the bowling alley, culminating in the bizarro but beautiful Busby Berkeley sequence later in the film.

The film is a delight to watch over and over again because knowing the plotting from the first viewing allows the audience to relax and enjoy these individual moments, specifically putting oneself in the shoes of the Coens’ affable and naive hero, The Dude, Bridges’ most inspired character of his career.

The Big Lebowski is available on Special Edition Blu-ray from Universal Home Entertainment.

Kiss Me Deadly

Kiss Me Deadly (1955) dir. Robert Aldrich
Starring: Ralph Meeker

**1/2

By Alan Bacchus

Film noir is a well established genre – dark crime tales usually involving ordinary guys caught in tangled webs of intrigue or crime, visualized with dark shadowy cinematography. Often low budget with tier B actors, the sexuality and violence became the attraction rather than star power. Kiss Me Deadly, considered one of the greats, is now immortalized by The Criterion Collection. It’s familiar territory, as described above, dramatizing another hard boiled crime story from writer Mikey Spillane. The film is also famous for influencing Quentin Tarantino’s glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction, Alex Cox’s glowing trunk in Repo Man and Steven Spielberg’s mysterious Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It certainly has the noir mood and tone. But unfortunately, other than its historical significance and the usually terrific Criterion treatment, it doesn’t age well.

Ralph Meeker plays Mike Hammer, an L.A. private eye who picks up a mysterious hitchhiker named Christina (a young Cloris Leachman). He then gets into an accident by the forced hand of an unknown assailant. When he wakes he finds that Christina has died. With the help of his local P.I. colleagues, Hammer embarks on a dangerous investigation into the accident and discovers a dark and dangerous magical maguffin that’s the root of all this criminal activity.

Two thirds of the film moves with the pace and excitement of a Law & Order episode. Hammer interviews several friends and colleagues trying to track down the source of Christina’s disappearance. Along the journey Hammer evades the usual shadowy but unimpressive henchmen. Hammer is no wimp though, as he fights off a knife-wielding hitman at night and violently throws him down a long flight of stairs; he disarms a bomb planted in his car with ease; and he fights off a half-dozen thugs at the home of local heavy Sugar Smallhouse.

The finale is a classic and the reason to watch the film. The legendary ‘whatsit’ box, which everyone is after, is never really explained, though it has been speculated that it’s one of several metaphors (a caution against atomic testing is the most popular). It’s interesting to see its influences on two important films from two different generations – Raiders of the Lost Ark and Pulp Fiction.

Though the ending packs a wallop, a great noir has to tease us with details, red herrings or false leads. Since the audience has the point of view of the investigator, we must also constantly feel the threat of Hammer moving forward to discover the mystery. For example, in DOA Edmund O’Brien’s character is poisoned and must find his killer within 48 hours in order to live. Or in The Postman Rings Twice, Frank and Cora conspire to murder Cora’s husband because it’s the only way she can escape her drab and boring life. Two acts of investigation in Kiss Me Deadly provide little drama or intrigue. Nothing is learned about Christina or the cause of her trouble until the very end in a rushed but fantastic finale.

Ralph Meeker is a tough gumshoe, but he’s missing the wit and charisma of a Humphrey Bogart and the confidence of a Fred MacMurray. As a character actor (Paths of Glory), he’s effective but doesn’t have the chops to fully carry a film (though I have to give him credit for the best-ever cinematic 'bitch-slapping'). Missing also is a credible antagonist. Where’s the Sidney Greenstreet or Peter Lorre or Orson Welles or Edward G. Robinson? A young and skinny Jack Elam makes an appearance, but his commanding presence just isn’t there yet.

Rudimentary plotting, which moves from scene to scene without impassioned danger or action, stalls the film. The ending certainly takes the film to another level, but the jump is too large, too quick and too much for me to recommend it over other classics of the genre. Watch Double Indemnity, Touch of Evil, Mildred Pierce, The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon first.

Kiss Me Deadly is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Night of the Hunter

Night of the Hunter (1956) dir. Charles Laughton
Starring: Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish, Ben Chapin, Shelley Winters, Peter Graves

**1/2

By Alan Bacchus

I can appreciate the reverence of critics and film buff to this film. As shot by the great Stanley Cortez (Magnificent Ambersons), the film is bristling who ominous moody southern Gothic noir-like suspense. There are half a dozen stand alone stunning shots which are simply some of the most memorable shots in cinema history.

Unfortunately, it feels as if the cinematic world at large remembers these few shots more than the film as whole. Which in terms of all storytelling is curiously spotty, and inconsistent.

Let’s start at the beginning. Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell a psychotic evangelical preacher who thinks he speaks to God, which justifies to himself his murderous rampage. While in prison his roommate Ben Harper (Graves) confesses to leaving a fortune from a bank robbery somewhere in his country home. Once out, Harry seeks out Harper and the lost money. Using his good looks and exploiting her susceptibility and fear of God Harry courts Harper’s widow Willa (Winters). But we, the audience, knows where the money is. Young John Harper has it, hidden in his sister doll.

At this point Laughton works on a level of fear of the audience for John. Harry doesn’t know where the money is, but John knows he’s up to no good. Reminiscent of Shadow of a Doubt, Laughton’s direction uses the best Hitchcock technique to create a gritty sense of oncoming doom. While Shadow of a Doubt is precise with it’s narrative, Laughton and writer Agee attempt to create a larger scale chase between John and Harry. The episodic nature of the narrative structure creates an uneven shifts in momentum. At the halfway mark, John and his sister escape into the wild and come into the company of a an elderly widow Rachel Cooper (Gish) who becomes the protector and mother figure to the children.

During this chunk Harry is completely absent. This comes too late in the picture. One of the key images of the film is the awesome shot of Rachel, in the fashion of the Western genre, sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair brandishing a long shot gun, protecting her home stead. This is the revered siege sequence. In the scope of cinema history I always felt the entire movie was this siege. Yet, Harry versus Rachel is less only about 5mins of screentime.

There’s nothing disappointing or ‘misremembered’ from Robert Mitchum’s performance though. He’s consistently awesome and diabolical in the picture. His ‘love/hate’ speech is deservedly iconic – and famously imitated by Spike Lee in Do the Right Thing.

Hunter is also as famous for being actor Charles Laughton’s first and only film he directed. Laughton, of course, was British, and famous for playing in period costume, both characters roles exploiting his enormous girth as in Spartacus as well as iconic literary heroes and villains such as Quasimodo, Captain Bligh, Rembrandt, Claudius and Henry VIII. It’s also an unlikely choice of subject matter, a distinctly ‘American story’, which satirically demonizes the Christian fundamentalist movement in America, and cleverly uses the tropes of two different genres, film noir and the American western.

Black Widow

Black Widow (1954) dir, Nunnally Johnson
Starring: Van Heflin, Ginger Rogers, Gene Tierney, George Raft

***

By Alan Bacchus

Nancy Orway is an ambitious social climber who ingratiates herself into the New York upper class elite through a friendship with big shot Broadway producer Peter Denver (Van Heflin). But with Denver’s wife Iris (Gene Tierney) out of town the friendship brings silent accusations of infidelity. It’s all very innocent until Nancy shows up dead in Peter’s apartment. Suddenly Peter’s seemingly innocent actions take on a whole new meaning. With the police quickly leaning towards a murder charge, Peter takes it upon himself to find the real killer. This fun whodunit setup makes Black Widow an effective mystery and will keep you guessing all the way to the end.

Beneath the surface, the fundamental question that drives the film is whether a married man can develop a true platonic friendship with a single woman. Peter apparently does this out of kindness to help a young writer get a foot in the business. But writer/director Nunnally Johnson never makes Peter out to be a saint. Though he appears to be honest in his philanthropy, there’s a dark side to Peter that keeps the audience on edge. In fact, everyone’s intentions are kept hidden from the audience. For the first half of the film, we’re not sure if Nancy is a crazed psychopath, if Denver is truly attracted to her or whether he’s trying to exact revenge for his wife’s affair a year ago. Johnson plants all the right seeds, which will pay off in the third act.

The film is presented in colour cinemascope, a format not traditionally associated with noir, but it works. The use of widescreen is fabulous. Johnson and his DOP Charles Clarke, along with the legendary photographic effects man Ray Kellogg, bathe New York in eye-popping colour and bold visual beauty. It’s rare to film a noir in colour, but remember that most of Hitchcock’s great colour films were essentially film noirs.

Van Heflin, whose prominent brow frequently got him cast as the bad guy in westerns, is completely believable as a reserved but confident Broadway producer. Ginger Rogers, though over the top, has fun with Lottie, a snobby elitist actress who bullies around everyone including the cops. Peter’s wife, Iris (Gene Tierney), is the most underdeveloped of the characters. Once the accusations of infidelity start, Iris never once questions Peter’s story. It isn’t until a confessionary letter in the mail from Nancy that Iris is sent over the edge; however, even with this information she is still inactive as a character. But then I watched the special features of the DVD and learned the great noir actress Tierney was suffering from severe depression and was heavily medicated during the time of the filming.

Two thirds into the film, I thought I had predicted the ending, but I was wrong. Johnson’s cinematic approach turns what could have been Murder She Wrote material into a tight, unpredictable whodunit with strong characters that stands out against most other films of its kind. Enjoy.

The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon (1941) dir. John Huston
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Gladys George, Elisha Cook Jr.

***1/2

By Alan Bacchus

“The stuff dreams are made of” is Bogey’s final line of this film, and one which ambiguously explains what exactly the Maltese Falcon really is. It’s arguably the most recognizable of maguffins in film history, a metallic statuette, made of some unknown substance, but has such innumerable value that is drives the entire story without the need of an explanation.

What is the Maltese Falcon? In cinematic terms it’s an excuse to get a punch of tough, greedy, backstabbing characters in a room together to scheme, fight and kill each other over.

For novelist Dashiell Hammett’s hero Sam Spade, the adventure starts when a lovely young woman Ruth Wonderly (Mary Astor) enters his San Francisco office and hires Sam (Bogart) and his partner Miles Archer to find her sister, who has seemingly attached herself to a nefarious slimeball whom we never see named Floyd Thursby. While tailing Thursby Archer is killed, which sends Spade hell bent on revenge.

That same night Thursby is found dead as well, and according to the cops Spade is one of the suspects. So Spade not only has to clear his name but find the murderer of his partner. He tracks down Ruth and discovers a complex web of lies and deceipt which track back to the aforementioned precious artifact being transported from abroad into San Fran harbour - The Maltese Falcon.

Bogey is at his most confident here, playing Spade as a determined and unflappable gumshoe who has the ability to get out of any situation, either by his impressive abilities to find the angles in every scheme, or simply by brute force. In fact on numerous occassions when he’s targeted at gunpoint, he can simply swat the gun out of his assailant’s hand with ease without getting shot. It’s fun, but it’s also a rather shallow characterization of the protagonist. Spade, although he has the skills as Bogey’s Rick Blaine from Casablanca, he lacks the vulnerability and broken heart which makes him identifyable and endearing.

As such, like say, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon is a plot driven affair. A completely dispassionate potboiling film noir, before there was such a term. Despite its sterling reputation though, Falcon doesn’t hit the hit high water mark of Bogey’s The Big Sleep. Both are complex and confusing crime stories, but I think the difference comes down to one scene at the end of Falcon when Bogey literally asks big ol charming Sidney Greenstreet who did what and why. It’s shamefully expository and the worst scene in the movie. The Big Sleep on the other hand, is purposely oblique and baffling which adds an element of cooky brainteasing fun. One of the death in that film is never solved and is debated by film buffs to this day.

That said, Falcon is still an enjoyable and entertaining cynical and tough noir piece. Watch Spade’s continual put downs of the effeminate hoods played by Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook Jr., a treatment which, in the documentary The Celluloid Closet, was famously analyzed as concealed homophobia. Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s a fascinating layer in subtext and characterization as well an interesting viewpoint into the time and place in which the film was made and one of the reasons why the film continues to be watched and discussed to this day.

The Maltese Falcon is available on Blu-Ray from Warner Home Video

The Phenix City Story

The Phenix City Story (1955) dir. Phil Karlson
Starring: John McIntire, Richard Kiley, Kathryn Grant, Edward Andrews, Jean Carson and John Larch

****

By Greg Klymkiw

“Somebody just threw a dead nigger kid on Patterson’s lawn. Go out and have a look.” Uttered with a chilling matter-of-fact timbre and an unmistakably Alabamian accent, a fat, sweaty, cigar-puffing dispatcher barks out this line in a dank, dirty and humid police station thick with smoke and the overwhelming karma of human rights violations. It occurs on the heels of the sickening, unforgettable image of a child's battered, bloodied body as it's flung like a rag doll from a passing vehicle and virtually into our laps via a creepy low-angle pull-back.

Without a doubt, this is one of the most brutal and hard-hitting film noir pictures you’re likely to see in your lifetime..

The movie is The Phenix City Story.

And it’s a great movie!

Not only is The Phenix City Story one of the best crime pictures ever made, but feels like it hasn't dated one bit (save for the period in which it's set). The filmmaking seems as fresh and vital as when it first puked up the grotesque reality of the deep American south upon its release in 1955. That said, a number of its techniques may seem familiar to many, but keep in mind - they began here, folks.

Ace crime director Phil (Kansas City Confidential, Framed, Walking Tall) Karlson, working from a sizzling screenplay by Daniel (Out of the Past) Mainwaring and Crane (Andre De Toth's Crime Wave) Wilbur, delivers a picture that gets so under your skin it demands multiple viewings - each more aesthetically exciting and thought-provoking than the last. Karlson's command of cinematic grammar is so sharp and astute that he's able to frame his work within a structure that breaks quite a few rules by always knowing what the rules are and using them when he needs to and flouting them when he wants to shove our faces ever-deeper into the mire.

Phenix City, Alabama is a real place. Bordering the state of Georgia where the mighty Chattahoochee River (one of the locations used for the movie Deliverance) slices through it, Phenix City in recent years has become known as one of the best places in America to raise a family.

It wasn't always this way.

And frankly, I find it hard to believe it's changed all that much. My few visits and albeit limited exposure to that “Great State” suggest that Alabama is one of the nastiest, weirdest, most dangerous and distressingly prejudice-ridden places I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing.

Historically, Phenix City was the site of one of the last big battles of the Civil War and during the 1940s and 50s, it became known as Sin City, USA. On a per capita basis, there was more crime (much of it violent) in this mini-metropolis, than any other region in America. Corruption ran rampant as did gambling houses, prostitution and murder.

Situated near the military training facility in Fort Benning, Georgia, Phenix City was the go-to location for America's fine military to indulge in all manner of debauchery. The American military has always and continues to be one of the largest consumers of prostitutes world wide. Throughout the 20th century and beyond, Uncle Sam’s protectors, due to their gluttonous appetite for no-strings-attached stress-relief have, in a sense, been primarily responsible for the sexual slavery and exploitation of women the world over. (A prime example is the Eastern European sex-slave-trade that exploded during America's involvement in the post-Milosevic struggles in Croatia and detailed in the new feature film The Whistleblower directed by Larysa Kondracki and starring Keira Knightley.)

During the 1950s, Phenix City, thanks mostly to the avid consumption of sexual favours, had the highest rate of venereal disease during WWII and in the post-war period. When off-site furloughs were unavailable, the army allowed truckloads of prostitutes to be brought right into Fort Benning to service the randy recruits. It has oft been rumoured that famed General Patton's death was actually rigged by organized crime since he threatened to clean things up when Fort Benning was under his command.

God Bless America! And the United Nations, of course - as both continue to disgustingly support sex slavery to keep the boys happy in the Middle East.

And, God Bless Phil Karlson - for real! One of America's great movie directors, Karlson chose a blend of docudrama, neo-realism and film noir to tell the story of the late Albert Patterson (brilliantly played in the picture by John McIntire), a lawyer who ran for the State Attorney General position on a major anti-crime-and-corruption ticket and was brutally and brazenly gunned down by the criminal mob running Phenix City.

The story begins with a benign Patterson, trying to live his life quietly. When Albert's son John (Richard Kiley, displaying his almost trademark, and here effective, moral outrage) returns home for a visit and discovers how corrupt things are, he decides to stay and fight the good fight. Albert joins the fight and agrees to run for Senator. Albert's old friend Rhett Tanner (a delectable performance from Edward Andrews - alternately next-door-neighbour friendly and malevolently smarmy), attempts to convince Albert to back down. When he doesn't the violence escalates to such extremes that men who believe in the law are faced with taking the law into their own hands.

Writing in his book Essential Cinema, one of the few great living film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum addresses not only the potential for vigilantism in the story itself, but the sort of audience reaction garnered by The Phenix City Story:

"Though the movie's politics are liberal, its moral outrage is so intense you may come out of it wanting to join a lynch mob."

One of the more interesting thoughts that Rosenbaum's quote elicits is the different ways in which similar true-life situations were treated in the 50s and 70s - especially by director Phil Karlson himself. With The Phenix City Story Karlson creates the desire to "join a lynch mob", yet does so within a story wherein the central figures never quite get to that point and use "the law" to primarily battle the corruption.

In the 70s, Karlson revisited a similar tale - that of Sheriff Buford Pusser in the huge vigilante boxoffice hit Walking Tall. Not only did audiences all over the world want to join lynch mobs (I remember the trailers and TV ads featuring footage of audiences leaping out of their seats and delivering standing ovations at the end of the film), the story Karlson chose to tell was an out and out pro-vigilante tome where its central figure walked softly, literally carried a big stick and used it with abandon. Walking Tall bears all the hallmarks of Karlson's terse, effective direction and manipulation of audience emotion, but does so by going all out in celebrating the notion of taking the law into one's own hands.

Another interesting observation is just how similar the story elements are in The Phenix City Story and Walking Tall. Both films feature the following:

- A young man returns to his hometown to discover it is a den of iniquity and decides to fight back.

- An inveterate gambler wins fair and square, but upon exposing cheating in the gambling club, is beaten to death. This is almost a replay of Walking Tall's opening with the character of Lutie McVey played by Ed Call.

- The primary location of vice in both films is presided over by a butch bull dyke (played by Jean Carson as "Cassie" and Rosemary Murphy as "Callie" respectively).

- The good guys are secretly aided by a hooker with a heart of gold (played by Kathryn Grant and Brenda Benet respectively).

- The good guys are aided by a Black man (played by James Edwards and Felton Perry respectively).

- The Albert Patterson character is similar to that of Pa Pusser played by Noah Beery Jr. in the latter picture.

Looking at both films it's obvious Karlson ordered Walking Tall's primary scenarist Mort Briskin to use Phenix City Story as a model.

One also cannot help but notice that Roger Corman must have taken a cue from Karlson's 1955 true-life depiction of crime and racism in the deep South when he adapted Charles Beaumont's book The Intruder in 1962. Corman shot his thriller dealing with racial integration in education on location in the towns hardest hit with the controversy. Karlson, of course, entered the territory first with his film.

Though in fairness, thanks to producer Mark Hellinger with the much earlier Naked City, noir and the crime genres during the post-war period were both highly influenced by the neorealist movement in Italy and led the charge for a whole new era of location shooting in American cinema.

Stylistically bold and downright daring in the myriad of chances it takes, The Phenix City Story begins with a series of interviews with actual citizens of Sin City, USA - major players in the real-life fight against the criminal element, some of whom admit to the camera that they have been the targets of harassment and death threats. These interviews are shot in the very locations in which the events took place - so real that we see people wandering in and out of the background - REAL PEOPLE - briefly looking at the cameras and/or quickly averting their gaze so as not to be caught on film.

In fact, if we didn't know going in that we were soon going to be seeing a dramatic recreation of the events, we might, during this lengthy pre-title interview sequence think the film was going to be a documentary. It's not, of course, but once Karlson begins the story proper, and shoots his tale on the very street where the Sin City crimes took place and goes so far as to have lead actor John McIntire costumed in the very suit that real-life Albert Patterson was murdered in, we're utterly mesmerized by this strange hybrid of docudrama and neo-realism - thus confirming that what we're watching is a movie that's going to be like no other we've seen.

The Phenix City Story is part of Volume 5 of the continuing series of Warner Home Entertainment box sets The Film Noir Classic Collection - perhaps one of the worthiest DVD boxes one is likely to own.

Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity (1944) dir. Billy Wilder
Starring: Fred McMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson

****

By Alan Bacchus

Billy Wilder’s noir classic has one of the best movie titles of all time - it’s razor sharp, like the efficient tone of the script and its execution, it also hints at the coiling and twisting narrative as well as the literal story plot point which is key to the motivation of its nefarious characters. Literally, it refers to the term in the insurance business of a double payout on a claim of accident death.

And it’s the insurance business in which this very cynical and seedy investigative plotter is set. It’s a terrific environment in which to set a crime film, one in which, as a claims officer, as Edward G. Robinson’s character puts it, “you’re a doctor, a bloodhound, a cop, a judge, a jury and a father confessor all in one.”

Walter Neff couldn’t possibly be categorized as the ‘hero’ of the picture, but as a film noir everyman who falls victim to his own lust and greed he‘s a prototypical antagonist. In the opening, he’s an innocent but smarmy insurance salesman, unmarried, no kids, living a Spartan existence. But when he goes to the renew the automobile claims of one his clients, he falls deeply in love with the man’s wife, Phyllis Dietrichson, played with maximum allure by Barbara Sandwyck (her large but trendy forehead curl not withstanding).

After some teasing double entendres and sexually subliminal dialogue Mrs. Dietrichson and Neff hatch a plan to set up her deadbeat husband for murder and claim a life insurance policy, and of course, with a double indemnity clause. As an insurance man who knows the business, Neff is like a surgeon with details, especially setting up his and her alibis. The husband is killed and everything goes as planned until Neff’s equally fastidious boss and claim officer Barton Keyes (Robinson) scratches the itch of his hunch and layer by layer strips away the cover stories causing Neff and Mrs. Dietrichson to unravel.

Wilder and his co-writer ahem.. Raymond Chandler!!..make terrific use of Neff’s voiceover into Keyes old fashioned Dictaphone to tell the whole movie as a flashback. Fred McMurray’s deep voice guides us through Neff’s journey from innocent nave to cold blooded murderer, through nerve racking fits of jealousy, betrayal and ultimately, however small, redemption. The apparent twist or femme fatale double cross doesn’t really come as a surprise, but it’s the very end, the reconciliation of Neff and Keyes, two old friends and colleagues whose broken paternal bond becomes a surprising moment of regret and the first real heartfelt emotion in the picture.

The effectiveneness of this moment reinforces how important Edward G. Robinson’s performance is to the picture. As always, he’s a marvel, a machine gun with words, able to spit out Chandler/Wilder’s dense dialogue with lightning quick rhythm. Just listen to his cadence and manner of his speech and you’ll see the influence on the Coen bros anachronistic films like The Hudsucker Proxy, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There. Even his name, Barton, perhaps, was an influence on them.

If we’re to define film noir as a genre devoted to exploring the darker side of human nature, and the capacity of the common everyday man to get into crime, Double Idemnity does noir better than anything before or since.

Armored Car Robbery

Armored Car Robbery (1950) dir. Richard Fleischer
Starring: Charles McGraw, William Talman, Adele Jergens, Douglas Fowley

**1/2

By Alan Bacchus

Old Hollywood b-movies were never shy about using extremely literal titles to tell audiences exactly what to expect. This one is perhaps the most literal of noir pictures I’ve seen. It’s just one of eight, count ‘em eight, film noirs movies included in the latest Warner Bros Film Noir Vol. 5.

Despite including pictures from Don Seigel, Anthony Mann, Edward Dmytryk and Vincent Sherman I chose this one, because well, it was listed as 63mins, and thus could sneak it in fast, and well, the title was just too intriguing to ignore. And Richard Fleischer is no slouch either, but more on that later.

Indeed Armed Car Robbery is about an armed car robbery. William Talman is Walter Purvis the mastermind of a new heist job which, if all goes right, will make he and his buddies rich. Purvis is tough as nails and clockwork in his method, but the job doesn’t go quite right, and one of the gunmans, Benny, is shot and injured. Despite Benny’s pleas he can’t go to a hospital, and after a confrontation is shot and killed.

With Benny found for dead it gives the cops the one lead to track down Purvis and the money. A cat and mouse chase between cops and robbers ensues with a buxom stripper named Yvonne Le Doux at the centre of it all.

Armored Car Robbery works best as an iron clad procedural in the traditional of the crime work of Michael Mann. In fact the rhythm and construction of the police investigation with the perps' escape recalls the Pacino/De Niro dynamic in Heat. On the side of the cops is the equally ruthless hardliner Lt. Cordell (Charles McGraw) who, like Pacino’s character, commands his troops and analyzes the evidence with workmanlike efficiency.

But let’s not aggrandize this film too much though, Heat this is not, nor is it M, or High and Low, the two essential classics of the procedural genre. In Robbery we never quite sure who to root for. Most often in heist films we cheer for the robber, who often steals for a purpose other than just money, or for the fact that they are charming or charasmatic. Purvis is no hero, not even an anti-hero, and thus we never really feel any warmth or attraction to him. Is it the cops? Do we want the cops to catch the thief? Unfortunatly Lt. Cordell is thinly drawn, not much deeper than a mere characterization of a cop instead of a hero with a journey.

As such this noir is simply an exercise in style – a series of crafty set pieces choreographed and directed with considerable flare by director Richard Fleischer, who is certainly no hack – a director who would go onto a successful career of populist entertaining classics such as the Fantastic Voyage, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Soylent Green and even all the way up to 1984’s Conan the Destroyer.

Armored Car Robbery is available in the Film Noir Collection Vol 5. from Warner Bros Home Video.

Odd Man Out

Odd Man Out (1947) dir. Carol Reed
Starring: James Mason, Robert Newton, Kathleen Ryan, Robert Beatty, Elwyn Brook-Jones

****

By Alan Bacchus

I recently had a chance to watch John Ford’s 1935 classic The Informer, a story of a reluctant IRA informant rattled with guilt over his responsibility for the death of his compatriot. Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out makes for a great companion piece. Reed’s portrait of a wounded IRA leader stumbling through Belfast looking for refuge from the British authorities plays like a surreal Homer's Odyssey version of John Ford’s story.

At the top Jimmy McQueen (James Mason), the recently escaped leader of the clandestine ‘Organization’ of Northern Ireland, is plotting a bank heist to help fund the further activities of their war against the British. After the heist goes awry McQueen is stranded from his colleagues, stumbling away from the authorities. As McQueen’s men scramble to find him the British hunt is intensified, and one by one McQueen’s men are captured.

Throughout the day McQueen stumbles from one situation to another encountering the citizens of the town he’s sworn to help. Unfortunately his presence in the various bars, cabs, or flats he moves through is met with fear and hostility more than anything else. The only one looking after McQueen’s best interests is his girlfriend who yearns to reconnect with him and save him from British authorities or the opportunistic vultures of his own people.

While The Informer was unabashedly sympathetic to the IRA, Reed’s film is not so clear cut. The explicit non-use of the name IRA in favour of the innocuous term ‘The Organization’ suggests some trepidation on Reed’s part not to make a political statement. Despite some opinions of other critics, from these eyes Reed walks a fine line between condemnation of the IRA movement and patriotic support.

At every turn in McQueen’s journey he’s met with schemers and subverters looking to capitalize or profit on having knowledge of McQueen’s whereabouts – a particularly negative treatment of Irish nationalism. Whereas in Ford’s picture, other than the lead character’s betrayal at the beginning, there’s a familial feeling of collectivism and support for each other.

Of course, Reed’s picture could be classified tonally as a noir as opposed to Ford’s elegant melodramatic treatment of his story. Made in 1947 Odd Man Out is as tense and unsettling as the noir genre demands. Visually, Robert Kraster’s contrast and shadowy photography seems like a practise run for Reed/Krasker’s cinematic visual perfection of The Third Man a few years later.

Arguably Reed reaches farther than he did in The Third Man in terms of visual image as metaphorical storytelling. Watch the changing environment as McQueen’s state becomes more dour. At the beginning, it’s bright and cheerful, reflecting the optimism of McQueen’s plan. After he’s shot and begins to wander the city for help, sun turns into rain, then fog, then snow – the full gamut of weather conditions like a one’s life flashing before one’s eyes the moment before death.

While the narrative is directed by the movements of McQueen throughout the day, arguably his presence is a mere prop for Reed to craft his rather compartmentalized individual scenes and set pieces. Each new sequence is dominated by a new scene-stealing supporting character. The woman who betrays McQueen’s two men for instance, who at first think they’re in the company of a friendly supporter when in reality she's a backstabbing traitor. Or the crazed painter who desires to find McQueen in order to paint the emotion of man near death is as treacherous a portrayal of patriotism as anything I can think of.

Films like Odd Man Out and The Informer survive well these many years not only because of the filmmakers' superlative eye behind the camera but these complex and intellectually challenges reactions of their characters to their intense situations.

Winter's Bone

Winter’s Bone (2010) dir. Debra Granik
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Kevin Breznahan, Garret Dillahunt, Shelley Waggener

***1/2

By Alan Bacchus

There’s some really smart storytelling going on in Winter’s Bone. At once, it’s a refreshing thriller/neo-noir anchored in character, featuring actors and locations few of us have seen before. Yet, writer/director Debra Granik builds up her textured film on the foundation of familiar Western genre tropes, resulting in a comforting genre-based familiarity but with all indie production credibility in tact.

The set up has the simplicity of a Budd Boetticher western, that is, the 1950’s Western auteur known for his minimalist collaborations with Randolph Scott. In the sparse, cold and monumentally depressing rural Ozarks, 17 year old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is given some awful news. Her father, a lifetime criminal recently arrested for a drug deal, has put up his house as collateral for his bond. This means if Dad doesn’t show up at court Ree and her invalid mother and two child siblings lose their home.

In storytelling terms these are the ‘stakes’ - the characters, environment, the tone and the genre are immediately apparent to us thus jump starting this film. We get this information in a matter of minutes, a common mistake made by inexperienced filmmakers who love to ease audience into their films and consequently boring them to shit. In Winter’s Bone, there’s a mature old Hollywood feeling to this set up.

Ree’s journey doesn’t take her far geographically, but mentally and physically her internal strength is pushed to limits. In order to find her father she immediately seeks out his family, specifically her brother, another nefarious criminal connected deep into the hillbilly meth crime network. As Ree’s Uncle, Teardrop, John Hawkes, the veteran character actor, deliver’s the film’s most iconic performance, with an arc which swings from isolated belligerent loner to heroic champion of his family.

Evil characters seems to lurk in virtually every corner of the Ree’s town, most of whom are directly related to her. Of course, this is also the world of Deliverance, but dramatized and realized with a more reverent tone than the kitchy treatment of Boorman's inbred hillbillies.

When it’s rumoured her father has been killed by his rival drug dealers, suddenly Ree finds herself confronting and negotiating with her enemies to save the lives of her family. In the final act, Ree is offered a means of keeping her house with the completion of one task, which makes for a gruelling climax, but one which leaves the audience a feeling of satisfying closure and a strange feeling of optimism, thus freeing itself from the trap of cinematic cynicism which plagues this modern neo-noir or revisionist westerns.

The Square

The Square (2010) dir. Nash Edgerton
Starring: David Roberts, Claire van der Boom, Joel Edgerton, Anthony Hayes

***

By Alan Bacchus

A lot has been made of Nash Edgerton’s directorial debut – a neo noir of the ‘Blood Simple’, ‘Bound’, ‘Red Rock West’ persuasion. While 'The Square' is a good film though not quite hitting the high water mark of those films, if anything, the film has a greater significance as the forerunner for an exciting new movement in Australian cinema.

Not many people are talking about it yet, but there’s a germ of a New Wave percolating down under – a group of filmmakers who, over the last 10 years, have been making short films together under the prodco name Blue Tongue Films, of which Nash Edgerton is one. Among the other filmmakers there’s David Michôd, Stephen Susser and Nash’s brother Joel Edgerton.

So far 2010 has been Annus Mirabilis for these lads – David Michôd, arguably showing the most promise with his stunning Sundance festival crime epic ‘Animal Kingdom’ which reminds us of the early bravura work of Paul Thomas Anderson. Spencer Susser’s first film co-written by Michôd, ‘Hesher’, is a lesser work, but shows the same kind Aussie toughness in both ‘The Square’ and ‘Animal Kingdom’. Joel, primarily an actor, has been doing some great character work over the past 10 years, notably in ‘Ned Kelly’, ‘Kinky Boots’, ‘King Arthur’, ‘Smoking Aces’ and the upcoming ‘The Thing’ sequel. He’s also a director and his acclaimed short film, ‘the List’ shows the same style in streetwise cinema as his other colleagues.

But back to the ‘The Square’, it’s a classic neo noir setup – an ordinary everyman finding himself caught up in a high stakes of world of crime. Raymond Yale is a real estate developer working on a new public works project. It’s a stressful job which perhaps is the reason why he’s taken up an extra-marital affair with a neighbour, Carla. They appear to love each other, with Carla holding out for Raymond to end his marriage with his wife. Carla, though is still in a relationship with her petty criminal boyfriend, Greg, and when he comes home with a bag full of cash, Carla sees it as an opportunity to free herself Raymond from their former lives and start all over somewhere, together.

So there’s the classic nourish inciting incident – the temptation of ordinary people by money, greed and lust. In order to satisfy these desires Carla and Raymond have to dip their toes into a complex web of crime and violence. Raymond hires petty thief Billy to steal the bag, burn down their house as a rouse for the stolen money. But as Robert Burns once wrote, ‘the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry’. Such is the case with Robert. When Greg's house burns down, so does his elderly grandmother. And when Greg smells foul play it doesn't take long before Raymond finds himself scrambling to cover up his tracks – a series of events and mistakes which will result in a tragedy of dramatic proportions.

While no new ground is broken in the genre what Edgerton does best is keeps the pressure cooker on high for virtually the entire movie. As a good screenwriter he puts his character into situations where he’s forced to make a number of decisions with the stakes rising with each choice. His first decision to start up an affair is made before the movie starts, so he’s already below the line of moral decency. His second decision involves stealing Greg’s money and burning his house down. Though Carla isn’t a prototypical femme fatale, Edgerton smartly makes her incitement of this choice. There’s a murder and its subsequent cover up midway through which puts Raymond further down into moral abyss, from which he struggles to climb out of for the rest of the picture and which will ultimately become his downfall.

In addition to the coming out party for Edgerton’s and his Blue Tongue Films gang, his cast of actors rip and roll with each other like a well-oiled machine as many of the key players have been involved with short films as well. There’s no one I’d fear more than a brazen Aussie thug. And Edgerton maximizes this ingrained culture of toughness in Aussie males. Edgerton dramatizes his world of crime with these types of characters in all corners of his picture. His other Blue Tongue Films colleagues appear to be doing the same as well.

Don’t forget to check out ‘Animal Kingdom’ when it gets a release later this year.

Here's trailer for The Square



Here's a trailer of Animal Kingdom

The Killers (1946)

The Killers (1946) dir. Robert Siodmak
Starring: Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmund O’Brien

****

By Alan Bacchus

Film Noir does not get more hard boiled, tough and pulpy then Robert Siodmak’s original 1946 ‘The Killers’. Of course, it’s also based on a story by Ernest Hemingway whose mere presence lends it the tough street cred, but apparently his name above the title actually overstates his connection to the story and the film.

The opening scene, which is Hemingway’s more than anything else in the film, is a stunner. In fact, it’s so good, it feels like a set piece lifted from another film. Two hitmen wearing overcoats and black hats walk into a small diner with ice cold attitude to spare. After bullying around the two occupants they reveal they’re here to do a hit job on someone called ‘The Swede’. Their banter is some of the sharpest hard boiled noir dialogue ever written. It’s so cold and ruthless it feels like a parody of crime dialogue. Soon we learn The Swede is Ole Anderson (Burt Lancaster’s first starring role), an ex-boxer and small time hood, and is indeed killed, but who dies without a fight as if accepting his fate as some kind of penance.

We learn his insurance policy lists an unrelated old woman, a near stranger, whom he boarded with once years ago as his benefactor. Enter crack insurance agent Jim Reardon (Edmund O’Brien) who seeks to trace back Ole’s life and find the secrets behind his mysterious death.

Writer Anthony Veiller (with some uncredited help from John Huston and Richard Brooks), does a Sunset Boulevard/Citizen Kane/Double Indemnity track back, bringing Reardon to the doorsteps of the influential people and events in his life. At the centre are a femme fatale dame Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner) and a burglary job with a number of double-crosses in between.

The caper anchors the film and is choreographed cinematically with the kind of distinct expressionistic technique we wouldn’t see until some of the great French crime films of the 50’s. The plotting scene is marvellous seedy, a shadowy poker game with boxing ring hoodlums, cigarette smoke creating ominous clouds adding textures to the scene. Ava Gardner, who forms a love triangle between the Swede and one of the thieves, is at her comely best. Just watch her posture as she watches the card game on the bed, dressed in a demure sweater. This is sexual napalm!

Siodmark who earned his stripes directing in Germany during the Lang/Murnau Expressionist days creates striking compositions. Elwood Bredell’s lighting nearly writes the book on the noir look. Long shadowsand harsh contrasty lighting dominate the frame. Swede’s funeral scene for instance, though filmed in an interior uses the studio control to create luscious and rich gothic cloudscape overhead. Bredell even uses Toland-style deep focus photography, low camera angles, dramatic camera moves, and long takes. The film's technical high point is the hat store robbery scene which is executed in one single unedited shot.

And lastly I can’t go on without mentioning Miklós Rózsa’s hard driving, an angry and violent pulsating rhythm as tough and brutal as anything else in the film. “The Killers” is a must see.

The Glass Wall

The Glass Wall (1953)
Director: Maxwell Shane
Starring: Vittorio Gassman and Gloria Grahame

***1/2

By Greg Klymkiw

Cinematographer Joseph Biroc's career spanned a rich period of American cinema. From the silent/part-talkie period in the late 20s through to the 1980s, his six decades of shooting movies include a diversity of titles - everything including the kitchen sink. From Frank Capra's classic "It's a Wonderful Life" to the Zucker Brothers "Zero Hour" parody, "Airplane!" and sandwiched between he developed a solid working relationship with such directors as Samuel Fuller (notably "Run of the Arrow" and "Forty Guns") and Robert Aldrich. The latter director used Biroc's eye to lens 16 of his pictures including "Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte", "Ulzana's Raid", "Emperor of the North" and "The Longest Yard". No job was too big (his Oscar winning work on "The Towering Inferno") or too small (some of the coolest 50s sci-fi second features like "Donavan's Brain" and "The Red Planet Mars").

Biroc was a meat and potatoes cinematographer who was equally comfortable shooting the liberation of Paris in World War II as he was capturing the famous campfire-bean-farting sequence in Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles".

His work on "The Glass Wall" is especially exceptional. This low-budget Columbia second feature has some of the most extraordinary location footage ever shot in Manhattan during the 50s (and not just the dirty mean streets, but the starkly beautiful United Nations Building as well). Blending documentary realism in many of the exteriors and sharp proficiency in the interiors, Biroc's work contributes immensely to this thrilling, offbeat tale of a refugee on the run from police and immigration officials.

Directed and written by Maxwell Shane, an extremely prolific screenwriter who specialized in genre pieces, "The Glass Wall", while not a great film by any means, is still one of those gems that's been largely forgotten and now, thanks to the medium of DVD, can now be seen by many more people.

And it deserves to be seen.

Starring the great Italian actor Vittorio Gassman in his American debut, we're immediately sucked into the tale of the desperate, sad-eyed displaced person and Holocaust survivor Peter Kaban, who, after illegally stowing away on a freighter and evading customs officials, begins a desperate search for the American soldier whose life he saved in order to get a sponsorship to begin a new life in America. The officials are having none of Kaban's story and with various levels of law enforcement pursuing him, he is befriended and aided by the sultry Gloria Grahame (Violet Bick, the prostitute with a heart of gold in "It's a Wonderful Life" and the gangster moll in "The Big Heat" who becomes seriously deformed after Lee Marvin tosses a pot of scalding coffee in her face).

Set over one night, the film becomes a desperate race against time for the couple to find Kaban's ex-G.I. friend and climaxes as Kaban storms the United Nations, seeking justice and sanctuary.

It's an almost-perfect little post-war thriller with all the right dark and tragic elements. It's also one of the few American films of the period to deal with both the Holocaust and the plight of displaced Europeans seeking asylum in the U.S. What keeps it from achieving some kind of classic status is Shane's competent, but unexciting direction. One can only wonder how much better Shane's fine script might have been in the hands of either a Fuller or Aldrich. It needs more than competence, it needs a nasty, pulp sensibility.

That said, Biroc's stunning photography, especially all the hidden camera nightime stuff keeps the picture buoyant. As well, Gassman and Grahame have fabulous chemistry and their performances bring incredible power and humanity to the proceedings.

One major bonus is that the picture features a very cool cameo with Jack Teagarden and his Orchestra. The ex-G.I., it turns out, is a struggling musician who gets a shot auditioning for the legendary bandleader. The other major bonus is that Kaban must prowl numerous Manhattan nightclubs in search of his old friend.

Manhattan at night. Gloria Grahame. Jack Teagarden.

Things don't get much better than this.

"The Glass Wall" appears on Volume One of Sony Home Entertainment's two-volume DVD set entitled "The Bad Girls of Film Noir". Incidentally, Biroc's work is on view in "The Killer That Stalked New York" which also appears in this series. Biroc's work there is fine, but it's hard to say if the unflattering shooting of leading lady Evelyn Keyes is intentional. If it was, then the picture might actually deserve more credit than I've given it. Like many of the titles in this series, the leading lady of "The Glass Wall" is not a "bad girl" at all and while it shares some of the post-war disillusionment of film noir, it's finally not really noir. But that's a minor quibble. If this type of branding is what the studio needs to get a back catalogue of interesting titles out and into the hands of movie geeks, who am I to complain?

The Killer That Stalked New York

The Killer That Stalked New York (1950) dir. Earl McEvoy
Starring Evelyn Keyes, Dorothy Malone, Lola Albright, Charles Korvin, William Bishop and Barry Kelley

**1/2

By Greg Klymkiw

Within the course of day-to-day existence, crime itself can be perceived as an epidemic, but when it comes to the movies, there's nothing quite like mixing illegal anti-social behaviour with the emergence of a deadly plague.
In 1950, two pictures managed to blend these elements in very interesting and entertaining ways. The most prominent of this odd sub-genre was Elia Kazan's "Panic in the Streets" a 20th Century Fox release which featured Richard Widmark as a Public Health officer in pursuit of a pair of criminals (Jack Palance and Zero Mostel) afflicted with the deadly pneunomic plague. Complimenting Kazan's high-profile item is an almost-forgotten entry in the post-war noir blend of threats to health and public safety in a low-budget, independently produced picture called "The Killer That Stalked New York". The former title is clearly the better film of the two, but the latter is not without merit, and seeing as it's been so rare, the picture is especially worth looking at.

One of the weirder aspects of this lesser-known crime melodrama is the central figure - a female character who is, by no means a traditional bottle-blonde bad girl. She's desperate, love-stricken, decidedly older and, I might add, vaguely pathetic - not a traditional hardboiled female heroine in the least. While cinema has had its share of suffering women, they always suffered gorgeously, and often, triumphantly, but here, we are shoved face-to-face with the 34-year-old-and-rather-long-in-tooth Evelyn Keyes (Scarlett O'Hara's sister Sue Ellen in "Gone With The Wind"). She's not especially well-costumed, nor made-up and lit in a manner befitting a leading lady. (In fairness to Keyes, though, she's definitely in the realm of MILF-dom, just not in a traditionally glamourous Garbo-Crawford-Dietrich manner.) This is something that makes her performance a lot more interesting, but there is also the nagging reality that Keyes was cast in such a low budget picture PRECISELY because she was affordable and that the poverty-row of the production didn't allow for the grooming and lighting NORMALLY afforded to a leading lady.

Playing the title role, we first discover Keyes stepping off a Cuban boat and onto the harbour platforms of New York. Having smuggled $50k worth of diamonds into the country for her smarmy, no-good, foreign accented boyfriend (Charles Korvin) - we know he's rotten to the core because this is America in the 50s and he sure doesn't sound American at all. He's also oily. In American cinema - especially during this period - oily men are always evil. Visiting a doctor, Keyes meets and briefly befriends a little girl who, as it turns out, is afflicted with smallpox. And before you can say "epidemic", Keyes desperately wanders the city, spreading plague and out-running law enforcement and public health investigators.

Anonymously, though often proficiently directed by Earl McEvoy (he worked primarily as an assistant and second unit director), it's a picture that, even for it's relatively short running time, feels about 20 minutes too long. In spite of this, it's still an entertaining and intriguing dark melodrama - mostly in its use of actual New York locations for much of the film. And, most of all, there's a rather talented and delectable trio of leading ladies. In fairness to the once-radiant Keyes, part of her frumpy, haggish appearance could be chalked up to the filmmakers (and Keyes) trying to be realistic about portraying a desperate, over-the-hill moll with smallpox. That said, Keyes is buoyed by the appearance and performances of Dorothy Malone (hubba-hubba) as a nurse and the yummy Lola Albright as Keyes's little sister who is having a torrid, shameful, guilt-ridden affair with the handsome slimebag Korvin.

Another oddball aspect of the picture is how our leading lady Keyes is so dour. She suffers through the picture to a point where she begins to look and feel almost cretinous. Whereas Palance and Mostel in the similar roles in "Panic in the Streets" are so manic and over-the-top that they elicit a lot of (intentional) laughs in addition to their malevolence. There is, ultimately, nothing malevolent about Keyes and she's humourless to boot.

We're basically forced to watch a pathetic frump flailing about.

That said, there IS a bit of sadomasochistic pleasure in witnessing her performance, and that's nothing to sneeze at.

"The Killer That Stalked New York" is available on DVD via Sony Pictures Home Entertainment in Volume 1 of the two volume series "The Bad Girls of Film Noir".

Berlin 2010-THE KILLER INSIDE ME

The Killer Inside Me (2010) dir. by Michael Winterbottom
Starring: Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba

**1/2

By Blair Stewart

And it was all just going so damn well before the ending. Arriving at the Berlinale after a controversal Sundance premiere, the prolific Michael Winterbottom's latest is a frank adaptation of Jim Thompson's "The Killer Inside Me" with a 1950's small-town 'aw' shucks, ma'am' wacko-killer sheriff. If you feel resentment for revealing that nugget of info or failing to put down a 'spoiler warning' beforehand, I suggest you refrain from reading the title of the film, ok?

Central City, Texas is enjoying the post-war oil boom and the clean streets are patroled by the chipper and handsome Casey Affleck as Deputy Lou Ford. If you're familiar with the younger Affleck's work from his debut in Gus Van Zant's 'To Die For" to his Oscar-nominated Robert Ford in "The Assassaination of Jesse James" you'll know the ease with which he can flick on a creepy switch-like a bug is going to up and crawl out of his throat at any moment. Good-ol' boy Lou gets mixed up with a connected prostitute played by Jessica Alba as one of the more improbable ladies of the night in American film history since Julia Roberts worked the streets.

Deals will go bad and folks will find themselves dead and Sheriff Lou will spin longer and longer yarns at the D.A. to stay out of the electric chair. As the film progresses Lou's sadism (and peculiar childhood activites, spanking fetish ahoy!) towards the women in his life is revealed, hence the controversy which itself is a quaint idea in the age of Google search engines. Watching Lou's psyche being peeled back makes for hypnotic viewing as Affleck's eyes have the right shade of ice to them when he needs it. Surrounding the Sheriff is a cast of Kate Hudson, Ned Beatty, Elais Koteas and Bill Pullman doing their Southern twangs well as his potential victims if they hang around long enough.

I'm sure Winterbottom was amped up to direct "The Killer Inside Me", it has a certain appeal for a Brit with Thompson's singular pulp Tex-Mex setting. You can see that joy in the lovingly-designed opening credits and the camera work of Marcel Zyskind, and for 98.5 % of the film it works-something nasty and slippery with a Lone Star bite, another "Blood Simple" was coming down the pike.

And then the ending happened.

While the final moments are true to Thompson's classic the delivery by Winterbottom and John Curran's script is flubbed. The finale is intended as a cruel death's head joke but it arrives with the bumbling execution of an audible fart on the soundtrack. Where I should have felt a punch in my gut instead I had to make due with the Benny Hill theme song playing inside my own mind from the plot and character inconsistencies pilling up. What a shame.

A missed shot at a classic, but if Winterbottom continues to churn out work he'll likely make up for this.