So, here's one of my favorite things from that trip to San Francisco I took in May:
I didn't exactly stumble onto it, but when you see that while flipping through your guidebook for something to check out in the morning, you've got to check it out and probably find it delightful that someone would decide to put a plaque up to commemorate one of the great films, even if it was probably all done on a soundstage in L.A.
Similarly, when the Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle Theatre are both running film noir programs - "Five O'Clock Shadow" for the former and "Authors of Noir" for the latter - you just sort of accept that this is going to be taking up a fair amount of your time over those couple of weeks, not grouse too much about not going home for Thanksgiving because you'll get to see two of Bogarts's best on that afternoon/evening, and enjoy a lot of 35mm film.
My one issue - and it's a truly minor one - is that the Brattle's films were almost all things I'd seen before, even if I didn't remember doing so. In fact, I'd seen two of them (
Phantom Lady and
Black Angel) as the same double feature
three years ago, although that turns out to be just about the perfect amount of time to not quite remember various details. The only ones in the series that I hadn't seen before turned out to be the ones on the night where work kept me late and the MBTA made the delay worse, so I wound up missing that night.
Still, I'm really hoping that both of these series reprise sometime in the winter or spring - the Brattle's celebration of the genre's 75th anniversary has a few more permutations to go through, and the HFA is great for doing somewhat deeper dives into a genre.
The Big Combo
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 November 2015 at the Harvard Film Archive (Five O'clock Shadow, 35mm)
There's something to be said for a movie that gets right down to it the way
The Big Combo does, laying out what it's about quickly and then just going right after it in fairly direct fashion. That's probably the best way to go about presenting what actually winds up being a fairly convoluted plot - just plow through it, and let a fairly game cast do their things.
The film focuses on a hard-driving cop, Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde), who had been spending half his department's resources on trying to build a case against Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), who had risen to control of the local syndicates through a combination of ruthlessness and his predecessor going on the run. Brown's girlfriend Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace) seems like the best target, but she is willing to attempt suicide rather than flee. Word comes down to abandon the investigation, but Diamond can't do it, leading Brown to start striking at him personally.
For as much as the crime pictures called "film noir" are often renowned for their morally compromised heroes, there's not necessarily a reciprocal complexity to the villains, and Mr. Brown is one of the more unrepentantly monstrous gangsters an overzealous cop has ever found himself facing. It's clear from the start as he lectures a boxer about the need to utterly destroy one's opponent without any hint of sadness, and there's no sign of irony or regret anywhere else in the film as he attacks enemies and treats Susan like a possession whose ability to think for herself is nothing more than a nuisance. Richard Conte dives into it with relish, making Brown a memorable villain despite being predictable in his evil - he's almost always going to do the worst thing possible - by being neither a cackling nor a joyless psychopath. He's a shark, but a clever one.
Cornel Wilde is not nearly as memorable as his would-be nemesis - he delivers the clipped voice and righteousness of thousands of crusading cops on film - but the way he and the other characters are written makes The Big Combo a little more interesting than it needs to be. It's easy to imagine there being more of a backstory between him and burlesque dancer Rita (Helene Stanton) than is explicitly laid out, and the tease of him having a foot in her disreputable world makes him a bit more intriguing. And while both the dark-haired pinup and angelic blonde wind up serving something to their expected roles in the story, Helene Stanton and Jean Wallace do get to define them as interesting people in their own right beyond how they relate to men, with the script by Philip Yordan even able to take a moment to acknowledge what a raw deal women get in this situation.
(It's also got one of my favorite classic-movie things, where the henchmen played by Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman are almost certainly a couple but it's designed to go unnoticed because they're not played effeminately at all.)
Yordan's script starts out pretty straightforward but builds a backstory that winds up increasing in importance as the film goes on, but he and director Joseph H. Lewis do a good job of opening the story up without making it seem like a real change in direction. Lewis also gives it a fair amount of style, doing a nice job of finding the line between the respectable world and the underworld. It's not always subtle - the finale literally involves a previously frightened person shining a light on villainy - but that's part of the fun.
That's on the nose, and there are a few other moments where it's much closer to class-B pulp than level-A noir, but that's okay. It's good pulp, and smart enough about the genre's weaknesses to make what might otherwise be issues work in its favor.
(Formerly at EFC)
The Big Sleep
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 26 November 2015 at the Brattle Theatre (75 Years of Film Noir, Part 2: Authors of Noir, 35mm)
If you can't make it home for Thanksgiving, then a double feature of classic film noir on 35mm at the Brattle Theatre is not a bad trade-off, and there is not much that is more classic than
The Big Sleep.
No matter how many times I watch this, it's the same, and that's pretty rare. Just the other day, I was writing how
House was not the same on subsequent viewings because it becomes a matter of waiting for the greatest hits, and it just can't surprise or shock a second time.
The Big Sleep, on the other hand, doesn't rely on shock or surprise, it's about perfect execution, keeping things moving fast enough that its confusing bits don't bog it down but not so much that there's no time to relish the many, many good pieces, along with perfect casting and a script that gives Bogie, Bacall, and everyone else room to do their best.
Full review (from 2006)
The Maltese Falcon
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 26 November 2015 at the Brattle Theatre (75 Years of Film Noir, Part 2: Authors of Noir, 35mm)
Watching Humphrey Bogart play Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade back-to-back is Lenape the best possible reminder that he was a pretty fair actor in addition to being a movie star with a persona that transcended whichever particular role he was playing that month. Though superficially the same - smart-mouthed private eyes - Raymond Chandler's and Dashiell Hammett's respective creations have distinctively different attitudes which Bogart captures perfectly. Marlowe has a thin shell while Spade is more resolutely cynical, and there's something very exciting about the meanness that Bogart brings to the latter.
He's only a part of
The Maltese Falcon, but he's the best part. That's not to disparage anything else in the film - from the pulpy backstory that adds a certain sort of grandeur to what can at times be a situation where characters are running around San Francisco in circles to the late entry of Sydney Greenstreet, the is a lot of good stuff here - but to marvel at how consistently good Bogart is. Other elements will occasionally veer off into being a bit silly for a moment or two, but Spade stays on-target throughout.
He's never better than at the film's climax, which is fifteen minutes or so of perfect cinema. Spade is setting the others against each other with a ruthless practicality, stripping the veneer away from the room full of people eager to sell each other out without making it any less tense, and then once it's down to just him and O'Shaughnessy, he goes on a tear that includes the film's most famous line ("when a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it"), but that's just the start of a steamroller, and "don't be so sure I'm as cropped as I'm supposed to be" works because Bogart and director John Huston don't give her or the audience the time to fully consider what that means before the fallout is on display.
I feel like I've been guilty in the past of not loving
The Maltese Falcon enough. When someone asked, I've said I liked it, because of course I do, but it hasn't been one that immediately popped up when someone asks me for favorite movies and I don't immediately blow the request off. It should be, though, because they really don't make movies this exciting as often as they should.
Full review (from 2006)
Murder, My Sweet
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 November 2015 at the Brattle Theatre (75 Years of Film Noir, Part 2: Authors of Noir, 35mm)
In the space of barely more than two years, four different studios released four different adaptations of Raymond Chandler novels with four different actors playing Philip Marlowe, a situation that seems almost inconceivable today. The second and third are the best-known, because
The Big Sleep is an all-time classic while
The Lady in the Lake is an interesting experiment, if a failed one, while the fourth (
The Brasher Doubloon) is almost completely unknown. This first one is quite good, and even knowing
The Big Sleep was being made at about the same time doesn't make it any sort of a disappointment.
In this tale, private detective Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) finds himself with two cases: First, a walking slab of meat by the name of Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) just back from eight years in the joint wants him to track down his old girl; there's also nervous fellow Lindsay Marriott (Douglas Walton) who needs backup making an illicit payment. The second should at least be straightforward, but it's a setup that also pulls in Ann Grayle (Anne Shirley), her wealthy father (Miles Mander), and his much-younger wife Helen (Claire Trevor), who appears connected to both Marriott and Jules Amthor (Otto Kruger), whose quackery is so ill-defined as to barely disguise his actual activities.
It's no surprise that there was such a rush to adapt Chandler's books in the mid-1940s (and in spurts since); they're great reads, and if Chandler's creation of a tough private eye who punctuates surprisingly eloquent narration with self-deprecating wisecracks wasn't entirely unique, it has seldom if ever been improved upon. At times, screenwriter John Paxton and director Edward Dmytryk struggle with that, especially when they try to drop prose from the novel right into the film as Marlowe gets knocked unconscious - moments when a film becomes as subjective as prose stick out a bit when the rest is conventional. They wind up about fifty-fifty on narrative flourishes.
What they do get right is how Marlowe is both a natural part of the world in which he operates and a contrast to it. There's something genuinely seedy about the business here; the hallways in the office building where Marlowe has his offices don't appear to have been swept for weeks, even the client hiring him on behalf of wealthier folks seems disreputable, and the actual work involves a lot of active sneaking and spying. It wouldn't be like that in The Big Sleep, where General Sternwood took an immediate shine to his detectives and Marlowe could hang back and follow suspects rather than really getting in and invading their privacy. It's a dirty business, and Marlowe can be as abrasive and occasionally amoral as the people he has to deal with in it.
That's not what makes him such a great character, even though Dick Powell can rattle off a snappy comeback as well as anybody. It's that he is smart and a romantic at heart, even if he tries to smother his nobler impulses because he knows the trouble they lead to. Powell's Marlowe talks tough but is always a sucker for a beautiful woman, even if it takes him a while to get to the point where he can trust and admire her. Some of his most entertaining scenes come against Mike Mazurki as Moose, where Powell bounces between sympathy, fear, and detached amusement at the dumb, heartbroken, and dangerous beast..
Mazurki is fun there, too, playing what is at times a comical thug with genuine menace. He's just one member of a fine gallery of supporting actors, with Claire Trevor, Douglas Walton, and Otto Kruger all giving the audience plenty of reason not to take their characters at face value while keeping them unique varieties of fun to watch while they're on screen. The same goes for Anne Shirley; she makes Ann Grayle an appealing partner for Marlowe as well as quietly capturing just how her character must find her father tremendously frustrating..
Shirley mostly hitting the right note is probably more important than it seems; even in 1944, audiences were probably canny enough to watch a mystery and just by applying the "it's always the person that looks most innocent" rule decode that the nice young girl is more likely than the wicked stepmother, so it's nice that Shirley, Dmytryk, Paxton, et al, give her a little reason to draw suspicion even if she is the one Marlowe naturally pairs with; it keeps a lot of things fair game even if the viewer is going by rules rather than clues. It's an enjoyable mystery in general, with the right balance of clues that need digging up and ones that are sitting right there, twists that never lose the plot, and characters that are appealing whether they turn out to be doing good or evil..
Powell would actually revisit the character of Philip Marlowe a decade or so later on TV, in an episode of
Climax!, and I'd like to see that, as well as some more of the dozen or so other takes on the character that have been committed to film (they have been an incredibly varied lot). It's not quite
The Big Sleep (little is), but it's entertaining in part for how it goes at the same sort of material differently, which is always welcome when comparison to a classic is inevitable..
(Formerly at EFC)
The Burglar
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2015 at the Harvard Film Archive (Five O'clock Shadow, 35mm)
The introduction to this screening of
The Burglar talked about how director Paul Wendkos was not just a great fan of Orson Welles but clearly heavily influenced by him on this film, and it's not exactly hard to miss. It's also fairly clear that not everyone can pull off what Welles did, but the attempts should be encouraged, because aiming high can yield a fine movie even when it has a rough patch or two.
This one starts with newsreel footage slowing how a "spiritualist" calling herself "Sister Sara" (Phoebe Mackay) may not have received a large mansion, jewels, and furs as
donations, technically, but that she paid just a few dollars to acquire them makes her not just a tempting target, but arguably a deserving one. So enter Nat Harbin (Dan Duryea), the sort of professional burglar who plans meticulously and never uses a weapon. He's the leader of a crew of four, including Baylock (Peter Capell) to sell the emerald pendant they're targeting, Dohmer (Mickey Shaughnessy) for muscle, and Gladden (Jayne Mansfield) to case the joint. A pair of traffic cops (Stewart Bradley & Sam Elber) put a crimp in their plans, forcing the gang to lay low.
That causes more problems, naturally - Baylock and Dohmer are naturally finding their gaze drawn to Gladden, who is only interested in Nat, who was taught the ropes by her father and therefore sees her more as a kid sister than anything else. The tone during these scenes can shift rather drastically - rather than a slow build in tension, Wendkos and writer David Goodis will suddenly have everybody crazed enough to be at each other's throats, and while the situation won't roll all the way back to calm, the changes in tension are a jagged enough line to work against the movie a bit, especially when it seems like actual violence affects them less than vague threats. There's also a fair amount of waste early on - Wendkos uses a fairly noteworthy gimmick to introduce Sister Sara, but that seems to fizzle, and the heist that must have Nat in and out in fifteen minutes is not particularly memorable. It's the sort of thing that needs to involve the whole team and make every second count, but doesn't.
(Full review on EFC; possibly lost?)
Phantom Lady
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2015 at the Brattle Theatre (75 Years of Film Noir, Part 2: Authors of Noir, 35mm)
Phantom Lady is, in a way, a demonstration of just how hard a good mystery can be to construct: The opening sequence seems tremendously unlikely on its face, but that's what it takes for a murder to become a puzzle worth reading about or watching, and the steps needed so that an amateur is the one to investigate and solve it... Well, it's unlikely.
That opening has Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) walking into a bar, his plans for the evening dashed, and meeting up with a woman (Fay Helm) for whom things don't seem to be going much better. He eventually convinced her to use the second theater ticket he has, and while they have a good time, he never gets her name, and indeed had a hard time remembering what she looks like underneath a distinctive hat. That turns out to be a big problem, because when he gets home, police Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez) is there to inform him that his wife has been murdered, and an alibi would be pretty useful. After the trial, Burgess has a nagging feeling that they've put the wrong man on death row, but it's Henderson's secretary Carol Richman (Elsa Raines) who is working hardest to prove his innocence, though Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone), a friend of his recently returned from South America, pitches in as well.
It's a fun murder mystery, though a rather unlikely one, often seeming to rest more specifically on finding the phantom lady of the title more than really seems necessary. Shouldn't the other scraps of alibi be enough, and doesn't everything else have to live up kind of perfectly? The screenplay by Bernard Schoenfeld (from a novel by Cornell Woolrich under a pseudonym) stretches credibility a bit, but I like the way it works; rather than playing it as a fair-play amateur detective story, it lets the twist happen as early as possible and has fun playing it out, and manages to do so without making its heroine look the fool.
That heroine may be second-billed, but Ella Raines is the glue that holds the movie together. She may not play plucky would-be sleuth Carol Richman as dopily love-struck at any point, instead getting to realize alongside the audience that you don't go this far for a good boss. She's dependable, brave, and genuinely funny when she goes undercover (saying "I'm a hep kitten" to seduce a jazz-playing drummer). It's a bit more nuance than is given to Franchot Tone as said boss's best friend - he gets a memorable entrance or two but he and director Robert Siodmak give him a bit too much of a twitch later on. Alan Curtis may be pushed to the sidelines relatively quickly, but he makes a strong enough impression as Scott to keep the audience from second-guessing Carol, while Thomas Gomez is solid as even if Inspector Burgess moves from one extreme to another fairly quickly. There are memorably big performances in small roles, like Aurora Miranda as a garish Latina singer and Elisha Cook Jr. as the girl-crazy drummer.
Those broad performances fit the movie that Siodmak is making, which is more wild thriller than moody noir. There's a fair amount of that genre's style to it, though, most obviously when Carol visits Scott in prison and is a high-ceilinged stairwell with long shadows rather than the traditional cramped rows of tables. The most important thing he does throughout the movie is is to make authority look sinister - Burgess is first revealed waiting for Scott in Henderson's own darkened apartment, a monster ready to pounce, while the trial occurs almost entirely in voice-over as the prosecutor sneers his accusations and the audience only sees the hands of the court stenographer recording the events in an arcane shorthand. With the scene set like that, the conspiracy that seems like the only explanation for Scott's claims almost seems reasonable.
It's not, strictly speaking, and even the viewer who accepts that mysteries don't get built around reasonable explanations may feel a little strain on their suspension of disbelief. Not enough for it to snap, though - a great director working with a fine cast can do a lot of good on that count.
(Previously on EFC)
Black Angel
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 November 2015 at the Brattle Theatre (75 Years of Film Noir, Part 2: Authors of Noir, 35mm)
Both times I have seen
Black Angel, it's been as part of a double feature with
Phantom Lady, which makes one ponder for a moment or two whether pulp writer Cornell Woolrich had other stories in him than variations on a good woman attempting to exonerate the man she loves of killing an unpleasant wife or lover. He does, of course, but the evidence says that he's pretty good at this one, especially when it's adapted to film by good collaborators.
In this case, the unpleasant woman is Mavis Marlowe (Constance Darling), a former singer who has moved into a swanky apartment by switching her focus to seduction and blackmail. The prime suspect when she is beaten to death is Kirk Bennett (John Phillips), although his story has another, unseen man in the room. Kirk's wife Catherine (June Vincent) believes it although she can't convince the homicide squad's Captain Flood (Broderick Crawford). So she decides to investigate on her own, with the trail quickly leading to Mavis's husband, songwriter Martin Blair (Dan Duryea). Martin's alibi is worrying but solid - when he gets this drunk, his landlord locks him into his apartment with a latch on the outside of the door - and he soon decide to investigate another fellow Mavis had something on, shifty ex-con Marko (Peter Lorre), by going undercover in his club as the new floor act.
Black Angel is a fun little mystery that occupies a space between what we now call film noir and a more traditional mystery story, although it's the kind of story that could be played both a lot lighter or darker than it is and still make for an interesting movie, and it might be fun to see what different filmmakers would do with Woolrich's novel. This middle ground is pretty good, although it might have been interesting if the focus wasn't quite so much on Duryea's Martin Blair compared to Vincent's Catherine Bennett. There's fun angles to play with her; such as how far she would go with the character she is playing on this quest fueled by devotion to her husband, or whether the life she is leading could prove seductive. On the other hand, one does kind of have to admire the restraint and devotion screenwriter Roy Chanslor and director Roy William Neill show by not going there much: This is a whodunit, and those storylines don't resolve murder mysteries.
Kind of a shame; Duryea and Vincent have great chemistry together, and it would be fun to see if she can play certain morally ambiguous notes as well and as often as he did. She's still well worth watching, because for as happily domestic as Catherine seems to be, there's always a part of her that's enjoying it even if it's behind the dedication. Duryea, meanwhile, doesn't completely play against his villainous type, making Martin an abrasive, unpleasant drunk at the start and not quite being tortured as he finds himself falling for Catherine as the picture goes on - the character may be a romantic, but he's the self-destructive variety, and Duryea captures the tragedy and danger of that well.
It doesn't hurt that they have Peter Lorre as a prime suspect, and he plays an oily gangster-type as only he can. Marko is a funny character, but also sinister, and Lorre's asides as he seems to find the running a legitimate nightclub boring sparkle - especially as he bounces them off former prizefighter Freddie Steele as amusing muscle. There's an archness to the character that shifts to rage at unexpected times, adding a great deal of energy that keeps the film from feeling quite as steady as it could be.
It's still plenty entertaining, though. Like a lot of the pictures of the time, it can stop pretty completely to feature a song that the studio owns the publishing rights to, although the plot allows director Roy William Neill (making the last film before his death after spending much of the 1940s cranking out Universal's Sherlock Holmes series) to keep it moving in spite of that. He and his cast and crew take a story that spends a lot of time treading water, using it to build up Catherine and Martin without pushing the murder mystery completely to the back, and mostly not stumbling at the end, letting the twist breathe and giving the audience just enough time to react emotionally.
I'm not sure that ending is quite so satisfying as that of "Phantom Lady", so I'll have to watch it on its own sometime to see how it hits me without the obvious comparison. The film still does pretty well even in those circumstances, so I don't figure to be disappointed.
(Formerly at EFC)
The Glass Key
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 December 2015 at the Brattle Theatre (75 Years of Film Noir, Part 2: Authors of Noir, 35mm)
That Veronica Lake, she was something, wasn't she? Astonishingly beautiful, amazing figure, commanding voice; her character spends this entire film scheming to string someone along for her father's political gain and somehow never loses the sense of being the good girl. She's not really the star of this movie, but she's sure as heck the part that makes the biggest impression.
Which is not, perhaps, ideal, especially on a second viewing where one would perhaps expect to get a little more drawn into the story and the class conflict between the wealthy and high-minded family and the lower-class folks trying to get things done. That part of Dashiell Hammett's story is still interesting, at least, although I had a bit of a harder time getting into the unraveling of it the second time around.
It's still some pretty decent noir, though, and it's got Veronica Lake, which is no small thing. Certainly worth catching at least once.
Full review on EFC (from 2013).
Miller's Crossing
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 December 2015 at the Brattle Theatre (75 Years of Film Noir, Part 2: Authors of Noir, DCP)
Second movie of the evening after a full day of work was not the best way to finally see what is considered one of the Coen Brothers' best, especially about a week or so from seeing one of its more memorable scenes referenced on
Fargo. It's only half sticking on its own. I'm going to have to see it again to get a better feel for it.
I will, though, because this thing is great. Dropping Gabriel Byrne into the middle of a quirky Coen exercise as a melancholy sort of hero is a brilliant move, offsetting their archness just enough for a sense of impending doom where it's necessary and tragedy as close relationships are ripped apart. It's neat to see Steve Buscemi and Mike Starr just as they're about to become noteworthy character actors, and Jon Polito and Albert Finney as rather different types of gangsters.
More next time I see it, because there definitely will be one.
