Marlowe

I'd be genuinely interested to hear what someone who doesn't have any particular prior attachment to Philip Marlowe thinks of this new film, based not on the original Raymond Chandler stories but one of the works by other writers that his estate licenses every few years, because this just felt off in so many ways to me but may, I suppose, play fairly well for the folks who are seeing it primarily as a Liam Neeson action/crime flick, or are far bigger Neil Jordan fans than I am. They are probably a bigger audience than Chandler fans, after all, and I gather this might not be a bad adaptation of a John Banville story, so it could just be Not For Me despite looking a lot like Just For Me.

Still, it kind of rubs me the wrong way. The ratio of "Marlowe punches someone out" to "Marlowe gets knocked unconscious" is way off. And I'm not usually one to complain about coarse language, but it comes off as pretty dull here when you know how Marlowe speaks when Chandler writes him.

Ah, well. I've got at least two good Marlowe movies on one set of shelves and all the books, and it's not like the Jason O'Mara TV series or Clive Owen movies are ever going to happen, so this is pretty harmless.

Marlowe '23

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)

Marlowe isn't based on a Raymond Chandler novel, but rather a licensed work by John Banville (writing under a pseudonym), and there are times when Chandler doesn't even feel like a primary influence to this film. Neil Jordan and company know the basics, and certainly know the trappings of the genre well enough to deliver something serviceable, but either don't get the vibe of the character enough to capture him or are trying to subvert expectations without ever really seeing them up to knock down.

It opens, as these things do, with a beautiful woman looking to hire Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson), a Los Angeles private eye but not telling him everything at first. Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) wants him to find her lover, Nico Peterson (François Arnaud), but doesn't tell him that (a) Nico was found dead when a car ran over him a couple weeks before and (b) she claims to have seen him afterward. Annoyed but undeterred, Marlowe keeps on it, knowing he must be onto something when numerous people - Clare's mother Dorothy (Jessica Lange) and gangster Lou Hendricks (Alan Cumming) among them - alternately try to bump him off or hire him away from Clare, so that they'll have first crack at Nico.

It's got the shape of a classic detective story, with a crooked path for Marlowe to follow, clues that dead end in what is often quite literal fashion, and some seaminess lurking just in the shadows. It's populated with stock characters, some more entertaining than others; Alan Cumming, for instance, couldn't be boring if that was the job. Neil Jordan and co-writer William Monahan tend to emphasize the wrong details, mechanism over personality. It's telling, I think, that where Chandler's books and the movies most directly adapted from them are full of clever turns of phrase that reveal Marlowe as having a sharp, self-deprecating wit, this film more often has him and those he'd verbally spar with quoting other people, expecting points for recognition but not creation.

It's also generally bland in other ways - for a movie that winds up centered on an illicit brothel and has characters described as being seductive, the film is so unsexy that it's hard to believe this is the same character Bogart played in The Big Sleep. It's got tons of Art Deco design but no shadows in which to hide things, and Jordan seldom gives the moments when things escalate from quiet to violent a moment to let the audience feel some shock. Everyone has nice period costumes and Spain stands in for sunny California well enough, although it all looks a bit too brand-new considering Marlowe is supposed to be a bit low-rent. There are moments when the Irish-ness of the film shines through to the point where one wonders if Marlowe's "bad war" was not World War I but the Irish War of Independence, but not so much that the Irish influence on this part of America at this point in time serves as a hook

Liam Neeson could have been a fine Marlowe, but he never gives any indication of why Marlowe tends to get drawn into foolish quests here, more cynical than world-weary on top of barely getting any chewy Chandler-style dialogue or narration to work with. Everybody seems too aware that the actor is too old to pair with Diane Kruger, heading that off immediately with acknowledgment of the age gap but never giving either of them something else to work with (as with the Irish-ness, there's an interesting idea to having an aging Marlowe drawn more to Jessica Lange's domineering mother than the daughter, but the filmmakers don't quite go for it). Marlowe disappears inside Neeson, rather than vice versa.

Darn shame. This has the talent involved to sit alongside the two or three great Marlowe movies, but plays like just another Open Road Neeson entry rather than an interesting take on one of the detective story's best characters.

The Brasher Doubloon

There. No-one can say I haven't reviewed all four Philip Marlowe movies made in the 1940s despite how I've occasionally mentioned how weird it is that four different studios did one, each with a different lead actor, in such a short span of time. I have finished something during the pandemic!

I've put this off in part do to format snobbery; as a relatively early adopter of Blu-ray (thought that came after my HD-DVD player) and then excited fan of 4K presentations who has been fortunate enough to live near theaters that often show this sort of thing on 35mm film for the past twenty-odd years, it's been pretty easy to look at this film only being available on DVD-R and figure I'd wait for something better. It's not even necessarily a deliberate decision; I just don't pay attention to the DVD-only section of release lists and always had enough reasons to go out or enough coming in that I didn't need to go looking for more. Occasionally I'd do something like follow links on IMDB from something else, be reminded this exists, and hope I had a chance to see it in something better than standard-definition.

I finally pulled the trigger on it a couple months ago, and it was a pretty good impulse. I don't recall consciously thinking that Disney would probably pull the plug on the Cinema Archives manufacture-on-demand line if they hadn't already, or that it would be harder for the Brattle or Harvard Film Archive to book this one for a theoretical Chandler and/or Marlowe series (note to anyone reading: A Chandler/Marlowe series would be fantastic), but that's probably the case, right? I'm not sure how much they've been letting deep Twentieth Century Fox catalog titles show up in other places (from TCM to KinoLorber Studio Classics) despite not really having a place for them in-house. Stuff like this doesn't really fit on Disney+ and Hulu is still sort of inching its way toward being "the Fox/Touchstone things that don't fit on Disney+" (which is also what I presume Star is going to be outside the States), but as a result of the merger, Disney has a whole massive library of cinema that stretches back to the silent age that they're really not positioned to exploit. Although, I suppose, now that they've more or less reverted the brand to "Twentieth Century" - thanks, Murdoch, for making the Fox name that toxic! - they'd be in pretty good position to launch classic-film/TV service by that name that includes both the TCF catalog and the less-beloved parts of the Disney library.

Anyway, for what it was, the disc didn't look bad on my TV at all. I don't know how much of that is a really nice transfer/encode and how much that is my UHD player doing a really nice job of upscaling, but the end result was that after an FBI warning screen that did not scale well at all, but it was good enough for me to maybe start paying a bit more attention to what sort of catalog stuff is available on DVD, because that format still owns a huge chunk of what's left of the home-video market, and with the folks who own most of the movies seeing streaming as the future but not necessarily seeing catalog titles as worth the effort to have at the ready, that may be the only way you can both see some of these movies now and be able to recommend them to a friend next week. Heck, this one's just barely available at Amazon and doesn't show up on JustWatch at all, so if you're curious, grab it now.

The Brasher Doubloon

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off-the-shelf, DVD)

There was a period in the mid-1940s when four different studios adapted four of Raymond Chandler's novels featuring private eye Philip Marlowe in as many years with as many actors, which from a modern perspective seems absolutely bizarre. Even more so, two were remakes of a sort, as the studios had purchased Chandler's novels when they were thought of as mere pulps to use their plots in B-movie series, making new versions when Chandler became more famous and respectable. That's the case with The Brasher Doubloon; Fox's second adaptation of The High Window isn't quite a half-hearted cash-in, but even as an okay B-movie it's certainly the least interesting of the four Marlowe movies.

It opens with Marlowe (George Montgomery) being called to Pasadena; secretary Merle Davis (Nancy Guild) pulled his name from the phone book to recover a coin stolen from the collection of her employer Elizabeth Murdock (Florence Bates), although Florence's son Leslie (Conrad Janis) assures him that it's not necessary. He's already on the case, though, so he starts following what leads there are - and finds his first corpse on his second stop.

The plots were never the most important pieces of a Marlowe story, and this one in particular is a scavenger hunt that Marlowe never has to work terribly hard to figure out. It's got the usual pieces - the thing hidden in a locker, the apartments and offices conveniently left unlocked after their occupant has been murdered, Marlowe just pocketing any gun he finds and creating a real chain-of-custody mess for the district attorney to deal with later. Fortunately, one can still at least see some of what made Chandler's stories stand out (aside from the delightful language) - the hard shell over a soft and gallant night, the way the city grinds some people to a paste but doesn't make them stop hustling, the nastiness hidden behind privilege. That it doesn't always hold together is not a big deal, because concentrating on the details would mean losing sight of the bigger picture.

Unfortunately, the studio isn't throwing its A list at this movie the way Warner did with The Big Sleep, and while George Montgomery shouldn't necessarily be trying to imitate Bogart's Marlowe, he never seems to get the character on more than a surface level, making for a clean-cut detective whose corner-cutting and cynicism often comes across as bullying rather than a shield for how he cares too much. A little comes out in narration, but though Montgomery is capable enough, it doesn't do much to deepen his character. He's also got to do a fair amount of the heavy lifting for his co-star, describing how Merle is supposed to be timid or shy because Nancy Guild doesn't really get that across (except, ironically, in a scene where she's supposed to be trying to play the femme fatale). Neither of them really sink their teeth into their roles the way that the side characters do - Florence Bates gives Elizabeth Murdock a meanness that could easily give rise to the sneer with which Conrad Janis plays Leslie, while Houseley Stevenson and Jack Overman are memorably disreputable in small parts.

It's capably-enough made, at least, with relatively little fat in its 72-minute running time, keeping things moving at a nice pace that allows a viewer to marinate in Chandler's seedy Los Angeles without feeling like one is mired there. The simple, low-budget staging plays into that, even if it does sometimes look a bit generic. It's got a bit of studio polish, just not a lot of flair.

Of the four 1940s Marlowes, The Brasher Doubloon is justifiably the most obscure and will likely stay that way, as the 70-odd years of studio and library consolidation since has left it in a different place than the other three. It's just good enough that curious fans of the character won't be too disappointed, even if it's not terribly interesting on its own.

Also at eFilmCritic

Crime, Noir, and Proto-Noir: Lady in the Lake, The Devil Is a Woman, Shanghai Express, You and Me, and They Drive by Night

October has been a good month for folks who like black-and-white crime in Harvard Square, as the Harvard Film Archive has kept up their "Five O'Clock Shadow" series (which I hope just becomes a regular Sunday afternoon thing beyond the current calendar) while the Brattle kicked off what they describe as a year-long celebration of film noir's 75th anniversary with a "proto-noir" series, examining the crime, horror, and other films that served as the ancestors of what French critics would later call "film noir".

It was a kind of discombobulating series for me, in part because it winds up highlighting elements that are fairly secondary for some of these films. You tell me this is noir, and I go in looking for crime, and when what comes out is more of a comedy or romance, it winds up feeling more disappointing than it should be. It's important to remember to take things as they are, rather than for what they are expected to be, because ambitious people generally don't make a movie based upon how well it fits into a box.

And, hey, considering that these two series are taking place in a spot that refers to itself as Boston's unofficial film school and in the basement of an actual school, it's good to feel like I'm learning something. If I had more time, I would consider outright re-reviewing Shanghai Express, as I was not great at appreciating vintage movies back in '04, or just writing in general. This isn't the time to do it, not least because I was fairly worn out for the Sunday double-feature at the Brattle, and try not to give full write-ups to movies where I might have missed a few minutes.

Also, I need to unpack my books. Lady in the Lake gave me a hankering to actually hear Chandler's words in my head again.

Lady in the Lake

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2015 in the Harvard Film Archive (Five O'Clock Shadow, 35mm)

This is a review that one would like to start with "Lady in the Lake is best known for its gimmick, but..." before listing all of the other great things that make it worthy of note. And while star Robert Montgomery's first film as a director is capable and creative enough, it lacks the personality that makes Raymond Chandler's mysteries so entertaining, and a unique first-person perspective isn't a great trade.

Philip Marlowe (Montgomery) begins the tale by addressing the audience directly, mentioning the murder case that's been in the news, before detail his involvement. He's called to the office of a magazine that publishes detective stories to be told he's sold one, although editor Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter) also would like to retain him as a detective to track down the wife of her boss, Dearce Kingsby (Leon Ames), whom she has clear designs on. The trail leads to the suburbs and gigolo Chris Lavery (Dick Simmons), as well as to the Kingsbys' vacation house, where the caretaker's wife has recently drowned. When Marlowe comes looking for Lavery and instead finds a gun-toting landlady (Jayne Meadows) - well, that's where the mystery gets complicated.

Raymond Chandler's Marlowe stories were written in the first person, so it's not an unreasonable idea to try and shoot a movie adapting one that way, especially as advances in technology were making the cameras more mobile than they had been before that point. That Montgomery plays the main character - whether as a voice or a face in the mirror - and directs isn't necessary but seems right, and on a strictly technical level, he and cinematographer Paul C. Vogel handle this smoothly enough, giving us a steadier perspective and maybe moving a bit slower than would be strictly realistic but not creating the motion-sickness issues often associated with the contemporary use of the technique in horror movies. A fair number of the shots are clearly playing with the technique, but it's enjoyable to watch the filmmakers experiment and things like watching Marlowe's gaze track the receptionist played by Lila Leeds are amusing.

Full review on EFC.

The Devil Is a Woman

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (75 Years of Film Noir Part 1: Proto-Noir, 35mm)

I suspect that I would like The Devil Is a Woman a bit more in another context; while one can see the roots of what would become film noir in it, the film itself is too lighthearted when you're anticipating that kind of crime story. Marlene Dietrich's Concha Perez may do a lot of things that would define later femmes fatales, but she's almost too cheerful about it, so frivolous that it's hard to take the film's later dramatics seriously.

The flashback structure undermines it a bit, too. It starts out as an entertaining enough romance - handsome young rebel (Cesar Romero) hiding out during festival season falls for the town's prettiest girl, only to be treated to a long flashback when he asks an older friend who has settled down (Lionel Atwill) what he knows about her - which is that she is trouble in an almost comically exaggerated way. It's so plainly laid out, complete with a funny, flighty performance by Dietrich, that the eventual duel is more frustrating than tragic. These guys know better, and Concha is so nakedly opportunistic that either convincing himself that he is her true love is a step too far.

So despite having the template of both a historical romance or tale of obsession, it doesn't work very well as either. As a comic take on those ideas, though, it has its moments - Dietrich is funny and exaggerated but also surprisingly introspective at the moments when Concha might seem most like an unchangeable force-of-nature plot driver, while Edward Everett Horton is a hoot as the frustrated ocal governor. Both Skipworth and Romero make for appealing men who find that they are no match for Concha.

It's an awkward split between them, although that split is the point of the story - that she will leave a trai of helpless men in her wake. Maybe that would work a bit better if it were less funny, although that seems an odd thing to say about a movie that is actually good at getting laughs.

Shanghai Express

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (75 Years of Film Noir Part 1: Proto-Noir, DCP)

It's been a while since I last saw Shanghai Express - this blog was very young - and I wasn't terribly impressed (and nobody's going to be imperssed with that writing, either). It's still not a particular favorite, although I have developed more of a taste for this sort of 1930s melodrama since, and there's no denying that Josef von Sternberg mounts a very impressive production, and one that seems a little more willing to wrestle with its colonialist underpinnings than other films of its time, even if one of the two most prominent Chinese characters is played by a white guy.

As much as I find myself appreciating what it does do better now, I do still think it suffers a bit for trying to be a romance at heart and really not really doing much with the relationship between Dietrich's "Shanghai Lily" and Clive Brook's handsome but bland English army doctor; they're not a compelling enough pairing to outshine the great big pile of characters stashed around them.

Unlike The Devil Is a Woman, though, it does well being slotted into this "proto-noir" program; one can see it trying to evolve into something moodier and more dangerous rather than something relatively bound by convention.

You and Me

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (75 Years of Film Noir Part 1: Proto-Noir, 35mm)

The title of "You and Me" was likely bestowed upon this film with no small about of playfulness; a couple buying tickets to see this odd assembly of romance and crime in 1938 might joke about Paramount pointedly trying to make a movie for both of them. It comes together much better than one might expect for that, as it turns out, and has matured into the sort of second-tier vintage film that may not be essential, but is certainly entertaining and interesting.

Then, as now, folks who had been to jail had a difficult time finding work after being released, so it's notable that department-store owner Jerome Morris (Harry Carey) is willing to hire parolees. One who works in the sporting-goods department, Joe Dennis (George Raft), has kept his nose clean and is now a free man planning to take Morris's recommendation with him to a new life in California, despite gangster Mickey Bain (Barton McLane) trying to recruit him for a job. A celebratory drink with his co-worker Helen (Sylvia Sidney) where he realizes that he likes her as more than a friend changes his plans - they find a justice of the peace, get married, and move into her apartment, wtih Joe getting his old job back. Helen warns him that they have to keep quiet about their marriage at work, because it's against store policy, but the truth is that she is also on parole, and marriage is a violation.

That seems like a bizarre restriction to put on a parolee, both because it leads to goofy moments like Helen's parole officer saying "no falling in love!" as a stern order and because one would think that the justice system would want to encourage that kind of stability even if it doesn't exactly push people toward marriage, but, hey, it's not like we've ironed all the contradictory impulses out of our criminal justice system seventy-five years later. That Helen doesn't tell Joe that she's also on parole early on and thus avoid a whole lot of hassle does occasionally seem to be on shaky ground; for as much as screenwriter Virginia Van Upp makes sure the audience sees that the parolees aren't informed of each others' status and that Joe is a bit of hypocrite about this, the double-standard she's fighting against could be a bit more prominent.

Full review on EFC.

They Drive By Night

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (75 Years of Film Noir Part 1: Proto-Noir, 35mm)

Depending on your perspective, They Drive by Night either takes its sweet time in becoming a crime story or veers off from its story of the challenges faced by the independent trucker in pretty spectacular fashion. I'm going to go with the first, because that puts Ida Lupino's femme fatale front and center, even if it does push Humphrey Bogart off to the side. Director Raoul Walsh and company may handle both halves fairly well, but it's the flamboyant one that gets remembered.

It starts with the Fabrini brothers, Joe (George Raft) and Paul (Bogart), co-owners and drivers of a truck that mostly moves produce up and down the California coast, this time a shipment of apples. A delay because of a blown tire puts them behind the eight-ball with a loan shark seeing a chance to repossess their truck, but also means they can pick up some better cargo - hitchhiker Cassie Hartley (Ann Sheridan), who has has enough of the wandering hands at the greasy spoon where she was working as a waitress. Paul is happily married, but Joe falls hard. Being an independent means taking on a lot of risk, though, both financially and in terms of driving dangerously, which might make an offer from Ed Carlsen (Alan Hale) to drive for his company tempting, despite the advances of Ed's wife Lana (Lupino).

There's something almost instructional about the first half of They Drive by Night, not so much that a person could operate a trucking business afterward, but they might get some idea of what the job entails - long nights, days away from the family, a genuinely difficult decision in terms of working for one's self or someone else, razor thin margins for error, the danger of falling asleep at the wheel. Marsh and screenwriters Jerry Wald & Richard Macaulay (adapting an A.I. Bezzerides novel) don't stop to explain much, although the Fabrinis will occasionally toss a line Cassie's way when things aren't immediately clear, and rather than making it dry, it's bolstered by some earnest drama and colorful characters. It's not a bad movie about trucking even without a heightened storyline.

Full review on EFC.

Noir City: Boston - Murder, My Sweet, Strangers in the Night, The Killers, So Dark the Night, Force of Evil, The Guilty, Try and Get Me!, and Shakedown

I've been flirting with the idea of going to the main "Noir City" festival in San Francisco for a few years, even before I got to experience the Castro at the silent film festival, and maybe I'll do it some year - it sure looks like it would be nicer weather than Boston that week. I kept putting that off, though, and that seemed okay when they made the announcement late last year that it would be coming for me, settling in for a weekend at the Brattle Theatre, which seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Unfortunately for me, it ran into my Red Sox 10-game package, so I missed Friday night, which I was kind of okay with - I've seen The Glass Key a few times - but still left me plenty of noir to see, with two double features per weekend day. The double-feature format was one of the neat things about this particular series, in that they were pairing "A" and "B" movies and doing it as single-admission double features, with Ned mentioning that the idea was rare enough that they occasionally get calls at the Brattle asking if you have to watch both ("yes, at the beginning of the first movie, seat belts automatically fasten and don't let you out until after the second").

Ned wasn't the main host, though, as the FIlm Noir Foundation's "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller was there to introduce each one. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with him because my cable package doesn't include Turner Classic Movies (Comcast bundles it with five college sports channels I will never watch, and I've got good rep theaters nearby), so I never see his "Noir Alley" presentations. He's got a lot of fun anecdotes, although I'm kind of a "get to the movie" guy, myself.

He did deliver one bit of information that I felt like I should have known, that being what these movies were called at the time. "Film noir" didn't enter the lexicon until a decade or so later, when French critics and filmmakers started examining them and incorporating their influence directly. American studios called these films "murder dramas" and "crime thrillers", the former tending to feature amateurs and being marketed to women, the latter about career criminals and marketed to men. The Killers, he noted, was successful and seminal because it functioned as both.

Me, I'm now just looking for a reason to use "murder drama" in its proper context.

Murder, My Sweet

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

This is the less celebrated of the two Philip Marlowe movies released in 1944, and for good reason, but it's still a good piece of crime cinema with an enjoyably likable Dick Powell as Marlowe and a lot of good bits around him. I was pretty darn enthusiastic the last time I saw it (at the HFA's "Five O'Clock Shadow" program in 2015) and not quite so enamored this time around, but it's still pretty terrific.

At times, it's a little too ambitious in trying to replicate Chandler's prose or create a filmic equivalent, but that's better to try than homogenize it. Still, for my money, this movie is all about poor Moose, a hulking brute who I suspect wasn't quite the fool Marlowe meets before he became a crook (I'm retroactively saying he's got CTE) and is now a sad, lovelorn loose cannon after doing his time. He's the tragic result of Chandler's predilection for ending chapters by knocking someone unconscious, and you have to hope that any woman Marlowe meets will be the one who helps him escape that fate.

Full review on EFC, from 2015

Strangers in the Night

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

This thing is utterly bonkers, an amateurish-seeming B movie that would likely collapse even further if it ran more than its 56 minutes, but it's a (sometimes literal!) trainwreck you can't look away from. The plot is daffy but kind of compelling, and it's got a bunch of people both in front of and behind the camera doing their level best even when the star is wooden and the story sloppy.

And it is a complete mess, taking bits from other, better stories and cobbling them together into something with a soldier (William Terry) who meets a nice lady doctor (Virginia Grey) on his way to meet the girl he corresponded with during the war, only to find she's not around but her mother (Helene Thimig) practically worships at the girl's portrait like it's an altar. What's going on is obvious enough that characters seem like they have to be really oblivious to miss it, there are a lot of things that don't even play natural by Gothic standards, but there are some surprisingly good bits buried inside the accelerated, often abrupt story, and the filmmakers fully embrace how nutty thing are by the end, which is the only way to go.

And make no mistake, that finale is something. It goes from a scene that deserves heckling to laying out just how silly its events are without shame. There's a moment during the finale explanation when the filmmakers cut to a genuinely hilarious "uh... what?" blank look on the characters' faces, just before a delightfully over-the-top coup de grace. It sends you out amused, if nothing else.

The Killers

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

An all-time classic noir, described in the introduction as the intersection between "murder dramas" and "crime thrillers", and as such featuring something for everyone, even before considering how downright genteel criminals apparently were then - no worries about being seen or eliminating witnesses. It's awful clever in how it sneaks the love story you don't expect in under the one you do.

This time around, I'm really stuck by what the filmmakers did with shadows. They're deep and eye-catching toward the start, quietly receding as the investigation yields greater clarity. The use of flashbacks is more clever than I remembered, too, using narration to keep the big heist less suspenseful because it turns out to be less important than everything else, but even in that sequence never failing to draw the audience in.

What I thought when I saw it in 2012

So Dark the Night

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

Well, at least that didn't turn out to be the solid hour and a half of franglais I was initially fearing, even if it often seemed headed in that campy direction early on, with the filmmakers occasionally seeming unsure whether the accents and production design was enough. So there's that.

Instead, it seemed like someone trying to do Hitchcock without his incredible talent - director Joseph H. Lewis and his collaborators have just enough ambition to set up some memorable shots and they make the same blunt attempts to craft a monster out of deviant psychology, but the characterization and storytelling panache that disguises how little is actually happening as the filmmakers try to make things simmer just isn't present. It's like the people making the movie gets so excited by the possibility of its twist ending that they can't help but blurt it out early.

Force of Evil

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

Sometimes a dry story about how the numbers racket worked, sometimes a flick that has more genuine style and personality than 90% of its competition. I ultimately liked its potential more than the thing itself. I some way, that's to be expected because this seems to be far more a passion project than most noirs, with the director not just credited with the script, but co-writing it with the writer whose research inspired the story. It a world of competent programmers, this is the work of someone with something to say and a strong desire to make an impression.

I'm also kind of impressed with just how thoroughly and flagrantly predatory its antihero was to the sweet love interest, though. I'm not sure whether it was meant to be a further illustration of how John Garfield's Joe Morse is an amoral man in a scuzzy business or if it was 1948 and this was supposed to come across as flirtatious, but it worked as the former 70 years on.

The Guilty

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

Efficient bit of film noir that could probably get more use out of having its two female leads be twins, especially since the main femme never seems quite so fatale as she's meant to be; this could have been a really terrific double performance for Bonita Granville, although having the focus be so solidly on "bad girl" Estelle may give her the chance to make her a bit more nuanced than a movie where the contrast between the twins is the focus. It makes me a bit curious to see what Cornell Woolrich's original story ("He Looked LIke Murder") was like - did it spend as much unnecessary time on whodunit material that isn't really important, or less? The film never seems to find what it means to focus on.

It's a bit hindered in other ways - the budget and necessary restraint where violence is concerned makes the audience take more on faith than they should, and some of the acting is kind of rough. There are enough good performances and run-down ambiance (the introduction focused on how miserable Woolrich's world could be) for an ambitious B, though.

Try and Get Me! (aka The Sound of Fury)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

Try and Get Me! is more than a trifle heavy-handed (to put it mildly), especially once a thoughtful professor starts putting the moral lesson of the film into so many words. Director Cy Endfield and writer Jo Pagano (adapting his own novel) are foregrounding social concerns that will probably always be relevant, and even when Jiminy Cricket in the form of an Italian physicist (Renzo Cesana) who knows reporter Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson) from the war isn't talking about the need for the press to show restraint, they're making progressive points. It's why the movie sometimes seems to struggle a bit; the stories of Stanton and factory worker turned getaway driver Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) are linked, but neither seems like much as they're advancing individually

Still, it's tough to deny the effectiveness of the final riot that comes when the two collide; it's a big scene with a bunch of extras that feels like it belongs in a Technicolor epic rather than a a B&W crime movie, although it's not entirely unexpected, given how well the early crime hits are executed. Much of the cast is businesslike, but Lloyd Bridges is kind of a hoot as the reckless crook who pulls Howard into a life of crime. The most wonderfully black-comic moment belongs to Adele Jergens as the Bridges character's girlfriend, dressed to the nines and enjoying the camera when the press starts to cover the arrest and trial.

It inevitably winds up three or four movies stitched together, but does do most of them well.

Shakedown

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 June 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Noir City: Boston, 35mm)

Pure pulp, this film is, introducing an unscrupulous lead and then not choosing to complicate him at all. Photographer Jack Early (Howard Duff) is a bastard from the start, but a talented enough one to make the audience buy his rise and identity with his ambition, and the filmmakers find just the right way of building him from maybe being inexperienced and desperate to enjoyably ruthless to downright villainous. Duff's not quite charismatic enough in the role to become a great anti-hero, but he's good enough, especially as the filmmakers show every female head turning, one of the more overt uses of male sex appeal in the genre - how often is the good-looking guy a woman's potential downfall?

The film doubles down on that, diving into the muck with the same sort of recklessness as its protagonist, making the danger of it a bit of fun. There's a lot of fun had with the gangsters, who are in their way more honest than the photographer who sees a way to extort them, but not so much that a viewer can't enjoy Early getting one over on them. It's not quite so much fun to watch him try and do the same with the two women who catch his eye. Both Peggy Dow and Anne Vernon are sexy as heck and their characters more so for being witty, capable, and not entirely ready to fall for Jack.

It ends just as abruptly and madly as it started, with double-crosses, violence, and a capper that is only wonderfully nuts than the one in Strangers in the Night because there's a scene where the characters acknowledge the irony rather than a quick "The End". It's just ridiculous enough at that point to be unambiguously fun pulp, but a little excess winking doesn't hurt it too much.

More Jodorowsky, more Altman

REMINDER: The Brattle Movie-Watch-a-Thon is in progress. Drop me a line if you would like to sponsor me, go here to make a donation, and check back on a near-daily basis to see how well I'm doing. With these films, I'm at 13 Brattle films seen and 11 elsewhere, which means 37 "points" total (or 18.5, depending on whether Brattle films count for two or other films count for ½)

I could have seen more, but Saturday was the day Red Sox tickets go on sale, so it was time to spend the entire day either in line, on hold, or in the "Virtual Waiting Room". I opted for the latter and thus wound up spending the whole day watching computer monitors and doing laundry. I got tickets, but they were mostly pretty crappy seats. I did better than my brother Dan, though, who didn't get through until almost eight o'clock and then couldn't get anything but standing room - which I suppose isn't practical when you're looking to bring your little baby.

I wound up missing McCabe and Mrs. Miller because of it, which was a bummer. I tried to make up for it on Sunday by rushing from Smokin' Aces to the double feature of The Long Goodbye and California Split, and I think I felt pretty bad by the end. I know I got through the last purely via ice cream.

A final note: The Brattle got a pretty crappy print of The Long Goodbye. A real shame, because I would be getting into the movie only to have the picture go black and white (and really crappy-looking B&W at that), and a bunch in the audience were complaining about the end being cut off. I hate when that happens. 3 Women was a little beat up, too, but nothing like The Long Goodbye

The Holy Mountain

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 January 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Special Engagements) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)

I think I may be at a disadvantage in appreciating Alejandro Jodoworsky's film because I have never dabbled in illicit drugs. I am thus stuck trying to comprehend them with little frame of reference other than objective reality, which isn't going to get you very far. At least The Holy Mountain has the advantage of looking nice, which was more than could be said for El Topo.

The film opens with a thief (Horacio Salinas) being tied to a cross by a throng of naked prepubescent boys who throw stones at him. He soon makes it to a city, where he and his quadruple amputee sidekick are hired by street performers who re-enact the conquest of Mexico with toads and iguanas, after which a nun decides to make a plaster cast of him with which to make statues of Jesus.. It's no wonder he soon ascends the gigantic obelisk in the middle of the town, inside of which he finds The Alchemist (Jodoworsky) who helps him to see his potential and join him and a group of rich industrialists (each represented by a planet) on a journey to the holy mountain, where they will learn the secret of immortality from the wise men who live there.

This, you must understand, only begins to hint at the strange imagery and outright bizarre sequences that occur between the film's opening and closing credits. I would guess that something like a third of the movie, if not more, is spent introducing us to the powerful men and women who will go on the quest with the Thief and Alchemist, and I'd guess that only about half of these vignettes really work. Some are just strange for the sake of being strange, and there's nothing wrong with that; Jodorowsky is making Art, pop art though it may be, and I suspect that any emotional reaction to his work is considered a positive. That section in the middle spends some time going for shock value, but mostly thinking in terms of satire. Heavy-handed satire, to be sure, but something that broad tends to still be relevant thirty years later.

Read the rest at HBS.

Smokin' Aces

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 January 2007 at Regal Fenway #13 (First-Run) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)

As soon as I saw the guy creating a rubber mask on the fly, I wondered how much of Smokin' Aces came from Joe Carnahan's aborted run at Mission: Impossible 3. Probably not a whole lot, but you might as well be thrifty. Waste not, want not, after all.

The film's main story is fairly silly, especially when it tries too hard to get into plot twists as opposed to sticking with its strength - an elegant set-up that allows Carnahan to throw a bunch of outsize characters at us and let action unfold within a known environment. Even though there are really too many characters, there's some excitement once the movie gets down to business about having them converge on the hotel and start leaving dead bodies in their wake. Once the action gets started, Carnahan really shows his stuff: The gunfights have enough bullets flying to remind you of John Woo and Chow-yun Fat, and the time spent establishing locations really pays off in terms of tension.

I have to admit, though, I snickered a bit during one gunfight when characters were being pelted with what may as well have been naval artillery from a hotel across the street. Once you've ascertained where the bullets were coming from, what's the point of returning fire with your pistols? Does a 9mm pistol even have the range to reach the target?

The Long Goodbye

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 January 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Altman in the 1970s) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)

Even in 1973, Elliot Gould must have seemed an odd choice to play a private eye most famously portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. But that's sort of the point - Robert Altman's Los Angeles may be a different place than the city that was home to so many excellent film noir tales thirty years earlier, but some things are still the same, even if people go about things a bit differently.

There's something unsavory going on at the Malibu Colony, an expensive gated community: Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) makes a late exit, asking his old friend Philip Marlowe (Gould) to give him a ride to the border. He does, but when Marlowe gets back home, he learns that Lennox's wife has been murdered, and spends three days in jail for accessory after the fact. When the private investigator is released, he learns that Lennox is dead. But his business at the Malibu Colony isn't done - Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt) hires him to help find her husband Roger (Sterling Hayden). This is easy enough, and it gives him an in to poke around the complex to find out who really killed Lennox's wife. Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) looks good for it - the gangster claims Lennox owes him money, and thinks Marlowe might know where it is.

Rather than film The Long Goodbye as a period piece, Altman opts to set it in then-present-day (1973) Los Angeles. Marlowe's neighbors are a bunch of blissed-out hippie girls who spend a lot of time topless, establishing exterior shots are more likely to show the freeway than a densely populated town, and everybody talks in movie references - Marlowe refers to calling Ronald Reagan, rather than just the governor, both to nail down the time frame and to point out how Hollywood has taken over.

Full review at HBS.

California Split

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 January 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Altman in the 1970s) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)

I imagine that gambling is like any other addiction, whether it be narcotics, alcohol, or anything else - it initially gives you a rush of excitement, making the rest of one's time seem boring, and in many cases it's not the addicting act itself that causes the addict's downfall - it's how it impinges upon his time and other resources. And yet, as it becomes a destructive activity, the pleasure drains out of it, so that an outsider wonders why people continue.

California Split starts with the excitement - Charlie Walters (Elliott Could) and Bill Denny (George Segal) meet when they share a table at a California poker parlor, then bump into each other later in a bar. It seems to be the first time Bill has found a kindred spirit who enjoys gambling as much as he does, and they spend the next few weeks gambling wherever they can - card games, the racetrack, making random bets in bars. As much fun as they're initially having, things aren't necessarily going well: They spend a night in jail, getting bailed out the call girls Charlie is staying with; Bill is separated from his wife, starting to miss work, and racking up debt; and one morning Charlie just disappears. Bill thinks he sees a way to get back even, though, with a high-stakes poker game in Reno.

Director Robert Altman and writer Joseph Walsh don't overload California Split with too much story or too many characters, and they're certainly not looking to make gambling glamorous in any way. The poker club where the film opens is crowded and despite its tidiness feels like a gambling sweatshop, discouraging any sort of socialization between the players and packing the tables in tight. The other gamblers don't have colorful nicknames like in Rounders and aren't admired celebrities; they're just other guys at the table or at the track. At best they're other addicts, but often enough they're just common thugs (and Bill and Charlie aren't necessarily exempted from that).

Full review at HBS.

3 Women

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 January 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Altman in the 1970s) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)

It's a funny thing. Normally when someone says that it feels like someone made a movie up as he or she went along, it's because the end result feels disorganized, like random scenes shot with no idea how they connect. Then, there's things like 3 Women, which were shot without an ending and just a vague outline of the rest, but feel tight.

Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek) takes a job at a rehabilitation center in California, having just moved there from Texas. The manager asks Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) to train her, and Pinky's immediately taken with the other girl, eventually moving in when Millie's roommate leaves. Millie talks constantly but the only one who listens is Pinky, though of course Millie doesn't appreciate it; she's too busy trying to try to find a boyfriend without having any real grasp on her desirability (or lack thereof). They live in an apartment complex owned by pregnant Willie and Edgar Hart (Janice Rule and Robert Fortier), who also own the bar they stop at on the way home. Things continue like that for weeks until a broken date leads Millie to do something which shakes Pinky's adoration, leaving things very different in the aftermath.

Three actresses are listed immediately after the title, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Pinky, Millie, and Willie are the title characters; certain individuals change enough over the course of the movie to potentially be counted twice. It's difficult to describe how this can happen without getting into spoiler territory; suffice it to say that Pinky and Millie, at least, are not quite the same people at the end of the film that they are at the start.

Full review at HBS.

Brewster McCloud

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Altman in the 1970s) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)

I suppose it's for the best that respected filmmakers get things like Brewster McCloud out of their system early. Robert Altman's career would feature no small amount of unusual projects and head-scratching decisions, and he'd rightly be celebrated as an independent voice making his kind of movie. But would he ever again, in three and a half more decades of making movies, give us a narrator who appears to changing into a bird while lecturing a class on the topic? I think not. Brewster is one of a kind in that respect.

Birds and flight are recurrent themes in Brewster McCloud. Rene Auberjonois's professor occasionally pops up to describe some bird whose behavior is relevant to the story going on. Their waste product appears on every one of the bodies that out of town detective Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy) arrives in Houston to investigate. There's an avian theme to each of the rest and retirement homes that Abraham Wright (Stacy Keach) visits with his driver, the titular McCloud (Bud Cort). And, once that job ends badly, we see that Brewster, with the help of free-spirited Louise (Sally Kellerman), is trying to build himself a pair of wings in the Astrodome's fallout shelter.

Doran William Cannon's script is chock full of characters too eccentric to simply be called "quirky", and Altman seems to be having a great deal of fun throwing them together. An early sequence, in which McCloud drives Wright around town, collecting profits from his rest homes plays like a running gag that we join at precisely the right time - Cort and Keach have got their banter down pat, and Keach's scenery-chewing as the vulgar old man is just about to wear out its welcome. Michael Murphy feels like he's just stepped out of a TV cop show with his clipped, cool demeanor and impeccable clothes, and it's a completely different type of show than the one that the traffic officer assigned to assist him (John Schuck) and the no-nonsense captain (G Wood) would appear in. Shelley Duvall's tour guide Suzanne is weird from first sight, but she and McCloud work well together.

Full review at HBS.

Images

* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Altman in the 1970s) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)

Images is an unreliable-narrator movie, even though the narration is for another story entirely. It's a pretty good one, compelling the audience to watch in an attempt to figure out what's real and what's in the character's head. I suspect that unlike the jigsaw puzzle that features prominently in the story, there are more pieces than needed to get the full picture, but I'll take that over too few.

In real life, a stay in the country is probably just the thing for someone on the edge of a nervous breakdown more often than not, although it tends to have just the opposite effect on film (to be fair, someone who is hanging on by a thread is going to snap wherever a movie puts them, or else there's no movie). Cathryn (Susannah York) is probably already slightly over the edge when she convinces her husband Hugh (Rene Auberjonois) to take her out to the manse where she grew up, and it doesn't help - she finds herself visited by the ghost of Rene, a former lover dead a year in a plane crash (Marcel Bozzuffi); Marcel, a handsome friend of the couple (Hugh Millais); and his daughter Susannah, who has a disquieting similarity to Cathryn in both appearance and temperament (Cathryn Harrison). Fortunately, there are knives and rifles in the house that can be used to fight off these apparitions, although Cathryn's judgment probably shouldn't be trusted vis-a-vis which are actually hallucinations.

I just realized, upon looking up the actors' names, that each character has the name of one of the other cast members. Cute, considering one of the ways Cathryn exhibits being crazy is by actually seeing one character as another. Further blurring the line between madness and fiction and reality, Susannah York wrote the children's book attributed to her character.

Full review at HBS.

Nashville

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2007 at The Brattle Theater (Altman in the 1970s) (Movie Watch-a-Thon)

Not a bad little movie at all, as Altman does a quite frankly amazing job of juggling dozens of characters without marginalizing many. It's the template for this kind of a movie, and deserves to be considered a classic.

Still, the end... What the heck? It's one of the biggest "this movie doesn't end, it just stops" deals I've ever seen.

The Brattle's Centennial Celebrations: The Blue Dahlia; The Glass Key; It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; and Raiders of the Lost Ark

I would have seen one or two more, but White Christmas didn't draw me in for the Danny Kaye double feature quite the way The Court Jester would have. Although, maybe I'm mis-remembering, but hasn't the Brattle had to cancel The Court Jester before because it couldn't get a print (or, now, a DCP)? Maybe I just missed it last time, but if not... C'mon, Paramount, what's wrong with you?

Kaye probably deserved a series of his own, but the others included in the tribute - Blue Dahlia & Glass Key star Alan Ladd, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World director Stanley Kramer, and Raiders cinematographer Douglas Slocombe - could probably say that too. At the very least, we got to see some pretty nice copies of some good movies. The Ladd ones were on crisp black-and-white 35mm, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was a good DCP, and I think Raiders was 35mm - it was advertised as such about half the time, but I never saw any of the telltale signs, like reel changes and the like.

My preferred theory for that is that the guys at the Brattle have show Raiders enough times that they don't actually need any prompting for when to do the changeovers. And, hey, they didn't correct Nick Frost when he tweeted that he'd just seen the movie in 35mm at the Brattle, apparently at the same show I went to.

The Blue Dahlia

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 November 2013 at the Brattle Theatre (Centennial Celebrations, 35mm)

There are a lot of names that can lead a person to check out The Blue Dahlia: while it was recently screened at the Brattle as part of a tribute to Alan Ladd, it's also a highlight for Veronica Lake and character actor William Bendix. Oh, and it's written by Raymond Chandler. That may not quite be a dream team, but director George Marshall certainly gets an enjoyable film noir out of it.

Johnny Morrison (Ladd), Buzz Wanchek (Bendix), and George Copeland (Hugh Beaumont) are returning home to Los Angeles from the war in the Pacific, honorably discharged; while George and the addled Buzz are looking for an apartment, Johnny aims to reunite with his wife Helen (Doris Dowling). Maybe he shouldn't have surprised her; he finds a party in full swing, with the guests including apparent lover Eddie Harwood (Howard Da Silva). He stomps out and starts hitchhiking to nowhere, coincidentally picked up by Eddie's spurned wife Joyce (Lake). The stink Johnny kicked up on the way out looks awful bad when Helen is found dead the next morning.

Writer Raymond Chandler is best known for his Philip Marlowe stories, most famously adapted to film with Humphrey Bogart playing the detective in The Big Sleep. That story is famously convoluted, and Chandler's plot for this movie is similar to it and his other novels, with sudden zigzags somehow adding up to a mystery story that may not quite be the fair-play puzzle of an Agatha Christie, but which reaches an end all the more satisfying because we like the put-upon hero. Johnny Morrison isn't really the Marlowe type, which is sort of a pity - there are few greater joys than reading the words Chandler puts in Marlowe's mouth - but there's honor to him, and even if the patter isn't as snappy as in Chandler's most famous works, there are still some great exchanges between the characters, Johnny and Joyce especially.

Ladd & Lake do their best work in some of their first scenes together, pondering the idea of becoming different people and unknowingly finding kindred spirits. They're a good-looking pair, well-able to get across the fact that, while Helen and Eddie have hurt them, some part of each recognized that their marriages were built on sand. Lake plays the cool one, while Ladd has a bit more fire to him, even when focused on finding his wife's killer.

They're good, but the supporting cast is what really makes the movie sing. Howard Da Silva's Eddie is in with gangsters, and we know that from his second scene, but he's surprisingly charming in a way that's not false or seemingly purposeful from his first. There's a similar charm to Will Wright as "Dad" Newell, a blackmailing hotel detective who is the sort of fun "extra" character that makes Chandler's convolutions worth it. William Bendix is the opposite as Buzz, abrasive and hostile from the word go (and he probably wouldn't refer to jazz as "monkey music" if the script were shot today), but the steel in his skull has left the character permanently confused, and Bendix does a fantastic job of bringing the horror of that situation forth.

It all comes together under the sure hands of George Marshall. He was a journeyman as opposed to a master, the kind of director who doesn't mess anything up but maybe doesn't quite push it into the canon of essential noir. Even without that distinction, the film still has a half-dozen things going for it, and most movies should be so fortunate.

(Formerly at EFC)

The Glass Key

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 November 2013 at the Brattle Theatre (Centennial Celebrations, 35mm)

The Glass Key is the sort of murder mystery where the fact that a man is dead comes across as an inconvenience and romantic attraction is often asserted as much as felt. On the other hand, it's also a movie with as much stuff happening as you can fit into 85 minutes without it feeling like too much, and never being dull counts for a lot.

We open with Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy), who runs the political machine in a medium-sized New Jersey city and is expected to play kingmaker in the upcoming gubernatorial election. Surprisingly, he throws his support behind Ralph Henry (Moroni Olsen), a reform candidate - mostly because his daughter Janet (Veronica Lake) turned his head. While Madvig makes nice with the beautiful people, his right hand man Ed Beaumont (Alan Ladd) deals with the less savory elements, like the gambling debts of Janet's brother Taylor (Richard Denning), whom Opal "Snip" Madvig (Bonita Granville), Paul's sister, has more than a bit of a thing for. When the dead body turns up, Madvig's old and new enemies are looking to pin it on him, and Ed's efforts to get him off the hook aren't helped by how little his boss seems to be bothered by the turn of events.

Madvig has a lot of enemies, to the point where it's difficult to keep track of them - there's a businessman who likely expected Madvig's support, a gangster, and a reporter, with the district attorney's involvement inevitable as well. It's a murder mystery that has no shortage of suspects so long as the term is described as "characters who are not the detective" (with Ed taking that role), especially if you take it as a given that framing Madvig may be all the motive someone needs. The trouble is, not many of them are really interesting enough for the audience to really invest in that story, even when it does connect to the good stuff.

What is the good stuff? Mainly, how class works as a dynamic in the story. The glass key of the title comes from Ed telling Paul that the Henry clan may say they've given him the keys to the kingdom, but that key will shatter if he turns it too hard, and that hangs over almost every interaction in the movie: Madvig may wield considerable influence, but his working-class roots show, and there's no chance that Janet will actually marry him once he's no longer useful. Madvig may be in denial about this, but Ed is hyper-aware, and there's a similar undercurrent to the other Madvig/Henry pairing, that Taylor may be a screw-up, but he'll only be allowed to fall so far, and Snip may only be allowed to climb so high.

The cast does a nice job with this, though it's not quite the arrangement the opening credits promise. Brian Donlevy may be first-billed, but Madvig is actually something of a supporting character, one who is always acting himself. Still, Donlevy makes him an interesting one, allowing the practiced artifice and overpowering infatuation to run into each other so that the audience is never quite sure where one ends and the other begins.

Still, it's Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake who sit at the center of the movie, and while it takes a long time for the attraction that characters talk about to really manifest, they're quite good individually. Ladd plays Ed Beaumont as a smart guy perhaps too committed to the chip on his shoulder to really succeed, although capable of great charm and sarcastic wit when pushed. Lake brings grace and refinement to Janet, but keeps in-character when she has to show a flash of passion because someone has hurt her brother or because Ed is just so frustrating. There are a couple of other nice performances in there, too, with Bonita Granville doing what's needed to make the audience believe that Opal will run to her brother's enemies because they at least seem to care about what matters, while William Bendix takes a character that could just be Thug #2 and making him one of the film's most memorable.

The thing is, for as much fun as it is to watch Ladd and Bendix abuse each other verbally and physically, that dynamic in particular has done more than its bit by the end, and for all that the various reversals, escapes, and arguments keep things moving, director Stuart Heisler and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer eventually wear themselves out. The finale is one of those mystery-movie last acts where everybody gets accused of committing the murder, to the point where it feels a bit artificial. It's not necessarily surprising that things turn out this way; Latimer is adapting a Dashiell Hammett novel, and Hammett tended to be more interested in corrupt men and institutions more than the crimes that corruption lead to. To be fair, this stretching mostly leads to the viewer noticing it's stretched rather than actual watch-glancing.

Ladd, Lake, and Bendix would reunite a few years later to tackle a script by another pulp master (The Blue Dahlia by Raymond Chandler) and make a somewhat better movie. This one's no slouch, though - whether filling out a double feature or a box set, it's a quick, often-clever movie tha certainly earns its keep.

(Formerly at EFC)

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 November 2013 at the Brattle Theatre (Centennial Celebrations, 2K DCP)

Depending on which cut you see, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World can run from two and a half hours to over three; the digital restoration that recently played the Brattle Theatre was the 154 minutes of its original 35mm release. That's a downright extravagant length for a film whose ambitions really don't go much farther than making the audience laugh a bit, but it is committed to that single, modest goal, and it never stops trying to make it happen, even when other films would have called it a day.

It starts tragically, as a car driven by elderly crook Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante) goes sailing off a winding California mountain road. The men in four other vehicles stop to see if there's anything to be done, but there isn't; before he goes, though, Smiler tells his would-be rescuers about $350,000 buried under a "big W" in Santa Rosita. They initially plan to go together, but arguing over how to split the windfall and basic greed soon make it a race. Buddies Ding Bell (Mickey Rooney) & Benjy Benjamin (Buddy Hackett) and married couple Mellville & Monica Crump (Sid Caesar & Edie Adams) take to the air, while a fender-bender has truck driver Lennie Pike (Jonathan Winters) and nervous J. Russell Finch (Milton Berle) - traveling with his wife Emeline (Dorothy Provine) and her pushy mother (Ethel Merman) searching for new ground transport. The former hooks up with Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers), who quickly ditches him to go after the money himself; the latter meet English horticulture enthusiast J. Algernon Hawthorne (Terry-Thomas), with the plan of having Emeline's brother Sylvester (Dick Shawn), a lifeguard in Santa Rosita, stake the place out first. In the meantime, the detective who has been working the Grogan case for years, Captain T. G. Culpepper (Spencer Tracy), is discretely keeping an eye on the lot of them.

That's a lot of names for a story that is not exactly complex, and there are many more passing through, from "Rochester" Anderson to The Three Stooges. Keeping them all occupied is one of the most impressive juggling acts in movie history, as writers William & Tania Rose come up with enough scenarios and obstacles to keep every member of the large ensemble busy while director Stanley Kramer allows them to play out at a natural pace, never cutting away from one group before its bit hits a punchline just to check in on someone else but also not ever letting it feel like characters are gone for too long or losing track of what each is doing. Editors Gene Fowler Jr., Robert C. Jones, and Frederic Knudtson are likely a big help as well; while the end result isn't perfectly smooth sailing - there are moments, when the movie jumps back to the police station and someone brings their neighbor up to date on what's going on, including the scene just prior, when I wonder if Kramer didn't necessarily trust his ability to keep things clear.

For all the skill Kramer et al show in keeping things moving, they're generally telling very basic jokes, from the moment when Smiler Grogan literally kicks the bucket to the last scene, when they pull out maybe the hoariest old chestnut that exists, a gag beloved by small children but obviously unsophisticated by adult standards. But that's when the movie has an overt wink at the audience, saying, sure, these are gags you've seen before, but the simple things work: Everyone laughs at an obnoxious person falling on his or her ass, especially if you don't get so caught up in yourself as to forget that the world is, in fact, kind of mad.

That said - if you're going to go with elemental jokes, it certainly doesn't hurt to fill the cast with folks who have the sort of split-second comic timing and carefully-honed comfort with their persona to make something the audience has heard a million times before hit the funny bone just right. Thus, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Johnathan Winters, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, and Phil Silvers. Fifty years later, Winters is probably the only one among them that a random sample of the population whose popularity has endured, while the idea that someone as milquetoast as Berle was a superstar can seem downright perplexing to a younger audience, but they know how to handle this material, and their fine-tuned execution should work for even relatively jaded audience members. It's kind of unfortunate that Merman is the only woman in the cast who really gets to be funny - and from doing an often-groan-worthy battle-axe mother-in-law character - but nobody has a joke he or she can't handle. That includes Spencer Tracy, the main actor in the cast, who does a fine slow burn and shares a nice moment with Dorothy Provine toward the end.

A lot of the comedy is physical, and it's some impressive slapstick, both in execution and scope. Kramer's got a great big Super-Panavision frame to play with, so when his characters stumble over something or destroy a building, it's bigger than anything they could do on the stage or the television of the time, or even the silent films that clearly inspired them. It gets cartoonish toward the end, but it's fine over-the-top slapstick. Kramer does a fine job with the other visuals, too - the movie doesn't have a lot of high-speed chases, but the automotive and aerial action is actually very impressive, especially for the time.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a comedy classic, although it's not the innovative gigantic-guffaws, I-can't-believe-they-went-there variety that makes the label unequivocal. But it tells jokes incredibly well, and keeps on doing so until well past when other movies would have ended and making it work. That it can get those laughs without offense without seeming timid just makes it more impressive.

(Formerly at EFC)

Raiders of the Lost Ark

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2013 at the Brattle Theatre (Centennial Celebrations, 35mm)

Look, I'm not saying I can't find new ways to say I love Raiders of the Lost Ark each time it plays in Boston and I go get a ticket, I just don't have time right now. So here's a link to the last time I saw it in 35mm (or just the eFilmCritic review).

The noon show wasn't the most packed, and the clear print wasn't quite the greatest I've seen, but still... When I got out of the theater, there were little kids excited about what they'd just watched. So, yes, it still holds up. Like there was any doubt.

Two Noir Series: The Big Combo; The Big Sleep; The Maltese Falcoln; Murder, My Sweet; The Burglar; Phantom Lady; Black Angel; The Glass Key; Miller's Crossing

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.

Full review on 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) on EFC.

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) on EFC.

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.

Full review on 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.

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.

Full review 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.

Full review on 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.