Films I Love #55: The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)

Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner is a rich, moving love story, a very warm film despite its snowy Christmastime setting. Although the film is focused on the antagonism of the store manager Kralik (James Stewart) and new employee Klara (Margaret Sullivan) — and of course, their eventual and inevitable realization of love for one another — in many ways it's more about everything that happens around this slowly developing romance. The film is set in a small shop in Budapest, and the texture of this shop, the daily business of the workers who gather outside every day for friendly chit-chat, is the real matter of the film. The characters are well-defined but not quirky, with just hints of low-key exaggeration lending some humorous edge to the anxious, sputtering Pirovitch (Felix Bressart) and the smart-alecky errand boy Pepi (William Tracy), who really comes into his own with a chest-swelled swagger when he gets promoted to salesman. The film's humor is gentle and quiet, with not a hint of mean-spirited mockery except, perhaps, in its portrayal of Kralik's foppish rival Vadas (Joseph Schildkraut). The film continually belies the idea that humor must be edgy or aggressive in order to be genuinely funny, as Lubitsch earns smiles, chuckles and occasionally even full-throated guffaws from his careful development of these characters and their minor foibles.

What's especially striking about the film's humor is the vein of real, deep sadness that runs through the center of it. There's a sense of loneliness in both Kralik and Karla, who separately believe they've found love in the form of someone they've never even met face-to-face, someone they've only corresponded with through letters. There's more than a hint of desperation in both characters: they invest so much into their romance-by-pen, as though it represents the last chance they each have for happiness or romance. In the process, they don't realize that the object of their love is right in front of them every day, that their relationship consists of sparring angrily by day and writing loving, romantic letters to one another by night. As such, the film is about the ideal of love as contrasted against the more prosaic but also more tangible reality: it's telling that before Kralik can reveal himself to Karla, he must adjust her expectations downward by shattering the fantasy of the letters, preparing her not only for the revelation that he's her great love, but that her great love is only a flesh-and-blood man after all. Lubitsch also has a wonderful feel for the anxieties of money, for the pressures of the working class life and the fear of losing a job, and the film makes great use of the Christmas setting for its subtle commentary on consumerism and salesmanship. It's a beautiful, funny, emotionally complex masterpiece with so much heart, so much beauty, in every image and every line that, despite its modest, unassuming surface, it winds up being an almost overwhelming experience.

Film No. 3: Interwoven/Tarantella

Harry Smith is perhaps best known for his stewardship of the famous Anthology of American Folk Music, an enthnomusicological attempt to preserve various folk traditions of the U.S. The multi-talented Smith was also an avant-garde filmmaker, and his 1946 Film No. 3: Interwoven was a work of lively abstract animation. Set to the music of Dizzy Gillespie, the film dances and bounces with jazzy rhythms, vaguely jiving to the same beat as the Gillespie tune but more just pulsating in sympathy with the music. The animation is geometric and colorful, with multicolored geometric shapes — mostly squares and rectangles, though a few circles and triangles show up towards the end of the brief short — shifting around the screen. Often, the quadrilaterals are arranged in tight grids, the internal boundaries of which are constantly shifting so that any given quadrant could pulse in size from a tiny box to spanning across nearly a quarter of the frame. These grids seem to be bouncing to their own internal groove, like there's a rowdy party going on and the whole place is jumping to the beat.

It gives the impression of architecture in motion, the boundaries all temporary, the straight lines deceptive because nothing ever stays in place for long — whereas most grids give the impression of rigidity and formality, this grid is fluid and free. Like jazz itself, it's structure in motion, structure with room for improvisation and movement, for unpredictability, for fun. It's hard to imagine a better visual metaphor for the spirit of jazz, this tension between structure/rigidity and freedom/motion. When Smith's shapes break out of the grid, dancing across the black space, momentarily suggesting bar graphs or rows of piano keys before returning to their abstract dance, it's even more suggestive of total freedom, though that sense of structure is lost.

Perhaps that's why the film's most compelling segments are the ones with that bouncing, shifting grid of colored blocks, where the borders are always changing and the colors leap unpredictably from one container to the next, creating fluid masses of shifting colors that dance across the screen, also in sympathy to the underlying beat. These images suggest so much, from tribal patterns or Oriental rugs — obvious influences — to color swatches and artists' palettes. In its suggestive abstraction, Smith's film doesn't merely accompany the jazz of the soundtrack or try to match images to the sounds of the music; it breathes and vibrates with the spirit of jazz, with the improvisatory and emotional intensity of jazz.


Tarantella is a 1940 short film made by the avant-garde animators Mary-Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth (with additional assistance by Norman McLaren). The film is synchronized to the music of the composer Edwin Gerschefski, whose harsh, alternately speedy and minimal piano music evokes the spirit of the tarantella. Like the Harry Smith short described above, the animation is an attempt to visualize the music, to find visual equivalents for the sound and the mood of the music that accompanies these images. However, Bute and Nemeth take a more literalist approach to this audio-visual collaboration, as opposed to Smith's freewheeling evocation of an improvisation in color. Bute and Nemeth's geometric shapes are much more closely related to the music they accompany, acting as a kind of graphic notation after the fact. In particular, a recurring figure is a squiggly line that seems to wave and vibrate in correspondence with the music, like a sound wave visualization of the piano. In another sequence, colored bars on a black screen elongate and shrink in response to changes in the music, creating little visual beats that correspond to the changing tempi of the composition.

Such synchronizations come off as mannered and pat, too basic and obvious to be really interesting. The film is much more interesting when it mirrors the modernist spikiness of Gerschefski's music in minimalist forms in which jagged, hard-edged lines and lightning patterns oscillate in and out of view against a solid red background. In these stretches, the images don't exactly track the music but instead form a visual counterpoint, a logical extension of the music's aesthetic and sensibility into the visual arts. These minimalist patterns seem like a futuristic city seen from above, a map of the future with a large central thoroughfare, stretching diagonally across the frame, with little geometric figures making their abstractly anthropomorphic way across it.

Film No. 3: Interwoven and Tarantella represent two superficially similar approaches to music/animation pairings that nevertheless have very different effects in practice. They're interesting little experiments, two visions of the potential for a form of visual music in which colors and shapes take the place of notes and tones.

By Night With Torch and Spear

The collage films of the filmmaker-artist Joseph Cornell, assembled from found footage — mangled commercial and documentary films and occasional specially shot sequences provided by Cornell's filmmaker friends — are strange masterpieces of excavation and recontextualization. Cornell's films forage through the ephemera of film's accumulated history to pick out the moments of eerie, potent magic, augmenting and intensifying that magic through judicious editing and bursts of vibrant, artificial color. By Night With Torch and Spear was itself excavated from Cornell's massive private collection of film reels, discovered only after his death in the mid-70s and preserved by Anthology Film Archives. It is a stunning, mysterious film, one of Cornell's most beautiful and poetic works. It is only eight minutes long but contains layers upon layers of suggestions and emotions.

The film is assembled entirely from snippets of industrial documentaries and educational films, seemingly from the silent era. In the first long sequence — after a first shot in which a pointer traces along a white sheet marked with black dots, as though instructing the viewer to watch closely — an industrial process runs backwards and upside-down, its images sensuously drifting in reverse. A large pot of molten metal hangs upside-down, the boiling liquid within strangely pulsing downward, as though straining to pour out of its container, but somehow defying the laws of gravity to remain in place. Showers of sparks rain down like fiery comets, coming together into a yellow-hot center that then rushes back into the factory machinery like a fireball. Rivers of molten metal run upstream, up long conveyor belts, then crawl up the sides of a container, as though the industrial plant is full of an inexplicable liquid alien intelligence, an amorphous being moving of its own volition in defiance of the laws of physics. Cornell's editing and his manipulations of these images are deceptively simple, but the effect is anything but. These grainy, distorted images, discombobulated and flipped around, become almost magical, their poetic effect very far removed from the staid documentary context in which this footage originally resided.


This is the world made strange, an ultimate surrealist statement. Ordinary industrial machinery, seen through a bright pink filter, seems to glow with otherworldly energy, and the men tending to these strangely vibrant, effervescent industrial playgrounds are like sorcerers, conjuring inexplicable phenomena. Cornell explicitly compares his manipulated industrial age images to a shot of Native Americans silhouetted against a darkening night sky. Even that image isn't as simple as it seems, since the playful sprinting and obviously celebratory mood of these headdress-wearing figures suggests that perhaps they're not even genuine Native Americans, but children playing at a role, enacting games of cowboys and Indians like in a Hollywood movie. The movies certainly inform Cornell's vision to a great extent. In his most famous film, Rose Hobart, he clipped images of the titular silent era actress out of a melodramatic epic, out of context, honing in on the core of the cinema as a magic of faces, gestures, single dramatic images rather than stories.

In By Night With Torch and Spear, the cinema burbles up from the film's subconscious in the form of found and recontextualized intertitles, often manipulated in the same ways as the images themselves, turned around backward and upside-down, often flashed onto the screen in an almost subliminal fashion, too fast to read, certainly too fast to decode the mirrored text. In any event, the titles, even when decoded (thanks to a DVD pause function Cornell didn't plan for) are banal and generic, snippets of pseudo-scientific language or context-free bits of information about a machine, an insect, a group of people. Cornell treats these fragments of ordinary texts like incantations, a mysterious language to be deciphered, curious transmissions from deep within the cinematic subconscious, flashing like lightning across the surface of the film and then vanishing just as quickly back into the depths from which they emerged.

Later in the film, Cornell inserts ethnographic images of a man playing a non-Western instrument, and then the image that gives the film its name, a shadowy nighttime sequence of some men fishing by torchlight with a long wooden spear. This shot is preceded by the only easily intelligible intertitle in the film, and the most poetic as well: "by night with torch and spear." Cornell's images bring together Western industrial society with the amorphous Other, the exotic and the foreign. In essence, he exoticizes what would be, to Western audiences, the familiar, by making the processes of commerce and industry seem as haunting, and as haunted, as the exotic images of foreign lands and foreign people.


These images also exist on a continuum with Cornell's found footage of insects, seen up-close and made even more terrifying by the application of negative-image filters that make it seem as though the film is delving into a truly alien landscape, a barren gray moonscape populated by exoskeleton-clad monsters with fuzzy feelers and click-clacking mandibles. The film represents a journey from the working class factory to the Old West or the exotic Orient, stopping in Egypt for a desert scene replete with camels, then venturing deep into the unseen underworld of insects and then beyond, to a final image in which abstract dots pulsate like subatomic particles dancing to an unheard and unfathomable music.

Cornell sees the cinema as a transmitter of poetic distortions, as a massive bank of images to be combed for magical moments, moments that can be amplified and reworked into something epic and unfamiliar. His was a totally original and remarkable cinema, and this short is perhaps one of the finest examples of his unparalleled ability to dig out the strange essence at the core of the ordinary.

Paisan

Roberto Rosselini's Paisan was his second postwar film, made after his scrappy, low-budget Rome Open City, which was filmed in the immediate aftermath of World War II with any film stock he could scrape together. Paisan is similarly rough and minimalist, continuing the ragged neorealist style that Rosselini inaugurated with his postwar work. The film consists of six tales set during the Allied liberation of Italy from the German occupation, focusing largely on interactions between Italian citizens and American soldiers, with the German troops a constant peripheral presence and lingering threat. The film is an interesting fusion of neorealist naturalism, melodrama and sentimentality. The stories Rossellini is telling are melodramatic rather than naturalistic, built around ironic reversals and stock characters, and the emotions evoked are generally broad and universal rather than specific. The film is more about the general experience of the liberation than it is about any particular stories or characters from this period, so its characters are fairly generic and its dialogue is mostly functional and rote.

Rossellini was working with a mix of actors and non-professionals, drawing from the ranks of the American soldiers still stationed in Italy to portray the Americans in the film. But the effect isn't quite realistic so much as amateurish; almost all of the Americans turn in awkward, stiff performances and not all of the Italians are much better. The amateur performances add to the sense of a film captured on the fly, with whatever materials are at hand, whatever locations can be filmed and whatever people are around, most of them real people who'd really lived through some version of the events depicted here. The film follows the structure of the Americans' northward advance through Italy, with each episode set in one town along the route of the military campaign, from the very south in Sicily to the very north in the Po River region. As the film progresses, and as Rossellini depicts the military struggle proceeding north, the relations between the American military and the Italian people become closer, less prone to misunderstandings and miscommunication. In the first three episodes of the film, the language barrier and differences in attitudes prevent a true connection between the Italian people and the Americans liberating the country, but in the final three episodes those divisions are increasingly erased.

The climax of the first tale is a touching scene between the American soldier Joe (Robert Van Loon) and the Italian girl Carmela (Carmela Sazio), who had been guiding a group of American troops through a dangerous area where only she knew the way. At one point, the other soldiers go out scouting, leaving Joe behind with Carmela to hide in a hilltop fort until the rest of the troops return. Joe doesn't speak any Italian, and Carmela doesn't speak any English, and yet the two sit side by side, trying to communicate, speaking to one another without really understanding anything of what the other is saying. They occasionally get a word or two, or can communicate through gestures and pantomime. The scene is very moving in its quiet, simple way, as they attempt to overcome the language barrier between them and make a connection. Rossellini stages the scene in one long take, a steady shot of the two people sitting next to one another by a window, talking, struggling with their words, smiling and sharing stories about their lives that, for the most part, they know the other person doesn't understand. It's a wonderful scene, and the warm emotions of this moment set up the heartbreaking ironies that follow from it in subsequent scenes, when a group of German soldiers stumble across the fort. The episode ends, not with communication but with further misunderstandings; that brief moment of frustrated connection is extinguished by violence.

In the second story, a black American soldier (Dots Johnson), drunk and disoriented, is taken advantage of by kids and street thugs — disturbingly, a couple of hustling kids try to sell him to the highest bidder in a back alley — and eventually winds up being led around by the bratty Pasquale (Alfonsino Pasca). As in the first episode of the film, the focus of the story is the inability to communicate across the language barrier between Italian and English. Sitting atop a pile of rubble — Rossellini filmed in the real streets of wasted Italian cities — the soldier entertains the boy with a frenzied re-enactment of a naval battle, in which the boy understands no more than a few words but enjoys the spectacle anyway, laughing and smiling. What he misses, of course, are the notes of pathos in the man's story, his drunken musings on home and the poverty and squalor that await him back in America. But the soldier doesn't really get the kid either, not until the end of this story when he finally confronts the reality of how so many poor, displaced Italian people are living: gangs of kids without parents, families without homes, large makeshift communities assembled from whatever trash is at hand.


In the third story, the American soldier Fred (Gar Moore) is picked up by the Italian prostitute Francesca (Maria Michi), who takes him home and listens to his story about the early days of the war. He tells her about a girl he met back then who was beautiful and kind and embodied, for him, the happiness of the liberation. Now it's six months later and Fred has grown cynical and exhausted, and he looks at the Italian people, and especially all the girls who have become prostitutes catering to the American GIs, with contempt and disgust. Of course, Francesca is the girl from the story, and once again this episode turns on a very O. Henryesque irony, based on the soldier's failure to recognize the girl he so badly wanted to see again. He also fails to recognize, as the black soldier had, the difficulties of surviving in the postwar chaos, and he has no sympathy for girls like Francesca who do the best they can to get along in this difficult situation. This sequence, which takes place mostly inside and is noticeably glossier than some of the other sequences, demonstrates the limitations of Rossellini's approach here. Without the virtues of the rough, realistic street photography of postwar Italy, all that's left are the tired clichés of the writing and the amateurish performances.

In the fourth sequence, the American nurse Harriet (Harriet White Medin) and the Italian citizen Massimo (Renzo Avanzo) try to find a way into German-occupied Florence, where Italian partisans are heroically fighting against the Germans while British troops sit just outside the city, waiting for reinforcements to arrive. Obviously, the gap between Allied efforts and Italian efforts remains large, but Harriet and Massimo run hand-in-hand through the city, each desperate to get inside for a different reason, her to find an Italian partisan who she loves, him to find his family who he fears may be in danger in the German zones of the city. The episode is basically an extended action sequence, with an emphasis on the spatial geography of the city, as the pair run across rooftops, dodge through hidden tunnels and avoid snipers and German patrols. It's a thrilling, effective sequence that ends with a moving, expressive closeup, one of the film's most glorious shots. Rossellini excels at closeups, at faces, and his final image of Harriet here is a sudden classical composition that emerges with devastating power from the loose, ragged style of the surrounding scenes.

The film's fifth segment concerns a trio of American military chaplains — a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew — who arrive at an Italian monastery and are welcomed by the monks. The monks, however, are discomfited by the realization that two of their guests are not Catholic, and they become concerned about the two "lost souls" who they fear have made the wrong choice in terms of religion. This story evokes the gentle humor that Rossellini directed at the brave priest in Rome Open City; it's obvious that Rossellini has great respect for religion without being entirely straight-faced about it. The sequence where the monks find out that the American chaplains are not all Catholic is clearly played for humor, as they go running around the monastery in a panic announcing to the others that there's a Jew amongst them. It seems like Rossellini is setting up the story to mock the provincialism and intolerance of the monks, but instead it turns out that the monks are genuinely worried for the men, that they believe so strongly that their Catholicism is the only correct path that they don't wish for any good men to risk their souls with another religion. The segment is tonally unbalanced with the rest of the film and ends with a saccharine speech from one of the American chaplains, driving home the moral of communion between Italians and Americans, praising the Italian monks for their "pure faith."


In the final segment, depicting the battles on the Po River, the boundaries between the Italians and the Allies have been virtually erased. The Italian partisans speak Italian, and the American and British soldiers speak English, but they all seem to understand one another, without the difficulties of language seen in the earlier segments. They are working together towards a common goal, and the segment opens with a taut suspense sequence in which an American soldier and an Italian partisan cooperate from different points along the river in order to fight some German sentries while retrieving the body of a dead soldier. In this episode, the various armies and nationalities intermingle, and in the nighttime scenes it's impossible to see who's who; one can only hear the voices drifting across the dark river speaking English or Italian. Even so, this episode also emphasizes the one crucial distinction between the Italians and the Allies, which is that the Italians are fighting here for their homeland, for their people, while the Allies are on foreign soil. There's a difference, too, in the treatment of the prisoners who are captured by the Germans, and the film ends with a moving and horrifying tribute to the sacrifices of the Italian partisans who fought and died in the battles to push the Germans out of Italy.

On the whole, Paisan is an interesting if deeply flawed movie. It is obviously a very emotional look at the postwar period and the events that affected the Italian people in the final stretch of the war. If the film's writing is occasionally sentimental and generic, Rossellini pours real feeling into his images and into his portrait of the rubble-strewn streets of his home country.

Gente del Po/N.U.

Michelangelo Antonioni, like many directors who later became known for their fictional features, started his career making documentary short films. His first was Gente del Po, shot in 1943 but not finished and released until 1947, its production hampered by problems with damaged and partially destroyed negatives. Despite this troubled history, the film is a beautifully shot document of the people who live their lives along — and on — the Po river, working as farmers or living on floating barges. The film's stark black-and-white images capture the physicality of this land, of the lives that are set within this often tumultuous landscape. The voiceover, spoken by a female narrator, is generic and banal, and doesn't have much to say beyond the most prosaic descriptions of these people's lives and occupations, as farmers or barge-dwelling laborers. It's the images that tell the real story, expressing the beauty and the harshness of this land and the work that's done in it.

Antonioni's visual sensibility is obviously already striking even in this first documentary. In one shot, he captures a woman walking home and frames her as a small figure against a massive, empty sky, with a tall, thin tree stretching up towards the sky above her. The shot, framed from below, looking up towards the woman and that blank gray sky, prefigures the distinctive compositions of Antonioni's later features, in which he also often framed his characters within landscapes that seem to tower over them, as expressions of their alienation and isolation. In another shot, he shows a young man going to court a girl by the riverbank, and he shoots the girl from behind, looking out at the water, only to turn around as the guy steps into the shot and sits down beside her. These little bursts of narrative suggestion belie the film's documentary construction; it's apparent that Antonioni, already possessed by the urge to tell stories and explore his characters' psychologies, was forming little narrative vignettes around the lives of these real people.

As a result, Gente del Po is an interesting debut, a rough but potent first short from a director who would later explore similar themes — like the effect of environment and occupation on people — in more depth. The film is ragged, with its routine narration, generic music and the abrupt ending necessitated by Antonioni's problems with his footage, but in its brief span it points the way forward to the ideas and aesthetics of the director's subsequent career.


N.U. is a more modest and simple documentary from Michelangelo Antonioni, a film about the workers of the Netezza Urbana, the department of sanitation: the street-sweepers of Rome. The film has very minimal narration, just a short blurb announcing its purpose at the very beginning of the film, describing the work of the street-sweepers and making the banal point that, though nobody pays attention to them, they are in fact integral to the city's activity. Antonioni then stages a series of quasi-documentary scenes of the street-sweepers at work. As in Gentle del Po, there is, already in this commissioned documentary work, a hint of narrative structure, a suggestion that Antonioni likes to look at the world and tell stories about what he sees. These scenes have the feel of a childlike imagination playing a game: watching ordinary people and imagining what private dramas they might be experiencing. A man and a woman, obviously a bourgeois couple of the type that Antonioni would later probe and psychoanalyze so incisively, walk down the street, arguing with each other, and as the woman walks away the man stops to angrily tear up a piece of paper and throw it on the street. As he runs to catch up to the woman, grabbing her arm and continuing their argument, a street-sweeper stoically sweeps up the shreds of paper into his shovel, dumping them into his garbage can. As the couple walk away in the background, taking their story elsewhere, a bum walks up and talks to the street-sweeper.

The staging of scenes like this in no way feels like a documentary; there's no looseness in Antonioni's compositions, nothing that suggests that this is unscripted reality. He may be shooting on the streets, capturing real people at work, but already his urge to impose his own will, his own vision on these images is apparent. He was never cut out to be a true documentary filmmaker. In one shot, his camera pans towards a small wooden shed, the door of which swings open as though in the breeze precisely at the moment that the tracking shot ends; a newspaper rustles inside, and eventually it's revealed that it's not the wind producing this motion but a homeless man who had been spending the night in this shelter with blankets of paper. Such images, so obviously arranged and choreographed, wind up working against the sense of ordinary reality that the voiceover pays tribute to: this is not a straightforward document of street-cleaners and bums but a carefully arranged series of images and stories.

The film ends with a sweepingly romantic image of a solitary street-cleaner walking home after work, a black silhouette in the darkening evening, the city stretched out around him in a long shot that perfectly captures the urban romanticism of this image, very unlike later Antonioni but not unlike his noir-influenced feature debut Story of a Love Affair, which he would make two years later. The image also recalls Charlie Chaplin's Tramp figure, a suggestion that the romanticized homeless people and laborers of this film are derived from the example of the movies as much as from real life. Antonioni, making these small documentaries to observe the lives of ordinary people, was already crafting the foundation for the films he'd make as a mature filmmaker, already laying the groundwork for a cinema dealing with people and their surroundings, with the importance of work in modern society, and with the isolation and alienation of the individual in a society where individual lives are increasingly marginalized, like the ignored street-sweepers and bums of this short.

Gilda

The thing that makes Gilda such a classic as a noirish love story is the way in which it boldly mingles love and hate, to the point where the two emotions, in their strongest and most virulent forms, become virtually indistinguishable from one another. This point is made again and again in the script, in the most literal terms, as all of the characters speak of how close strong love and strong hate are to one another, how easily one could be mixed up with the other, and how at times it can seem like the intensity of an emotion can be more important than the specific emotion that's being felt. The script is built around this idea, but, as befits such an emotionally charged concept, it's expressed most powerfully not in words but in the love/hate, push/pull sexual tension that develops in the midst of the film's central love triangle.

This is a film with some interesting things to say about triangles, for sure. The first triangle in the film develops, not between two men and a woman, but between two men and a weapon: the rich, corrupt casino owner Ballin Mundson (George Macready), the down-on-his-luck crooked gambler Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) and Mundson's cane, which hides a blade that he refers to, rather phallically, as his "little friend." Soon enough, Mundson pulls Johnny into his business and begins to refer to him, too, as a little friend, someone he can rely upon to help with his business, someone who's as trustworthy as his weapon. That threesome will change when Mundson marries Gilda (Rita Hayworth), who unbeknown to Mundson already has a history with Johnny, his trusty little friend. Neither Johnny nor Gilda is very happy with this state of affairs, especially Johnny, who's upset that his original, homoerotic triangle with Mundson has been broken apart by a woman — and as Mundson himself says before meeting Gilda, women are nothing but trouble for gamblers.

When Mundson introduces Johnny to Gilda, there's a weird tension between the three of them almost instantly. Mundson is swelling with pride, eager to show off his beautiful bride, but Johnny is jealous before he even sees the woman, as though he's jealous not of Mundson for scoring a beautiful woman, but jealous of her for taking away his friend and benefactor. Then Gilda appears, bursting into the frame, standing up into a ravishing, thrilling closeup, whipping her hair back, her dress hanging off her bare shoulders, a mischievous smile on her face as her husband asks if she's decent. Her lips curve up in that glorious smile, a little glint flashes in her eyes and she seems on the verge of answering him with a predictable wisecrack — "Me? Never," one imagines her saying, holding that same naughty smile all the while — but instead the smile fades a little when she sees Johnny, and she forgoes the banter to say that she is decent, as though already constructing her defense against Johnny's as-yet-unspoken accusations. The introduction is fraught with these tensions, as the dialogue crackles and sparks with barely submerged antagonism, particularly when she implies that she views Johnny as just some more of the "hired help," slighting him as forgettable and insignificant, even though something in her tone, nasty as it is, suggests that exactly the opposite is the case.


Hayworth plays Gilda, not as a tramp, but as a woman who's been told she's a tramp so often that she's started to believe it, that she's decided to live up — or down — to the reputation. She shamelessly admits that she married Mundson for his money — more than that, that she allowed herself to be bought, which makes it sound even more like prostitution, like a transaction. And once she's married she begins running around with other men almost immediately, more to make Johnny jealous than to have any effect on her husband, who seems to mean very little indeed to her. Over the course of the film, Hayworth betrays more and more of the insecurity and desperation lurking beneath her seemingly cavalier exterior — she's playing at being a femme fatale, but in fact she's been deeply wounded, and now she's trying her hand at wounding the man who hurt her so badly. Behind each of her smiles, each of her barely disguised insults and subtle slights, lurks a reservoir of hatred and anguish, a desire and a love so strong that it's curdled into contempt, and a correspondingly tangled self-image.

The film coasts by on the power of Hayworth's performance, on the complicated emotions that she projects from within her outwardly vivacious form, and on the quick wit of the verbose screenplay. The dialogue has real pop to it, real bite. It's a writer's picture, not a director's — Charles Vidor's direction is glossy but unexceptional — and it's no surprise to see that writer Ben Hecht was an uncredited contributor to this punchy script. These characters are constantly using words to hurt one another, slicing at each other with pointed jokes and barbed comments. Johnny even makes the comparison to weapons explicit when he says that Mundson's cane/blade — which Gilda is replacing as the third point of this bizarre triangle — must be feminine rather than masculine, because "it looks like one thing but right before your eyes it becomes another." Johnny's hatred of women, and especially of Gilda as a representative of women, is even more potently expressed in his nasty joke: "there are more women in the world than anything else... except insects." Gilda is more direct, expressing her hatred in especially naked terms, saying, "I hate you so much that I would destroy myself to take you down with me." Love, transmuting into hate, doesn't get any more intense than that.

That's the core of the film, and it's embodied almost exclusively in Hayworth. Ford and Macready, as the other points of this triangle, glower and mope but seem pint-sized, insignificant, in comparison to the bold, exuberant womanhood of Hayworth's Gilda, who seems to feel so much, so intensely and generously, that she dwarfs the men with the magnitude of both her smiles and her tears. Hayworth even transforms a seemingly joyful song-and-dance striptease number — her hip-shaking, devastatingly sexy performance of "Blame It On Mame" — into an expression of her inner turmoil. To the appreciative crowd, she looks like she's having a ball, gleefully stripping off her black gloves and throwing them into the audience, bending over to allow her cleavage to spill out of a ludicrously low-cut dress, even tossing away the necklace from around her neck, and finally, naughtily, inviting some guys to come up on stage and unzip her dress, keeping a big grin on her face the whole time. In fact, she's doing it only to hurt Johnny, to cut into him by trying to live up, again, to his impression of her as a cheap tramp. She's rubbing it — her willingness to embody the woman he hates — in his face.

There's a plot in here somewhere, one that has nothing to do with the central love triangle, and which is therefore just a distraction from what really matters in this film. All the weird business about tungsten monopolies and shady international conglomerates just fades into the background in comparison to the sheer intensity of the tragic romance. The film's ending gets a little too tied up in those cops-and-criminals machinations, and turns more than a little too corny in its tidy resolution, but before that point it's a poignant, sexually charged examination of love and hate.

He Walked By Night

He Walked By Night is an early example of the realistic police procedural, a film that attempts to examine, with a documentary's attention to detail, the procedures and routines of a real police investigation. The film, credited to director Alfred Werker but apparently mostly directed by an uncredited Anthony Mann, is filled with striking sequences and darkly beautiful noir imagery. It is a continuation of Mann's series of docudrama noirs like T-Men and Raw Deal, and it was shot by frequent Mann cinematographer John Alton, whose shadowy images are among the most intense exemplars of the noir style. The film is based on the true story of a loner, a former police radio technician and World War II veteran named Roy Martin (Richard Baseheart) who kills a police officer while committing a string of robberies and stick-ups. The killer eludes the police for months, using a police radio scanner and his unpredictable intelligence to evade capture while holding up liquor stores, extorting money out of his former employer, and assembling various pieces of electrical equipment for a mysterious purpose.

The film adopts a faux-documentary style that purports to show the real workings of the police, but its attempts at realistic credibility often fall flat. The film is periodically marred by an overbearing voiceover that narrates the police's activity, describing pieces of equipment or procedures. The film aims for the routine: emphasizing the fact that much policework is boring and repetitive, consisting of searching through files or asking the same questions of countless people. The exaggerated drama of so many noirs and mysteries is drained from the policework shown here, replacing it with a slow-burning suspense as every avenue of inquiry is patiently exhausted in the search for any tiny clue. This aspect of the film's realism is appreciated, even if it means that some scenes — like the slow process by which the police assemble a composite sketch from the testimonies of various witnesses — are stretched out far beyond what their visual or narrative appeal would warrant.

At other times, the flat, unemotional voiceover is simply distracting. In one sequence, as Martin escapes from a liquor store robbery by dodging into a sewer, the voiceover provides an explanation of the sewer tunnels beneath Los Angeles, layering dull exposition over the striking beauty of Alton's gorgeous images. The tunnels, black and slick, glow with the reflected beam of the fleeing criminal's flashlight as he's swallowed up by the darkness. The narration — which basically extols how clever the criminal is in choosing this escape route — is utterly extraneous. At times like that, the images aren't allowed to stand alone or communicate the story; instead, the narration explains what's happening with its portentous style.


The moments when the narration falls silent are far more effective, and thankfully much of the film's climax, as the police slowly close in on Martin, plays out silently. Indeed, in many sequences the film eschews any form of sound, even music, though there are generic string cues scattered along the soundtrack at especially dramatic moments. The film's best moments are calm and quiet. When the police try to trap Martin at a meeting place, the scene plays out silently as the criminal creeps around a shadowy office, circling around the police as they try to catch him. Not only is there no music, but there's hardly a trace of any sound whatsoever. The footsteps of the criminal and police make no noise, and the silence is eerie and almost unnatural. It's as though any trace of sound has been artificially extracted from the environment; only when Martin pounces on one of his pursuers does the sound return, with an abrupt crash that shatters the stillness.

Later, the buildup to the final showdown is set in a similar unnatural quiet, as the police surround the small house where Martin has holed up. The tension builds as the film crosscuts between Martin inside, growing suspicious as his dog yelps and growls at the unseen cops, and the cops as they lurk in the shadows, moving in and spreading out around the area to trap Martin. The silence emphasizes the emptiness of the suburban night, the complete absence of anyone moving around. It's only the police and the criminal, getting into position for the final confrontation. Martin paces around his darkened homes, the blinds on the windows casting slatted shadows on his body as he checks his gun and prepares for an escape. Outside, the empty street seems completely still, but the police lurk in the shadows, slowly approaching the door of Martin's house, seemingly cutting off all exits. The music cue that suddenly erupts when Martin finally sees a policeman running across the road signals the end of this patient build-up, and the beginning of the tense, viscerally exciting climax. As Martin once again escapes into the sewers, the police follow him, and the editing contrasts the sweaty desperation of Martin, running in circles and trying to find any unguarded exit, against the patient, methodical advance of the police, signaled by the line of their flashlights hovering in the darkness of the tunnels, moving inexorably forward towards the increasingly rattled criminal.

The film is at its best at moments like this, scenes of almost abstract tension. The story is rather flat and generic, with no explanation ever advanced for Martin's crimes, and the cops chasing him (led by Scott Brady's Sgt. Brennan and Roy Roberts' Captain Breen) are almost entirely without character. They're important as the men conducting this investigation, but their lives beyond the job, their characters or human dramas, are mostly incidental. Curiously, Martin seems far more human. His dog, who he devotedly cares for and feeds milk to, seems to be his only living connection, the only friend of a friendless, isolated man. There's also a very Mann-like scene where the criminal performs ad-hoc surgery on himself to remove a bullet from his side. As he pierces the wound and uses tweezers to pull the bullet out, the camera holds a prolonged closeup on his sweating face, beads of sweat standing out on his skin, his face screwed up into a grimace of pain, wincing and whimpering, his voice blending with the cries of the dog in the background. This emphasis on physical pain and suffering is very characteristic of Mann's work, and though it isn't the only sign of his presence in this film, it's one of the most striking. He Walked By Night is most effective in small, detail-oriented scenes like this, and in its understated but intense action climaxes.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Mildred Pierce opens with a very noirish murder, a few bullets fired, a cracked mirror, and a man lying dead in a swanky beach house by the shore, an isolated cabin in the middle of an expanse of sand, the kind of unreal, romantic Hollywood location that's prefabricated for murder. But the film isn't a noir, and it isn't a murder mystery, not exactly. Instead, it's a kind of dark, proto-feminist nightmare, the story of a woman who struggles violently against all the constraints placed on her as a woman, all the straitjackets and exploiters. Mildred (Joan Crawford) claws her way up through the world, always doing more, pushing further, than anyone expects from her, and still it isn't enough: she can't satisfy the demands of her snotty, nasty monster of a daughter, Veda (Ann Blythe), and she can't break free of all the weak people who would lean on her strength, weighing her down with their own inconsistency. Over the course of the film, Mildred pushes aside her lazy, philandering first husband Bert (Bruce Bennett), she goes to work as a waitress and eventually starts a chain of restaurants, she dodges the advances of the slimy opportunist Wally (Jack Carson), and she's alternately ensnared by and evades the decadent but now broke society heir Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott), the man who dies in the film's opening scenes.

Throughout it all, Mildred suffers and struggles, never quite getting beaten down by anything that's handed to her. The film, directed by Michael Curtiz, is a parable for the life of the strong, independent woman: sometimes it seems that every time Mildred clears one hurdle, a new and more forbidding obstacle is erected in her path. She's besieged on every side, and still she fights. The film is a class A melodrama, casting an admiring glance equally on Mildred's determination and strength and on the sheer scope of what she's forced to overcome. It's a pretty scathing portrait of men, too, as virtually none of the film's men emerge with their dignities intact. Mildred's first husband not only loses his job and fails to look for another one, while Mildred scurries around the kitchen baking pies to sell, but he runs off with another woman. Wally, supposedly Bert's friend, takes this split as an opportunity to begin instantly smothering Mildred with his attention, coming on to her like one of the girl-hounding foxes of a Tex Avery cartoon, the context for Mildred's chilly remark that he makes her feel like Little Red Riding Hood. Even Beragon, who initially seems like a more conventional movie romantic — enough so that Mildred even falls in love with him, at least for a little while — winds up being a useless, wasting loser, clinging pathetically to the last of his society prestige while accepting handouts from the more successful Mildred.

Within its melodramatic story, the film examines the struggles of a truly independent woman within a world that isn't ready for her. Mildred has a friend, Ida (a wisecracking Eve Arden), who's as independent as she is, a woman who's made her own way in business, but Ida, though she alludes to some disappointments with men, seems to have had an easier time of it than Mildred. Ida had never married, never had children, and now she simply works hard and makes a success of herself. She's a great character, with a quick wit (she gets some of the crackling script's funniest lines) and a self-assured manner that shows that she doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks of her. She's what Mildred could be, or could have been, if not for so many entanglements pulling her down; Mildred's surrounded with people, mostly Veda and Beragon, who rely on her success, who use her and take her money, but who simultaneously despise and pity her for it. There's a class component to the film as well as the gender component: it's about the idle rich's snobby distaste for those who are willing to get their hands dirty, those who work for a living. Mildred isn't afraid of work, she isn't afraid of baking or waiting tables or working long hours, whatever it takes to provide for the people she cares about. Veda, the film's villain, a little demon with a scrubbed-clean face and a chilling ability to turn her emotions on and off as though flicking a switch, leeches off of the fruits of Mildred's labor, but hates her mother for her work ethic, hates the whole idea of having to work. She sees herself as belonging to the upper class, despite her middle class birth, and she's determined to live as though she's a society heiress.


Veda is an infuriating character, and a despicable one, and the film handles her very cleverly: she initially just seems like a mildly bratty kid, a bit distant and pouty, a bit ungrateful, a bit spoiled, like a lot of teenagers. Over the course of the film, she reveals herself as something else entirely, a real outsized movie villain, hiding an almost sociopathic indifference to her mother's feelings behind her cheery, charmingly girlish face. She becomes almost terrifying in the way she exploits and manipulates her mother, draining the strength from this strong, intelligent woman. Blyth's performance, this sweet but emotionally empty aura she projects, is fascinating when juxtaposed against Crawford's tough, expressive tour de force. As Crawford runs a gamut of feelings from steely determination to near despair, delivering a powerhouse performance, Blyth maintains her slightly creepy composure except when, with obvious forethought, she turns on a particular emotional reaction to get a desired effect. The girl's disconcerting control over her emotions is captured most tellingly in a sequence where she announces her engagement to a rich young boy; when her fiance is looking at her, she's all smiles and affectionate glances, but the moment he turns away from her she betrays a flash of a cold, cruel expression, her lips curled into an expression of distaste, her eyes dead and empty.

Coldness and warmth, the traditional dichotomy of womanly behavior, are embodied in these two characters, mother and daughter, but not in the usual ways. Mildred, for all her independence, for all her strength and ability to survive without a husband, isn't a caricature of the cold, loveless career woman. She feels a great deal, maybe even too much — her compassion, her love and tolerance for people who don't deserve it, is her ultimate weakness. It's Veda who's the cold one, Veda who isn't strong at all, who only knows how to use and exploit people, how to take advantage. Veda is contrasted, in the early scenes of the film, against Mildred's younger daughter Kay (Jo Ann Marlowe), another independent woman in the making, a girl who likes to play, who likes to join in on the boys' games, not caring if she gets dirty, like her mother who digs in at work, and very unlike the prim Veda. Mildred takes Kay for granted, knowing that the girl isn't demanding, that like her mother she can take care of herself — it's Veda, who can't, who gets all the attention. This situation symbolically comes to a head in a staggering tragedy, as Mildred loses Kay, loses the girl who might have otherwise grown up to be like her strong, spirited mother. Later in the film, when Veda returns to Mildred after a time apart, a photograph of Kay is tellingly placed in the foreground as Mildred runs to the window to see her inconstant daughter. The photo is a reminder of the very different daughter who'd suffered the fate of so many other cinematic independent women.

Mildred Pierce is fascinating for the way it both upturns and upholds these kinds of stereotypes about independent women: the film is conflicted at its core, torn between rival visions of womanhood. Its ending, sadly, suggests a compromise, a return to the dependency of marriage, as though Mildred hadn't learned any lessons from her ordeals. This is a pretty insubstantial reassertion of the romantic norm, however, a weak gesture towards convention that does little to reverse the subversion of marriage and motherhood represented by the rest of the film.

Films I Love #51: Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)

[This is a contribution to For the Love of Film (Noir), the second Film Preservation Blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren. The blogathon has been organized for the benefit of the Film Noir Foundation, who do important work to restore and preserve the noir heritage. Please consider donating to the Foundation during this week. The blogathon will run from February 14-21, and during this time I'll be posting about some noirs to raise awareness of the blogathon and its worthy cause.]

Edgar G. Ulmer excelled at making tough, gritty pictures on miniscule budgets: films that transcend their Poverty Row production values with a strangely haunting grace and beauty, a powerful aesthetic guiding every rough shot of Ulmer's work. The ratty B noir Detour is perhaps Ulmer's strongest film, a pithy hour-long ode to fallen men and dangerous women — or is it the other way around? Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is just an ordinary guy, a bit down on his luck maybe, a pianist whose beloved singer girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake) has moved to California, hoping to make it in show biz. Roberts hitchhikes after her, but his journey to be reunited with his love goes awry when, through an improbable series of circumstances, he accidentally kills a man who has picked him up on the road. Knowing that the police would never believe his outrageous story, Roberts decides to hide the body and assume the other man's identity. But even this plan is foiled when he himself picks up a female hitchhiker, the fiery Vera (Ann Savage), who recognizes the car and knows that Roberts wasn't the one who was driving it not long ago. Roberts' sad story is told through a series of flashbacks, narrated in a shattered monotone by the antihero, who relates each new twist as though he still can't believe these things happened to him. Roberts is an everyman, with no money in his pockets and no luck, and he's easily manipulated by the sinister Vera. Savage's performance is truly eviscerating; she looks at Roberts like he's prey, with her eyes wide, gritting her teeth, her eyebrows gesticulating wildly, her voice a cold hard rasp.

Ulmer's a true poet of the noir: his images have an unsettling potency and startling emotional depths. Even Vera, the wanton woman, has her moment of warmth, when she places a hand seductively on Roberts' shoulder and tells him, her words freighted with meaning, "I'm going to bed." She looks at him expectantly, and when he shakes off her implicit offer, her face hardens into her usual eagle-like mask, putting up a front of rage to disguise her disappointment and hurt. Ulmer's ragged poetry can also be found in the half-awake dream Roberts has while driving, a vision of Sue singing against a backdrop of shadowy jazz musicians — a surreal interlude that juxtaposes Sue's cheery, all-American sweetness against the dark, tawdry circumstances into which the dazed Roberts stumbles. Ulmer's images have a hazy, raw quality that is both hyper-real and disturbingly unreal, a nightmare imagining of a world determined to punish the innocent, to corrupt them, to make them guilty. But his vision is also sufficiently open-ended that it allows for another interpretation, in which the entire film is the delirious self-justification of a guilty man, spinning wild stories to assuage his conscience. Either way, Detour is a harrowing and unforgettable noir, a distillation of the genre's essential themes and images into their most untempered form.