Bicycle Thieves

Bicycle Thieves is a deserved classic of the Italian neorealist movement. Made just a few years after World War II, Vittorio De Sica's melancholy masterpiece starkly captures the poverty and desperation of the post-war years. The film is all about the lack of jobs and money that afflicted so many working class families during the long, slow years of post-war recovery, with Europe in ruins, its economy struggling to rebuild and leaving many people floundering. Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) is one of these struggling men, out of work and unable to provide for his wife Maria (Lianelli Carell), their son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) and a baby. When he does stumble into a job, it comes with the caveat that he needs a bicycle, and he pawned his bicycle long before to get food for his family. He buys the bike back and is excited to finally be working again, but on his first day on the job, the bike is stolen and his hopes are dashed.

De Sica quickly establishes just how vital this bicycle is to this family's future, to Antonio's ability to provide for his family. The bicycle, which had been hocked to pay for food, is bought back by selling the sheets off their bed; every one of their meager possessions can potentially be traded to feed the family. A job is a near-miraculous stroke of luck, since the work is handed out by lottery with just a few jobs randomly distributed among eager crowds of men waiting for their chance to work.

Since the bicycle is necessary for this job, it is absolutely essential to the family, and De Sica creates nearly overwhelming tension in the scenes after they've retrieved the bike, simply by tracking and zooming so that the bicycle inches out of the frame, its form cut off as the camera moves. Every time the bike is out of view, one expects it to vanish for good, that the next time the camera tracks back to where it was, it will be gone. It's unnerving, this subtle formal play with the boundaries of the frame, because the bike has become a symbol of the family's economic stability, and its absence from the frame provokes an almost unbearable tension, particularly when Antonio leaves it sitting against a building, guarded only by some kids playing in the street, and walks inside. When Antonio comes back out again, De Sica frames the shot of him descending the stairs tightly, so that it seems as though the bike is no longer sitting in the doorway where he'd left it, until the camera pulls back a little and the frame expands so that the bike's handlebars poke into the shot at the bottom edge.


When the bike is stolen later, Antonio and Bruno head out into the city in a nearly hopeless attempt to find it. De Sica uses this very simple story, this desperate search for the bicycle, as a way of exploring the poverty and desperation of working class families in Italy. The film's cinematography is stark and bleak, suggesting the dreary existence of these people, most of whom have no steady work, no security or stability. De Sica frequently places Antonio and Bruno in long shots where they blend into the crowds in open-air markets or on streets crowded with laborers riding bikes to work. There's nothing exceptional about their lives, they don't stand out, and their search for the bicycle is no different from the desperation experienced by so many other families. In some ways, they're not even the worst off, as evidenced by the scene in which Antonio pursues an old man (who he thinks knows the thief) into a religious shelter for the extremely poor, where the mostly old residents are locked inside to attend mass before they can get some free soup.

De Sica's compositions are bleakly realistic, but they're also formally rigorous, with a striking sense of framing that's especially obvious in the way he explores the widening divide between father and son as they search together for the stolen bike. Bruno frequently trails behind his father, ignored as Antonio remains focused solely on the search. The irony is that he needs the bicycle, and the job, so much because they will allow him to provide for his family, but in his singleminded obsession with the search he loses track of his son again and again. In De Sica's wide shots, the boy is often separated from Antonio by a broad gulf of empty space, Bruno falling in the rainy gutter or nearly getting run over by traffic without his father seeing a thing. The desperation and poverty of their situation is creating this disconnection between them, making the father/son relationship secondary to the necessities of struggling for food and shelter and money.

That fractured paternal relationship is the film's real tragedy. Bruno is the film's most sentimental, moving figure, and the film's only source of sporadic comic relief, as when he opens up a confessional's curtain and gets smacked on the head by the angry priest inside. Just as often, though, his innocent face is clouded with melancholy, as in the heartbreaking scene where his father takes him to a restaurant and he looks jealously at an upper-class boy whose family is eagerly eating many dishes and courses, while Bruno feels guilty about wasting their scant money on a small order of bread with cheese. His touching, naturalistic performance is especially startling since Staiola, like the rest of the cast, was an amateur who had never appeared in a movie before. Bracing, beautiful, and almost unbearably sad, Bicycle Thieves is a moving portrait of the desperate, narrowly focused struggle that life is reduced to when abject poverty is so omnipresent and so difficult to escape.

Macbeth (1948)

Orson Welles' expressionist, visually stunning version of Macbeth was the director's first attempt at a cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare. Shot quickly and cheaply, the film makes a virtue of its budget minimalism by setting the familiar play within a spartan, eerie wasteland of fog and bare rock. Welles surrounds this bleak, violent parable of power and ambition with swirling fog, twisted trees devoid of leaves, stark expanses of vague nothingness in which only the light-sculpted features of the play's protagonists stand out, as though they are declaiming into a void, spitting out their tormented speeches while already engulfed in the hell that awaits them for their vile deeds.

Welles is mostly faithful to the text of Shakespeare's play, shifting some words and characters around here and there, and somewhat emphasizing the religious subtext of the story, but mostly remaining true to the language and the story. Macbeth (Welles) is moved to murder the king by a prophecy given to him by three witches, further encouraged in the deed by his scheming, ambitious wife (Jeanette Nolan). His crime gets him the crown, but he's overcome by paranoia and madness, growing ever more bloodthirsty and reckless as he desperately defends his ill-gotten title. The story is a classical study of the corruption of power, and Welles revels in the blustery speeches and stormy psychological subtexts, all of it delivered with the familiar disembodied sound that often characterized Welles' approach to dialogue — he recorded all of the speech separately, so that the actors are simply mouthing their words, and the dubbed, echoing quality of the sound contributes to the film's strange, haunting feel.

It's visually that Welles really makes his mark on this material. The chintzy sets and shoddy theatrical props of this production were doubtless necessitated by budgetary limitations, but Welles uses his limited means with purpose. The castle through which Macbeth stalks looks more like a cave, the bare rock walls warped and full of holes in which all light disappears, the ceilings low and craggy overhead. The film's atmosphere would be well-suited to a horror movie, with fog draped around the dark, minimal set, reducing visibility to a small circle of empty space in which Macbeth paces like a trapped rat, his face often blown up in dramatic closeups that capture every bead of sweat dripping from his skin, every quiver of his lips and every wild, bulging expression in his eyes. The backgrounds are blurry and sketchy, a few warped trees sticking up out of a wasteland, crudely carved rock everywhere, while the faces of the actors are crisply delineated with bold, high-contrast lighting, their eyes often shining out of the darkness of their shadowed faces.


The frequent close framing of the actors places the larger-than-life emotions of Shakespeare's text front and center. Even the minimal scenery, so gloomy and gothic, seems to reflect the warped inner psychology of Macbeth and his wife, their paranoia and evil writ large upon their surroundings. Welles poses Lady Macbeth as a seductress, a femme fatale, urging her husband on to his murderous, treacherous deeds. In the crucial scenes where she convinces him to kill the king, Welles frames Macbeth in the foreground with his wife slyly positioned to his side, whispering in his ear, casting charged glances his way. She's Eve and the serpent all rolled into one form, her last-act attacks of conscience notwithstanding, and at one point her face glides into the frame at the fringes, behind a towering closeup of Macbeth, like a sinister sprite perched on his shoulder, whispering evil in his ear.

The minimalist aesthetic at times seems to mock the protagonist. When Macbeth is crowned king, a silly-looking square crown, at once flimsy and bulky, is placed upon his brow, with his glowering face beneath it. He marches out before his assembled troops and subjects for the first time as their king, and the music too mocks him, accompanying what should be his grand entrance with a jaunty tune more suited to a court jester than a king. Later, at the climax of the film, as Macbeth's foes amass beneath his ramparts to unseat him, the king runs back and forth across the bare stone of his courtyard in a crown designed to resemble the Statue of Liberty's spiked headband, thus ironically juxtaposing the vicious tyrant with the symbol of American democracy.

Macbeth's famous final act soliloquy — "full of sound and fury/ signifying nothing" — is delivered against an abstract image of smoke roiling and spinning in slow motion, a foggy void that's set to devour the murderous king, to end his time of strutting upon life's stage. Welles' visual interpretation of this material is often subtly clever like this, expanding the text with a truly cinematic sensibility. Welles cuts from Macbeth looking at a twisted tree branch and musing about crows to the image of the two murderers who Macbeth has sent after Banquo, crouched on a tree limb, their shadowy forms looking very bird-like as they wait for their victim to pass by so they might descend on him. The sound design is also exceptional, with Welles ascribing piercing, harrowing import to a few key sounds on the otherwise hollow, disembodied soundtrack: after the king's death, especially, the loud knocking of Macduff (Dan O'Herlihy) at the castle door reverberates impressively, a foreboding sound of doom, and there's a similar force to the screech of the owl that so frightens Lady Macbeth that she grasps at her chest as though she's been stabbed by the sound. Welles' Macbeth was not appreciated in its time, but in fact it's a stunning and visually inventive adaptation.

The Boy With Green Hair

The Boy With Green Hair is a moving, unique fable that deals with the aftermath of World War II through the perspective of a young boy whose life had been irrevocably altered by the war. Peter (Dean Stockwell) was orphaned by the war, although nobody bothered to tell him; he was passed from one relative to another, each of them eventually having some reason why he could no longer stay with them, all of them perpetuating the illusion that someday his parents would return from Europe and he'd be reunited with them. Finally, he goes to stay with Gramp (Pat O'Brien), not his real grandfather but some older relation or friend of the family, one more place for Peter to live, for however long. With Gramp, Peter finally starts to settle down, to realize that he might have a semi-permanent place to stay and be happy: Gramp is a perfect companion for a little boy, a former entertainer who's always cheerful and always has far-fetched, fanciful stories to tell. But the war's grim reality still haunts the boy, and when he finds out that his parents are actually dead, that he's a war orphan just like the poor children that his school class has been helping with donations and fliers, it shakes him and changes him in a strange way.

He wakes up one morning and his hair has turned green. The film then becomes a parable dealing with the effect of war on children, as Peter faces ridicule at school and fear from adults, who wonder if the effect is contagious and might spread to their own children. Peter has been marked out as different, because subconsciously he wants to be noticed, he wants people to know that he's different, that he's a war orphan, someone marked in a very profound way by the war. At one point, he imagines that he is haunted by other war orphans — obviously projections of his own mind — who tell him that it's good to be noticed, that it's good to have people paying attention to him. Because, of course, so many of these tragically affected boys and girls are not noticed, their plight forgotten. Peter cannot be ignored in this way, and though he's initially horrified by the green hair, he soon comes to think of it as a sign with great meaning, a visible reminder of the horrible effects of war.

This was the first film for director Joseph Losey, an unlikely but also somehow appropriate start to his career. This bright, blunt children's movie is unique in that it focuses so intensely on the perspective and inner life of a child, privileging his reactions and his thoughts about his own experiences. The adults in the film, even the well-meaning Gramp and a kind teacher (Barbara Hale), try to understand but can't fully grasp what this boy is struggling with, and eventually even Gramp, who tries to put a good spin on the new hair color at first, gives in to the community's pressure and encourages the boy to shave his head. This is a great betrayal, a failure to recognize how much this symbol means to Peter, how much it means for him to be able to embrace his difference and use it to spread his anti-war message. The head-shaving scene is staged with the townspeople anxiously looking on, and the mood is tense and melancholy, with each lock of green hair that falls from Peter's head increasing the somber mood in the observers, who seem deeply ashamed of what they've done by the time Peter's scalp has been shorn to a shiny bald cleanness.


The film's message is bluntly delivered but nonetheless affecting, perhaps because the war was still so fresh when Losey made this in 1948. In one scene, Gramp and Peter reflexively flinch when they hear a plane go rattling by overhead. Gramp reassures the boy by saying that it's just a mail plane that must have a heavy load, but he doesn't seem so sure, and his words hide the fear, rational or not, that the plane's cargo is actually a bomb. In another extraordinary scene, Peter, before his hair turns green, goes to the grocery store and overhears two women talking about the war and their fears that there will be more wars to come. As is often the case in this film, the adults are filmed from the shoulders down, so that Peter, below their level, can't see their faces. It's a good way to convey the child's eye perspective of a boy scurrying about, unnoticed, while the adults converse, unmindful of the effect their words are having on Peter. It's as though they don't even know he's there, but their terror about nuclear war and more young people being sent off to die is affecting him deeply, especially when they explicitly reference him, expressing their fear that his generation will also grow up to be sent off to war. Peter, startled by this grim speculation about his future, drops the milk bottle in terror, but the adults don't realize what has happened, and they only laugh affectionately at his clumsiness.

This adult obliviousness is a big part of the film. Peter, in his youthful naïveté, wants to break through the adults' seeming certainty that war is inevitable, to convince them that there's no reason to go to war and kill more young people and their parents. He's the logical one, the one who reacts to the horror and losses of war with the common-sense proclamation that there shouldn't be any more wars, but he's met with head-patting condescension and blank stares when he delivers this message. He can't understand: why does nobody else seem to agree with him that war could or should be stopped?

The film's polemics provide a hint of what was to come for Losey, who would never flinch from politically engaged cinema, a fact that would send him into exile following the McCarthyite purges of Hollywood. But The Boy With Green Hair was different, both from Losey's later work and from virtually everything else in Hollywood, because it was so focused on these issues as they pertain to children. Because of that focus, it can approach complex, emotionally fraught issues with the simplicity and directness of a child. The film's aesthetics mirror that simplicity, cutting away the excess to emphasize Stockwell's naïve performance in tight closeups. Stockwell delivers a very charming performance, capturing the extreme shifts in mood that the confused Peter goes through; in a more unguarded moment, he makes funny faces in the mirror, but more often he's overcome with wide-eyed fear. As a children's parable about war, loss, and hope, The Boy With Green Hair is a memorable and moving work that uses its surreal central conceit to explore some surprisingly weighty emotional subtexts.

Germany Year Zero

The final film of Roberto Rossellini's post-war trilogy continues his examination of World War II's effects on ordinary people living in the devastation of a bombed-out, battered Europe. While Rome Open City and Paisan focused on Rossellini's post-war Italy, with Germany Year Zero he heads to Berlin, divided by the victorious Allies and wracked by poverty. As with the previous two films, this one is an intense and raw drama that draws on the wreckage of the post-war streets and the rough conditions of life for those who survived the war. Rossellini shot on cheap film stock in the actual streets of Berlin, which gives his film a real documentary appeal. Everywhere, there are piles of rubble and damaged buildings, pavement cratered by bombs, and whole families living in cramped one-room quarters. They subsist on minimal rations, there's hardly any work to be found, and prices are high for even the most essential foodstuffs. A hearty black market thrives, but it's full of crooks eager to take advantage of people's desperation to sell off their most valued possessions in return for a few cans of food.

Rossellini uses these dismal, desperate conditions as a backdrop for the potent story of one boy and his family struggling to survive in the aftermath of the war. Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) is just 12 years old, but he bears a lot of the responsibility for his family. His father (Ernst Pittschau) is too sick to work or even to leave his bed most of the time, while his sister Eva (Ingetraud Hinze) does what she can by going out every night — much to Edmund's disgust and confusion — with Allied soldiers so she can acquire cigarettes and trinkets. Worst of all, Edmund's brother Karl-Heinz (Franz-Otto Krüger) does nothing, because he served in the army during the war and is in hiding, fearing that he will be identified as a war criminal. He hasn't registered for food coupons, can't work, and simply loafs around the house all day while Edmund and Eva scrape together what few supplies they can gather for the family.

There are ambiguous intimations that Karl-Heinz could have involved in some atrocities during the war — he says he's afraid he'll be arrested when the authorities find out what unit he was in, an ominous suggestion — but he's only one sign of the more sinister undercurrents still threading through post-war Germany. The de-Nazification efforts cleanse the most overt displays of Nazi sympathies, but more subtle remnants are as ubiquitous as the rubble. By chance, Edmund encounters his old teacher Mr. Henning (Erich Gühne), who had been an organizer for the Hitler Youth during the war, and who now seems to be involved in some very shady activities. While walking around town, Henning casually trades words with an old acquaintance, who seems wistful for the days when they were "men, National Socialists," instead of just disgraced former Nazis. Moreover, Henning, whose solicitous, seductive manner towards the oblivious Edmund is skin-crawlingly pedophilic, lives with a secretive group of people, watched over by a mysterious and domineering man who has the air of an officer. Henning has vinyl records of Hitler's speeches, which he has Edmund sell to American and British GIs eager for a souvenir, but the group he shares a big house with seem to be secretively plotting something much bigger than black market sales. The whole icky vibe is of a shadow society of former Nazis still hidden within the ruins of the city, some of them slipping seamlessly back into society and some of them carrying out their vile plots at the fringes.


Though Rossellini certainly acknowledges the legacy and horrors of Nazism in sequences like this, the film's focus is not on the war criminals and evil masterminds of the Reich, but on the ordinary German citizens who lived through the war, some of them serving in the army, some of them simply staying at home while the bombs dropped all around them. In one of the film's most pointed political moments, Edmund plays a record of one of Hitler's speeches, and the words reverberate through a bombed-out building, before Rossellini cuts away to show more wrecked buildings, rows of houses missing their roofs, rubble and destruction everywhere. Hitler's stirring words about victory and glory seem so empty, so foolish, when played back atop these images of what Hitler's plans did to his people and his cities.

That's what this film, like Rossellini's other post-war street-level dramas, is really about: the human toll of war, the cost paid by the ordinary people who are simply trying to live quietly and provide for their families. It's a heartbreaking film, as Edmund's increasing desperation drives him to the edges of crime and corruption, trying to do anything he can to help his struggling family. He's just a boy, he barely understands so much of what's going on, but he hears the snide remarks from neighbors about his lazy brother and his "whore" sister, and he hears his father moaning about wanting to die, to relieve the family of the burden of caring for a sickly old man. It's chilling to see what Edmund is driven to by these circumstances, to feel his confusion and horror at the pitiless situation he finds himself in. In a typically understated shot, Rossellini holds Edmund and his father in a composition as the boy stoically, expressionlessly watches his father drink a poisoned cup of tea.

Germany Year Zero is a harrowing and heartrending film that holds a deep, tender humanism within its depiction of harsh, cruel realities. The film is raw and roughshod, the acting often shrill or stiff, and the music's bombast and melodrama is ill-suited to the ragged images that Rossellini found on these real war-torn streets. But this roughness and jaggedness is just a part of the film's greatness, adding to the impression that the director has captured the essence of day-to-day life for so many poor people just barely holding on in the aftermath of Europe's defining war.

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.

The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's film about a ballet company and its new star, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), who is torn between her love of dancing and her love of the composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). Victoria has always dreamed of being a great dancer, and with the famous ballet director Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), she gets her chance, catching the notoriously picky Lermontov's attention and increasingly becoming the company's star performer. At the same time, Lermontov has hired the aspiring young composer Julian, and he too becomes a star within the company, composing original new music that impresses everyone who hears it. The only catch is that Lermontov has an obsession with dancers committing their entire lives to their art — he is furious when his previous star announces that she's getting married — and since it's inevitable that Victoria and Julian will eventually fall in love, their success seems very tenuous.

The film is about the ballet, of course, but more than that it's about the untenable position of women in a world that forces them to choose between ordinary domestic pleasures — love, marriage, family — and the ability to express themselves creatively or professionally. By the end of the film, Victoria is positioned between two men, Lermontov and Julian, neither of whom will allow her to build a balanced, happy life for herself. Both men demand that she choose one or the other. The final confrontation is structured like the showdown of a love triangle, the two men verbally dueling over the woman they both want, even though Lermontov has no sexual or romantic desire for Victoria; he wants only for her to dedicate herself entirely to dancing. In between them, Victoria can only cry, being asked to choose when it's obvious that she both loves Julian and loves dancing, and wouldn't want to give up either. (Though why she'd ever want Julian, who's made up like a wispy 30s Hollywood leading man and who's as much of an arrogant, unyielding jerk as Lermontov, is a question the film can never quite answer.) The film is positively progressive in its examination of Victoria's dilemma, even if it's only in tragic terms, with no way out for her, no solution to resolve these tensions tearing her apart.

But that's the nature of this film. It's an overwrought melodrama and it knows it — it revels in it, in fact. The performances, with the exception of Shearer's supple, subtle turn as Victoria, are uniformly over-the-top, both onstage and off. At one point, the choreographer Ljubov (Léonide Massine) dances around Lermontov while arguing with him, as though dancing a part in a ballet; a spotlight even follows Ljubov around as though he were still rehearsing. This scene, with its light comic undertones, suggests that these people live the ballet, that onstage and off they're prone to dramatics and overstatement, to grand gestures that could be seen way up in the last rows of the theater. They're always projecting, and so their histrionics work within the context of their characters. This is especially true of Lermontov, who despite his backstage role always seems to be acting, to be projecting the image of the demanding, tyrannical director that he believes he should inhabit. Walbrook's performance is such great fun because of this artificiality, this note of hysterical overacting that infuses everything Lermontov does. After he finally convinces Victoria to return to dancing towards the end of the film, when she leaves the room he shakes his arms around, clasping at the air, grandly declaring his excitement at his victory to the empty room.


Powell and Pressburger match the story's melodramatics with lush, patently artificial imagery that enhances the film's underlying themes: as is so often the case in their cinema, the film seems to take place in a surreal dreamworld of painted backdrops and lavish sets that stand in for such glamorous locales as Monte Carlo. Onstage and offstage are united in artificiality, suggesting that for these artists, under Lermontov's guidance, life and art are unified, with the latter overshadowing the former. Nowhere is this more apparent than during the sublime 15-minute sequence in which Victoria performs the ballet The Red Shoes for the first time. It is one of the finest sequences in the cinema, a beautiful and remarkably playful melding of the cinema and the theater, and an ode, not to the power of ballet but to the power of Powell and Pressburger's own chosen art.

Once the performance starts, Powell and Pressburger deliberately and playfully erase the boundaries and limitations of the theatrical stage, leaping into the realm of the cinema. When Victoria's character in the ballet sees the red shoes in a shop window, she imagines that she sees herself dancing in the window, turning pirouettes. It is an idea that's all but impossible to convey purely through dancing, on a stage: it is internal, a moment of imagination that can only be conveyed cinematically. So Powell and Pressburger superimpose an image of Victoria dancing in the window, as she stands outside, looking in and imagining this scene. Although the moment ostensibly occurs during a real theatrical performance of the ballet, before an audience, Powell and Pressburger instead stage the sequence with a cinematic sensibility that could never be translated to the stage in this way. When Victoria first dons the red shoes, she does so by leaping forward into them, and in a closeup on her feet, the shoes change, in an instant between frames, from her plain white ones to the bold red ones. It is, again, a moment that purposefully shatters the illusion of a ballet taking place on a stage — in a theatrical performance, the dancer would have to go backstage and change her shoes at this point, but Powell and Pressburger elide the costume change through the magic of editing.

Again and again, the filmmakers are calling attention to the differences between the cinema and live theater, using every cinematic trick at their disposal to transform this ballet into a fluid, magical sequence. Victoria turns and leaps across the stage — and the wooden boards of the floor keep reminding one that this is a stage — and dances in long straight lines that would be impossible to maintain on a real stage without dancing into the backstage area. Indeed, at one point, after a lengthy sequence in which Victoria dances through a succession of narrow corridors and between buildings, Powell and Pressburger cut back to a long shot of the entire stage, which reveals Victoria emerging from the rear of the stage, where she would have just been dancing for a long time completely unseen by a theater audience. Only the camera is able to follow her back there, its graceful tracking following the fluid lines of her movement. The subsequent sequence of Victoria being taken away by the power of the red shoes relies heavily on superimposition to lend a ghostly, translucent quality to the dancer as she hops and twirls through eerie nighttime vistas and, finally, enters a free fall that's familiar from cinematic dream sequences but would, again, break the constraints of reality on a real stage. Still later, she dances with a wisp of paper that transforms briefly into a man, her own costume changing between shots, before the man again fades away into a newspaper blowing in the breeze.

Towards the end of the performance, Powell and Pressburger finally insert a high shot looking out towards the audience beyond the row of lights at the front of the stage, the first time since the very beginning of the performance that the presence of the audience or the stage borders are revealed. But at this moment the audience is replaced by a superimposition of a churning sea, and the sound of the waves blends subtly with the sound of applause, suggesting that Victoria is seeing everything through her character and the story of the ballet, seeing everything around her transformed and made real through the magic of creative expression. It is a stirring, thrilling sequence, and one feels both Victoria's joy in the dance, and the joy of the filmmakers in shaping and directing her dance. That joy, both in front of the camera and behind it, is the joy of creativity and art, and even when this film is at its most tragic and heartrending, that joy is the feeling that comes through most strongly.

A Song Is Born

Howard Hawks amassed such a consistent, and consistently fascinating, oeuvre by always making, with very few exceptions, only the films he really wanted to make. In an era when directors had very little power or prestige in Hollywood, Hawks was notable for working largely independently, outside of the usual studio system; he moved from studio to studio, breaking contracts and going elsewhere when he couldn't get his way. Hawks thus earned a reputation as a director who seldom bowed to the pressure of producers, who always stuck to his own vision. One of the few exceptions to this independence was A Song Is Born, which Hawks made at the insistence of Samuel Goldwyn, who got Hawks to say yes to the project by, quite simply, offering him an exorbitant amount of money. The resulting film feels like the work of a man who's just earning a paycheck, too. It's not so much a remake of Hawks' Ball of Fire as it is a shameless pilfering of the earlier film, barely bothering to alter the example set by its predecessor; the film basically counts on fresh audiences who hadn't seen Ball of Fire. Hawks of course was famous for such pilfering and recycling. If a bit worked in one film, he wasn't afraid to translate it into a new context, and late in his career he kept remaking the basic scenario of Rio Bravo, riffing on its relationships and structure in interesting ways. This is nothing like that: A Song Is Born simply repeats, by rote, the best lines and moments from the earlier film, barely bothering to offer anything new. It's stale, and dull, and comes off as the one thing Hawks otherwise never made: a formulaic flop.

The basic set-up is taken right from Ball of Fire. Seven professors, six old bachelors and a younger man named Hobart Frisbee (Danny Kaye), are researching an ambitious musical encyclopedia that would chronicle the entire history of music, with accompanying recordings of various musical forms. In the earlier film the professors needed to learn about slang, but in any event the film's plot is triggered by Frisbee's realization that he's out of touch, that he needs to go out into the world and get refreshed on current events in his field, folk music. In other words, he needs to learn about jazz. The film's enduring appeal — indeed, virtually its only appeal — comes from the inclusion of musical appearances by some of the great jazz musicians of the era, including Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Mel Powell, Lionel Hampton and many more. At its best, the film is merely an excuse to throw all these musicians together into massive jam sessions. It's fun stuff, and Hawks thankfully put his foot down by refusing to segregate the black and the white jazz musicians, one of the few stands he took on a picture he otherwise didn't seem to care about at all.

The jam sessions and the scenes at jazz nightclubs thus incorporate both white and black musicians, refusing to ghettoize the black players or maintain a racist separation. The notoriously conservative Hawks was at least enlightened enough to recognize that such attitudes would have been as out of place in the free-wheeling jazz milieu as they were in the lily-white Song of the Thin Man, which was shot the year before and similarly tried to chronicle the jazz scene, but with no black musicians at all. Hawks' film is thus notable for acknowledging the music's black roots — one number explicitly chronicles the nascent origins of jazz in slave spirituals — and the importance and talent of black musicians. The whole crew reportedly wasted a lot of time simply jamming and listening, both on camera and off, but not much of this no doubt lively atmosphere really makes it into the film. A lot of the music is infectious and enjoyable, but there's not enough of it to distract from the rote dullness surrounding it.


Part of the problem is Danny Kaye, who Hawks was saddled with since the film was conceived by Goldwyn mainly as a vehicle for the MGM comedic star. There's also the problem of Virginia Mayo, taking on the Barbara Stanwyck role from the earlier film, as singer and gangster's moll Honey Swanson. Mayo doesn't have Stanwyck's side-of-the-mouth toughness, or her edgy sex appeal, just as Kaye doesn't have the earnest goofiness that Gary Cooper brought to the role of the stiff professor in Ball of Fire. Instead, Kaye's Frisbee just seems stiff and boring, which is fitting for a stuffy, starched professor but doesn't leave much wiggle room for his eventual realization that he loves Honey and wants to be looser and freer. Hawks can't coax the comedic performance he got out of Cooper from Kaye, nor can he get Mayo to give Honey quite the edge she requires. Mayo's actually fine here, radiating a cheery girl next door quality, and she infuses the best patter from Ball of Fire — like her veiled naughty allusions when trying to convince Frisbee to let her stay overnight — with just enough zing to get them across. But she lacks the slight dangerous quality, the realistic vibe of a been-there-done-that kind of gal, that Stanwyck naturally brought to the role. If there wasn't that precedent to compare her against, Mayo would probably seem perfectly okay.

So in one sense, the only real problem with A Song Is Born is coming second. If it weren't for the familiarity of it all — and a majority of the film is outright stolen, line for line and sometimes shot for shot, from the earlier film — A Song Is Born might be a slight but enjoyable musical comedy. Unfortunately, as it is it's impossible to avoid the comparison, and A Song Is Born can't help but seem especially wispy in relation to its source. There's just no imagination here, none of the playfulness that Hawks so often brought to his best works. Kaye is allowed to simply be a dreary killjoy, rather than being lovably shy and naïve. And unlike in Ball of Fire, Hawks never manages to do much with the gangster subplot that takes over the film for its finale, as the gangster Tony Crow (Steve Cochran) arrives to claim Honey as his girl. The whole thing just seems rote, so much so that Hawks even skips over the great gag where Frisbee, confronted with fighting Crow, quickly teaches himself boxing from a book before pummeling the thug. Hawks skips the joke and just has Frisbee pounce on the gangster and beat him up.

That's the film's dominant aesthetic: cutting corners, recycling earlier bits but without the edge, without the humor, without the unpredictable chemistry of fine actors bouncing off one another. The basic elements are all there, the framework of the fine film that Hawks had, in fact, already made just seven years earlier. This time around, the framework is all there is; it's never filled in with any of the warmth and excitement that would've been needed to make this one of Hawks' more creditable attempts at a remake, like the way in which El Dorado riffs on the central conceit of Rio Bravo. Instead, Hawks took his money and turned out a generic film that's only enlivened by its sporadic bursts of music and its status as a Hollywood record of the era's jazz scene.

They Live By Night

Nicholas Ray's first film They Live By Night, based on the same story as Robert Altman's later Thieves Like Us, is a tale of doomed romance between a desperate criminal and a simple, inexperienced country girl. It's a story as old as crime fiction, or even as old as time itself: the bad man who wants something better, who dreams of a "normal" life, and the girl who loves him even though she knows they'll never have the life they want. Bowie (Farley Granger) was in prison for hanging out with the wrong gang as a sixteen year-old orphan, until he breaks out and goes on the run with two older, hardened criminals, T-Dub (Jay Flippen) and Chickamaw (Howard da Silva) — another bad gang, because Bowie's a guy who always seems to be in the wrong place, with the worst friends. Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell) is Chickamaw's niece, who grudgingly ministers to the gang after a failed job on which Bowie was injured. These two young, confused people are unlikely lovers, but there's nevertheless a magnetic, seemingly irresistible connection between them, the bond of a desperate and slowly developing love. Neither of them has ever had much happiness from life, from their families or the situations in which they find themselves. They share absent parents: both their mothers ran away with other men, and Bowie's father was killed before his eyes while Keechie is saddled with a drunken, no-good old man.

Ray treats this young love with grace and shadowy romance, capturing the brooding quality of this slow-burning desire between two inexperienced youths. "I don't know much about kissing," Keechie admits after the couple are married, and Bowie shyly agrees that neither does he. He's billed, on the radio and in the newspapers, as the leader of a vicious gang of bank robbers, but his infamy is almost accidental, entirely out of proportion to his simple ways, his country boy decency and good manners, his humble ambitions. He actually convinces himself that if he can just raise enough money for a good lawyer, he can show everyone that it's all just been a mistake, that he's actually not a bad man, and they'll let him go. Keechie has the same fantasies: they'll settle down, live a good life like ordinary people, and then the authorities will let him be since he's proven he can lead an honest life. They have to know it doesn't work that way, that their story is predestined to have a darker ending, but Ray portrays their insular romance so convincingly, so romantically and beautifully, that one is swept along in their fantasies, momentarily blinded to the unrealistic foundations upon which they're attempting to build this love.

The pair go on the run together, splitting away from T-Dub and Chickamaw, and manage to craft a haphazard domesticity in an out-of-the-way vacation lodge. Nothing is perfect for them, everything's a ramshackle parody of respectable life, but they don't mind. Their marriage — telegraphed by a great shot where, as the bus the couple is on pulls to a stop, a blinking neon sign advertising all-hours weddings is framed by the front window — is an expression of their deep, intuitive connection with one another. They get married at a small chapel where a weary minister marries eager couples for $20, charging an extra $10 for the full deal with music and photographs and recordings of the rushed service. Keechie and Bowie skip the frills, getting the stripped-down essence of a wedding, with sour-faced witnesses who only provide the expected good wishes and blessings after they've received their tips. Later, the couple's honeymoon lodge is rundown and dusty, though the place is overseen by a cheerfully eccentric proprietor who keeps passing on business tips to his young son. The film is packed with eccentricities like this, bit characters who get some compelling business to do around the fringes of this lovers' story.


The core of the film, though, is the romance between Keechie and Bowie, and Ray is well-suited to portraying their unconventional love. Their relationship seems like a nascent indication of the makeshift family formed by a group of outcast, neglected teens in Ray's famous Rebel Without a Cause; Keechie and Bowie don't seem much more mature or adjusted to life's cruelty than James Dean and Natalie Wood do in the later film. Ray's images are meticulously framed and intimate, bathing the doomed lovers in lushly romantic light and shadow. He frequently places his camera in close proximity to them as they kiss and clench, enforcing the intimacy and exclusiveness of their love. As their romance develops, other characters and dramas increasingly drop out of the film; Bowie's gang disappears, as does Keechie's father and various other supporting characters. It's as though the whole plot is put on hold by the sheer force of their love, their determination to create a new life away from the violence and criminality of their pasts. There's a lengthy interlude at the film's center that feels more like a romance than a crime film or a noir, but the intensity of this focus only makes it all the more devastating when the sinister Chickamaw's return heralds the couple's true tragic destiny.

Although this was only Ray's first film, his sensibility is already tough and his command of storytelling surefooted. The film has a raw energy that elevates it above many similar stories. The early encounters between Keechie and Bowie are fantastic, seething with barely contained stormclouds of hostility and attraction, which Ray captures by dwelling on Keechie's sullen, heavy-browed glares and Bowie's hesitant attempts to maintain his gangster composure. Ray's equally assured with their brighter moments, like the dawning grin on Keechie's face as she awakes one morning, stretching and mewling in a way that Bowie quite accurately describes as kittenish. Ray is undoubtedly better when dealing with the darker shadings of this story, however, and nowhere is this more apparent than when the couple has a brisk, pointed exchange about Keechie's unexpected, unwanted pregnancy. Bowie expresses his frustration and unhappiness with the situation, and Keechie responds with an absolutely harrowing line: "you don't see me knittin' nothing, do you?" It's such a direct and heartfelt response to her pregnancy, completely overshadowing Bowie's reaction with an implicit suggestion that she's the one who's really affected by this, that she's the one who's going to actually have the baby.

As forceful as Keechie is here, she can also be almost painfully subservient and pathetic elsewhere in the film. In one of the most nauseating scenes, she actually compares her loyalty to Bowie to that of a dog, telling him that a bad dog will take anyone for a master, while a good dog will remain true to the one person it loves. She tells him about one dog who, after its master died, wouldn't take food from anyone else and died not long after, and the obvious implication is that she's like the dog. It's a pretty horrifying analogy, and once Keechie drops her antagonistic initial response to Bowie and the other robbers, the film does little to make Keechie into a more developed character: her only desire is simply to be by Bowie's side, eagerly leaping into his arms at every moment. The limitations in the portrayal of Keechie hold the film back from being completely satisfying, but in other ways it's a worthy noir romance, replete with dark undertones and a poignant depiction of the gap between reality and impossible fantasies.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

[This review has been cross-posted at Decisions At Sundown, a blog started by Jon Lanthier and dedicated exclusively to the Western genre. From now on I will be cross-posting all of my Western reviews with this blog, where I am one of several contributors.]

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is John Huston's epic exploration of American greed, paranoia and violence, of the ways in which material wealth can corrupt the soul. It's a dark, relentless parable, setting up its central tensions very early on and then simply letting its characters slowly build up pressure until they inevitably boil over. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) is an American drifter in Mexico, scraping by without any dignity by begging for coins from American tourists. A running gag throughout the first segment of the film is Dobbs' habit of asking for change from the same American man in a clean white suit (played by Huston himself in a cameo). He asks the man for change three times, each time in the same way, each time receiving a coin, but finally the man blows up at him and asks to be left alone. It's both a moment of humor and a demonstration of just how pathetic and beaten-down Dobbs is; he hadn't realized that he was continually begging from the same man because he never looked people in the eye when asking for money, looking only at their hands and the money itself. Dobbs is a slave to money, debasing himself for it, obsessed with getting more of it. He soon meets a fellow American bumming about, the equally poor but slightly less desperate Curtin (Tim Holt), and the two of them decide to hook up with a wizened old prospector named Howard (the director's father Walter Huston) to look for gold.

This trio heads off into the mountains together to search for gold, but it's obvious from the beginning that there's too much tension between them for this to end well. Huston masterfully foreshadows the explosions to come, in tightly packed frames where the characters seem jammed together, pressed against one another, their fates intertwined as they share the same cinematic space. In one early shot, Dobbs and Curtin shake hands, agreeing to become partners, and Huston frames Howard in the background, looking on sadly at the hands joining in the foreground. It's obvious that he already knows: this union will be only temporary and fragile, will shatter as easily as two hands drawing away from one another after a handshake. (Or as easily as the film's illusion of verisimilitude is shattered whenever Huston awkwardly stages a fistfight.)

Throughout the film, Huston's images have this kind of clarity and insight into his characters. His deep-focus compositions are strikingly beautiful, but more than that they have texture, they have weight to them. The scratchy beards of the prospectors look as sharp and spiky as the spines of cacti in the rocky area around their camp. The dirt and exhaustion of their labor is palpable; they move with the feel of men who have actually just spent all day in the sun hauling rocks and swinging pickaxes. Huston immerses his audience in this world, and thus he allows the quarrels between the men to develop organically from their frustrations and daily toils. Dobbs' innate greed and ornery nature, already evident in the early scenes of him as a beggar in a Mexican town, becomes even more dangerous once he's at the gold mine.

In one of the film's most telling early scenes, immediately after Dobbs had begged enough money to get himself some food, he is approached by a young Mexican boy (played by a very young Robert Blake, of all people) asking for money for a lottery ticket. Dobbs simply snarls at the kid and tries to chase him away, even throwing a glass of water at his face. Dobbs has no sympathy for those like himself, no understanding of the parallels between his own situation as a beggar and that of this boy — once he gets some money, he doesn't care about anybody else. It's as though he's forgotten that only an hour earlier he'd been approaching strangers as well, begging for money without even a lottery ticket to offer in return. Later, when he's dreaming of what he'll do when he's rich with all his gold, he describes a rich man's day of indulgences: a Turkish bath, ordering fancy food at a restaurant, and treating the staff with contempt. Dobbs seems to see money as an excuse to act superior to others, to become what he hates when he's poor.


There's a not-so-subtle socialist undercurrent to the film in scenes like this, and at times it's startling just how much Marxist critique Huston was able to smuggle into the film. At one point, Howard all but quotes from Karl Marx, applying the labor theory of value to the search for gold, theorizing that gold is valued so highly because its price factors in all the labor that went into searching for it, not just of those who actually found it but of all those men who didn't find it as well. More pointedly, Dobbs is oblivious to his own class status, and he's such a miserable figure because he never recognizes any companionship with those who struggle, like him, for every coin that falls into their hands. Instead, Dobbs — like Curtin and Howard to a lesser degree — embraces the race for wealth, the all-encompassing greed that dictates that there is never enough. Instead of truly uniting himself with his partners, developing a trusting, mutually beneficial relationship, he sabotages everything with his paranoia and every-man-for-himself ethos.

Dobbs is, essentially, the ugliest incarnation of a popular American icon, the rugged frontier iconoclast, striking out on his own to make his fortune. Huston completely undermines this figure, suggesting that his determination is far from admirable, and Bogart plays Dobbs with ratty, nervous energy: he's both hunched-over and wrapped up into himself. He's cruel and vicious, a hard contrast against the compassionate, righteous Curtin and the vivacious, doggedly cheerful Howard. As Howard, Walter Huston continually steals the show, infusing his character with a touch of the eccentric old codger charm of a Walter Brennan role, as well as a quiet dignity and decency that shows through especially in the scene where he tries to read the last letter a dead man had received from his wife, and keeps stumbling over the words but determinedly pressing on. He's at his best, though, in the film's final moments, when he reacts to tragedy and defeat with hearty, heaving gales of laughter, his body shaking, his mouth wide open, letting out gasps and howls of convulsive laughter. It's the only possible reaction to the unfairness and absurdity of what's happened, the way all his struggles and labor have led, ultimately, to nothing, at least in material terms.

For Dobbs, of course, such laughter would never be possible. He's too obsessed with money to ever laugh so genuinely over its loss. He's trapped by money, and trapped by the things it drives him to do. In one of the film's most memorable shots, Dobbs lies down for a guilty, sleepless night beside the campfire, and Huston has the flames lick up across the frame, obscuring Dobbs' face from view, swallowing him up. Dobbs is sentencing himself to Hell, to a self-imposed Hell of greed and perpetually unfulfilled desires. He can never have enough, and so he's devoured and cast aside, with no one to protect him and no one to mourn his loss.

3 Godfathers

Three outlaws ride into the town of Welcome, Arizona on a clear, calm day, planning to rob the local bank. They're not particularly hard men. They're cattle rustlers, used to making money off a few stray cows here and there. This will be their first bank robbery, maybe, their first attempt at something bigger and badder. Not being hard men, they exchange pleasantries and share coffee with a man they meet on the outskirts of town, a man named Buck Sweet (Ward Bond), who turns out to be the local sheriff, the man who will dog these outlaws relentlessly for the next few days of their lives — for some of them, the last days of their lives. John Ford's minimalist Western 3 Godfathers begins with this easygoing introduction, with three friendly, good-natured men passing the time before a robbery with the man who will shortly become their worst enemy. The three outlaws are Robert (John Wayne), William (Harry Carey, Jr.) and Pedro (Pedro Armendáriz), and their first appearance in the film makes it clear that, despite their shiftless ways, they are not bad men, merely misguided, perhaps with few other options available to them besides making money in various dishonest ways. They are sympathetic bandits, driven not by greed but by simple necessity to rob and pillage.

Ford introduces these men in an economical, fast-paced prologue, establishing their essential decency and then staging the bank robbery itself as a quick flurry of motion and gunfire, a harsh interruption of the tranquil, friendly atmosphere of this town, which seems to have earned its name as a welcoming place. The men then flee into the desert, where they'll wander for the remainder of the movie, hemmed in by the forbiddingly dry, desolate land and the sheriff's posse cutting off both their routes of escape and their access to water. With the sheriff's men staked out by the two closest water supplies, the three bank robbers must make a dangerous trek across the desert towards a more distant water tower where they can slake their thirsts and tend to the worsening bullet wound in William's arm. Ford, always a master of landscape and location, makes the isolation of the desert felt intensely, shooting his three anti-heroes as fuzzy silhouettes within wide shots in which the blank white expanse of the cracked desert hardpan is matched only by the open blue of the sky, a stray fluffy cloud or two scrawled across its surface. Many of Ford's compositions divide the frame horizontally between sand and sky, with the outlaws' staggering forms positioned right at the boundary line, trudging through the sand and pushing forward against high winds and overpowering heat.

The film's visual palette is thus simple, in the way that a Mark Rothko painting is simple: an area of pale blue hovering above an area of white, with a hazy horizon line and a few indistinct black blotches separating the two color fields. These stark compositions, like Rothko's, create subtle tensions and resonances between the halves of the frame. Sand and sky both serve to isolate the protagonists within large open spaces. The sheer scope and grandeur of these images suggests spirituality, or at least an understanding of man as insignificant within the scale of the world — let alone the universe. This is why the opening bank robbery is quickly forgotten, and the motivations behind it and the outlaws' other crimes never explained. Those are petty human concerns, and this film quickly positions its protagonists in a setting where concepts like material wealth are increasingly remote. As soon as these men are out in the desert, it doesn't matter that they've made off with a sack full of money, and indeed the money is never mentioned again. The money is perhaps in one of the parcels they shed during their trek, shrugging aside their worldly possessions as these things become too burdensome. As with Rothko, one gets the sense that for Ford, size itself is a signifier of spiritual feeling and philosophical inquiry: the pale expanse of the sky and the salty white ground envelop these men, inescapably confronting them with their own mortality. One begins to suspect that this film, and not the more recent antecedents so often mentioned, is the true predecessor to Gus Van Sant's existential desert movie Gerry.


The three outlaws of the title wander endlessly through the desert, trying to reach their amorphous destination, which is at best only a momentary resting place, a way station for them to recover slightly before continuing their flight. But even these uncertain plans are disrupted when the men stumble across a covered wagon abandoned at a water station whose tanks have been drained dry. Inside the wagon, they find a dying woman, pregnant and on the verge of delivering her baby, left behind by an incompetent husband driven half-mad by lack of water. They help her deliver the child, a boy who she names after all three men — Robert William Pedro — and then, before she dies, she exacts a promise from them, a promise to protect her baby, to take him from the desert and bring him to safety.

This is an extraordinary situation, but the three outlaws take this promise very seriously. Despite the constant threat of the posse catching up to them, and the desperate lack of water and food, they are determined to bring this child safely out of the desert. In his quiet way, Ford completely shifts the driving force of the movie: the men are no longer trying to escape themselves, but only trying to help this baby survive, even if it means forgoing water for themselves completely, even if it means that some of them will not survive the journey across the desert. Ford never makes a big deal of it, but finding this baby is a moment of redemption for these men, the moment at which they cease caring about themselves and start caring about the pure, innocent fledgling life they hold in their arms. There's no sudden shift, no hesitation, because these are three decent men to begin with; being charged with the care of this baby simply reminds them of their inherent decency, redeeming them from their outlaw lives. In the latter half of the film, their journey increasingly takes on Biblical overtones, reflecting the journey of the three wise men to visit the baby Jesus on his birth. That the film's denouement takes place on Christmas is only the most obvious of the parallels between the stories, though this heavy-handed symbolism merely makes explicit the themes and ideas already apparent in the film's more subtle moments.

At the same time, Ford's treatment of these symbolic religious elements gives the film's final act a kind of sentimental poetic spirit, embodied in the broad emotional strokes of the climax, which subverts traditional Western ideals and denies the lawman his cathartic showdown with the last outlaw standing. Instead, the ending is a moving affirmation of family bonds and community, providing John Wayne's Robert with a much more optimistic resolution than the one he'd receive as Ethan Edwards a few years later in The Searchers, another film that ends with Wayne's character returning a child to its proper family. Ford holds out the hope of redemption to his characters, the idea that one can re-embrace society and family and spirituality after stumbling off the path. This is a warm, moving, often even humorous film, inflected with patches of folksy comedy to offset its bleak, deadly landscapes. Painting with the earth tone palette of the desert, Ford composed a large-scale tribute to spiritual redemption and determination.

Sorry, Wrong Number

Sorry, Wrong Number is an over-the-top chamber melodrama in noir drag, an adaptation of a popular radio play that frequently betrays its origins with its talky exposition and woefully overwritten dialogue. It's a potentially interesting story, with the germs of some great ideas (and great images) scattered throughout, but on the whole it only disappoints. The film centers around Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck), the wealthy but nearly invalid daughter of a pharmaceutical company owner. She's home alone one night, waiting for her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster) to get home, when she accidentally hears a phone conversation that she shouldn't have: the wires get crossed and for a few tense minutes she listens in as two men plan to kill an unnamed woman and make it look like a robbery. In the aftermath of this call, Leona's paranoia and angst begin intensifying, as she tries in vain to get the police or anyone else to do anything about the horrifying snippet of conversation she's heard. And as the night progresses and she receives more and more distressing news from voices on the phone, she begins to suspect that her now chronically late husband is somehow involved in a sinister plot of some kind, and that he may even be plotting to kill her. She begins to suspect that she overheard a premonition of her own murder.

The raw story has the makings of a fantastic chamber piece, centering on the growing fear and desperation of this woman who can barely walk a few paces from her bed, and who is increasingly overcome with terror. Instead, the film's structure sabotages the story's inherent tension and drama by frequently diverting from its naturally claustrophobic setting. It's obvious that no one involved had any faith in the commercial possibilities of a film set entirely in a single room and focused on the horror of an isolated woman as she talks on the phone. But in opening up the mise en scène, the script sacrifices its tense momentum for a self-devouring circularity that keeps pulling away from the forward drive of the present tense. This is a film overwhelmed by flashbacks, propelled by them, but propelled only backwards. There are flashbacks within flashbacks, including multiple ones from different perspectives, where someone will start telling a story only to switch over to someone else telling a story within the story. Because Leona is isolated, the script is forced to come up with some pretty outrageous contrivances to give her (and the audience) some information about what's happening in the outside world. So she speaks, for example, to her old college rival Sally (Ann Richards), who just so happens to be married to the D.A. (Leif Erickson) who's investigating Leona's husband.

The conversations between Sally and Leona, improbably spread out across several phone calls, unleash a string of complex interlocking flashbacks, some of them so long and involved that the supposed real story is almost entirely forgotten for the duration. Remembrances of the early days of Leona and Henry's romance reveal Leona as manipulative, casually cruel, and demanding. She steals Henry away from Sally and then takes charge of his life completely. One of the film's most interesting aspects is the tension between the Leona depicted in flashbacks — nasty, arrogant, controlling, and cold — and the terrified, ailing, sweating, desperate woman at the center of the film's present-day narrative. Leona is clearly meant to earn the audience's sympathy for her anguish, and yet the flashbacks to the rest of her life often reveal her as the villainess of the story, suppressing her husband's earnest attempts to make a life for them free of her father's influence. Sally also relates to Leona a strange tale about how she trailed her husband the D.A. in order to find out why he was investigating Henry. This flashback reveals little in terms of concrete information, but it does yield a wonderfully staged set piece on a foggy, hazy beach, where shadowy men in trenchcoats meet in secret, exchanging suitcases and passing codes back and forth. This quietly thrilling sequence, staged in near-silence with only occasional voiceover comments from Sally, translates the noir sensibility to an unlikely locale in the abandoned wharfs of Staten Island.


Director Anatole Litvak shows a flair for memorable images like this, even in the midst of this cramped, ungainly scenario. A scene where Leona speaks to the shadowy, mysterious Waldo Evans (Harold Vermilyea) provides a hint of what the film might've been like if it had resisted the impulse to expand its milieu with its clunky flashback device. While Leona grows frazzled, her voice cracking as she cries into the phone for answers, Evans (who has some undisclosed relationship to her husband) remains eerily composed, shown in silhouette as his clipped, businesslike tone relates a precise series of messages to the distraught woman on the other end. Of course, even Evans soon enough can't resist puncturing the mystery, letting the whole sordid story spill out in the most rambling flashback of all. The film is sabotaged by its talkiness and compulsive need to explain, and by its melodrama. Stanwyck is excellent at capturing the terror her character feels, the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped and alone, but in some of the more melodramatic flashback sequences, she explodes over the top, saddled with material too lurid even for her naturally expressive talents.

The film is nearly redeemed, however, in its final sequence, an admirable suspense showcase that finally fulfills the promise of the scenario. As Litvak's camera wheels around Leona's room, turning slow spirals that move progressively further and further away from the bed where she's trapped, she is increasingly isolated in the center of the room, looking profoundly alone in the middle of all that empty space. Meanwhile, downstairs, a man's shadow falls against the outside wall, and a man's gloved hand opens the window, allowing him to step inside. The finale is a masterpiece of tension and building terror; if only it had been attached to a more worthwhile movie.

Force of Evil

Force of Evil is a dark, unflinching look at a society in which criminality has become so commonplace that it's practically become a business. This is a film about characters who keep forgetting, or wanting to forget, that they're not actually honest men, that they're crooks. This is especially true of Joe Morse (John Garfield), a mob lawyer who makes the transition from representing his clients to helping them set up their "business deals," to being actively involved in every aspect of their organization. Throughout all this, Morse keeps telling himself — and anyone who'll listen — that he's just a lawyer after all, that soon he'll help introduce legislation to transform these underground organizations into just a few more legitimate businesses. It's obvious that neither Morse nor anyone else believes this self-justification, but one of the film's primary themes is the ways in which people lie to themselves in order to get what they want but know is wrong — Morse has even turned this ethos into a tortured morality in which, he says, the only "natural" human reaction is greed, not guilt.

This blunt, economical noir is one of the few credits for writer and director Abraham Polonsky, whose career in cinema was tragically truncated by the Hollywood blacklist. Certainly, it wouldn't be hard to detect Polonsky's socialist bent simply by watching this debut feature, which makes the not-so-subtle point that racketeering is not really so different from other businesses in a capitalist society — it's only a grander form of thievery, a difference of scale rather than kind. As Morse's brother Leo, Thomas Gomez plays this aging racketeer like a frazzled businessman, in over his head, not wanting to make his living by robbing from others but unable to see a clear alternative; after all, he did basically similar things when he owned a gas station earlier in his life, except he made less money then. This blunt social commentary is matched by the often awkward narration, which is the film's one real weakness. Garfield's voiceover, mercifully limited to a few scenes, conveys the world-weary noir mood, but the writing lacks any verve, bogging down in too many repetitions and trotting out cliché after cliché. This is odd, because Polonsky's dialogue is frequently sizzling, funny and sexy and hard-boiled, all punch and pepper. His writing seems to thrive whenever he goes for pulp — which, thankfully, is most of the time — while his narration reeks of literary pretensions and strained profundity.

The voiceover is pretty much the only real caveat, though, in a film that otherwise rigorously develops its slow-burning plot. This is a morally engaged noir that deals openly with intricate issues of culpability, social responsibility, and justice, sometimes with ham-fisted preachiness — like a brief moralizing speech about the importance of acknowledging psychological ailments, obviously shoehorned in for the sake of the out-of-place message — but more often with intelligence and subtlety. The Morse brothers present a dichotomous moral character study, one feeling forced into evil and the other talking himself into believing that he's good, even though they both wind up being complicit in the same evil system. The duality of their relationship is both built into the script, and inscribed in the phenomenal performances by Garfield and Gomez: the former smooth, untroubled, and fast-talking, and the latter a sweaty, overweight neurotic, his eyes bulging, seemingly always just one piece of bad news away from a heart attack.


The doubling of characters is also carried over, albeit in a less fully developed way, to the two women in the film, the girlish Doris (Beatrice Pearson), who works for Leo's numbers racket but quits in a moment of conscience, and the prototypical femme fatale Edna (Marie Windsor), the wife of Joe's gangster client Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts). Doris might easily have been just another in a long line of sappy, unbearable heroines coming out Hollywood, but there's much more to her than a cute face and a plucky attitude. Pearson was a stage actress who made her movie debut in Force of Evil, then quickly returned to the stage for the rest of her career, obviously a loss for the movies on the evidence of this performance. She brings a subtle blend of emotions to this complex character, who projects such innocence and all-American cleanliness, and yet who has served as secretary for a numbers runner for years. She's a good girl with a criminal record, and she's undeniably drawn to Joe's roguish charm and his unabashed advocacy for naked self-interest and criminal greed. The sexual frisson between her and Joe is downright hot: not their curiously passionless kisses, but the quick-witted dialogue they throw back and forth, which crackles with the unsaid seduction going on between them. When Joe tells her he's celebrating "a clear conscience," she primly asks, "Oh, whose?" Certainly not Joe's, but probably not hers either. She's all mock-innocence and widened eyes, but her pouty mouth is just as likely to twist into a bit of a smirk as it is to patiently wait for a kiss. Next to her, the film's real femme fatale seems almost boring, even though Marie Windsor is a joy even in a somewhat small role, as the gangster's wife who keeps hitting on and tormenting her husband's lawyer more out of boredom than anything else.

Polonsky's first directorial effort inevitably makes one bemoan his shortened career. His visual sense is well-developed even on his first foray behind the camera. He has a crisp, clean sensibility, an eye for realistic street scenes and expressionist shadowy interiors alike. He creates a strangely unpopulated, artificial-seeming city that only occasionally opens out into brightly lit views of its buildings and facades, but seldom its people: the streets of this city are mostly empty. This emptiness is carried through in every frame of the film, especially in the undecorated white walls of the mobster Tucker's home, against which any human figure stands out like a filthy blotch on the unblemished white. In one striking sequence, as Tucker and Joe walk down a white staircase, Polonsky shoots from above in a long shot, letting them get lost in the nearly abstract maze of lines and shapes formed by the stairs, the railing, and the shadows strewn across the wall. Polonsky uses these striking effects sparingly, letting his dramatic framings accentuate the action: looking up from the bottom of a staircase at Joe, framed in shadowy profile; seeing Joe's face move, in close-up, through the criss-crossing areas of light and shadow in an abstracted composition. Force of Evil is a true classic noir, one of the shining masterpieces of the genre.

Red River

Red River is a sweeping Western epic from Howard Hawks, a towering yarn spanning 14 years, with a thousand-mile cattle drive at its center. It's a Western on a grand scale, and Hawks can't always balance the story's epic dimensions with the human conflicts behind them. It's thus very uneven, with the pacing especially falling apart in the last half hour, unraveling what was up until then a very solid film. There's still a lot to love, though, in this hard-edged tale of the fearless cattle baron Dunson (John Wayne), who established his own massive ranch from very humble beginnings, through a combination of hard work and necessary violence, and just a little outright theft. He's established early on as a man willing to do virtually anything to get his way, and who always follows through once he's made up his mind. In establishing his ranch, he leaves behind the woman he loves, who is slaughtered in an Indian raid soon after he heads off, and he adopts the sole survivor, a tough young boy named Matt. Dunson and Matt (together with stalwart character actor Walter Brennan as the sidekick Groot) establish the ranch, but 14 years later the Civil War has taken his toll, and Matt (played as a young man by Montgomery Clift) has just returned from fighting in the war. With the Texas economic system shattered like all of the South, the destitute Dunson can only avoid going broke by making a last-ditch cattle drive north to Missouri to sell his herd.

This massive cattle drive, with almost ten thousand animals, is the center of the film, and this is where Hawks is most successful. In its grand-scale set pieces, with an endless sea of cows and the men driving them hard, the film evokes the grandeur and excitement of the drive in every crowded frame. Hawks fills his usual overloaded frame for once not with people but with animals. The chaotic scenes on the trail, with men and beasts working in tandem to accomplish one difficult feat after another, are masterpieces of large-scale design and action. It helps that these scenes have a Fitzcarraldo-like realism, giving the sense that there really are ten thousand cows being herded, barely under control, over treacherous territory. This is especially true of the grand crossing of the Red River, which is just plain exhilarating filmmaking.

Strangely enough, Hawks handles things more unevenly on the human scale. The cattle drive turns Dunson, increasingly desperate and all too aware of the make-or-break stakes involved, into a tyrannical madman, driving the men harder and harder with less and less rest, and brooking absolutely no dissent or grumbling. The escalating tension in the camp, culminating in Dunson's attempt to hang two men who tried to flee, leads Matt to the breaking point where he can't just follow orders anymore, and he takes over control of the cattle from Dunson with the support of all the other men. This slow ratcheting up of tension is beautifully handled, and the great performances from both Clift and Wayne do a good job of developing their complex relationship. Wayne especially is a virulent force of nature, raging and intense but with the vulnerability of a desperate man underneath it all. When Dunson is left behind, he vows to get his revenge and to kill Matt, and the look on his stone face is enough to sell that he really means it.

Unfortunately, a lot of the effort put into establishing this loving but nonetheless fierce rivalry is tremendously wasted in the film's second half, where with Wayne largely offscreen and a new romantic interest (Joanne Dru) abruptly brought in for Clift, the film falters and eventually falls apart, limping towards an unbearably weak climax that allows all the build-up and suspense to simply deflate. Before this, though, there's a fight against an Indian raiding party, which provides one last jolt of genuine thrilling action as Matt and his men protect a wagon train from an attack. Dru is introduced in the midst of this fight, as the tough and determined Tess, who takes an arrow in her shoulder and keeps talking, gently sparring with Matt, without even skipping a beat as she's hit. It's a great and memorable introduction, typically Hawksian in its pattering dialogue and feigned toughness, a scene good enough to forgive even the obligatory appearance of that most unfortunate of Hollywood tropes, the romantic interest. The goodwill generated by this scene is quickly squandered, though, in a series of unbelievable, sappy, and just plain awkward scenes that seem to have been pasted in from a totally different film. It's painfully obvious just how bad an idea this last-minute romance was, and Hawks seems to realize it as well; these scenes are so sloppy and rushed that not even the least effort is put into making them cohere with the film as a whole.

In addition to the romance, the film is also marred by the lazy and uncinematic use of on-screen titles, uncharacteristic for Hawks, who always knew how to get across his characters' inner conflicts and basic essence in dialogue and visuals alone. The texts in this film purport to be from a historical diary describing the cattle drive, and at the beginning of the film Hawks uses these handwritten inserts, superimposed over images from the drive, simply to transition between geographical locations and describe the progress. This is an understandable, though still probably unnecessary, shortcut, but as the film wears on, the texts increasingly describe the characters' internal states and spell out ideas and thoughts that would have been much better conveyed indirectly. With two strong central performances at the film's heart, it's puzzling that Hawks has no faith in the actors' ability to get across the characters' emotions, and instead resorts to telling us outright that Clift is scared, or that Wayne is enraged.

This would be bad enough, but Tess also manages to disrupt what should have been the grand finale, the inevitable showdown between Matt and Dunson. This confrontation had been hinted at since at least the one-hour mark of the film, and the continual emphasis on both men's quick-draw capabilities promised a tense and powerful showdown between them. But the showdown is quickly and almost bloodlessly defused by the domesticating power of a woman, and all the suspenseful build-up is revealed to be for naught. Instead of a taut standoff that unpacks the complex emotional entanglements between these two men, it's all brushed aside with little ceremony after a few teary-eyed words from the woman who entered the picture out of nowhere only twenty minutes earlier. The surprisingly sunny ending, seemingly coming out of nowhere, is totally at odds with everything else in the film, and it's certainly a rather drastic and unearned change in Wayne's character. If Hawks and the screenwriters had invested more effort into developing Tess, or given Dunson any meaningful screentime in the film's second half, the sudden and lighthearted ending might not have been quite so ludicrous or disappointing. As it is, Hawks betrays what could have been a powerful film with a lackluster and uneven second act, and a climax that simply doesn't exist.