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 Sound of Fury

[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. The film I'm writing about today is the actual film that is going to be preserved and restored due in part to the efforts of this blogathon; every dollar contributed through the blogathon donation link will go to restoring this film.]

Cy Endfield's The Sound of Fury is based on the same true story as the Fritz Lang-directed Fury from fourteen years earlier, and both films are concerned with the mob mentality of lynchings and revenge. The films approach this story from very different angles, though, and they wind up being completely different films with somewhat overlapping themes. In Endfield's film, Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) is a struggling family man with a pregnant wife (Kathleen Ryan) and a young son. Tyler is determined to find a job, but in a depressed economy he's not having much luck, and all his prospects come to nothing. When he returns to his home after a failed job-hunting trip, it's heartbreaking to see the hope and joy in his wife's face when she momentarily thinks that he's found something, as though she's been restraining her worries for so long that they finally burst out in a brief burst of hope. As in Lang's film, economic pressure is at the forefront here, straining what would otherwise doubtless be a good relationship, but unlike in Fury, Tyler is not an innocent man. Tyler cannot resist the temptations of crime, not when he can't find any other job, not when his wife breaks down crying at their kitchen table because they don't even have the money to buy groceries and they're quickly running out of credit. So when Tyler meets the smooth-talking Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), initially thinking that he's being an offered a straight job at last, he decides to become Slocum's accomplice on a series of gas station holdups.

This is an archetypal noir scenario, the basically decent man who's corrupted by his circumstances. What's interesting about The Sound of Fury is the sympathy that's developed for Tyler, even as he willfully abandons his decent suburban life in favor of an escalating crime spree. He increasingly exists only at night, leaving behind his home and the daytime, spending his nights behind the wheel of a getaway car, watching Slocum rob gas stations and return to the car with fistfuls of bills. Endfield captures this ordinary guy's moral degradation with a direct, emotional style, contrasting Tyler's guilty conscience and hesitation against the smirking, sinister Slocum. Bridges seethes with intensity here, initially coming across as simply a cheery huckster — and something of a dandy, admiring his muscles in a mirror as he smears on cologne and puts on his silk shirts — who eventually reveals much darker undercurrents. The first scenes between Slocum and Tyler are staged like a seduction, as Slocum takes Tyler back to his apartment, where he shows off his wealth and his muscular torso. It almost seems like a gay come-on, but really what Slocum wants is to lure his prey into being his accomplise.

The darkness lurking beneath this dandy persona comes to the fore when Slocum hatches a plot to bring the duo's criminal partnership to the next level by kidnapping a rich man's son and holding him for ransom. The kidnapping is one of the film's best sequences, a tense and shadowy nighttime set piece as Slocum and Tyler kidnap the rich young man and try to stow him at an abandoned military base while awaiting the ransom's delivery. Of course, the plan goes wrong almost instantly, and Slocum reacts with a horrifying act of violence, fully revealing the raving evil that had been lurking just beneath the surface of his slick gangster image. Tyler tries to stop his partner, but when he fails Endfield frames Tyler in the foreground, his head in his hands, sobbing in despair and weakness, as in the background Slocum pounds a rock, brutally and repeatedly, onto the head of their victim.


The film also deals, like Lang's, with mob violence and the threat of lynchings. Throughout the film, Endfield occasionally intersperses Tyler's story with scenes involving the reporter Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson), a yellow journalist who believes that he's performing a valuable public service by stirring up public sentiment and appealing to the public's most virulent emotions. Stanton's editor convinces him to drum up circulation by exaggerating Slocum's scattered gas station robberies into a massive crime wave perpetrated by a vicious criminal gang. This is only the start of the newspaper's complicity in creating a public atmosphere conducive to punishing the criminals in the most violent possible way. As in Fury, these scenes are extremely didactic, hammering home the point that the justice system shouldn't be subverted, that innocence is presumed until a fair trial proves guilt, that journalistic sensationalism inflames ugly emotions by appealing to the worst in people. Stanton's friend (Renzo Cesana) provides the moralistic voice delivering these sentiments, lecturing his friend — and the audience — about the importance of fair trials and the dangers of the media's influence. Such concerns seem almost quaint now, in an era of widespread media saturation and sensationalistic coverage of everything and anything, but this film presents exaggerated newspaper headlines as though they're capable of tearing apart the fabric of the world.

As a result, the film's climax takes on a hysterical tone as the jail where Tyler and Slocum are being held is surrounded by a massive angry mob, eager to pull the two criminals outside and enact mob justice without waiting for the courts. The soundtrack becomes shrill and deafening, dominated by the crowd's screams and the frazzled rants of Slocum as he rattles around in his small jail cell. The contrast between the resignation of Tyler — who knows that he's done wrong and feels crippling guilt as a result — and the caged-animal rage of Slocum creates a compelling tension in the scene, even beyond the slow-building tension of the mob gathered outside. The roar of the crowd, the constant noise clattering on the soundtrack, abruptly cuts off for the quiet finale as, nearby, the sheriff and the newspaper reporters wait helplessly as the crowd drags Slocum and Tyler away to be killed. The eerie silence of the scene is shattered twice, with a distant cheer like at a sporting event, one cheer for each man who's dying. It's a chilling scene, with the seeming joy of the crowd contrasting awfully against the horror of what they're celebrating.

Also very compelling are the earlier scenes in which Tyler and Slocum, before they're caught, go out with two girls, Hazel and Velma (Katherine Locke and Adele Jergens), as cover for their mission to mail the ransom note in a neighboring town. The justification for this outing is narratively flimsy, but what's fascinating about it is how Endfield briefly pulls the focus off of the main story to focus on these two girls, who know nothing about the kidnapping plot and simply think they're going out on a fun date. Velma is Slocum's long-time girl, a statuesque good-time girl whose relationship with this unpredictable sociopath is as volatile as expected, alternating between steamy passion and bouts of anger and mutual violence. Hazel is very different, a shy and lonely woman who says she's saving herself for marriage, and who immediately clings to Tyler despite his brooding manner. The scene where the two women prep for their date, chatting and exchanging their hopes and dreams about the happiness and glamour they'd like to experience, is an interesting moment precisely because it's so peripheral to everything else that happens, an acknowledgment that these characters, who would be mere plot devices in any other movie, have lives and dreams of their own. (Interestingly, the two girls are much more thoroughly developed than Tyler's weepy, melodramatic wife, an utterly boring personality vacuum.)

In the end, The Sound of Fury is a fine noir that chronicles the descent of a normal guy into crime, driven there by economic desperation, and though the film is unflinching in examining the consequences of Tyler's weakness, it's also a bold plea on behalf of justice and order, a rejection of the bloodthirsty drive for revenge. Endfield's film is very much deserving of the restoration effort being conducted by this blogathon and by the Film Noir Foundation. As one can no doubt see from the screen captures included with this post, the film, with its heavy blacks and dark atmosphere, is definitely in need of a restoration so that one could descend, with Tyler, more completely into the inky blackness of his sad fate.

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.

Crossfire

[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.]

Crossfire is a fascinating noir with a message that was, in the post-WW2 era, remarkably topical, slowly creeping up from beneath its mystery surface. At first, the film appears to be just another strikingly shot suspense picture about murder and violence, opening with a brutal sequence staged in half-darkness, as several men struggle, their shadows cast on the walls until one of the men is thrown to the ground, knocking over a lamp, leaving the screen momentarily completely dark. After a beat, one of the men switches the light back on, checks on the body on the floor, and leaves with another man, all of this in half-darkness with only the lower halves of the men's bodies visible, the rest obscured by shadows. It's an intense introduction, swift and brutal, the stark lighting adding to the sense of menace and brutality in this anonymous killing. The rest of the film follows the investigation into this murder, as what initially seems like the unfortunate result of a common drunken argument turns out to stem from much darker, uglier impulses.

The investigation, conducted with calm precision by the police captain Finlay (Robert Young), centers around a group of soldiers who were with the murdered man, Samuels (Sam Levene), before his death. The three soldiers — Mitchell (George Cooper), Montgomery (Robert Ryan), and Floyd (Steve Brodie) — met up with Samuels at a bar and went back to his room with him, but at that point the various stories diverge, leaving it unclear who killed the man. Mitchell seems like the most likely fall guy at first, but his friend Keeley (Robert Mitchum) thinks otherwise and begins looking into things himself. The film employs a Citizen Kane-like structure with different people filling in the blanks in the night of the murder, but the device is vestigial, as it becomes clear relatively early what's really going on here.

At first, some broad clues are dropped in the dialogue, hints at something beyond a typical drunken brawl, and eventually the film dispenses with the flashback structure entirely and just reveals who the killer was, well before the climax. The reason for this abandonment of the film's central mystery is that director Edward Dmytryk, working with a script adapted by John Paxton from a Richard Brooks novel, is thrusting at something much deeper than a whodunnit mystery. The film morphs halfway through from noir mystery into an impassioned treatise against prejudice and bigotry, against the kind of hatred that, as Finlay says, is "like a loaded gun," ready to go off at any moment. The film's source novel was about anti-homosexual bias, but the message is translated to be about anti-Semitism for Hollywood, both because any overt mention of homosexuality was still impossible in the cinema of the time, and because a film about anti-Jewish bigotry would arguably be even more relevant in the years after the war, as the horrors of the death camps became public knowledge.


In any event, despite the specifics of this murder's prejudiced motive, the film mounts an argument against prejudice and hatred in any form. At the film's climax, Finlay delivers what would in any other film be a distractingly on-the-nose and lengthy speech about prejudice and bigotry; so many films are interrupted by such obvious message moments, but it almost never works as well as it does here. Part of it is Young's performance as the police captain who remains calm and generic until his big moment, when he unleashes an intensity of feeling that's surprising in this previously unshowy man. He delivers this speech with such depths of sincerity and emotion in his voice that he overcomes, through sheer force of will, any sense that this might be just a pro-forma message interruption of a thriller narrative. More than that, though, it's such a profoundly admirable speech, simple and direct in its language, not written especially cleverly, but written nonetheless with real feeling for its ideas. And its ideas, as specific as they are to the post-war era, are sadly still relevant in any number of contexts: the idea that prejudice is eternal and simply shifts from one target group to another over time; the idea that the violent form of hatred that results in murder is simply an outgrowth of milder, more prosaic forms of bias and dislike. This latter idea, with the memory of Hitler's extermination program still bracingly fresh, hits especially hard, as a reminder that murder and violence are only the most extreme forms of sentiments that are often widespread in society.

Young gets these messages across brilliantly in this extended sequence, which culminates in his linkage of anti-Semitic sentiments to earlier forms of prejudice against Irish immigrants, suggesting that such virulent hatred can afflict any group. Robert Ryan, as the bigoted Montgomery, with his Irish surname, doesn't get this: he sees only his own closeminded preconceptions about people, and he's so hateful he can barely contain his nasty remarks. He's nearly incapable of hiding his poisoned mind, which reveals itself first in insinuating remarks about "those people." Ryan's sneering, glowering performance is a fine counterpoint to Young's tranquil demeanor and steady progress towards the truth. Ryan plays a man who can seem ordinary or even charming for a few minutes at a time before something much uglier begins leaking out. That he's a soldier, someone who had just returned from fighting a war against one of the vilest, most hateful regimes in history, only deepens the bitter irony — and Ryan, the prototypical square-jawed American, allows the darkness of this character to slowly consume him. As he's gradually revealed as the villain of this story, he inhabits the role more and more fully, until he's captured in a closeup, looming over a fellow soldier, glaring down at him with threatening, angry eyes, his former innocuous manner entirely submerged.

Crossfire is the rare topical film that reaches across time to retain its power in the modern era. The situations it depicts don't feel remote, not by any means, and its direct, unflinching examination of irrational hatred — whether racial, ethnic or sexual — makes it both an important film and an affecting one. For once, the shadows of the noir don't just hide another story of bad dames and greedy men. Instead, what's lurking in the shadows is both more familiar and more frightening: hatred of a man just because of how he was born, violence incubated in feelings of prejudice and bias, the seeds of genocide planted in the minds of seemingly ordinary people who carry around their hatred like loaded guns.

Born To Kill

[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.]

There have been countless films where a woman is torn between a life that would bring her mild but unfulfilling happiness and an alternative that she knows is bad for her but wants anyway: facing a choice between the good, stable but maybe a little boring man who loves her, and the bad but irresistibly exciting man she can't help but love. Few films, though, make the choice so explicit as it is in Robert Wise's Born To Kill. Helen (Claire Trevor) says she's not interested in men who are "turnips," that she wants someone strong and forceful, someone who knows what he wants and takes it. That seems to fit Sam Wild (Lawrence Tierney) perfectly: he's a violent, impulsive man, jealous and angry, unwilling to let anyone walk all over him. He's carrying a heavy burden on his shoulders, the burden of class: he's got none, and feels like he's been cheated out of the good life he deserves. He's had so many people try to step over him and he won't tolerate it. Helen is in many ways just like him. She exists on the outskirts of polite society: her foster sister Georgia (Audrey Long) is the heiress to a newspaper fortune, while Helen has all the appearances of a wealthy society woman without the actual wealth. It's obvious that she, like Sam, feels aggrieved by her poverty, constantly reminded that she depends on her sister for charity, forced to rely on others. For an independent woman like her, that especially hurts.

At the beginning of the film, she's just gotten divorced — to a man who's never actually mentioned by name, so complete is his erasure from her life — but she's already got a new marriage lined up, to the rich Fred (Phillip Terry), who can provide her all the stability and security she's always wanted. Nevertheless, when she meets Sam on a train back from Reno after her divorce, she's obviously drawn to him, impressed by his strength and his self-assured manner. Laying out the film's themes in an especially naked way, she says that Fred represents security and comfort for her, but not Sam. She tells him, "You're strength and excitement and depravity. There's a kind of corruption in you, Sam." That's what turns her on, what drives her into his arms again and again, even as Sam, a social climber like her, latches onto her sister instead, courting and marrying Georgia once he learns about her fortune.

The class subtext flows through the film, often in rather uncomfortable ways. Those who have money, like Georgia and Fred, are seen as icons of innocence and goodness. They are noble and free of bad thoughts, never knowing the desperation or pettiness or conflict of people like Sam and Helen, people who have to worry about money, who aren't secure in their place. Arnett (Walter Slezak), the private detective hired to look into Sam, is like Sam and Helen as well. He's a down-on-his-luck immigrant who doesn't even have an office for his business. He stumbles into a juicy case only because he happens to be listed first in the phone book, and once he does, he's determined to milk it for every cent he can get out of it. If cheating justice pays better than fulfilling it, he's willing to do that, too. The film seems to imply that the lack of money makes one willing to do anything to get it, that class is synonymous with morality. Sam's compunction-free evil, Helen's weakness, Arnett's easy corruption: all are signs of low character, a lack of morality, a rotten core that's tied to their lack of wealth.


Still, it's possible that the bad do have more fun, at least in the short term. The film's opening scenes are largely set in a boarding house where Helen is staying during her divorce proceedings. The place is run by a cross-eyed matron, Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard), a boisterous old drunk who had obviously once been a prostitute or simply a raucous party girl, and who in her old age lives vicariously through the bawdy tales of her young friend Laury (Isabel Jewell). This duo's banter is light-hearted and fun, reflecting their total delight in their lifestyle of decadence and pleasure. Mrs. Kraft might be lonely in her old age — no security or stability for her — but at least she has her booze and a good story. The film delights in these lively characters, even as it acknowledges how fleeting their happiness is — and how dangerous it is for them to get involved with the deadly-serious Sam, who can't coexist with this free-and-easy lifestyle.

Tierney delivers a powerful, glowering performance as the violent Sam, who will kill at the slightest provocation, who won't tolerate any real or imagined affront to his fragile ego. He's constantly called strong, but in fact he's delicate, always on the verge of losing his cool, never truly in control of his emotions. His violent temper is carefully monitored and soothed by his longtime friend Mart (Elisha Cook Jr.), whose connection to Sam is ambiguous but obviously intense. Cook is a perpetual Hollywood sidekick and bit player who often seemed to have a small guy's chip on his shoulder, a side-of-the-mouth tough guy attitude out of proportion to his weaselly looks. He is also almost always fun to watch whenever he shows up, and this film is no exception. At one point, he manages to make "I'm a baaaad boy" sound simultaneously infantile and playful and threatening and creepy, and it instantly becomes clear why he's such good friends with the sinister Sam.

Tierney's seething performance, set against the hard edges of Trevor's tough gal Helen, makes Born To Kill a compelling noir melodrama, in spite of (or even because of) its unsettling undercurrents of class warfare. The film juxtaposes bleak settings — particularly a haunted-looking abandoned street adjacent to windswept sand dunes, a prime site for late night murder — with the bright, lavish interiors of the palatial home shared by Georgia and Helen. Wise emphasizes closeups that capture the determined glares of Helen and Sam, and lend a discomfiting intimacy to their sudden, violent clenches and kisses. The film's most effective moment, though, is a surprising scene of attempted murder that blends menace with desperate slapstick pratfalls. The scene's tone shifts from sinister to morbidly comical, making murder seem anything but clean or easy: what starts as an assassination becomes a sloppy tussle in the sand. That abrupt and disturbing tonal destabilization is indicative of the film's boldness and assurance. It's a hard, edgy, tough-minded film — adjectives that describe both the film as a whole and its central characters.

Fury

[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. The 1936 film I'm writing about today is based on the same story that later provided the impetus for Cy Endfield's 1950 The Sound of Fury, which is the film that is targeted for preservation by this particular blogathon.]

Fritz Lang's Fury is a harrowing film with a preachy but important message at its core. It was Lang's first Hollywood film, and it is obvious that he wanted his American debut to be a film that meant something, a film that, in a way, sent a message about what Lang saw as distinctively American values and vices. It's thus a film about justice and injustice, about goodness and corruption, about the loss of faith in the ideals upon which American democracy is built. Early on, in a scene in a barber shop, the customers discuss the American Constitution, with one right-wing man advocating for laws restricting the freedom of speech, suppressing those who say things that he disagrees with. The barber, an immigrant, speaks up, saying that the other man should read the Constitution, that such ideas run counter to the foundation of the country — he's read the Constitution, he says, because he had to in order to become a citizen, while those who are born here seldom bother. This seems like Lang's assertion of his own foreign perspective, his statement that, as an outsider, he's pointing out both what's best in this country and what threatens to destroy those great ideals, those noble concepts.

The film's central character, the ordinary working class guy Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy), suffers the loss of faith in these ideals over the course of this film. When the film opens, he's planning to marry his sweetheart Katherine (Sylvia Sidney), although the happy couple are first forced to spend a year apart in order to save up enough money to get married. Joe's an honest, upright man, a man who tries to pass his values and ideals on to his two brothers, Charlie (Frank Albertson) and Tom (George Walcott). Charlie's caught up in some dishonest activities, running around with a mob outfit, and in many other noirs this would provide the central conflict: one can see Joe getting pulled into Charlie's criminal world, drawn by greed, forced to sacrifice his goodness and his honesty in the pursuit of enough money to reunite him with his woman. Instead, Joe pulls Charlie up into the light, convincing his brother that this flirtation with lawlessness is misguided. Lang intentionally inserts the gangster movie references as a red herring, a hint at a different kind of movie, and Joe's casual rejection of those clichés establishes him as seemingly incorruptible, unshakable in his faith and righteousness. So many noir antiheroes spiralled to their doom through this kind of temptation, but Joe is not swayed — and he spirals to his doom anyway.

Joe's sense of faith in goodness — the idea that a good life is its own reward — is eventually shattered, in the most dramatic way. The film's centerpiece is a jaw-dropping, heart-squeezing sequence of wrongful imprisonment and tragedy, as anxiety-inducing as any of Hitchcock's nightmarish "wrong man" scenarios. Joe gets mistakenly identified as being involved in a prominent kidnapping case, gets put into a small town jail, and while he's waiting for his innocence to be proven, he finds that the townspeople don't want to wait, that they want swift, brutal punishment for the man they believe to be a kidnapper. Lang's exaggerated vision of small town gossips and petty rabble-rousers transforming into a bloodthirsty lynch mob is patently artificial and stylized, but it's no less affecting for its contrivances. What matters is the impression that the institutions of civilization and democracy are horribly fragile, that at any moment the veneer of decency and justice can be peeled away, replaced by a mob mentality that overruns all of the values usually upheld in this country — or in any other country; after all, Lang had just left Germany in the early years of the Nazi government. What's striking about these sequences is that even in this nightmare vision of society run amok, Lang doesn't present the onset of hysteria and violence as inevitable: a few voices of reason do speak up and sway the crowd back from the brink, only to be overpowered again by other, less reasonable voices. And it's telling that the voice that finally does push the crowd fully over the edge is the voice of a strikebreaker, a man who'd just come from violently suppressing workers in a nearby town, and who now advocated similarly violent and horrible action in this town.


In the scene where the lynch mob starts gathering, pouring out into the streets towards the jail, a black man is nearly pushed aside by the swinging doors of a bar as the angry crowd races out. The man leaps up onto a table, hiding in the corner, out of the path of the enraged townspeople, and he remains in the back of the frame as the crowd rushes by. It's obvious that Lang is giving a little nod to this story's real subtext, to the real injustice that his film is, at root, really about. "Lynching" is a loaded word, a word with a real racial subtext to it in American history, and there's no escaping the obvious fact that all of this film's bold courtroom speeches about the prominence of lynchings in America are directed primarily at the lynchings of black men by white mobs. The film is, like many Hollywood films of the era, in code — it's quite possible that a film about a black man being lynched would have been impossible to make, and the enactment of a lynching story with a white innocent standing in for a black one allows Lang to make his observations about justice, revenge and the hatred and evil that can be so easily stirred up from petty motivations in otherwise normal people.

The lynching itself — the burning of the jail, with Joe inside, looking on in horror as law and order fall apart outside — is one of the most absolutely horrifying and sad sequences in cinema. Its impact is like slamming into a brick wall, as the fearsome, raw emotions of this sequence are unlike anything else in the film to that point. When Katherine arrives just in time to see the building engulfed in flames, with Joe at a barred window screaming, Lang holds a closeup on her stunned, horrified face, her eyes wide and glossy with tears, her mouth trembling open to murmur denials, as though she could wish away what she's seeing. These closeups are devastating, as is the hushed silence of the crowd as they watch the jail burn, stoically admiring the results of their actions, with Katherine's grief lost amidst the crowd, singled out only by Lang, who alternates closeups of Katherine with Joe at his barred window, even though the latter doesn't see his would-be bride and her horror.

The film's second half, after this pivotal event, chronicles the disruption of the American dream by this kind of hatred and violence. It is, inevitably, somewhat preachy and didactic, with plenty of courtroom speeches and showboating by the unnamed district attorney (Walter Abel), who often comes across as smug even though he's technically on the side of good. Compared to the bracing, darkly beautiful quality of Lang's images of the imprisonment and fire, it's of course a letdown when the film shifts almost entirely to courtroom theatrics, but the film's hammering sloganeering clearly comes from a place of real feeling. As a result, the film remains passionate and engrossing even when the courtroom scenes kill the momentum of the story. This is a fascinating film, a rumination on the justice system and the concept of revenge, but even when it threatens to become a wordy tract on these subjects, the film's strong emotional foundation prevents the speeches from overwhelming the characters.

Nightmare Alley

[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.]

Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley is a bleak, fatalistic noir, a rich and unusual examination of ambition, hypocrisy and ruin. The film is set in the world of the carnival and show business glitz, as the young carnival barker Stan (Tyrone Power) dreams of developing an act that will get him out of the low-rent carnival; he wants money and fame as a high-class night club attraction, wowing audiences with displays of psychic power and mind-reading. He sees his chance in the washed-up psychic Zeena (Joan Blondell), who had once been a famed night club performer with a flawless code system that had allowed her to stun audiences, until her partner and husband Pete (Ian Keith) was driven by her infidelities to become a drunk, no longer able to maintain the precision necessary for their act. The pair continue performing, in hobbled form, at a low-budget carnival, as Pete is kept barely stable by Zeena, even as she continues to stray. Stan — who openly admits that he thinks only of himself — worms his way in and sees Zeena on the side. Once he learns about the secret code she's guarding, of course he tries to get her to give it up to him, even as he lusts after the much younger Molly (Coleen Gray).

The film is built on a subtle structure of parallels and mirrors, as the film's first half carefully sets up the path of Stan's fated rise and fall. Stan's conversations with the drunken, no good Pete are so pointed that one senses it's only a matter of time before he winds up in the same situation. "How does a man sink so low?" someone asks early on, and the question — which will be repeated as some of the last words in the film — is the hidden driving force behind much of the action. How does a man sink so low? Through greed and cold ambition, through pushing away friends and using people for what he thinks he can get out of them. In the opening scenes of the film, Stan observes a performance by "the Geek," a carnival attraction of the basest sort, a man who degrades himself by pretending to be a subhuman brute, a monster with no thoughts who eats live chickens for the amusement and horror of the audience. Goulding stages this sequence brilliantly: the Geek is positioned at the front of the stage, hidden from view by the crowds gathered around him, and as Stan walks away, disgusted by the spectacle, a man on stage throws a pair of chickens to the brute. As the chickens squawk and squeal, the camera pans away with Stan, towards a fire-eater who blows turrets of flame into the air from his mouth. The audience begins to turn away from the Geek as well, to watch the fire-eater instead, and the moment underscores the insignificance of the degraded, unseen man. He lowers himself to the level of an animal for the momentary entertainment of a fickle crowd, and when they're satisfied with his degradation, they turn to the next spectacle, seeking the next stimulus.

That's why it's so heartbreaking when Pete and Stan discuss the Geek later, watching the man go crazy, pursued by carnival workers. Pete admits that if not for Zeena, that would be him: the Geek is just an ordinary man, a drunk who's sunk so low that he's willing to do anything for a bottle of booze, even if it means utterly debasing himself in the most humiliating and public ways. The Geek pretends to be without thoughts, without a human brain, but Pete's awareness of his own degradation, his own uselessness as a sloppy drunk, suggests that beneath his brutish surface the Geek is very much aware of what he's doing, very much aware of how low he's fallen. That only makes it all the more horrible, and Stan in particular is horrified by the Geek, as though he were seeing a creeping premonition of his own future in this debased man, a former carnival performer himself.


Stan's rise to fame occurs when he gets away from the carnival, at first not of his own free will, though he eventually realizes that he's actually gotten his big break. He brings Molly with him, and one of the film's cleverest scenes is the one where Stan concocts his newest scheme. He's thought of the idea to create a new psychic act with Molly as his partner, and a grin spreads over his face as he thinks of all the money and fame they can earn. But Molly obviously misunderstands, thinking he's happy to be with her, starting a new life with her. "Do you really mean it?" she asks breathlessly, looking at him with wide, happy eyes, and he excitedly exclaims, "yes," but there's some obvious miscommunication here. Molly's happy to be married, to be in love, but Stan is just happy to finally be on the verge of major success. He's happy he's got the girl, but only because he knows he can use her in the act, because she'll be very useful to him. The scene is staged like a conventional romantic climax, a moment of togetherness and union, but the lovers are talking past one another, seeming to say the same things but meaning something very different. The way the different meanings criss-cross in the subtext makes the scene heartrending rather than uplifting, even as the strings soar and Molly proclaims, with sappy earnestness, that she'll be a good and loyal wife to her man. It's as though the film is mocking Molly for being just another mark, just another sucker for Stan's clever patter.

It's fascinating to watch the sweet, innocent Molly hoodwinked by Stan, even as he himself gets tangled up with a calculating psychiatrist, Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), who sees one of his acts and gets interested in him. The interplay between Stan and Lilith is a study in power struggles and mutual manipulation, as Stan thinks he's using the psychiatrist for her connections to wealthy society people. But, in a potent scene late in the film, the rug gets pulled out from under Stan, to the point that he begins questioning his own sanity, unsure of what's been real and what's been a con, not knowing if he's losing his mind or being brilliantly played. Goulding, ingeniously, allows the audience to wonder as well. Walker plays this scene with a hint of menace, an undercurrent of knowing manipulation, wrapped up in sincerity and bursts of seemingly genuine confusion. As the psychiatrist winds around her patient in the dark, the shadows making a cruel mask of her face, the audience is left to wonder what's truth and what's lies — to think back on what had already happened and wonder if there had been an elaborate long con running, and if so where the deceit had begun, how far back the web of lies stretched. The uncertainty places the viewer into Stan's position, concocting paranoid conspiracy theories, lost in the dark, feeling used and betrayed.

This is Stan's comeuppance, one explanation for how a man can get so low, how a man becomes the Geek. It is, in some ways, a divine justice, a form of destiny or punishment from above: the film's script is full of allusions to destiny, to the magic of the Tarot deck, and to God and the Christian Bible. There is an increasingly religious fervor to Stan's psychic performances, as he puts his audiences in touch with dead relatives and uses the rhetoric of the church pulpit as fodder for entertainment and spectacle. To him, religion is just another con, and Molly, growing afraid as he crosses the blurry line from entertainer to con artist, begs him not to invoke the wrath of God by playing the role of a spiritualist. But Stan has a literalist's understanding of religion; he believes, or tries to convince Molly that he believes, that because he never explicitly mentions God, then he is free of blasphemy. It's as though he's even trying to con God, to sneak by on a technicality. In the end, though, as Stan semi-consciously falls lower and lower until he's mirroring first Pete and then the lowly Geek, the film suggests that there's no way to con destiny, no way to avoid the inevitable and awful descent into pathetic ruin.

The Big Heat

[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.]

Fritz Lang's The Big Heat is a dark, tough noir, an intense crime thriller that moves at an unrelentingly brisk pace as it delves fearlessly into the darkness of its story. It is a remarkably adult film, never wincing away from the seedy truths at its core, and for the Hollywood of its era — even in the gritty world of the noir — it especially stands out. Its dialogue is taut and punchy, dealing candidly with this world of corruption, adultery, death and disfigurement, and the sad fate of "that kind of girl." The film focuses on the scrupulously honest cop Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), a guy with such a highly developed sense of morality that he never thinks twice about doing the right thing. When the suicide of a highly positioned police officer starts stirring up some ugly suspicions, Bannion charges into the middle of the case, even when it becomes apparent that there are some very powerful people above him who would like the whole matter to be put to rest as quickly and cleanly as possible. Bannion can't go along with that. He's got a kind of brute force morality that drives him forward, pushing at the people who'd like him to simply go away — including the dead cop's widow, Mrs. Duncan (Jeanette Nolan) and the gangster Lagana (Alexander Scourby), a powerful man with connections that run deep into the police force. Bannion doesn't have the smarts to conduct his investigation quietly or subtly, so he just keeps forcing himself on underworld contacts and on Lagana himself until someone decides he needs to be dealt with.

Bannion is setting himself up for tragedy, and of course he gets it. The film goes to some very dark places, but before it does, Lang takes pains to establish the stakes for Bannion: a very happy home life with a lovely wife, Katie (Jocelyn Brando), and a daughter. The early scenes of Bannion and his wife at home create a contrast against the darkness and corruption he encounters at work. Bannion is scraping by on a cop's salary, always conscious of the tight budget his family has to maintain, and his conversations with his wife about money set him apart from the dead Duncan, who'd transcended his cop's salary by serving on a criminal's payroll, at least until his conscience caught up with him. Moreover, the scenes between Bannion and Katie serve as a tonal contrast; these scenes are syrupy and romantic, dripping with pathos and big goopy closeups, and the bright, clean light of the Bannions' home makes it look like a cheery sitcom set as opposed to all the shadowy hotel rooms and seedy bars where the corrupt and the crooked do their deals. The couple has a light, flirtatious relationship, rooted in concrete details like Katie's habit of taking a sip of her husband's beer or polishing off his whiskey, or their gentle sparring and coded sexual banter as she prepares dinner. Their romance is pure and good, but it's obvious from the beginning that Lang is establishing this foundation for Bannion only in order to disrupt it in some way.

When the disruption finally comes, it's one of the film's most chilling scenes, a shattering break in this domestic bliss that comes just as Bannion is telling a story to his daughter. The remainder of the film ventures even further into darkness, as Bannion becomes obsessed with breaking up the ring of corruption in his city, following the chain of crime towards the men who pull the strings from behind the scenes. He particularly becomes concerned with Lagana's right-hand man, Vince (Lee Marvin), a sociopathic tough guy who takes his anger out on women more often than not. Vince has a bouncy, cheery good-time girl, Debby (Gloria Grahame), who drunkenly mocks Vince's eager obedience to Lagana, but is still happy to profit off the illegal gains from her man's shady activities.


Like so many of the best noirs, The Big Heat is about pain and rage, about revenge and justice. Lang focuses intently on both the violence and its ugly consequences, particularly when the psychopathic Vince goes too far with Debby. Vince is a brutish character, played with chilly intensity by Marvin, whose tight-lipped, stony expression perfectly captures the casually sociopathic violence of this killer. In one crucial scene, Vince utterly loses his cool and assaults Debby with a coffee pot, perhaps a nod to Raymond Burr in a similarly unhinged performance in Anthony Mann's Raw Deal.

Grahame is even better as the hard-drinking party girl who's eventually forced to sober up and face the ugly reality of the life she'd been living. As with the use of Bannion's relationship with his wife, Lang develops a contrast between the playfulness of Debby and the crude nastiness of Vince. There's also a contrast between Debby in the first half of the film and the increasingly pained, pathetic Debby in the second half of the film. Debby goes from a character of light — dancing around in Vince's well-lit apartment, cracking jokes and admiring herself in a mirror — to a woman who's afraid of the light, who wants to hide in the shadows instead. The film cleverly exploits these dichotomies between dark and light, and it's especially interesting that Lang reverses the motif for Debby. When she's in the light, she's living a corrupt life as a thug's moll, enjoying her decadent ease with dirty money paying for her shopping trips and keeping her supplied with liquor. It's only when she's swallowed up in shadows that she sees things with some clarity. It's fitting, then, that she spends the second half of the film divided in half, her face half-covered with a white bandage, the other half of her face often bathed in the richly textured shadows of Lang's images. Debby is divided between a fun, mostly carefree past that now seems lost forever, and the knowledge of the ugliness on which that life had been built.

The Big Heat is a powerful film, a stark examination of the tremendous difficulty of maintaining honor and morality in a corrupt world — an examination of the risks of speaking truth to power, and the slim rewards. In the film's final scene, Bannion has returned to the daily routine of police investigation. There is no glory, no real reward, only the resumption of relative normality, minus the horrible costs he'd already paid. That's part of what makes the film so bracing and affecting and even, despite its glossy aesthetics, somewhat realistic in its portrayal of corruption and the cost of honesty.

The Sniper

The Sniper is an early example of Hollywood taking a stab at the kind of criminal/psychological analysis that is, today, a commonplace element of crime fiction. At the time, though, in 1952, this film's dead-on look at the psychosexual dysfunction of a killer must have seemed bracing and realistic, even if today its psychology seems strained and its examination of the subject superficial. The film focuses on Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz), a man with some serious issues about women. The film's opening text offers up a message about sex criminals, and indeed Miller's sickness is explicitly compared, within the film, to that of rapists and other sexual predators and perverts. With that context established, the opening images of Miller assembling a sniper rifle immediately acquire a sexual subtext, and his use of that weapon to murder women becomes a form of symbolic rape from a distance for a man who's afraid of and disturbed by women, who simultaneously wants them and detests them. During Miller's first murder, director Edward Dmytryk, in one of the film's most shocking shots, zooms in for a closeup on Miller's hands, caressing the barrel of his rifle, wrapping his hands around the gun and running them up and down its smooth metallic length. The sexual subtext of the crimes, the sense that Miller is getting off on these women in the only way he knows how, couldn't be more blatant.

Dmytryk does an excellent job of staging the murders, establishing the creepy sensation that Miller is lurking in the shadows, watching and waiting. His first victim is the pianist Jean (noir stalwart Marie Windsor), a woman Miller knows as one of his customers from his job as a laundry deliveryman. When Miller visits Jean's apartment early in the film to drop off a dress for her, the two flirt innocently — or rather, Jean flirts with him, not suspecting that it's anything more than the casual banter that often passes between acquaintances when conducting this type of routine business. But Miller is a very damaged man, and it's obvious that he's attracted to Jean, and at the same time turned off every time she drops a hint of her lifestyle as a nightclub pianist, every time she hints at the men she knows. Windsor brings just a touch of her usual femme fatale persona to Jean, a few stray touches of regret and world-weariness, a shade of noir toughness in this otherwise normal woman. She has only a few scenes, and Windsor, typically, makes them count, makes this woman memorable so that her sudden death, which sets Miller off on a killing spree all around the city, will be all the more affecting.

The scenes of Miller stalking Jean, following her down shadowy streets to her club and then setting up with his rifle on a roof nearby, are interrupted by a brief scene inside the club, where Jean fends off a drunken admirer and banters with the club owner. The juxtaposition subtly connects the drunk, with his increasingly antagonistic behavior, to the killer waiting outside, who nurses his own even more violent hostility towards women. What's interesting about the film, particularly for its era, is how it pointedly brings the subject of attitudes about women to the surface. It seems like virtually everywhere Miller goes, he encounters someone who has something to say about women, and usually something negative or stereotypical. A doctor tells Miller that he should get married, that cooking is women's work, and Miller's landlady tells him virtually the opposite, that men should learn how to cook just as well as women. In a scene where Miller makes a phone call at a drug store, Dmytryk cleverly stages a miniature drama in the background as the couple running the place bicker over the guy's perceived flirtation with a customer. These kinds of prosaic details subtly comment upon and enhance the central story, and the way this scene places a whole story into the background of the shot is fascinating.


Later, Miller goes to a carnival and unleashes his hostility in a game where the object is to throw a baseball at a target to knock a woman into a tank of water. Miller becomes increasingly enraged and violent, knocking the woman into the water again and again with his perfect aim, but what's notable is that he's really only getting too into the spirit of the game, which seems to be based entirely on this kind of hostility, on the idea that guys will want to step up and knock the woman off her stool if they can. Miller's only more honest about it — and has a better aim than most. The film doesn't exactly explicitly question these kinds of attitudes, but they certainly come bubbling to the surface, often in ugly ways. There's an odd disconnect, for example, between the killer's attitude towards women and the joking tone of a scene where one cop teases his older partner about married life. Similarly, a scene where the police question a lineup of sex criminals, trying to find out if one of them is the sniper, is frankly just bizarre, as the interrogator adopts a blatantly comic tone, turning around to catch the reaction of his fellow cops as he delivers his one-liners about rapists and peeping toms. It's staged like a comedy routine rather than a real interrogation of dangerous sexual criminals.

If the film never quite resolves these tensions, it's at least obvious that the treatment of women, and men's attitudes about women, are at the center of this story. A subtle line is drawn between common ideas about women and Miller's extreme actions. Less interesting is the film's tendency towards blunt, pat psychoanalysis and preachy speeches, which become more common in the film's second half. At its best, particularly for its first half, The Sniper is a taut and tense psychological thriller that places the audience in uncomfortable intimacy with the dysfunctional killer. In the second half of the film, though, the emphasis begins to slide away from Miller and onto the police who are trying to catch him, including Lieutenant Kafka (Adolphe Menjou) and the police psychologist Kent (Richard Kiley). Kent is prone to long speeches about how sexual criminals should be treated and committed to mental institutions, an early expression of the idea, now encoded in our justice system to some degree, that sexual crime should be treated differently from other kinds of crime. The film essentially goes on hold whenever Kent speaks: there might as well be an announcement that the film is being interrupted by a political advertisement or a public service announcement. Similarly, the depiction of Miller as having been damaged by his mother's strict and possibly abusive upbringing is delivered so bluntly and obviously that it takes away from some of the film's more subtle points.

In the end, The Sniper is an interesting if flawed picture that should be credited for attempting to explore sexual crime in a bold and direct way. Its ideas about sexual deviancy and the dynamics of gender relations might seem dated today, but nothing can take away from the creeping terror of its murder sequences. And nothing can dull the power of its haunting final shot, a slow zoom towards the face of Miller as he's caught by the police, hugging his rifle to his chest, a single tear running down his cheek.

Brute Force

Jules Dassin's Brute Force is a dark, fatalistic prison noir, a film in which there is no exit, no freedom, no opportunity for escape — it's an unrelentingly oppressive journey towards its final confirmation that bloody destiny is inescapable. The film is set in a prison that's dominated by the cruel, sadistic guard captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn), who keeps the men under his charge on a tight leash through brutality and manipulation. Not only that, but he seems to take pleasure in it; when he's beating an inmate, or driving another to suicide by spreading lies about the man's beloved wife, a small smile inevitably creeps across his lips, while his eyes bulge in insane joy. The film presents the prison as a near-complete moral vacuum, a place where if anything the prisoners are mostly morally superior to those who watch over them. The prisoners are men who have made mistakes, who have done stupid things, committed petty crimes for foolish reasons, or been betrayed or framed. On the other hand, if Munsey is a brutish sadist, the prison's warden (Roman Bohnen) is a coward with no ability to curb his underlings' excesses, while the good-hearted doctor (Art Smith) tries his best to resist such brutality, but mostly just drowns himself in booze. He's prone to boozy speechifying, to bursts of righteous outrage and indignation, but all his fiery oration never has any impact despite his good intentions. Even so, he does provide the apt summation of Munsey's approach that provides the film with its title: "not imagination, not cleverness, just force... brute force."

Dassin surrounds the prisoners with an oppressive system that offers no possibility for escape. As Munsey makes clear, he's the one who decides what prisoners have been on "good behavior," and therefore he more or less controls the parole system. This means that the prisoners understand parole as an empty promise, and collaborating with Munsey is equally fruitless since it practically guarantees death by fellow prisoners: one "stool pigeon" meets his end in a license plate press, chased there by inmates with blowtorches. Dassin is essentially showing how few options are open to these men, closing each avenue of escape off one by one, demonstrating that there's really no hope. The stool pigeon tries to gain his freedom by turning on his fellow inmates, and meets a grisly end as a result, while Munsey brushes the man off once he's done with him, not caring about his fate. The prison newspaper editor Gallagher (Charles Bickford) hopes to gain his freedom through parole, by maintaining friendships with both guards and inmates, helping to keep the whole prison system running smoothly. But he soon enough learns that parole is a remote hope, especially when the prison board arbitrarily decides to suspend all parole hearings, demonstrating conclusively just how little control these men have over their circumstances. Lister (Whit Bissell) tries to keep to himself, only concerning himself with writing letters to his wife, but Munsey's intervention teaches him that even this is not a tenable position.

The film's mood is one of claustrophobic intensity. Dassin films the men in their cramped cells, packed together within these concrete walls, the bars casting striped shadows on their faces, as they squirm and plot under the restrictions enforced by Munsey. The men all want something on the outside. Collins (Burt Lancaster) wants to be reunited with his sickly girlfriend Ruth (Ann Blyth), who is wasting away in his absence. Soldier (Howard Duff) wants to get back to his Italian wife, for whom he took the fall in the first place, risking his career to get her and her father rare post-war food and supplies. The others have girls and dreams, too. Dassin awkwardly shoehorns in the men's flashbacks to their pre-jail days, and these saccharine diversions seem to have come from a different movie, with melodramatic acting and trite stories. These interludes don't serve the film particularly well, since they distract from what is otherwise an all-encompassing claustrophobia and dread, the sense of being trapped within the walls of the prison. The flashbacks, by taking the action outside the jail walls, dilute the film's feeling of being trapped along with these men, and moreover these scenes are unnecessary to establishing the stakes of escape. The desire to get out is written in every man's face anyway, in their desperate eyes, and the flashbacks don't do anything that a couple of terse lines of dialogue don't do just as well.


Flashbacks aside, the film is a stark, angry prison drama, and Dassin does a good job of ratcheting up the men's desperation until an escape attempt seems like the only possible solution. Early on, a glimpse of freedom is offered by the sight of the prison's gates opening and its drawbridge going down to let out a car carrying the body of a dead prisoner. Dassin films this shot as though it were the gates of Heaven itself opening: there's something ecstatic about the sight of an open road appearing where before there had only been forbidding walls. Collins watches with yearning, not realizing that this scene confirms what they all already know, that dying is one of the few ways to ensure that those gates will open and the bridge will lower.

This tension pays off in the final sequences, as Munsey's sadism reaches previously unimagined levels. The captain's beating of an inmate who he suspects of being involved with the escape plan is truly brutal, and Dassin films the scene mostly through suggestion, with the actual violence happening off-screen. Instead, Dassin captures the expression of mad pleasure, nearly lustful, that plays across the captain's face as he beats this man. Cronyn, so bland and innocent-looking, plays the role with obvious relish, brilliantly portraying the banality of evil, the ordinary sadist whose own ambitions and dreams are modest, and seemingly extend no further than the advancement of his career. In service to these utterly conventional middle-class ambitions, he commits acts of unspeakable horror and nastiness, not because they're strictly necessary but because he enjoys it, and because he's convinced himself that brutality is the only possible response to his charges.

The escape attempt itself is predictably violent and nasty, as the prison is set ablaze, so that the whole sequence seems to be playing out in this fortified Hell, flames licking up at the men's desperate, rage-filled faces, as they struggle against impossible odds to get those gates open again, to get their revenge. By this time, the film's mood has reached a fever-pitch peak of insanity and cruelty, as the prisoners and the guards prove themselves equally capable of pointless violence and destruction, while everyone's confused plans fall apart all around them. In the end, no one gets what they want, and no one can escape. It's the fatalistic essence of the noir, a lesson Dassin imparts in a point-blank coda that underlines the impossibility of escape, the fact that bars — literal and metaphorical — cage us all.

The Lineup

Don Siegel's The Lineup is an interesting noir with an unusual structure, starting with the cops investigating the death of a cop during a drug smuggling ploy gone wrong, then midway through making a pair of out-of-town killers the protagonists instead. The film's opening seconds are a burst of sheer adrenaline as a porter throws a piece of luggage into a cab, which promptly speeds away, crashes into a truck, runs over a cop, and finally crashes again, killing the driver. All this happens in a rush before the film's title appears onscreen, but after this the story slows to a crawl as inspectors Quine (Emile Meyer) and Asher (Marshall Reed) show up to investigate the aftermath. Their plodding, careful investigation never really kicks into gear: as passionate as they are about finding out who's responsible for the death of a fellow officer, their efforts reveal just how routine, how dull, real policework can be. There's a sense that Siegel is trying to infuse a certain realism into his film, capturing the forensics, the slow process of gathering evidence, the frustrations of not having any leads. Even the titular lineup is a disappointment, not to mention a red herring: their sole witness to the incident, Dressler (Raymond Bailey), can't identify the porter who stole his luggage, and the cops half-suspect that Dressler's not so innocent anyway. Moreover, the porter soon winds up dead anyway; this story isn't about him any more than it's about Dressler or the cops. Siegel shoots these scenes with panache — the lineup itself, taking place on a strikingly bright set, is visually compelling — but can't disguise the fact that realism, at times, is kind of boring.

That's why it's so thrilling when, without ceremony, Siegel discards the story of the frustrated cops and instead switches focus to new arrivals Dancer (Eli Wallach, in only his second feature film after his electric debut in Baby Doll) and Julian (Robert Keith). They are quite an unusual pair. Dancer is a sociopath, a killer who perhaps enjoys his job too much; he sneers and delivers a chilly, unhinged stare that unnerves anyone who's on the receiving end of it. Julian, in contrast, is an older man, cultured and reserved, who keeps Dancer just barely reined in. He is, as their wheelman Sandy (Richard Jaeckel) observes at one point, like a "coach" to Dancer, encouraging him and making sure he doesn't go overboard. He encourages Dancer to learn good grammar, too, saying that it's the route to success. He seems to be of a literary bent himself: he records the "famous last words" of Dancer's victims, gathering material for a book, a psychological study of those facing death. Obviously, these are two Hollywood bad guys, with stylized eccentricities and exaggerated menace; their portrayals rub uncomfortably up against the bland stolidness of the police in the earlier scenes. It's as though the film really comes alive once they step onto the scene, trading weird banter and radiating a nearly Lynchian menace; they would fit in comfortably as a pair of outlandish thugs in one of Lynch's films.

After these two killers are introduced, the film becomes about their attempts to gather some drug shipments that had been placed in various knick-knacks carried into the country by unsuspecting tourists. This is a contrivance of the first degree, a needlessly convoluted plot that provides the engine for Dancer and Julian's sinister shuttling around town. They visit their marks in sequence, with Dancer calmly going about the business of getting the drugs and killing anyone who gets in his way. There's a casual brutality to Dancer's rounds that makes him a very disconcerting figure, especially when juxtaposed against the professorly Julian.


Each of these sequences is meticulously designed. When Dancer goes to see a seaman (William Leslie) who knowingly brought in the heroin, the two meet in a sauna where Dancer turns up the steam so that he remains obscured, a shadowy silhouette drifting through the fog. Later, he shoots a house servant while stealing a set of flatware with heroin stored away in the handles, and the shooting is captured in a mirror, the servant stiffening, his body at an oblique angle to the diagonals of a stairway. Siegel has a sharp sense of place and location that constantly informs the film, which uses its San Francisco settings to dramatic effect. The characters are continually framed in closeups with the scenery looming behind and below them, hills and valleys majestically framing the characters. When Sandy first appears at a remote hotel where Dancer and Julian are staying, he is poised on the edge of a cliff leading down to a valley below, where clusters of geometrically rigid buildings create patterns in the background. As he walks up to the hotel, the pillars outside the rooms divide the background into slim rectangular sections receding into the distance. Siegel has a keen eye for such geometric patterns and divisions, like a window that segments the San Francisco skyline into semicircles and polygons as two cops discuss their case.

The final car chase is another perfect example. It's a thrilling sequence that relies on the geography of the terrain, particularly a highway under construction where the criminals, confused by their circular turns and the road blocks erected in their path, are forced to flee. The final showdown takes place on this road that ends literally in midair, overlooking a massive drop, and then in a narrow cul-de-sac where Siegel plays with perspective: at first the road looks like an entry to a freeway and a clean getaway, but then the path narrows down to a point and it's revealed as a dead end. Scenes like this, where the raging insanity of Dancer plays off of Siegel's fascinating visuals, make the film worthwhile far beyond its rather ramshackle plot and uneven pacing. At times, the script falters and plods. It is front-loaded with some dull and preachy speeches obviously designed to teach the public about the horrors of drug use and drug smuggling, and its psychological characterizations of Dancer are sometimes far too on-the-nose. At one point, when someone asks him what makes him "tick," he responds, apparently without irony, that he never knew his father, a pat explanation that hardly accounts for the psychosis in his character.

Maybe that's the point. Wallach's performance as Dancer is startling in its intensity and brutality, his eyes flashing with lunacy. It's a truly unhinged performance, one that makes a mockery of the script's periodic stabs at psychological profiling. Dancer's confrontation with the mysterious criminal leader known only as "The Man" (Vaughn Taylor) reveals what happens when Dancer slips off his leash, when he can no longer control his violence or his rage. When The Man, a quietly creepy figure in a wheelchair, refuses to give Dancer the validation he asks for, and instead gently insists that Dancer is now a dead man, the killer can't control himself, can't hold back the rage constantly boiling beneath the surface. Siegel subtly encloses Wallach's performance within the film's hard lines and rigid separations between foreground and background, suggesting that Dancer is raging and fighting against the entire world, against the bounds of society. There is no better metaphor, then, than that climactic sequence in which what had seemed to be an open road closes down to an unpassable trap, closing off all exit for the criminal who wishes to push his way outside of the law. There is no way out from here, nothing left to say, and it's appropriate that Siegel doesn't have anything more to say either: the cops leave the scene afterward in silence as the camera pans away to take in the skyline in the background.

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.