TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN (Deux Hommes dans..., 1959)

You never know who you'll meet in the big city.

Why, it's Jean-Pierre Melville, the French master of crime and suspense, the direcor of Le Samourai and Army of Shadows. Don't let his sleepy demeanor deceive you; he's a busy man today. Melville isn't just writing and directing this picture, but he's acting as well -- in fact, though he doesn't take top billing, Monsieur Modest is the main character of the story. And he shares a cinematography credit with Nicolas Heyer. He's in New York to shoot exteriors (and the interior of a subway train) and establish atmosphere; he'll shoot the other interiors back home in France. They don't really match that well, but Melville's Manhattan is less a physical place than a territory of mood and music. His opening credits play over Times Square to establish his bona fides, but his camera sets the tone by pulling inexorably away from the familiar crossroads of the world toward darker, more nondescript places. The music still says Manhattan, however, if not America, or 1959. Some of it sounds like library music but much of it is jazzily evocative the way Melville intended. This French film could be the soundtrack for a certain strata of America at the end of the Fifties, where rock 'n roll hasn't reached yet, where the tone of the vibraphone is the church bell of sophistication ringing through the midnight fog cigarette smoke across a sea of booze. They call this film an homage to film noir but it's more of a homage to its own time than to the decade past. It's a Fifties, not a Forties film, in spirit as well as fact.

It might remind you of a Thirties film, since Melville's hero is a reporter hunting a story. He writes for Agence France-Presse and his job is to track down a French diplomat who didn't show up that afternoon at the U.N. Melville acknowledges New York as the capital of the world through his attention to the U.N., portraying its headquarters as an eerie monolith perched like an upright domino begging to be toppled into the river. His quest takes him from this heart of the world into the Manhattan demimonde, descending from a Broadway theater -- the Mercury Theater, mind you, since there's something Wellsian, evocative not only of Kane but Arkadin, to the story -- to a Capitol Records studio to a burlesque club, tracking down women known to be lovers of the diplomat. But the path of the hard-boiled newshound is also the path of Sidney Falco, and Melville's sidekick, the photographer Delmas (Pierre Grasset) is a man on the make, looking for his opportunity to get a scoop, or to catch an entertainer topless when she isn't looking.

It may not have been too soon for Melville to be influenced by Sweet Smell of Success, and in any event Burt Lancaster is spiritually present in Times Square -- his picture Separate Tables is playing in one of the long-gone movie palaces while the credits roll. While Melville hints at characteristic suspense by having himself and Grasset tailed by a mysterious car, the story eventually resolves itself into a moral dilemma. Reporter and photographer find the diplomat dead in an actress's apartment, tipped off by news of her intermission suicide attempt at the Mercury. For Delmas it's the opportunity of a lifetime that only grows bigger when it turns out that AFP intends to cover up the sordid circumstances of the diplomat's demise. The truth grows only more lucrative if it catches someone in a lie. The funny part of it is that Delmas is willing to lie in a similar way. Melville's boss has him move the body from the apartment to a car, but Delmas had earlier moved it from the couch where they found him to the more provocatively photogenic bed. The news agency and the government have their reasons for the cover-up, among them being the deceased's reputation as a hero of the Resistance, but Delmas's resistance to their scheme is no blow for Freedom or Truth but a hunt for the Buck or the Franc. Melville's character goes along with the cover-up with no real enthusiasm. but when it becomes clear to him that Delmas is willing to disgrace the diplomat's innocent family to get his scoop, then there has to be a showdown ... or does there?

The new DVD of the film -- its American debut on home video -- sports a Tarantino blurb equating Melville with Sergio Leone, and maybe for that reason I caught a faint hint of Pulp Fiction in the way a fixer tells our protagonists how to deal with a dead body while telling a tale of wartime heroism. I wouldn't make too much of that, though I suppose the atmosphere of homage makes Deux Hommes Melville's most Tarantinian film. It may not seem very Melvillian to those used to his suspense classics of the Sixties; there's a more overt sense of fun, of Melville living out a fantasy of his own, than you'll get in his masterpieces. His enthusiasm overrides most of the awkwardness that comes inevitably from the mismatch of interiors and exteriors and the casting of Francophones as stilted-sounding Americans. Acknowledge the film as homage instead of mimesis and most objections to its awkward moments will fade away. It's a labor of love more than anything else, and I kinda like it that way.

THE GLASS WALL (1953)

If there were eight million stories in the naked city by the conventional reckoning of 1953, Maxwell Shane's film tells the 8,000,001st. It's the story of Peter Kuban (Vittorio Gassman), a Hungarian refugee seeking political asylum in the United States. He's gone about it the wrong way, though, by stowing away aboard a ship carrying documented refugees and displaced persons. He speaks good English and tries to explain to the immigration authorities that he's spent most of the past ten years in camps and could end up in another, or worse, if he's sent back to his homeland. He claims that a New Yorker can vouch for him: a paratrooper he knows only as Tom whom he rescued from the Germans. All Peter knows about Tom is that he plays the clarinet and lives in New York. That's not specific enough for the feds, who keep him confined on board ship until it heads back across the Atlantic.

Overnight, however, someone does a very strange thing. Whoever it is talks to a reporter for the New York Daily News, and the next morning, for some reason, Peter's face is on the front page. A sailor tells him that this could work in his favor, as women will feel sorry for him and people in general will want the government to give him a break. But Peter's not taking chances. He overpowers the sailor and manages to leave the ship, but not without breaking a rib along the way. From there he hops on a truck that takes him all the way to Times Square, which is where he expects to find Tom the clarinetist. As the feds warned him, that's not as easy as he supposed. The futile searching through streets and jazz clubs gets to him, as illustrated in a classic Hollywood montage of delirious symbolism.

Peter has to take a break in a cafeteria, and there he meets our Bad Girl of Film Noir for tonight. It's Gloria Grahame, just off winning an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful, playing Maggie Summers. Shane introduces us to Maggie in a scene of almost Chaplinesque poverty. She fills a teacup with hot water, then heads to a table where a man has left behind a half-eaten donut. She discreetly eases the remnant over to her side of the table, then daintily extracts a used tea bag from her change purse to dunk in the hot water. This is poverty, folks, of the kind I didn't think people saw much of in Fifties movies, and the next thing you know Maggie's bolting out the door with somebody else's coat. This is where Peter's chivalry kicks in, as he uses his refugee skills (the man escaped from Auschwitz single-handedly) to help her evade the cops in a park.

"Did you ever put tips on shoelaces?" Gloria Grahame demonstrates.

Maggie lives in an attic hovel and has to endure a hag of a landlady and the romantic attentions of her gorilla of a son. She's late with her rent and the hag wants it now. Maggie has nothing, but Peter hands her his last $7 to keep the hag at bay. He wants to go on his way, but passes out from his injury. Maggie keeps him overnight and bares her soul (at least) to him. She lost her awful job in a shoelace factory after falling ill and hasn't found work since. This news rather clouds Peter's vision of America as a land of unanimous prosperity, but he still intends to stay. But the hag and the gorilla are on to him and finally drive both him and Maggie out. Now they have to fend for themselves on the streets. For Maggie that means having to steal two dimes from a couple of busking children as Peter looks on in horror. But that change will get them onto the subway, where they can ride all night and get some sleep -- except for the fact that the cops recognize Peter from the papers and give chase, nabbing Maggie in the process. He barely escapes by dashing across the tracks just before a train plows through.

The cops aren't the only ones looking for Peter by now, because none other than Tom the clarinetist (Jerry Paris)has seen this morning's News and recognized his erstwhile wartime buddy. He wants to contact the immigration people, but this is the night of his big live audition with the Jack Teagarden Orchestra, and his girlfriend pressures him to keep a date that can make his career. As soon as the set is over, however, Tom makes a beeline for the authorities. Once he vouches for Peter, the manhunt becomes a race against the legal clock. With Tom's good word the feds will let Peter stay here, but they have to bring him back into custody before the ship he came in on leaves New York, or else he'll be permanently ineligible. There's also the matter of his broken rib and potential complications....

The Glass Wall is the final film in Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's Bad Girls of Film Noir Vol. 1 collection. As the previous film I reviewed, Two of a Kind, demonstrated, the films from the Columbia Pictures library have been selected mainly on the name value of their female leads: Evelyn Keyes in one, Lizabeth Scott in two, and Grahame here. Two of a Kind had a lot of the right ingredients but lacked the spirit of a true noir, while the film I won't bother reviewing, Irving Rapper's Bad For Each Other, is little more than a class-anxiety soap opera with a lot of people arguing with each other for no good reason. So how does Glass Wall rate on the noir meter?

Judging by looks alone, it'd be a noir. Columbia sent cinematographer Joseph Biroc back to New York (he'd done The Killer That Stalked New York) for some impressive nighttime footage of Times Square and early morning midtown footage. Sometimes the footage is used in process shots when it's time for Gassman's close-up, but the Italian actor is actually at the Crossroads of the World and appears to try to catch some Zs in a real penny arcade at one point. Some of his Times Square scenes appear to have been shot with a handheld camera to avoid public attention to the shoot, while the morning scenes are shot on largely empty but clearly real streets and are impressively composed. There are other moments, whether shot on set or location, that look and feel like echt noir. In story terms, there's also a social realism and attention to poverty and low life that argue for the film's noir standing.

Location, location,...location? Joseph Biroc's cinematography is excellent regardless.

But if anything disqualifies Glass Wall from noirdom, it's the fact that Peter Kuban is an unambiguous good guy. Given the time period, you might have suspected the writers to tease that Peter might actually be a fugitive from justice or a Commie spy, but our hero has nothing on his conscience except his failure to go through proper channels to enter the country. It's entirely appropriate for him to get a happy ending (though we may ask how he intends to support himself and, one presumes, Maggie), but it's so thoroughly deserved that there's no room for the moral ambiguity that often defines noir.

Now ask me if it's a good film. It certainly is, and I'm inclined to call it the best film in the set. While the whole newspaper business is a contrivance to make it easy for Tom to get into the story, The Glass Wall is otherwise constantly inventive, throwing important new characters into the mix quite late in the game, as when a Hungarian-born stripper ("She's Atomic!") befriends Peter and decides to shield him from the law at a point when he most needs the law to find him. This causes a scene when the stripper's criminal brother (Joseph Turkel) finds out about the fugitive and makes a loud case for turning him in that only earns him slaps in the face from sister and mother. Turkel, later of Paths of Glory and Blade Runner fame, storms through his one scene as if he's out to steal the whole movie, and he helps keep the film fresh as it heads into the homestretch. Glass Wall is close to being one of those "night from hell" movies that became fashionable decades later, and those films could be seen as evolutionary offshoots from film noir. In general, it may be best to say that noir is a subcategory of a larger genre of socially-conscious lowlife dramas to which Shane's film also belongs -- hence the resemblances. Grahame is effortlessly good here, and Gassman nails the desperation of many a noir hero even if he isn't one exactly. This film was his introduction to American movie audiences, but the trailer (currently unavailable online) undercuts him a bit by emphasizing first and foremost that he was then Shelley Winters's husband. He went on to have a distinguished international career but could have had a stronger Hollywood sojourn on the strength of this effort, which was regrettably released in most places, from what I could tell, as a second feature on double bills. It deserved better than that.

Along with all the features I've mentioned in the previous posts, Bad Girls of Film Noir Vol. 1 has one more extra that makes a nice square-up for viewers disappointed in the films' noir content. "The Payoff" is a half-hour episode of the anthology series All Star Theater (aka The Ford Television Theater minus the ads) starring Howard Duff as a private eye hired to receive a mysterious envelope at a boxing card. It's written by Blake Edwards (just prior to Peter Gunn) and proves a quite entertaining case of who's double-crossing who. It's another detail that persuades me to give Volume 1 a recommendation for old-movie fans in general, if not necessarily for noir specialists. I'm just about persuaded to give Vol. 2 a shot as well.

THE KILLER THAT STALKED NEW YORK (1950)

Meet a different kind of femme fatale. Sheila Bennett (Evelyn Keyes) is "the blonde death," a diamond smuggler on a mission in New York City. The mission is revenge. She brought the hot diamonds from Cuba for her husband, Matt Krane (Charles Korvin), not knowing that the rat has been two-timing her with her own sister (Lola Albright). She's arranged to have the rocks delivered discreetly by mail to her impatient lover-boy, but he takes advantage of her apparent illness to take the diamonds and run without telling her they'd arrived. She learns from Willy, a sleazy nightclub owner (Jim Backus) about her boyfriend's cheating. After confronting her sister, she goes to a sympathetic fence to learn that hubby's still holding the diamonds, which were too hot to unload because the feds had followed Sheila into the city. He told Matt to come back in ten days, so if Sheila can wait it out she can have it out with her husband. It's more than sister Francie can do; she killed herself in a fit of guilt while Sheila was out. It's just something else Matt will have to answer for, if only Sheila can stick out those ten days. It won't be as easy as it sounds, because Sheila brought something back from Cuba besides diamonds -- smallpox.

Sheila is soon the subject of two separate manhunts. First, the feds are still after her for diamond smuggling, but their investigation is handicapped by their lack of a photo image of her. Why the agent who followed her back from Cuba couldn't sit down with a sketch artist at any point in the pursuit is an unsolved mystery of this picture. But at least they have the memory of a face to work with. The doctors who discover a smallpox outbreak don't even have that. They only get clues to the carrier's identity as more people get sick. Ironically, the doctor leading the hunt (William Bishop) saw Sheila in his clinic the night she arrived in the city. At the time, "Agnes Dean" was only complaining of headache and weakness. Dr. Wood hands her a bottle of "medicine" off the shelf and tells her to use it regularly. Whatever this medicine is, it must be a wonder drug, because it keeps Sheila careening through Manhattan in search of clues about Matt well beyond a point when a normal smallpox victim, we're told, would be flat on her back, or dead. On the other hand, this amazing medicine may have been no more than a placebo, since we're also told that "drive" can make cripples walk, or make the sick keep walking.

Men: They'll pay in different ways for messing with the Blonde Death.

While she moves from place to place, just keeping ahead of the feds over the ten days until Matt returns, New York City is mobilized to vaccinate as many people as possible as more of those whose paths she crossed start dropping: a Penn Station porter; a little girl in Dr. Wood's clinic; Willy the nightclub owner, and so on. Vaccine supplies are limited, since hardly anyone anticipated a smallpox outbreak in the U.S.A., so as long as Sheila runs free, thousands if not millions of lives are in danger.

A remarkable piece of title-card art for The Killer That Stalked New York.

This slick Columbia B picture is clearly hoping that two great tastes will taste great together: the medical-procedural thriller a la Panic in the Streets and the mortally-doomed protagonist of D.O.A. It has many of the major film noir trappings, including impressive location shooting in New York by Joseph Biroc and, regrettably, an omniscient narrator who speaks in the first person but never becomes a character in the story. The narrator (Reed Hadley) lays the rhetoric on real thick during the first few minutes, but his presence becomes thankfully more intermittent afterwards. Loosely inspired by a real-life smallpox scare, the story often lapses into agitprop for immunization, and I have to admit I was ruefully amused by scenes of paranoid skeptics protesting against the shots when I know that people like that still exist in this country.

Evelyn Keyes stands out in a mostly-competent cast that includes a young Dorothy Malone as a nurse and future teenage monster maker Whit Bissel as Sheila's flophouse-operating brother. Keyes bravely submits to the deglamorizing effects of smallpox and effectively portrays a woman betrayed by family and fate alike, as well as the obsessive drive that animates many a noir hero or antihero.

Earl McEvoy directed only three features, this being his second, after serving time as an assistant director at M-G-M. He's no great stylist on this evidence, but he makes good use of the locations on several occasions, particularly two sweeping shots, one at Penn Station, showing one character watching another from high above and far away. Harry Essex's script credits range from Man-Made Monster to The Sons of Katie Elder, but this time there are too many story-prolonging contrivances (the incompetent feds, the miracle medicine) for it to be one of his finest hours. But while logic may have made the story shorter, the film still comes in at a lean 75 minutes and is never dull. The location work and Biroc's cinematography as a whole make The Killer That Stalked New York at least worth looking at, and Keyes's performance is definitely one worth watching.

This is one of four films in Bad Girls of Film Noir, Volume 1, another extraordinary release from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment in defiance of industry trends. Each film (the others are Henry Levin's Two of a Kind (1951), Irving Rapper's Bad For Each Other (1953) and Maxwell Shane's The Glass Wall comes with a theatrical trailer, while Two of a Kind is supplemented by an interview with co-star Terry Moore, and the set as a whole comes with a presumably noirish episode of the All-Star Theater TV series. Volume 2, similar equipped, is already available. These are priced comparably with Sony's Icons sets of Hammer and Toho films, a relief after the company's somewhat overpriced Film Noir set and it's way overpriced Samuel Fuller collection. I'll let you know about the rest of the films as I see them. They may be B movies, but I'm hoping for the best.

Here's the trailer, courtesy of TCM:

1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS (1982)

My recent viewing of The Road inspired me to crack open Shriek Show's Post-Apocalyptic Triple Feature box set and take a fresh look at how Italian genre directors imagined the collapse of civilization nearly thirty years ago. Enzo G. Castellari's action film is an early example of the Italian sub-genre, and reflects the influences available to him at the time. It's possible that Castellari could have seen Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior before filming this, but you can't really tell from the product. The Mad Max influence is arguably more apparent in The New Barbarians/Warriors of the Wasteland, also from 1982, but 1990 is more obviously influenced by more non-dystopian movies like The Warriors and the controversial Paul Newman cop film, Fort Apache, the Bronx.

For starters, Shriek Show's box cover lies brazenly when it describes 1990's setting as "Post-nuke New York City." There's no evidence of a nuclear attack, as all the landmark skyscrapers (including the World Trade Center towers, of course) are still standing, the better to lend epic scope to Castellari's location footage. Nor is 1990 about scarcity or the depletion of resources, as The Road Warrior is. There's no evidence of shortages and over in Manhattan civilization seems to be still puttering along quite nicely. The real problem, as a title card explains, is that government has lost the will to enforce the law and defend public safety in its worst neighborhoods. We may be meant to assume that New York can't afford to do so anymore, but it's just as dystopian to imagine a wealthy elite deciding to leave the rabble to their fate while shoring up their defenses in gated or otherwise segregated enclaves. We've seen this kind of dystopia as recently as George Romero's Land of the Dead, and we're likely to see it again.

1990 often leaves you wondering how post-apocalyptic things really are in a more-than-intact New York City (above) but if you want an explanation of societal breakdown, look no further than the malt liquor can on this stooge's desk (below).

By 1990, the script says, law and order in the Bronx has been left to the gangs. The situation is a little confusing, since the film portrays a gang leader played by Fred Williamson as the "King of the Bronx" who can allocate resources to different neighborhoods, while the title card claims that the real law in the benighted borough is the motorcycle gang known as the Riders. This is an utterly generic gang, as the name should have told you, lacking any kind of uniform compared to the pimpadelic Tigers (led by Williamson) and the hockey-fetishist Zombies (led by beloved Italo-brute George Eastman as "Golan," --which sounded like "Golem" to me). The Riders -- could they really not come up with a more intimidating name? -- look for leadership to a man named Trash, the hero of our film.

Trash is played by Mark Gregory, a Castellari discovery found in a gym. He's arguably the most post-apocalyptic thing about 1990, because -- I don't know, maybe it's just me -- he doesn't seem quite human. He looks misshapen, top-heavy. He walks in a very careful way, stiff-backed, chest out, and arms stiff at his sides, as if profoundly uncertain of what to do with his hands or concerned that if he didn't step just so the top half of him might topple forward and fall off. On the DVD, Castellari explains that he had to choreograph Gregory's movements very carefully; the result looks like a giant imbecile child's halting emulation of militant adulthood. Here is a man born (made??) to play Frankenstein's monster or a denizen of Goon Island in a Thimble Theater movie. His performance is riveting; watching him, you're in constant anxiety that he'll suddenly malfunction or come to a dead halt. And when he talks, from the mouth of this atavism comes a dese-dem-dose dubbed delivery that sounds about as futuristic as 1970: The Bronx Warriors, at the service of such dialogue as, "We were born dead. Life means nothing. Death walks with us....We carry its smell under our skin." Speak for yourself, Trash.

It's good to be the king, even of the Bronx, as Fred Williamson proves in this strangely interactive shot from 1990

Gregory isn't the only thing that's just sort of wrong with 1990. Frankly, the entire cosmic order is out of whack when Fred Williamson is in a movie and a character named Hammer is played by someone else. While Fred is assigned the role of "the Ogre," and attended by a tall blond whip-wielding "Witch," "Hammer" is the handle of the actual star of the film, Vic Morrow. Hammer is a Bronx-born mercenary (Trash: "He's an asshole who thinks he's God") who's under contract to the Manhattan Corporation, the firm responsible for 60% of world arms production. All that power comes into the hands of an heiress, Anne, on her eighteenth birthday, but she's run away to the no-mans-land of the Bronx, where she seems to be the only civilian apart from the occasional comical drunk. Assaulted by the rollerskating Zombies, she's rescued by Trash, whose consort she becomes. Hammer has to retrieve Anne and deliver her back to Manhattan despite her disinterest in warmongering. His plan includes provoking a general gang war, though I suspect the real reason to do that is so he can lead a flamethrowing cavalry into the Bronx to destroy them all.

The heroes of 1990: The Bronx Warriors fight mercenaries, "Zombies" and all ... that ... jazz!

So Hammer wanders around the Bronx assassinating folks and planting gang spoor to sow distrust, despite Trash's judicious skepticism ("You fuck," he answers one hothead, "it could be a pile of shit out of someone's asshole."). When the Zombies finally succeed in snatching Anne and all too easily laying out Trash, Hammer tries to buy her from Golan (I still like "Golem" better) while an all too rapidly recovered Trash goes on an anabasis to the Tigers, fending off subhuman Scavengers and Fosse-ite dancing fighters along the way, to recruit Ogre and Witch for a rescue operation. But Anne's rescue by Trash and the Tigers is only the prelude to Hammer's blitzkrieg, codenamed Operation Burnt Earth, the nearest thing to an apocalypse we'll get from this movie and, actually, a genuinely inspired gonzo gotterdammerung presided over by a transfigured, barking mad Morrow, for whom only The Twilight Zone was left after this. It turns out that Trash was right about this Hammer person, who we last see howling, "HAMMER! HAMMER IS GOD!" before being proven wrong.

Hammer commands! The horsemen of the post-apocalypse obey!

The final ten minutes of 1990 have an exhilarating and sometimes hilarious intensity that exposes just how halfhearted and misconceived most of the movie was. Castellari seems uncertain of the tone he wants to set and clearly had a hard time taking much of the story seriously. There are moments when he apparently wanted to impose a kind of musicality on the film, editing to the beat of a drummer who just happened to turn up at his location during a gang summit and opening the film with an almost glamorous montage of gang weapons, makeup and fashion. You could believe that the film he really wanted to make was Streets of Fire. As it is, there's an obvious artistry to 1990, which is really a meticulously art-directed picture thanks to Sergio Salvati's cinematography and Massimo Lentini's production design. It's pictorially ambitious in a way that later genuine post-apocalypse films wouldn't be. But as far as the genre goes, Castellari's New Barbarians (which I've seen only in its grungy American form) is a more aggressively imagined and more viscerally disturbing film than this one. I intend to watch the better version from the Shriek Show box set soon. Until then, I'll restrict my recommendation of 1990 to those looking for a lark through the slums of the post-Seventies collective consciousness on a purely tourist basis.

Here's an English language trailer (with Dutch subtitles), uploaded to YouTube by aylmer666:

And here's a sample of Mark Gregory walking and talking, sort of, uploaded by grumblenonymusbosch. Anne is played by the director's own little girl, Stefania Girolami: