Family Plot (1976)

Family Plot, released in 1976, was Alfred Hitchcock’s final movie. This is definitely Hitchcock Lite, but that does not mean it’s a lesser Hitchcock movie. Some of Hitch’s cleverest and most delightful movies can be thought of as Hitchcock Lite, obvious examples being Young and Innocent and The Trouble with Harry. And of course To Catch a Thief. When I say these movies are Hitchcock Lite I mean that they were intended as lighthearted feelgood entertainment. I like feelgood entertainment if it’s done well, and Hitch did it extremely well.

There are Hitchcock fans who wish that his final movie had been something more in the style of his previous movie Frenzy. But it was not to be, and I think Family Plot was Hitchcock going out on a fairly high note.

Family Plot is essentially a comedic caper movie but the movie it most resembles in tone is The Trouble with Harry. That movie had been a flop because it was at least a decade ahead of its time. It was pure comedy, but it was black comedy. Neither audiences nor critics were ready to embrace such a concept in 1955. By 1976 however audiences were accustomed to black comedy and Family Plot was quite well received by both audiences and critics. By that time they had caught up with Hitchcock.

There are two entirely separate plot strands involving two contrasting criminal couples. We can see early on how the two plot strands are going to intersect and knowing this adds to the fun.

Blanche Tyler (Barbara Harris) is a phoney psychic. Her boyfriend, cab driver, George Lumley (Bruce Dern) helps her out by digging up background details on her clients to help her to convince them that her psychic powers are real. Now they’re hoping for a big score. Mrs Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbitt) is an old lady with a guilty conscience. Thank to her her nephew missed out on his inheritance. And the Rainbird Estate is worth many millions of dollars. If Blanche and George can produce that long-lost nephew Mrs Rainbird will give them a large cheque.

Fran (Karen Black) and Arthur (William Devane) operate on a whole different level. Thy have just pulled off a kidnapping and collected a million dollar ransom.

Blanche and George are not really particularly dishonest or immoral. They really do intend to find Mrs Rainbird’s nephew and it never crosses their minds to try to substitute a phoney nephew. They don’t do that because it would be out of character for them. It would be immoral and cruel. They are just not cruel people and in their own way they have a sense of fair play. They intend to produce the genuine article. They are very much small time. Their score, if it comes off, will amount to a $10,000 cheque from Mrs Rainbird. And they will make an old lady very happy. It’s also significant that they are amateurs and they’re working class.

Fran and Arthur are big time and they’re ice-cold professional criminals. They’re smooth and sophisticated middle crass crooks. They don’t have the ethical qualms that Blanche and George have. I don’t think Hitch had any intention of making a political statement about class - it just adds extra flavour to make the two couples so very different in every way.

What links these two couples was something that happened a long time ago. We, the audience, know all about it. The fact that the protagonists don’t know this crucial fact leads them to make absurd and mistaken decisions. They have no way of knowing that their decisions are absurd and mistaken. That not only adds to the fun, it creates the suspense.

William Devane as Arthur is great fun. He’s not so much a psycho as an old-fashioned scoundrel. A Victorian melodrama villain for the audience to boo and hiss. Karen Black looks like a classic Dangerous Dame.

Bruce Dern had been around for a long time mostly doing B-movies or playing heavies and misfits. This gives him a rare opportunity to strut his stuff as a comic actor and he makes the most of it. He gets so much mileage out of that pipe. George is no genius but he really is a nice guy.

But the movie belongs to Barbara Harris. She does the phoney medium bit to perfection She’s funny and adorable.

We can’t help really liking George and Blanche. They’re only mildly dishonest but really they’re pretty nice and they love each other.

Technically Hitch is in complete command. The film is full of neat little Hitchcock moments. And the highway scene with the car is the sort of thing he’s done before but he manages to make it feel totally fresh, and it delightfully combines whimsy and terror (which is of course very Hitchcockian).

It’s a movie with real charm and wit and a lightness of touch and I manages to be very 1970s as well. This is not a movie made by a tired old man who had lost his touch. It’s a movie made by a man who still had enormous enthusiasm and style.

Family Plot is based on Victor Canning’s novel, The Rainbird Pattern. Canning was one of my favourite thriller writers and a lot of his novels were filmed. He’s not as well known today as he should be. I’ve reviewed his novels The Golden Salamander, Panther’s Moon and Castle Minerva all of which I recommend.

Ernest Lehman wrote the screenplay, having previously written North by Northwest for Hitchcock.

Family Plot is just splendid entertainment. Highly recommended.

It looks great on Blu-Ray.

La Vérité (1960)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Vérité (The Truth) was released in 1960. For many people this is the movie that established Brigitte Bardot as a serious actress but it’s interesting for a number of reasons.

This is a courtroom drama with most of the story told in a series of flashbacks but the French criminal justice system (and their entire legal system) is radically different from British or American systems. If you don’t know that then you will be extremely perplexed. A young woman, Dominique Marceau (Brigitte Bardot) is on trial for murder. She has a defence counsel but the victim’s mother is also represented in court by counsel. In this movie he is in practice acting as a second prosecutor.

And the fact that Dominique shot and killed her lover, Gilbert Tellier (Sami Frey) is not in dispute. Her defence is based on the claim that this was a crime of passion and in France until the 1970s that was a legitimate defence. It could make the difference between the guillotine or a very short prison term, or could even mean acquittal. What that means in this story is that it is the strength of her love that is on trial.

La Vérité is also interesting because of the social milieu in which Dominique moves. She is part of a group of what are essentially beatniks. 1960 was a time when juvenile delinquents and youth subcultures were causing much excitement and hysteria. And the Sexual Revolution was just starting to gather steam. The prosecution in this story is in practice putting Dominique on trial for flouting traditional morality. In her social circle sexual promiscuity is taken for granted.

Dominique is actually a bit wild but to the middle-aged members of the jury and the officers of the court she is a monster of depravity. They are shocked to learn that after leaving her parents’ home in the provinces and moving to Paris she has frequented coffee shops and cinemas.

In Paris she meets Gilbert Tellier, a student of music. He was her sister Annie’s boyfriend. Gilbert soon decides that the free-spirited Dominique is much more exciting than the staid resectable Annie.

Gilbert and Dominique but from the start there’s trouble. And there are dramas and breakups and reconciliations and betrayals. It was always likely to end badly. And it does.

The title makes it clear that this movie is a search for the truth. But what exactly does that mean? This is not a conventional mystery. We know precisely what happened. We know that Dominique shot and killed Gilbert and then tried to kill herself. We need to know how exactly that came about. We need to know if Gilbert ever truly loved her, and if she ever truly loved him. And given that her defence relies on the claim that it was a crime of passion both the court and the audience have to find out exactly what was in Dominique’s mind when she pulled that trigger.

And when the court and the audience know what was in her mind they have to decide if her passions were so inflamed that she can be forgiven.

And of course this is a trial, with both the defence counsel and the rival counsel having their own versions of the truth which they hope they can persuade the court to accept. Lawyers know that the secret is to present and package the truth in just the right way.

And Clouzot feeds the truth to us slowly. One obvious truth quickly emerges. Gilbert and Dominique were terribly young, terribly in love and terribly and spectacularly mismatched. They were always going to hurt each other. They both realised it, and could do nothing about it. Dominique knows Gilbert is the wrong man for her but she cannot get him out of her mind and her heart.

They both behave badly. Dominique cheats on Gilbert repeatedly but that’s the inevitable result of their being so mismatched. He’s a very serious minded ambitious musician with no time for fun. Dominique is a high-spirited passionate 20-year-old girl who needs fun and excitement as much as she needs oxygen. That does not excuse her betrayals, but the betrayals were inevitable. Dominique cannot change who she is.

There is a girl who is perfect for Gilbert - Dominique’s sister Annie. Annie is serious minded and respectable and equally career-oriented. They are an ideal match. But Gilbert dumps her because Dominique is much hotter and is dynamite in bed.

And Clouzot is not going to make it easy for us. Do we ever learn the real truth? Will it satisfy us if we do? You’ll have to watch the movie and decide for yourself.

Bardot is absolutely superb. We like Dominique but sometimes we want to shake her and tell her, “Girl, you just can’t do that.” But we know that she will anyway. Bardot captures her elusive and contradictory personality perfectly, and her youthfulness. There’s no point in expecting Dominique to think anything through. She cannot. She is not evil, but she’s like a driverless runaway car. And she can be manipulative. Could she be lying about the shooting? Perhaps. But she could be telling the absolute truth. And she could be telling the truth as she sees it.

It’s a complex movie and it necessarily takes its time unravelling the story of this disastrous love. But it is enthralling and Bardot is mesmerising.

La Vérité is highly recommended.

The Stone Killer (1973)

The Stone Killer, released in 1973, was third of the six films directed by Michael Winner that starred Charles Bronson.

Bronson had been around for a very long time and had been a minor presence in 1950s TV (including the lead role in the interesting Man with a Camera series). He seemed destined never to be a major star. He just didn’t have movie star good looks. He had a fact that looked like it had been kicked around a football field. He lacked obvious movie star charm. It was Michael Winner who realised that Bronson really did have star quality, albeit unconventional star quality. And he had a very masculine brand of charisma. There were other movie tough guys but Bronson was just a whole lot tougher.

The Stone Killer can be considered to be part of a wave of movies set against a background of seemingly out-of-control urban violent crime but it is important to point out that unlike the next Winner-Bronson movie, Death Wish, this is not a vigilante movie. The character played by Bronson, Lieutenant Lou Torrey, is a cop. Having become somewhat controversial he accepts an offer to move over to the the west coast but in L.A. he is still cop. He is now a Detective-Lieutenant in the LAPD.

While his methods are ruthless and sometimes unconventional and while he has major disagreements with senior officers over his current case he does at all times act with the knowledge of, and the approval of, his immediate superior Captain of Detectives Les Daniels (Norman Fell). He is not a rogue cop.

And the shooting which upset his superiors at the beginning of the story was justified. The punk, who had already shot a cop, pulled a gun and pointed it directly at him. Lou Torrey blew the punk away, which is what a cop is going to do in such a situation.

Over-sensitive critics at the time (and today) were very upset by movies like this one and Dirty Harry and Death Wish which did not conform to the politically acceptable line that it’s the violent criminals who are the real victims. And some over-sensitive viewers will be clutching their pearls at many points during the film.

The case gets moving when Armitage, a burnt-out hitman facing a drugs charge, offers Lou information that a major hit is going to go down soon. That’s all that Lou finds out. It’s an essential ingredient of the plot that although the audience knows what’s going on the cops initially do not have a clue. But it is obvious that it’s not just some businessman hiring a hitman to kill an inconvenient business partner. Armitage had been a senior Mob trigger man. And whoever is behind this hit soon demonstrates a willingness to kill anyone who might conceivably spill the beans to the cops. And they’re sufficiently well organised to kill people in police custody. It has to be something big.

Now this was the 70s, when left-wing urban terrorism was a big thing in the U.S. (and in Europe as well). So when the police top brass jump to the conclusion that whatever is going to go down is likely to be political that’s not an implausible conclusion. But Lou Torrey doesn’t buy it, and he’s right.

The audience knows what is going on. It’s wild and crazy but Winner was trying to make a movie that would be a manic adrenalin-charged exercise in frenetic action and large-scale mayhem and that wild premise is perfect for such purposes.

And this movie really delivers on the mayhem front. It’s like a full-scale war. And the action scenes are terrific. And the momentum just keeps building as Torrey slowly starts to realise the sheer scale and insanity of the crime, and as the momentum builds it gets more manic and deranged.

There’s also Lou’s amusing encounter with the hippies at the ashram. It’s a swipe at the counter-culture but I enjoyed it.

Bronson is excellent. Lou Torrey isn’t a vigilante or a maverick cop as such but he is a force of nature. He’s an effective cop because he’s unstoppable.

Norman Fell was always good in these kinds of roles. I can’t tell you anything about the character played by Martin Balsam but he’s very good.

Michael Winner really pushes the buttons of many critics and film scholars. Their disapproval of the subject matter of films like Death Wish makes them unable to admit that maybe the guy actually knew how to direct movies and that maybe his films were successful because they were actually entertaining.

The highlight of the Blu-Ray extras is an audio recording of a lecture given by Michael Winner in 1970. He really was a very funny man and he wasn’t afraid of being provocative and he’s a joy to listen to.

The Stone Killer promises action and mayhem and it delivers the good. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed Winner’s extremely interesting 1964 film The System (one of six he did with Oliver Reed). And I’ve reviewed his much misunderstood Death Wish (1974), his superb The Mechanic (1972) and his very underrated spy thriller Scorpio (1973).

Les Diaboliques (1955)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955) was based on Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s 1952 novel Celle qui n'était plus (translated into English as She Who Was No More).

The film was a huge hit in France and an international success and its critical reputation grew steadily.

In 1996 Jeremiah S. Chechik directed another adaptation, Diabolique. It has huge flaws and a trainwreck of an ending but a few interesting elements.

Hitchcock had been very keen to acquire the film rights to She Who Was No More but Clouzot beat him to the punch by a hair’s-breadth. A few years later Hitchcock adapted another Boileau-Narcejac novel, D'entre les morts, as Vertigo.

In his film Clouzot made major changes to the plot and further major changes were made in the 1996 film so if you’re familiar with any of the other versions do not assume that you knew exactly how the Clouzot film is going to end. I’m not going to talk about the plot at all since it does rely on a big twist and I don’t want to offer even the smallest hints.

Clouzot changed the setting to a private boys’ school. This works very well - a school has just the right hothouse atmosphere. Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse) is the headmaster. He’s a third-rate headmaster of a third-rate school. And the school belongs to his wife Christina (played by the director’s wife Véra Clouzot). She has all the money.

Michel is having an affair with one of the teachers, Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret).

Christina and Nicole are planning to murder Michel.

This is where the story starts to become strange and twisted. There’s a very odd relationship between the two women. They should hate each other. Instead there’s a weird bond between them. Modern critics and viewers will be tempted to assume they’re lesbians but they’re not and it’s nowhere near as simple as that. The bond is based on the fact that they are sharing a man. Both women love Michel and both women hate him.

There is a hint of sexual perversity. Michel bullies and humiliates both women but something has drawn both women to him.

This a story that deals with female sexuality and desire and emotion in ways that modern viewers might find disconcertingly grown-up, complex and subtle.

Véra Clouzot is extremely good as the neurotic Christina who is guilt-ridden before she’s even done anything. She’s probably been guilt-ridden her whole life.

The standout performer though is Simone Signoret as the ambiguous puzzling Nicole. Nicole thinks she has everything under control.

Les Diaboliques truly was a ground-breaking movie - a movie built entirely around a fiendish shock twist at the end. Since then countless crime and horror movies have employed this technique so a viewer watching this movie today is going to be on the lookout for such an ending. Even if you haven’t been told that this movie has a shock twist at the end you’ll be anticipating such a possibility because it’s become a tried and tested formula. But when Les Diaboliques came out in 1955 it knocked people’s socks off. They simply were not prepared for the possibility that the film had been playing games with them, leading them up the garden path. Sadly Les Diaboliques cannot possibly hit as hard today as it did then but that does not detract from its greatness and its originality or from its boldness.

The movie also benefits from some superbly atmospheric black and-white cinematography by Armand Thirard. This combines with the seedy setting that reeks of defeat and despair to create a superbly unsetting and uncomfortable air. There’s this all-pervasive feeling of wrongness.

The twist is the selling point but it’s the unhealthy emotional entanglements and the growing atmosphere of paranoia that really impresses.

Les Diaboliques is a crime thriller with some definite horror overtones and it’s a magnificent cinematic achievement. Very highly recommended.

The Criterion Blu-Ray looks great and the highlight of the extras is the interview with the always perceptive and entertaining Kim Newman.

I’ve also reviewed the Boileau-Narcejac novel She Who Was No More.

Witness in the City (1959)

Witness in the City (Un témoin dans la ville), directed by Édouard Molinaro in 1959, is included in the recent Kino Lorber French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set.

The screenplay was by the great French crime-writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. I believe it was based on one of their novels. They’re best known as the authors of the source novels for two of the greatest motion pictures ever made, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques and Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Witness in the City begins with a brutal murder of a woman on a train. We see the murderer, Pierre Verdier. There’s no ambiguity. We know it was murder. The case against him is however dismissed for lack of evidence.

The woman was the murderer’s mistress. Her husband Ancelin (Lino Ventura) is not going to take this lying down. Verdier had carried out a perfect murder. Now Ancelin plans a perfect murder of his own.

This all happens right at the beginning of the movie so I’m not giving away any spoilers. All this is just the setup.

The trouble with plans for perfect murders is that when put into practice some minor unforeseen circumstance always gums up the works. In this case it’s a witness. He didn’t see an actual murder, but he saw enough.

The movie is a hunt or rather it becomes a tale of two hunts.

Lino Ventura gives a nicely minimalist performance. It’s as if Ancelin is in some ways dead inside.

Henri Decaë provides some very fine very moody black-and-white cinematography.

There’s an enormous amount of night shooting. The movie really does have a noir city at night feel. There are a couple of scenes involving trains (alway a bonus) but a huge amount of the film takes place in cars, and cabs. The witness is a cab driver. Half the cab drivers in Paris end up being involved.

This is a movie in which characters are always in movement but not actually getting anywhere. They keep ending up driving down the same streets. The streets of Paris are like a gigantic spider web from which there is no escape. No matter how far and how fast you drive you can never leave that spider web. You always end up back where you started. The city will not allow you to escape. Noir cities are like that.

The driving scenes, some involving a dozen or more cars, are extremely well done. They have tension and energy but it’s a frustrated kind of energy. An energy that needs resolution but the resolution seems like it will never happen.

Overall I’m not sure that this ticks enough noir boxes to satisfy film noir purists (there is for example no femme fatale) but it’s definitely a movie that film noir fans will love. There’s as much pessimism as one could desire. There are also some existentialist touches.

Things are not full explained, and this is clearly deliberate. We know what happened on the train at the beginning but not why. Verdier gives his account of the events that led to the murder but Ancelin doesn’t believe him, and Verdier has a motive to lie. On the other hand Ancelin has a motive to lie to himself.

There are some touches that you wouldn’t get away with in a Hollywood movie of the 50s, such as Ancelin’s encounter with a prostitute.

We’re never quite sure if we should be sympathising with Ancelin or not.

Witness in the City is slightly offbeat noir. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Édouard Molinaro’s Back to the Wall (1958) which is also superb. It’s included in the Kino Lorber set, along with Speaking of Murder (1957) which is not as impressive as the other two movies but still very much worth watching. There are no extras included with any of the three movies.

The Anderson Tapes (1971)

The Anderson Tapes is a 1971 Sidney Lumet movie and the fact that I generally dislike Lumet’s movies put me off seeing it for years.

On the other hand it’s a heist movie. And it’s a 70s paranoia movie. And it’s all about surveillance. These are all things I like a lot.

Robert Anderson (Sean Connery), known as Duke, has been in prison for ten years. That will prove be significant. He’s known as a very skilled and professional safe-cracker but the world has changed in ten years. Duke doesn’t really understand the ramifications of new technology for his kind of old school criminal.

He has a plan to rob an apartment building. There are six apartments, all inhabited by very rich people with all sorts of valuables - cash, negotiable bonds, jewels, paintings, objets d’art, coin collections.

He needs financing to set his scheme up and he gets it from the Mob. A very big Mob boss owes him a debt of honour.

There’s another ticklish complication. A little task that the Mob wants him to do for them.

Anderson puts together a team. The heist is intricately planned and it’s a good plan. There’s one problem. The authorities have Anderson and everyone else involved under surveillance. Not just one government agency, but a whole bunch of them - the narcotics bureau, the FBI, even the IRS. They’ve been under surveillance right from the start. Every movie they’ve made has been taped, photographed and filmed.

This is a movie in which everyone is being watched all the time. This was 1971, when the surveillance state was still in its infancy, but this movie is already taking a deep dive into tech paranoia.

The usual formula for a heist movie is that a master criminal comes up with a plan, we see the detailed planning and the rehearsals and then when the plan is finally put into operation something inevitably goes wrong. In this movie everything has already gone wrong right from the start.

When we come to the heist Lumet gets a tad tricky, with the narrative jumping back and forward between the present and the future. It’s a bit risky but he pulls it off rather well.

One very cool thing about this movie is that it features so much incredibly cool analog technology that was absolutely cutting edge in 1971. The Feds even have a super-computer, with punch cards and flashing lights just like a proper computer. And ham radio plays a key role, which is amazingly cool.

Connery gives a standard Connery performance but that’s OK because that standard Connery performance is always fun to watch. And he did tweak that standard performance for different films. In this one he lacks Bond’s charm and humour.

Dyan Cannon is quite good as his girlfriend. Christopher Walken, in his first significant feature film role, is good as a young crim befriended by Anderson in prison. Martin Balsam is there as well, as reliable as ever. Ralph Meeker is a riot as an uber-tough cop.

The heist itself occupies a very large chunk of the running time and it’s superbly done. There are only occasional moments of violence and that’s why they work and why they hit hard. Suddenly it’s not a game. And suddenly the guys who thought they had everything under control realise they’ve been fooling themselves.

The Anderson Tapes is a fine exercise in suspense and paranoia. This is easily the best move I’ve ever seen from Lumet. Highly recommended.

This movie is paired with Physical Evidence on a double-header Blu-Ray from Mill Creek. There are no extras but it looks terrific.

Back to the Wall (1958)

Back to the Wall (Le dos au mur) is one of three 1950s French crime movies included in Kino Lorber’s recent French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set. It’s based on the novel Délivrez-nous du mal by Frédéric Dard.

It lays out its noir credentials right at the start. The opening scene is not just a night scene, but it’s that film noir kind of night. You know, those nights when you know that bad stuff is going to happen.

Then we see a sinister guy in a trench-coat and he’s clearly up to no good.

We’re not surprised that there’s a murder. At least we assume it’s a murder although we don’t see exactly what happened.

We then get some grisly scenes of the body being disposed of.

It then gets even more noir, with a flashback and voiceover narration.

There’s an adulterous wife, Gloria Decrey, played by Jeanne Moreau during the film noir icon phase of her career. The cuckolded husband knows about her betrayal but his reaction is not quite what we expect. He intends to do something about it but his plan is convoluted and indirect.

There’s a blackmail angle. There’s a sleazy private detective and he’s surprised that what he’s being asked to do is not quite what he anticipated.

It becomes a war of nerves.

What a director doesn’t tell you is just as important as what he does tell you, and being told things can be just as misleading as not being told if the director knows what he’s doing. You’re going to suspect from the start that there may be a bit of misdirection going on but suspecting such a thing does not necessarily help. This movie keeps leading up to obvious plot twists and then the plot twist turns out not to be the one we expected.

We understand part of the motivations of one of the key characters but we don’t know what that person’s actual intentions are.

And there’s plenty of suspicion, guilt and emotional ambiguity.

I don’t know anything about director Édouard Molinaro but he does a confident assured job here, leading us up the garden path with considerable skill. He has a clever literate script from which to work which always helps.

I know almost nothing about Gérard Oury, whose acting career apparently petered out by the early 1960s, but he’s very good here. It’s a very noir performance as a man in control on the surface but in turmoil underneath.

This movie was in the same year that Elevator to the Gallows AKA Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) made Jeanne Moreau a huge star. She’s excellent here. Gloria is not exactly a femme fatale, or at least not in a straightforward way, but she has the same kind of disastrous effect on men.

This is a nicely shot and very atmospheric movie.

Back to the Wall is genuine film noir as well as being a clever mystery suspense thriller, and it’s very highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray offers the movie in French with English subtitles. The transfer is extremely good (the movie was shot in black-and-white) and thankfully there are no extras.

I’ve also reviewed Speaking of Murder (1957) from this set. It’s not quite as good but it’s well worth a watch. And another French noir very much worth seeing is Witness in the City (1959).

Pale Flower (1964)

Pale Flower is a 1964 Japanese film relased, surprisingly, not by Nikkatsu Studio but by rival studio Shochiku (although it was independently produced). It’s a film noir but not a conventional one and it’s a yakuza movie but not a conventional one.

Muraki (Ryô Ikebe) is a yakuza who had just been released from prison after serving a sentence for killing a member of a rival gang. Now he discovers that the two gangs have joined forces, but there are no hard feelings.

Muraki is obsessed by gambling. He meets a strange girl, a fellow gambling obsessive. Her name is Saeko (Mariko Kaga).

They are drawn to each other, but not just by their shared love for gambling. They both feel somehow doomed, as if their lives have no meaning and no direction and can only end in disaster. The gambling is clearly symbolic - they both have a desire to play for the highest stakes of all, life itself. There are lots of gambling scenes in this movie.

It’s important to note that the plot has not offered us a single reason why these two people see their lives as having no value or purpose. It’s something missing within them.

Perhaps they fall in love. They don’t seem quite sure about that. Perhaps their obsession with each other is like their passion for gambling - it’s just a way to deal with the boredom.

The plot kicks in slowly but this is not a heavily plot-driven movie. The two now united yakuza gangs are facing a challenge from a powerful Osaka-based gang. Muraki will be a key player in the defensive moves against this encroaching gang. Muraki believes he will have a high price to pay but he accepts this with his usual indifference.

Ryô Ikebe as Muraki gives a very noir (and very good) performance. Mariko Kaga as Saeko is rather mesmerising.

Saeko is not really a femme fatale. It’s more that these are two doomed people drawn together, not to try to save each other but to share their doom.

Director Masahiro Shinoda claimed that the background to the movie was Japan’s political position at the time as a not entirely willing U.S satellite which he felt had robbed the country of a sense of purpose. This is the kind of thing that exercises the minds of intellectuals while ordinary people are too busy living their lives. I cannot see any political angle whatsoever to this movie, except perhaps that it does give us a sense of a society adrift, and individuals within that society adrift. But mercifully there’s no overt political content whatsoever.

Although stylistically they are poles apart in its own way this movie is, like Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill, an attempt to reinvent the yakuza movie. There’s an intriguing subtly surreal dream sequence.

The film is set in Tokyo but the location shooting was done in Yokohama. It has a very noir look.

It certainly has plenty of noirish impending doom vibes. But it’s not quite straightforward noir. Muraki knows that he’s headed for disaster but unlike the typical noir protagonist he makes no attempts to escape his fate.

Muraki’s motivations are to some extent determined by the yakuza code of honour but to me this doesn’t feel like a conventional yakuza movie, or even a conventional Japanese movie.

I got some rather French vibes from it. A definite whiff of existentialism. If Camus had written a screenplay for a yakuza movie he might have come up with something like this. It doesn’t feel quite Japanese. There’s some Christian symbolism. It seems to be about people finding all the existing belief systems (traditional Japanese values, the yakuza code, Christianity, materialism, consumerism) unsatisfying. So they’re left with a vague existentialism of a warped kind - a death fetish.

There’s also a fascinating hint that both Muraki and Saeko have an erotic interest in death, and particularly in murder. In fact that’s the whole basis for their attraction. Saeko is attracted to Muraki because he killed a man (that’s why he was in prison). But not only that. He enjoyed it. It was the greatest pleasure he had ever experienced in his life. Muraki is attracted to Saeko because she understands how he feels about killing. And then there’s a wildcard in the pack - Joh, a stone-cold half-Chinese hitman also in love with killing.

This is vaguely similar to the territory explored years later in Basic Instinct. In this case we have three characters with a sex-death fetish.

This is a very dark disturbing provocative movie. Very highly recommended.

It’s on Blu-Ray in the Criterion Collection.

The Glass Web (1953)

The Glass Web was a product of that brief period when Hollywood actually believed that a ridiculous gimmick like 3D was going to win back the audiences that had deserted them when television appeared on the scene.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray includes both 2D and 3D versions and I watched it in 2D. The movie includes lots of the silly gimmick shots you expect from 3D.

Don Newell (John Forsythe) is a TV writer screenwriter on a true crime series called Crime of the Week, made by a production company named TVC. It’s a series that claims that it aims for absolute accuracy. Henry Hayes (Edward G. Robinson) is the chief researcher. He thinks that he’s the key member of the production team but he isn’t. He is obsessive about getting the details right. The series is up for renewal and everyone is nervous.

Henry comes up with the bright idea of basing their season finale on a case that is happening right now, a murder case in which a suspect has been picked up but has not yet been indicted. Viewers will in effect be watching the case on TV even as the actual court case will be happening. In reality of course the network’s lawyers would put the kibosh on such a risky idea.

The real-life case involves people actually involved with the production of Crime of the Week.

Both Don and Henry have been having dalliances with TV actress Paula Ranier (Kathleen Hughes). She’s a cheap blonde who is obviously ruthlessly using both men but Don and Henry are the kinds of guys who fall for tramps like Paula. She’s obviously a no-good dame but everything about her is ripe with the promise of steamy illicit bedroom thrills.

It’s no surprise when Paula’s manipulations and attempts at blackmail end in murder. There are several possible suspects, including both Don and Henry.

The key to the movie is when Paula tells Don that she picks her victims carefully - weak men who don’t have the guts to fight back.

As a whodunit this movie flops completely. The identity of the killer is embarrassingly obvious. Maybe the screenwriters didn’t care and maybe their intention was to focus on an innocent man caught in a trap, partly due to his own poor judgment and party due to the schemings of others.

Kudos to Kino Lorber for not trying to pretend that this is a film noir. Its affinities to noir are superficial. And it is entirely lacking in noir visual style. Visually it’s flat and uninteresting.

Playing a sad schmuck who gets taken for a ride by a cheap blonde is something Edward G. Robinson could do in his sleep. He’s OK here but he’s hampered by the overly obvious script. I like John Forsythe as an actor but he’s a bit on the dull side here, although in fairness he is playing a bit of chump.

Kathleen Hughes pulls out all the femme fatale stops. She’s a riot. Paula is a gal who could make doing the ironing seem like a sleazy come-on. There’s no subtlety to Hughes’ performance but the only time this movie comes to life is when she’s onscreen.

The use of a TV studio as a setting provides some interest - this is TV in its infancy when shows were extremely clunky and so it’s quite appropriate that we get the impression that Crime of the Week is a clunky show.

This is a movie that just doesn’t work. There’s no mystery and no effective suspense. It’s just lifeless. The script is feeble. I like Jack Arnold as a director but in this case it feel like something he just did for a pay cheque.

Overall rather disappointing. I cannot recommend it.

For a more favourable review of this movie check out the Riding the High Country blog entry.

The Woman Racket (1930)

The Woman Racket (later retitled Lights and Shadows) is a 1930 MGM pre-code romantic/crime melodrama. I have heard that it was originally shot as a silent film but that only the talkie version survives. It’s one of MGM’s early attempts at a hardboiled feel, which works fairly well.

It begins with a police raid on the Blue Moon speakeasy. Patrolman Tom Hayes (Tom Moore) takes pity on one of the hostesses, Julia Barnes (Blanche Sweet) and allows her to escape. They go out together, they fall in love and they get married.

The problem is that Julia likes glamour excitement and pretty things and you don’t get much of that married to a cop, on a cop’s salary. Tom is decent enough and he’s crazy about her but he’s a cop through and through.

She succumbs to the temptation to pay a visit to the Blue Moon.

And she’s tempted to fall back into her old wicked ways. The marriage is on the rocks.

Pretty soon she’s the mistress of the owner of the Blue Moon, Chris Miller (John Miljan). But her old life doesn’t appeal to her so much any more and she’s riddled with guilt.

There’s also the matter of her friend Buddy (Sally Starr). Buddy is a sweet kid and a promising chanteuse but Julia is worried that the wicked Chris Miller will corrupt her. And Chris has every intention of doing just that. Julia wants to save her Buddy from making he mistakes she made.

The other problem is that Chris isn’t just a nightclub owner but also a bit of a gangster, in a modest way. So Julia and Buddy could get mixed up in some very shady goings-on if they’re not careful.

The Wall Street Crash happened in late October 1929. The Woman Racket was released in January 1930 which means that production would have been well underway or perhaps even completed) before the Crash hit. Which means this is a Jazz Age movie rather than (like so many pre-code films) a Depression movie. And it does have a Jazz Age feel.

Blanche Sweet had been a major star in silent films but failed to make a successful transition to talkies. In this film she’s trying to achieve a mixture of mildly hardboiled with sweet and good-natured and she does a fairly decent job but by this time new time new stars were starting to emerge, who did this sort of thing better. But there’s really nothing wrong at all with her performance here.

John Miljan was one of the great slimy oily villains of the early sound era. Maybe he wasn’t quite in the Warren William class but he was very nearly as good. He’s in deliciously sinister manipulative form here.

The plot is serviceable enough. There are moments that betray its stage origins (it was based on a successful play).

The ending is slightly contrived but the final confrontation in total darkness is quite well done.

Is it really pre-code? Not overly, although it is fairly obvious that Julia really is Chris’s mistress and she is of course a married woman. She was a hostess as well as a singer and the title of the movie suggests that perhaps we’re intended to assume that the hostesses at the Blue Moon are part-time prostitutes. It’s possible that that element was more evident in the original script but was seriously downplayed in the final cut.

I enjoyed The Woman Racket and I’m happy to recommend it.

The Warner Archive DVD is fine.