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.

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.

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.

Song of the Thin Man

The sixth and final of the William Powell/Myrna Loy Thin Man movies unfortunately sends the often entertaining, delightfully light series out on a bit of stale note. Song of the Thin Man, directed by Edward Buzzell, attempts to update the sleuthing, sparring couple of detective Nick Charles and his wife Nora by placing them in a Jazz Age mystery. Unlike in previous installments of the series, the humor here arises not so much from the arch, witty interplay of Nick and Nora, but from the couple's cluelessness in a hip, modern jazz milieu. It's an acknowledgment that the suave, sophisticated Nick and Nora, always unflappable and poised with a cocktail in hand, dressed beautifully for society functions and dive bars alike, are archetypes of another era, increasingly out of date in the late 40s. But it's not a welcome change. Nick and Nora are timeless icons, or they should be anyway, and their cool transcends the particularities of time and place. The appeal of the first five Thin Man films is how ageless they are, how they evoke a certain era's glamorized conception of itself without being tied too tightly to that era. Nick and Nora's cocktail-swilling charm and fast-paced banter are inexhaustible, and though the series' charms tended to deflate a little in some of the middle installments, each of these films succeeded to the extent that they revisited a perfectly honed formula.

The sixth film in which Powell and Loy play these familiar characters toys with the formula, and it does so at the risk of eliminating what made these films so special in the first place. This film suggests Nick and Nora in a new time, a new age, one where they don't fit in as comfortably and seamlessly as they once did. The joke is on them here, to some extent: they don't get the jazzy banter of the musicians they meet, who talk in a fast-paced slangy argot. The mannered banter of Nick and Nora themselves is almost rendered inert, outdated, like the then-declining whiz-bang wordplay of screwball comedy, a sister genre to Nick and Nora's signature comedic mysteries. It's no fun to see these two screen icons, still as spry and comfortable with one another as ever, mocked and shown up in their own movie.

Moreover, the jazz milieu they find themselves thrust into here isn't even a terribly convincing one, and itself must have been outdated even when the film first came out. Investigating the murder of a jazz bandleader on a floating nightclub, Nick and Nora sneaky into the shadowy, mysterious world of late-night jazz. They're "squares," outsiders, and they have to be led through the smoky, hard-to-find clubs by the piccolo player "Clinker" Krause (Keenan Wynn), who takes them to all the places that can usually only be penetrated by those in the know. Of course, once inside these "dangerous" and incognito jazz joints, they find jazz sessions consisting only of white musicians playing staid big band tunes, with nary a trace of a black face or more modern music. For a movie trying to update Nick and Nora's image, its setting is curiously out of touch.


That said, the film isn't without its charms. It actually sports one of the better mysteries in the series, a convoluted whodunnit in which the solution is genuinely a surprise and the pieces fall into place only slowly, with many false detours and side mysteries along the way. The murdered bandleader from the beginning of the film is surrounded by a web of intrigue, and as usual the cast is packed with great character actors investing life into the many suspects prowling around the fringes of the plot. As a torchy nightclub singer, Gloria Grahame is especially noteworthy, lending a sneering coolness to her smoldering, tormented femme fatale, who was in love with the clarinetist Buddy Hollis (Don Taylor) but betrayed him with the bandleader Tommy Drake (Phillip Reed) before Drake's murder. Drake also owed money to the slick gangster Al Amboy (William Bishop), and the small part of Amboy's striking wife provides an early bit turn for future noir queen Marie Windsor. Meanwhile, circling peripherally around the murder mystery is the love of Jessica Thayer (Bess Flowers) for Phil Brant (Bruce Cowling), who is arrested for the murder, while Jessica's disapproving father (Ralph Morgan) gets tangled up as a suspect as well.

Strangely, this is a Thin Man film where the mystery is actually at the center of the action; usually, the crime and investigation are just an excuse for Nick and Nora to bounce off one another, and some of the series' best installments barely functioned as mysteries at all. In this film, however, with Nick and Nora's banter somewhat toned down, the mystery edges back into the spotlight. This film is about an older, softer Nick and Nora, somewhat sweeter and warmer than the prickly pair of previous films. Here's a Nick who aches to leave a party early and go home to be alone with his wife, and a Nora who displays a stern, matronly affection for the couple's son (a young Dean Stockwell), whose presence is not quite as irksome as in earlier films. As the final appearance of Powell and Loy in their most iconic roles, Song of the Thin Man can't help but be a disappointment. But there are still enough sparks to make this an enjoyable if minor last hurrah for Nick and Nora.

Daisy Kenyon

Daisy Kenyon is a surprisingly quiet, understated melodrama, slow-moving and restrained when it could just as easily be torrid and unsubtle. There's a certain coolness to it, likely the result of director Otto Preminger's iron hand — Preminger may have been a notorious tyrant on the set but he rarely allowed hysterics to disrupt the placid surfaces of his films. This is a love story in which logic and rationality eventually win out over heated passion, which is rare enough in any romance, let alone in a weepy big screen melodrama. Preminger bathes the film in deep shadows, giving the film the visual texture of a noir and doing such a good job of it that he apparently convinced Fox that it is a noir — the studio recently released the film on DVD under their noir banner. But Daisy Kenyon is not a noir, its shadows are more lushly romantic than ominous, and its title heroine, beautifully portrayed by Joan Crawford, is hardly a femme fatale. Instead, she's a working woman, a professional illustrator, as well as the unhappy mistress of big-time corporate lawyer Dan O'Mara (Dana Andrews), who, it's increasingly apparent, will never leave his wife for her despite his declarations of love. Daisy wants to leave him, but can't quite bring herself to do it until she finds herself being improbably drawn to the troubled World War II vet Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda), who's still haunted by the death of his own wife and the things he saw in Europe. When Peter proposes to her, Daisy somewhat unexpectedly accepts, trying to make a clean break with her past and hoping that the two of them, both still in love with unattainable others, can love and help each other instead.

The love triangle between Daisy, Dan and Peter drives the film, with the two men in Daisy's life representing opposite emotional extremes. Dan is explosive and passionate, prone to lose his temper or be overcome by strong feelings of grief, desire, rage, depression or love. He's an open philanderer, coolly making the situation clear to his wife Lucille (Ruth Warrick), who stays with him more or less so as not to rock the boat. And he adores and coddles his two daughters (Peggy Ann Garner and Connie Marshall), who worship him in return. Peter has his own emotional troubles, but they mostly tend to boil beneath the surface, hidden from view, and he's capable of being surprisingly lucid and rational about his feelings. One of the film's key exchanges between the two men is when Dan, after asking the boat designer Peter to describe the reason why a boat is made a certain way, says that he doesn't trust logic: "anything logical makes me want to fight for some reason." The mathematically inclined Peter's capacity for calm, rational discourse about complicated emotions is infuriating and sometimes puzzling, but Fonda does an excellent job of dealing with the subtleties of this complex man, who is capable of caring deeply while outwardly seeming disinterested.

In fact, the film's acting is uniformly extraordinary, and is one of the crucial factors in elevating it above a conventional melodrama. Andrews and Fonda are scintillating as the opposite corners of this love triangle, mostly because they consistently underplay the tensions between them. They even seem to like each other, and their rivalry over Daisy is friendly and courteous rather than fierce; they play games of oneupsmanship but maintain a respectful aloofness. In fact, despite the heavy topics in this film — divorce, child abuse, multiple love affairs and reversals and reconciliations — the overall emotional register of the material is strikingly cool and calm. Another director would have simply gone with the story's natural tendencies, encouraging the actors into emotional breakdowns and over-the-top histrionics at every point; there are more than a few scenes that seem to call for such fireworks. Instead, Preminger gets a trio of sensitive, supple performances from his main actors, letting the emotions arise naturally and slowly rather than simply bursting out in messy spasms. This has the paradoxical effect of increasing the film's emotional impact, since its moments of catharsis are all the more moving for the general restraint that surrounds them. At one point, after seeing his daughter with a bad earache, Dan abruptly remembers that his distraught wife had hit the girl while upset over her philandering husband's long affair with Daisy. For the first and only time in the film, Dan quietly cries for a few moments, realizing what he's done to his family, the ways he's hurt his beloved daughters, both mentally and physically.


Even Crawford, seldom known as the most subtle actress, is here disarmingly low-key, allowing her character's indecision and confusion to come through without overacting. She's a woman who doesn't quite know what she wants, who is controlled by the men in her life, men who, despite their genuine feelings for her, sometimes seem to be maneuvering and bargaining for possession of her without so much as consulting her first. Daisy is also, to some extent, slighted by the script, which permanently traps her between the two men and gives Crawford little chance to create any substance for Daisy's character beyond her romantic relationships. She says that her illustration career is important to her, but based on how often she's seen actually doing any work in the film, the audience has to simply take her word for it. Even her non-male connections seem transitory: she has a dog who disappears with no explanation halfway through the film, never to be seen again, and a best friend (Martha Stewart) with whom she shares paltry screen time. Daisy is defined by her romances, by her men, which is of course typical of a melodrama but especially sad in a film whose theme purports to be a woman trying to break of such dependencies.

Nevertheless, though Daisy Kenyon suffers from occasionally trite plotting and a hesitant approach to the story's drama, the film remains affecting and enjoyable. Its quiet, simple emotions and shadowy beauty convey a mood of bittersweet melancholy; in its aftermath, the film leaves behind only the ghostly afterimage of its autumnal emotions, suspended between the fiery heat of a summer romance and the icy chill of a love affair's end. Daisy Kenyon is not about passion or hatred but about more ordinary and transitional feelings: the slow development of love over time, the cooling down of lingering lustful desire into friendship, the tension between professional goals and personal emotions. Preminger locates in these small-scale dramas a much more interesting dynamic than the usual melodramatic tendency to inflate, to blow up, to explode outward. Instead, Preminger's characters burrow inward, exploring themselves; it's a film about introspection, about finally coming to terms with one's own self.

Black Narcissus

"There's something in the air here, it makes everything exaggerated." So says Dean (David Farrar), the local English agent in the isolated Indian village of Mopu, describing to a group of nuns the dangers of setting up a convent in an ancient palace perched on the side of a cliff, a place that once served as a harem for a general and his dancing girls. Indeed, there's something in the atmosphere of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus that is exaggerated, overheated, not just melodramatic but luridly so, as though strangled emotions are being unleashed at long last by the mountainous open air surrounding of the convent. Powell and Pressburger inscribe in every frame of the film, in every one of its lush, painterly images, the central conflict between spiritual restraint and the sensuous pleasures of romance, nature and sexuality. What's remarkable is that the filmmakers have an obvious respect for the virtue of the nuns, for their spirituality and devotion and desire to do good, and yet it's equally clear that these women will never be able to win out against the simply awe-inspiring splendor of their surroundings, the colorful grandeur of the images that Powell and Pressburger capture here.

The sister superior of this doomed convent, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), is a hard, righteous woman, proud and stubborn and fiercely in control of her emotions. And yet there's an inner core of sensitivity and warmth to her, as well as a long-suppressed past in which she was a very different woman: a daughter of a privileged family, deeply in love with a man she'd grown up with since very young. She joined the sisterly order as a way of escaping this lost past, of fleeing from the love she wasn't able to realize, but when she arrives in Mopu, she finds that the surroundings awaken in her these heretofore forgotten feelings and memories. Her austere, constrained present life begins fading more and more — via slow dissolves, themselves as sensuous as the scenery — into this happier, freer past, a past in which it seemed certain that she would soon be happily married, on her way to a different life than the religious cloister she finds herself in now.

In her new vocation, Clodagh is surrounded by women who are, like her, much deeper and more conflicted than the plain ghostly white of their loose frocks would suggest. Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) is a no-nonsense gardener, stern and wise, somewhat older than the other nuns, but even she finds herself distracted by the atmosphere, moved to plant beautiful flowers rather than the more practical but less aesthetic onions and potatoes she had been instructed to cultivate. Among the other nuns, the giggly Sister Honey (Jenny Laird) and kindly Sister Briony (Judith Furse) are especially distracted by the arrival of the elegant, bejeweled figure known only as the Young General (Sabu), whose fancy clothes and gemstones are the subject of much gossip around the convent. But perhaps none of the nuns is more affected by this place than Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), who has always felt somewhat left out among her fellow sisters, always an outcast who doesn't quite belong in the order, and who in Mopu is increasingly driven near-mad by her desire to cast off her robes and give herself up to sensual pleasures instead. Her sickly, wild-eyed performance is amazing, culminating in her descent into disheveled madness at the film's denouement, looking like a pale, heavily made-up vampire as she skulks around the convent's shadowy corridors.


Powell and Pressburger make sure that this atmosphere of lush, natural sensuality is not only felt in the transformations of the sisters. The film itself is awash in images of such jaw-dropping sensuality that one cannot help but be seduced, along with the faltering nuns, into embracing the wild beauty and overpowering aesthetic bliss of this place. In this mountain stronghold, the wind is always blowing, in powerful gusts that make the nuns' habits flutter in long trails around their heads. The wind's howl and low whisper is omnipresent on the soundtrack, whistling through the convent's halls. Other sounds of the surroundings also infiltrate these walls. Drums pound in the distance to signal the local people's commitment to religious and spiritual ideas that long predate their tenuous association with Christianity. Like the implacably silent holy man who sits on the convent's grounds, unmoving and silently worshiped by all, these drums indicate a religious communion with this place, with the land and the mountain air, very different from the self-denial proffered by the newly arrived nuns. The convent's bell, echoing among the mountainous peaks, is answered by the plaintive moan of native horns, a long, soulful blast that sounds like it's born from the roaring wind itself. The tinkle of bells and bracelets announces every movement of the Young General or the slyly seductive dancing girl Kanchi (Jean Simmons), a young orphan who the nuns agree to take in to calm her untamed sexuality.

Soon enough, of course, the free-spirited Kanchi sets her sights on the General, seducing him with her large green eyes and the slow, deliberate shimmy of her walk, so different from the shuffling of the sexless nuns. In one remarkable scene, Kanchi does a sexy Indian dance for herself in a large empty room, her hips swaying from side to side, her movements causing the loose folds of her dress to cling to her body and reveal the womanly curves so otherwise carefully hidden in this place of God. She gently sashays around the room, admiring herself in the mirrors on the walls, a gesture that Powell and Pressburger reserve for those who have embraced sensuality and rejected spirituality — the only other characters in the film to look in a mirror are the convent's benefactor, the worldly Old General (Esmond Knight) and Sister Ruth, after she's cast off her vows. Kanchi, looking in a mirror, is admiring herself, admiring the frank sexuality with which she dances, admiring the way her own body moves and her skirts twirl up to reveal her lithe legs.

Powell and Pressburger present scenes like this with a loving attention to detail that makes it obvious that, no matter how complex and sympathetic the nuns are, the film's sympathies lie with those who are able to make peace with the sensuality of the world rather than trying to turn their backs on it. The surroundings are rendered in gorgeous, eye-popping Technicolor, with a stunning artificiality achieved by using backdrops hand-colored with pastel chalks. The shots of the natural world have a heightened, blown-out quality, with colors possessing the outrageous clarity of a painting rather than the more prosaic hues of the true natural world. The mountains and the rich green fields around the convent are thus allied with the bright fabrics of the Young General or Kanchi, with whom he eventually falls in love: these characters, like the rugged, uncouth Dean, are in communion with the world around them in a way the nuns, trying to maintain their unstained white habits, can never be.

Dark Passage

Dark Passage is an atmospheric, stylishly made noir about a man who is framed for killing his wife, breaks out of prison to clear himself, and remakes his face, emerging from plastic surgery looking like Humphrey Bogart. Not a bad deal for him. Bogart himself plays convicted murderer Vincent Parry, and director Delmer Daves goes to great lengths, for the first 40 minutes of the film, to keep Parry's pre-surgery visage off the screen. His face is seen twice in newspaper photos, showing a distinguished-looking chap with a mustache, very different from Bogart's heavy-lined face, which bears the marks of a rough, sad life. The bulk of the film's first half is told with judicious use of Parry's first-person perspective, with the camera peering through his eyes, glancing about while Bogie's signature drawl provides commentary from offscreen. Daves balances this first-person storytelling with shots where the escapee's face is obscured by shadows, like a wonderful sequence during a cab ride where the contours of Bogart's face are obvious even while his features are hidden from view. Later, after the surgery, Parry is swaddled in bandages like Claude Rains in the Invisible Man, his face wrapped up in white. The effect of all this sleight of hand is ostentatious, and obviously intended to keep Bogart out of sight until the point where the story actually requires him to look like Bogart in addition to sounding like him. In Casablanca, the shot where Bogie is first introduced focuses first on the ashtray and glass on the table in front of him, before panning up to reveal his face. Here, this type of introduction is stretched out for the entire first half of the film, banking on the iconic nature of Bogart's face to enhance the impact of his eventual unveiling, which is almost ritualistically performed by Lauren Bacall as Irene, the young woman who's helping him hide out.

Unlike Bogart and Bacall's earlier two screen pairings — in Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep — the main appeal of this film is not necessarily in the crackling chemistry between the real-life couple. The duo does get some good scenes together, but the script doesn't have the same high-energy dialogue as in Hawks' films with the pair. Bogart gets some good lines off, of course, with his usual laconic drawl: talking about faces after the surgery, he tells Irene, "Don't change yours, I like it just as it is." Irene initially helps Parry out because she suspects he's innocent, and because she had a handily similar incident in her own past; her father died in prison after being falsely convicted for killing his second wife. Needless to say, she eventually begins falling for Parry in the course of helping him out, but the burgeoning relationship between the duo is almost perfunctory. The film's real focus is on the moody, perfectly handled suspense of Parry's attempts to avoid capture.

Parry's adventures bring him into contact with a fascinating array of shifty figures, all of them portrayed by memorable character actors. His visit to a back alley plastic surgeon (Houseley Stevenson) has a macabre, sinister aura, with the surgeon chatting amiably beforehand about botched surgeries where the men came out looking like bulldogs. Parry is referred to this disreputable doctor by a chatty, overly friendly cabbie (Tom D'Andrea), who recounts his own horror story, about a woman whose facelift essentially washed off and drooped off her face during a rainstorm. The segment is capped by a glimpse of Parry's feverish dreams under the influence of anaesthesia, populated by Irene, the doctor and the cabbie, all floating in multiple exposures amidst a black nothingness. Later, Parry has run-ins with a suspicious detective (Douglas Kennedy) and a small-time crook (Clifton Young) who gets the idea to blackmail the prison escapee. These scenes are crisply, memorably written, and performed as though these walk-on characters were major parts. Young has a jumpy, leering persona, with a faint echo of the baby-faced evil that Richard Widmark would bring to Kiss of Death that same year. His character is just playing at this kind of high-stakes crime, though, and his scenes with Bogart have an interesting dynamic as a result: the twitchy hood with the itchy trigger finger, ostensibly in control but clearly outmatched by the cool, collected Bogart.


Among the film's minor players, none stand out so much as Agenes Moorehead, who plays the vicious, petty, possessive Madge, a woman with connections to both Parry and Irene. It was Madge who essentially set Parry up for his fall, testifying that he killed his wife, and she now haunts Irene because of a dispute over a hapless man who neither of them seems to want much anymore. Madge, however, can't let go of anything. She either gets what she wants, or she wants no one else to have it, even if she doesn't particularly want it anymore. Madge is like a shrewish, dowager version of the traditional noir femme fatale, tenacious and willful. Moorehead only appears in a few scenes, but she makes sure her presence is felt, especially in her climactic showdown with Bogart, where her progressively unhinged demeanor culminates in a monologue of devastating insanity.

Moorehead's star turn in a bit part is indicative of the film's overall thrust, its attention to detail and continual inclusion of little bits of business happening at the fringes of the plot. There's no reason to invest any particular characterization into a diner owner who regrets drawing attention to Parry, or a nervous motorist who nearly runs over the detective pursuing Parry, or the impatient cab driver who keeps buzzing the door bell every few seconds until someone comes down. But all of these characters, appearing for just single scenes, are nevertheless given some personality, some complexity beyond whatever's required of them for the simple practical function they have in the plot. Most of these bit players aren't memorable in themselves, but their cumulative impact is to create a sense that Bogart's story, as dramatic as it is, is taking place in a living, breathing city populated with more ordinary folks who aren't necessarily less interesting just because they're not involved in murder plots and daring jailbreaks. Daves' use of real San Francisco street footage rather than studio sets also helps to situate the film in a very realistic milieu despite its over-the-top pulp fiction narrative. The film's settings feel real, as "lived in" as Bogie's face or his wearied side-of-the-mouth drawl.

Dark Passage is a fine noirish thriller, notable for its inventive first-person opening, its succession of intriguing character actors, and of course that great Bogart/Bacall chemistry. There's a lot to love here, as Parry's escape from prison and subsequent adventures lead him through one enjoyable, stylishly staged scene after another. These scenes, littered with improbable coincidences and contrivances, don't always hold together as drama or add up to a coherent plot, but the film is compulsively entertaining nonetheless. Its individual parts are strong, even if the whole picture they add up to doesn't always make much sense.

T-Men

In Anthony Mann's seminal noir T-Men, as in his later morally ambiguous Western cycle, there are the makings of the kind of tough-minded, hard-edged, beautifully shot morality studies that Mann continually returned to. Here, he is slightly hamstrung by his material, an über-patriotic story that attempts to mythologize the agents of the U.S. Treasury Department as they ferret out counterfeiters and alcohol bootleggers. The script is an obvious piece of propaganda that aims to overcome the unglamorous nature of this work, propelling the "T-men" to the level of tough-guy feds who never rest until they get their man. The film opens with a mock-documentary sequence featuring a Treasury official reading a prepared statement about the functions of his department, then introducing the sample case that constitutes the film proper. This is naturally cheesy material, made worse by the overbearing voiceover that mars much of the film's first hour, a tell-don't-show omniscient narrator who delivers the party line about the bravery of the T-men and the greatness of Uncle Sam. Any other director, saddled with such a self-evidently mediocre script, would simply churn out the kind of moralistic low-budget gangster pieces that thrived on the lower half of double-bills in the 40s. Instead, Mann and ace cinematographer John Alton crafted an often-stunning piece of art from this crude foundation, cramming the film with gorgeous visual effects and even subtly working against the film's propagandistic agenda.

The film follows Treasury agents O'Brien (Dennis O'Keefe) and Genaro (Alfred Ryder) as they attempt to infiltrate an elusive mob running a large-scale counterfeiting operation out of Detroit and Los Angeles. The two agents go undercover as criminals, slowly working their way up the chain of command in order to locate and apprehend the top levels of the criminal organization. Along the way, Mann and Alton engineer endless opportunities for visual experimentation. A stakeout scene, with O'Brien tailing the counterfeit ring's middleman, nicknamed "the Schemer" (Wallace Ford), becomes an exercise in creative cinematography: long shots of shadowy streets with the agent sulking in pursuit, then a wonderful sequence in a club where O'Brien hides in a phone booth, and the interior of the club is seen reflected in the glass in front of him. In other places, unusual camera angles create emphasis or highlight points of interest. In one scene, O'Brien has hidden a counterfeiting plate under a sink and is trying to retrieve it while both he and another hood are washing their hands in the cramped bathroom. Mann positions the camera below the duo, looking up at the plate taped to the sink's underside, with the two men towering above. It's a perfect vantage point that allows an unobstructed view of O'Brien's surreptitious attempts to grab the plate without arousing his companion's suspicion. The tension in the scene is subtly ratcheted up by the perspective, which emphasizes what's going on in a way that a more conventional view would not.


In ways like this, Mann and Alton's visuals bring a great deal to a script that would otherwise have been entirely forgettable. In addition to the handicap of the pro-government propaganda, the script lacks the typical noir flair: its dialogue is nearly as flat and unexceptional as the droning narration, and the characters have little of interest as individuals. There are not only one but two femme fatales (including Mary Meade as a mob moll), but virtually nothing is done with either, and they wind up being just forgettable bit parts. Even the two leads don't have much opportunity to do more than spit out generic tough-guy lines. However, Mann is able to infuse several scenes with emotional frisson despite the blandness of the script, suggesting without words the intensity that is required of the biggest scenes. The film's unspoken emotional center is clearly the scene where Genaro, while undercover and walking with the Schemer, accidentally runs into his wife Mary (June Lockhart) and her friend. The friend recognizes him and calls him by his real name, while he steadfastly denies that he knows them. He finally comes face to face with his wife, who realizes that he can't blow his cover, and with a straight face she says that her husband is much taller and more handsome, then drags her friend away. It's a riveting scene, and Mann locates all the tension in tight closeups on Genaro's face, his forehead knotted and drawn taut around his slitted eyes. Everything in the scene is there in his face: his fear of being outed joined with the agony of having to deny his own wife, having her right there in front of him and being unable to kiss her, embrace her, even acknowledge that he knows her. The script itself never does anything to establish the importance of Genaro's marriage, to suggest the depth of his love for his wife or his concerns for her safety, and she appears and disappears for one scene only, never to be seen again. This one scene nevertheless perfectly captures the feelings churning beneath the surface; it's all there in Mann's closeups, in the tension around Genaro's eyes or the few tears dotting his wife's cheeks after he leaves.

This economy of expression, necessitated by a minimalist, even bland story, is carried over into a later scene where O'Brien has to witness a murder committed by the counterfeiting gang and can't react without blowing his cover. Just as in the scene with Genaro, Mann keeps the tension localized in the area around the eyes, his closeups capturing the deep shadow-filled lines etched into the agent's face by what he sees. In a film where the dialogue is as emotionally inert as a cardiogram flatline, Mann and Alton extract the maximum of affect from their actors' faces, inscribing the narrative's emotional undercurrents in a coded language of shadows, pointed looks, and worry lines. The effect is often startling, as a powderkeg of emotion seems to be ready to blow right beneath the film's cool surface. It's even possible to read in O'Brien's face at this moment the stirrings of a subversive question: is this worth it? Is stopping the flow of fake money worth letting a murder happen right before my eyes? He seems on the verge of acting, blowing his cover, doing something, his conscience straining against the strictures of his orders. By the film's cruel logic, these agents should be willing to pay virtually any price — even their own lives — for the sake of halting the economic and social crimes they investigate. Mann's film never explicitly questions this assumption, instead simply documenting, with his characteristic moral and visual rigor, the progression of violence and brutality necessary to put an end to this ring. The question under the surface, "is this worth it?" is never verbalized but lingers potently in the background, unasked by the screenplay, floating like smoke through the shadows with which Mann and Alton flood the frame.

10/17: Kiss of Death

Kiss of Death is a solid mid-level noir that really comes alive in its second half, with a powerhouse supporting performance from Richard Widmark (his first role ever!) that makes it more than worthwhile all by itself. The film starts out slow and conventional, with Nick (Victor Mature) going to prison after a failed jewelry robbery, and refusing to squeal on his cohorts to get a better deal. He is a crook with a sense of honor, and moreover a crook basically forced into this life by lack of options — he can't get a job, and he has a wife and two daughters. While he's in prison this time, he befriends Tommy Udo (Widmark), a psychopathic hitman who inserts an eerily unhinged laugh at the most inappropriate places in his sneering speech. Nick also learns that while he's in prison, his wife has engaged in an affair with one of his former partners and wound up killing herself, leaving their daughters in an orphanage. The incident jolts Nick into taking action, and he goes to the DA to agree to turn over on his gang and testify against them. He also falls in love with his kids' former babysitter, Nettie (Coleen Gray), in a relationship whose basic creepiness is largely left unexplored (later, Nettie tells him, as they kiss, that she wanted him ever since she was a little girl... um, ewww).

This setup largely takes up the first half of the movie, and it's hardly compelling stuff for the most part. It is, however, necessary to establish Nick as a family man at heart, a basically decent guy who made some bad choices and now desperately wants to fix his life. This makes the film's second half, with its increasing focus on Widmark's sadistic, sociopathic Tommy, all the more terrifying and intense. We sense Nick's fears because we've already seen how much he cares for his family, how much he wants to go straight, and we feel his frustration at the continuing obstacles thrown in his path. Before he's totally free of his old life, he must live up to his deal and testify against Tommy, but the jury fails to convict the killer, and Nick knows that he's sealed his own fate and that of his family. He knows this, and the audience knows it too, because Tommy has already been established as one of the most unforgettable movie psychos of all time.

In a scene before Nick's testimony, Tommy chases another suspected stoolie, but finds that he has already fled the country. Denied his revenge, he settles for attacking the thug's crippled mother instead, tying her to her wheelchair and pushing her down a staircase. It's a stunning and horrifying moment, and one that Widmark amplifies with the intensity of his performance. Director Henry Hathaway also shows his instinct for capturing a fine performance, cutting to and holding a closeup of Widmark as he stands, leering over his wheelchair-bound victim. The shadows accentuate his twisted, cartoonish grin, his petulant whining voice seeming creepily ill-fitted to the sheer evil of his visage. And Widmark himself actually steps into the closeup, moving closer to the camera to get the effect of a de-facto zoom. Otherwise, the camera stays still for this, letting Widmark's unhinged brilliance dominate the screen. When he steps forward and looms even larger in the frame, his brows arching wildly and his mouth twisting to the side as he spits out veiled threats, the effect becomes overpowering. The moment is so intense, its mood so sustained, that it hangs over the whole rest of the film's second half. After he pushes a crippled woman down a staircase to her death, looking so gleefully creepy while he does it, Tommy takes on a totemic power for the remainder of the film. He is a symbol of death and destruction for Nick, a powerful threat to everything he holds dear.

If the rest of the film doesn't quite live up to the staggering intensity of that single closeup moment, it's more than understandable. Even so, the tense standoff between Widmark and Vic Mature (who is surprisingly good in this, considering how much I hated him in Anthony Mann's least interesting Western The Last Frontier) is very satisfying. The film as a whole provides more than enough energy to its standard script, and Widmark's scene-stealing is reason enough to check this one out.

[This post is, considering the importance of Widmark's performance here and the screencap above, my contribution to the Close-Up Blogathon currently going on until October 21, 2007.]