Films I Love #53: Touch Of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

Orson Welles' 1958 masterwork Touch of Evil came late in the generally accepted timeframe for the first wave of film noir, a form that especially thrived in the 40s and early 50s, but it is undeniably one of the pinnacles of the genre. It's a movie that's fraught with contradictions and compromises, like many of Welles' films, so often subject to meddlesome studio interference, multiple versions and budgetary constraints. It is on the one hand tightly, even meticulously, constructed, with each shot staged and composed as though for a photograph or a painting. Few directors controlled foreground and background as effortlessly as Welles, and nearly every shot features elaborate relationships between figures and objects, creating unforgettable visual resonances. And yet despite this formal rigidity, the film feels loose and spontaneous, as though all its complex compositions were simply fortuitous accidents. Its soundtrack is obviously overdubbed, which only enhances the artificality of Welles' aesthetic; voices seem to be at some remove from the people supposedly speaking, their voices drifting in through the dense fog that enshrouds the tiny desert town where the film is set. The plotting is also rough and ragged, dealing with various intersections and intrigues along the Mexican border following a car bomb explosion. The corrupt and corpulent American detective Quinlan (Welles) investigates, but his attempts to wrap the case up quickly, possibly even pinning it on the wrong guy, are hampered by the suspicious Mexican narcotics officer Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston, thoroughly if entertainingly unconvincing as a Mexican).

The loose, rambling plot allows plenty of room for entertaining diversions, as well as for subplots focusing on characters floating at the periphery. Among the many fantastic performances, Janet Leigh is languidly sexy as Vargas' wife Susie, who he continually places in harm's way with oblivious ease while he dedicates himself wholeheartedly to his work. Welles also lingers with the character of Tanya (Marlene Dietrich), a former flame of the washed-up Quinlan, who has declined so far by now that she doesn't even recognize him anymore. There's also a memorable cameo by Dennis Weaver as a twitchy, goggle-eyed motel manager, the kind of surreal touch that often makes the film seem like a bizarre nightmare. With this film, Welles took a rough B-movie plot and elevated into a grand and mesmerizing epic, a morality tale about corruption and self-righteousness.

Le beau Serge

Claude Chabrol's first feature, Le beau Serge, was also in many ways the first feature of the French New Wave, or at least the first feature to be made by the small group of critics from Cahiers du cinema who eventually became the seminal filmmakers of the New Wave in the 60s. Chabrol's debut isn't as formally audacious or startling as the films to follow, from him and his peers, but it is a rough, raw, amateur film, ragged at the edges and seething with bleak intensity. It's the story of François (Jean-Claude Brialy), who returns from college to his small home town to recover from a debilitating illness, and who finds that much has changed in his absence. The people he once knew seem to have settled into depressing and unsatisfying lives, particularly his former best friend Serge (Gérard Blain), who has become an alcoholic good-for-nothing, stumbling drunkenly through town with his equally pathetic father-in-law, Glomaud (Edmond Beauchamp).

But Serge and Glomaud are only the worst cases of a general misery that afflicts the whole town: everyone seems beaten down, hopeless, from the lousy town doctor, who basically just watches over deaths and failed treatments, to the priest who's long ago given up on even trying to help anyone. François, who left the town for college, for better things, and returned only to rest and recover after his sickness, finds that those who didn't leave the town have been weighted down by the lack of options here, by the emptiness and the desolation of this town with nothing to do.

Though this is François' story, and it's told from his perspective as an outsider returning, Serge, as the title character, is the true center of the story, the magnetic core that everyone else is subtly and disastrously attracted towards. Blain plays Serge like a Gallic James Dean, in his leather jacket, his unshaven face, his cocky bad boy attitude and self-conscious cinematic poses. Later New Wave films would turn again and again to the American cinema for these kinds of recycled bad boys, these posing toughs copping their attitudes from Hollywood films, but Serge is a more authentic incarnation of the form than most. Jean-Paul Belmondo, in Godard's Breathless, seems like a wannabe Bogie, too small and insecure for the role he's trying to inhabit — which is, indeed, part of the point. Serge is different, in part because he's got not only Dean's cockiness and his sneer but also his vulnerability, the sense of a scared little kid hiding behind the leather and the tough expression. One thinks, almost inevitably, of Rebel Without a Cause, of the urgent and desperate desire for family and security that runs through that film. As with Dean's Jim Stark, Serge doesn't want to act like this, he doesn't want to be this pathetic drunk trying to act cool and tough, he's simply erecting defenses against the pain of his loneliness, of his unexpressed longing for a family, for love, for something, anything, more.


As François learns upon his return, Serge married Yvonne (Michèle Méritz), Glomaud's daughter, after getting her pregnant, but the baby was born with something wrong with it and quickly died. Now Yvonne is pregnant again, but Serge knows that things won't be any better this time, that it's too much to hope for a healthy child, for some normality and happiness. Instead, he accepts as "normal" the dissolute life he's been leading, and the miserable circumstances of this town where nobody really strives for anything better. François, for his part, thinks he can help, but really he just looks down on Serge, and on this whole milieu, with condescension and pity, as though from above the fray — while at the same time getting tangled up with Yvonne's younger sister Marie (Bernadette Lafont), well-known as a local tramp who switches boyfriends every day. François obviously likes to see himself as better than his former friends and peers, as well-situated to drag them out of their ruts, but his condescension only drives them away even as he gets pulled into a tawdry story of his own.

Chabrol tells this story, which is often melodramatic and despairingly bleak, in a direct, raw way, shooting mostly in the streets of the town and the surrounding countryside, seemingly in natural light. When he shoots interiors, they seem cramped and claustrophobic, and especially when more than two characters appear in a shot, the compositions are often full to bursting, as when François visits Serge's home for the first time and Marie and Yvonne gather around the two men as they catch up. The film is loose and ragged, a film made on the fly, with the feel of real places, real squalor and real desperation. It's obviously indebted to the Italian neorealist movement so admired by the Cahiers critics when they were just starting to make their own first films, and it looks forward to the looseness and amateur aesthetics of the other early New Wave features. The only unfortunate throwback to traditional aesthetics and traditional movies is the score, a jarringly inappropriate old-school movie score with cues intended to arouse bathos or suspense or cheeriness depending on the scene. Such emotional hand-holding seems like an artifact here, in a film that is otherwise quite bracing and unsentimental, a film that makes a mockery of its protagonist's moral certitude and fumbling attempts to make things right.


If the score is the most traditional aspect of Le beau Serge, the one element that captures Chabrol still looking backwards to other movies and established traditions, the film's stunning final sequences point the way forward to the more revolutionary films to come. In these final scenes, François wanders the streets of the town in the dark, with a flashlight providing the only unpredictable, minimal light, searching for Serge as Yvonne is going into labor. The darkness is complete with the exception of the small circle of light surrounding François, and Chabrol makes no compromises to leaven the darkness. These scenes are dark and frantic, shot with the flashlight sometimes shining directly into the camera, the action unclear, just dark figures stumbling through a black night that seems to be all but strangling the sad light of the flashlight. Chabrol heightens the intensity by cutting in a series of absolutely devastating closeups of Yvonne in labor, crying out her husband's name, her face turning to look into the camera, or more precisely, to look past the camera, as though hoping to see the unreliable Serge there, somewhere beyond the claustrophobic confines of their disorderly hovel.

Le beau Serge is a promising debut, both from the nascent New Wave and from Chabrol himself, who would soon sharpen his sensibility into something truly cutting, but who already draws some blood in this first film. It's a raw, unflinching portrait of largely self-inflicted suffering, a portrait that reaches its climax in François' rejection of Marie, which causes her, in turn, to throw herself at Serge and gloat over Serge's savage beating of his former friend. It's part of the film's emphasis on the cyclical nature of these kinds of stories, as François repeats his friend's mistakes in the course of trying to correct them. There's a strangely intimate bond between Serge and François, an attachment that borders on obsession and even homoeroticism, particularly when François sleeps with Marie for the first time and then, as pillow talk afterward, intuits that her first time was with Serge, a fact that seems to fascinate him. This fascination eventually leads to the aura of secular sacrifice in the film's finale, though the final shot, a joyous closeup of Serge that then fades into an abstract blur, suggests that this momentarily optimistic conclusion may yet give way to even more repetitive cycles of suffering and despair.

The Lineup

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

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

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


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

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

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

The Return of Dracula

Paul Landres' overlooked 50s horror great The Return of Dracula could be subtitled, with some justification, "Dracula Goes to the Suburbs." And yet the film does not, as that premise might suggest, play up the campy silliness or incongruity of the blood-sucking count setting up operations in a sunny California town. Rather, the film is dark and grainy and straightforwardly terrifying, its horror arising from the way the undead's nighttime evil seems to silently infiltrate this ordinary American suburb, an Old World nightmare seeping into New World homes, creeping among the picket fences and shiny chrome-laden 50s cars. Dracula (Francis Lederer) arrives in the guise of a suave European visitor, posing as the émigré Balkan cousin of suburban widow Cora Mayberry (Greta Granstedt). Cora and her family — perky, sweet-natured daughter Rachel (Norma Eberhardt) and tousled-haired little son Mickey (Jimmy Baird) — are as all-American as possible, making the arrival of "cousin Bellac" an exciting event for them, a chance to experience something foreign, something far outside of the norm of their cozy, isolated little community. What they get is far more than they expected.

In this sense, the horror of The Return of Dracula emerges from the fear of difference, the fear of immigrants and their ethnic distinctions, their varying customs and eccentric behavior, so unlike the fair-haired, fresh-faced American kids of this small town. This is a Dracula who scorns American suburban conformity, who represents the ultimate outsider, refusing to assimilate and adapt himself to the way of life of those around him — who refuses, in fact, to adapt to life itself, preferring to tempt those he encounters into death instead. Lederer is an incredibly creepy vampire, but also a decidedly non-traditional one. Landres' take on this tale incorporates some aspects of vampire lore (the fear of crosses, the aversion to sunlight, the stake through the heart, the lack of reflection) but sheds others. This version of Dracula leaves no teeth marks on his victims, but it's not clear what exactly he does to them: he visits them in the night, appearing from a cloud of smoke, whispering seductively to hypnotize them, sneakily insinuating into them the desire to embrace death, to reject life. He is not so much a vampire as a lothario who creeps in the night, luring innocents to their doom. He looks the part, too: this Dracula dresses like a gangster in a nappy suit and fedora, and with his craggy face and hawk-like nose, Lederer looks as much like an intimidating hitman as an undead count. But his beady eyes, ringed with black, and his sinister, leering smile confirm his supernatural pedigree.

The creeping malice of Lederer's Dracula is only enhanced by his surroundings, by the quiet and tranquility of the neighborhood through which he stalks. Rachel is, of course, the focus of the vampire's fascination, and she's a pure, good-hearted girl who dedicates a great deal of time at the local church, where she cares for the ill and reads to the blind. She has dual ambitions to be a nurse or a dress designer, and when she's not at school or doing charity work, she's making out with and playfully teasing the earnest boy next door, her boyfriend Tim (Ray Stricklyn). The two are typical 50s teenagers, happy and carefree and good-humored; one expects them to say things like "golly" and "aw shucks" without any trace of irony. Their sexuality is disarmingly open and yet somehow chaste, peaking at heavy kissing, and Dracula's seduction into death represents a darker, stranger sexuality as yet unexplored. There is almost always a sexual component to vampire stories, and this mostly bloodless vampire is even more explicitly than usual a seducer, leaving his mark in his victims' minds rather than on their necks. In this way, the film might be a prototype for David Lynch's Blue Velvet, a dark fantasy of unspeakable evil coexisting with equally unnatural goodness, of dark sexuality tempting small town teens towards violent oblivion.


The film is dark aesthetically as well as thematically. Even in the daytime, this town is gray and overcast, as though perpetually clouded, and at night the shadows threaten to swallow up everything. Dracula melts out of the darkness, haunting the night, appearing and disappearing as though he could be any place he wanted at any time. His voice floats everywhere through the town, his insistent whispered entreaties calling his victims to him. In one of the film's eeriest sequences, he creeps into the room of the blind young woman Jennie (Virginia Vincent), who opens her unseeing eyes as Dracula tells her to see him in her mind. The girl is stiff and transfixed, her eyes watery and wide, as the vampire approaches her bed, bending down towards her neck and blotting out the camera's view as he does. With misdirection like this, Landres suggests horror rather than showing it directly. In one early scene, Mickey returns from exploring the nearby caves distraught and weeping uncontrollably, having just found his kitten ripped apart and killed; his reaction to this unseen horror is more harrowing than modern horror films where the gore is piled on thick but the emotional reactions are sparse. Landres doesn't care as much about the blood and violence as about the effect of it all on his characters, the slowly increasing mood of dread as Rachel's opinion of her stylish "cousin" shifts from admiration to suspicion to wide-eyed terror.

The overall restraint of the film, its deliberate pacing, also enhances the shock of the swift brutal violence when it finally does come, like the scene where a vampire hunter, closing in on Dracula's trail, is assaulted and torn to shreds by a ferocious white dog, one of the vampire's many incarnations. Even more startling is the way that Landres, at a key point, inserts a sudden few seconds of color footage, with blood red oozing up out of a wound — an effectively sensational way of representing the shock of violence in this monochrome world.

Landres also has an intuitive eye for striking compositions, like the way he shoots the purposeful gathering of a group of vampire hunters led by police inspector Meiermann (John Wengraf), converging in a triangle as they walk towards the camera carrying stakes and crosses. Later, when Rachel finally discovers the truth about her "cousin," Landres playfully places a mirror in the extreme righthand corner of the frame throughout the scene leading up to this moment. The director is banking on his audience's knowledge of vampire lore, and he knows that by subtly pointing to the mirror's prominence in the scene, he's ratcheting up the tension, suggesting the inevitable moment when the vampire will appear, invisible in this mirror but no less real. Moments like this suggest the style and flair that Landres brings to this unpretentious B movie, elevating it into a minor classic of its genre. The Return of Dracula is a surprisingly potent, original take on the Dracula legend, revitalizing the old vampire tale with its blunt low-budget aesthetics and small town setting.

Buchanan Rides Alone

Buchanan Rides Alone continues Budd Boetticher's famed cycle of Westerns starring Randolph Scott, although this is perhaps the series' lightest, silliest outing. All of the Boetticher/Scott Westerns are notable for giving the normally dour Western hero a sense of humor and a ready grin, but this film in particular is dominated by a loose, slapstick feel. The hero is largely incompetent, stumbling into the middle of trouble, getting out of it just as haphazardly, and then stumbling right back into the thick of things. Scott plays the lone Buchanan, who had just spent some time as a mercenary in Mexico, earning enough money to fulfill that most common of dreams for Western heroes: buying a piece of land all his own. On his way back to his West Texas home, however, he makes the mistake of stopping in the tiny border outpost of Agry Town, which is ruled over by the feuding, competitive Agry brothers: the nasty, greedy sheriff Lew (Barry Kelley), the hypocritical judge Simon (Tol Avery), and the comical, loyalty-switching hotel owner Amos (Peter Whitney). Buchanan only wants to stay a night and get a good meal before moving on, but finds that the townsfolk will do anything they can to relieve him of some money before he moves on: "this sure is a ten-dollar town," he quips with a sly grin. (As he says it, he casts a glance at a nearby saloon woman, as though wondering if perhaps she costs ten dollars, too.) Worse, he soon finds himself entangled in the longstanding rivalry between Lew and Simon when Simon's son, the no-good drunkard Roy (William Leslie), is killed by a rich Mexican's son, Juan de la Vega (Manuel Rojas), seeking vengeance for Roy's rape of Juan's sister.

Buchanan and Juan barely avoid a hanging when it turns out that Simon at least wants to present a façade of justice, and soon enough Buchanan's involved in a complicated plot to trade Juan's life for $50,000 in gold sent to town by Juan's father. Everyone wants to get a hold of that gold — preferably without losing the chance to hang Juan anyway — and Buchanan finds himself trapped in the middle, trying to protect his newfound friend, get back the gun and money that was taken from him by the corrupt sheriff, and get back on his path to home to buy himself some land. The stakes are high, but Boetticher treats the whole thing with a light touch and an eye for broad, comical strokes, playing down the ostensible seriousness of the plot in favor of a rambling, freewheeling atmosphere. For a Western hero, Buchanan isn't actually very formidable: he keeps letting his enemies get the best of him, and makes often frustratingly poor decisions. At one point, after getting the drop on three of Lew's thugs, he ties them up with a few weak strands of rope, admits he has no idea of what to do next, and then rides off, leaving the bad guys loosely tied up with their guns and their horses easily accessible nearby for the inevitable moment when they get free.

Moreover, Buchanan is rarely even an agent in his own victories. Moments like the one where he actually manages to ambush his enemies are rare. More often, his escapes from near-certain death are achieved via various deus ex machina, last-minute contrivances of chance and fortune rather than any inherent skill or fancy gunplay on Buchanan's part. The result is an odd Western in which the hero succeeds not because he's stronger, faster or smarter than his opponents, but because he's just plain lucky. So many of the great Westerns have a subtle Darwinist slant, advancing the idea that the hero is the guy who draws fastest, who's so formidable with a gun that his enemies can only best him by playing dirty, and so tough that his mere slit-eyed glare inspires quavery fear. Scott can certainly play this kind of hero, with his craggy face and tough-guy aura, but he's just as capable of playing a lighter kind of hero, smiling broadly and bumbling his way in above his head.


Buchanan's biggest streak of luck comes from his encounter with the sheriff's henchman Pecos (L.Q. Jones), who just so happens to be a West Texan like Buchanan. The comradely feeling between the two men, the result of their shared homeland, winds up saving Buchanan from one of the many executions he faces in the film, and makes Pecos his ally for the duration. One of the film's funniest scenes is the impromptu funeral that the slow-witted, somewhat cowardly but earnest Pecos is inspired to hold for a slain former buddy. The two men even bungle the funeral, which takes place near a river: unable to dig a hole in the ground without it filling up with water, they're forced to tie the carcass up into a nearby tree so the animals don't get at it. Pecos' eulogy — which includes an acknowledgment that the dead man was a card cheat and a thief, but not so bad in other ways — is a hilarious speech, made even more so by the way that Boetticher works Buchanan into the frame, casting wry sidelong glances at his companion's unbelievable oration. Boetticher further accentuates the morbid comedy of it all by continually cutting away from Pecos' sincere, squint-eyed face to a deadpan shot of the corpse's feet sticking out of the tree above.

The film milks some further comedy out of the character of Amos, who is continually running around the town, clutching his chest as though perpetually on the brink of a heart attack, spreading gossip and generally reacting with bug-eyed disbelief to everything he encounters. It's a broad, frankly comedic performance, practically a slapstick turn in the midst of a film where most of the other actors, including Amos' two brothers, are playing things straight. Buchanan, Amos and Pecos are often comic figures, bringing a light touch to the material, while more straightforward (and humorless) Western archetypes are embodied in the form of the noble Mexican lad Juan and the town's morally ambiguous gunman Carbo (Craig Stevens). Carbo is an interesting character, an adviser to the corrupt judge who seems to have a slightly greater sense of ethics and honor than any of the town's other prominent citizens. He's dead-serious and tough, a typical Western antihero. In another film, he might be the hero, his struggles with his sense of morality and rightness the film's central dilemma; here, he's relegated to the fringes, pushed aside by Buchanan's bumbling adventures.

On the whole, Buchanan Rides Alone is another interesting Western from the Boetticher/Scott team, a study in tonal contrasts in which a serious and often bloody drama is played for laughs, defusing the sense of real danger in this story. Instead, the film is a fun, lightweight take on the Western genre, one whose irreverent tone is best represented by the moment when Scott, languidly lounging back in the midst of a tense saloon standoff, actually winks at one of his adversaries. Try to imagine Gary Cooper ever doing that, and then you'll know exactly how different this film is from the typical genre programmer.

Films I Love #12: Equinox Flower (Yasujiro Ozu, 1958)

The sound films of Yasujiro Ozu are almost all cut from the same cloth, sharing similar plotlines, characters, and aesthetics, making it difficult to single out one film as his finest work. Nevertheless, Equinox Flower is my personal favorite mainly because in this film, Ozu achieves perhaps the most delicate balance between the many elements of his work: the understated rhythms of daily life, the subtle dramas percolating beneath seemingly placid surfaces, the formal grace of his simple aesthetic, and the deadpan humor and wit, so often overlooked, with which he gently skewers his characters. The story is a familiar one, a variation on Ozu's perennial concerns of marriage, familial bonds, aging, friendships, and the difficulty of expressing emotions in a largely repressed society. In this version of the typical Ozu tale, Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi) is upset by his daughter Setsuko's (Ineko Arima) desire to marry a man he does not approve of. Wataru represents a hypocritical fusion of traditional and modern Japanese values, giving out open-minded and sensitive advice to friends, and yet when it comes to his own daughter's happiness he is angered by his lack of control over her life. He wishes her to marry a man he picks for her rather than marrying the man she loves and chooses for herself. The story may be simple, but Ozu's compositions, mostly static shots from his signature low angle, are immaculate and perfectly conceived. Each image in an Ozu film has weight and formality, and his colors are richly textured, pitting eye-popping reds against a background palette composed mostly of lush green hues. Ozu's films are arch-formalist masterpieces in which mundane human dramas are deliberately parceled out, bit by bit, within a rigidly conceived framework.

Bell, Book and Candle

Bell, Book and Candle is a fanciful, charming, lightweight love story, a low-key comedy about magic and love, and whether there's really any difference at all between the two. The witch Gillian (Kim Novak, sporting the most ridiculous painted-on eyebrows in cinematic history) is growing bored with her life and wants something different, which for her means hanging out with ordinary mortals for a change. Naturally, she takes a liking to her new upstairs neighbor, the publisher Shep Henderson (Jimmy Stewart), and she becomes determined to make him hers when she discovers that he's engaged to marry her college rival Merle (Janice Rule). The set-up is an obvious one for a romantic comedy — what are the odds that Gillian falls in love with the guy she's only using for revenge and cheap thrills? — and the only real wrinkle is a light dusting of magic, which is used sparingly and with not much flash or impact.

Still, despite its obviousness there's a lot to like here. Novak and Stewart worked together on two films in 1958 (the other probably doesn't need to be named), and their chemistry is obvious. There's something inherently appealing about throwing together Stewart at his most "aw-shucks" with the icy, glib Novak, a perfect Hitchcock blonde if ever there was one. Sparks fly just putting the two of them together, and there's something urgent and believable about their kisses, an uneasy passion that Hitchcock would channel into something sinister and gripping in Vertigo, and which here director Richard Quine uses to much more prosaic effect. It's a good thing that the stars are so good together, because in some ways they're the film's primary pleasure. The script lacks the crackle and punch of the best romantic comedies, and there's little enough truly engaging patter — a stray quip here and there elicits a smile, but the film is more amusing than actually funny. Jack Lemmon, as Gillian's brother Nicky, gets most of his laughs from physical comedy. You'll rarely find a more natural comedian than Lemmon, but he doesn't get many choice lines; he's hilarious anyway at times, and it's hard not to enjoy his introduction, looking stoned out of his mind as he bangs on a pair of bongos at a nightclub. His goofy smile and rolling eyes define a character who otherwise doesn't have much to do.

Even Stewart does his best work with his face rather than with the rather generic dialogue. He gets a lot out of pure nervous energy: a self-conscious stammer, manic pacing and arm motions, eyes popped so wide they look they're going to fall out of his head. On anyone else it'd look like hammy mugging, but Stewart manages to make this kind of over-the-top awkwardness seem natural to the character. Stewart's characters in this mold — which is to say, when he's not working with Hitchcock or Mann, two directors who tended to roughen up the actor's edges — are charming and kind of naïve, genuine nice guys who have a real down-home appeal even in their darkest moments. This certainly describes Shep, who is sympathetic even when he's dumping his fiancée for Gillian, a woman he met only yesterday. He tells Merle that he's "a cad," and smiles politely as she slaps him. That's a Jimmy Stewart nice guy, alright.


In addition to Stewart and Lemmon, the film is graced with several fine comedic bit turns: Ernie Kovacs as a perpetually disheveled, alcoholic writer drawn to New York by one of Gillian's spells, in order to write a book for Shep; Elsa Lanchester, the Bride of Frankenstein herself, as Gillian's lovably dotty old aunt; Hermione Gingold as a powerful rival witch. But again, the writing doesn't seem to be on par with the quality of the cast, and most of the fun arises from seeing these great comic actors inject bits of physical humor and small visual touches into their performances. Gingold doesn't have much to say or do, but she's fun to watch, all done up in thrift-store rags and almost constantly lit from above by a diffuse green light, puttering around her old haunted house, mixing occult ingredients with a bemused smile on her face.

Quine also graces the film with a light touch behind the camera, an unobtrusive but nevertheless strong perspective as a director. The credits sequence, in which the camera moves around Gillian's antique shop from one relic to another, pausing for a few moments on each, foreshadows a technique that Quine will employ several times throughout the film. He likes to move the camera gently within a scene in order to shift from one point of interest to another. A shot outside Gillian's store, as her things are packed away into a truck outside, slowly tracks in, edging around the truck, so that Gillian and Nicky can be seen through the store's front window. In other scenes, Quine's playful sense of framing elicits eccentric effects: Kovacs, Lemmon and Stewart outside Gingold's house, clustered on her steps like ersatz Christmas carolers; a long shot of Gillian and her aunt walking through a beautifully artificial snowy city set; a shot of Stewart distorted through the lens of a crystal ball. There is nothing, though, that can quite match the startling, haunting closeup of Gillian as she casts her love spell on Shep, holding her cat familiar Pyewacket under her nose, her deep blue eyes and the cat's both staring into the camera, her face lit with an otherworldly glow. It's the film's most exciting image, and the only one that truly probes the magical, mystical quality that is really at the story's core. This is the only moment where it feels like anything magical is happening, in either cinematic or narrative terms. It's a masterful shot. The curve of the cat's black ears mask the lower half of Novak's face, letting her eyes shine intensely in isolation, mirrored in the lower half of the frame by the cat's own blue eyes.

The rest of the film doesn't have anything quite as tingly or evocative as this sequence, but even by itself it's almost enough to elevate this otherwise rather middling romantic comedy to something of a higher level. As it is, this is an intermittently enjoyable and amusing fantasy, a cute picture but with just enough substance to prevent it from being completely disposable. It's about the magic of love, how falling in love is so inexplicable, so mysterious and resistant to logic, that it might as well really be magic.

Films I Love #3: Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)

Bonjour Tristesse is, like many of Otto Preminger's films, an extended exercise in toying with the problems of audience identification and tone. The film shifts, in its first ten minutes, from a somber black and white prologue in which Cecile (Jean Seberg) and her father Raymond (David Niven) seem subtly discontented in their upper-crust lifestyle, to a gorgeous Technicolor flashback in which everything is breezy, carefree, and fun for the pair and Raymond's latest fling Elsa (Mylène Demongeot). Preminger injects the color into the film slowly, fading in some blue ocean waves over Cecile's shoulder as she dances, then irising out from the center of the image with a burst of color. The shift to Technicolor highlights the contrast between the two Ceciles we see, one numb and disconnected, the other vibrant and almost relentlessly sunny. The film tracks Cecile's downfall as her father abandons his carefree ways to marry the matriarchal Anne (Deborah Kerr), who immediately assumes a domineering, motherly attitude towards the defiantly flighty Cecile. Preminger's brilliance lies in the way he gets the audience irrevocably on Cecile's side — it's hard not to love Seberg's smiley, unrestrained performance and to sympathize with her desire for freedom — only to pull the rug out as he delves more and more into the selfish, willful, and vengeful aspects of this charming girl's personality. The film remains ambiguous, right up to its final black and white closeup of Seberg's agonized face, as to whether Anne or Cecile is the real victim in this battle of wills.

As always, Preminger's direction is fascinating, his distinctive roving camera framing and reframing the characters in various couplings and trios, emphasizing Anne's intrusion on Cecile's carefree life by placing her in dominant positions within the frame, always looming over the younger girl. And yet Preminger hardly makes her an unredeemed "evil stepmother" character, infusing her with unexpected pathos while Kerr plays her as a complex, well-meaning woman who is simply ill-suited to the morally loose, privileged existence enjoyed by Cecile and Raymond. The film also provides a dazzling showcase for Seberg in her second role, which Preminger conceived as a comeback attempt after she was roundly mocked for her debut in his Saint Joan the year before. The American critics mostly didn't bite this time either, but Seberg's wide-eyed naivete and cheerful bombast made her a curiously effective Joan of Arc, and an even better Cecile. Of course, at least some French critics caught on to what Preminger and Seberg are up to here, and her performance in Bonjour Tristesse directly brought the young actress to the attention of Jean-Luc Godard, who immediately cast her in his own debut feature. Godard picked up on the film's purposeful tonal ambivalence and Seberg's deftness in conveying a character who is at once charming and ruthless. He famously said that Seberg's Patricia in Breathless was a continuation of Cecile's arc: "I could have taken the last shot of Preminger's film and started after dissolving to a title, 'Three Years Later.'"