Noir Diary # 13 / Thoughts on… Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)

I.

Ever since I decided to start writing up my viewings of ‘40s/’50s Film Noir a couple of years ago, I’ve found myself bedevilled by the question of where, precisely, the boundaries of ‘noir’ lie. It’s an issue I’ve wrestled with to some extent in pretty much every one of these Noir Diary posts to date, and, with every critic, fan, reference book and blu-ray label on earth drawing their preferred demarcation line somewhere entirely different from all the others, it is not a debate which seems liable to be happily resolved any time soon.

In trying to find a workable way to define ‘noir’ therefore, my current thinking is that, though we may treat it as such for the sake of convenience, noir is not a genre, in the conventional sense of the term. In some ways, this is a pretty obvious point to make - after all, no one in the USA prior to about 1975 ever sat down and said “I’m gonna make a film noir” - but I think it bears repeating.

Instead, I believe noir can probably be best understood as an ineffable essence - a kind of aesthetic virus, if you will - which infects a wide swathe of cinema and literature to a greater or lesser degree. As irreducibly ‘noir’ as the canonical classics of the form may seem, it’s worth remembering that they all simultaneously belong to other genres as well. To the people who wrote and directed them, the 40s/50s films we now categorise as noir were gangster movies, police procedurals, psychological thrillers, murder mysteries, or, in this case, even a quote-unquote ‘women’s picture’.

The germ of what we now call ‘noir’ is something which crept into them from outside, changing and perverting the material it infected; eating away moral clarity, tilting camera set ups and dimming the lights like some celluloid Dutch elm disease. And, like everyone’s favourite virus here in the second decade of the 21st century, the effects of this bug were varied and unpredictable in the extreme.

Some films emerged so slathered in the thematics and visuals of noir than their root genre almost shrivels up and dies; for others, noir simply hangs in the background, barely perceptible, like some eerie seed of doubt. Then, there are movies in which the noir is spread unevenly - confined to certain scenes or sub-plots, or hitting full strength in some reels whilst completely disappearing from others. In spite of its storied position in the noir canon, ‘Mildred Pierce’ fits perfectly into this latter category.

II. 

Considered as a standalone short film, opening fifteen minutes of ‘Mildred Pierce’ are as vivid and intoxicating an invocation of the 1940s So-Cal noir aesthetic as has ever been conjured before the cameras.

Straight out of the opening credits, the sound of six gunshots is foleyed over an exterior shot of a luxurious yet lonely Malibu beach house with a shiny black sedan parked outside. Cut to the interior, where a man in formal dress spins to face the camera, clutching his chest. He just has time to gasp the name of the movie’s titular heroine(?) before he hits the floor, as inert as the remains of the chic standing lamp he pulled down with him.

Cut to a breath-taking crane-shot of (a studio recreation of) a rain-sodden Santa Monica seafront, water gleaming on the wooden boardwalk in the light of neon hoardings for bars and seafood restaurants as the unmistakable figure of Joan Crawford - looking like a Cossack officer in her wide-shouldered fur coat and hat - strides away from us toward the pier. 

As she stares at the black waves below, her contemplation is broken by the sound of a beat cop’s baton tapping on the iron railings. The first words spoken in the film if we discount the murder victim’s final utterance, the cop’s ensuing lines (“if you take a swim, I’ve gotta take a swim. Is that fair? Because you feel like killing yourself, I gotta get pneumonia?”) give us a brilliant example of the approach to dialogue which will remain consistent throughout the film. Most readily attributable to sole credited screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, these lines are simple and to the point, lacking the literary self-consciousness of many post-war noirs, but are nonetheless attention-grabbing, memorable and devoid of cliché. (1)

(It is only on repeat viewings that we might note that, a few years prior to this in the film’s chronology, Mildred’s beloved younger daughter did indeed die from pneumonia after “taking a swim”, instigating a fatal shift in her mother’s psychological make-up.)

Anyway, the cop’s well-chosen words seem to do the trick, turning Mildred (for of course it is she) away from her watery grave and pointing her in the direction of a loud, claustrophobic seafront bar, where she immediately falls in with the lecherous, fast-talking Wally Fay (Jack Carson), an old friend who seemingly owns the joint. Clearly an inveterate hustler, Wally is suspicious when Mildred - who, we are given to understand, has routinely rejected his crude advances since time immemorial - invites him back to her pad for a quiet drink.

Mildred is clearly in an unsettled state of mind, but, like every noir fall guy, Wally prides himself on keeping his eye on the prize, never looking a gift horse in the mouth, etc etc. So, before we know it, he’s propping up the sleek, chromium bar back at that accursed beach house, boastfully bantering to himself, as Mildred slips out, ostensibly to change, and locks the door behind her.

By the time he finds the corpse, it’s too late. Careening around the increasingly labyrinthine beach house, Wally ascends winding, disorientating flights of stairs, dense lattices of shadow thrown by the house’s baroque / art deco accoutrements hemming him in from all sides, as he too cries Mildred’s name.

Photography by Ernest Haller, whose CV includes ‘Gone With The Wind’, ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and 183 other top-flight flicks, and art direction from Curtiz’s regular collaborator Anton Grot (also see: Doctor X), are, of course, fiendishly superb here, briefly bringing a touch of Orwellian nightmare sci-fi to proceedings.

Eventually making his exit by crashing through the French windows, Wally briefly staggers across the sand - inevitably reminding us of the unforgettable finale to Robert Aldrich’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ a decade later - before he is frozen in the beam of a searchlight, trained on him from the road above by the cops Mildred presumably called.

Soon regaining his wise-cracking composure once he’s back amongst other men, he tells them, “you know, this is a pretty big night for you guys; yeah, lots of excitement - there’s a stiff in there”. “Izzat so? And I suppose you were running right down to the station to report it?” retorts the younger cop, who’s clearly got Wally’s number.

Amazing. Just amazing. Really, if you’re in search of the condensed essence of ‘noir’, it doesn’t get much better than that my friends.

The subsequent scenes, in which Mildred is picked up from the opulent mansion she apparently shares with her adult daughter and informed that her husband(!) has been murdered, are equally great. The limbo-like inertia of the police squad-room - where thick-necked cops sit around, smoking, eating sandwiches or desultorily typing up their nightly reports as Mildred is forced to sit amongst them in her Cossack finery, awaiting the attention of the investigating officer, is brilliantly conveyed. (“Would you like a paper, lady?” some toad-like brute asks her, as if the wife of a murder victim might want to catch up on the sports pages or something.)

As she is eventually ushered into the strangely inviting environs of the interrogation room (incongruously low-lit, as if by firelight) and disconcerted by the smooth, logical and ingratiating tone taken by the detective within (“even his more courteous, somewhat friendlier types gave one pause for concern,” begins the IMDB bio of actor Moroni Elson), we know we’re sliding headlong toward extended flashback territory, as Mildred is coerced into recounting her sorry tale.

Even as we cross that one off our “Film Noir signifiers” bingo card however, first-time viewers expecting to file this one alongside Double Indemnity and ‘The Big Sleep’ are liable to be taken aback by the extent to which the film takes a stylistic handbrake turn as soon as the fairy-dust of noir glamour disappears in the flash of a back-in-time dissolve, leaving us adrift in the flat, sit-com greyscale of the (then novel) surroundings of pre-fab suburbia, where a somewhat fresher-faced Mildred Pierce exchanges her furs for apron and oven gloves, thoroughly immersed in the drudgery of domestic routine.

III. 

When I first watched ‘Mildred Pierce’, around twenty years ago(!) at this point, I didn’t get it. I was in the process of discovering Film Noir for the first time via a Film Studies module I was taking in college, and as such, my expectations of the “genre” chiefly revolved around gun-toting gangsters, scummy tenement apartments, crumpled fedoras and weary P.I.s striking matches on their unshaven jaws.

By failing to deliver on these hallowed signifiers of the hard-boiled idiom, ‘Mildred..’ fell flat for my younger, dumber self. I mean, not only does it feature only a single murder, which we see in the opening minute, but it then has the audacity to follow the day-to-day travails of somebody’s freakin’ mother - and like, who’s got time for that, right?!

Returning to the film as a respectable, wage-earning adult however, greater life experience and (I would like to think) more mature tastes have allowed me to engage far more deeply with the tale being told during the - entirely noir-free - central hour of their movie’s run-time.

Admittedly, I’ve not been through a painful divorce, raised a hateful harridan of a daughter or gone into the restaurant business during the interim, but what can I say? I suppose I can now at least relate to such quintessentially ‘grown-up’ concerns, meaning that, when Mildred’s extended confession begins, I no longer tune out.

At 114 minutes, ‘Mildred Pierce’ is a long film for its era, and it packs a hell of a lot into that run-time. Full of ostensibly repetitious character encounters, melodramatic contrivances and mountains of detail concerning the titular heroine’s property deals, legal transactions and business plans, this material could, in clumsier hands, have become a colossal bore. Indeed, one suspects that it is only the prestige Curtiz was still enjoying a few years downstream from the success of ‘Casablanca’ that prevented Warner Bros from scything through the screenplay in no uncertain terms.

But, thank god, they didn’t. And at the risk of stating the obvious here, ‘Mildred Pierce’s final cut is a fast-moving, thoroughly engrossing, friction-free joy to sit through - an example of ‘40s Hollywood artistry raised to its absolute zenith.

Always a gifted director, Curtiz brings both a steady hand and an unparalleled mastery of visual storytelling to proceedings, whilst MacDougall’s writing is, as mentioned, exceptional. Haller, Grot, editor David Weisbart and composer Max Steiner are also all at the top of their game, and in front of the camera, Crawford is - of course - magnificent, whilst the rest of cast is packed out with carefully chosen, lesser-known players who inhabit their roles just perfectly.

Basically - this crew could have made a film about the history of Battenberg cake and it would have been worth watching, so seeing them take on an inspired adaptation of a second tier James M. Cain novel is just dandy, thank you very much.

IV. 

The nebulous concept of the ‘women’s picture’ represents a distinct category within studio era Hollywood filmmaking - one which, predictably enough, been largely overlooked by the male-dominated critical / Film Studies establishment.

Being just as in thrall to the whims of said establishment as anyone else, I’m not really sufficiently familiar with the form to judge how indicative ‘Mildred Pierce’ is of its overall conventions, but certainly one suspects that many (now largely forgotten) movies aimed at female audiences must surely have followed the same basic trajectory seen in the film’s central hour; a steadfast, hard working wife/mother overcomes the obstacles life throws at her, negotiates her relationships with men, fights her corner in assorted melodramatic conflicts and misunderstandings, and so forth.

The big difference of course is that, in the regular run of things, one supposes that these stories would most likely have ended with their heroine finding true (legally sanctioned) love, securing a bright future for herself and her children, etc etc…. which is where the shadow of our old friend ‘noir’ begins to creep in once again.

One of the masterstrokes of ‘Mildred Pierce’ is the complex characterisation of the three men who play a role in its heroine’s life. Though all of them are eventually found severely wanting on the scales of the film’s moral schema, they are all somewhat fascinating characters in their own right, and, crucially, none of them are portrayed as entirely irredeemable. This adds a note of moral ambiguity to proceedings which takes us beyond the realm of boilerplate melodrama, even as Mildred is weeping into her oven gloves in her suburban kitchen as first husband Bert (Bruce Bennett) walks out on her.

Openly conducting an affair with the oft-mentioned “Mrs Beiderhoff”, Bert Pierce is initially depicted as a cruel and gloomy sad-sack who refuses to acknowledge his own culpability for the failure of the couple’s marriage. But as the film goes on, and the machinations of the plotting become more complex, he emerges as something of a paragon of plain-spoken honesty, offering Mildred his heartfelt apologies and best wishes when she proves him wrong by achieving success on her own terms, and attempting - in a characteristically vague sort of way - to protect her from the sharks who are circling.

Significantly, Bert is also the only character in the movie who is not entirely fixated on making money. Unemployed when the flashback segment of the movie begins, he remains glum, dishevelled and content with with relatively lowly position in the economic hierarchy. Even after a brief bit of exposition informs us that he has eventually found work in (where else) the aerospace industry, he remains uninterested, it seems, in signing up to the crazed pursuit of the dollar which motivates the rest of the cast.

Framed more-or-less as Bert’s polar opposite meanwhile, the aforementioned Wally Fay is a ruthless opportunist, a loud-mouthed braggart and a shameless lecher who, as he repeatedly demonstrates, is willing to throw his business partners under a bus at a moment’s notice in pursuit of his own interests. But, despite all this, his fondness for Mildred seems genuine, he works hard to help make her business a success, and despite his boorish conduct, he never forces himself upon the female characters in the movie after they’ve rejected his overtly cartoonish advances.

Armoured against ethical doubts by the same spiel employed by carpet-baggers and capitalist ultras to this day (hey, it’s just good business, nothin’ personal, etc), against all the odds, we kind of end up liking the guy. There are even moments here when, fleetingly, Mildred and Wally seem to be operating as a pretty tight team - a kind of proto-power couple almost - until his roving eye for some amoral side deals inevitably gets the better of him.

Which just leaves the most fascinating gentleman of all, Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). Gifted with a name worthy of an Iberian dragon-slayer, this fellow has sometimes been likened by critics to a gender-reversed femme fatale (homme fatale?), but personally I’m not sure that glove really fits.

In stark contrast to the raw sexual magnetism generally assigned to yr average ‘femme fatale’ in fact, the root of Monte’s seductive charms remains rather elusive. With his receding hairline, cleft chin and skinny build, Scott leaves us with the impression that Joan Crawford could probably break him over her knee and send his remains wafting away on the ocean breeze, leaving him a far weaker, more compromised, figure than the ‘black widows’ who routinely preyed upon the protagonists of male-orientated noir.

Given that Beragon is also stony broke - and everyone in the movie seems to know it - it is presumably only his intangible aura of old world, aristocratic glamour which keeps a steady stream of debutantes and wealthy widows heading back to his heavily-mortgaged beach house. (Though the script is reluctant to address Beragon’s promiscuity directly, references to his notoriety in the ‘society pages’ and a running gag about the multiple bathing costumes he keeps on hand for his many ‘sisters’ make the point clearly enough.)

And, in good time, we get a first-hand taste of his talents too, as, thanks to Curtiz’s proven talent for handling romantic material, the scene in which Monte eventually gets Mildred alone in his ‘lair’ zings with more of a sense of inter-personal chemistry and genuine human warmth than the rest of the movie put together… even as bad news and piled up IOUs combine to douse their passion more or less immediately.

Between them, these three fatally-flawed suitors then add up to far more than mere shooting gallery ducks for Crawford’s world-beating super-woman to knock down, allowing the film to chart a surprisingly complex (if resolutely cynical) cross-section of the relationships between the sexes in the competitive, hot-house environment of post-war America. (2)

As Mildred’s loyal right-hand-woman Ida (brilliantly played by a scene-stealing Eve Arden) remarks at one point as the pair raise a lunch-time glass of bourbon, effectively cutting the crap and compressing a fair share of the complex machinations of the film’s plotting into a single sentence: “to the men we’ve loved… the stinkers”.

V. 

Though the relentless fixation on acquiring wealth which triggers the bulk of the conflict within the script could lead some to label ‘Mildred Pierce’ an ‘anti-capitalist’ film, several factors - not least the movie’s refusal to elevate Bert Pierce to a higher plain for his prioritising of emotional honesty over material gain - suggest that a slightly different moral dynamic is actually at work here.

If anything, the film functions primarily as a kind of unabashed celebration of the Protestant Work Ethic, promoting hard graft as the engine through which the put-upon proletariat can improve themselves and take revenge upon their social ‘betters’; a theme which I assume must go all the way back to Cain’s source novel, as such messages were often close to the writer’s heart, in spite of the nihilistic air which defines his best-known material.

Thus Mildred becomes an almost Christ-like figure for those who strive to better themselves and their families through hard work - an avatar perhaps for the overlooked female labour force brought to the fore during WWII - whilst the scenes demonstrating the success of her restaurant chain convey the sheer exhilaration of post-war American prosperity better than anything else in the era’s movies; a seething world of polished chromium, gleaming glass, imitation leather and bubbling grease, every inch of space filled by voluminous, big-spending customers whose gigantic automobiles idle outside, ready to send them roaring off to the next fashionable destination, amid the not-yet-polluted air of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Meanwhile, true evil within the film’s moral schema is reserved for those refined, Luciferian layabouts - as represented by the tag team of Monte Beragon and Mildred’s spoiled elder daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) - who scrounge their living off the hard work of others whilst mocking the honest toil which underpins their wasteful, dissolute lifestyles.

Stretching right back across the Atlantic and down through the annals of antiquity, this particular class-based dynamic can be traced through the whole deathless lineage of Europe’s debauched aristocracy, from the fall of Rome to the French and Russian revolutions, to the gout-addled, rotten borough squires of British popular fiction (an archetype splendidly lampooned by Charles Laughton in ‘Jamaica Inn’ (1939)), and, more pertinently, the related lineage of ‘Jane Eyre’-derived gothic heartthrobs who were busy menacing and abusing their pure, proletarian maidens in vast swathes of the celluloid which followed in the wake of that rather more celebrated Hitchcock/Du Maurier joint, 1940’s ‘Rebecca’. (3)

It is in in imitation of this legion of sub-Byronic cads - along with a touch perhaps of the aristocratic affectations of the silent era Hollywood elite - that Monte Beragon was presumably moulded, and in this sense, ‘Mildred Pierce’ becomes less of an anti-capitalist parable and more of an all-American class war diatribe, in which evil and corruption ultimately derive, not from capital itself, but from snobbery and laziness, from refined manners, bohemian self-indulgence and any remaining hint of old world entitlement.

A very different prospect from the kind of native-born, inherently American, corruption routinely unpacked in the literary noir of Chandler and Hammett… but, having said that, the rot lurking at the heart of the American dream can certainly be seen elsewhere in the film - if not in the figure of the foreign-coded Monte, then certainly in that of his protégé, and the movie’s ultimate villain, Veda.

VI. 

If I suggested above that man trouble accounts for a fair share of Mildred’s woes, it is the remainder which ends up being both far more significant and far more uncomfortable, ultimately swinging the picture firmly in the direction of Film Noir - and for better or for worse, it’s a very female pile o’ trouble indeed.

In general, I try not to make a habit of hurling misogynist insults at the screen whilst watching films, but if you can get through the first half of ‘Mildred Pierce’ without yelling “you BITCH” in the general direction of Ann Blyth’s Veda, well, your olde world manners must be more refined than my own, let’s put it that way.

Arguably the most memorable character in a film packed full of memorable characters, Veda functions as a magnet for audience hatred right from the outset. A full-on, ‘Bad Seed’-level monster whilst playing younger in her earlier scenes, the toxic snobbery and insincerity which seems to have taken possession of her - traits not obviously inherited from either of her parents - seems so inexplicable, it almost pushes the movie in the direction of horror. (Certainly, it’s difficult to imagine that the producers of the aforementioned 1956 film didn’t have Veda in mind to some extent.)

Beyond mere vindictive, bad-kid nastiness though, there is something so perversely vile, so cruelly idiotic, about the idea of a child attacking her own mother for her perceived low class breeding (“..you never talk about your people, or where you came from, do you mother?”), that Crawford’s inchoate reaction to her daughter’s behaviour can’t help but mirror our own.

In a more conventional, more sentimental story, it would be easy to imagine Veda learning the error of her ways as she grows up, redeeming herself as time goes by and becoming less of a conceited, duplicitous cow as a result. But - thankfully - that’s not the film we’re watching here. The essence of ‘noir’ has sunk deep into the bones of ‘Mildred Pierce’.

And so, under the questionable tutelage of Monte Beragon and Wally Fay, the teenage Veda is soon a fully signed up apprentice femme fatale - a Phyllis Dietrichson or Cora Smith on training wheels, complete with a side-gig as a night club bawler (clearly the money mummy spent on all those music lessons didn’t go to waste) and the future of at least one promising young man already crushed beneath her wheels.

There is a sense here that we’re supposed to see Mildred’s parenting - spoiling her daughter with gifts and luxuries whilst failing to put the time aside to actually build a relationship with her - as being somehow responsible for Veda’s beastly conduct, but to be honest, this intended bromide on child-raising is one element of the screenplay which never quite lands, which is perhaps for the best.

Better by far I think to just see Veda as some Satanic anomaly - a force of nature capable of bringing down her indomitable mother the way no mere man ever could. And indeed, it is the warped, rather obsessional nature of this mother / daughter relationship which really steers the movie back toward darkest noir territory during its final act.

As has often been noted, once Veda has flown what’s left of the family coop, Mildred - perhaps still mourning the tragic loss of ‘good’ daughter Kay - dotes on her as if she were a lost lover rather than an errant daughter, going to what we in the audience recognise as absurd, self-destructive extremes to try to win back her tarnished “love”.

Things proceed to become outright queasy, as the sequences depicting the eventual reunion of mother and daughter are shot more like passionate love scenes than parent/child interactions. There is some freaky, co-dependant kind of shit going on between these two we realise, altogether too late, and the result is… pretty weird, to be honest, bringing the sense of intoxicating gothic perversity which has been lurking deep beneath the surface of his story gasping, finally to the surface.

In cultural / symbolic terms, the extent to which Veda dominates the action in ‘Mildred Pierce’s second half causes the film to sometimes plays more like a prequel / precursor to the full-blooded Film Noir tradition than a fully fledged example of it. Through no fault of her own (?), Joan Crawford’s paragon of hard-working American motherhood, pursuing the American dream for all it’s worth, has given birth to a witch the boys back in Salem never dreamed of, ready to scour the underbelly of her mother’s rotten dream, devouring its losers and rejects with a relentless cruelty.

As critics Molly Haskell and Robert Polito joke in the discussion included as an extra on Criterion’s blu-ray and DVD editions of ‘Mildred Pierce’, you just know, when the cops lead Veda away to the cells at the film’s conclusion, that she’ll be running that damn prison in a couple of weeks.

And as soon as she gets out, well… she’s gonna be heading straight for the nearest Robert Mithum or Fred McMurray, and the whole terrible cycle begins a-new; evil slouching toward Malibu to be born.

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(1) Although Ranald MacDougall takes the sole on-screen credit for ‘Mildred Pierce’s script, and I’ve assigned authorship to him in this post just to make everybody’s life a little easier, authorship of the screenplay is, as with most studio era movies, highly contested.

So - deep breath. First off, Warner Bros apparently commissioned no less than eight writers to produce treatments based on Cain’s novel (including an unused draft from William Faulkner), making it unlikely that everything except MacDougall’s effort went straight in the trash. Secondly, quoth IMDB trivia; “writer Catherine Turney [who wrote a number so Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis pictures at around this time] was credited on some release prints, but chose to have her name removed.” Thirdly, producer Jack Wald (who instigated the project) has taken credit for devising the opening sequence and the murder-based flashback structure. And finally, also from an anonymous posting on IMDB: “due to script problems, some of the film was improvised by the actors together with Michael Curtiz”! So in conclusion: who the hell knows who wrote this thing.

(I will at least say though that, if that last claim is to be believed, the cast must really have been improvising at the top of their game, because, as mentioned, the dialogue in ‘Mildred Pierce’ is consistently excellent, and seems (to my mind at least) to suggest the work of a single authorial voice.)

(2) As an aside, it’s interesting to note that, despite it being filmed whilst WWII was still being fought, the script for ‘Mildred Pierce’ does not address the war, or its potential effect on the lives of the characters, in any way whatsoever. Instead, the film seems to take place during the kind of exciting economic ‘boom’ period we’d retrospectively tend to associate with the recovery of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s - a fact apparently not lost on Warner Bros, who seem to have deliberately delayed the film’s release until October 1945, when the war was safely in the rear view mirror.

(3) Seriously, it seems like you couldn’t hurl a brick in ‘40s Hollywood without hitting a few of these ‘Rebecca’-type gothic romance movies. Just off the top of my head, you’ve got ‘Dragonwyck’ (1946), ‘Secret Beyond The Door’ (1947), ‘The Spiral Staircase’ (1946), ‘Jane Eyre’ (1943), ‘My Name is Julia Ross’ (1945), ‘Gone to Earth’ (1951)…. and no doubt many others which I’ve not bothered to watch, as I don’t particularly seek these things out.

October Horrors 2019 # 3: Bad Moon (Eric Red, 1996)

So, who’s up for a totally standard ‘90s werewolf movie?

I may not normally have been, but, as any readers who dutifully memorised my 2018 Best First Viewing list may recall, I was completely blown away by Eric Red’s directorial debut ‘Cohen & Tate’ (1988), so, the fact that that guy waded into the midst of American horror’s most boring decade for some lycanthropic hi-jinx certainly piqued my interest.

Ok, so, first off - ‘Bad Moon’, which was adapted for the screen by Red from Wayne Smith’s novel ‘Thor’, isn’t really big on werewolf mythology (cinematic or otherwise), but proably the most interesting thing it does in this regard is to entirely jettison the familiar lore laid down by Curt Siodmak’s script for 1941’s ‘The Wolfman’, and to instead take its inspiration from Stuart Walker’s oft-overlooked Werewolf of London (1935).

Red signals this most obviously by featuring a clip of the latter movie, which is playing on TV in the background at one point (at breakfast time, no less – what kind of wild TV station is this?), but he also echoes Walker’s film by positing the idea of lycanthropy reaching the western world from ‘exotic’ eastern climes when a caucasian interloper has the misfortune to get himself bitten, and also by (briefly) exploring the idea that the victim may try to cure himself using science.

Unfortunately, he also replicates what most critics have deemed to be ‘Werewolf of London’s biggest flaw by short-circuiting the pathos generally expected of the werewolf narrative and instead making the cursed individual an inscrutable, misanthropic ass-hat… but, we’ll get onto that later.

For now, let it merely be noted that things do not exactly get off to a good start. During the pre-credits prologue, we are introduced to Ted (Michael Paré) and his girlfriend Marjorie (Johanna Marlowe), who appear to be intrepid gap year explorer types or something, leading an expedition comprising a bunch of heavily moustached, furry-hatted tracker/guide types who could have come straight from ‘30s Hollywood Central Casting through a back-lot recreation of what I assume to be some unspeakably remote place in Asia minor.

In the midst of a drearily non-explicit hard body sex scene which definitely did not come from ‘30s Hollywood, the couple find themselves interrupted by a bloody, hulking great yeti-like werewolf, which kills the furry-hatted men and rips through the side of their tent. Though Marjorie is torn to pieces in the ensuing melee, Ted, though severely wounded, manages to reach for a rifle and promptly blows the creature’s head off.

All of which, I’ll admit, sounds like a lot of fun on paper, but something about the execution here is just *off*. The film cuts choppily around the werewolf as if worried that the effects simply weren’t up to scratch, and, though the setting and situation is goofy and exploitative in the extreme, it all seems to have been realised in a spirit of mundane, soap opera earnestness. To be frank, for a filmmaker whose earlier work as both a writer and director relied on tightly-wound, hard-boiled drama and careful attention to detail, this is some sloppy, trashy shit right here.

We cut directly to the good old U.S. of A – somewhere in the Great Lakes area I’m assuming, in view of the stirring, National Park scenery and references to nearby Chicago. Janet (Mariel Hemingway) is a high-flying lawyer and single parent, who has recently given up her big city practice, and now lives in an isolated house on the edge of the forest with her young son Brett (Mason Gamble) and the family’s beloved dog, a German Shepherd named Thor.

Shortly after we are introduced to this family unit, Janet receives a call from her estranged brother, who is back in the area after some time away and would like to re-establish contact. It’s Ted from the prologue, of course, and he is now living in a pleasingly retro Airstream trailer parked in a picturesque lakeside beauty spot. When Janet & co visit him, he confesses to his sister that his girlfriend is “gone”, and that he’s “not doing so good”.

Thor, needless to say, doesn’t like Ted one bit, and Brett, whilst snooping around in his trailer, discovers a bunch of mysterious test tubes and lab equipment and…. a big old book about werewolves! (This being a movie of course, he naturally finds this to be frightening and suspicious, rather than just thinking, wow, what a cool book, my Uncle’s into some interesting stuff.)

Before long, the police are cordoning off the area around Ted’s trailer, investigating a spate of mysterious hiker murders apparently involving wild animals, and Ted is once again on the phone to Janet, who invites him to park his trailer out behind her house and come spend some more time with the family.

And thus, the stage is set for an epic territorial battle between Ted’s lupine alter-ego and the protective Thor, who of course is the only family member to initially grasp the nature of Ted’s affliction. Indeed, as the film goes on, Thor increasingly takes on the role of protagonist, with the dog who plays him in close-ups and character scenes (credited as ‘Primo’) delivering a loveable and emotive performance that should have swept the board at the Doggie Oscars, if only they existed.

Not that it is exactly difficult for Primo to overshadow the human cast here, it must be said. Gamble is pretty much yr average Hollywood child actor, but neither Hemingway nor Paré really seem to be able to make anything of the characters they’re playing, or to connect with us in any tangible fashion – which is an issue, given that they’re basically the only human adults in this story.

Paré does his best I suppose, but the inconsistencies in the way his character is written are maddening. In classic Paul Naschy fashion, Ted manfully attempts to keep his wolfen self in check by spending his nights handcuffed to a giant tree, but he also seems pretty careless about ensuring that he actually achieves this before nightfall, and seems dismissive of the accidental carnage which results.

Ted claims that he has moved in with his sister in the hope that, with all else having failed, good old fashioned familial love may cure him of his affliction (and he writes this in his private diary, so we know he means it). But, we never see him reaching out to his sister and nephew or showing any warmth toward them. Instead he remains sullen and withdrawn, and, in the film’s final act, he inexplicably begins acting like a full-on villainous asshole, deceiving and threatening his relatives, goading their dog into attacking him, and triumphantly pissing in the poor mutt’s dog-house to assert his territorial dominance after Thor has been taken away by the police dog handlers.

Why does he do this? Is his “wolf side” affecting his day-time, human behaviour too? Or has he always basically just been a horrible person? Despite being treated to voluminous extracts from his diary, we basically never get into this guy’s head or get a handle on what he’s up to, making it difficult for us to answer these questions, or even to gauge whether he is still fighting, or merely enabling, his own lycanthropy.

As such, it is impossible for us to empathise with him in his plight, as the script – reliant on decades of werewolf tradition – seems to demand. (Actually, Paré’s performance could have worked a lot better if the film had explored the idea that his character may just be a common-or-garden human psychopath, but with the reality of the werewolf always front and centre, thins never really go in that direction.)

In other respects meanwhile, ‘Bad Moon’ seems content to proceed upon what I can only describe as a defiantly unrealistic basis. This is, after all, a film in which an average joe who wants to find out about werewolves in 1996 is forced to resort to a massive, leather-bound grimoire, and in which a local sheriff responds to a case in which a family’s dog is alleged to have torn a man to pieces just outside their driveway not by examining the dog or seeking to gather any forensic evidence, but instead by merely having a quiet word with the owner, suggesting she “might want to think about getting a new hound”. (Small town policing at its finest.)

As if not content with this kind of silliness meanwhile, Red later also gives us a world in which a ten-year-old boy with a pair of wire-cutters can cycle to the local dog pound – whose security arrangements consist solely of a chain-link fence which can be easily scaled by a large dog – and liberate his pet in a matter of minutes.

Of course, such Argento-esque mutations of real world cause-and-effect wouldn’t bother me in the slightest in the context of an exciting, fantastical horror film, but sadly ‘Bad Moon’ struggles too in this regard, and ultimately offers little to distract our attention from its assorted inconsistencies.

Perhaps reflective of its big studio status (the film was backed, and presumably carefully overseen, by Morgan Creek, the production house whose biggest hits included ‘Last of the Mohicans’ and ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ amongst others), ‘Bad Moon’ keeps it slow and steady, carefully adhering to the middle of the road. Photography remains bright and clear, framing and lighting are conventional, and colours are muted. No hint of atmosphere or otherworldliness is allowed to accrue, despite the promise offered by the rural locations.

Likewise, Red’s script is largely devoid of the kind of symbolism or psychological / metaphysical thematics which could bring a story like this to life, and the film’s take on werewolf lore remains just as sketchy and ill-defined as the deeply unsatisfactory character relationships. (Despite Ted telling us that his transformations are not limited to full moons and basically occur every night for instance, we’re still treated to regular stock shots of the moon, which, I’m duty-bound to report, remains full for about six consecutive nights or something. Again, we’re in goofy b-movie territory here, however much the film might strive to achieve a tone of earnest, dramatic sobriety.)

Although I’m not familiar with Smith’s source novel, I can well imagine that, in the grand tradition of post-Stephen King horror doorstops, it must surely have been full of digressions and sub-plots and such, which I can in turn suppose must have been ruthlessly excised by Red in order to ensure the story adheres to his trademark narrative minimalism.

In the process of hacking the novel into shape for a ninety minute three-hander though, he seems to have lost the thread of whatever this story was actually supposed to be about, leaving its human characters feeling empty and opaque, and draining the on-screen events of any wider resonance.

In fact, a minimal amount of research reveals that the novel is actually written from the point of view of the dog, which immediately invites a far more interesting set of conflicts than is presented in the film, and also helps explain why Thor is the only character here who actually manages to establish an emotional connection with the audience. (Did I mention that the scene in which he is taken away by the dog-handlers is more harrowing than all the werewolf stuff put together?)

On the plus side, Red’s insistence on using practical effects to realise the werewolf should be commended (it must have been a hard sell in ’96), even if the transformation scenes are marred by some very dated CGI ‘warping’ effects. The film’s finale meanwhile is staged in impressively brutal and uncompromising fashion, delivering on the promise of a German Shepherd vs. werewolf vs. gun-toting mother showdown in a blood-drenched, bone-crunching manner that many studio filmmakers would have understandably bottled on (I mean, just imagine the complexities of throwing actors, animals, animatronic monsters, gore, guns and stunt-work all into the same shot, and actually making it work), reminding us, for a minute or two at least, of ‘Cohen & Tate’s similarly crazed final act.

But, it’s too little too late. Overall, ‘Bad Moon’ just doesn’t work, in spite what I assume must have been Herculean efforts on the part of its crew and director. Admittedly, it does at least make for a pretty great dog movie, and Primo is an f-ing star, so if you’re, say, a big fan of the Lassie movies who wishes they could have been a bit more edgy and hardcore, well, you’re in luck! If you’re looking for a werewolf movie (or indeed a human movie) though, this one is a bit of a bust I’m afraid.

Creepy-Crawl Cinema: One Upon a Time in… Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

1969 feels pretty impossible to escape at the moment. All these 50th anniversaries coming thick and fast – moon landing, Manson murders, Woodstock, Brian Jones, Altamont – and now, man-of-that-particular-moment Peter Fonda passing away right on schedule, an exact half century after his image was pinned up on a thousand dorm room walls. Perfect timing then, for retromancer in chief Quentin Tarantino to chime in with the celluloid equivalent of a shiny collectible plate. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got some room on the sideboard.

I.

Like many movie fans, I could frankly spend all day here trying to unpack my mixed feelings about Tarantino and his work, but for the sake of both your sanity and mine, I’ll try to keep it brief.

As sophisticated, cine-literate readers, you will no doubt have realised long ago that all of Tarantino’s films are essentially set within a fantastical movie wonderland. They are films-about-films, indulgent thrill-rides with zero real world relevance, offering pure, dumb-headed escapism.

An obvious point perhaps, but one that is worth restating at the outset, given the persistent failure of many mainstream critics to comprehend it. (Honestly, how they can continue to toil away under the misapprehension that ‘Django Unchained’ actually has something to say about slavery, or ‘Inglorious Bastards’ about the Second World War, is beyond me.)

Though I can dig this superficial, ‘fantasy-land’ approach to a certain extent, I confess its appeal has worn pretty thin for me over the years, particularly when (as in the examples above) the Big QT finds himself romping around in the midst of subject matter which would conventionally seem to demand a certain amount of depth or ideological engagement. For a while now, I’ve been hoping that one day he might finally leave the play-pen behind and make, like, you know – a proper, sincere movie of some kind?

By gently weaning Tarantino away from his films-about-films universe and moving to a painstakingly researched, naturalistic historical setting that just happens to be all about the making of those films he loves so much, ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’ (man, I HATE that ellipsis) would seem to offer him the perfect opportunity to do this, allowing him to play his meta-textural, movie nerd games, but in a more grounded / ‘realistic’ context - one in which actions may be seen to have consequences, and in which characters might finally manage to acquire a second or third dimension for themselves.

Given that he basically fails to take up this offer though, instead delivering yet another barrage of defiantly shallow, crowd-pleasing nonsense, I think we can assume by this stage that he probably never will make the jump to the quote-unquote ‘next level’.

As such, this leaves us with a few things that we are just going to have to accept if we are ever going to enjoy any Tarantino movies.

Firstly, they will mean nothing. Any thematic framework or ideological intent detected within will be purely coincidental - probably just a by-product of all the cultural tropes being re-heated and played around with.

Secondly, they will be massively indulgent, typically containing upwards of an hour of entirely irrelevant material that he shot and kept in the movie just because he could. (We may roll our eyes, but hey, if it’s good enough for Fellini…)

And, thirdly, everything in his films will feel just slightly cartoon-ish and overblown. Comedy / character scenes will drag on too long, just to make sure everyone gets the joke. Serious/violent scenes will pretty much always fall off a cliff into OTT absurdity, just because, as all exploitation fans know, crazy stuff is cool, and cool = good. Pop-cultural references and tributes meanwhile will be so shamelessly foregrounded that they might as well be accompanied by a little QT popping up in a box in the corner of the screen ala a Japanese TV show, pointing to them and guffawing.

Once we accept these certainties and abandon the possibility that things may one day be otherwise, we can hopefully loosen up a bit and appreciate the fact that, taken on its own terms, ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’ is about the most purely enjoyable three hours of cinema that the 21st century has yet been able to offer.

II.

As someone who has spent a great deal of time living and breathing the storied mythos of Hollywood ’69 over the years, I’ll confess that I was pretty psyched about seeing this movie, and that – leaving aside the caveats outlined above – I was not disappointed.

Although the film is packed with things (small details, creative decisions, wasted potential) which irked me, each of them is balanced out by two other things (character beats, clever gags and references, likable performances) which delighted me. (1)

Yes, this makes for a large number of ‘things’ in total - but such is only right and proper for a picture with this kind of gargantuan run time. If you like films with ‘things’ in them, well strap in buddy, cos you’ll certainly get your money’s worth here. The frantic pace barely ever flags across 170-odd minutes, and new stimuli comes thick n’ fast with every shot. As an immersive ‘Where’s Wally?’ puzzle for a pop-culturally literate crowd to lose themselves within, this film is hard to beat.

As such, it is ‘Once Upon a Time…’s production design which is chiefly deserving of celebration. Barbara Ling [Production Designer], John Dexter [Art Direction], Nancy Haigh [Set Decoration], Arianne Phillips [Costumes] – take a collective bow.

There are, it is safe to say, few other living filmmakers who have both the resources and the inclination to retro-fit vast swathes of Los Angeles to conform to some mystic, rose-tinted dream of late ‘60s perfection, and the results Tarantino’s team achieve in this regard are magnificent – a triumph of “world building” equal to any of this century’s CG-enhanced fantasy epics, and a hell of a lot more fun from my personal POV.

Again and again over the past forty years, we may have seen movie directors pay teary-eyed tribute to the days when Americans could roar around guilt-free in massive, pastel-coloured automobiles, chain-smoking their way into an early grave as they negotiate a neon labyrinth of cinema marquees, movie billboards and fast food outlets…. but never has this celebration been rendered quite so exuberantly, quite so convincingly, as it is here.

As a result, moments such as the panoramic shot in which Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth stands on the roof of Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio)’s Cielo Drive house to fix the TV aerial, looking down over the perfectly rendered sprawl of the Hollywood Hills and down to the streets below, are pretty darn spine-tingling.

(The cinema in which I saw the film isn’t exactly what you’d call top of the line in terms of its A/V presentation, but even so, Robert Richardson’s 35mm photography, ripped through whatever kind of cutting edge HD processing brings it to our 21st century screens, looked *incredible*.)

Yes, brothers and sisters (but mainly brothers, let’s face it), this really WAS the promised land, Quentin seems to be telling us, and for a moment or two here and there, I do not feel inclined to disbelieve him.

The fact that Tarantino grew up in L.A. and was six years old in 1969 should probably be noted here, particularly in view of ‘Once Upon a Time..’s all-consuming obsession with syndicated TV, movie posters and radio ads. As you might well imagine, the film’s dense collage of movie nerd fan service is a joy to behold, at times becoming so dominant that it almost takes the movie into quasi-documentary territory, complete with voiceover narration and clip / poster-based alternate history recaps.

And, just as inevitably, I can’t help but love this stuff. Whatever high-minded reservations I may have about Quentin’s oeuvre, all I need do is think back on the fact that Rick Dalton’s calling card action movie was “The Fourteen Fists of McClusky”, or upon hearing Al Pacino (playing Dalton’s liaison with the Italian movie industry) describe Sergio Corbucci as “…only the SECOND BEST director of Spaghetti Westerns in the world” (in outraged, what-do-you-mean-‘who’ tone of voice), or indeed upon the clip of DiCaprio appearing in an Antonio Margheriti spy movie… and all is forgiven. I might as well be sharing popcorn with the fucker on weekend movie night.

(Incidentally, based on the audience’s mocking laughter, I think many of them must have assumed Tarantino was just making all this Italian b-movie shit up for giggles. Little do they know…)

III.

More surprisingly meanwhile, the film’s other great strength is its cast. In the past, I’ve often been surprised to read critics earnestly praising the committed performances of actors in Tarantino movies, given that the director doesn’t display much more concern for in-depth characterisation than if he were Michael Winner shuffling around the cannon fodder in a ‘Death Wish’ sequel… but, such is the paradox of an exploitation filmmaker who finds himself working with the kind of talent and resources usually reserved for critically-acclaimed Oscar-winners, I suppose.

Here though, the plaudits seem more justified. After all, ‘Once Upon a Time..’ is a long film which needs to retain our attention whilst holding back violent action or pyrotechnics until the final reel, and, as fictional creations with the chutzpah to get us there, Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth certainly make for a winning pair of protagonists.

An anxious, clumsy, floundering movie star and his vastly more handsome and confident stuntman / gopher, they’re clearly conceived as an odd couple in the age-old Jeeves and Wooster mould, but their relationship is believable, their interplay with the movie’s other characters is always fun, and it’s basically easy for us to settle in and have a good time with their assorted travails and misadventures.

DiCaprio’s performance may have a touch too much huffing-and-puffing Wellsian grotesquery about it for my tastes, but this suits his character, and if nothing else, he certainly succeeds in persuading us to anchor our sympathies to a guy who is essentially pretty pathetic and dislikeable.

Here, though, is a sentence I never thought I’d find myself writing in a Breakfast in the Ruins post: it is Brad Pitt who is the real revelation here. He is not an actor I’ve ever much cared for in the past, but what can I say, he really seems to have “grown into himself” in ‘Once Upon a Time..’, if that makes any sense?

Essentially representing Tarantino’s ideal of the time-honoured Hollywood hero, Cliff Booth is our requisite humble, taciturn working class guy who looks good, does good, and always comes out on top. And, somehow, Pitt manages to embody this storied archetype whilst also ringing true as a fully-formed and immensely charming individual, absolutely nailing that crucial “yeah, what a cool guy” feeling we all love to get from our favourite movie heroes.

Of all of the far-fetched notions which film’s script asks us to accept in fact, probably the most outlandish is the idea that this guy has apparently been hanging around on TV and movie sets for decades, and no one seems to have noticed that he radiates star quality like a goddamned lighthouse.

IV.

Backing up this dynamic duo meanwhile are a wide variety of equally talented supporting players, whose work in small roles and ‘one-scene-wonder’ parts enhances the film considerably. I don’t so much mean the inevitable big name cameos (Pacino, Kurt Russell), but more the younger cast members really… which brings us neatly to the thorny issue of the film’s portrayal of the Manson Family.

Again, I have mixed feelings about this. In script terms, the Mansonites don’t really serve much of a purpose here beyond providing some generic antagonists, parachuted in to liven up the final act of what would otherwise basically be a stress-free three hour “hang out” movie. Indeed, Tarantino seems entirely unconcerned with exploring the context behind the Family’s existence and activities, instead relying entirely upon his audience’s perceived familiarity with the historical background – an approach which worked just fine for me, but which could easily cause problems in terms of the way the film plays for a wider audience.

For instance, I watched the film with a predominantly young crowd, and when, in a beautifully rendered scene early in the film, we see Cliff and Rick cruise past a group of ragged teenage girls who are scavenging from a roadside dumpster whilst singing one of Charlie’s songs, I could almost sense a 50/50 split in the audience between those who shared my shiver of recognition, and others who had no idea of the intended significance of what they were seeing.

Throughout the film, references to the cult’s lunatic beliefs or to Manson’s psychological hold over his followers are entirely avoided, leaving us in a strange situation where the only message which can drawn from the text itself is that dirty hippies are inherently evil and murderous, and that Quentin Tarantino hates ‘em.

That said however, the pivotal sequence in which Cliff visits the Spahn Ranch after picking up a fictional (I think?) Manson girl named ‘Pussycat’ (Margaret Qualley - and yes, fear not, Tarantino’s feverish obsession with trying to wring comedic value out of terms for female genitalia remains undiminished here), is wonderfully observed, feeling ‘real’ enough, and crammed with enough esoteric detail, to satisfy even the most demanding of Manson obsessives. (2)

Although Tarantino has the scary, dead-eyed hippies swarm and diminish like Romero zombies at times, what really won me over here is the fact that most of the Mansonites (barring a witchy, passive-aggressive turn from Dakota Fanning as Squeeky, and James Landry Hébert as a redneck grotesque Clem) are disarmingly naturalistic. The fact that they play it calm, friendly and not overtly crazy is to me more unsettling than any quantity of ominous, horror movie shit the film might have thrown at us.

(In view of my speculations below, it might be worth noting that the kill squad, when we share some time with them in the car on their way to Cielo Drive, basically speak very much like 21st century young people; I particularly liked Sadie/Susan (Mikey Madison) exclaiming that, “I’m sorry if I’m not familiar with every FASCIST who was on TV in the FIFTIES”.)

Likewise, the decision to concentrate during the ranch sequence on Cliff’s need to ascertain the well-being of George Spahn (a splendidly cantankerous performance from Bruce Dern – notable here I think as the only cast member who was actually on the scene in Hollywood when these events went down) proves an inspired one. It’s dramatically interesting, true to Pitt’s character, and allows the film to shine a light on an element of the Manson mythos which has largely been side-lined in the past, in factual and fictional chronicles alike.

Thinking about how Cliff immediately zeroes in on the necessity of speaking to George (because I mean, of course this 40-something stuntman would be more concerned with checking in on an old buddy than with quizzing a buncha fuckin’ hippies about the finer points of their belief system) meanwhile gets me thinking about the extent to which Tarantino essentially frames this entire film through the prism of his protagonists’ worldview. (Admittedly, it could be argued that this is not too far removed from his own worldview as another middle-aged Hollywood dude, but… let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume at least a thin line of division, shall we?).

V.

Though the surface signifiers of the counter-culture – in the form of sex, drugs and long hair - may have been ruling the roost in Movieland by 1969, Hollywood nonetheless remained a world in which women were expected to be seen and not heard, and in which non-white faces were almost literally invisible. And, this is exactly what Tarantino gives us - reality filtered through the eyes of a couple of old school, movie industry bros, with no explanation or apology offered along the way.

For better or for worse, proceeding in this manner, without even a passing nod to contemporary standards of representation, is a ballsy move on the director’s part, and as usual, certain sections of the media seem to have had a hard time even comprehending it. In particular, articles such as this one, which criticise the director for giving Margot Robbie little to do beyond looking pretty in her role as Sharon Tate, seem to be missing the point entirely.

After all, the sad fact is that the real Sharon Tate was given little to do in her tragically foreshortened life, beyond looking pretty. She was the product of a culture that allowed young women few other avenues for advancement, and her portrayal in the film merely reflects this. Of course, we can always imagine that she may have steered her life and career in a more rewarding direction had she lived, but trying to retrofit this ultimate victim of the era’s chauvinist attitudes as a super-capable 21st century heroine would have seemed questionable to say the least.

Likewise, I’m happy to defend Tarantino when it comes to the movie’s other big bone of contention, comedian Michael Moh’s portrayal of Bruce Lee as an egotistical buffoon. In a complete reversal of the Robbie/Tate issue, I have no reason to believe that this is an accurate characterisation of Bruce Lee, but at the same time there is something very refreshing about seeing such a revered, untouchable figure get the bubble of his legend so crudely ‘popped’ and – the ultimate justification for anything in a Tarantino film – the scene he shares with Pitt is loads of fun. (I particularly enjoyed the perfect take-down of the old “my fists are registered as lethal weapons” routine.) (3)

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WARNING: Spoilers follow in the next few paras. This film has some nice surprises, so please do go and see it before reading the rest of this review.

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Whilst I’m generally cool with all this stuff though, I do fear that, whether by accident or design, the director’s willingness to court controversy and blow a few gentle raspberries in the direction of quote-unquote “political correctness” may be apt to lead him into some choppy waters here, should anyone choose to disregard my First Rule of watching a Tarantino movie above, and succumb to the cardinal sin of actually thinking about the damn thing for five minutes after the lights go up.

After all, QT’s personal/professional reputation only just made it out of the whole Miramax / Weinstein debacle in one piece, so, as much as I wish I could just turn my brain off and go with the flow, it’s pretty difficult not to detect a certain, uh, emphasis in the fact that the first movie he has made since severing those connections ends with the triumphant spectacle of two middle-aged Hollywood dudes violently murdering a couple of mouthy young women who wish to forcibly disrupt their comfortable, decadent way of life… y’know what I mean…?

In real life of course, we know that those women were the brain-washed pawns of a criminal lunatic whose practice of racism and misogyny dwarfed that of any Hollywood playboy, but, given that ‘Once Upon a Time..’ pointedly fails to address this and instead merely depicts them as a bunch of damn fuckin’ hippies who won’t get off Leonardo DiCaprio’s drive…. well, let’s just say that the potential for a very troubling alternative reading of the film is certainly there, should you insist on poking it with a stick.

Personally, I’m happy to leave it be. As I stated at the outset, I’d question whether Tarantino has *ever* set out to make a film with this kind of ideological subtext, and even if he did, I’d inclined to believe that this film’s violent finale should be read as heavily tongue in cheek – an intent clearly acknowledged by the young audience at the screening I intended, as they gasped and guffawed in “I-can’t-believe-he-just-did-that” style disbelief.

Basically, I think Tarantino chose to end the film this way for the only reason he has ever done anything in his films – because it’s cool, and funny, and will leave the audience feeling good. The bad guys lose, and DIE! Movies and the swell guys who make them triumph! Brad and Leo save the ‘60s, and a brighter alternative pop cultural universe opens up for everyone.

Which, come to think of it, is the only possible conclusion for a movie named ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’. Fairy tale ending meets Western ending meets po-mo inter-textural headfuck ending. Perfect.

It may be crass and ugly and contrived and stupid… but there’s a strange kind of beauty here too. Just like Hollywood, am I right?

Boom, great ending for a review! Cut and print!

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(1) I couldn’t find a way to slot this into the main text, but the only thing that seriously annoyed me about Tarantino’s direction here was his decision to include lengthy scenes of DiCaprio’s character performing his lines in a TV western pilot,  shooting them with gliding Steadicam, beautiful diffuse lighting, Leone-esque cutting between multiple angles and other things that would obviously NOT have been present in a 1969 TV pilot.

Basically he presents these scenes exactly as if they were part of one of his *own* Westerns, having apparently not yet got that bug out of his system, which feels both disruptive to this film’s period setting and indulgent in all the worst ways. Wouldn’t it have been a lot more interesting to pull back and take a verite / behind-the-scenes kind of approach to these TV-show-within-the-film bits, giving us a look at the detail of how shows like this were made, and of what the crew were getting up to as the actors did their thing etc…? Just a thought.

(2) The set looks pretty much like an exact repro of the photos I’ve seen of the Spahn Ranch, and I loved details like the pile of dune buggy parts, the sign pointing toward the ‘chop shop’, and the inclusion of a few surly, disengaged bikers, and even a guy done up like Bobby Beausoleil, in the background. Well done, team, well done.

(3) For anyone counting the beans re: the film’s representational issues, I’m fairly sure Moh is the only non-white actor in the cast who actually even has *lines* -- but again, I’d put this down to nature of the world inhabited by our viewpoint characters, rather than any reflection of Tarantino’s personal agenda.

Deathblog: Peter Fonda (1940 – 2019)

As you might imagine, I was very sad to hear of the death of Peter Fonda this weekend.

Whilst many of the mainstream obits will likely begin and end with ‘Easy Rider’, those of us with a more, uh, diverse taste in cinema will remember Fonda fondly for the myriad of other off-beat roles he essayed through the ‘60s and ‘70s, in the course of establishing himself as what I can only describe as the pre-eminent leading man of the exploitation / counter-culture wing of the New Hollywood.

Whether playing asshole anti-heroes in ‘The Wild Angels’ and ‘Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry’, freakin’ out in ‘The Trip’, popping up as an incestuous ghost(!) in Roger Vadim’s segment of ‘Spirts of the Dead’, kicking Satanic ass with his buddy Warren Oates in Race With The Devil, or radiating affectless calm as he upsets the lives of Oates and Harry Dean Stanton in Thomas McGuane’s oddball Florida fishing black comedy ‘92 in the Shade’, Fonda has always been an actor whose performances I’ve enjoyed, and for whom I’ve always felt a great deal of warmth, irrespective of the sense of stubborn, egotistical antagonism which often seems to bleed through into his on-screen persona.

Just as important however is the fact that the two films Fonda directed in the early 1970s – the elegiac, character-driven western ‘The Hired Hand’ (which I reviewed many years ago here) and the independently-produced sci-fi oddity ‘Idaho Transfer’ (which made my best first watches list last year) – are both excellent. Far removed from anything his “Hollywood bad boy” reputation may have led the world to expect, these films are both thoughtful, humane and challenging works which stand alone within their respective genres.

If Fonda had had the inclination and resources to further his career as a director, I have little doubt that the world wouldn’t have merely been mourning the guy from ‘Easy Rider’ this weekend, but an important and distinctive voice in American cinema.

Hearing him talk about his experiences behind the camera in contemporary interviews, I’d imagine it must have simply been his frustration with the machinations of the movie-making “system” – and, no doubt, his films’ notable failure to reap commercial rewards – which led him to direct his energies elsewhere; into family, environmental activism and community work, publically lambasting both Republican and Democratic presidents in typically forthright fashion – and of course a steady stream of acting gigs that kept him busy right up until the end.

In the statements released by his family following his death, I was touched by his sister Jane’s assertion that “he went out laughing,” and by their collective request; “In honour of Peter, please raise a glass to freedom.”

Consider it done, with Bruce Langhorne’s sublime soundtrack to ‘The Hired Hand’ as accompaniment.

Noir Diary # 5 / Thoughts on... Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

Given its status as both a cornerstone of golden age Hollywood artistry and as arguably the key exemplar of the Film Noir aesthetic, I’m going to assume that most readers here will be familiar with Billy Wilder’s ‘Double Indemnity’, as released by Paramount Pictures in 1944, scripted by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, from a novella by James M. Cain.

So, rather than wasting time by proceeding with a standard review, I thought it would be more interesting to frame this piece as a list of thoughts and observations which struck me after recently re-visiting the film for the first time in many years.

1.
I first watched ‘Double Indemnity’ at the age of seventeen, as part of a module on Film Noir which formed part of my A Level in Film Studies (yes, I have an actual A Level in Film Studies, in case you were worried I’d been writing about this stuff all these years without the proper qualifications).

I recall the course tutor insisting we watch the film’s opening scene – in which the mortally wounded Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) drags himself through the offices of the Pacific All Risk Insurance Company in order to record his confession on the tape recorder belonging to claims assessor Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) - upward of a dozen times, painstakingly rewinding the VHS again and again as she encouraged us to explore the psychological significance of every vertical or horizontal line in the frame, and the placement of Neff’s figure in relation to them.

At the time, I recall finding this process extremely tedious, recognising even then that the notion that decisions taken by cinematographers, set designers, costumiers, lighting technicians on so forth on a commercial Hollywood thriller could collectively add up to some kind of grand, illuminati-style system of hidden, esoteric meanings, beyond the ken of casual viewers without A Levels in Film Studies, was… kind of far-fetched?

A few decades(!) down the line however, I can finally appreciate the value of this exercise, given the extent to which ‘Double Indemnity’ functions as a text book example of a director using visual detail as a fully developed form of alternative / parallel story-telling. This works both on the easy, conscious level of expressionistic set design (the insurance offices becoming a jagged ‘house of traps’, and the dusty Dietrichson house a seductive ‘lair of the spider’, both lousy with the ominous shadow-bars that so obviously foreshadow the prison cell lying in wait for their victims), but also through a remarkably effective brand of more fleeting, subliminal suggestion.

Check out for instance the lofty overhead crane-shot that is used to capture the dark, hunched figure we will soon identify as Neff as he exits a taxi and heads through the front doors of the insurance building. A presumably costly production decision, this tight, high angle composition functions solely to add a sense of vertiginous unease to what would otherwise be a run-of-the-mill, three second transition shot, implying the presence of a remorseless divine overseer passing judgement on this character’s earthly failings, and by extension promoting us, the viewers, from a chattering peanut gallery to a classical Greek Chorus, ready to bear witness to a tragedy.

This is all very ‘Film Theory 101’, I realise, but the depth of the film’s visual language remains remarkable, and it bears repeating. The prospect of erasing ‘Double Indemnity’ from one’s memory and watching it again for the first time, sans sound, as a kind of avant garde silent film, in order to see just how much of the story’s essential emotional drive and narrative information is communicated purely through Wilder’s relentless barrage of visual suggestion, is a fascinating one.

2.
Likewise, I’m struck by the way that both of Billy Wilder’s key noirs (the other of course being ‘Sunset Boulevard’, 1950) depict Los Angeles as a kind of glimmering, transitory, fantastical space, intoxicating yet fraught with sudden danger. It’s difficult to put into words, but there is a particular thing that is there in both these films, lending them an almost magical realist quality; a specific sliver of movieland sorcery which was left largely dormant until David Lynch harnessed it so brilliantly in ‘Mulholland Drive’, half a century later.

It can perhaps be more strongly felt in ‘Sunset..’, and also to an extent I think in Hawks’ ‘The Big Sleep’ - both films which feel so oneiric that you wouldn’t be totally surprised if the characters suddenly stumbled upon some demonic puzzlebox or started fusing/transferring their identities into each other or whatever - but the true origin of this “thing” can be found in Double Indemnity’, in spite of the cold steel logic of Cain’s “just the facts, ma’am” plotting.

It can be felt in the gleaming exterior of the Dietrichson house (the smell of honeysuckle indicating a kind of Lynchian transition between worlds), in the sunlight gliding across the dark bonnet of Neff’s car and the quasi-gothic ‘web of the spider’ décor which surrounds Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) throughout, but, perhaps even more strongly, it can be felt in the scene in which Neff dallies with the nymph-like Lola (Jean Heather), in the trees above the brightly lit Hollywood Bowl; an image which feels SO weirdly mythic and unreal, whilst at the same time depicting a location entirely real, and indeed physically reachable, to American viewers of the 1940s.

What manner of place is THIS, the world beyond Hollywood is invited to ask; what giddy, mythic tragedies are being enacted here, day by day, through long, drowsy eternities?

(It is all too easy of course to assign the origin of this “feel” to Wilder’s status as an immigrant, parachuted into the monstrous heart of Hollywood Babylon in the early 1930s – but I’ll leave the biographers and researchers to fill in the gaps on that score.)

3.
Directly related to the above –

“I told [John F. Seitz – Director of Photography] what I would like to get on the screen – you know sometimes when the sun kind of slants through the windows of those old crappy Spanish houses, and if the house is not too well kept, you see the dust in the air.”
- Billy Wilder, interview with John Allyn for ‘Literature / Film Quarterly’, February 1976

The best part of a century down the line from the classic Hollywood era, we tend to think of the kind of grand Hollywood / Beverley Hills homes exemplified by the Deitrich house in ‘Double Indemnity’ as being iconic, nigh on mystical, locations (I’m always reminded of the house in which Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid shot Meshes of the Afternoon, a year before this). So much weird, water-from-the-desert faux classical beauty, so many generations of darkest intrigue, ruined / rented lives of the rich and crazy, and gateways to the bottomless pit of L.A. Gothic.

It’s hilarious therefore to realise that, for Wilder, this place was simply “crappy” – a gaudy, nouveau-rich folly which he aimed to depict with distaste and disdain; kind of the 1940s equivalent of a modern satirist depicting the lives of myopic tech company middle-management types living in flimsy-walled new-build penthouses, perhaps? The silver drinks tray and the clouds of dust hanging in the air, so retrospectively romanticised by modern viewers, were simply meant to imply that the Dietrichsons drank too much and were too damn sloppy to look after the place!

(It’s all too easy to imagine that Wilder’s take on this must have been shared by his co-writer, the perpetually snobby Chandler, whose work ironically did so much to define the parameters of sordid L.A. mysticism. Perhaps domestic architecture and housekeeping might even have been the only subjects the two could find common ground on in their legendarily antagonistic partnership?)

4.
Although I appreciated ‘Double Indemnity’ as an enjoyable and well-made film when I saw it as a teenager, one thing that prevented me from embracing it as a favourite was the fact that the scope of its story just seemed so small.

At that point in my life, I’d recently discovered Chandler’s novels, and I suppose my ideal of a Film Noir narrative was already more of a sprawling, labyrinthine kind of a thing – the kind of story in which a sardonic, down-at-heel private eye takes us on a whistle-stop tour of sinister locales housing shady, desperate characters, with gratuitous plot convolutions, shock double-crosses and armed confrontations happening on a regular basis, and corpses messing up the rugs in hotel suites and beach houses like clockwork every ten minutes, until it doesn’t really matter WHO is responsible for all the carnage, because everybody is guilty in spirit. (Something very much like ‘The Big Sleep’, in fact.)

So - a movie about one murder, in which the central character is an insurance salesman? That just sounded like some uncool, small-fry kinda stuff to my eager teenage brain, I suppose. It was probably still a few years before I’d read ‘In Cold Blood’ and ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ (a story whose success Cain was clearly trying to replicate with this one, of course), and begin to develop an appreciation for the “zeroing in”, rather than “spreading out”, approach to crime fiction.

In fact, with both Cain and Chandler looming large on its writing credits, it’s interesting to consider ‘Double Indemnity’ as a unique meeting point between these two modes of storytelling, as represented by their quintessential exponents within the ‘hard boiled’ field.

Cain’s relentlessly logical demarcation of the background, planning, execution and psychological ramifications of a single crime of course predominates in ‘Double indemnity’, but at the same time I think we can see some of Chandler’s “spread” creeping in here too, particularly with regard to the Lola / Nino Zacchetti storyline. In fact, with Wilder acting as a kind of intermediary, I think the film eventually manages to strike a pretty perfect balance between the two approaches.

As a tightly delineated three-hander, the story moves in as straight a line as the express train which poor old Mr Dietrichson gets kicked off the back of, resulting in a film which still feels fresh and accessible to viewers over 75 years down the line, marking out its central points and conflict so plainly that they’d probably hit home even to a hypothetical viewer who had just emerged from a lifetime of total cultural isolation, having never heard of this strange place called “America”.

At the same time though, the film’s world has a wider scope and a sense of depth, with Wilder & Chandler’s screenplay incorporating a web of cultural references and allusions that Cain’s more stripped down, utilitarian writing often lacks, spreading out beyond the tunnel vision of Neff’s all-consuming anxiety and Keyes’ dogged attempts to break the case, embracing a sprawling, waking dream of Los Angeles circa 1944… presumably the same one in which the loping predators and troubled degenerates of Chandler’s novels lie in wait, just around the corner.

5. 

“Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money, and for a woman. I didn't get the money, and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?”
- Walter Neff

Although Stanwyck and Robinson have understandably claimed the acting laurels for ‘Double Indemnity’ over the years, upon returning to the film it is the man upon whose shoulders their characters dance like some cartoon good n’ evil double-act – our resident straight man / fall guy Walter Neff, as portrayed by Fred McMurray – who fascinates me the most.

Presented by the film as an easily-relatable every-man and a feckless victim of his own, work-a-day moral weakness, Neff is a figure whom the vast majority of viewers, after watching ‘Double Indemnity’ for the first time, will state that they found sympathetic - but why?

We may not expect the behaviour of our protagonist in a story like this to be admirable, but, until he launches his last-minute attempt to achieve a kind a doomed redemption in the movie’s final reel, Neff actually does very little in the film that might justify our sympathy.

Though his background and psychology are never explored in much detail, he exemplifies a very particular strain of malign blandness and calculated over-confidence which is still all too frequently encountered in the worlds of law, sales and insurance - always with a terrible (but never overtly acknowledged) loneliness and loss of self-identity at its core.

Through the first half of the movie at least, Neff has a great, whip-smart patter, dropping a ton of genuinely witty lines and very much giving the impression of being a good-natured, street-smart operator. But, all of this is exactly that – his professional patter.

Even in the death-bed confession which forms the film’s famous framing narrative – directed of course toward Keyes, the ‘father figure’ whose absolution Neff seeks – he barely manages more than a few sentences which sound genuinely sincere. Right to the end, he still has his ‘professional’ face on; he’s still looking to impress his audience, looking to make a sale.

Who really lurks behind the mask? Who knows. Neff seems, perhaps, to be a former college jock? Sporting trophies and boxing portraits adorn the walls of his otherwise rather impersonal apartment, and when he is shaken up after meeting Phyllis for the first time, he unwinds by going bowling. ON HIS OWN, you’ll note, because he doesn’t seem to have any friends outside of work. And really, what kind of 35-year-old former jock with a reasonably lucrative job and carefully manicured social skills lives alone, in a stuffy furnished apartment where no one ever seems to call..?

When Phyllis visits his apartment, Neff tries to make out that he’s living the bachelor dream (“do you prepare your own breakfasts?”, “I squeeze a grapefruit once in a while” – my god, that dialogue!), but the flat lighting and depressing, cramped-yet-empty squares of his uncomfortable-looking rooms tell a different story. If she didn’t already have him pegged as the perfect mark by this point, one look at his living quarters must have really sealed the deal.

The only points at which Neff’s mask slips come when he tries to explain the feelings that Phyllis (and later Lola) have aroused in him – at which point, he begins to sound like some kind of artificial man, experiencing emotion for the first time and unable to explain or correctly respond to it… a too-late glimpse of actual humanity that leads him, ironically, to his final, bloody grasp toward moral redemption.

We are briefed of course to see Neff as a victim – just a helpless pawn of Phyllis’s evil machinations, an ordinary joe who got himself in a jam, the same any one of us assumed-to-be-dumb-hetero-male viewers could have done. Judged purely on his actions however, he is as black-hearted a villain as has ever graced the screen.

Driven by lust for a married woman, he murders an innocent man for his money, then begins spending time with his victim’s orphaned daughter, before murdering the wife whom he professed to love in order to prevent her from ratting on him! What a callous, amoral, home-wrecking fiend! No jury in the land would ever give this fucker a break. Are we in the audience to ‘forgive’ him, simply because we’ve followed him around for a while and know he’s a likeable shmuck with a good line in banter?

It is easy in fact to imagine an alternative version of this story, told from the POV of Zacchetti or Lola perhaps, in which Walter Neff is the sinister, shadowy villain - the ‘other man’ creeping around behind the scenes, orchestrating their woes for his own fun and profit, until he finally cracks up under the weight of his own guilt.

6.
Or, for that matter, wouldn’t it be great to see a version of this story told from Phyllis Dietrichson’s point of view? In Neff’s telling – filtered through the typewriters of no less than three straight-laced male writers – Phyllis is pure evil incarnate, beckoning her victims to death and perdition as surely as any vampire or Satanic emissary. But let’s face it, no one on the face of earth has ever framed their own actions in such villainous terms. (In fact, as great as her role as the quintessential femme fatale is in pulp/genre terms, I could easily imagine a certain cadre of critics finding the film’s failure to believably develop her character to be a real deal-breaker vis-à-vis the possibly of ‘Double Indemnity’ being considered as a “serious work”, or whatever.)

So, what kind of a spin would she herself put on things? Wilder’s ‘Double Indemnity’, never gives us the chance to find out (the climactic final confrontation between the lead couple in particular comes to us direct from Neff’s self-justifying recollection, with no witnesses, and no evidence presented to support his version of events) – but, it is the possibility the film offers for these kind of ‘Rashomon’-like alternative angles that I think lends this story its crucial sense of moral ambiguity, helping the film’s ostensibly simple, open-and-shut case to remain endlessly immersive and re-watchable across the years.

7.
Although on a surface level, ‘Double Indemnity’ is refreshingly devoid of religious symbolism (though I’m sure the Film Studies boys & girls will be able to find some in there somewhere), the moral schema underlying the film is brutally remorseless in its sense of Old Testament damnation – very much in keeping with the sense of a ‘looming presence’, placing the audience in an implied position of divine judgement, which I identified above in the film’s opening scene.

It’s all about the seed of doubt (seed of lust?) which enters Neff upon his first meeting with Phyllis. From the moment he returns to his apartment after initially walking out on her and reconsiders, basically deciding “ah, what the heck”, he is done for. No forgiveness, no hope.

This kind of unswervable, predestined doom of course became a key element of the Film Noir formula for which ‘Double Indemnity’ to some extent set the template, but even so, few of the films which followed managed to hammered home their “inescapable machinations of fate” type stuff quite so ruthlessly.

Phyllis and Walter’s ‘love’ (if we may call it that) is blighted right from its inception by the corrupting force of sin. Each intimate moment they spend together feels sick with horror – and what’s worse, they KNOW it too. “It’s straight down the line”, their dialogue reminds us ad infinitum; yeah, all the way to the cemetery, we’re encouraged to ad-lib. (Hell, at least the doomed lovers in ‘Gun Crazy’ and ‘They Live By Night’ managed to have some fun before checking into the boneyard!)

The depths of moral turpitude to which Neff has sunk by the drama’s final act are truly wretched. Only by piling sin upon sin, murdering his lover in cold blood, can be try to crawl free and “redeem” himself. He may gain the last minute absolution of Edward G. Robinson, but what about the Big Man Upstairs? Not a hope in….. yeah, you got it. This is some Mortal Sin type shit right here, and we, at the end of the day, are the ones giving his floating spirit with the cartoon angel wings the “thumbs down”. Think on, the next time you feel like sewing yr wild oats, smirking young insurance men.