Dry Ice Factory

holyoutlaw and I caught the opening night double feature of the new Noir City series playing at SIFF Cinema this week. It was a full house, so it could be that Noir City is going to be harder to get tickets to in the future. I think this is the third year that it has played in Seattle. (It originates in San Francisco.)

The first film was Andre de Toth's Pitfall (1948). This has a reputation as an underrated gem, but I was mildly disappointed by it. It's the story of an bored insurance man (Dick Powell) who is feeling the seven year itch. He has a fling with sultry Lizabeth Scott, and soon his cozy suburban life is coming apart at the seams. The movie reminded me of a lot of others, but mostly it reminded me of Act of Violence (also 1948), which is another noir about the ideal life disrupted. The comparison suggests what I found disappointing about Pitfall. What it lacks that Act of Violence has in spades is that nightmarish sense of despair and fatalism that's so characteristic of noir. It's there in Pitfall too, but it seemed weaker somehow, less desperate, less poignant, less fatal. Still, it's full of interesting, well-drawn characters, including secondary ones like Scott's jittery imprisoned boyfriend and Raymond Burr as a sleazy stalker detective. Powell, whose independent production company made the film, is well cast as a nice guy who is feeling dissatisfied with his mundane life. There are some great lines. Despite my mild disappointment, I'd watch it again. I guess I'd say that having seen it, I don't think it's surprising that it isn't better-known than it is.

The second film was Larceny (1948), which I had never heard of before. The connection with Pitfall, as Noir City guru Eddie Muller pointed out in his introduction, is that William Bowers worked on the screenplays of both. Bowers doesn't get a credit on Pitfall, so maybe he was just a script doctor on that one. Here the snappy wit occasionally seen in Pitfall is in full flower. This is the story of a group of con men led by Dan Duryea and John Payne who are trying to bilk a young war widow (Joan Caulfield), using Payne as bait to her grieving loneliness. Shelley Winters plays a sort of femme fatale -- a moll in the middle of a love triangle with Duryea and Payne. She aptly describes herself as "a boa constrictor in high heels." She nearly steals the show, although Payne and Duryea are really good too. The snappy dialogue gives this one a lighter feel, but the selfish criminality of the leads isn't whitewashed. Payne is an ambiguous character with some sympathetic qualities, but he's something of an homme fatale himself. The fact that he's catnip to women is a running joke and key plot element, but there's definitely a dark edge to his casual use of this power. Another film of postwar malaise and disillusionment. One of the odder twists is when the widow comes to believe that her sainted husband had actually been unfaithful to her, and she feels momentarily liberated by it.

Johnny Farrell: I thought we agreed that women and gambling didn't mix.
Ballin Mundson: My wife does not come under the category of women, Johnny.

( Statistics show that there are more women in the world than anything else. Except insects. )

holyoutlaw and I saw this double feature on the last night of the Noir City festival at SIFF Theater. SIFF Theater, by the way, is a really nice venue, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in classic or hard-to-see contemporary films.

Alias Nick Beal was only marginally noir, as far as I'm concerned. As Eddie Muller said in his intro, it's a variation on "The Devil and Daniel Webster," in which a man -- in this case a politician -- who is trying to do good is seduced by the devil and led astray. So it's a supernatural or religious fantasy. A moral parable. The devil is played with wonderfully subtle menace by Ray Milland. The film does have a beautiful look, especially the densely foggy scenes around a wharfside bar, which reminded me of the French poetic realist movie, Port of Shadows (1938). Muller said that the negative for this film was only recently rediscovered, and that this new print had only been shown once before. The print certainly was flawless. The film is both eerie and funny, although it seemed to me to drag now and again with some predictable business. Wonderful self-aware moment at the end, when the devil (alias Nick Beal) complains, "I know what you're doing. You're trying to knock me into a morality tale!" You're soaking in it, dude!

The second feature was a B-movie called Night Editor. As Muller said, the only way to follow a heavy morality fable is with a raw slice of sleaze. Night Editor is a much more traditional noir, although a bit lacking in visual stylistics. It's about a frumpy cop who is having an affair with a sadomasochistic high society dame. They witness a murder, but he can't report it without ruining his and her marriages. She's turned on by the killing and wants to see the victim's bashed in head. Of course, in the best tradition of noir (see also The Big Clock), he's assigned to investigate the murder. William Gargan is a bit of a stiff as the lead, but Janis Carter as the kinky femme fatale is a riot. The story is perfectly lurid and leads to a wonderfully perverted climax. This isn't as well done as Ulmer's Detour (1945), but it's working similar territory. Muller said that Carter and Ann Savage competed to be the top bad girl at Columbia, and Carter won. A strong dose of nasty noir to send us out into the night streets of the big city.

I watched three movies last night, spanning thirty years and a nice variety of genres.

First up was A Modern Musketeer (1917). I'm still working my way through the collection of early Douglas Fairbanks films put out by Flicker Alley, and this is the film that gave the set its title. It's based on the story, "D'Artagnan of Kansas," and features Fairbanks as a typical (for this part of his career) rambunctious day-dreamer who was born in a cyclone (a hilarious sequence) to a mother who read Dumas during her pregnancy. He's too restless for the small Kansas town he grew up in and heads west. Wild West adventures around the Grand Canyon ensue. The movie opens with a dream sequence in which Fairbanks plays D'Artagnan, testing out the possibilities of his playing in costume adventures, which would eventually become his forte. This movie still has a lot of comedy in it, and Fairbanks is able to move between slapstick and amazing physical stunts with apparent ease. The director was Allan Dwan, who would direct a couple of his big budget smash hits in the '20s and who said they worked hard to make Fairbanks' stunts look effortless. One of the interesting things about this Flicker Alley set is that you can feel the Hollywood production machine growing in sophistication from movie to movie. It's also interesting that the Fairbanks character is often, as here, kind of an asshole. There's a bit of the ugly American beneath that cheerful, energetic, heroic surface.

Next up was Sign of the Cross (1932). 1932 was the greatest year in movies, and I continue my exploration of the riches. This one's by Cecil B. DeMille, and boy, hm, what can I say? This is a story set in Nero's Rome. Nero's top commander, Marcus Superbus (not to be confused with Atrios' Supertrain) falls in love with a Christian woman while resisting the overtures of the Empress Poppaea. DeMille is famous for making lurid morality tales, and this falls squarely in that contradictory category. 1932 was in the middle of the pre-Code era, so the lurid parts are pretty racy, perhaps most famously Claudette Colbert just barely up to her nipples in donkey milk, although honestly, all of the Roman women might as well be wandering around naked for as little as their clothes cover them. The film's stirring climax is a day at the coliseum in which depraved Romans (cf. the movie audience) avidly watch all manner of horrific killing, including the feeding of Christians to lions. The martyrdom of the Christians is played at the highest melodramatic pitch possible. Their heroism is their willingness to die for their beliefs, only adding to the overall morbidity of the movie. What's interesting is that the Romans get no comeuppance for their depravity, unlike in, say, The Last Days of Pompeii. One wrong note for me was Frederic March as Marcus. He seemed too wimpy for the role, in contrast to his great performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the year before. Charles Laughton chews the scenery as the effete Nero, with a very funny Roman nose glued on. This movie is a hoot, and I kept imagining that the cast of depraved actors and actresses were probably on the side of the Romans throughout.

Finally I watched They Live by Night (1948). This is categorized as a film noir, although except for the fatalism it didn't feel all that noirish to me. It's a story of lovers on the lam, directed by Nicholas Ray. It's visually striking, and there was something about the story that kept triggering unexpected feelings in me. I'm not actually sure what that's about. I guess I have a strong gut feeling that all romance is doomed. Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell play young hicks with no experience of the world (he's been in prison since he was sixteen) who fall in love and try to find a niche where he can go straight. Their naivety is heart-breaking, perhaps a little bit too much so, I dunno. There's definitely a melodramatic feel to it, but also, like the other Nicholas Ray movies from this era, a very personal feel that's strange in a genre movie. It feels both incredibly realistic and incredibly stagy and artificial. It's interesting to compare it to Gun Crazy (1950), which is a very similar story and yet miles different because the woman in the couple is an aggressive femme fatale who takes part in the crimes. I've got to say that on a first viewing, I prefer Gun Crazy to this one, although I also got the feeling that Gun Crazy was riffing off this movie, particularly in some of the shots from the backseat of the car. Anyway, this is another movie that I've wanted to see for years, and I'm glad to have caught up with it. Now could somebody release Ray's The Lusty Men (1952) on DVD? That's one I've wanted to see (without knowing its title at first) since I saw a clip of it in Wim Wenders bizarre memorial to Ray, Lightning Over Water, at the Neptune over twenty years ago.

In the wake of the discussion of film noir here last weekend, I decided to watch all three versions of The Maltese Falcon on the special edition DVD that Warner Bros released a couple of years ago. I had seen the 1941 version with Bogart at least a couple of times before, including on the big screen at least once at a repertory theater in the days before home video, but I hadn't seen the other two.

The 1931 version, starring Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez, is very similar to the 1941 version scriptwise. Since it's a pre-Code movie, Sam Spade is allowed to be more of a womanizing heel than he is in the later version, and there's a lot more overt sexuality in general. It's closer to the novel in these aspects. All the same, there's a tacked-on ending in which Spade visits Ms. Wonderly in the jail and reveals he's taken a new job that is completely unbelievable and out-of-character for him. The pace of the movie isn't as sharp as the 1941 version, but otherwise it's a very entertaining interpretation in its own right, aside from that ending. Fascinating to see how two very similar scripts can be treated so differently. Also fascinating to see an early film interpretation of the hard-boiled private detective, which hadn't become a convention yet.

The 1936 version is called Satan Met a Lady, and it changes all the names and turns the falcon maguffin into the horn of Roland. The tone of this version is comedic, almost farcical. Unfortunately, the tone is also fairly uneven, as are some of the performances, most importantly that of Warren William as Ted Shayne, the Sam Spade character. Nonetheless, there are some lines of dialogue from this version that were used in the 1941 version too, and despite the numerous changes, many of the same story details surface over the short course (72 minutes) of the film. You also get a bottle-blonde Bette Davis, and a nice mugging performance by Alison Skipworth as a female version of the Casper Gutman character. The quality of the image for this movie is the worst of the three on the DVD, which is a shame, because one of the other things it shares with the 1941 version is cinematography by the great Arthur Edeson.

Coming to the 1941 version after seeing these earlier versions, and several years and hundreds of movies since the last time I saw it, the thing that struck me the most was Edeson's visual style. Edeson, although an American, was one of the figures who developed the German expressionist style into film noir style, via gothic horror. The 1926 old dark house picture, The Bat (an influence on the comicbook Batman), shows him using the expressionist style, which he then took into an almost abstract direction in James Whale's Old Dark House (1932). He also photographed Whale's Frankenstein (1931), which isn't quite as dark but features a lot of low angle shots and low key lighting. By the time he got to The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca (1942), he had created an incredibly sophisticated look -- "painting with light," in John Alton's phrase. One thing I noticed in The Maltese Falcon is that he would take lattices of light produced by venetian blinds and use them as abstract ornaments completely removed from their source, including one that is used to frame Spade's head as he's talking to somebody offscreen with nary a window in sight. In scenes in darkened rooms, Edeson manages to outline figures in different gradations of faint light that allow us to make out where everyone and everything is in relation to each other, while reducing them to dark featureless shapes at the same time.

Many of the shots are looking up, as in the userpic on this post, so that figures are distorted and looming. While the tone of this movie is relatively tame compared to the more psychological noirs, there's an effective undercurrent of tension and uncertainty. I had never liked Mary Astor's performance as the femme fatale before, but now that I've seen some of her other movies (including Preston Sturges' comedy, Palm Beach Story from the same year, in which she plays a completely different character), I saw it with new eyes this time. I think part of what put me off the performance before is simply that she's playing a very unlikeable character (as is everybody else). What's impressive is that she's playing a character so deceptive that she doesn't even know herself. There's no identity there, no core, just a succession of extemporized masks. Astor is playing a chameleon, and she's so good at it that, unlike Bogart's mannered interpretation of Spade (very fitting for this highly stylized movie), you don't notice what she's doing.

This is also the first time I've looked at the story as an artifact of the pulps. The backstory of the falcon as an object of treasure could have come from an Orientalist adventure, perhaps one of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories or a planetary romance by Leigh Brackett, where the falcon would be an ancient superscientific device that legend says allowed personality transfers. The cast of grotesques chasing the falcon are familiar pulp characters too. It was terrific, by the way, to see Dwight Frye's nearly wordless psychotic gunsel, Wilmer, in the 1931 version. I've always been a big fan of Elisha Cook Jr's performance in that role in the 1941 version -- thus the userpic -- but Dwight Frye, who is familiar from Universal horror films such as Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein, is perfect too. Never imagined that Wilmer had so much in common with Renfield!

This tense film noir thriller is a little gem. It takes an apparently good man living out the American dream with his beautiful wife and child and gradually reveals the sickening act of betrayal he committed in a Nazi prison camp in WWII, turning our sympathies against him. It takes an apparent monster (played by the great Robert Ryan) chasing through the shadows with relentless, murderous purpose and gradually reveals his human torment. The cast is uniformly excellent, with a young Janet Leigh playing the naive, surprisingly resilient wife. But the standout performance, as many have said, is by Mary Astor as a hooker (we are led to assume) who has seen her better days. Her portrayal of this broken, used-up woman scraping by on the underbelly of the big city is utterly astonishing.

Having just seen her hard, butch performance in Desert Fury, I've definitely had my eyes opened about Mary Astor. I've seen a number of her films, going back to Red Dust and The Kennel Murder Case in the early '30s, when she played desirable beauties, and of course her signature film noir role as the treacherous femme fatale in The Maltese Falcon. None of these performances particularly impressed me, but between these two movies and her ditzy-but-knowing turn in the Preston Sturges comedy, The Palm Beach Story, I'm thinking she was actually pretty damned good. Amazingly versatile, really. I didn't recognize her at first in Act of Violence, she had so transformed her appearance, as though her face had been worn away by time and abuse.

Anyway, Act of Violence is well worth checking out for it's portrait of post-war American anxiety. It was directed by Fred Zinnemann -- another European emigre working in Hollywood. The emigre directors seemed to have the clearest view of the ambiguity of the American dream, perhaps because they understood better the nightmare of history underlying all dreams. "History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake" could be the motto of this film. And to quote the title of another film noir, I wake up screaming.

Well, yesterday was much like last weekend: hauling water to the cedar tree and weeding the traffic circle -- in the HOT sun -- watering wilted plants around the yard, picking raspberries, cleaning the bathroom, and working on wedding words. The neighbor loaned me a useful book in the latter cause: Sacred Threshold - Rituals and Readings for a Wedding with Spirit by Gertrud Mueller Nelson & Christopher Witt. Helped me get a sense of the traditional structure of the ritual. In the evening, carl and Scott stopped by on the way to Vanguard, and carl and I went over the latest proof of Chunga. I watched a couple of episodes of FLCL after they left, and then to bed, weary from the more than usual physical labor for me.

Today I'm seeing the Technicolor noir Desert Fury at the Noir City festival at the SIFF Theater with Craig and AP. One of the commenters on IMDb describes the film this way: 'Back in the forties, when movies touched on matters not yet admissible in "polite" society, they resorted to codes which supposedly floated over the heads of most of the audience while alerting those in the know to just what was up. Probably no film of the decade was so freighted with innuendo as the oddly obscure Desert Fury, set in a small gambling oasis called Chuckawalla somewhere in the California desert. Proprietress of the Purple Sage saloon and casino is the astonishing Mary Astor, in slacks and sporting a cigarette holder; into town drives her handful-of-a-daughter, Lizabeth Scott, looking, in Technicolor, like 20-million bucks. But listen to the dialogue between them, which suggests an older Lesbian and her young, restless companion (one can only wonder if A.I. Bezzerides' original script made this relationship explicit). Even more blatant are John Hodiak as a gangster and Wendell Corey as his insanely jealous torpedo. Add Burt Lancaster as the town sheriff, stir, and sit back. Both Lancaster and (surprisingly) Hodiak fall for Scott. It seems, however, that Hodiak not only has a past with Astor, but had a wife who died under suspicious circumstances. The desert sun heats these ingredients up to a hard boil, with face-slappings aplenty and empurpled exchanges. Don't pass up this hothouse melodrama, chock full of creepily exotic blooms, if it comes your way; it's a remarkable movie.'

Wheeeee! After that, the pubmeet, Fans with Bheers.

Sometimes the old Hollywood studio system was able to produce movies that are shockingly weird or perverse, and this low-key film noir directed by Otto Preminger is certainly a good example. As with Morocco (1930) and Peter Ibbetson (1934), the ending was so over the top that I found myself laughing uncontrollably as it faded to black. The reaction was simultaneously WTF?! and Of course! Then I had to watch the whole thing again (with the commentary by Eddie Muller) to digest it a bit better.

Preminger is definitely playing with the Hollywood conventions in this one, which is in many ways a re-examination of the premises of the noir classic, Out of the Past (1947). Robert Mitchum plays the same cool, manly man who seems to be in control but is actually completely in over his head, torn between the homey comforts of the good blonde girl (who in this movie actually has some spine and vinegar, unlike in Out of the Past) and the allure (some of it financial) of the gorgeous, crazy, murderous dark-haired femme fatale (played by the angel-faced Jean Simmons). One of the deep ironies of the story that Muller points out is that the femme fatale here is the only one who really exhibits a conscience. Another sign that Preminger is almost teasing the conventions comes in the courtroom scene, where the pompous district attorney (played by Mr. Magoo, Jim Backus) and the oily defense attorney both have the story behind the crime utterly wrong, one intentionally and the other not. There is no truth here. Hard to believe that the Production Code let that little jab at the justice system get by. Perhaps the enforcers of the Code were more focused on making sure that crime doesn't pay, but, man, the way it doesn't pay in this movie is a huge pay-off in the ending.

Muller says that at some point in the '70s Godard listed this movie as one of the top ten Hollywood films of the sound era. He probably liked the sly subversiveness, or perhaps the almost total formal control that Preminger shows over how to structure a cinematic narrative. Muller keeps emphasizing how efficient the story-telling is. It slips between the ribs with a smooth, painless precision. Then while you're wondering where the blood's coming from, the pole-axe hits you. Brilliant!

I did something last night that I've never done before: I watched the new Region 1 DVD of Nicholas Ray's 1952 film noir, On Dangerous Ground, and then I immediately watched the whole thing again with the commentary by Glenn Erickson (a.k.a. DVD Savant). All right, all right, of course I've never done it with this particular DVD before, but I've never done it with any DVD before. It helped that the movie is only 82 minutes long, but still, it was a butt-crushing three-hour marathon.

It's not a great movie, but it is a complex and fascinating one. Robert Ryan plays a violent cop who is sent up-country to solve a murder and to cool his heels, and there he meets a blind woman played by Ida Lupino, who is the sister of the prime suspect. The first half is a tough, dark urban crime film, and the second half, in an enormous and sudden shift, is a desperate, twisty chase across a frozen rural landscape, with melodramatic rest stops in the fire-warmed darkness of the house where Lupino lives by herself. It is about isolation and loneliness (and alienation and violence) in both the city and the country, about coping with loneliness, and -- very un-noir-like -- about transformation through love. The combination of crime thriller and romantic melodrama isn't always a good fit, but the characters and plot twists (and the soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann) are so interesting that it held my attention tightly. (Erickson's commentary is also full of interesting details about how the movie was recut and restructured over the course of a year and a half after it was shot in 1950 -- which may be the reason the film feels a bit ramshackle at times.)

But my random observation in all this is that Robert Ryan should have played the cop in Fritz Lang's 1953 noir, The Big Heat. I've never bought Glenn Ford as the vengeful cop who tears into the underbelly of the underworld when his wife is murdered. He just doesn't have that dangerous, violent edge to him. Robert Ryan has it in spades; there is something genuinely threatening about him (which is why he played villains so often), and yet he can also play it tender. His performance in On Dangerous Ground is riveting. Or at least I don't think it's all Herrmann's aching, moody score!