Nightmare Alley

(1947) director Edmound Goulding
viewed: 09/10/2011

Nightmare Alley is a film noir set in the milieu of the sideshow, phony mentalists, and other grifters.  Based upon the excellent 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, it’s unique in its setting and characters in the noir realm.  But unlike Tod Browning’s classic pre-code film, Freaks (1932), Nightmare Alley, the film, though edgy for its time in many ways, goes nowhere near the outre weirdness of the sideshow depicted in that film, nor the more perverse, Freudian depths of the novel.  Not only does it have the “Hollywood ending” tacked lamely on, but it softens many of the edgier elements of the story, as one would typically expect.

It’s one of the anticipated short-comings of reading a good book first and then seeing the film.  But taking that into account, it’s still a pretty good movie.

Tyrone Power stars as Stanton Carlisle, the young man in the sideshow who yearns to become a mentalist (mind-reader), especially after learning the tricks of the trade from the expert Zeena (Joan Blondell) and her alcoholic wreck of a husband.   They had once been big time, and Carlisle likes the looks of that, as well of the attractive Zeena, who he starts seeing on the side.  In the book, he intentionally gives the DT-enthralled husband rubbing alcohol to drink, hoping to knock him out so that he can tryst with Zeena.  In the film, it’s an accidental mix-up, which leads to the husband’s death.  Still it hangs over Carlisle internally.

He starts learning Zeena’s coded system for signaling a blindfolded mentalist the cues he needs to “read minds” and “tell the future” but he decides to make off with the young, gorgeous, good-hearted Molly (Coleen Gray) and make it big.

The novel is an excellent crime story, much more lurid, dark, deeply Freudian, cynical of religion, magic, everything.  And the book has the killer ending, pulling the story full-circle from its beginning introduction of “the geek”.  I was actually surprised that the film had that final scene, poignant as it is.  Only the film has a bit more, finalizing a hopeful redemption, the classic “Hollywood ending”.  Still, the film does introduce “the geek”, the man so low in life so inveterate an alcoholic, that he bites the heads off chickens is only a breath away from death or the madhouse.

And the film does have a darkness, perhaps even great perversity.  It doesn’t go as far as the book.  How could it in 1947?  Maybe in 1931.  Still, it’s a good noir.   I do recommend it.  But I recommend the novel even more so.

Strange Illusion

(1945) director Edgar G. Ulmer
viewed: 08/09/2011

After revisiting director Edgar G. Ulmer’s no budget noir masterpiece, Detour (1945), I queued up another noir of his, released the same year, the interesting-sounding, Strange Illusion.

Ulmer, who started out as a set designer for Fritz Lang, among others, made it to Hollywood, but rarely worked with a real budget.  Strange Illusion is similarly bare-bones, but also more interesting than a lot of movies made with higher budgets.

It’s the story of a young collegian, Jimmy, who revisits his home after his father’s sudden death in a mysterious car accident.  He has a vision of a dark figure trying to step into the picture and suspects that his father’s death may have been murder.  The film channels Hamlet and is rife with Freudian themes, especially Oedipal lust.  For his mother is being pursued by a gentleman, and Jimmy finds himself in a mental institution, trapped by a sinister psychiatrist.

For its low budget, the dream sequences, including the scene of the car accident, have real flair.  It doesn’t have the mean, lean perfection nor significant performances to rival the much richer Detour.  But it is an interesting film, in no small part to its low budget and high capabilities of Edgar Ulmer.  I’m queueing up more of his films, as I type.  So to speak.

The Lady in the Lake

(1947) director Robert Montgomery
viewed: 10/05/10

A film noir adapted for the screen from a novel by Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake stands out as unique due to an inventive, if not particularly effective, cinematic technique, shooting the film as if through the eyes of the main character, private detective Philip Marlowe.

Actually, star and director Robert Montgomery, as Marlowe, addresses the audience directly at the beginning to introduce the concept, posing to the viewers, to see if they can solve the murder based on just the same things that he sees.  Outside of these brief moments of addressing the audience directly, Montgomery is only caught in glimpses in mirrors, usually in very convoluted set-ups to get him on screen at all. 

The technique rules the film considerably, limiting it, giving it the strange situation of the main female lead, Audrey Totter, addressing herself to the camera as if it was Marlowe himself, which she does pretty well, all things considered. 

Interestingly, later in 1947, another film noir would take this approach for the beginning of its story.  In Dark Passage, adapted from a David Goodis novel and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the film opens through the eyes of Bogart’s character, who undergoes an underground facial reconstruction surgery to “give him a new face”, so the idea that you don’t see his face in the beginning is so that Bogart’s distinctive voice let’s you know it’s him but you don’t have to see another actor playing the role before the surgery.

In all, the story is typical detective fare, nothing utterly notable.  It’s not a bad film, more of a quirk.  An attempt at something novel, but not every strange technique is always successful.

Detour

(1945) director Edgar G. Ulmer
viewed: 09/23/10

Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour is one of the best film noir ever made.  Not just my opinion, but one that is widely shared.  But unlike some of the other finest noir films, Detour was filmed on the lowest of budgets, often referred to as “poverty row” pictures, and both because of and despite its limited and cheap constructs, is a bleak and vivid a noir film as there is ever made.  I had seen Detour some years ago and it had stuck with me. 

Tom Neal is a piano playing schmoe in New York whose girl heads off to California to try to make it big.  After their initial split, he decides to follow her out there so that they can get married.  As Neal hitchhikes his way across the country, he gets a ride with a garrolous fellow who is heading all the way to Los Angeles.  But when Neal stops the car to rest and tries to rouse the car’s owner, the owner falls out of the car and hits his head, dying instantly.  Sure that he’s going to be blamed for killing the man, Neal does the only thing he can think of, steals the man’s car, clothes, and identity, with the plan of ditching the car once he makes LA.

The film is narrated by Neal in voiceover, a reflection on what has brought him to be where he is, haunted and cast in shadow and weird lighting at some diner in Bakersfield.  But the illogic of his choices start to call into question the verity of his storyline.  No one will believe him because it’s so unbelievable that he didn’t kill the man.  Maybe we don’t even believe him.

As Neal hits the road again for LA, he picks up another hitchhiker, a young woman, Patricia Savage.  Only it turns out that Neal had ridden with the original owner of the car and immediately sizes up the situation and takes control, lest she report Neal to the cops.  She’s as hard-boiled as they come and gets him to head to LA with her in tow, pretending to be the dead man and his wife.

Savage is savage, an emotional rollercoaster of a broad, ten thousand times more wise than Neal, biting his head off and bullying him, while drinking and being vicious.  Savage’s performance is really something else, suggesting so much, while veering between viciousness and vulnerability.  Neal is just a sap, with the face of an injured puppy dog, but also the mug of the Depression and depression.

Like so many film noir protagonists/lovers, they are in a spiralling dance of death.  And the dramatic event, the twist in the story that makes it so weird and lurid, what pushes them both over the edge, is just a strange and clever plot device. 

For a film that is not even 70 minutes long, made on the way cheap, starring an actor and actress for whom this was their biggest claim to fame, what is created is nothing short of grand cinema magic.   The film has a ruthless air of depression and doom, but is vibrant and clever. 

And interestingly, this film, which was selected by the United States National Film Registry for preservation (showing a keen and selective eye for this diamond in the rough), is part of the public domain.  Available on DVD in several formats as a result, it is also available for free download on the web from a number of sites.  And it is just plain one of the great films out there.

Nightfall

(1957) director Jacques Tourneur
viewed: 07/14/10

Just released as part of a Columbia Pictures Film Noir collection, this 1957 film had two key points of interest going for me.  First, a film noir directed by one of my favorite directors, Jacques Tourneur (Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Night of the Demon (1947)).  And second, it’s adapted from a novel by a great crime fiction writer David Goodis (Dark Passage (1947), Shoot the Piano Player (1960)).

Made the same year as Night of the Demon, sadly however, the film isn’t anywhere along the lines as striking, startling, or incredible.  Rather, it’s a mediocre noir, actually suffering from a pretty illogical story.  Aldo Ray is a veteran who is on the run from some bank robbers, bank robbers from whom he’d stolen their stash sort of accidentally, when they killed his friend and tried to frame him for the murder.  And the loot is lost in a national park in Wyoming which has been snowed over for months and so unattainable by anyone.

Aldo Ray is an odd lead, with his football lineman build and his raspy voice.  He doesn’t seem like the most natural of actors.  Starring alongside Anne Bancroft, who is quite striking as the model that he meets in a bar and falls in love with, he holds his own okay.  Brian Keith is the “good” bad guy, while Rudy Bond plays the juicier villain role, the unpredictible and violent “Red”.  Character actor James Gregory has a good turn as an insurance investigator.

The film opens with its strongest visuals, the oncoming night, with the theme song “Nightfall” crooned over the soundtrack, with the neon lights popping on, giving Ray a sense of paranoia (as he is hiding out).  The film flashes back for its narrative, not the strongest of narrative styles, and not the most effective.  The story goes back to Wyoming landscapes, snow-covered and broadly contrasting to the city, yet the point of the contrast doesn’t seem particularly employed.

Kind of disappointing for me.  Tourneur has an excellent film noir to his name, 1947′s Out of the Past, which is one of the greats of the style.  But this film does fall toward the end of the period.  It’s not a fine example of anything really.  Though I’ve read some positive things about it, for me, it doesn’t feel entirely too memorable.  Oddly enough, I don’t recall much about the novel either, though I’m sure that I read it some years ago.

Night and the City

(1950) dir. Jules Dassin
viewed: 03/15/10

Better late than never, I am discovering the work of director Jules Dassin.  It’s not like it’s a secret discovery.  The fact that most of his films that are available on DVD are Criterion Collection editions tells you pretty safely that he’s solid stuff.  Over the past year or so, I’ve watched Rififi (1955) (my favorite) and Brute Force (1947) and now his 1950 film, Night and the City, and all I can say is I can’t wait to watch the next one.

Dassin was one of the filmmakers who was chased out of Hollywood during the Red Scare and blacklisted.  Night and the City was filmed on location in London, and essentially was his last film for the Hollywood system that stymied him.  Even though his name has such a European sound to it, he’s American, from New York and he made serious contributions to the film noir aesthetic and period crime picture.

Night and the City stars the fantastic Richard Widmark as the poor sap who strives so hard but just doesn’t have what it takes to make it big, only what it takes to make a big mess.  He gets involved in a rather convoluted scheme to “take over professional wrestling in London”, aiming to shaft the current promotor, played by a young Herbert Lom.  He teams up with a legendary Greek wrestler and his protoge and plans to run roughshod over Lom, protected because the honorable Greek legend is Lom’s semi-estranged father.

It’s kind of confusing to explain, and there is this other angle, borrowing money from the wife of the bar owner that he works for, she thinking they’ve got a “thing”.  And then her husband suspects and puts the bite on Widmark.  Anyways, it’s a world of duplicitous people and honest people, and sometimes, quite often, each person is both, honest and duplicitious.

The cinematography is amazing, using the city streets of London and the shadowy offices and apartments of the characters as cages for these would be prisoners.  Or maybe they are all just prisoners of their own situations.  When Widmark is running from the whole city, he is chased across a construction site and climbs the stairs to hide, but has to attack to survive.  The scene is brilliantly filmed, moving the camera from shot to shot and catching Widmark’s harried face in varying angles of sweat and fear.

It’s excellent stuff.