Il Cittadino si rebella/ Street Law (Enzo. G. Castellari, 1974).

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Italian Poliziotteschi films of the 70s are a protest against existing conditions of existence. The literal translation of Il cittradino si rebella is A CITIZEN REBELS. The government is corrupt, the police is corrupt, the judges are corrupt; the bourgeois benefit from the system and are mostly inured from its worst effects. The average person makes do, bends the law, tries to scratch a living from left-over scraps. The top rung of professional criminals are ruthless, the lower ranks gleefully violent: causing suffering is their joy. It’s very different from what we see in American cinema of this period, even in the paranoid conspiracy thrillers. STREET LAW, the English title, is something that might well describe an American or even British crime film of this period. In America, the street does have its own laws, a separate, parallel world, but institutions are to be protected; the system might be tainted in this or that part but recoverable as a system. In the French policier of this period the institutions are upheld or left out of the narratives altogether and the criminals are excellent professionals who are too bored or too greedy to do anything else with their lives (The Melville films, the Verneuil films, Alain Delon’s policiers from this period). In Spain, the crime film won’t really begin to unfurl until Franco was dead and buried, even though some of these Italian ones are Spanish co-productions. In Italy, street crime is a given…..but a citizen rebels! The Poliziotteschi really are special.

 

In IL CITTADINO SI REBELLA, Franco Nero goes to put his hard-earned money in the bank, gets caught in a hold-up, and is so frustrated by institutional responses that he takes the law into his own hand, aping the American vigilante film (DEATH WISH) but doing something special with it. A characteristic of these films is that they are shot in location, in this case the port-town of Genoa, which not only brings grit but a historical context that exceeds the needs of the narrative proper. Reality intrudes, whether the film chases it or not. There are lots of shoot-ups, often in slow-motion, people getting run-over by cars, some car chases, very little characterisation, and lots of visual invention. The influence of Peckinpah is everywhere. Barbara Bach doesn’t have much to do but look beautiful, which she does.

José Arroyo

High Crime/ La polizia incrimina la legge assolve (Enzo G. Castellari, 1973)

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A stylish, pulpy crime film; clearly influenced by BULLIT (Peter Yates, 1968) and THE FRENCH CONNECTION (William Friedkin, 1971) one of the several enticing collaborations between Enzo Castellari and Franco Nero (Keoma) , then one of the most popular stars and Europe, here handsome as always but with one of the worst dye jobs in the history of cinema.

The film co-stars Fernando Rey as a former drug kingpin, underlining the connection to FRENCH CONNECTION, now living out a retirement in luxury, devoting his attention to his hot-house, and the beautiful flowers that surround him adding to the colour and heat, evoking luxury and a certain corruption or degradation that recalls THE BIG SLEEP (Howard Hawks, 1946).

The film has brilliantly playful compositions that are always a pleasure to look at:

There’s a brilliant word-less opening, a tour de force of speed, chase, operatic use of zooms, brilliantly edited to convey excitement in motion:

The chase scenes, which might seem slow  and clunky in the age of super-fast editing and CGI, seems to me more exciting than practically anything currently on-screen:

The images are elegantly composed to serve speed but usually also in a social context, here the crowd, a strike, as a place for the criminal to hide. Social context is interestingly deployed but  both visible in the films and transformed into something else, real social problems here a background to action/spectacle:

The mise-en-scène is dazzling. Note here the frames within frames of every composition; then the way the reflection on water is itself used as a framed plane of action; and lastly, the use of colour to the focus the eye once the body falls into the water. I find it brilliant.

Another trans in Poliziotteschi:

Typical Castellari

A great popular success credited with popularising the poliziotteschi genre. Perhaps not a great work of art but certainly the work of an extraordinarily skilled director.

 

José Arroyo

GANG WAR IN MILAN / MILANO ROVENTE (Umbeto Lenzi, 1973)

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Umberto Lenzi’s GANG WAR IN MILAN / MILANO ROVENTE is neither as visually exciting as the Enzo G. Castellari Poliziotteschis; nor as socially conscious and emotionally affecting as the Damiano Damianis. It is, however, exciting pulp; beautifully plotted, crudely characterised, efficient, accessible, with lots of sex and gore. It’s about a Sicilian immigrant, Salvatore Cangemi (Antonio Sabàto) who’s taken over the sex industry in Milan. A French gangster intrudes to try to sell heroin through Cangemi’s prostitution ring. A gang war ensues and an American gangster is brought in to help.

I enjoyed it all thoroughly until a moment where Cangemi and his thugs catch the French men in bed with a woman who turns out to be a man which makes clear the characters’ (and the film’s?) hierarchies of disgust: Murderers, pimps, drug dealers can all look down on women, who all look down on gays, and a trans is abouts as low as you can get. It’s a scene that made me wonder about the extent of my own internalised misogyny. Why was it only at that point that the film became a problem for me? Are we only troubled by those things that touch close to home? Can a film with these levels of misogyny and homophobia be enjoyable – can one separate them from other elements of the film? –…and which ones and to whom?

José Arroyo

THE ROAD TO SHAME (Des femmes disparaissent, 1959);

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Édouard Molinaro’s first three films — BACK TO THE WALL (Le Dos au mur, 1958); THE ROAD TO SHAME (Des femmes disparaissent, 1959); and WITNESS IN THE CITY (Un témoin dans le ville, 1959) are all noirs, all interesting, all at best only mildly successful when first released, all still in circulation now, and with good reason. Molinaro came up with the Nouvelle Vague but, like Claude Sautet, who was his assistant, was not of it. Moreover the filmmakers and types of criticism that together constructed the idea of the ‘Nouvelle Vague’ were much more enthusiastic about low-budget American crime films than their own indigenous variant, so it would take a while for Molinaro to find a place in the panorama of French cinema, and then only as the director of comedies à la Française (Louis de Funès films) and stage adaptations (La Cage aux folles). I’m glad he’s now receiving recognition for these early films.

The Road to Shame (Des femmes disparaissent, 1959) is about young women promised opportunities as models and actresses, who then get trafficked abroad as prostitutes. Robert Hossein plays Pierre Rossi, a young man so intensely in love with his childhood sweetheart (Estella Blain) that he follows her to this party she insists on going to without him, and thus saves her and breaks up the ring – a facile reading might claim that the message seems to be that a stalker has his uses. A visually inventive film, with a brooding Hossein, evoking a monomaniacal combination of love and lust, impactfully evoked by the patterned shots of his walking to the camera and into close-ups that are then held for a while. In his autobiography Molinaro still delights in his first view of the multi-level set constructed for the mansion where the party is held and all the different types of shots it made possible for him and his team. Magali Noël, immortal for her work with Boris Vian on FAIS-MOI MAL, JOHNNY, here plays a gangster’s moll whose job is to put the girls at ease whilst they’re enticed abroad. The film has a brilliant jazz score by Art Blakey, who like Miles Davies in LIFT TO THE SCAFFOLD/ Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Louis Malle, 1958), improvised the music to the film.

José Arroyo

KEOMA (Enzo G. Castellari, 1976)

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I’m continuing with my Castellari kick, this time with Keoma, a western shot in Italy. It has one of the most visually stunning opening scenes I can remember: a lone soldier (Franco Nero as Keoma), looking like a bedraggled Jesus, return home from the Civil War only to encounter death in the figure of an old woman who reminds him/ tells us that she’d sought him out before when his homestead was slaughtered as a child. Death will walk with him periodically, like in Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL, a clear influence. I finally understand why people like Tarantino are so entranced with these films. They lack subtlety but not depth; they are beautifully shot with some dazzling compositions, the action is superb; and to say that the melodrama is over the top, whilst true, does not get at why it continues to be so effective. At the end of the film, Keoma the ‘half-breed bastard’ is tied to the wheel of a cart like Jesus, the father who he went to live after his mother was killed, who loved and protected him is now gone; the craven, greedy, half-brothers who tortured his childhood are now in charge, ready to judge and pass sentence. The old black man (Woody Strode) who had taught Keoma to defend himself but who had given up on life after realising that winning the war of ‘Emancipation’ had not made him free is also no longer there. There’s a cholera epidemic raging in the town and a pregnant woman about to give birth. Keoma’s already saved them time and time again. Will any of them lift a finger for  Keoma?  A terrific film with a strange but effective cod-imitation Leonard Cohen score by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis.

José Arroyo

The HEROIN BUSTERS/ LA VIA DELLA DROGA (Enzo, G. Castellari, 1977)

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Another Poliziotteschi by Enzo G. Castellari, a follow-up to THE BIG RACKET, just as sensationalist, just as sensational and also starring Fabio Testi. This one is clearly inspired by the French Connection fims and this time Testi plays an undercover cop trying to bust a heroin ring. The film begins with him buying drugs in Hong Kong, Amsterdam and New York before returning to Rome, where he gets busted, befriends a junkie in jail, and uses him as a conduit into the local dealers and couriers. David Hemmings narratively plays the detective who’s the only one in the know as to Testi’s true identity and purpose;  industrially he functions like Vincent Gardenia in THE BIG RACKET, as a box office hope of some Anglo-American exposure.

The film is beautifully shot with some dazzling panning zooms that involve very intricate framing knitted together marvellously in editing to maintain pace and usually ending on some striking composition:

An attempt at providing the sex the filmmakers think audiences wanted in that period is quite lurid but interestingly narrated. Are we being shown something actually happening behind a door or is it the boyfriends’s projected dream or a fear; or a combination of both?. See the exchange of looks the precedes the sex scene:

It features remarkable staging:

and marvellous set-pieces such as the one in the Rome metro, which must then have been in the process of being built:

A superb bike chase and shootout:

and some great stunts throughout, including this areal one:

The stunts remain so thrilling that they raise questions as to why the action sequences in contemporary action cinema usually aren’t. What is the effect of CGI on how audiences experience action/

Fabio Testi has a very particular ‘look’ in THE HEROIN BUSTERS, and I don’t remember anything quite like this from the 70s, flares yes, platforms yes, pointy collars yes, but those are for other people in this movie. He wears one outfit in the whole film — dressing or undressing the various components: knee-high boots with jeans and a long denim jacket tied in the middle with a thin scarf, lots of necklaces and a baseball cap. I don’t remember anything quite like it, like a Carnaby Street variant of 90s grunge. He’s supposed to play an undercover cop though everything about the outfit says ‘look at me!’

 

 

The ten years since Blow UP (Antonioni, 1966) had not been kind to David Hemmings:

The filming in front of things with characters in the background and the striking compositions seen in THE BIG RACKET are evident here too:

 

Every image is a pleasure to see, even in the most lurid contexts:

this film also features the on-location shooting seen in THE BIG RACKET, this time also as setting for spectacular set-pieces:

A real pleasure to see and I’m eager for more

 

José Arroyo

IL GRANDE RACKET/ THE BIG RACKET (Enzo G. Castellari, 1976)

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Saw Enzo G. Castellari’s IL GRANDE RACKET/ THE BIG RACKET last night, my first POLIZIOTTESCHI – originally a disdainful term, like SPAGHETTI WESTERN – to describe popular homegrown crime films influenced but seen as derivative of American Crime movies. This one is about racketeers brutally extorting small businesses around the Piazza Navona with some very evocative on-location shooting.

The film is beautifully shot by Marcelo Maclocchi, one of those ‘every frame a painting’ type of movie, but also one where this type of aesthetic is least likely to find a home, a bombastic action movie, crude in characterisation, with melodramatic situations taken to loopy heights ( see the nun in the car bit). The contrast between the artistry involved in creating the look and movement and the crudeness in the writing of ‘themes’ and character is quite startling.

This would rank quite high in my list of most violent movies I’ve seen, not because of what it shows, we’ve seen it all before — and much more graphically — but because of the relish with which it acknowledges moral and psychological violence and punctuates scenes with their transgression. It’s a film in which it’s not enough to rob, kill, rape and pillage, you’ve then also got to see the relish with which the goons urinate on their victims as relatives watch.

How to Agitate a Mob:

Clearly influenced by DIRTY HARRY and DEATH WISH, it was accused of being fascist when first released. It is about a cop (Fabio Testi) so frustrated in his work by corrupt higher ups that he enlists the victims of the racketeers to fight gangs (there’s a bit of THE DIRTY DOZEN in this as well). I think the politics are a bit more complex than this (there is a scene of horrors an unruly mob may inflict when manipulated by gangsters). It’s also seen as a reflection of the YEARS OF LEAD in Italy, that period of gang wars and kidnappings in the 70s where it seemed to some that Italy was becoming a failed state and again, though it would be too simple to see it as pure reflection there are definitely elements of that context that feed into the film and are interestingly mediated by the narrative.

The reason to see it now is that it’s thrilling to see both for the way it stages action and for the way it films it. The action scenes are super and must be amongst the most beautiful and thrilling every filmed.  Characters are often shot through something, framed in the background, always in movement to or away from the camera, as stuntmen do incredible things over-head or on the side, actions and their effects immanently evoked, a clear sense of what’s at stake in each deadly beat.

THE FAMOUS CAR ROLLOVER SCENE:

Other things that caught my eye: Vincent Gardenia is wonderful as a jovial gangster and lightens up every scene he’s in; one of gangsters is a woman played by Marcella Michelangel, even more evil and chilling than Mercedes McCambridge in TOUCH OF EVIL; her character doesn’t just want to watch, she wants to do. Lastly, and superficially, has a crime film ever featured as many gorgeous men as this one?

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK/ La Mariée était en noir (François Truffaut, 1968)

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Saw Truffaut’s THE BRIDE WORE BLACK yesterday, a clear homage to Hitchcock in many ways but without any of the visual precision or flair one would normally expect of either filmmaker. I’m puzzled by this film. It’s a very enjoyable watch — according to Truffaut, an exercise in plot based on a novel by Cornell Woollrich — and it definitely works on that level. Plus, there’s Jeanne Moreau, impassive and beautiful, floating around the film killing men in a series of modish Pierre Cardin dresses – only in black or white or a combination thereof, as if wearing that moment of transition from bride to widow, from hope to despair. She’s the bride whose husband was killed on the steps of the church minutes after their marriage. Those responsible are a bunch of bored laddish middle-class messieurs out drinking, having fun and playing irresponsibly with guns. The shooting was an accident. But they’re going to pay. She sees her life as forever ruined, is out to kill each and every one of them – and does. Someone might make a case for the film being feminist. Truffaut himself does, tentatively, in one of the extras in the blu-ray . The film definitely ‘sides’ with the Jeanne Moreau character. All the men are on the make, even at their own engagement parties. They each objectify and try to make out with the widow – who has no compulsions telling them how boorish they are before killing them. But the film seems to revel more in the men’s attempts at seduction – it’s so at one with a particular playboy ideology of the time, at least a French variant – that it fails to convey the moral urgency in Moreau’s actions much less the fun in her revenge. For a Hitchcock homage favouring plot, it’s a film curiously lacking in suspense. Bernard Herrman did the score. Truffaut argued with Raould Coutard about the cinematography and use of colour, and one only has to see the film to see why they would; it’s at best unremarkable (and I dislike all those zooms, no less annoying for then being so characteristic). It was critically panned but a big success on its initial release, and both are perfectly understandable now. What isn’t is the current critical elevation.

The Mob (Robert Parrish, 1951)

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It took Broderick Crawford almost twenty years to become a star, with his Oscar-winning performance in ALL THE KING’S MEN (Robert Rossen, 1949). He then had a smash hit as the rich brute trying to corrupt Washington into doing his bidding in BORN YESTERDAY opposite William Holden and Judy Holliday (Cukor, 1950). THE MOB (Robert Parrish, 1951) is a programmer, but it was also a hit.

The advertising tried to ally it with THE KILLERS (Siodmak, 1946), which aside from its connection to crime and gangsters, I don’t quite see. The film is based on Ferguson Findley’s anti-corruption thriller, WATERFRONT and ON THE WATERFRONT (Kazan, 1954) might be a more apt comparison, at least up to a point.

 

Broderick Crawford plays a cop who lets a cop-killer escape at the very beginning of the film and is then charged with infiltrating the mob that runs various scams from the port in order to find the killer and smash the gang. THE MOB is not an A-film but Joseph Walker, the cinematographer who did such brilliant work for Capra and Hawks, makes it look smashing (see above). It’s got some crackling dialogue with contemporary references,–  ‘only gophers and communists go underground’; and its snappily edited and flows well. It’s got disguises, trick doors and even an ingenious ultraviolet gizmo designed to follow cars unobserved, elements that would only gain in popularity as the 50’s advanced.

Ernest Borgnine characteristically plays a union thug. Charles Bronson, uncredited, has a few lines as a dock worker (see below)

José Arroyo

THE WEB (Michael Gordon, 1947)

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The last of the films in my UNIVERSAL NOIR #1 box-set, and it made me wonder what the selection process was: are they the best Universal had to offer? Are some choices mere padding?  Are some meant to be representative samples, rather than the best of? Are others illustration of genre outliers that help define the central corpus? Re-releasing these films on blu-ray gives them a new life so there’s something at stake in the choices.

Recounting plot:

I raise these questions because THE WEB is almost a quintessential programmer, a standard crime film in which a rich industrialist (Vincent Price) scams a million dollars, kills his associates and tries to frame his secretary (Ella Raines) and her soon to be boyfriend (Edmond O’Brien) for the murder, only to be foiled by a detective who’s much brighter than he looks (William Bendix). It’s got some snappy dialogue and an attractive, second-string cast, though only Vincent Price is given enough to shine with.

A shot:

Visually, there’s an attempt to bring some flair (a shot that begins with contrasting close-up of two pianists playing, then mirrored in a piano and descending onto the subjects in a night-club scene — see above) and there’s a lovely edit with the sound of a gunshot over-taken by a truck discharging pebbles but is otherwise undistinguished (see below).

A cut:

There’s not much suspense EITHER as a third of the way through, in a hypothetical, the villain gives away the plot (see first. clip at the very top). All that remains is to catch him with enough to indict. William Bendix, with what comes pretty close to a deux ex-machina, takes care of it. An enjoyable if unimpressive watch; and, of course, one does need a sense of the norm before discussing whatever is better or worse, so far from useless viewing.

José Arroyo

Abandoned (Joseph M. Newman, 1949)

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Many of the great cinematographers of the classic period were filming programmers by the late 40’s, here it’s Billy Daniels, doing superb work in what must have been tight circumstances for ABANDONED, a lurid tale of a woman (Gail Storm) who goes looking for her sister and the baby she’s recently given birth to only to find her sister’s dead and the baby sold by a gangland ring that traffics in newborns. It’s got an attractive cast (Dennis O’Keefe, Jeff Chandler) of which I particularly liked Marjorie Rimbaud as the grand dame ringleader and Raymond Burr as a double-crossing detective who evokes a strangely powerful combination of the porcine and the epicene that is right at home in this noir setting. The film is beautifully lit in classic noir style but also attempts a documentary or at least ‘educational’ springboard to the narrative. Thus we get a very amusing explanation of what a police stakeout is, perhaps the first and last time that appeared in a crime film:

The definition of a ‘Stakeout’:

 

The more noir dimensions of the visuals:

José Arroyo

NAKED ALIBI (Jerry Hopper, 1954)

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Is Al Willis (Gene Barry) a humble baker or a gangland psychopath? Is Chief Inspector Joe Conroy (Sterling Hayden) condoning police brutality or is he merely doing his job? Marianna (Gloria Grahame), a girl who gets hit and might like it, will be the key to the solution.

A girl who gets hit and might like it:

 

Gloria Grahame’s introduction in the film, lip-synching to Jo Anne Greer’s rendition of  Cole Porter’s ‘Ace in the Hole,’ is sublime: external desirability as an evocation of sexual alienation; the body a sad, desultory last-chance exchange mechanism; each shimmy a tired indication that there really is no way out; another of the already innumerable reason why Grahame is such an essential figure in noir.

Gloria Grahame Intro

NAKED ALIBI  is beautifully lit by the great Russell Metty, so that light and its absence becomes an additional layer of signification into what the actors, dialogue and framing are already evoking; beautiful, bleak, expressive. It was partly shot in Tijuana and director Jerry Hopper intelligently weaves in the physical and metaphorical dimensions of a’ border-town’ into the story.

Russell Metty lighting:

Windows and Mirrors as Framing:

Hayden is lanky, cool, with a very expressive body but minimal facial movement, and eyes suggesting that he’s seen it all and nothing he’s seen is nice. The police ‘win’ of course, but only On the surface. This is a film where there’s a victory but one without victors: no one really wins. At the end, Joe Conroy, having already lost much, walks under a lamp-post and into a dark, dark night. Alone.

Chuck Connors, even taller than Hayden, appears in an early role:

The Indicator disk has also has a superb ten minute film demonstrating what it is a cinematographer does, featuring Karl Struss, who shot Murnau’s SUNRISE and many other films. Billy Wilder briefly appears on-set.

José Arroyo

Larceny (George Sherman, 1948)

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Joan Caulfield gets an Orry-Kelly wardrobe but Shelley Winters gets all the best lines…and the reviews. When Winters was doing the rounds of talk shows in the 80s, hawking her biography and commenting on what a sex bomb she’d been in her films…I don’t think I quite believed her. Sure, she flashed a couple of pictures but I’d known her my whole life as…well, other people. But here she is in LARCENY, the first film in which she got star billing, as the sultry femme fatale who can’t keep her mitts off John Payne –no woman in this film can but it’s a bigger mistake for Shelley as she’s meant to be Dan Duryea’s girl, never a good idea in the movies. I’ve spliced together all her scenes – under 14 minutes. She’s got some archetypal hard-boiled dialogue, so recognisable it must have carried a hint of parody even then, and endlessly quotable now.  Had the film been better, she’d have become a queer icon earlier (or perhaps she was…even as early as this?

I’ve edited together all of her scenes in the film, under 14 minutes, so those interested might see: she’s fantastic!

José Arroyo

DEPORTED (Robert Siodmak 1950)

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In 1949 Robert Siodmak returned to Europe to film DEPORTED. It’s loosely inspired by the story of Lucky Luciano, whose deportation back to Italy in 1946 had been head-line news nationwide. Jeff Chadler plays Vittorio Mario Sparducci aka Vic Smith, fresh out of a five-year jail sentence for a $100, 000 heist and deported to his home-town in Italy. His loving family receives a cable from the American Embassy, mistake him for a big shot connected to the government, and celebrates him as a local boy made good. He in turn falls in love with the place, his family and the local countess (Märtá Toren).  But complications arise. A former associate believes he’s due half of the heist money and follows him to Italy. Vic dreams up a scam where he’ll import$100,000 worth of food and medical supplies through a charity run by the countess, steal it from the warehouse, and make even more money by selling it on the black market. Lots of double crosses ensue and love gets in the way.

 

Was Siodmak influenced by neo-realism? The film is shot on-location in Italy. All the shots taking place in real locations, teeming with people, evoking a very particular time, place, and way of life. They are beautifully staged and gorgeous to see. The film enters more familiar noir territory, clearly filmed in sound-stages, for the final double-cross; and that’s lovely also. The main problem with the film is that it inevitably whitewashes a notorious crook and avoids dealing with the darker and more unsavoury aspects of his character and career, though to his credit, Siodmak does his best to downplay the sentimentality whilst doing his best to inject some humour, romance, and sentiment. The leads are perhaps not the big stars Siodmak hoped for but they’re both very effective, particularly Chandler.

The film’s style of shooting does evoke, directly and indirectly, a particular structure of feeling of the period, at least as seen from a US perspective: that Marshall-plan aid from America, the want and scrambling for food and supplies by the locals, the can-do to make-do attitude one sees in the Italian cinema of this period; and is the best reason to see this film now. A marvellous giddy village dance is one of the highlights.

Aside from a brief return to Hollywood to film THE CRIMSON PIRATE with Burt Lancaster, Siodmak would largely remain in Europe for the rest of his career, one which would continue for at least another twenty years.

José Arroyo

 

Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner, 1958).

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In America it seems you never really get that house you hope for. If you keep at your job, it’ll take you at least 23 years to pay off that 28,000 and you might as well die; If you become a contract killer…well, no contract killer survives to the end of a 1958 film. This is an influential one. In an introduction to the Powerhouse Indicator blu-ray, Martin Scorsese talks of how he wanted to include an excerpt in MEAN STREETS; how the Robert De Niro exercise bits in TAXI DRIVER were inspired by this film; how years later he hired Irving Lerner, its director, to oversee the editing of NEW YORK, NEW YORK; and how later than that, for THE DEPARTED, they looked at this film in relation to perhaps using a single instrument score like the zither in THE THIRD MAN or the guitar score by Perry Botkin in MURDER BY CONTRACT.

 

A film that seems effortlessly cool: the pace, the stillness and warmth of Vince Edwards’ face and the soft low tone of his voice in contrast to his deeds. MURDER BY CONTRACT is noteworthy for its narrative inventiveness with the passage of time; the elliptical way it communicates without showing; the sparseness of the images, often in close-up, often framed so characters’ faces are off-screen. There’s an existential dimension to the film as well, pre-dating THE GODFATHER; murder’s not personal, it’s just business to Claude. He doesn’t believe in the supernatural; he gets no kicks out of crime; he contains his emotions; he’s methodical, systematic, thinks and takes his time; he feels hot or cold, hungry or not, but no guilt and no remorse; he likes to take responsibility for his actions and likes his work well done. He just does the deed and adds up the figures that will buy him his home. Oh yes, he likes to be warned if the contract’s for a woman: he charges double for that.

 

A B film, shot in only seven days, but a marvellous one, beautifully photographed by Lucien Ballard

José Arroyo

Tight Spot (Phil Karlson, 1955)

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Ginger Rogers returns to the type of ‘Anytime Annie’ role that first got her noticed in the early thirties. Vince Striker, the cop played by Brian Keith, describes her as ‘smart talking, brassy, third class citizen’. But Ginger’s now on her third decade of stardom, so even though we first see her doing laundry in jail, she’s got the type of manicured nails that would make Barbra Streisand proud decades later; and this being Ginger in the 50s, her character’s a product of her environment, which here means a good girl who’s been accompanied by the wrong men but never so far as to do anything ‘cheap’; she’s been jailed for being a chump rather than for being guilty of anything.

Fingernails

She plays Sherry Conley, the only person left who can finger mob boss Benjamin Costain (Lorne Green) and get him kicked out of the country as an ‘undesirable alien’. Edward G. Robinson is the D.A who hopes to convince her. Brian Keith is the love interest as the cop who’s charged with protecting her. It’s a film worth seeing for its brilliant cast. Robinson and Keith are old dependables but it’s lovely to see Ginger play so broad and brass and Lorne Greene surprises (and makes one think of what all those years playing Pa in Bonanza might have deprived us of).

noir

The film itself hovers between comedy (mainly at the beginning) and noir (near the end). It takes very cheap shots at television with the camera repeatedly cutting to what’s on television (hair lotion commercials, hillbilly music, fund-raising marathons) followed by the characters derision of the content (‘television should be so good that when you close your eyes it sounds like the radio’). The recent House of Unamerican Activities Hearings are also everywhere evident in the narrative: the film begins with Ginger in jail telling a new inmate, ‘never volunteer for ‘nuting’ and ends with her convinced that it’s everyone’s responsibility – a well-worn word throughout the narrative – to point the finger and inform.

Television:

Ostensibly inspired by the strong-arm tactics used to get Virginia Hill to testify against Bugsy Siegel. Based on Leonard Kantor’s 1953 Broadway play, DEAD PIGEON, which took place entirely in a hotel room, and which the film opens up with a chase scene at the beginning, a court-room scene at the end, and by designing the hotel so that it’s at angles where one sees the various rooms, the windows looking outside, and the doorways at angles so one can see the hotel corridor. An ingenious use of mirrors enhances the view into the different spaces.

Spaces

 

An uneven film that progressively turns up the tension, becomes increasingly more interesting, visually and narratively, as it goes long, with a wise-cracking and rousing finale in the courtroom scene at he finale. I ended up liking it.

 

An Act of Murder (Michael Gordon, 1948)

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An example of the fluidity of noir as a term. ACT OF MURDER is a domestic melodrama which would have been marketed as a ‘serious’ film on difficult moral and ethical issues: is mercy killing acceptable even if a dear one is terminal and in unbearable pain? Should intentions be a consideration when applying the law, by whom and to what extent? It’s the themes and the ‘seriousness’ of treatment that would have drawn in Fredric March and Florence Eldridge to star. They’d subsequently perform Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE and O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT on Broadway in the 50s to great acclaim as one of America’s great couples of the theatres (the Lunts being the only rivals).

 

March plays Calvin Cooke, a judge who applies the law literally and harshly. His daughter (Geraldine Brooks) is about to be engaged to a lawyer (Edmond O’Brien) with a different, more liberal interpretation and understanding. Cooke’s convictions are put to the test when, after celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary, the wife he still loves is diagnosed with a terminal illness whose ending will be accompanied by horrifying pain, currently untreatable. When he sees the pain she’s in, he decides to put an end to further reoccurrences by crashing his car in the hopes of killing her and himself. She dies. He turns himself in with every expectation of having the law applied to himself as he has applied it to others. But his daughter’s fiancé steps in to offer an unsolicited and unwelcome defence that nonetheless saves his neck, and converts him to the point of view the film hopes to convince the audience of: that intentions and individual circumstances matter.

An absorbing, efficient melodrama that in the last twenty minutes develops into a court-room drama, very well-acted throughout but ultimately unconvincing. The famous Universal Courthouse set was built for this film. The gap between the film’s ambitions and its achievements can be seen in the funhouse sequence, clearly influenced by Welles’ A LADY FROM SHANGAHI but not a patch on it. Based on a novel by Ernst Lothar.

In Conversation with Richard Layne on YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND (Tate Modern)

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I talk to Richard Layne on ‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’, currently on at Tate Modern. You might recognise Richard from our podcast, THINKING ALOUD ABOUT FILM. What you might not know is that he is a long-time fan of Yoko Ono and one of the most knowledgeable people on her work as an artist and performer. In this podcast, Richard, compares this exhibition, billed as ‘the largest ever undertaken in the UK’ on the work of Yoko Ono, and compares it to the many others he’s attended. We talk of how he became a fan, her various types of work, the performance art, the conceptual art, her books of instructions, the connection to Fluxus. We also touch on her collaborations with some of the key figures of mid-twentieth century art (John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, John Lennon) and  how her work prefigures that of contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovíc. Our conversation broadly follows the flow of the exhibition itself, so I’ve included photographs from the exhibition in the blog so the listener might more clearly follow the points of conversation. Richard is very illuminating on why Yoko Ono is one of those figures that keep getting re-discovered periodically, on her extensive influence in various domains of art, from the gallery to punk, and on how she is a wonderful conduit to chance meetings with The Pet Shop Boys.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may  also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

José Arroyo

 

 

THE LINEUP (Don Siegel, 1958)

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THE LINEUP (Don Siegel, 1958)

 

The best of the noirs I’ve been seeing recently. It starts with an exciting set-piece – a driver steals someone’s suitcase from the port; the police chase him; and he ends up killed. It starts great and it doesn’t let up. The premise is that a gang is using innocent tourists returning from Hong Kong by ship to smuggle heroin by hiding the powder in their belongings (dolls, statues, silverware handles). Like many of the crime films of the period, the film makes great use of its on-location shooting. It’s a thrill just to see the San Francisco of this period. But Siegel does more with this. It’s like his characters are always caught on the edge of some barrier or some praecipe; highways made for freedom become dead-ends; aquariums where one is meant to gaze though glass prisons end up imprisoning; the wheelchair-bound are pushed to fly on air; steam that’s meant to revive and relax becomes a cover for death; etc. The choice of shots, camera movement, angle; everything seems economic, purposeful, meaningful; beautiful to see and exciting to watch. There’s a terrific mirror shot of murder in the mansion scene. Eli Wallach is a great psycho killer, simultaneously controlled and unhinged. Robert Keith is his more cerebral partner in crime. Perhaps one of the earliest spinoffs from radio  (1950-53), then to TV (54-60); with the film coming out in the midst of its run. The ad-line was ‘Too Hot…Too Big…for TV’.

 

The Mirror Shot:

José Arroyo

LADY ON A TRAIN ( Charles David, 1945)

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A light-hearted, slightly spoofy, detective story. The tone is somewhat in the vein of Simon Templar – sophisticated, elegant, tongue-in-cheek — hardly a surprise as the film is written by Lesley Charteris, who also wrote The Saint. The film begins with Deanna Durbin, playing a San Francisco heiress on her way to New York by train, who looks up from her detective novel and her box of chocolate, and witnesses a murder being committed as the train speeds by, a detail Agatha Christie must have taken note of, as that’s how her 4.50 FROM PADDINGTON begins.

As with CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (Robert Siodmak, 1944) this is a concerted effort to expand Deanna’s persona and her audience, also set at Christmas. She’s surround by a great cast (Ralph Bellamy, Dan Duryea, Allan Jenkins, Edward Everett Horton), beautifully lit by  Woody Bredell, and gets to sing three very famous songs songs in a low slow style that sounds lovely (‘Silent Night’, ‘Give Me A Little Kiss’,  ‘Day and Night’). She doesn’t quite swing but she’s no longer singing opera either. She wears a striking array of hats, dresses (by Howard Greer), hairdos and jewels ( and I see there are still entire Pinterest pages devoted to these).

The question is ‘what is this film doing in a noir box set’? The answer, I suppose, is that it’s instructive in that so many of the situations and the lighting are those one expects from noir, but the tone and moral world are so different as to turn the film into something else.

Deanna Durbin is very charismatic; she looks smashing, and sings great. But the character as written is very thoughtless of others and her charm has a bullying quality that slightly brings to mind Shirley Temple. The screen brags at the very top are a selection of her outfits and hairdos but also , immediately above, some archetypally noir imagery from the film. Lastly, it sometimes seems all a man needs to be imaged a villain is to carry a cat.

José Arroyo