The Set-up

Robert Wise's 1949 bleak and brutal film noir The Set-up is one of the best boxing films ever made. I was actually very surprised to learn that it was actually adapted from a narrative poem! Arts and Letters Daily now points me to a long essay on Joseph Moncure March, the poet and screenwriter who wrote it, which discusses this poem in great detail. It is also available on a very nice DVD with commentary by Martin Scorsese who speaks about its influence on his own work and also its very innovative narrative style - the story is told in (almost) real time. Actually the film is bookended by shots of a clock which actually shows the total time elapsed which is almost the same as the total length of the film itself. This is also one of Robert Ryan's greatest performances which makes you wish he had got more lead roles to play. In my opinion he was way ahead of actors and regular noir-leads like Robert Mitchum, Dana Andrews or Glenn Ford.

High Sierra

Humphrey Bogart in a very Bogartesque role - a tough guy (that stare in the shot above!) with a hidden sentimental and soft side. It was his first major hit as a leading man. It was co-written by John Huston, who directed him in The Maltese Falcon which came a few months after this and which really made him a big Hollywood star. Raoul Walsh, the director of the film, is more well-known for his straightforward gangster and action films so may be it was the presence of Huston which gave this film depth, complexity and pathos and which places it in the great noir tradition. (Though admittedly I am not really familiar with Walsh's work.) It does boast of some very impressive chase sequences and location shooting however.

Two Films by Abraham Polonsky

Abraham Polonsky was one of the many talented screenwriters and directors who were blacklisted during the McCarthyite witchhunts for suspected "un-American activities" in the fifties. Anthology Film Archives has been celebrating his brief career the last couple of weeks. I saw Force of Evil at the anthology which was both written and directed by him and then saw Body and Soul on dvd which was made a couple of years earlier and to which he contributed only as a screenwriter. Village Voice and Slant have detailed reports about the retrospective. I will just add my two cents here.

Body and Soul follows the career of young boxer played by John Garfield who rises from his jewish ghetto background to become a prizefighter and a money machine. If you are familiar with those boxing movies, you already know the deal. The mobsters and match-fixers soon come in, the hero starts making one moral compromise after another until it is already too late, or may be there is still some chance left to redeem oneself in one last climactic fight.

It is brutal and bleak, even though it has a (kind-of) happy ending. The story is structured in a very innovative manner. Garfield just before his final fight in which he has agreed to take a fall in return of money goes into a reverie and starts reminiscing his past and the entire film is told in flashback. It makes the similar scene in Pulp Fiction with Bruce Willis waking from his dream look like a homage to this film. Elsewhere, Martin Scorsese has named this film as one of the influences on his own classic of Boxing film Raging Bull too. It has similar boxing scenes, though less sophisticated, full of point of view shots, camera in between the boxers fighting in the ring. (Scene from Raging Bull here, not for the faint-hearted.) It is certainly a great classic of the Boxing movie genre. Another excellent film, equally brutal and bleak, though not that well known is The Set-up directed by Robert Wise. It is another favourite of Martin Scorsese.

Force of Evil

Film-noirs are in general extremely pessimistic about human nature but they are always too sophisticated to indulge into "good and evil," "hero and villain" variety of moral essentialism. Nobody is essentially good and nobody is likewise essentially evil. What they lack is not goodness but agency and freedom. The people in noirs have to make tough choices and they are almost never strong enough to do that.

Joe is a typical noir hero in that sense. He works as a lawyer for lottery racket kingpin. They together hatch a plan to defraud smaller lottery companies and establish a monopoly and make quick bucks in the process. The problem is that Joe's elder brother, who sacrificed his life so that he could get a good education, runs one of those smaller business. He and the people he employs in his illegal company (including the girl Joe falls in love with and who tries to save him) are shown to be good-hearted guys who were forced to make morally compromised choices because of the circumstances. Joe asks him to take the money and get out of the business but he refuses. Family melodrama and tragedy soon ensue. In the end Joe realises the moral gutter that he has found himself in but then it is already too late.

The only complaint I had with the film, and it is true for many of the Hollywood films of that era, is that it is too short. It is not even eighty minutes long! Specially when you have such poetic and biting dialogues in almost every single scene you are left hungry for more in the end. In one of the scenes Joe painfully protests after his brother has refused his offer, "To reach out, to take it, that's human, that's natural. But to get your pleasure from not taking. From cheating yourself deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from not taking. Don't you see what a black thing that is for a man to do? How it is to hate yourself, your brother, to make him feel that he's guilty, that I'm guilty. Just to live and be guilty." And also in Body and Soul after the gangster threatens the hero, he replies in resignation, "What you gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies!" A good article about the film here. A profile of Polonsky from Senses of Cinema here.

Also related the HUAC and blacklisting there is a fantastic overview of the controversy surrounding the awarding of life time achievement Oscar to Elia Kazan. It is quite long, part two and three are also there on the same site, scroll down for the link. Polonsky could have had a career like Kazan too, had he agreed to name names for the committee like Kazan did. Instead he agreed to let them curtail his highly promising career. On the evidence of these two films, there is absolutely no doubt that he was a man of uncommon talents and it was a great loss for Hollywood. Jim Hoberman's commentary on the Kazan controversy is also worth reading and so is his essay on On the Waterfront. Interestingly these two films anticipated a lot, in everything subject, characters or style, of On the Waterfront which came only after five-six years.

Two Films by Fritz Lang

Ministry of Fear


Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear is based on the Graham Greene novel of the same name. It is very entertaining and like many other films noir by Fritz Lang, visually ravishing, almost text-bookish in its style and look, but in the end I found it slightly disappointing. It is neither The Third Man, which was also written by Graham Greene, nor Scarlet Street or The Woman in the Window two films Lang would direct just after this. Still it is quite worthwhile overall.

The film is set in Britain during the early years of second world war. Ray Milland, who was extremely good in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend and Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, is just out of an asylum when the film starts. (We get to know why he was there only later in the film.) Eager and excited about the prospects of getting back to the regular life and society, he drifts into an innocent looking village fair near to the railway station. Before long and before he can realise what is happening, he has actually run into a deadly ring of war secrets, clandestine Nazis, double crosses and murders.

The basic Langian (and film noir) theme is present throughout - the malignant and hostile impersonal forces intent on crushing the will and spirit of the hero who tries to resist but is ultimately defeated. Only that in this case the ending is a happy one. A lot of other such films have happy endings too but in those cases the psychological trauma that the characters go through is always too much so that the happy ending is happy only nominally. Another reason why the film fails is that the central Ray Milland character remains quite shallow throughout, even with the subplot about the reason why he was admitted to the asylum. Still the film holds one's attention because of its visual design (as exemplified in the shot above). There is a bizarre seance scene which makes a really impressive use of chiaroscuro lighting. There is also a shootout scene in the dark where we see just the tiny hole in door through which the bullet has hit the intended victim. Pretty good overall. A more detailed appreciation from noir of the week here.

Fury

Unlike Ministry of Fear you can't accuse of Fritz Lang's Fury of getting all sweet and happy and entertaining in the end. It is harrowing and a harsh little tale of an innocent man trapped for a crime he never committed. (Again the idea of malignant impersonal forces scheming an innocent man's physical and spiritual downfall.) The hardworking, working class man played by Spencer Tracy is accused and imprisoned for a crime he never committed (the interrogation is truly Kafkaesque) just when he has saved enough money to get married to his long-suffering sweetheart. Before he can stand to trial in court a local mob attacks the police station and sets it to fire. He miraculously escapes but he is profoundly changed by the experience. He now wants vengeance himself. He pretends to be dead so that the townsmen who attacked the jail in order to kill him can be punished for murder. After some riveting melodrama he lets himself persuaded by the pleas of his fiancee and confesses in front of the court just before the court is about to give the final judgment. (Interestingly a documentary footage, which was actually the same scene we saw earlier in the film, is used as an evidence in the court to indict the defendants.)

In its subject and even the documentary-like style it anticipates Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, which is similarly harrowing and very harsh. (The final scene with Vera Miles in the asylum is unforgettable.) There is a similar scene in this film in which Tracy wanders alone and aimlessly on the dark and desolate streets, which come to signify his own spiritual death. In this film Tracy and his fiancee do embrace in the court and walk off in the end but Lang leaves us in no doubt that they are both psychologically and emotionally scarred for life.

It is also worth noting that this the first film that Lang made in America. He had first hand experience of the mob-psychology and its far reaching moral and political significance and it is that experience that he brought from Germany that gives the film a feeling of authenticity and contributes to its overall effect. An interesting essay which compares it to Chaplin's Modern Times.

More Film Noirs*

I have been catching up with these old hollywood film noirs. So much so that colour and brightness have started to hurt my eyes.

All four films here were produced by the RKO pictures which specialised in these kinds of films. Of course at that time the producers there didn't know they were making any "film-noir." They were just short on budget so they couldn't afford to make wide-screen costume musicals or historical dramas. The reason they chose to light the set in that particular way was more to do with economics than with conscious design. In the same way there are also the actors who became associated with the genre. One of them of course was Robert Mitchum with his sleepy eyes, droppy shoulders and "baby I don't care" fatalistic attitude (an actual dialogue from the unforgettable Out of the Past.) Three out of four of these films has Robert Mitchum in the lead or supporting roles. He is not really a great actor (except perhaps for his performance in The Night of the Hunter, one of my all time favourites) but he fits these roles really well.
Then there was also this German influence. Before the war a large group of extremely talented filmmakers and technicians emigrated from Germany (most of them Jewish) and found themselves working in Hollywood. Soon enough they were assigned movies dealing with these subjects since more established directors wouldn't touch them. They brought with them not only the technical know-how about the expressionist lighting but also bleakness, fatalism and gloom. Otto Preminger, who directed Angel Face, was from Vienna. He also made the other quintessential film-noir Laura and a few other great films too. He is one of my favourites.

Most of these films were profitable for the studios but only in a relative sense. They were in general looked down upon by serious viewers and critics mostly because of the sensational subject they dealt in. It was actually the french film critics who found thematic and stylistic continuity in these films and grouped them together under "film-noir." Unfortunately the term now has become somewhat meaningless because of overuse. These days any underlit scene is called "noirish" which is certainly not correct.

More than the basics of style what I love about these films is the daring they show when dealing with questions of class and gender relations in the American society of the time.

I won't write about the individual films here, will just direct to the wonderful internet resource noir of the week, which actually discusses all these four films including a host of others. The wikipedia articles on film-noir and the history of RKO pictures are also quite good.


To close off the post, some of my favourite film noirs (from the ones I have seen so far, limited to only one by each director)

1. Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder)
2. The Third Man (Carol Reed)
3. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur)
4. Laura (Otto Preminger)
5. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray)
6. The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston)
7. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles)
8. Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang)
9. The Killers (Robert Siodmak)
10. The Killing (Stanley Kubrick)

*There is some confusion about the correct English plural form but I prefer this one to films noir.

Elevator to the Gallows

I had heard the praises of soundtrack and cinematography of this film before but watching it last night exceeded all my high expectations. Now I feel even worse for missing its big screen revival last year.

The basic story is a standard noir template - that of lovers conspiring to kill the husband only to find themselves trapped by the irony of a malignant fate which leads them to their inevitable doom (so elegantly captured by the title in this case.) The story has three separate sections which only occasionally overlap. (In fact the two lovers never meet at all in the film!) First the murderer who finds himself trapped in an elevator after the crime, then the woman, played by a stunning Jeanne Moureau, thinking herself abandoned by her lover walks on the night-time Parisian streets almost in a trance, talking to herself and overwhelmed with desire and grief, and finally a bunch of teenage delinquents who run off with the hero's car which adds to some suspense and plot confusion. This is perhaps the weakest section of the film. The petty criminals and their hyper-romanticism made me think of Godard but that only made it look ineffective. Ineffective also were half-hearted attempts to bring in politics - french involvement in Algeria and Vietnam and the German occupation in the second world war. I read some reviews which comapared the elevator section of the story to Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (on which Malle worked as an assistant director) which seemed to me an absurd overpraise.

The highlight of the film is of course the Jeanne Moreau section. Specially the way she is photographed only using the natural night time street lights. Every flicker of light, every contour of a shadow, and every expression on her face is sharply visible and it adds to the extraordinary atmosphere and mood. Add to that the iconic trumpet soundtrack by Miles Davis, underscoring her melancholy yearnings, it all makes an unforgettable impression. In fact I was thinking if Malle had made an entire film just out of Jeanne Moureau walking on champs elysees to the tunes of Miles Davis, it could have still been a riveting film. It might even have been a better film!

In the interviews on the DVD extras Moureau recalls how liberated she felt acting in this film because she didn't have to wear a thick make-up or act under the glare of excessive artificial lighting which was de rigeur at the time specially for her because of her unconventional looks. This approach of shooting on real street locations using only available lighting wasn't as common as it became later after the new wavers took on the reins. It is in fact also called a precursor of the new wave film movement. The dvd also contains lots of information about Miles Davis. As it turned out the film score is considered to be a very important work in the history and evolution of Miles Davis' work and in history of Jazz in general. Some of it didn't make much sense to me, illiterate as I am in these technical, theoretical matters but the sound of the music itself is heavenly.

The trailer here. Contains part of the soundtrack too:

Two film noirs

Film forum has put together a series of classic hollywood noirs set in the new york city. This weekend I managed to see three of them. Sweet Smell of Success, The Woman in the Window and Laura. I had seen Laura before but I saw the other two for the first time. Just a few brief notes... (an article from the new york times here)


Sweet Smell of Success on the surface looks an atypical film-noir. There are no guns and no murders in the film, no detective in the raincoat and hat walking down the dark city streets. But that's not to say the film is not violent. Just that its violence moral and emotional. Presumably based on some real-life character, it tells the story of a powerful new york columnist J.J. Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster, who uses his influence and popularity to make and break careers, and his poodle a publicity manager played by Tony Curtis who would descend to any depth to get a good deal for his client from J.J. The best part of the film is its writing. It is full of crackling dialogues, most of it sounds unreal and strange because both the characters speak the bombastic language of newspaper columns. Though at places I felt the writing was a little too extreme, not justifiable by the information we have about the characters. It is hard to understand how only ambition and desire for success and careerism can drive someone to such depths of moral self-degradation as the Tony Curtis sinks down to. I have no problems with misanthropy but at places it just felt like shrill, raging and completely irrational. The film, specially the Curtis character reminded me of Billy Wilder's The Apartment which has a (kind-of) similar story. Their the misanthropy feels more natural, even though it has a happy ending (though I think it is happy only in name.) I was thinking what Wilder could have done to the story. It certainly fails to reach that level of general social criticism and the way we live now as The Apartment succeeds in doing. Still a very impressive film overall.



Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window has the same cast as Scarlet Street which Lang made a year after, in almost similar roles too. Edward G. Robinson, the wonderful character actor, plays the hapless, pitiful, lonely middle aged man yearning for some youthful adventure. Joan Bennett is the standard femme fatale, at least that's what it appears initially though in the end it is much more complex. There is even the sleazy smooth-talking villain Dan Dureya (who reminded me of our very own Prem Chopra!). One day just after he has dropped off his family at the grand central station for a long holiday, the middle aged professor finds himself transfixed by a portrait of a female figure in the shop window. He meets some of his fellow middle-aged friends and discuss the dangers of transgression and the inevitability of old age. In the night he again stops at the window to stare at the painting and what does he see? Well, the woman herself. Soon he gets himself invited to her house and even sooner finds himself involved in murder and blackmail.

I won't reveal the ending but it is absolutely delicious. It in a way reminded me of F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh. A happy ending which can be seen in purely ambiguous terms and which only increases the irony. The original script had a darker and brutal ending and Lang had to change it to fit some censor guidelines. I read somewhere that he was quite happy with the change and it shows too. It keeps the comic underpinning of the rest of the story intact and in no way diminishes the theme of an all-powerful malignant fate plotting the downfall of the tragic hero that Lang and other film noir experts so excelled at portraying on screen. It was loved by the audiences at the film forum too. It received a big applause in the end. A great classic!

Scarlet Street

I saw this 1945 film by Fritz Lang today. I saw it on dvd but it is also available on Google video (somehow its rights have fallen into public domain). You can see it here. (That's an amazing blog by the way.) It is classified as a fim-noir but it is more of a (very) dark melodrama. There are a few scenes of rain-drenched darkly lit streets but style-wise Lang plays mostly straight. That said, its pitch-black portrait of human relationships and deep pessimism all around will make sure no film-noir fans are disappointed.

Edward G. Robinson, a regular fixture in these kinds of movies, plays Christopher Cross, a lonely man married to a nagging and harrassing wife. Starved of love and affection, the only solace to him is his hobby -- painting. One night he meets Kitty, the typical femme fatale, and promptly falls in love. She is in turn involved in an abusive relationship with a sleazy con-man. Together they both plan to fleece the naive hero until the hero after being betrayed and humiliated is driven to...

Robinson is just fantastic in the role. I had only seen him in the roles of smart detectives and gangsters before but here he is amazing in the role of a victim, a diminutive, weak and pitiful figure adrift in a cruel and unjust world.

Out of the Past

This is one of the best film-noirs ever made and I think I should have seen it before. Sometime last year in Chicago a double bill of Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, both directed by the same Jacques Tourneur, played at the music box theatre which I missed. I am going to hunt them down now. I hope they are available on DVD. Though a movie so moody and atmospheric like Out of the Past should only be seen on big screen. This is really a fantastic film.

Robert Mitchum plays the archetypical hero with such effortless abandon that it seems that he is sleepwalking through his role. His trademark droopy eyes (look at the picture above) and his lethargic, laid-back persona were made for playing these kinds of roles. Kirk Douglas, the other hyper-masculine long-nosed hero, is electrifying too. He doesn't have much of a role, it was only his second film, but the way he delivers those crackling trade-mark noir dialogues just sizzles on screen. And of course the best of the lot is Jane Greer in what must be the greatest femme fatale ever in a noir. Just look at how the poster maker has painted her in the portrait. I don't think it is from the movie but it captures her personality so well, specially the way she is holding the gun and the way she is looking. In my opinion, she handsomely beats Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. She is unbelievably beautiful and so alluring is her persona, that you think perhaps doom is all worth it!

Very entertaining and not only that, it is the kind of film which carries with it an entire world-view, a way of looking at the world, and convinces you that it is indeed the right way to look at it. Rent the DVD today if you haven't already seen it. I think it is much better than Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon or even some other top-notch noirs. I still have to see a lot of films from that period though.

P.S. A Deluxe edition DVD of Double Indemnity is out this week. Enthusiastic thumbs up from Green Cine and some qualified praise from New York Times:

Wilder, who had as little interest in visual expressiveness as Jackson Pollock had in figure painting, remained a literary filmmaker to the end of his career, relying on such stock techniques here as endlessly repeated lines and situations (how many times will MacMurray light Robinson's cigar for him before the gesture has a dramatic payoff?) and a condescending approach to his audience that led him to spell out everything in large capital letters (compare Stanwyck's blatant, vulgar sexuality in Double Indemnity to Jane Greer's elusive femme fatality in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past).

Stanley Kubrick's The Killing

Saw this classic film noir by Stanley Kubrick last night, on big screen. The character types, plot and narrative tropes are from standard film noir and heist movies. What is extra, though, is the brilliant use of flashbacks to show parallel action in the great heist sequence. It makes you really think about the use of 'time' in how shots are sequenced. Films like Pulp Fiction will look less innovative after you have seen this film.

It also has some really brilliant dialogues. Here is the archetypical tough-guy-with-tougher-luck hero admonishing the femme fatale:

Johnny Clay: Alright sister, that's a mighty pretty head you got on your shoulders. You want to keep it there or start carrying it around in your hands?
Sherry Peatty: Maybe we could compromise and put it on your shoulder. I think that'd be nice, don't you?

You might have to see the film at least twice to really appreciate the wizardry of the writer and the filmmaker and be prepared for a truly anti-climactic and utterly heartbreaking climax at the end.