MOONTIDE - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2008. 

Jean Gabin was one of the earliest stars of French cinema, sort of like the Parisian Humphrey Bogart. A man's man and an extremely physical actor, he played tough guys in movies like Pepe le Moko and Port of Shadows. When I call him a physical actor, I don't mean that he was doing stunts like Erol Flynn and jumping around, but that he acted with his entire body, becoming the role in full the way Gerard Depardieu would decades later (or, for a more contemporary reference, Javier Bardem). At the same time, he also had that classic Hollywood quality where, regardless of the role he played, he was always Jean Gabin. His gestures, his way of speaking, the very way he carried himself--all Jean Gabin.

Archie Mayo's 1942 suspense picture Moontide was Gabin's first Hollywood production after emigrating stateside when the Germans rolled into France. In it, Gabin is still very much Gabin, but this time in English. He plays Bobo, a carefree dockworker in his cups on the Southern California coast. Bobo sees life as a party, and he hits the whiskey pretty heavy to keep it going. The whiskey hits back pretty hard, too, leaving the seaman with many nights unaccounted for. One in particular may need more accounting for than others: an old salt that Bobo argued with early in the evening is dead by morning, having been strangled. It seems maybe Bobo has killed with his hands before, and he may have done so again. His buddy Tiny (Thomas Mitchell) might know, but Tiny may also be keeping his lips zipped just to keep the Bobo gravy train going. It pays to harbor a man's secrets.

Things go the other way the next night, however, when Bobo sees a young woman trying to drown herself and pulls her out of the water. Anna (Ida Lupino) is a waitress with secrets of her own, and Bobo refuses to hear what drove the lady into the water, instead letting secrets remain so. Though traditionally a wanderer, Bobo decides to settle down and run a bait shop with Anna. Naturally, Tiny doesn't like seeing his ship moored, and so he tries to make trouble for the couple. It becomes a game of who knows what, who is bluffing, and who will call those bluffs.

For his American debut, Gabin surrounds himself with a marvelous ensemble of actors, and he more than holds his own. Bobo is a character who takes whatever comes how it comes, and Gabin lets his body hang loose for the role, saying just as much with his graceful and comic hand gestures as he does through dialogue. He's excellent with Lupino, whose frail demeanor is perfect for the world-weary Anna. She goes from tentative to increasingly confident in Bobo's care, even eventually mustering the strength to stand up to Tiny. As the bad guy, Thomas Mitchell almost owns the whole show. The character actor is probably best known as Uncle Billy in It's A Wonderful Life [review] and the Mayor in High Noon [review], far cheerier roles than this one, and it's actually a shame he didn't get to be the heavy more often. Tiny is a real bottom-feeding weasel, the kind of guy you love to hate and whose mere presence adds tension to a scene. If you said that they didn't have to cue Bobo's dog to growl at him every time he came near, he just got testy because Mitchell made the canine believe he really was a lout, I'd not doubt it. He also brings an intriguingly obsessive edge to the role that lends some fire to the homoerotic undertones in the Tiny/Bobo relationship. Being gay would certainly explain why Bobo keeps taking off to go fishing or work on an engine rather than spend the night with his woman, which otherwise just looks like a clumsy device to clear the way for Tiny to victimize Anna.

Of the strong cast, only Claude Rains (Casablanca) seems to be playing under his usual caliber. Perhaps it's just the nature of his role, though. The character of Nutsy is more of an observer who occasionally doles out some barroom wisdom rather than being a completely active participant in the melodrama. That particular role certainly isn't the only thing undercooked in Moontide. Despite having such amazing actors and a narrative gumbo that practically demands Mayo pour on the spice, Moontide is a pot that never boils. The entire picture moves at an even pace, never speeding up to match the bloodlust or slowing down to enjoy any other kind. The direction is workmanlike, only mustering up any semblance of a style in a few of the late-night shots and one amazing, Dali-inspired drunken montage. Then again, how hard is it to get a dramatic image by backlighting an actor on a foggy coastline? Plus, we don't know how much of that was really Fritz Lang, who left the movie after two weeks of shooting, making room for Mayo.

Moontide is neither dark enough for a noir, nor histrionic enough to be a truly effective melodrama. The seas should rage, but instead, the waves roll in calmly with barely enough force to push a dead body ashore. Not a terrible movie, but not all that memorable either--just disappointing.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN - #1020

“Of all the seven deadly sins, jealousy is the most deadly.”

It’s ironic, I suppose, that I became positively obsessed with Gene Tierney the first time I saw Leave Her To Heaven. I tracked down every film I could at the time, which meant following a lot of the Fox reissue series from the DVD era. It was a good mini label, often using A&E and AMC programming as extras, and they numbered the spines. Someone was paying attention to the Criterion obsessives.

Why I say it’s ironic is because Tierney’s character Ellen is obsession personified. Driven by jealousy, she fixates on her husband, determined to share him with no one else. Not his brother, nor her sister, nor eventually even their own child. Ellen is so alluring and so attentive, he’s blind to it far longer than he should be, ignoring all warnings. And, of course, as a film fan, I was glued to her every move.

Leave Her To Heaven is considered a hybrid of film noir and the “women’s picture,” as perhaps best personified by Douglas Sirk. Like many classic movies, I sought out Leave Her To Heaven  based on a Martin Scorsese recommendation. My purism rejected the notion of a Technicolor noir, but resistance was futile. I ultimately had to see it and sample this cinematic Reese’s peanut butter cup. You got my noir in your melodrama!

When it comes down to it, though, Leave Her To Heaven has few noir trappings. It’s set in a rural domain, it’s mostly in sunlight, and it’s far more romantic than fatalist. It’s actually more of an upending of the “bad husband gaslighting his wife” movies, like Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door [review], Max Ophuls’ Caught [review], or Sirk’s own Sleep, My Love [review]. Director John M. Stahl--working from a screenplay by Jo Swerling, adapting a novel by Ben Ames--instead has the wife slowly undermining her husband’s faith in himself, ironically chipping away at his love rather than securing her position as the only thing in his life. (Fun aside: Stahl directed versions of both Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession before Sirk’s more famous remakes [review of both versions of Magnificent Obsession].)

Cornel Wilde plays the husband, novelist Richard Harland. Criterion viewers will know him for The Naked Prey [review], his triumphant directorial/starring vehicle, but he doesn’t fare as well here. He’s a bit of a weak link, failing to be charming or seductive. Honesty, his rap is so bad, down to quoting his own book, I have cause to wonder if Ellen picks Richard because he’s a bit dim and thus easily manipulated. Likewise, most of the supporting cast is fairly mediocre, giving more room for Tierney to control the frame. Her only competition is from her Dragonwyck co-star Vincent Price, who here plays her jilted lover, but who really gets to shine as the district attorney in the courtroom scenes that occupy Leave Her to Heaven’s final act. Price manages to distinguish himself because his character is the only one as driven as Ellen. His passion in front of a jury is blazing.

But then, he also doesn’t have to compete directly with Tierney. It also helps that he’s hot in ways that she’s cool, creating a balance between them. Tierney’s take on Ellen is sculpted out of ice and steel. The key to her villainy--and, arguably, to her sexiness--is how together she is. It’s not just that Ellen would never have a hair out of place, but that she rarely has an emotion out of place. She might seethe when she sees some competition for Richard’s affection, but the wheels immediately start turning on how to get the advantage back. Her best moment is that iconic scene on the lake, the one that is highlighted on the Criterion Leave Her to Heaven cover. In that segment, we see her coldly seize an opportunity and then course correct in order to cover her tracks when it appears she might get caught.

Leave Her to Heaven was shot by Leon Shamroy, the cinematographer of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, but it’s worth noting that there is also a Technicolor director, Natalie Kalmus. The colors here are phenomenal. Tierney in particular stands out for her gorgeous clothes, like the baby blue swimsuit and nightgown that she wears for a couple of her worst deeds--a color that the internet tells me should resemble “trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.” I doubt this is a choice that was made without consideration. All of Leave Her to Heaven has an almost unreal pastel look to it, arguably Stahl’s replacement for the shadowy confines of noir. In his world, evil is bright and pink and has shiny red lips.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

SCARLET STREET - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2007 as part of a film noir boxed set.

Fritz Lang practically invented showing the perils of a guilty conscience on film when he made M [review] in Germany fourteen years earlier; 1945's Scarlet Street continues this obsession with the evil that men do, casting Edward G. Robinson as the meek bank teller Christopher "Chris" Cross. This man's existence is a full-fledged illustration of the phrase "a life of quiet desperation." Married to a shrew of a wife who keeps a painting of her dead husband hanging up in their living room and doling out cash day in and day out while having none of his own, Chris' only solace is in the humble paintings he does in his spare time.

Then one night he happens upon a pimp (Dan Duryea, Black Angel) beating on his girl, Kitty (Joan Bennett, The Reckless Moment). Cross steps in, ingratiating himself to the girl and unwittingly getting pulled into a long con. She convinces him to set her up in an apartment where he can paint, and not wanting to tell her he's a nobody, he steals money to pay for it. She strings him along, eventually passing off his art as her own and sucking him deep into a tangled web of deceit that he can only see one way out of.

Lang and the main cast had first teamed up the year before in another classic noir, The Woman in the Window, and they clearly had something going together. Robinson is incredible as the shy and broken banker, showing great restraint and pathos. Duryea is a dirty lout that just oozes scum, and Joan Bennett is perhaps best of all, playing a woman who uses her sexuality to get what she wants but also showing how unsophisticated she really is. On her first night out with Cross, she orders a Rum Collins and drinks it with a straw, letting it dangle from her mouth as she talks. Cross is attracted to her as an old man looking at a woman whose childishness he mistakes for freedom.

The plot of Scarlet Street is full of twists, but it's also brimming with cynicism. In this bent love triangle, no one is innocent, and thus no one escapes punishment. Yet, even beyond the core characters, the people in Cross' life are no more innocent, taking full advantage of the man's nature, sometimes right out in the open, but also with tactics as underhanded as Kitty's. It's just that they have the approval of society to do it, and it's no wonder that a man would break when the world has made it okay to hold him down.

CRAIG'S WIFE - CRITERION CHANNEL

“People who live to themselves -- are generally left to themselves.”

What a splendid little film Craig’s Wife is. The 1936 film from Dorothy Arzner is a bit of Trojan Horse, parading as a domestic drama, but smuggling elements of a paranoid thriller.

The Craigs are a wealthy married couple living a seemingly normal upper-middle-class life. Walter Craig (John Boles, Stella Dallas) loves Harriet (Rosalind Russell, Gypsy [review], The Women)--but by some accounts, too much. He is blind to her true nature. And it’s not really like she hides it. The maids are nervous around her, lest an inexact dusting cause wrath; Walter’s aunt (Alma Kruger, His Girl Friday [review]) only lives with them so she can keep an eye on things; and when Harriet and her niece, Ethel (Dorothy Wilson, The Milky Way), are on the train back from visiting Ethel’s dying mother, not only does Harriet lie about the woman’s health, but basically lays out her mercenary philosophy. Walter was a step up for her, a chance for independence and a place in society. All she has to do now is wait for him to pass on. That’s why she’s so exact about the house: it’s her future.

Harriet is a bit of a snake in the grass, but she’s a snake who’s in charge of the landscaping. The façade of her life with Walter, one created largely for him, is one she orchestrates entirely. In her mind, people are a means to an end, and any excess number of them should be trimmed. This, of course, means she also trusts no one. Not Ethel’s fiancé, whom she secretly seeks to isolate, and certainly not her husband, whom she thinks is being hit on by everything in a skirt--including the aging widow next door (Billie Burke, The Wizard of Oz). When her snooping causes her to discover Walter might actually be a suspect in a double death, Harriet pulls everything in closer. Never mind the portentous nature of the truth, which might signal to her that these next two days will be her downfall, with everything and everyone converging against her. Walter wasn’t involved, he couldn’t be. The tragedy was a murder/suicide perpetrated by a husband on his cheating wife
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Described as it is above, Craig’s Wife has all the ingredients of a cheap B-movie or even a television soap opera, but as Arzner presents it, it is neither of these things. It’s an animal unto itself, a tad similar to trapped women pictures like Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door [review] or Douglas Sirk’s Sleep, My Love [review], but with the roles reversed. The woman traps herself. If this were Rebecca [review], Harriet would be her own Mrs. Danvers. In terms of drama, Arzner leans away from suspicious shadows and jump scares. There isn’t even a hint of danger or violence. Human emotion is enough. Like a Eugene O’Neill play, their conversations are their own undoing.

Rosalind Russell by far runs away with this picture. Her performance is as flawless and calculated as Harriet aspires to be. She can snap from rigid to tender in a second, and had we not seen her reveal her true colors in other scenes, we’d certainly fall for her routine. Like any villain, you have to like her, at least a little bit, and Craig’s Wife leaves enough room for sympathy so that in the end, you can ‘t help but feel happy for her when she gets exactly what she wished for, and sorry for her in that it’s exactly what she deserved.

COLUMBIA NOIR: MURDER BY CONTRACT/HUMAN DESIRE/DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD/NIGHTFALL - CRITERION CHANNEL

I am continuing to work my way through the Criterion Channel’s “Columbia Noir” bundle, a collection of crime and melodrama spanning three decades of the Columbia studio. You can see my first group review here; it appears this collection will be off the Channel at the end of the month, so hurry if any of these sound like your thing.

Murder by Contract: This raw 1958 hitman picture from Irving Lerner is considered a B-movie classic, lauded by Martin Scorsese and others for its rough-hewn, independent style. It’s a bit like Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence [review] in that what it lacks in polish, it makes up for in earnestness.

Vince Edwards, who played Val in Kubrick’s The Killing but was probably best known as TV’s Dr. Ben Casey, stars as Claude, a self-motivated would-be contract killer looking to earn enough cash to buy a house on a lake far away from the grind. Claude’s m.o. is that he uses his brains rather than weapons, avoiding any pitfalls that might lead to the police tracking him down. After a few successful jobs, he is sent to Los Angeles to take out a nightclub performer (Billie Williams) about to testify against a colleague of Claude’s boss. With the trial a few days away, Claude decides to soak up Hollywood...only to find the time wasted when the girl proves harder to kill than he thought.

It’s funny to watch Murder by Contract now, as it’s hard not to think about the HBO show Barry, in which Bill Hader plays an assassin who tries to leave the life to become an actor. Too bad Murder by Contract has none of Barry’s wit, character, or even action. This is all pretty standard stuff, obviously done on the cheap, with little editing or rewriting applied to Ben Simcoe’s sloppy script. The narrative meanders, and Edwards appears committed to the role but incapable of delivering what that commitment requires.

Human Desire: Master director Fritz Lang had scored a noir hit with The Big Heat, also for Columbia, in 1953, and Human Desire sees him reuniting his principal cast a year later for another go. This time, Lang is adapting La bête humaine, the Emile Zola novel that also inspired Jean Renoir’s excellent 1938 drama of the same name [review]. Glenn Ford takes over the Jean Gabin role, playing Jeff, a fresh discharge from the Korean War returning to the small town where he grew up to pick up where he left off. Jeff is looking to resume his quiet life as a train conductor, renting a room in a house with his co-worker, the man’s wife, and the growing daughter who has eyes for the levelheaded boarder.

Enter temptation. On a random trip, Jeff crosses paths with Vicki Buckley (Gloria Grahame), who lays on the charm. Little does Jeff know that Vicki’s flirting is to distract Jeff from finding the body of the man her jealous husband, Carl (Broderick Crawford), just killed. As Jeff is drawn into Gloria’s web, he soon ends up covering for her misdeeds and heading toward the inevitable: he’ll have to kill the husband if he wants the wife all to himself.

Stylistically, Human Desire has more in common with Lang’s 1952 steamer Clash By Night than it does The Big Heat. The title says it all: this is a plot about base emotions and internal struggle. Grahame sizzles as the manipulative femme fatale, playing off nicely with Jeff’s more earthy paramour, the innocent who can see no wrong in the man she loves (a noir trope). Ford conjures some of that grinding anger that worked so well for him in Gilda [review], but the real star here is Broderick Crawford, who portrays Carl as scheming and black-hearted, but also nervous and insecure. He makes the violent creep almost sympathetic.

Drive a Crooked Road: Okay, now this is more like it. This 1954 crime piece from director Richard Quine (Sex and the Single Girl [review]) is sharply written and unflinching in its dark cynicism. Mickey Rooney plays Eddie Shannon, a natural wunderkind with a car engine who also likes to race from time to time, but always comes in second. Ribbed at work for being short, and self-conscious about the scar on his face, Eddie is a lonely guy just getting by.

Enter into his life Barbara Mathews (Dianne Foster, The Last Hurrah), a Beverly Hills swell with a car that needs his special touch. When Barbara takes Eddie outside the garage, however, it’s she who will be applying her own special touch. Barbara is a unique kind of femme fatale--she plays the part of the loving, open girlfriend so convincingly, there isn’t even a hint that Eddie is being played. Rather, it’s guys in Barbara’s social circle who eventually approach Eddie, looking for a driver who can navigate the winding California roads.

Quine makes great use of the landscape, from beach to mountain to the almost space-age confines of Eddie’s dealership. There’s a sparkle to it all that hypnotizes our protagonist, and though Eddie is an A-grade patsy, Rooney brings empathy to the role. You really feel sorry for the guy, and Foster is such a warm presence, so kind, it feels like a double betrayal when it goes wrong. These factors give special stakes to Drive a Crooked Road’s finale, affecting who we root for and why in a way that has more emotional truth than the standard noir payoff.

To see Mickey Rooney in a similar role, and also just to see another quality film noir, also seek out Quicksand from 1950.

Nightfall: Jacques Tourneur could bring style to any genre, be it horror like I Walked With a Zombie [review] or the quintessential noir Out of the Past. While his 1956 Los Angeles crime picture Nightfall does not necessarily rise to the level of that classic Robert Mitchum collaboration, it’s still a solid chase picture in its own right.

Aldo Ray (Miss Sadie Thompson [review]) plays Jim, a Navy vet built like a quarterback with a cool, gentle demeanor. Jim is hiding out in Los Angeles, where he is being watched by several pairs of eyes. Most notably, by two crooks, John (Brian Keith, The Parent Trap; The Pleasure Seekers [review]) and Red (Rudy Bond, On the Waterfront), bank robbers who ran across Jim in Wyoming while on the run. That tussle left one man dead and a bag of money went missing--money the pair of hoods believe Jim is hiding.

It just so happens the night they catch up with Jim is also the night he meets Marie (Anne Bancroft, The Graduate [review]), a lonely model who lucks out by meeting the one gentleman in Hollywood. Or so she thinks. Her chance encounter puts her in danger once Jim gives the bad guys the slip, and the two of them end up in a race to get out of town and find the cash.

Tourneur, working with a script by Stirling Silliphant (In the Heat of the Night [review]), strikes an interesting balance here. The hunt has all the great tension of an urban thriller, while flashbacks to Jim’s story, and really the man himself, have the easygoing calm of a farmland drama. The blonde patsy is not your typical noir hero. His voice is soft, his vocation is art, his origins are rural; he’s a light fish swimming in a dark pond. That means when we shift to Jim’s terrain for Nightfall’s snowbound climax, things get a little quieter than we are used to in a noir showdown, but Tourneur and Silliphant are letting the characters dictate the action, bringing the hunter and the hunted full circle to have an ending that perfectly suits who they are.

COLUMBIA NOIR: MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS/SO DARK THE NIGHT/EXPERIMENT IN TERROR - CRITERION CHANNEL

Film noir has long been a passion of mine, and regular readers of my reviews will know I can be rather pedantic over what qualifies a particular movie as part of the genre. As the years have passed, I’ve watched lots of critics and festivals and marketing men bend the term to fit anything that has some kind of crime element in its narrative, disregarding style, tone, and theme in the process.

So it is with the newly opened Criterion Channel’s special collection of “Columbia Noir,” bringing together an unlucky thirteen from the Columbia studio vaults. Upon first entering the new site, I was particularly excited, because out of that baker’s dozen, I had only seen one: Fritz Lang’s bonafide classic The Big Heat.

Sadly, from my initial sampling, the curation here is lacking in rigor. Picking movies from both sides of the set in terms of chronology, at least to start, I have found the selection to be a mixed bag of solid flicks of varied stripes, but not really film noir.

Take, for instance, My Name is Julia Ross, the earliest release offered, dated 1945. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, who went on to make the noir perennial Gun Crazy, My Name is Julia Ross is more an amalgamation of early Hitchcock than traditional noir. It’s like a mash-up of The Lady Vanishes [review] and Rebecca [review], a little bit of mystery and a little bit of gothic atmosphere.

Nina Foch (An American in Paris [review]) stars as the titular Julia, a London career girl excited to gain regular employment as secretary to a rich widower and his mother. Only, as Julia quickly discovers, this gig is not on the up-and-up. The day after she moves into her new quarters, she wakes up at the seaside in an unfamiliar house where everyone refers to her as Mrs. Hughes and treats her like a hothouse flower. What she quickly realizes is that her employers, played by George Macready (Paths of Glory [review]) and May Whitty (coincidentally, Mrs. Foy in The Lady Vanishes), are trying to use her to replace the man’s dead wife, gaslighting Julia in an attempt to cover up the murder.

It’s a good concept, and could be quite captivating in more adept hands, but Lewis and screenwriter Muriel Roy Bolton (The Amazing Mr. X) give the game away too quickly. They never let the audience spend any time in Julia’s shoes, and so there is no suspense. We are privy to the plot she’s been drawn into and never once led to believe she’ll have any trouble getting out of it.

In terms of storytelling, My Name is Julia Ross is equally flat. There is no apparent aesthetic here, no dark shadows or misty moors, nothing to tie the film to any particular cinematic movement. My Name is Julia Ross is a perfunctory B-picture, little more. The screenplay skirts the edges of intriguing issues--the compulsion to kill that drives Julia’s would-be husband, the perception of single women in the city, etc.--but stops short of really giving any of these topics genuine heft.

Lewis followed this film a year later with 1946’s So Dark the Night, a noir tile in search of a matching script. What that moniker finds instead is an Agatha Christie-type whodunit, complete with a genial, yet world-weary detective. In this case, it’s Henri Cassin (Steven Geray, In a Lonely Place [review]), a Parisian police inspector going on holiday. Geray is so likeable and so assured, I thought there must be more adventures of Cassin, that this was part of a series, or at the very least lifted from a pre-existing literary franchise

No such series exists. Cassin was created by a writer named Aubrey Wisberg (Hercules in New York) for the story adapted here. So Dark the Night follows the middle-aged Inspector Cassin on a much needed vacation to the countryside. In the small town, his reputation precedes him, and his presence shakes up the norm. He attracts the attention of Nanette (Micheline Cheirel), the innkeeper’s daughter, and when Nanette turns up dead, her jealous fiancé (Paul Marion) is the obvious first suspect. Only, someone has killed him, too, leaving the normally unflappable Cassin with nothing to go on.

So Dark the Night is an enjoyable little mystery, taking advantage of its rural setting and maintaining an upbeat manner that is antithetical to the usual urban existentialism we associate with noir. Inspector Cassin is a genuine good guy who wants nothing but happiness for his fellow man, and so also far from our expected noir protagonist. In fact, his demeanor should make the mystery’s resolution even more implausible. The climax of So Dark the Night would normally be a textbook example of something you just can’t do in a murder mystery, withholding clues and offering a resolution the audience couldn’t possibly puzzle out on their own, but Lewis--and more significantly, the ever likable Steven Geray--makes it work. Even so, this is more PBS territory than it is noir, more conservative flirting between decent folk than overheated passion amidst desperate degenerates.

On the opposite end of the timeline here is Blake Edwards’ 1962 thriller Experiment in Terror. A stylish psychological potboiler, Experiment in Terror is closer to noir territory, but it’s more indicative of a post-Psycho box office landscape than post-War anxiety.

Lee Remick stars as Kelly, a single woman raising her younger sister all on her own in Twin Peaks, Washington. (Yes, that Twin Peaks.) At the start of the movie, she thinks she is coming home just like every other night, only she is jumped by a man in her garage who knows a little too much about the minutia of her life. He threatens her and her sister if she doesn’t rob the bank where she works and deliver the cash to him. It’s a tense, unsettling scene, made all the more scary by the violent attack Kelly suffers when she tries to call the FBI, believing her assailant to have already gone.

Luckily for her, the call got through anyway, and Agent Ripley (Glenn Ford, Gilda [review]) is ready to help out. Believing this is not the first time this crook has pulled such a trick, Ripley attempts to make it his last by stringing the bad guy along, hoping to figure out who he is before he forces Kelly to carry through on his demand or otherwise has to make good on his own threats.

Edwards is, of course, better known for comedies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s [review] and The Party [review], but he proves no slouch in the suspense department. Experiment in Terror is tense and mostly intriguing, only falling short by maybe being a little long. Edwards draws a sharp divide between his good guys and his bad guys, presenting Ford’s Ripley as the last good man standing guard against a demented criminal future--a trope dating back to Chandler’s The Big Sleep [review] and essential to many a noir antihero. There is a certain inevitability to how the world is changing, suggesting that somehow a destructive fate is unavoidable. And yet, Experiment in Terror lacks the cynicism of a good noir. Ripley is a true believer, and Kelly a shining beacon leading the way, suggesting that civilization should win because it’s good, rather than survive in spite of itself.

And, of course, since it’s Blake Edwards, we get a striking Henry Mancini score, showing as much facility for dramatic tension as he normally does with light melody and irresistible rhythm. It’s the sort of thing Orson Welles rejected from the composer in Touch of Evil [review], a decision I’ve never entirely agreed with--so I’ll give that point to Edwards.

Even as I take some away from the Criterion Channel. Of the three films reviewed, I’d only give Experiment in Terror a full recommendation, noir or no. Let’s hope some of the movies in the center of this virtual collection fit the mold a little better.

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS - #952

Orson Welles is the true prototype of a Wes Anderson character. A child prodigy, precocious and intelligent, obsessed with magic, a born entertainer, emerging from a semi-privileged background with a blind self-determination that would hinder as much, if not more, than it helped, he could have been Max Fischer or Steve Zissou or, god help him, in terms of his relationship to Hollywood, Eli Cash.



And I think even Wes Anderson would tell you, he wouldn’t have created his real second feature (Bottle Rocket fans, come at me [review]) without Orson Welles’ 1942 second feature, no The Royal Tenenbaums [review] without The Magnificent Ambersons.



The comparisons are obvious from the jump: the intro for each is a family history played out in a montage using artificially antiquated imagery, explained by a narrator with a soothing voice, somewhat detached, somewhat reverent, but also sardonic and prone to ironic commentary. In the case of The Magnificent Ambersons, it’s Welles himself, his only mask the recording booth, grappling with the stars of his narrative like a proud parent resigned to letting his children make their own mistakes.



Like the Tenenbaums, but with a more pronounced urgency, the Ambersons are a family in decline, even if they can’t see it yet. A family soon to be out of step. As the 19th century nears its close, the Ambersons are top of the heap, but soon they will be as superfluous as the horse-drawn carriage. Indeed, their happiness and prosperity will become inextricably linked to the advancement of the automobile. A onetime suitor of Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello, Little Lord Fauntleroy), Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotton, The Third Man [review]) returns to town after years in exile looking to establish his own auto factory, building a model he designed. A widower with a young daughter, Lucy (Anne Baxter, All About Eve), Eugene is everything the most recent two generations of Ambersons are not. Namely, he is self-made and self-sufficient. Essentially, he is the Danny Glover character in The Royal Tenenbaums, an example of frugalness and responsibility--and thus an interloper in a clan resigned to doing things their own way.



It only takes one brief encounter for it to become apparent that a torch still burns between Eugene and Isabel. And one also quickly ignites between Lucy and Isabel’s bratty son, George (Tim Holt, Stagecoach [review]). They all come together at a glorious party thrown by the Ambersons and beautifully choreographed by Welles. There is dancing at the soirée, but the affair itself is its own dance, a physical exchange set to social rhythms. Welles favors long, complicated shots with the partygoers circling each other, George trying to disengage from the flow and isolate Lucy, but the crowd consistently coming together, dialogue providing the occasional percussive flourish. It’s a smooth and elegant set piece, establishing the full dynamic of The Magnificent Ambersons, assigning each player their part in the ballet. It’s also effortless, the director’s technique becoming invisible since his first feature; where Citizen Kane dazzled with its constant invention, Ambersonssoothes with its easygoing, imperceptible style.



The Magnificent Ambersons is based on a sprawling book by Booth Tarkington (Alice Adams), a family melodrama informed by historical sea changes. Part of adapting the book to film is paring it down to a manageable narrative, with a focus on George as the central figure. There is an irony to George. As the youngest Amberson, he is the most resistant to change, probably because he is the one who has benefited most from his grandfather’s fortune while contributing absolutely nothing to it. George expects everything to be handed to him and expects nothing to disrupt that. So, why adopt a horseless carriage when he is getting on fine with the dependable horse-drawn version? And when his father passes, if he were to let his mother marry Eugene, who knows what that would mean for the family fortune.



While George succeeds at heading off the romance, the business of making cars is something the remaining Ambersons see as a good investment prospect. Thus George’s two biggest concerns become linked, and if one were to believe in karma, his selfish block against happiness results in professional failure for Eugene and the bankruptcy of the Ambersons. George is a tough part to play. If an actor is too petulant, as was Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the 2002 Alfonso Arau adaptation, the movie becomes unwatchable. No one ends up really liking George, not his family, not even his director, but Tim Holt manages to maintain some glimmer of humanity for the character. There is a sense that his shell could break with the right impact. He can cross over from the side of the family that never worked for anything to the side that pitches in where it counts, leaving his bitter, scornful Aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead, Magnificent Obsession [review]) to join the jovial Uncle Jack (Ray Collins, Touch of Evil [review]), as it were. If George has cursed the family, then it will require a sacrifice to undo it.

Sadly, even as Welles had pared down the Tarkington novel, the studio would pare down The Magnificent Ambersons in his absence, gutting the plot by nearly an hour to shorten the running time. The full Welles cut of the film is one of the great holy grails of cinema, though one likely to never come to fruition, as there has been no indication that the missing footage exists anywhere, and up until Criterion recently rescued the film, Warner Bros. had treated it like an unwanted stepchild, only ever releasing it on DVD coupled with its more accomplished sibling, Citizen Kane. It’s a testament to Welles’ skill that the movie is still so damn good, but if you are watching it and get a weird feeling that something is missing or has been glossed over, your instinct could very well be correct. The one spot where it’s most obvious is the hurried conclusion, which was shot without the great director. Georgie’s off-screen redemption and rescue feels rushed. You have to wonder what the true character arc here was, what great moments fell to the editor’s scissors, or how it would have left the audience without the tacked-on finish. The final fade out in The Magnificent Ambersons comes without much warning.

A couple of other quick notes I jotted down on this viewing of The Magnificent Ambersons:

* Joseph Cotton has always had a quiet presence, making him the perfect foil for a blustery actor like Orson Welles, but in movies like Citizen Kane or Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, he also has an angry edge. Not so here. Eugene Morgan is his most gentle performance, and with his kind eyes and somewhat growly voice, it suits him.

* The audio in The Magnificent Ambersons is particularly impressive. Welles mixes the sound to match the location, with voices echoing and fading out in relation to where the actor is to the central focal point within the cavernous halls of the Ambersons mansion. Likewise, the lighting is designed to be natural, befitting the time period, meaning lots of shadows are cast across the rooms, changing to fit the time of day. In some scenes, the aesthetic becomes almost gothic, befitting the stifled passions and secrets that lay behind each door in the Amberson household. (See also: Hitchcock’s Rebecca [review]; Lang’s The Secret Beyond the Door [review].)

* I watched The Magnificent Ambersons on Christmas Eve, and there is enough wintery melancholy here to qualify it as a Christmas movie, but I’m posting the write-up closer to New Year’s, a more fitting holiday for The Magnificent Ambersons, as it’s all about the passage of time, and the need for growth and change. Shall we start a new tradition? Maybe pair it with Visconti’s The Leopard?

PANIQUE - #955

A small Parisian neighborhood. A carnival. A dead body. A local outcast. A young hustler. A conflicted femme fatale. Nosy neighbors.

These are the essential ingredients of Julien Duvivier’s 1946 French noir Panique. Season with romantic intentions, double-crosses, and even a little mystical mumbo jumbo, and you have the sort of emotional potboiler Fritz Lang liked to make with Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett. Here instead we have the great Michel Simon (L’Atalante [review], The Two of Us [review]) and Viviane Romance (Any Number Can Win) as, respectively, the older man who lives a life of intellectual isolation and the woman too loyal to her criminal boyfriend (Paul Bernard, Les Dames du Bois du Boulogne) for her own good. It’s a great set up, taken from a novel by Georges Simenon, and one Duvivier plans to milk for all the drama and intrigue he can.

Simon leads the picture as Monsieur Hire, a strange character, dismissive of his neighbors, but nice to children and awkward in courtship. His early contact with Alice (Romance) is borderline stalkerish. Hire is a man of many lives: he works under a different name, peddling astrology as if it were a science, and he has a past he abandoned when his wife ditched him for his best friend. Yet, the more we learn, the less shady he becomes, our suspicions replaced by sadness and even sympathy.

Alice is similarly charmed by Hire--though, initially, she only indulges him because he claims to have evidence implicating Alfred (Bernard) in the killing. Alice just spent three years in jail taking the rap for a robbery Alfred committed, and she’s not prepared to lose her lover just yet. Caught between these two unsavories, the unspoken question becomes: whose affection is more genuine? What does each man stand to gain from maintaining her love?

That nothing comes totally clear, that Duvivier allows for such gray motivations, is what keeps Panique so intriguing from start to finish. Viviane Romance plays Alice as sincerely conflicted all the way to the end, despite Alfred showing himself as having no nuance whatsoever. And how are we not to be drawn in by Michel Simon’s natural charisma, even as he does his best to tamp it down? There is no distinct moment in Panique when M. Hire is shown as being entirely good or sympathetic. When he confesses his greatest pain, he follows it by showing his guiltiest pleasure, the photos he takes of the downtrodden and indigent, a spectator in other people’s misery. In classic Beauty and the Beast fashion, he only presents his nobler intentions after making the basest of threats. Simon’s performance is like one long dare being leveled at the audience. Will you have the guts to side with a man who we know can be a real creep?

Panique is like a melding of American suspense pictures and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s morality plays, particularly the small-town poison-pen drama Le Corbeau. At times, you might also think of Hitchcock’s Rebecca (Hire taking Alice to his old house) or The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Panique’s desperate climax). Duvivier’s only true genre is melodrama, even if he sharpens it on crime-fiction tropes or winks at gothic traditions. His construction is artful, relying on shadowy actions and voyeuristic impulses--both ours and that of the extended cast--to keep the plot energized. There are even some visceral action scenes. You’ve never seen as savage a bumper car ride as you’ll see in Panique. And it’s no throwaway scene, either; the memory of these dangerous amusements will come flooding back in the final act when the mob leaps from the carnival rides and takes to the streets.

So Panique has a little bit of everything while always feeling like just one thing. There are no unnecessary digressions, no excess fat. Rather, the film is fine-tuned for maximum effect, ceaselessly entertaining and always surprising. That it comes immediately after the end of World War II, and was the first film that Duvivier made upon returning from Hollywood, it must have also had many personal overtones for the director, a parable of groupthink, collaboration, and individuality vs. the mob. In that, it is also like Le Corbeau in how it despises petty small-town gossip, but even more challenging for pushing us to root for a man who, under many other circumstances, might not deserve it. As with any good story, it’s as relevant as ever, though now the controversy and drama would never spill into the public square, it would just remain online--which, even after seeing how wrong things go in Panique, seems all the more barbaric.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

METROPOLIS - FILMSTRUCK

This review was written for the theatrical release of The Complete Metropolis in 2010 and published at DVDTalk.com.

"There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator."

There are few films from early cinema that could even get close to touching Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece Metropolis in terms of its impact on pop culture. Lang's silent sci-fi parable is an imaginative, visually stunning piece of work. His creation of a future city and the lady robot that would bring it crashing down has influenced just about every future vision to follow, be it in movies, comic books, or even music videos.

All the more impressive, then, that this impact was achieved despite that fact that versions of Metropolis people have been seeing for the last 80 years are vastly different than the one Lang and his crew intended. The movie immediately ran afoul of German censors, who started making trims. Then Metropolis traveled overseas, and American censors and greedy exhibitors made even more cuts. Most of the footage that had been taken out was believed to be lost forever, so it was a gutted Metropolis or no Metropolis at all. If you can't quite grasp what that means, imagine if someone had taken a pair of scissors to da Vinci's Last Supper and cut out five of the apostles. It's a totally different painting, and one that's full of holes.

The story of Lang's film got a surprise happy ending recently when a nearly complete print was discovered in Buenos Aires. A restoration team seized upon this unearthed treasure and immediately got to work restoring more than 20 minutes of footage not seen since the movie's earliest showings. Though the title The Complete Metropolis is somewhat of a misnomer (we're still missing the showdown between Joh Fredersen and Rotwang, for instance), the new prints of the film that are currently touring arthouses is the closest to the full picture as we're likely to get, so I'm willing to go with it.

And my, what a difference this added footage makes! Metropolis is now a far more coherent and rich film, working much better as a narrative but without sacrificing the movie's legendary weirdness. Based on a novel by Thea von Harbou, who also worked on the script, Metropolis is the story of an industrial city in a far-flung future. The creation of businessman Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), this mechanized wonderland is built in correspondence with the social order. Fredersen and his rich pals live up high, their workers toil in the pits below, and all manner of life floats in between.

Fredersen is a widower, and his son Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) is living the life expected of a privileged heir. He frolics in a literal Garden of Delights, chasing potential wives through the foliage and around an opulent fountain. Things change the day Maria (Brigitte Helm) peeks into this paradise, bringing along a field trip of working-class children to see the world she believes they deserve. Intrigued by this luminescent beauty, Freder travels down into the lower factory in search of her. He ends up trading places with one of the workers (Erwin Biswanger) so he can experience what a common life is like, and once he is believed to be just another employee, his co-workers take him to a secret labor rally--led by none other than Maria herself.

Meanwhile, the scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is working on a mechanical man that will revolutionize the labor force. He shows Fredersen his invention and promises he will make the robot resemble a real person within 24 hours. He has dubbed her Hel, and he is building her in honor of Fredersen's lost wife. There is a history between these three, and Rotwang holds a grudge over the woman's death. So, when Freder demands that the machine maker make his creation look like Maria so she can topple the worker rebellion, he doesn't realize he is giving his rival the means for revenge.

Metropolis is a movie that is many things all at once. It's a political allegory commenting on worker's rights and the dangers of industry. It's a science fiction adventure that, despite its high-tech trappings, uses traditional storytelling tropes--a chosen hero, a damsel in distress, a misguided king--to create a cautionary future. Metropolis is also a religious parable, riddled through with Christian iconography and echoes of Biblical tales. There is a whole segment retelling the story of the Tower of Babel for the machine age, and the above and below of Fredersen's city represents Heaven and Hell, with the humans caught in between. The great machine that powers the whole thing is even given a mystical personification. He is Moloch, and workers shall be sacrificed in his bloody maw!

Amazingly enough, Lang's narrative is still relevant, and his vision is still dazzling to behold. He builds his Metropolis using elaborate sets, models, and matte paintings, creating a city that is massive in size and scope. The actual design of the architecture used contemporary art deco but advanced it to incorporate more industrial elements. At the same time, Lang recreated Biblical images, such as creating a whole stage show for the whore of a Babylon to strut her stuff. We're talking about a movie that has both a pageant featuring Death and the Seven Deadly Sins as well as an android woman brought to life via diodes and Tesla coils four years before James Whale would jolt Boris Karloff into action in Frankenstein. We may be in the 21st century, but we still haven't made our world look this damn cool.

In previous cuts of Metropolis, the story jumped around at random points, and whole subplots were dropped in favor of a shorter running time. For instance, when Freder takes over the work station, the man he replaces takes Freder's clothes and goes off to spend the rich boy's money. None of those scenes were on Kino's 2003 restored DVD, they were only explained in expository title cards. Now we can at last see what Georgy gets up to, alongside other side plots and fill-in scenes that add greater nuance to the overall story. Other versions of Metropolis were like skies full of flying cars racing every which way with nothing to guide the traffic; The Complete Metropolis is like those same fantastical skies, but now the cars have road markers telling them where to go.

If you've never seen a silent film before, don't fear. The Complete Metropolis is as fresh and exciting as any talkie. This isn't some worn-out relic more interesting for its historical importance than it is the actual entertainment. I have a feeling that if they give it a chance, this film will surprise a great many people. It's like a cinematic time capsule that most other movies are still running to catch up to, an imagined future that could still turn out to be our tomorrow. It's the motion picture experience eight decades in the making! If you are lucky enough to have it come to your town, don't hesitate. Get in line right now.