Boomerang!

Beyond the other complaints I have about it, ironies and contradictions abound in Elia Kazan’s 1947 film BOOMERANG!

Upright District Attorney Henry Harvey (played by Dana Andrews) goes against pretty much the whole town he serves in suburban Connecticut in order to keep young drifter John Waldron from being convicted of murdering the priest of the local Church, Father Lambert. Contradiction number one: District Attorneys are supposed to either prosecute crimes or not bring them for indictment in the first place, and yet Harvey brings the case to trial and then tries to plead nolo prosequi, reversing field and telling the whole courtroom why the accused man could not be guilty (and making himself look like an incompetent in the process). I just couldn’t see that happening, even though the movie is “based” on a real life case.

Contradiction number two: District Attorneys are the most political of animals, and yet Harvey stands up to the political fixers and brokers and kingmakers in town even though it is political suicide. He is backed by the “reform party” in town, the ones who have thrown out the “machine” hacks. The reformers are up against it when the cops, their cops, and their DA, can’t find the killer. The newspaper in town is run by the ousted machine, and so the longer the powers that be fail to find out who put a bullet in the back of Father Lambert’s head, the worse it looks for Harvey come next election time. I had trouble believing a District Attorney could be so principled and still have managed to become District Attorney in the first place (can anyone say Eliot Spitzer?)

And yet this guy Harvey takes on the whole town, including police Chief Robinson (Lee J. Cobb), who looks all during the movie like he just pulled on one of his boots and found out it was full of piss. And Harvey comes out not only smelling like a rose, but then goes on to become US Attorney General! Give me a break.

1947 was the same year Kazan won the Academy Award for GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT, one of the first Hollywood movies to directly confront anti-Semitism. I hope GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT was a better movie. In BOOMERANG!, Cobb is not the man or menace he was later in ON THE WATERFRONT (1954), also by Kazan, and Karl Malden, as Lieutenant White, is vapid, inconsequential, a milksop, not the hard-assed priest who takes a beer bottle to the head in “Waterfront.”

BOOMERANG!, like TWELVE ANGRY MEN and THE OX BOW INCIDENT before it, pits one rational and just man against a mob, some of whom may be well-meaning, but whose fear and bloodlust have driven them beyond reason. It takes guts to face down a mob, and Harvey’s supposed to be showing a real impressive set of cojones here, but I just didn’t buy it. No fire in the belly. Andrews uses the same expression to convey every emotion from joy to despair, steely determination to dyspepsia. He blows his couple of chances to shower himself with rhetorical glory by coming off as a blowhard. I went to the fridge for a beer for both his big speeches.

I didn’t like the documentary style (I prefer the way Woody Allen makes fun of such style in TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN). The style’s didactic, indoctrinating us into right thinking, feeding us a simplistic morality as if we were baby birds and truth could be dispensed with an eye dropper. That is irony number one: a movie about a guy who keeps his head and doesn’t follow the crowd force feeds its point to us. We are explicitly told there is a lesson in it for everyone. The town in Connecticut is never named, and the narrator tells us that the name doesn’t matter, that all American small towns are the same under the inconsequential surface differences. So pay attention, boys and girls, because this could happen to you!

The second irony has been pointed out many times by thinkers much superior to me—Democracy is created to give John Q Public civic freedom, and yet that gives good old John Q the freedom to take his own freedom away (can anyone say Patriot Act?) The movie is very clear about how we must rely on superior men to keep us from falling into this trap, to save us from the machines (which, interestingly enough, were started by immigrants who couldn’t access the political process any other way) and the crooked newspapermen and crooked cops. Henry Harvey is our man, then. And so is Captain Robinson, who flatly turns down the old Irish Bull cop who says to him, when the interrogation of Waldron is going poorly and slow, “you know, there’s a faster way to do this.” No beatings and a DA who really believes in giving the common man a fair shake? We’re not in Connecticut, Kansas or even the U.S. anymore.

Third irony. Kazan lionizes the common (although superior) man as some kind of torchbearer for democracy, in the mold of Mr. Smith (played by Jimmy Stewart in MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON in 1939, eight years before this movie, but on the other side of WW2), an exceptional everyday guy who uses his free speech to preserve our rights, and yet Kazan named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan, who was the child of Greek Immigrants, knew about political persecution, but played along to save his own skin. Yes, he allowed himself to be cowed by the mob, quite unlike Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in “Waterfront,” who takes a beating standing up to a mobbed-up union so all the poor ham-and-eggers busting their humps just to put those ham and eggs on the table could get a fair and square deal. Kazan played along even though he knew full well that the people he named didn’t hate America, but had a different vision of how democratic ideals should be brought about.

Fourth irony-Jane Wyatt, Harvey’s wife in the film, was an outspoken opponent of McCarthy! You go, girl. And who says Father Knows Best.

The movie is ham-fisted in its approach. Harvey is asked if one man’s life is more important than the whole community, and he unhesitatingly says yes. I think of myself as a good liberal, and even I hesitate over that one, or see it as a more complex question than it appears. In a day and age where torture is being touted as the way to save the nation (and we only torture the bad guys, right, like anyone who disagrees with us) I question this tactic, but only because I think it endangers the community more than it does anything to save it. You can’t start torturing people and really think it is only going to happen to guilty people. If there was a way to know that only the terrorists were going to be tortured, that every drop of guilty blood spilled guaranteed innocent blood would not be, I would say torture away.

Kazan wasn’t brave enough to say that we have to protect the guilty from unfair treatment. He doesn’t really go out on a limb at all. Harvey protects a blameless man from a mob that is bound to come eventually to its senses (and he will always have Marge—who would have thought that Jane Wyatt was once so hot?) Big deal. Protect a child molester, or some other genuine pariah. If you really want to go to the wall for democracy, those are the ones whom you have to defend. Not because they deserve the benefit of the doubt, but because everyone does.

One last quibble with Kazan. He gives us a totally depraved real killer that confesses to Father Lambert about some other sin, but can’t get forgiveness (he probably went to a movie the National Legion of Decency didn’t endorse). Father Lambert is going to have said crook committed to a sanitarium (there’s some Christian forgiveness for you, but then again, it is a realistic movie). I didn’t know priests were trained in psychiatry, and that they were allowed to commit people. And the guy who confesses his unknown crime(s) to the good father has a furtive adolescent quality to him (along with eyes that don’t quite track together) that makes me think he should have hair growing on his palms. We never know what he has done, except kill the Father, but the imagined perversion of the crime to me speaks of a kind of unalloyed depravity to counterbalance Harvey’s solid-gold goodness. Realistic, my eye.

Finally (I know, I am really starting to sound like a whiner) the movie is touted as noir. This is not noir. Noir is about doomed losers. This movie was about hope, not doom. It trumpets about free will and American self actualization, and is not some exercise in existential despair. Saccharine and unrealistic, it is in no way noir.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Body Heat

The characters in BODY HEAT (written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, 1981) are trapped in a brutal heat wave in a claustrophobically small Florida town. The residents remark that it seems like there was never a time when it was anything but hot. This kind of detachment from a more pleasant time, a detachment that grows so extreme that you forget there ever was a better time, mirrors the way in which the characters are presented in this (and pretty much all) noir movies. Things are so bad that it seems like they always were that way, and maybe they really were. Why go into the backstory of Ned Racine (William Hurt) and Mattie Walker (Kathleen Turner)? They are in a place where the past doesn’t matter anymore. They are thirsty for something with a raw and desperate intensity, and can’t remember a time when they weren’t.

Their thirst is so great that they will do anything to try to quench it, and anything to avoid the painful realization that there is nothing that will. Ned is a small time no-account lawyer who has the lack of morals that would seem to augur success, but he is not successful: laziness and incompetence hold him back. He thinks he hasn’t got hold of the brass ring because fate has not presented him with the chance to go for it, but the evidence for that is to the contrary. He comes to court unprepared, and seems more interested in bedding waitresses than advancing his career. He drinks too much, and the only thing close to a genuine friendship he has is with assistant DA Lowenstein (Ted Danson) who regularly bests him in court, but doesn’t have as much luck with the women. The one healthy thing he does is run, but he always promptly fires up a cigarette when finished.

Mattie Walker seems to be that brass ring. She is quite a serving of woman, a cut above the usual waitress-sized sexual meal Racine is used to having. She tells Racine, or rather gets him to drag it out of her, that her husband Edmund (Richard Crenna) is both despicable and rich. He actually is a pretty morally challenged guy (although he seems to kind of worship her), and Racine decides (surprise!) to be her knight in tarnished armor. Her damsel-in-distress routine and declarations of undying love for Racine would only fool a complete narcissist, but that is what Racine is.

Edmund Walker explains to Racine, in one of those oblique tough guy conversations where they may be talking about what they are talking about and they may be talking about something else, that to be successful you have to be willing to “do what it takes.” Crenna thinks he has Racine pegged as strictly small-time, a guy not willing to do the ugly, the abhorrent, the criminal, to get what he wants. He’s the kind of guy used to having people afraid of him. He’s also used to people wanting his wife, but he figures their fear will outweigh their desire every time. He is arrogant enough to not see that the intensity of Racine’s desire, his desperation, his obtuseness, maybe just the damn heat itself, may finally balance the scale on the other side.

Edmund also doesn’t count on his wife’s ability get men to do what she wants. She enlists Racine to do her dirty work for her, all the while protesting that they aren’t murderers, are they? Could they really be doing this? Maybe their love, their lust, the heat, is so great that the social contract can be violated just this once, sweetheart, because no one ever loved the way we do (lust).

There are plot twists galore in this movie, and they are really impressive, but what interested me most was its tone. There is not one really likeable character in this film, except maybe the minor character of the Police Chief, who goes after Racine even though they are friendly with one another. Lowenstein approaches likeability early on when he tries to warn Racine that Mattie is poison. Later though, he laughs when Racine tells him of Mattie’s 7 year old niece finding her performing fellatio on Racine, and of the child getting an intimate view of him in an aroused state. That soured me on Lowenstein, to say the least. And I think it was supposed to. No one in this film is even tolerable.

So Mattie does what any woman who wants to be caught by a man does (at least according to the Noir School of things): she runs. And she catches the man (Racine) who thinks he is pursuing her. And then submits to him only after he has smashed in a window and taken her in a way that borders on rape, but apparently is just foreplay for a certain class of people.
Mattie convinces Racine that she has never been in love before (and never had orgasms like that before) and he is willing to believe her. Interesting that a guy so cynical, so untrustworthy himself, is so easily taken in. But he is. He believes that she is as desperate for him as he is for her, and even believes her when she says she doesn’t want her husband’s money, but to simply be rid of him, to be with the man she really loves. I smiled when I thought of how it is the lawyer who is supposed to make money off the depravity of human nature, but here finds himself outmaneuvered by a smoky, smoking hot blond so many moves ahead of him he should have surrendered his King, sued for peace, or run for the hills (but, of course, there are no hills to run for in Florida).

Like I said, plot twists galore in this flick. I won’t tell you about any of them, in case you want to see it. The sex scenes were supposed to be pretty hot, especially for 1981, and I guess they were. But what got me was the way that the sex was portrayed as the kind of need that only grows more powerful each time it is satisfied. As if everything you desperately drag in the front door results in two things bolting out the back. Racine and Matty are noir losers, which is what real noir characters are. I won’t tell you if they end up with the money, or if one does and the other doesn’t, because I don’t want to ruin the enjoyment of an ingenious plot, but I will say that the way the movie is shot, the skill with which the bleakness of these characters is portrayed, makes it clear that no matter what they get, it will never be enough.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Looper

The movie LOOPER (2012), written and directed by Rian Johnson, is a dystopian crime-thriller-sci-fi-neo-noir-suspense-coming-of-age-love-story set in 2044. Kind of. It jumps around from 2044 to 2074 and back, as people in 2074 can travel back to 2044, but not vice versa.

The reason people go back is so that they can be killed. Not that they are committing suicide-- they are getting the time travel kiss-off off instead of the old-fashioned-cement-overshoes-goodbye you might get from a twentieth century mobster. You see, as Joe (played by Joseph Gordon Leavitt) tells us, forensics is too sophisticated in 2074, so organized crime sends guys back in time to get whacked, which is the only sure way to disappear them.

When I think of hit men, I think of amoral and scary guys who can kill you eight ways from Sunday without even breaking a sweat—guys like Charles Bronson in THE MECHANIC. It’s both a vocation and avocation for these guys, who might not have grown up wanting to kill for a living, but found somewhere along the way that it was the only thing they were good at. The hired killer, the mercenary, the hit man, the assassin—these are the ultimate noir characters, who live in a world so debased that there is nothing they can do that would make any moral difference. They are not knights, not hard-boiled tough guys meting out rough justice in a rough world, but more like ronin, samurai without a master, killers who kill for nothing but personal gain, for whom everything, even the taking of human life, is just business.

Joe is amoral, certainly, but he doesn’t seem to me to have been “called” to killing. He’s certainly not an artist, or even a competent craftsman. All he really does is wait for guys to fall hog-tied from the sky and then blow them away with a shotgun called a blunderbuss: As he says : “You can’t hit anything further than fifteen feet, and within fifteen feet, you can’t miss.”

Joe gets a shitload of gold or silver bars for each hit, strapped to the back of the victim. He is saving up for some kind of life in the future, although it seems his future life will be as lonely and drug addicted as his present one. In the Kansas City of 2044, most of the city is a third world slum. A small percentage of the population (including Joe) lives a Club Med/Studio 54 kind of existence while the “vagrants” starve. There seems to be no middle class, with the rich and poor both being completely idle—the difference between them being the rich get to eat.

The movie starts to get really interesting when Old Joe is sent back from the future to be killed by Young Joe. For a little while, my mind got bent around the possibilities—if you killed your future self, would your present self die? (apparently not, although if your present self is killed your future one dies, and a new, alternative time line is created). Bruce Willis, as Old Joe, manages to elude Young Joe, who is dead set on killing his older self. He has to, or the entire criminal organization he works for will hunt him down and kill him. I loved the conceit, and thought about how often we mortgage off the future for a shinier, better present—athletes with steroids, Faust by selling his soul to the devil, young drug dealers and gang bangers selling off the future to live large now, all of which is not a new phenomenon, the phrase “live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse“ going back to at least the thirties, I think.

The two Joes meet in a diner, and the old version of Joe tells his former self (who sees the future holds no hair for him) that “The time travel shit doesn’t matter. We could sit around here all day with charts and graphs and it still wouldn’t make any sense.” It didn’t matter to me, either. The idea of your old self meeting your young self fascinates. What would I tell my twenty-two year old self if I could? Certainly, I would say lose the mullet. And avoid that boxing match where you tear the rotator cuff, as the shoulder is going to give you a lot of trouble later on. And certainly I would say stop drinking so much, and stay away from the wrong kind of women, and pay more attention to the right kind. And most of all, I would say stop being such a self absorbed, self pitying, navel-gazing, melancholy and morose fool.

Which is basically what Old Joe tells Young Joe. It’s a great scene. Of course, all this wisdom is lost on the impetuous youth. Wisdom is no match for impulse, the rash and the mercurial stronger than the seasoned and more measured (although maturity is just as capable of violence).

And from there we are off. The action scenes are great, but those are not what kept me in the movie. What did was the fact that there are two timelines at stake here, and in one, Old Joe loses his girlfriend in the future, and in the other, Young Joe loses his in the present. And there is the life of some young kids on the line, all three of them needing killing as an unknown one of them will become a criminal mastermind (somewhere around puberty, I would guess). Or will he? Do we have the right to kill people just because of what they might do? Especially since this differing “time lines” business seems to offer some version of free will?

But it is Young Joe’s movement back to the community of man, however tainted that community is, that really got me. You would think Johnson wouldn’t have bothered with something like that, what with the cool gimmick, the shtick, the conceit, the device, that he has come up with, but he has Joe learn to care for someone besides himself. Young Joe learns to love his girlfriend and her kid, and won’t let Old Joe kill either of them, which Classic Joe feels he must do to alter the terrible future (which contains the mastermind and the death of his girl). Both Joes are acting out of love, even though a complete lack of belief in the power of love is practically a job requirement for both of them.

Is there a third timeline where everything and everyone can be saved? Do people really change? The Future Joe does seem to have become a somewhat different man (although he still can rack up quite a body count). The best scenes in the movie are where Young Joe confronts old, and where Young Joe confronts Cid, his girlfriend’s (played by Emily Blunt) child. Cid is obviously emblematic of the younger Joe, before he was embittered by the loss of his mother, and all the useless death and pointless dystopian butchery and drugging and whoring and general dissipation and debauchery. Can a man choose love in a world where it has not only gone out of style, but seems not only a stupid but a suicidal choice? And will it make any difference in a world that doesn’t seem to care, a world that seems willfully opposed to any happy endings, that seems to insist that even if the two men act out of love, one of the girlfriends must meet a horrible death, and all three kids, including Cid? (Who may, on one timeline, embittered by the loss of his Mom, become the dreaded Rainman, the criminal mastermind with special telekinetic powers who decides to close everyone’s “loops” by having all the future killers go back in time to be slaughtered by their present ones, thereby closing their “loops”?)

No spoilers here. Let’s just say that people, and movies, can surprise you.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Reservoir Dogs

Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs is a simple movie that possesses surprising depth. It is also an homage to tough-guy noir and crime caper movies. It revels in the masculine and the gory; it is blood-soaked and yet about brotherhood. It is about the surprising tenderness that tough guys can feel for each other and the oblique and odd and funny ways they end up expressing it. It is about pop culture, it is a satire, a send up, but also an homage to a certain type of movie making. It is funny and suspenseful and postmodern and, most of all, it tells a compelling story.

The movies, and books and TV are, for me, portals into dimensions, to times and places, where I could otherwise never go. Or to places I would like to go, but will never get the chance. Or to places I don’t know how to get to, or would be too afraid to go to even if I knew the way.

The foreign land this movie transports me to is the macho criminal underworld, a country of only the hardest of hard guys. These guys have balls as big as those of a brass monkey’s, they are alpha males, top dogs, they could survive any prison, being stranded in the desert, the longest forced march, the darkest night time of the soul (if they even possessed one of those). I’m in awe of these guys, at the same time they repulse me—what freedom to not be afraid of the mundane things that frighten us less masculine types—cops, nuns, mother-in-laws, the IRS, mean dogs, the guy on the subway who won’t stop staring at you!

Lawrence Tierney, playing Joe Cabot, is the quintessential hard-boiled character. Even near the end of his life, playing the mastermind of a jewel heist pulled off, or bungled, by a group of criminals right out of the old noir movies Tierney starred in during the 30’s and 40’s, he looks and acts as if he could beat down the lot of them between drinks and telling stories about the other young punks he has beaten down in other buckets of blood in other tank towns, different places all, and yet somehow all the same.

Tierney and the crew he commands are guys who make their living outside the law, who follow an outlaw code, who have pledged to live a life of crime, to live fast and die young and make a good- looking corpse. There are no women in this movie, no girlfriends or wives or mothers, no femme fatales, none. The only time we get even a glimpse of a woman is in a strip club, and when one of the “dogs,” on the run from the aforementioned botched robbery, tries to hijack a car, only to have the female occupant reach into her purse and plug him in the guts with a bullet. He goes from victimizer to victimized in the brutal second it takes for her to pull the trigger.

Even when they haven’t been thrown together to do a job (and certainly not when they are getting gut shot by women) these guys seem to be the kind to prefer the company of other men. And when they are together, what they like to do is tell stories. Interesting that Tarantino makes stories a central theme in his story—this kind of self-awareness and self-commentary is very postmodern, in a movie that is in some ways old-fashioned, and in other ways certainly is not. While the intricacies of the dark plot are pure old fashioned noir, the focus on the gore, and the way that the pain of being shot and tortured robs these men of their prized masculinities, is not.

In reading reviews of this movie, I was struck by how they mentioned it “stylized” and “eroticized” violence. It certainly did! The scene where Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) tortures a cop while dancing to Stealer Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” is disturbing, but also gives you a kind of frisson that is undeniably like pleasure. And I felt guilty for laughing when, after cutting the cop’s ear off, Mr. Blonde talks into it, saying “what? Did you hear that?”

Funny also is the way that the gangsters ramble on about pop culture, and have discussions that are of a type that a more metrosexual guy might have. When Mr. Pink won’t give a waitress a tip, Mr. White lectures him on how waitressing is the only way an undereducated single mother can hope to make any type of decent living.
It is funny, but there is a bonhomie to the banter, to the interaction of these boon companions, a kind of fellow feeling, that makes it seem like they, unable to relate to women, or cops, certainly, or civilians (anyone who is not a cop or a crook), find the need for closeness and connection that they can’t find anywhere else in this seemingly casual and offhand repartee.

Another funny thing about the movie is the prickly vanity of these extremely macho guys. When Steve Buscemi’s character learns he is to be Mr. Pink (Cabot decides to give them all code names so they won’t be able to rat each other out later) he is distraught. Mr. White tells him to leave it alone, and he says “that’s easy for you to say, you’re Mr. White, that’s a cool name.”

When Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) infiltrates the gang, he wins their confidence with a story about trying to stay cool with a shitload of drugs on his person while a group of nearby cops listen to one of their number tell a story himself, and the cops’ German Shepherd eyes Mr. Orange suspiciously. Mr. Orange’s mentor tells him he has to own that story, to make it his own, to know every least detail and nuance of it until it becomes real to him. And he does. And Tarantino does it with this movie, which was as real to me as real life. Even when the movie steps back and references TV and popular music, which serves to remind us that the movie itself is just pop cultural entertainment, I was enthralled. I wanted to know if Mr. Orange was going to be found out, if Mr. Blonde was going to kill the cop, if Mr. White and Pink would kill each other.

What of the reviews of this movie, which has gone from cult classic to icon in the twenty odd years since it was made? I read one said that the movie was about homosexuality, another that it was about feminism’s threat to traditional “manhood”, a third that it was about how there is no absolute meaning in a postmodern world, a fourth that its meaning was all about redemption through pain and suffering, and finally one that said it was about how the gangsters want to go “straight” and become real people, but can’t.

Tarantino himself said he wanted only to make a good movie. And he did. We have an instinctive sense of what a story is, and what a good one is. It comes from our unconscious, and the message we get from it is pleasure first, followed by meaning. The pleasure we get from it is clear and powerful if it is a good story, because it appeals to something deep within us. The meaning comes after that initial aesthetic response, and is often not as clear. And if you are a critic, you often want to make the meaning more complex of abstruse or esoteric than it is or has to be so you can justify yourself as someone who has some special insight that the normal moviegoer doesn’t have. This leads to a lot of weird critiques, to be sure.

Is Reservoir Dogs about the male fear of homosexuality? Is the scene about the black woman who crazy glues her abusive boyfriend’s penis to his stomach about the fear of strong women? Are the racist and homophobic remarks the gangsters make a comment on the dominant white male culture, whether it be criminal or not? I would say that it could be all those things, but that Tarnatino didn’t say to himself, before he made the movie: “Ok, now I need a scene where I can comment on homosexual panic, or male fear of the feminine, or about male insecurity about penis size, or on the honor, or lack thereof, among thieves, or on how popular culture may be intellectually barren but is still fascinating, lending itself as it does to a camp treatment that is hard for a movie maker of a certain time and place to resist…” No, he set about simply to make a good story. To shoot good scenes. He may have then chosen and ordered and edited those scenes with some idea of what the “meaning” implicit in those choices and arrangements was, but the story came first. And therein lies art—not in the message, but in the story. The story, of course, contains the message, but it is also more than that. And the “goodness” in a good story is a much rarer thing, and harder to find or explain, than any message. Tarantino knows that.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Laura—Is it Really Noir?

Gene Tierney is beautiful. That is the one thing about LAURA, Otto Preminger’s 1944 noir masterpiece that I can say with certainty. God is she beautiful. But beyond that, it is hard for me to say anything with certainty, or much of anything at all. I am not even sure if the movie is noir. I mean, noir is supposed to be grimy and gritty and dark, and the characters in thrall to their own obsessions, and everyone is supposed to come to a bad end. Though this one has death, in the end it also has the uniting of the detective, Mark MacPherson, with Tierney, who plays Laura Hunt. It is comedy that is supposed to end with marriage, not tragedy, not noir.

And although we see a few scenes where it is dark and raining or snowing, we are mostly surrounded with beauty. Beautiful things, beautiful people, even if those people may be ugly inside. And Laura is not portrayed as a beauty that harbors evil within her—she is as gorgeous inside as she is outside (although some critics have opined that she is a blank and beautiful slate upon which the three men who love her project the image of their ideal woman).
And at least part of the mystery is solved halfway through, when we find out that it was not Laura who had her face blown off, but the sometime girlfriend of her suitor Shelby Carpenter, Diane Redfern.

And the movie is in places high camp. To me, camp is when a stock character is taken, consciously or unconsciously, by the actor, to a ridiculous extreme. When it is done by mistake, it can be funny (think Ed Wood). And it can be funny when it is done on purpose (think Tim Curry in THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW).  And surprisingly enough, a character can be both camp and an effective cog in the machinery of a movie at once.

I am referring to Clifton Webb’s role as Waldo Lydecker, of course. He’s brilliant as the effete, effeminate, waspish, viperous, vile and full of bile social critic who loves Laura and whom we meet, MacPherson and the viewer both (MacPherson so obviously a different kind of man than Lydecker in this scene), typing his column in a bathtub which would have made a Roman Emperor proud. And Vincent Price plays it for laughs and on the level all at once, too, as a 6’4" limp-wristed and charming Casper-Milquetoast-layabout-genteel southerner who lost the family fortune and who is involved in the only on-screen violence of the movie (save the last scene) when MacPherson punches him in the gut. He crumples like the big baby he is, and is nearly weeping when Ann Townsend (Laura’s aunt and rival, who is evil both inside and out, but at least shows an awareness of this when she says to Laura about Carpenter “I want him. I’m not a good person, and neither is he, but I don’t care”) comes and cuddles and coddles the little mammy’s boy, who is nevertheless, in the words of Lydecker, “a male beauty.”

There’s a little kinkiness to the movie, too. MacPherson takes to spending all this time at Laura’s apartment, going through her closets, drinking her booze, and reading her letters. If it was not the 40’s, we might have had him sniffing her panties, or even wearing them. He’s falling in love with his fantasy of who she was, and Lydecker knows it.

MacPherson is a tough guy in the classic mold, for all his sexually outré tendencies. He had his leg shot up taking down a gangster in “the Battle of Babylon” (so dubbed by Lydecker) and so possesses a “silver shin.” And the corrupt rich that he must investigate don’t impress him at all. He says of Price and Lydecker and all the other men Hunt has allowed to court her: “For a charming and intelligent girl, you certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes.”

Maybe the corruption of the upper classes is the problem. There is no one for Hunt among all that glitz and phoniness. She is too trusting, too good, even to the point of constantly giving Carpenter another chance, even as Lydecker proves to her he is cheating on her. MacPherson wouldn’t give the time of day to any of the “dopes” he meets as he travels through high society in this tale.

And there is another noir element missing—the detective doesn’t get beaten up. MacPherson has nobody to really fight (you couldn’t call what happens with the wimp Carpenter a fight), and is never in danger himself, never has to put himself on the line for Laura. Of course, he proved his mettle when he got his silver shin.

There is certainly romance in this movie. MacPherson falls asleep in Hunt’s chair, drinking her booze. She comes home from her weekend in the country, and he wakes from his dreams to find the girl of his dreams. There was never “meet cute” cuter than this one. Before the scene is over Hunt is calling MacPherson “Mark” and saying that sometimes when you meet someone you feel like you have known them all your life.

Laura’s romantic view of life is counterbalanced by Lydecker’s cynicism. It is funny to hear Lydecker espousing noir-ish cynicism in his fey way, and effective: “sentiment comes easily at $15 a word,” and “I’m not kind, I’m vicious, it’s the secret of my charm.” It is sex and romance he is most cynical about, telling Hunt “with you a lean strong body is the measure of a man.” He tells her she is being cheap and predicable in falling for MacPherson, who “is muscular and handsome in a cheap sort of way, but not capable of normal and warm human relationships.” But Hunt sees better then Lydecker does the human nature around her (she knew deep down that Carpenter couldn’t have done it, and Lydecker could, and she tells Lydecker it is he who is being “cheap and predictable.”)

Yes, Hunt is a pretty wonderful character. A determined career woman, she tells MacPherson that she only does what she chooses to do with her own free will, and gets the half-broke Carpenter a job. And when she corners Lydecker at lunch, trying to sell him on promoting a product, a pen, and he says, “I only write with a goose quill dipped in bile” and tells her that his lunch is more important than her career, she is proudly angry and also shows real pity for a man who could think that way.

In the last scene, Lydecker, who has killed Redfern instead of Hunt by mistake, decides to finish the job, to kill Hunt rather than let another man have her, and as his radio spot plays in Laura’s bedroom, a spot about love itself, and death (“they are not long, the weeping, the love and the hate…”) he confronts her with a shotgun. MacPherson has not gotten there in time to save her, but she manages to push the gun away and runs into MacPherson’s arms, and another cop kills Lydkecker. We realize that for all his faults, for all his rage and narcissism, Lydecker really did love her, the old noir ambiguity raising its head here, love and hate, good and evil, always mixed, nothing ever pure, except for when Andrews and Tierney are portrayed as perfect people possessing a perfect love.

So true love, and inner beauty, conquers all. Or does it? Could it be that the movie maker has something of the sense of Waldo’s cynicism about such things? Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney are by far the most physically attractive characters in the movie, and the most attractive as human beings. But in a world where inner beauty really mattered most, would they have to have such attractive exteriors? Well, they would if you wanted the movie to make any money, I can’t help but think. Lydecker would have said the same, except he would have found a better way to say it.

© 2014 Mike Welch

Another Dark Movie—Klute

When I was nine, I wanted to see KLUTE, with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. I wasn’t a particularly sophisticated nine-year-old movie goer, but it was Saturday night and my parents were going. They often took my brother and me to the movies, to all kinds of movies, and I still remember seeing PLANET OF THE APES, FUNNY GIRL, and DOCTOR ZHIVAGO with them. Of course, I liked PLANET OF THE APES the best. But KLUTE, said the parental units, was too adult, which really made me want to see it. No dice. My parents went off to the movies, and Matt and I were relegated to watching KUNG FU with the baby sitter.

In retrospect, my parents were right. Too adult it was. Jane Fonda won an Oscar for her portrayal of the prostitute Bree Daniels (Bree sounds like her working name, doesn’t it? Bree would be a name for a prostitute like Candy would be a name for a stripper, I couldn’t help thinking as I watched), and she is excellent in her portrayal of a complex and troubled woman. While there is a mystery/thriller element to the movie (where has Tom Gruneman disappeared to, why did he write “sick” letters to Daniels, and is it he who is stalking her now?), it’s pretty thin, and every review I read talked about how the crime angle was just an excuse to do a little artful exploration of gender roles circa 1971.
Donald Sutherland is the cop, John Klute, who saves Daniels from the stalker, who is perhaps also a “john” (customer) come back to haunt her, and in the process Klute figures the whole mess out. I could have figured it out at nine. In addition, the camera shoots not from the perspective of the stalker, but over his shoulder, which is disconcerting.

And the music is right out of some NBC semi-scary movie of the week of that time period. It certainly doesn’t get into what motivates the stalker (Gruneman’s boss, who killed Gruneman when Gruneman discovered the boss was a “freak” who liked to beat up prostitutes). And as a cop, Sutherland is the strong silent type to the point where he almost disappears from the movie. He has two facial expressions to cover everything from fear and anger to confusion and stomach upset. One reviewer compared him to Calvin Coolidge. Most reviewers also questioned why they bothered to name the movie after him, and one suggested they should have called it “Prostitute in Search of an Identity” or some such, although to me that sounds more like an exotic French movie title.

You figure out who the stalker is pretty early on. And you don’t get any insight into his character or Klute’s. The movie does explore, in depth, the character of Daniels. It doesn’t give any easy answers, though, to what makes her tick, and I don’t think that is a failing. There are no easy answers to those kinds of questions. Why is Daniels a prostitute? Is being a prostitute harmful to her, or is it empowering in a hypocritical and patriarchal society that objectifies women and denies them the opportunity to be economically independent like men? Why does she always need to be in “control” in her relationships with men? Why does she always need to manipulate those relationships, instead of letting herself become attached to someone, to nurture and be nurtured, and all that warm and fuzzy stuff? Who the hell knows?

Daniels wants an answer. She goes, with her mod clothes, thigh high boots and shag haircut, to an analyst who is appropriately grey-haired, although she has no Viennese accent, and they try together. Daniels says she likes hooking, although she is trying to get out of the business, and she is going on auditions for Off Broadway type plays and perfume commercials, and yet she is lonely and sad. The analyst does that annoying analyst thing, not giving an answer when Daniels asks for her opinion, but asking “how do you feel?”

They say that an analyst’s job is to be a cipher, content free, blank, so you can imagine them to be your mother or father or other significant other, and then to aim all your angst at them as if they were that that person. Interestingly, it is Klute’s blankness which becomes something Daniels can project all her feelings about men onto, at least at first, when in that blankness he seems to her like he is incorruptible. She successfully maneuvers him into bed, figuring all men are led around by their nether parts and he is no exception.

Then things get more complicated. He shows her a kindness and compassion that is not simply a quid pro quo for sex, and she becomes confused. She says to the therapist she feels frightened and out of control because this kindness and her warm feelings towards Klute him make her feel like she is in danger. So much so that she tries to go back to her pimp, Frank Ligourin, played with greasy, overacted glee by Roy Scheider.

When she does so, we have what perhaps is the most stirring scene, or the most overdone one, in the movie. As Ligourin and Klute fight (and Sutherland kicks his ass, which I just couldn’t get my head around, this guy from Animal House beating up a guy who was in The Seven Ups and Jaws and was in real life an undefeated amateur boxer), Daniels picks up a knife and ends up attacking not Ligourin but Klute.

And still Klute is loyal to Daniels, and in the penultimate scene saves her from the “freak.” Just before that scene there is one where the two go shopping for fruit in an open air market. It is the one sweet and romantic scene in the movie, and though they do little more than smile at each other, it seemed real and was affecting. At one point, as Daniels stands behind him, she gets closer and closer to him, and you can see she wants to put her arms around him, to rest her head on his broad back, but she doesn’t, perhaps absolutely can’t.

The fact that Klute must save Daniels from a misogynist psychopath at the end is telling. In the kind of world Daniels lives in, hookers, and indeed all women, need to be protected from woman-hating freaks. The deeper questions the movie asks, like why does Daniels pick the life she chooses? (Many women in a patriarchal society, and many women afraid to let go of control in their relationships with men, don’t go the route she does), and will their always be men like the freak no matter how we structure gender relationships in our society? , go unanswered, as they should. No one has those answers, not really, and I doubt any one ever really will.

As a movie about the 70’s, I was intrigued. New York was portrayed as a cesspool. The seamy underbelly of the city included strung-out junkies and murdered prostitutes. The reality of death from drugs or violence for women in the world’s oldest profession was vividly portrayed. There is even a discotheque scene with an uncredited appearance by Sylvester Stallone. Everyone talks about letting it all hang out, and about who has hang ups and how they are going to get rid of them, and Fonda tells her clients to ask her for whatever they want, that “nothing is wrong” and I was surprised to find that all this seemed quaint. It was hot stuff in my parents’ time, but not now. Everyone is looking for fulfillment, and no one finds it. That’s perennially true, isn’t it? Daniels asks Klute if he is impressed with all the lights, the sin and the glitz and the glamour, and he says it is all so pitiful. In the end, Fonda is still looking for fulfillment, leaving the city with Sutherland to bravely face a brave new world. Is it a futile gesture? Who knows? The 70’s didn’t have the answer, and neither did Klute. Sometimes the point of a movie is not to answer questions, but to ask them.

© 2014 Mike Welch

Point Blank: Film Noir Meets the Sixties

I don’t have a systematic way of picking the books and movies I review for the Crime Writers’ Chronicle. Someone mentions one or the other and I go and check it out. When Ken Bruen, author of LONDON BOULEVARD, mentioned POINT BLANK, with Lee Marvin in the role of “Walker,” I figured I would give the movie a whirl. Bruen’s character Patrick Taylor is an inveterate crime novel reader and crime film aficionado, and he mentions POINT BLANK as a masterpiece about a man who won’t take no for an answer.

The “experts” claim that film noir lasted from the early 40’s until the late 50’s (many pointing to TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) as the final true “noir”). Point Blank was filmed in 1967, and it was interesting to see how things in the movie biz had changed since the early 40’s (or even 1958).

Walker goes only by his last name. When Chris, the sister-in-law of his dead wife Lynn, asks him a question, he responds with his own: “do you know my last name?” Of course she doesn’t. And we don’t find out either, because Walker is like Clint Eastwood’s man with no name, his High Plains Drifter: a man who can’t be known, who exists outside the pale of normal society, a loner who lives only to dispense a kind of rough justice, an avatar of true vengeance, an avenging angel who is more demon than cherub.

There is not much plot in this movie. What happens is not as important as how it happens. The LA that Walker cuts a wide swath of destruction through is alternately slick and corporate and then all flower-power-y and groovy. The man in the gray flannel suit meets the Dave Clark Five kind of thing. And Walker is having none of either. He has no code, not really, he just wants his money back (he must say this at least ten times, to at least ten people, in the movie).

Walker, he of the barely contained rage, of pure malice and hatred, is a force of nature really un-tempered by any kind of tenderness. If there is any justice at all in the movie, it is a tenuous kind indeed, as the money Walker wants back is only his from a heist he and his friend Mal Reese committed. They robbed the Mob (known now as the Organization, all corporate but still lethal, but in a faceless, amorphous way—even their hit man is cold and sterile, shooting people with a long range rifle instead of garroting them) and then Reese, who has taken up with Lynn (Walker at one point flashes back to a scene where he dances with her and actually smiles, and this for the only time in the movie) shoots Walker and leaves him for dead.

It’s almost like the plot from a country and western song—you stole my money and you stole my wife, you low down varmint, and now I’m gonna git you—but Walker does not try to heal himself by strumming a guitar. He is left to die on Alcatraz, where the robbery took place, but he struggles to the water with bullets in him and swims to land, we are to assume, even as we learn that no one has ever managed to escape The Rock by doing so in the freezing and treacherous water of San Francisco Harbor. This is, of course, if he is not just imagining this all (he flashes back and forth to lying on Alcatraz with the bullets in him, but you could interpret the whole movie as a dying man’s fantasy of revenge as he lies dying).

This superhuman feat is only the first one he commits. He, just one lone man, takes on the Organization, killing one person after another on his way to identifying who the top man is, piercing the corporate veil, if you will, in a very enthusiastic way.

Everyone Walker encounters tells him it is impossible for one man to take on the Corporation, an institution made up of men (Latin corporis means bodies, and to incorporate to combine into one body) that becomes something more than human when they are in combination. There is none of this in film noir that I can think of—it is all personal, all man to man in the world of the 40’s and 50’s. The characters are alienated, but not in opposition to inhuman institutions. In fact, the Organization can’t even immediately gin up the cash to pay him off (too many signatures and counter-signatures, I guess) when Walker has his gun to the head of one of the executives. The only way is to go back to Alcatraz, the place where the money drop Walker and Reese robbed is still occurring.

The signature moment in the movie for me comes in a psychedelic discotheque where everyone, young and old, corporate and hippie, is “groovin,’” and Walker has a backstage brawl with two Organization thugs. The fight had no slick choreography, but a lot of grappling and grunting and slipping and falling down. Walker smashes a bottle across some guy’s face, and when he gets his other opponent prone, he savagely brings the back of his hand down on his groin which such enthusiasm that I crossed my legs and groaned. A girl who was shimmying on a pedestal comes backstage and witnesses the bloodied man cringing in agony and screams. Great stuff.

Walker finds Lynn, but doesn’t kill her. She is not really a femme fatale. She is somehow lost and broken in a way that can’t be repaired. She tells Walker she just kind of drifted away with Reese, she doesn’t know why, and now he is gone and she takes sleeping pills and lives on $1000/month Reese provides and she is losing her mind. Walker doesn’t beat or kill her, doesn’t try to get her back. He sleeps on the couch, and in the morning she is dead of an overdose.

The other woman in the film is not much of a femme fatale either. Angie Dickinson, as Chris, is the woman Reese wants now. She tells Walker she despises Reese, and that Walker was the best thing that ever happened to Lynn. Still, we see that although she is not quite a hooker, she sleeps with the rich and powerful so she can have a comfortable life. In one of the movie’s most morally conflicted scenes, she acquiesces to Walker’s request that she sleep with Reese in order for Walker to gain entry into his old friend’s apartment.

The only two left standing at the end are Walker and Fairfax, the shadowy figure that has been feeding Walker information on the others so that he can consolidate his power on top of the Organization. Walker doesn’t’ know or care as long as he can exact his vengeance and get his money back. Which apparently was only a matter of principle, as Walker walks away from it, and all the dead bodies he left in his wake, in the end.

It is tempting to think that there is some moral center to Walker, that he could have been saved by a friend and a woman who didn’t betray him, but I don’t know about that. When he tells Dickinson he has just been playing with her affections to get what he wants, she goes nuts and beats against his broad chest. And he is impassive. He wants what he wants, and that is only vengeance. We get no history for his man Walker, but I get the feeling he was always like that.

© 2014 Mike Welch

Another Film Noir: Scarlet Street

Fritz Lang’s 1945 masterpiece SCARLET STREET, with Edward G Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea, is disturbing to say the least. The film plays with appearance and reality almost in the same way that the characters do, conning each other into one thing or another, becoming one character or another as they all greedily, and without compunction go for the brass ring, the main chance, the big enchilada.

I wondered as the opening credits rolled if this was even going to be a noir movie. Maybe I had gotten mixed up when I was browsing Netflix and gotten hooked into some romance? The music over those credits seemed breezy and romantic, and I couldn’t see where we were going to get noir at all. The only detective in this piece turns out to be the deceased spouse of Robinson’s battle-axe of a wife Adele, and he was a dissolute bum who is more concerned with chasing down bribes than he is with chasing down criminals.

Robinson, playing the part of Christopher Cross, the same Edward G Robinson of the parts Rico in PUBLIC ENEMY and Rocco in KEY LARGO, plays an unassuming, diffident little wallflower who wouldn’t say sh*t if his mouth was full. He is too soft-boiled to be the protagonist of the typical crime drama.

In the opening scene, the guys from work are having a little party, and Robinson, a cashier who has performed faithfully for 25 years, is given the clichéd watch that you always get when you have been a wage slave for decades. He stands in the rain at the bus stop with a co-worker, both tipsy, and they seem like lonely guys, even though they are both married.

Robinson started out as a boarder in Adele’s place, and she acted sweetly at first, but she turned shrewish upon taking the wedding vows, just one of the people who gull Robinson throughout the story. She has insurance money from the sainted and dead husband (easier to be one when you are dead, as we will see later) but won’t spend any of it even for a radio, which she continually nags at Robinson to purchase for her.

Robinson dabbles at painting, turning mundane reality into beautiful fantasy even though he “could never master perspective.” Adele thinks his painting silly, and even accuses him of wanting to paint naked women. He protests that he has never seen a naked woman, and you feel sorry for him until you remember what Adele probably looks like in the buff (and how she behaves, clothed or not).

As Robinson walks through a depression era Greenwich Village, he sees a woman being accosted (Bennet being slapped around by Duryea), and rushes to the rescue, the sight of a woman in distress inspiring him to overcome his milquetoast nature for once. He whacks the fellow with his umbrella, and takes the poor girl home after going for a cop who goes after the fleeing attacker in vain.

This damsel in distress motif is extended into a sweet scene where Cross takes Kitty home and they have a soda in the basement establishment below her apartment, which she shares with a girlfriend. Kitty appears to be a sweet girl, and here we have the film trope of the “cute-meet” whereby the couple that will end up together first spark each other’s interests, before being blocked from being together in the second reel, and then finally united in the third.
But Kitty is far from what she seems to be. And Chris is not entirely honest either, telling her that he is a successful painter, or at least not disabusing her of that notion when she gets it into her head. He, who has seen his boss drive off with a young girl who is not his wife, and doesn’t consider that perhaps money has something to do with the pairing of a silver-haired oldster with a girl young enough to be his daughter, is playing the romantic role, and she, out of pity or for laughs, plays along.

Lang here is saying something important about human nature, I think. As human beings, we are self-conscious creatures, and we are aware of how we are supposed to act, and how we seem to others. So we create social personas, or masks, and use those masks to navigate our social world. And sometimes that mask is worn so long that we forget that it is a mask.

The movie merrily hums along in a romantic direction until the next scene, where we learn that the “attacker” was really Kitty’s boyfriend, who was just slapping her around because she wouldn’t give him any more money to gamble with. The two of them are as id-driven and libidinous as you could possibly be in a 1945 movie. Her apartment is filthy, and she lies around all day in her bedclothes, and throws cigarette butts into a sink overflowing with dirty dishes. “Johnny” practically lives there. He’s a hoodlum, a ne’er do well, and a grifter, but she doesn’t mind because, as she says to her girlfriend, she is in love. In a movie of the new millennium, I am sure there would have been violent sex, and it is intimated even here.

Neither Kitty nor Johnny is much for work, so they come up with a scheme for Kitty to induce Chris to get her an apartment she will “pay” for by modeling. Johnny gets hold of Chris’s paintings, which Chris has never been confident enough to sell, and Kitty starts to impersonate Chris, who doesn’t care, because now he imagines they will be together. The paintings begin to see like mad.

And then, of all things, Adele’s ex husband reappears. He supposedly drowned when he tried to save a woman suicide from doing so, but really he had been attempting suicide himself, because he had gotten caught taking bribes from speakeasies to allow them to stay open. He is mistaken for dead, and he doesn’t mind. He is a great big lout, a greasy, smelly, bear of a man, and a lush. He asks Chris to pay him off so he won’t tell Adele he is back.

And for the first time Chris really, and cleverly, is as duplicitous as those around him. He tells the ex that he can come by the house when Adele is out and get the insurance money she got from the insurance company upon his death, but of course she is home, she sees him, and now Chris, still deluded into thinking Kitty loves him, thinks he can finally be with Kitty. It is the ending of the perfect romantic comedy, lovers meet, lovers spark, lovers can’t be together, lovers can be together (when Chris’s marriage is dissolved).

But when Chris goes to see Kitty, he undergoes the same shocking reversal we did when we discovered Kitty’s attacker was really her lover (a not too complimentary view on what keeps men and women together, violence and sex, or violence followed by sex). She tells him he is old and ugly and she hates him. And when he finally must face that fact that perhaps he is, and that his romantic notion of love is ridiculous, he kills her.

Johnny gets blamed for the murder, but he is so obviously a hoodlum that no one believes him. It doesn’t help that he steals Kitty’s jewelry when he sees she is dead (“she didn’t need it anymore”). And no one believes that Chris was really the painter. Chris greatly enjoys Johnny’s death in the chair, until he thinks how Kitty and he will be lovers together in eternity, laughing at him. Chris is broke, fired for stealing from the boss to pay for Kitty’s apartment. He wanders the depressing Depression era streets, shattered, starving and crazed, and finally tries to hang himself, only to get saved by another boarder in the shanty of a rooming house he is living in. His mind gone, he tries over and over to confess, but no one will listen to him. He is in hell, but one of his own devising, not one for those who have sinned against other men, but for those who can’t come to terms with life without the social mask.

The twist in this particular noir film is that passion, combined with the inability to reconcile a romantic view of life with the harsh reality of life as really lived, is what destroys Cross. He never wanted to be a crook, a criminal; he never set himself against society. He just, as he says to his friend, wanted to know just once what it would be like to be loved by a beautiful young girl. It seems like a small crime to commit, his deluding of the self, but it leads to the killing of Kitty, and his inability to let go of the dream finally drives him mad.

© 2014 Mike Welch

Out of the Past—Classic Film Noir

Is it more admirable to struggle, hopelessly, against your fate, or to accept it with as much dignity as you can? Robert Mitchum, as Jeff Bailey/Jeff Markham, in the brilliant film noir OUT OF THE PAST, tries one and then settles for the other.

And he does it in great film noir style, traipsing around gritty nighttime New York and San Francisco in a fedora and a trench coat, with an omnipresent cigarette practically surgically attached to his lips. Mitchum is a great physical presence, a quite large man with broad shoulders and a deep chest, and a sinewy, sinuous slow and cocky walk that seems to say, “I can kick your ass now or later, but I’m going to kick your ass.” And you don’t doubt him for a second.

And Jane Greer, as Kathy Moffat, the beautiful, sultry and terribly sexy femme fatale, has an equally dangerous physicality, a vamp-y, lusty sense of her own sexual power that mirrors Mitchum’s in the sense that she seems to be saying “I can f$%^ you now, or I can f$%^ you later, but I am going to f$%^ you.” And you don’t doubt her for a second.

And when Moffat says “we deserve each other,” and when she asks Markham if he believes her when she says she didn’t steal $40,000 from the gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas in a great early role) and he tells her “I don’t care” you believe them again. The irresistible force and the immovable object, the yin and yang, the head cheerleader and the quarterback on the football team, the masculine and feminine principles, the two of them are so powerfully drawn to each other that you can’t imagine they could ever resist each other.

But Markham should have, because Moffat is as morally diseased as she is physically perfect. Markham is hired to find her after she shoots her boyfriend Sterling and absconds with $40,000. Markham is a gritty guy in a gritty profession, and agrees to do it even though he knows Sterling may be lying when he says he only wants her back. Sterling tells Markham he likes him because he is smart and honest, implying implies that even those qualities can be bought, which they apparently can.

Markham finds her, of course, and instead of fulfilling his contract, he runs away with her. They both have the idea that they will live an idyllic life of romance, of laughter, of picnics and the racetrack, their primitive longings for each other transmuted into some kind of genuine partnership, something exalted and grand, something miles away from the grime and squalor of the city streets they grew up on. Markham tells Moffat, “Nothing in the world is any good unless you can share it,” and they do try to share their world.

But you can’t escape the past, or who you are, and they are tracked down by Markham’s old partner, who wants some of the dough Moffat stole. Markham gives him a good thrashing (what other outcome could there have been, as Mitchum exudes a supreme physical and sexual confidence, even going so far as telling Douglas as Whit Sterling, when it looks as if they are to come to blows, “forget it, you’re out of shape,” as Markham gracefully takes a seat on the couch and Sterling decides not to test him), but then Moffat kills the partner in cold blood as he lies, senseless and helpless, on the floor. It turns out she did steal the money, and she runs back to Sterling.

Perhaps Markham can’t help his romantic and decent impulses any more than he can help himself from being attracted to Moffat. He goes into hiding as Jeff Bailey, after Moffat leaves, in an unassuming little town in the Sierra Nevada, Bridgeport, runs a gas station, and falls in love with Ann Miller, who is an Ivory Soap kind of girl, the kind of girl who had the best handwriting in third grade in Catholic School and was liked by the nuns and her classmates both. When Sterling finds Markham, Markham tells Miller everything, and she tells him she still loves him, believing Markham didn’t kill his partner (in the dark and convoluted plot, Bailey eventually gets framed for three murders by both Sterling and Moffat), or the other two.

Sterling pushes Markham back into another job for him, and Markham lets himself be pushed, perhaps having an impulse to ruin himself instead of ruining Anne’s life (she really does play a likeable character, a good girl who is not prudish or prissy, and who genuinely love Jeff, going on picnics with him and watching him fish, kissing him and believing in him in a way he can’t believe in himself).

The plot is not all that important, dark and convoluted as it is. Let us just say that Sterling, his henchman, Markham’s partner and a lawyer who got caught up with Sterling all wind up dead, and Moffat is in one way or another involved in all the deaths. She’s the most completely cynical character of the bunch, gulling both Markham and Sterling with that beautiful thoroughbred body, the brooding black eyes, and the radiant smile that promises that you are the only one.

Markham makes one last attempt at the good life, to be with Ann, when he goes to see Sterling to un-frame himself and set everything right. But Moffat has killed Sterling, and tells Markham to run away with her or go to jail for the murders he has been framed for. She is capable of speaking out of both sides of her mouth, this one, as is everyone in the movie, practically, except perhaps Ann and the boy who helps Markham at the gas station, who saves Markham’s life, and who is true to Markham and Ann till the end, no matter how much danger that puts him in. The boy is deaf and mute, unable to be manipulated or to manipulate others with the very language that everyone else uses to deceive.

And so Markham drives away with Moffat, and lust and venality and corruption seem to have taken the day, except that Markham has tipped off the cops. Moffat kills Markham, telling him he is a double-crosser in a voice that seems to betray her truly evil nature for the first time, and the cops kill her.

Maybe it is both noir and romance, this movie, because now Ann is free to be with the boyfriend who has been pining for her all through the movie, a good guy whom she passes up for the more magnetic Markham, whom she can’t resist any more than Markham could resist Moffat. The two survivors drive off together in the end and you know that death at a police roadblock is not in their future.

Touch of Evil

In TOUCH OF EVIL, Orson Welles’s film noir masterpiece, Hank Quinlan (a corrupt police chief played by Welles in a nameless American town on the Mexican border), is a presence so large, literally (he wore padding on his already outsized body during the filming) and especially metaphorically, that he crowds out the rest of the film—the actors (Charlton Heston in particular), the plot, whatever ‘message’ the film might have—by squeezing it all to the margins or entirely off the screen.

Quinlan is a great man—not a good man, not a moral man—but a man great in appetite, larger than life, more fully immersed in life, suffering more greatly, and living with more courage and intelligence than an ordinary man. That he succumbs to his own pride, that his “touch of evil” becomes a raging infection that devours him, is the fascination of the movie. And seeing Janet Leigh lying around in her underwear didn’t hurt, either.

As I was watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think of the word ‘camp’ and wondered if the movie was intentionally so. It made me think of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 or THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, so grotesquely caricatured were some of the characters. I have come to think this was intentional, except in the case of Heston, who must have gone to the same acting school as William Shatner.

The inflation of the characters into funhouse creations made me think of medieval mystery or miracle plays, where characters are exemplars of human qualities. These characters are necessarily two-dimensional, so that the complexity of Welles’s character stands in bold relief to them. The movie is great—pulp comic, grotesque and voyeuristic, sensationalized and as outsized as Leigh’s (Suzy Vargas, married to Mexican diplomat Mike Vargas, played by Charlton Heston) breasts, over the top, a mystery/morality play with an incorruptible Mexican married to a virtuous American wife, and an American police chief corrupt in a south-of-the-border kind of way. The whole thing is both Shakespearean and Biblical. And Heston’s make-up is so overdone he looks like the make-up girl got drunk, giving him a tan that makes him look almost orange, or at least burnt umber, in the black and white movie.

The unconscious is one of those things we can only know by its effects, like light or Santa Claus or God or Capitalism. For my purposes, I will refer to it as the place, the grimy neglected nightmare basement place, where we store all the fear, desire and rage that we can’t face consciously. These feelings are not defeated by being repressed, however, and influence our behavior in unseen ways, kind of like rich donors perverting the political process. Movie and cultural and literary critics are big on the unconscious, and you can look at TOUCH OF EVIL as expressing our society’s collective repressed sexual and economic fears, our repressed individual desires, and as an interesting study of how Quinlan has perhaps repressed his awareness of his own evil.

I could see the tawdry excesses of Bordertown as both revolting and a thing to be desired, revolting to my conscious mind, and yet attractive because unconsciously the license and the riot of the place compelled me. It was like putting peanut butter on top of chocolate on top of ice cream on top of chocolate cake and closing your eyes unable to look and taking the biggest bite you ever took.

Things in Bordertown are raw and impure, if “made in America,” not homogenized, or pasteurized, chlorinated or fluoridated, not approved by the Hays Code or Emily Post, lacking the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, a place where the mongrelized, the bastardized, live, where the stuff left over in the Ivory Soap, the fractional percent against the 99 44/100 percent purity, is. It’s as if the prosperous America of the 50’s, the eager Leave-it-to-Beaver-Donna-Reed industrial juggernaut, was a kind of living organism, and this horrid little place was the flatulent excreta of this too full USA, the byproduct, what was the left over and left out after you made all those Chevy’s and toasters and bombs.

Whatever it is that drives Quinlan, we can see that it is irresistible. And as perceptive as he is, as knowing of the criminal mind, as able as he is to distinguish appearance from reality, the innocent from the guilty, he is unable to see he has crossed the line from good to evil and become the kind of criminal he seeks to bring to justice. Indeed, if he realizes this at all, it is on an unconscious level, which is why perhaps that he seeks the confrontation with Mike Vargas, with part of him wanting to lose. He asks the gypsy Tanya, played by Marlene Deitrich, the character of whom he was once enamored in some sleazy border way, what is in his future, and she tells him he has no future at all. And perhaps he is relieved to hear it, eager on some level to be defeated. He represses the knowledge that Vargas, and Quinlan’s partner Menzies (played by Peter Calleia) , are setting him up. As Quinlan has already set up Vargas, along with scores of others, and is a man who always seems one move ahead, you have to wonder why Quinlan doesn’t see it coming.

Tanya is ambiguous, and you can’t tell if she is a prostitute, a madame, a fortune teller, or the owner of a very seedy bed and breakfast. She is at once self-interested and loving. She says at the end of Quinlan, “what can you say about a man?” as if to dismiss him, but she is not dismissing him, as she is taking the time and making the effort to say anything at all.

This is at the heart of TOUCH OF EVIL and of noir, this ambiguity, and Quinlan possesses it in spades. It is in counterpoint to the characters of Akim Tamiroff (as Joe Grandi, who harasses Suzie Vargas because her husband is involved in prosecuting Grandi’s brother for drug trafficking ) and the Denis Weaver character, caretaker at the hotel where Grandi’s minions inject Suzy with drugs and we come dangerously close to witnessing a gang rape, when all the leather jacketed juvenile delinquent henchman grab a handful of the pure Leigh. Grandi and the caretaker are banal and two-dimensional (although Weaver seems sexually repressed in an extremely weird way, almost a Norman Bates kind of way). Both are cartoonish-ly evil, and cowards, not men with the strength and conviction of Quinlan and Mike Vargas.

And even Mike Vargas is part cartoon, in that his strength and courage have never really been tested, and so is in that way hard to see as any kind of real strength at all. He hasn’t lost a wife to murder, hasn’t had his leg shot up in the war, like Quinlan, hasn’t seen the way that good and evil in Bordertown become entwined in the way of snakes on a caduceus. Tanya is the opposite of Suzy Vargas, without Suzy’s pure and innocent sexuality, more complex, not as arrogant, wiser, knowing the world is ultimately unjust, and youth and strength and innocence eventually give way to their opposites.

Quinlan is a man past his expiration date, branded on his feet, having missed his train, his bus, his plane, the brass ring, a man who rules, but in hell, and the ambiguity of it all, that all the cops are criminals and all the sinners saints, is contained in him, a man who has fallen from a very high place and survived when lesser men would have hit the pavement and just died. The fall injured his soul mortally, the trauma of the kind where you smash a bug and to your horror it begins to try and walk away with what remaining parts of its body still work, like a dog dragging its paralyzed back legs along on a skateboard. Welles has had his wings pulled off for sure.

In the final scene, after Suzy Vargas has been penetrated by hypos and perhaps penises (in order to discredit Mike Vargas who, if he wasn’t so wet behind the ears, would have seen the plot coming a mile away, although perhaps not the evil twist Quinlan works on it), Mike goes extra-legal on the gang, beating them all down in a Los Robles bar (the name of the Mexican town across the border). Mike then gets Menzies (Quinlan’s right hand man, a man that Quinlan saved in the war) to wear a wire in order to get Quinlan to confess his crimes. Vargas is finally stooping low to conquer, and forgetting his decidedly American code of ethics and honor, his boy scout oath. And Welles, perhaps aware at some level what is happening, does admit to planting all that evidence, to coercing so many confessions from so many suspects, yet insists they were all guilty, and revenge for the loss of his wife, and recompense for her killer, the only one, ever, that he didn’t catch.

Quinlan finally realizes he is being gulled and Menzies, who loved Quinlan, and believed in Quinlan as long as he could, is shot by Quinlan, the very man who once took a bullet for him (in the war). Quinlan gets the drop on Vargas, too, but Menzies, in an appropriate kind of fated and fatal symmetry, kills Welles with his dying shot, the figurative and literal last shot in his gun. If there is any redemption at all, it is found by Menzies in death. Welles falls dead into a huge garbage-filled puddle and it’s stunning, and truly tragic, in the sense that tragedy is about the fall of great (if bloated and bleary and filthy and drunk) men.

As Mike and Suzy (what bright All-American names, and kids) drive away the next morning (one of the few daytime shots in the entire movie) you see that the nightmare is over for them, but wonder what has been accomplished, if anything. We have learned that the man Quinlan set up before Vargas was indeed guilty, and we are left to wonder if perhaps Quinlan’s ends justified his means. I don’t think it is because Heston is a good actor, because he always looks this way, but Mike Vargas has a kind of self-satisfied look on his face that you just want to slap off. And you know that life is going to do just that.

© 2014 Mike Welch