Black Mass

Growing up watching the Godfather movies, I always thought gangsters were Italian. The Irish in mobster movies all seemed to be flat-footed cops, like the ones that are always chasing Bugs Bunny in the cartoons and failing to catch him, talking in an exaggerated brogue and displaying the brains of turtles. The Italian bad guys were more interesting to me than the Irish good ones. Being Don Corleone was way more cool than being Eliot Ness or, God forbid, Sergeant Joe Friday. It wasn’t until THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987), with Sean Connery playing Jimmy Malone, that I found an Irish Cop who was cool enough, charismatic enough, and tough enough to make me wish I could be him (if I could do it without risking being gunned down by Al Capone’s gunsels).

Maybe we all want to be that powerful. And that tough. Say what you want about the immorality of these guys, you can’t say they are wimps, or cowards. If they have any fear (the truly crazy ones don’t, perhaps, but if you are that crazy I don’t think you last long), they never give in to it. They don’t let anyone steal a cab from them, whistle at their girlfriends, or cut in line on them at the movie queue. What freedom that kind of toughness and courage could give you! When you are a mobster, you very rarely encounter a problem you can’t buy off or kill off (indeed, the longevity of your career often depends on how long you can keep buying off and killing off your problems).

James “Whitey” Bulger is a real life Irish tough guy mobster portrayed by Johnny Depp in the 2015 movie BLACK MASS. And he’s Irish, a guy who grew up in “Southie” (South Boston) an Irish American neighborhood that has been around since before George Washington drove the British off Dorchester Heights during the Revolutionary War, those heights being where South Boston High School (ground zero for the melee over forced busing in 1974) now stands. Southie doesn’t get the same attention as Compton or Bed Stuy, but it is a ghetto nevertheless. An Irish one.

There have been portrayals of South Boston in the movies before. Matt Damon plays a tough kid from Southie in GOOD WILL HUNTING, and Casey Affleck a detective solving the disappearance of a young girl from the neighborhood in GONE BABY GONE. But Affleck, his brother Ben (who appears in the movie with Damon) and Damon were pampered rich kids not from the area. Denis Lehane, on the other hand, is from Southie (which is still among the poorest places to live in America, even with the recent rise in real estate values from the increase in demand resulting from the rehabilitation of the Boston Harbor area), and he portrays it with a chilling realism in his novel MYSTIC RIVER (later a movie directed by Clint Eastwood). Mark Wahlberg is from nearby Dorchester, and has a felony record from his gang activity as a youth.

Bulger has been portrayed before. In DEPARTED, Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) is loosely based on him. Costello famously tells someone early in the movie that he, like Lucifer in Paradise Lost (and Stephen Daedalus in PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN), will not serve, that he will not be a “product of my environment. My environment is a product of me.” James Woods, in the Showtime series RAY DONOVAN, plays Bulger as a ruthless old psychopath also (he murders his girlfriend when she lets slip with something that could remotely be thought of as perhaps leading to his being caught), but without the charm and intellect of Nicholson’s Costello.

Depp’s Bulger has ice blue eyes, slicked back hair, and the emotions of a lizard—i.e. none, except for a kind of all encompassing hunger for more money and power. Indeed, except for playing cards with his dear old Ma (after he does nine years in prison as a young man), whom he lets win, while she tells him “didn’t they teach you how to play cards in prison?”, he shows almost nothing, with his sunglasses on or not. But his hunger, and the anger he feels when he can’t satisfy it, does show occasionally through, like when he kills members of his own crew and strangles the stepdaughter of one of his partner’s girlfriends.

I was thinking of a parallel with Tony Soprano here, especially when I saw that Depp’s Bulger did seem to really love his wife and kid, brother and mother. And he had a sentimental feeling for the IRA too (and not just because they pay him for guns). Tony was loyal to his family like Whitey (or tries to be, until he kills his nephew Michael and forfeits his soul). Tony would never be a rat. Bulger, on the other hand, would never try therapy. Tony does, to try and quiet the voice in his head that tells him there is no way he can ever square what he is doing. There is never even a consideration for what is moral for Whitey. He can’t lose his soul because he doesn’t have one.

Bulger early on is a rising member of the Irish mob in South Boston. He kills people on both sides in the Killeen-Mullen wars, and ends up head of the Winter Hill Gang. But the Patriarca family in the North End (a subsidiary of the Gambinos in New York), in particular the Angiulo brothers, are a danger, a threat, a cause of that hunger. So Bulger teams up with a grade school friend, John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), who has now become an FBI agent. In return for intel that will help bring down the Cosa Nostra, Whitey becomes immune from prosecution (as long as he commits no crimes—ha!) Whitey ends up getting more useful information from Connolly than Connolly gives to him (even some that leads him to “rats” he blithely executes).

In the end, people notice that Whitey now rules Boston, and new blood on the force brings him and Connolly down. Whitey, though, clever as a fox (and vicious as a rabid dog) flees and is on the Most Wanted list for 12 years, until 2011. Connolly gets forty years for giving Whitey information on who is ratting Whitey out, information on how to avoid prosecution, and for withholding information about Whitey’s criminal activities from his superiors.

Towards the end of the movie, there is a scene where Whitey, just before he runs, calls his brother William, a Massachusetts state senator, to say goodbye. It made me wonder why one brother turned out good, and the other not. That is, if you think being a state senator is better than being a killer. It’s close, I know, but the point is, I don’t think you can lay what Bulger becomes at the doorstep of poverty. Whitey talks about the oppression of the British, and even the Italians, during the movie, but he is the real oppressor of South Boston. He can’t be corrupted by South Boston because he was rotten from the start, and he corrupts it. The one thing you never do in Whitey’s world is rat, and that is what he did, even as he killed people for doing the same. Someone in the movie says “You can lie to your wife or your girl, but never to a friend.” Lying is betrayal, informing the worst kind of betrayal. But maybe that is what it takes to be a mob boss. Maybe I don’t want to be a gangster after all.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Nightcrawler

NIGHTCRAWLER (2014), written and directed by Dan Gilroy, is a profoundly disturbing movie. The sociopath at the center of the action, Lou Bloom (played with an unctuous and creepy intensity by Jake Gyllenhall) does some horrible things, but it is the venality and complacency of the people and society around him that really got to me.

Bloom has no background at all. He comes into the story stealing copper from a construction site. He proceeds to whack the guard who catches him on the skull, take his watch, and then sell the booty to a contractor who turns him down when he asks for a job: “I don’t hire thieves.” Gyllenhall is more sensitive to the irony than the contractor, who does business with thieves but doesn’t consider himself one. And the contractor is not the only one in the movie who whines about the duplicity and depravity of others while not seeing those same qualities in him or herself. In fact, there is not one character in this movie that is not corrupted or proves to be non- corruptible.

Bloom apparently has no connection to anyone, lives by night and educates himself by day by surfing the internet. He is a 21st century self made man, an autodidact, a polymath, Frederick Douglas as Frankenstein’s monster, the American dream turned nightmare. He has got his eye only on the main chance. The idiom he uses when he is trying to manipulate or extort or deceive his way to the American Dream is a blend of Horatio Alger and Tony Robbins, corporate double speak that means nothing, all about communication and innovation and positivity , growth and negotiation, all those things corporate America holds out to us as the keys to our success, when we really know it is a con, a dodge, that it is not invention and initiative, innovation and hard work, that count, but deceit, cheating, and friends in high places. The vision of the world in this movie is a kind of inversion of the idea that a rising tide helps all boats—in this world, you only succeed by sinking the other guy’s.

And so Bloom sets out to do so. He stumbles across a new way to make money—driving around nighttime LA with a police scanner and a camera, collecting the most lurid images he can find to sell to the local news affiliates. He becomes pretty good, makes some of his own luck by committing a few felonies, hires a desperate guy named Rick he pays less than minimum wage (calling it an “internship”) to help out, and soon he is selling footage to Nina Romina (Rene Russo) at a local news station. Nina cheerfully tells Bloom: “if it bleeds, it leads.” She starts out treating Bloom like a leper, but his stock goes up with the quality (i.e., shock and sleaze) of his work. Still, she sees him not as a real player, but another worker bee. Everyone who underestimates Bloom in this movie suffers. He extorts sex and a foot in the door of the news biz from her in trade for his footage. She at first feigns shock at his offer, but then he tells her he could just go elsewhere, and ratings week is coming, and he starts to look better and better to her.

We learn that not only if it bleeds, it leads, but if the crime happens to middle or upper class people it gets more attention. The strategy is to play on the fear suburbanites have about urban crime landing on their doorsteps (even if it isn’t). So when some people in a chic neighborhood are shot-gunned (it was about drugs, but the news station buries that, because that isn’t as scary as violent urban hoods tired of waiting on you at McDonalds stealing the family jewels, kidnapping the kids, and maybe even dating your daughter), Bloom scores big with bloody, and exclusive, photos.
It’s only going to get worse, and we know it. And there is no hero in this noir tale, or even an anti-hero. Bloom flouts the law (which is not fooled by him, but can’t bring him to heel), gets what he wants, gets away with it all. He even manages to rid himself of a troublesome employee and get the shot of a career at the same time (I couldn’t figure out if the way he did it was illegal, but it was one of the most immoral things I have ever seen a movie character do).

There is nothing redeeming about Bloom, although the movie plays on our expectation that there might be. He is a lonely guy, socially inept, living in a shabby apartment that is so devoid of any kind of hominess that you wonder if there ever could be a home for this guy. And people do treat him like he isn’t there. He’s poor, after all. But at the same time, he is bright, very bright, and maybe he will overcome it all. Maybe he is even a little autistic. Is there anything redeeming about him? Shit, even Hannibal Lecter had a kind of charm, and a code of ethics, kind of.

But in an understated yet great scene, we are disabused of the notion that he deserves any sympathy (which is exactly the amount he has for anyone else). Rick tells the boss he might do better if he understood people more. Bloom responds: “did you ever think it’s not that I don’t understand people, but I just don’t like them?” And Bloom does understand Rick, well enough in fact to make a bundle off of him and get him killed all at once.

I won’t give away the final scene, except to say that Bloom becomes a kind of demonstration of the Heisenberg Principle, not merely observing, but altering the thing observed. It is great and chilling stuff. And the whole thing made me wonder about markets, both those for goods and those for ideas. Is this what we get when both are free? News that is really pornography, intellectually nourishing only in the way eight bowls of Count Chocula would be? And is everything else we sell and buy the same (and everything is for sale in this movie) —unadulterated crap that makes a few people rich and the rest of our lives empty, hollow, and cheap? Perhaps hard news about corporate criminality instead of cartoons about urban bogeymen would serve us better, but that is not what a “free” market for ideas is giving us. The irony, of course, is that movies like this one could be the answer. Then again, this one went from the theaters to pay-per-view faster than you could say “Heaven’s Gate.” Oh, well. You’ve got to give the people what they want. Or do you?

© 2015 Mike Welch

Killing Them Softly

KILLING THEM SOFTLY is about politics, crime and business, and about how often we should use those words as synonyms. In the final scene, Brad Pitt (as hit man Jackie Cogan) makes the argument that “America is not a community, but a business (and I want to get paid!)” By then, I was convinced he had a pretty good point.

The first scene of the movie is about poverty and degradation, and it is linked to the final one with a story line familiar in mobster movies, but which nevertheless shocks with the pitiless and violent nature of its characters, who are not above begging for their lives, even though they are offended when they are doing the killing and the victim imposes on them by begging for theirs. Hence the title KILLING THEM SOFTLY, which Jackie professes is his approach to killing for hire, because up close and personal killing, unlike assassination at a distance, leads to all that begging and pleading and crying, all those appeals to God and mother, and that, to him, is “just embarrassing.”

We fade in on a city scene which could be anywhere USA, any dying city in the USA, where they don’t have gated communities and golf courses, but where there are cracked sidewalks and shotgun houses, warehouses and pawn and porn shops, South Boston or East St Louis, maybe North Philadelphia, places where you can have anything you want, if you have the bucks to pay for it, as long as you don’t wish for anything crazy, like ever leaving the blighted place for a better life.

Like in PULP FICTION, there is a lot of philosophizing done by the low and mid-level gangsters that inhabit this movie. Everyone has a philosophy about everything, often a pretty nihilistic one, but then again I guess coal miners are pretty pessimistic, too. These guys are the grunts, the day laborers, in a business more upfront about the violence inherent in it than most are. Pitt is fairly loquacious, especially for a hit man, which I, for whatever reason (older movies?) always thought were Clint Eastwood types (but not avengers) men with no names, strong, silent and sociopathic, if not outright psychotic.

The whole thing, of course, takes place at night, in freezing rain, down mean and lonely streets. And whenever a car radio plays, or characters talk in a bar, a politician is trying to make political hay off the 2008 bank bailout. It’s hard times in America, and apparently for the mob too.

The wasted and bleak guy walking down the wasted and bleak city street at the beginning is named Frankie, and he’s just out of jail, and is clear on how the only way he will keep from starving is by making a score. He meets up with Russell, a desperate heroin addict who is trying to make ends meet by stealing pure-bred dogs and taking them to Florida. One of the funniest scenes in the movie takes place when Russell tries to drive a car full of terrified dogs to Florida during a storm, and they shit all over and he can’t open the windows. It’s funny, and terrible, and the irony is that Russell is so disgusting that you can’t imagine a little (or a lot of) shit is going to make his smell, or situation, any worse.

Russell and Frankie meet up with Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola) and Curatola brokers a scheme whereby the dynamic duo will rob a mobbed-up card game run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). They are all upset by the woeful state of the economy, and Johnny is insulted by Russell’s smart- ass attitude (he’s an Aussie, and maybe that accent makes things worse)—kind of like the way John Travolta gets pissed off at Harvey Keitel in PULP FICTION. Anyway, Markie already robbed his own card game once, and they figure he’ll get blamed for setting up this hit too.

It doesn’t work out exactly that way, and the movie is not suspenseful in the sense that it does not make you wonder if any of the major players are going to get out of it alive. These guys would have gotten caught, even if Russell had not been so stupid as to have talked about the job to a guy he wrongly thought he could trust (does someone always talk in these movies?)There is a kind of awful fatalism in this movie, in that there is only the game, the knock around life for these knock around guys, and you are playing against a house that never loses in the end.

Jackie is called in, and he recommends to Driver (Richard Jenkins), a kind of liaison between the suits and the soldiers, that they hit Markie, whether he is responsible this time or not, to “restore confidence” in the card game (like Bush and McCain exhorted us to remain confident in the Stock Market) . And pretty soon Johnny and Russell and Frankie are on the list, too.

Three scenes, one of drug use and two of violence, really hit me in the gut. In one, Markie gets hit repeatedly in his gut, standing in the freezing rain (for as long as he can stand up, anyway), and in the face too, and as he begs for mercy from his tormentors (‘it’s just business, Markie, take it like a man’) they become more and more incensed , turning what should have been a merely serious beat down into a near-fatal one. In another, Russell and Frankie converse while Russell is tripping on heroin, and the stylized way the point of view of the nodding Russell is shot makes the use of drugs look pretty seductive. And of course there is the scene where Markie is shot, in slow motion (a la NATURAL BORN KILLERS) as you watch rain drops fall on a spiraling bullet that imbeds itself in Markie’s head. Is this what they call pornographic violence? I am not sure, but there was something sexual and seductive about it, the absolute opposite of the scene where the beating is delivered, which was grotesque, pitiful, and deeply disturbing.

The rest of the movie is carried by the dialogue Jackie and Driver, and Jackie and Mickey (James Gandolfini), an out of town hitter hired to help out with the sudden need for four (count ‘em, four) hits. Mickey is depressed, addicted to booze and hookers, terrified of going back to the joint, unable to function. He has come to the conclusion that “none of it means anything.” And he looks like he means it. Tony Soprano knew he was in hell, perhaps, but if he was, he figured he was going to rule there. Mickey is just a tired and defeated foot soldier, and after Jackie sets him up to go down to his third felony, Jackie takes on all the killing himself.

Anyone who has ever gambled with cards or stocks knows that the only winners are the guys who run the game. The sub-prime mortgage crisis was merely an elaborate Ponzi Scheme made possible by loosening the regulations that kept investment and commercial banking separate. When it came down, we were told we needed to stay confident in the very scam that brought us down in the first place. The regular guys, men and women, water carriers, the non commissioned officers, the rank and file, paid by losing their homes and retirements.

In the end of this noir nightmare, the politicos blather on the bar TV as Jackie and Jenkins argue over his payment (Driver’s superiors are cutting back). Pitt, who has a genuine menace to him, is nevertheless not going to whack Jenkins and we know it. Jackie knows that he is even more replaceable than Jenkins is (Jenkins not being exactly the CEO of Murder Inc himself). The only real tension between the two comes when Jenkins tells Jackie not to smoke in his car, and Jackie ignores him and lights up. It’s anticlimactic and kind of silly, because you know they both know their place in the hierarchy, and this is real life ( not some movie). Jackie is not going to off Jenkins and take on the mob singlehandedly (what kind of confidence would that inspire?) That would be a different kind of movie.

In this movie, Jackie just wants to get paid. He says Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner who sold freedom to a bunch of dopes so that he (Jefferson) could stop paying British taxes. For the average guy, winning the war was not winning anything. The movie is asking if we need to play the game at all. But robbing the card game, making a score, any kind of score, is all there is for the hoods of Skid Row. For us, the corporate shell game, the old bait and switch, is the only game too.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Angels With Dirty Faces

How is Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) different than the Dead End Kids movie from the year before, Dead End?

It’s got a kind of hokey love story, like its predecessor, but this time it is between the bad guy, James Cagney (as Rocky Sullivan) and the good girl, Ann Sheridan (as Laury Martin), instead of between the good guy, Joel McCrea (as Dave Conell), and the good girl, Sylvia Sidney (as Drina Gordon). Of course, Connell doesn’t find the really good girl Martin/Sheridan until he gets past the flashy charms of a half bad girl, the semi-gold digging Wendy Barrie (as Kay Burton), but the love story in either movie seems almost grafted on to the story the movie makers really wanted to tell.

And that story, like in Dead End (1937) and Boys Town (Spencer Tracy, also 1938), tells us that there really is no such thing as a bad boy. Angels with Dirty Faces is also a story about friendship, loyalty, and about the limits of both. Finally, it asks the question—just how much do you owe your fellow man?

Rocky Sullivan(James Cagney) has always been the staunch friend of Father Jerry Connolly (Pat O'Brien). They were pursued by the cops when they were rough and tumble kids, hard cases in the making (with dirty faces and empty bellies), and Rocky got caught, and refused to give up Connolly, and so Rocky went to reform school, where he learned to be a gangster.

Unlike Humphrey Bogart as Baby Face Martin in Dead End, whose entire moral code seems to consist of looking out for himself and the main chance, Sullivan has some feeling for his fellow human beings. He helps Connolly in his attempts to reform the kids, and he protects Connolly when Connolly vows to go after both Cagney and his crooked compatriots (Bogart as mob lawyer James Frazier and George Bancroft as a mobbed up contractor named Keefer, both of whom have gotten their slimy tentacles around the body politic of the city) and Frazier and Keefer decide to bump off the good father for his trouble.

When I say Cagney protects Connolly, of course, it means he kills Keefer and Frazier. And eventually he goes down for it. And up to there you have a pretty good melodrama. But then we get another climactic scene, an encore to the great shootout where they finally get Sullivan (out of bullets, and always with a flair for the dramatic, the stylish and the daring, Sullivan throws his empty weapons at the cops), and it is one of the all-time great ones. Rocky is going to the chair, unapologetic and unafraid all the way to the end. And Jerry, his old buddy, begs him to beg for his life, to play the coward, to turn the boys away from the road they are on, the road to perdition, and Rocky does. When the boys ask Connolly if it is true, what the papers say, that Rocky begged and pleaded for his life at the end, he tells them yes. “Now let’s pray for a boy who couldn’t run as fast as I could.”

How can you not love that? For all the clumsy groping and pulling at the heart strings, it works. What makes the movie so good, I thought, was not the message, which is at best simple and at worst simplistic—that there but for the grace God go I, go they, go the children, oh dear God save the children— but the two main characters. Cagney, and to a lesser but still considerable extent, O'Brien, carry the movie. Connolly is a priest who genuinely cares in a completely un-sanctimonious way, still loyal to the buddy who was loyal to him, but more loyal to these kids who may be on a dead end, unless he can find an exit for them. Sullivan, who lives by his own code, kind of like save the women and children after yourself, and only kill those who were going to try and kill you, puts Connolly and the kids first at the end.

Cagney is great, charismatic, and unashamed of what he is. He is not entirely happy about what he has become, but he completely accepts it. He is 100% himself. And you can’t help but like him, knowing that he is bad, but kind of good too. You almost want to be him, but when you start to think you do, there will always be Father Jerry there to warn you against it.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Dead End

Poverty. Like every other thing that blights our existence here on this earth, or at least blights the existences of some of us, we seek to understand it. We do so out of both curiosity and the belief that such understanding will allow us to eliminate it. It seems to me that explanations of poverty fall along a spectrum, with those who feel poverty is the fault of those who are poor (either congenitally or for lack of trying) at the one end of the spectrum, and those who believe it is foisted on the impoverished by circumstance on the other. The Conservatives are on the one end, telling the poor to just go and get jobs at McDonalds and work there 100 hours a week for 1000 years and they won’t be poor anymore, and the Democrats on the other, saying that everyone who is poor is noble and misunderstood and just needs a break, an even break, a new deal, a square deal.

Each side has a political axe to grind. The Conservatives want to not have to feel guilty while not giving any aid to the poor through taxes and the liberals want to feel virtuous by caring for their fellow man, even to the point of paying taxes for the social programs that might help them. The Conservatives claim to be practicing tough love, that they are teaching a man to fish. The Liberals accuse the Conservatives of lying about the existence of, or access to, the fish. Any truly thinking person has to admit that circumstance grows out of nature and nurture, environment and heredity, personal effort and social circumstance. Some people are going to be poor, or even criminals, no matter what—and the only thing that class decides is what kind. If you are born with a golden spoon in your mouth, you become an embezzler or financial adviser, and if you are born poor you hold people up at gun point or become a loan shark or the owner of a pawn shop.

There were class concerns reflected in attitudes towards poverty early in the 20th Century. The WASP establishment was not too happy with the huge influx of Southern and Eastern European and Catholic immigrants to this country around the turn of that century. NINA (no Irish or Italian need apply) signs could be seen in shop windows. The haves did not want to share with the have-nots, even though the have-nots did the work in the factories and built the railroads and died in the wars. Prohibition was partly about this. And there was the old blame the victim thing going on—those lousy Papist, drunk and fornicating immigrants were un-American, and The Establishment wanted to keep them down, or at least not help them get up. These new Americans were either congenitally unable to be good citizens, born without smarts or a moral compass, or they choose to not be good, but either way they were a threat to “our” (good Americans, does anyone hear an echo of all this in Donald Trump?) way of life. Maybe it all comes down to who you identify with—do you feel like an aristocrat who is being held back by the welfare state, or do you align yourself with the downtrodden, and champion unions and governmental control of some aspects of the economy?

DEAD END (1937) deals with the nexus of poverty and crime. And it is decidedly more sympathetic to the downtrodden, even the criminal, than previous movies were. Maybe it had something to do with the Depression, the point of view this movie took. A lot of the people ginning up a quarter for the movies were the very people society had left behind. Certainly, many people who had thought they were above something as unseemly as poverty found out that they weren’t. The country was close to outright rebellion, and some ground had to be given to the have-nots (although they were demonized as communists and anarchists and, worst of all, atheists). The movies had theretofore betrayed poverty as the province of the depraved, as a comeuppance for sloth or moral turpitude—for not standing during the Pledge of Allegiance or giving enough to the collection plate in Church (or for missing church altogether).

DEAD END, starring Joel McCrea, Sylvia Sidney and Humphrey Bogart, along with the “Dead End Kids” (some of whom would morph into the more comic and benign East Side Kids and Bowery Boys after the war) places the blame for poverty and crime directly at the larger society’s door. Of course, it also, because of the Hays code, couldn’t depict crime as something that ultimately pays. If it was truly true to life, one of the kids would rise up from meager beginnings as a leg-breaker or rum-runner to fight promoter, financial investor or politician.

The “Dead End Kids” live on a literal and figurative Dead End, somewhere in the East 50’s, cheek by jowl with the East River, in what is now probably Sutton Place, at about exit 11 on what is now the FDR drive. The docks that they dive off of are also cheek by jowl with a mansion owned by the Griswolds. When the boys, who are portrayed as high spirited and rambunctious but basically good, mug young blue blood Philip Griswold (an annoying little Lord Fauntleroy type, although he comes across also as just wanting to be one of the guys, and his milquetoast nature can be seen as inevitably arising from his cosseted upbringing), things go from bad to worse. Tommy Gordon (Billy Halop) is collared by Griswold’s old man, and cuts old Griswold with a pocketknife to get away. Tommy’s sister Drina vows to somehow get him out of the city so he won’t end up in reform school, which he is sure to do if he gets caught (Griswold’s brother is a judge).

Reform school is portrayed not as a place for criminal youths but as a place where youths become criminals. And the deck is clearly stacked against the poor in other ways—the Irish cop on the beat knows that he is going to lose his job if he doesn’t find Tommy. Two kinds of justice—that for the rich and that for the poor.

Dave Connell, a neighborhood kid who made good, kind of, is an out of work architect who managed to grow up hard without getting hardened into criminality. Humphrey Bogart is his counterpart, counterbalance, the id to his super ego, a good kid who went bad, a murderer who goes by the moniker Baby Face Martin. He comes back to the neighborhood to see his Ma (Marjorie Main) and his old flame Francie (Claire Trevor). Ma tells him to drop dead, and Francie has turned to prostitution and contracted syphilis: The sainted martyr and the fallen woman who has fallen so hard she is never getting up.

A bitter Martin decides the trip should not be a complete waste, and he kidnaps the little Prince. Connell kills Martin and gets the reward for his capture, which he uses for a lawyer for Tommy, who turns himself in (crime doesn’t pay, even if you are driven to it, let’s not get too truly radical here) hoping that a little money will grease the machinery of justice well enough so that Billy won’t go to the dreaded reform school. And of course, you get the feeling Connell and Drina will get together, and the good man will save the good kid and the trying-to-be-good woman from whatever evil will befall them, including becoming evil themselves.

OK, saccharine, cloying, sentimental, and simplistic. Still, I liked it better than a lot of earlier gangster movies. There is some pathos, some genuine drama. Bogart is a bad man but there is some good in him, and the kids are basically good, trying to hold out against the darkness all around them. The women are either good or bad, with no middle ground, except for Connell’s girl Kay, who loves him but won’t marry him since he is poor. And Connell, although he is pretty saintly, is also dumb enough to not see that Drina is a much better choice for a life partner. She’s not flashy, but she has substance. She can probably bait her own hook, whereas Kay would not even deign to fish. Sylvia Sidney is as pretty as Claire Trevor, I thought, and even if she wasn’t, men don’t have to make their choices in women based solely on looks. (Do they?)

Perhaps the most effective scene comes at the end. Spit (Leo Gorcey, who would later become Slip Mahoney in the series of East Side Kids and Bowery Boys movies) gives up Tommy in order to save himself, and Tommy tracks him down in order to give him the mark of the squealer (to cut his face and leave a permanent scar). But Tommy hesitates, and Connell steps in and stops (and saves?) him. Into that moment of hesitation you can impose your ideas about everything above, from either end of that spectrum. If Tommy does cut Spit, would it be him or poverty or his own congenitally damaged nature that would be doing it, and would he be solely responsible, or would all of society carry some of the blame? No easy answer to that one, which made it the best scene of the movie for me.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Killer Elite

Watching KILLER ELITE (2011) made me think about other soldier-of-fortune-mercenary-freebooter-pirate-assassin movies I’ve seen and wonder why they fascinate me.

Part of it is because it must be freeing to have nothing left to lose. When you are that willing to die, you don’t worry about much. And if you are that tough, that manly, you don’t need to be careful about what bars you walk into, or what neighborhoods, or about who you mouth off too. No, you’ve none of the worries an ordinary man has as he tries to negotiate between his manly pride and keeping his blessed hide intact.

Jason Statham and Robert Deniro and Clive Owen could never have had the kind of worries the other little boys had in grade school. Can you see Robert DeNiro worrying about an older kid who is going to hijack him on the way home, sit on his chest and spit a big loogey on his face while the other kids stand around and laugh? No, hell would freeze over first. And Clive Owen’s Dad, I am sure, declined to spank the young savage for his insolence, and if Statham went to Catholic School he gave even the hardest Nun pause when she considered smacking him for taking the Lord’s name in vain (which he does almost like he’s got a tic). Even the most savage bully could be reduced to a lifetime of therapy by any one of these guys.

Not only do these guys not ask for directions, drink milk after the expiration date, tug on Superman’s cape, spit into the wind, pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger—they also take on entire governments and win, or at least fight them to a draw.

And they get the hottest women. It is a truth known to every boy, from about third grade on, that girls will say, and even maybe believe, that they like “nice” guys, but that they really want are the barely civilized brutes, the dangerous ones, the ones who live on the edge and beyond the pale, the ones for whom Cialis will never be a necessity, even in their 90’s. Yes, for whatever messed up evolutionary reason, women usually prefer Bluto to Popeye.

And sometimes, at least in the movies, a guy is a savage brute and a nice guy at the same time. Danny Bryce (Jason Statham) is, and after he and Hunter (Robert Deniro) perform an assassination for hire where they kill a man in front of his kid, Danny decides to get out and live a normal life with his beautiful girlfriend Annie (who is his perfect female mirror image, stunning, but with none of the vanity or cruelty that a truly beautiful woman often possesses).

Danny is genuinely tender with Annie and appropriately contrite when she castigates him for being so mysterious about what he does for a living. Instead of telling her she’s the peasant girl and he’s the King and if she doesn’t shut it it’s gonna be bang-zoom-to-the-moon-Alice he tries to be honest with her, and himself, about what he has done.

Hunter and Danny don’t have a mercenary relationship with each other. In fact, when they get caught between the governments of Oman and Great Britain and must do a lot of killing to get each other out of things alive, they stay loyal to each other all the way, even though it means risking themselves. No, it is the governments of the UK and Oman, and their agents, who are guilty of expedience, of sacrificing valiant men in the name of money and power, of being duplicitous, of brute cynicism and a brand of Realpolitik that makes CIA crimes in places like El Salvador look like kid’s play, and it is the pair of friends who stand for something more than brutality, deceit and the almighty dollar.

As I watched this movie about war crimes over oil and power, about geopolitical and personal savagery on a scale that guys like me can only marvel at, I felt little guilty pleasure at being safe at home in my Barcalounger. What a relief to be all relaxed and mildly lubricated by a couple of beers as these guys did things to their enemies, and had things done to them by those enemies, that would have immediately brought me to my knees begging for mercy. These guys mete out beat downs, and take beat downs, that would cripple lesser men (or even your average gorilla) and they come back and do it again in the next scene! I don’t know who can take those kinds of kicks and punches and stay on their feet, no matter how hard they are. Oh, and they say a lot of really great hard-guy type stuff too. The kind of thing I imagine myself trying to say in a bar, until I realize I would only get laughed out of the place, or worse. My favorite is when one guy asks another who he is, and the guy responds, in a great cockney accent—“call me MFWIC, that’s short for the motherfucker what’s in charge.”

It was an interesting movie, perhaps a little more thoughtful than the usual movie of its ilk. The man against the machine, the individual, the man with true merit, being hunted by governments composed of the mediocre, the cowardly and the evil. The very kind of man that society claims to value, the man of integrity and guts, becomes the enemy of the state. Of course, it is a little silly too. I mean, how do such a couple of nice and loyal guys get into the mercenary business anyway? And what do they do when they get out? Manage a Stewart’s? Sell used cars? Give me a break.

I won’t detail all the crosses and double crosses in the movie here. Clive Owen, as Spike Logan, is an EX SAS (kind of a British Navy Seal) officer who gets annoyed when Bryce starts killing SAS officers in order to get Hunter out of the clutches of a Sheikh in Oman who got annoyed when the SAS assassinated three of his sons. Spike and Danny square off a number of times, and develop a mutual respect of the mercenary kind, not exactly a bro-mance, not the kind of friendship where you punch your buddy on the shoulder, but more the kind where you give him a savage kick in the balls.

Danny tries to convince Logan that they have both been betrayed, and that they should get out now while they still can. Danny tells him that he’s not afraid to fight, but that he would prefer not too, not anymore. He just wants out of all the corruption, the savagery, the chaos, and wants to be with Annie ( who can blame him?)

But I couldn’t help but think that you can’t spend your whole life making love to a woman, even a woman like Annie, and Danny is going to have to think of something new to do. I mean, when she is at yoga class, and he can’t find anything to fix around the house, and Reality TV has him feeling in a really violent mood, then what? In THE GODFATHER, Al Pacino (as Michael Corleone) says “I try to get out, but they pull me back in.” And it’s true to a point, but doesn’t part of him want to get back in? It’s like Bryan Cranston (as Walter White) in BREAKING BAD. After all the horrid stuff he has done, real blood crimes, mortal sins, beyond the pale kind of stuff, and after telling his wife it was all done for her and their kid, he finally admits “all right, I did it because I liked it.” And that is the rub, I think, and what makes these characters interesting—we are drawn to things on one level that repulse us on another, and we have to choose every day which level we are going to choose to exist on.

© 2015 Mike Welch

13

Being Irish, or at least Irish-American, and being at least somewhat informed about Irish history, I’m ambivalent about the British. And even if I wasn’t from the auld sod, I think I would feel that way. Tweedy types with pipes, going on and on about stiff upper lips and the Queen, and all that rot. I have, however, developed a fondness for Downton Abbey. And they have The Beatles, and the Stones (and the Who, and later Elvis Costello), and I love all of them. Then again, they play soccer, the most boring game ever invented (cricket being the most confusing), and they eat blood pudding and kidney pie, and Masterpiece Theater and Upstairs Downstairs can both be a snore. They’re pretentious, those Brits, spelling things with re at the end instead of er, and they talk weird. And except for Monty Python, those BBC comedies are mostly awful. I don’t get half the jokes, and I’m sure I would not think they were funny if I did.

But never let it be said that I am not willing to try something new. I really liked Brighton Rock, with Sam Riley, so when I was looking through Netflix for my next movie to review, I saw that he was in a thriller called 13. It’s a remake of a French thriller called 13 Tzameti, and I wondered what it would be like to see a French movie seen through a British lens with my thoroughly American eyes. At least it wasn’t a comedy. I mean, the French like Jerry Lewis, and seeing Jerry Lewis interpreted by people who think Hetty Wainwright in Keeping Up Appearances is funny sounded somewhere beyond absurd, completely inscrutable, a Zen Koan told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying …. Well, it just didn’t sound funny.

And then I realized that just because it had Sam Riley, Ronald Winstone, and Jason Statham in it, it wasn’t necessarily British. It also has 50 cent, Mickey Rourke, and Ben Gazzarra, and was produced in the United States. Maybe Rourke and Statham got to drinking on the set of The Expendables and decided to make another movie where each plays, well, the characters they always play—tough guys. Statham does the Silent Man thing, an angry missile of a man looking to blow up anything he can, and Rourke plays an eccentric whacko who is also pretty damned tough (this time out as a cowboy from Texas). His accent sounds like Texas, or at least like Mickey Rourke doing a Texas accent.

Sam Riley plays an American guy named Vince Ferro who overhears a dying guy talking about making a lot of money, and he impersonates him and ends up in a tournament where groups of guys play Russian roulette for rich sponsors who bet gads of money on them. It was done better in The Deer Hunter. This savage “sport” is open to all comers, so I guess that is why you have that hands across the water thing. And to round things out, the director of the original French movie, Gela Babluani, directed this one too. If the remake was faithful to the original, then the French version was awful. The three countries involved should have to play the game, but instead of a bullet to the head, the loser takes responsibility for the movie.

In bit parts, you have Andrew Skaarsgard (True Blood) and Michael Shannon (from Boardwalk Empire, and who played, in a great turn, serial-killing-hit-man-killer Richard Kuklinski in Ice Man). All the guys in this movie have made great movies, in fact, but like all-star teams often do, they add up to less than the sum of their parts.

There have been movies with great ensemble casts (It’s a Mad Mad World comes to mind) and there have been ensemble movies about people who’ve got nothing to lose risking it all at near impossible odds on the slim chance for freedom or a bundle of cash (The Dirty Dozen, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The Magnificent Seven) but most of these kinds of movies stink on ice (the movie is bloody bollocks, is what I mean to say), like The Poseidon Adventure did, and this one truly does.

There are all kinds of side bets and sub plots in the excruciating “plot”, but they seem like they are there merely to get the flick out past 90 minutes. The thing that can make a movie like this good is caring about the characters, or hating them, or being concerned, anyway, about what happens to them. Of course, Riley wins (the other finalist is Winstone, and of course the plan of an evil plotter, who I will not name, is to not let Riley get away with his winnings. Either the bad guys, or the cops, are going to get Ferro (Ray Liotta turned down the role of the detective, which is a shame, because his turns as a crooked cop in Narc and Avenue of the Pines were fantastic), and there has to be a twist at the end, or two. What they come up with is worthy of an episode of Magnum PI.

Not only are the characters not memorable, they are hardly distinguishable, even as types. At least give each guy some kind of gimmick of shtick to identify him with. The only guy who stands out is Rourke, and that is because of the bad accent (Riley does better with an American one). Winstone and Statham are interchangeable, sinister British guys, except that Winstone is older and not as buff. You know that in the end it is going to come down to two guys, and it does. Will they both make it, like Charles Bronson and James Coburn in The Dirty Dozen, or like Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven? Of course not, it’s Russian roulette.

Maybe these actors all get together and cut deals about which movies they get to live in. Steve McQueen makes it in Magnificent Seven, but not in The Great Escape. And Bronson makes it in Dirty Dozen, but not in The Magnificent Seven. I was not surprised to see who the last guy standing in this movie was. When it was in the theater, I bet no one was either. And instead of trying to be a noir thriller about amoral people who are all doomed, or about existential heroes who are doomed to try and be heroes (and are also just plain doomed), it converts itself into the final scene into a saccharine parable about greed.

The one level this interests me on is that of urban legend. Really rich people can do just about anything they want, but do they do things like this? Do they hunt other humans for sport (see Surviving The Game with Ice T) too? I mean, I don’t believe the one about the gigantic alligators in the NYC sewers, but this seems somehow plausible. I hope it isn’t.

© 2015 Mike Welch

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

Brute Force

First, I should make a complete disclosure. Although I am not a big fan of labels, I could accurately be called, at least in many ways, a liberal. As such, I don’t cotton to the idea that we are completely in control of our destinies. I believe that accidents of both birth and circumstance contribute greatly to what we become. No man, for good or ill, is completely self-made. This kind of thinking gets in the craw of those conservative types who like to imagine that they are where they are because they worked hard and put their money on the right God and that luck had nothing to do with it. They would have you believe the guy who owns the coal mine earned his way there, when we all really know that the laziest worker in the mine works harder than the owner, and is morally superior to him to boot. In a backward kind of way, you can almost forgive the owner, as he never had the opportunity to do anything but cheat and steal and earn his living from other people’s sweat.

That being said, I don’t believe that we have the right to lay everything we do at the doorsteps of that luck and those circumstances. We need to be as responsible for ourselves as we can be, even if fate is not playing the game of life with us using a full deck. So movies and books that attempt to completely absolve people due to their environments (I’m depraved because I was deprived) stick in my craw too. Convicts are products of their environments but also of their own choices, so prison movies that portray murderers and rapists as mere products of a broken system are missing part of the point.

BRUTE FORCE (1947) is one of those movies. In it, the prisoners sharing one of the cells in Westgate Prison (led by Burt Lancaster as Joe Collins) are just hard luck guys, beaten by Lady Luck, by poverty, and by the love they have for one lady or another. Collins himself only crossed the line to make a little scratch to try and save his girl from life in a wheelchair. Spencer (John Hoyt) is the most honestly dishonest of the bunch, a purveyor of phony stocks, who has a fond memory of Flossy (Yvonne DeCarlo), who fleeced him of his gambling winnings at the point of his own gun.

The story of Tom Lister (Whit Bissell) is the most saccharine and sentimental in this melodramatic flick. Trying to make it on the straight and narrow as some kind of bookkeeper, he can’t keep his beautiful wife (Ella Raines) in furs, and so embezzles to get her one, in fear that she will leave him if he does not. Finally, there is a GI who took the murder rap for his Italian girlfriend when stationed there during the war. I wonder what a feminist interpretation of this movie would consist of, seeing as all these man have women to at least partly blame for their penal predicaments, none of them bad guys really, no rapists or psychopathic murderers certainly, the only truly bad guy being evil guard Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn) who takes prisoners into his office and turns up the old Victrola while he beats information about the other prisoners out of them. Munsey doesn’t have a woman to blame for his psychopathy, and seems to not really care for human contact at all, at least not real contact, preferring to make his connection to the rest of mankind with the end of his truncheon.

Throw in a drunken prison surgeon who is a kind of soused truth teller, who gets bombed and lets the feckless warden and the sinister Munsey know what is what, an uncaring populace and mean spirited bureaucrats, and you have a recipe for something, but not for a great movie. You know there will be a break, and you know that Munsey and Collins will have to settle up with each other for good before the movie is over, but it all seemed such a foregone conclusion that I was not particularly moved. I wasn’t even surprised when one of the gang rats out the other’s plan to break out ( through the dreaded drain pipe).

It seemed so formulaic, but then it made me wonder if it followed the formula or created it: you know, the one where the warden and/or the guards are the real criminals, even though the poor misguided prisoners may have done some not so nice things themselves (Collins orders a guy who squealed on him to be killed, but he kind of deserved it, if anybody deserves being crushed to death in heavy machinery). I loved BRUBAKER, SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, COOL HAND LUKE, and these all came out after BRUTE FORCE. Of course, COOL HAND LUKE was so much better, Strother Martin so much more menacing than Cronyn, who mouths his lines with a kind of restrained and even urbane viciousness that just doesn’t convince. He is more convincing as a Machiavellian than as a brute, but they try to make him both. As he beats on one of his charges to try and figure out the last piece to the puzzle he is constructing about the break, I almost wanted to laugh. Hume Cronyn! He couldn’t beat a confession out of my grandmother. He shouldn’t have been portrayed as the type who would have even bothered to use his hands on those he tormented. Martin never did, and yet when he warned Paul Newman his next escape attempt would be is last, I believed him. Oh, yes I did. Think about it. Machiavellian works, it really does: Nurse Ratched never laid hands on McMurphy, and at the end of the LONGEST YARD, Eddie Albert only takes up the rifle and aims at Burt Reynolds after his guard has ignored is order to shoot.

Melodramatic, this movie was. And not noir. Noir is not hopeful. This movie is, in a way. It holds out the hope that if we provided men with the chance of rehabilitation they would come out of prison better men than when they went in. It not only is the unspoken message of the movie, the feckless warden actually gives a speech about it. The movie (and the speech) indicts an uncaring society that allows men who go to jail as minor criminals emerge as major ones. But would there not be men like Cronyn still, whatever side of the bars they were on? Yes, I believe there is something wrong with a system that imprisons so many young black men, and there is something wrong when we imprison a higher percentage of our citizens than any other Western Democracy. But if you are going to do a propaganda movie, don’t make it so obviously propagandist. Give us characters of real complexity on both sides of the line, and have some of those characters straddle it.

The movie could have also been entertaining as a clash between two men of fierce will and intelligence, but it didn’t work as that either. This was no stand-off such as that between David Niven and the Japanese prison warden in the BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI, and Lancaster is no Cool Hand Luke, no “Mac” McMurphy, no Papillon. He doesn’t dominate the film, failing to fill the vacuum left by Cronyn’s inability to do so. He mostly glares, and spouts tough guy dialogue, and then shows us his hidden heart of gold when he flashes back on his helpless and hapless girlfriend, the one he must break out to go and see. She could have saved him from himself, you see, the problem with Collins being that, I guess, his mother didn’t love him enough, and he had to eat the government lunch at school. Boring, old hat, de rigueur—Blah. And the final physical confrontation between Collins and Munsey is comical. Lancaster is an imposing physical specimen, with a kind of alpha male’s confidence in his animal self, but he needs a worthy adversary to show us just how hard a guy he is. Cronyn doesn’t cut it as such (I couldn’t help but imagine him in COCOON playing someone’s Grandpa. Didn’t he make some kind of commercial for adult diapers or suppositories or hemorrhoid cream or something?)

It’s not that I don’t think prisons need to be indicted. I read up a little on this, and apparently it came shortly after a deadly riot in Alcatraz. If the movie was supposed to clean up the system, it failed. Over twenty years later, we had Attica. And as noir, the movie misses too. Noir doesn’t offer hope. This movie does, but does so in such a melodramatic, unimaginative way, that one is not particularly moved. Those who would tend to agree with it needn’t be convinced (and although these liberals, like myself, do think reform is needed, it hasn’t come about) , and those who don’t can easily disregard this clumsy little morality play filled with cardboard heroes and villains.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Sorry, Wrong Number

My Dad used to tell me about his love for old-timey radio shows like “Suspense” and “The Shadow” and “Inner Sanctum.” His claim was that the imagination could create images more horrible than anything special effects could manufacture for the movie or TV screen. He also claimed that there was more of an onus on the actors and actresses of these old shows to really carry their parts, as they had no computerized special effects geniuses to save them from mediocrity with their 21st century legerdemain (or to upstage them, for that matter, I could have said, but I wasn’t in the habit or arguing with my father).

When I saw SORRY, WRONG NUMBER (1948, Paramount) I got to thinking about his claims. The movie, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster as Leona and Henry Stevens, was based on a radio play written by Lucille Roberts. It was basically a one woman play, and Agnes Moorehead scared the pants off listeners so adroitly that Paramount asked Roberts to expand and rewrite the play for the big screen.

Sure, less is left to the imagination on the screen. With Moorehead, you couldn’t see her surroundings, you couldn’t see her, and in the movie we can see the posh, tony, chic bedroom Leona Stevens inhabits quite well (if in black and white) on the big screen, as well as the scale of emotions she runs up and down on her pretty, spoiled rich girl face. But this is still minimalist film making. Stanwyck’s portrayal of Leona has to carry the film, and it does. Most of the drama takes place in phone conversations. No fires, explosions, no trains disappearing into tunnels, no gun battles, aliens, slow motion Kung Fu Battles, death stars, no grand sets, epic scenes, no burning of Atlanta, nothing. Just a woman who, in trying to call her husband, gets cut into a call (this used to happen, I guess, party lines and all that) which she slowly begins to realize is about her own impending murder.

What a grabber, that first scene. Her own murder! And she’s an invalid to boot, and the servants are out for the night, and her husband is nowhere to be found. Alone in her bed, which is so nicely appointed with all kinds of frilly stuff, Leona sprawls in a nightgown that looks fancy enough to wear to a coronation. Poor woman, she can’t interest the police in her plight, and the phone company can’t trace the call after the party has hung up (I guess things have changed in that regard).

I read a NY Times review written shortly after the opening of this movie, and the critic cracked wise about not leaving women alone with their phones to whip themselves into hysterical frenzies (and run up the bill). That would go down as sexist today, and I think it is really true that men are on the darn cell phone as much as women are now, but it was a funny line. And Leona Stevens is a hysteric, and a hypochondriac, and a spoiled rich girl, so it is a little hard for her to get anyone interested in her case, or for us to care about what happens to her.

But slowly we do. Stevens gamely and doggedly pieces the wildly improbable story together, starting by tracking down her husband’s secretary, who leads her to her old college roommate (Sally Lord, played by Ann Richards), who is married to the DA Fred Lord, who just happens to be investigating Henry Stevens. Good old Sally (from whom Leona stole Henry at a college dance) decides to do an imitation of Nancy Drew and figure out why. Far-fetched coincidences, to be sure, but who cares? Suspend a little disbelief, ignore the minuscule chances you would get cut into a phone conversation about your own murder in a city of 8 million, and this movie is great fun, great thrilling and chilling fun, giving you that old frisson of terrified pleasure that good suspense movies do.

There are stunning revelations every time poor Leona dials that telephone. Leona realizes her husband is not who she thinks he is, and that even she herself is not, when her new doctor reveals to her that all her infirmity is in her head and not her heart. Spoiled rich girl or not, nobody deserves what she is going to get at 11:15 pm, a woman alone, who might as well be tied down to a railroad track with the hoof beats of Snidely Whiplash’s horse growing ever louder, ever closer.

And the way she must overcome herself, her own weakness and self-delusion, to save herself is classic. She must conquer her hysteria, get up and walk to the window, to scream for help, but she can’t. Perhaps she can’t give up the power her weakness has given her over her husband and father. She certainly bats them around with it. And maybe unconsciously she just can’t believe anyone will stay with her unless she stacks the deck in her favor, not only with her beaucoup bucks, but with her china doll fragility, her neurasthenia, and her poor weak heart. Doesn’t everyone leave? Didn’t her Mom? (Who died giving birth to her). Can she find safety, from herself, from heartbreak, from an 11:15 appointment with a murderer? It’s what you wish for, but this is noir, and like in any good noir, you are never safe, not from them and, in the end, not from yourself. The bomb ticks, and 11:15 awaits.

The movie flashes back and forth and sideways to give the back story, and it does a good job. Leona’s maiden name is Cotterell, and her father James has made a pile in pharmaceuticals. She meets Henry Stevens (Lancaster) at a college dance and asks him if he goes to Harvard. This starts her off on the wrong foot, as Lancaster is a hardscrabble guy from Grassville (great name for a down at heels town) who has only gumption and good looks going for him. She tries to cut in on him and Sally and he says no, but Leona doesn’t take no for an answer from anybody, but he’s not anybody, and you figure their back and forth, the sexual tension, will resolve itself into a nice romance, that he will tame the shrew and his real talents will be rewarded, a la Horatio Alger, and they will live happily ever after. HA.

They get married, but none of the above happens. He works for her father, in a kind of sinecure, and he calls himself the invoice king, the emperor of paperwork. With the help of the old man, Leona keeps Henry on a short leash, keeps him from taking a job anywhere else, and when Henry insists they move out of her father’s house, she has an “episode” and begins to manipulate him with her ailment as much as her money.

It’s classic. She doesn’t believe he could really love her, and so acts in a way that guarantees he won’t. And he, finding the yellow brick road to American success blocked off, decides to take a very illegal detour, which involves him with some very bad guys, who blackmail him for big bucks, which he can only get by knocking off his wife for the insurance money (and you wonder if he really minds knocking her off anyway—the moral ambiguity is great, classic noir stuff). And so he plans his lovely wife’s murder, but is nice enough to request that they make it quick and painless. If he can’t get by on a smile and a shoeshine, murder will do, especially for a kid from Grassville, from hunger.

Great tension, without any over the top FX type stuff. Could Arnold Schwarzenegger carry a film like this? Carry the whole movie with tone of voice and body language and facial expressions? I don’t think so.

And the great twist is that Henry Stevens has a change of heart, and confesses to Leona, from a pay phone, no less (she already knows, but he doesn’t know she does). He tells her to run to the window and to scream out, do it now (at 11:15 the El comes by and will drown out her screams) but can she overcome her psychological affliction, give up her whole flimsy persona, will she be able to lose her old self to save the new one? Nah. This is noir. Nobody saves themselves.

The movie gleefully fakes us out in two ways: As a thriller, where we think that the doughty Leona and her old college friend/rival will solve the crime and live happily ever after (they solve it, but no one finds happiness) and then with the standard romantic expectation that the lovers will be reunited, reconciled. She will save herself, won’t she? She must. She doesn’t deserve to die, we have found a kind of grudging sympathy for both of them in our hearts, there has to be a happy ending. Doesn’t there have to be a happy ending?

© 2015 Mike Welch

American Hustle

I was in my second year of high school in the late ‘70s when seven Congressmen (six Representatives and one Senator) were getting “stung” in the ABSCAM operation. I hardly paid attention. It’s like that, I guess, when you are a teenager. I was more concerned with whether this one particular girl I had a huge crush on would accept my invitation to the Prom, frankly, and my indignation was mostly centered not on official corruption, but on why I was not getting a chance to start on the basketball team, and also about how so many of my peers had succumbed to the tawdry allure of disco.

So the movie American Hustle (David Russell, 2013) was fun, nostalgic, and an eye opener for me in many ways. It was like a garishly colored newsreel documentary of the decade, and a funny, but still keenly acute, contemplation of the dark side of the American Dream. I had forgotten about all the good music the decade produced (excluding disco) and how bad the clothes and hairstyles were. And I hadn’t thought, all those years ago, about how the ‘70s were the end of the big economic boom produced by our victory in WWII. Yes, the ‘70s: A time of cynicism, inflation, hard times, the end of the ideal of peace, love, truth and beauty. The hippies and yippies still existed, but their dreams of utopia had been co-opted by the youth of the era as an excuse to get high and get laid, and the hell with social justice (what’s that? I imagine my callow self saying to anyone asking me that question at that time).

Times were hard, but I didn’t pay for anything but tickets to the movies, beer, the occasional Stephen King novel, and albums (Supertramp, Springsteen, The Eagles, et al), so I didn’t much care. But there were people who did care, cared very much, about the bottom line, about success, about having a lot of zeros at the end of their bank balances. And, like always, there were people willing to acquire those zeroes through means that were anything but cricket.

It seems to me that the American Dream is about, among other things, re-inventing yourself, and about living in a meritocracy where your talent and hard work will be rewarded. This reinvention in the classical model did not have to do with being a grifter, a flim-flam man or woman, but with throwing off your past, your mistakes, and getting a fresh start. Go west, young man, west from Europe, a less upwardly mobile place, to America, and then move west again across this brave new country. To some this was about new opportunities, but to others it was about selling snake oil. No luck stealing horses back in the old country? Move to New York and sell pieces of the Brooklyn Bridge. In danger of getting your legs broken from doing that? Move west and become a phony doctor or preacher or spiritualist, and just hope you hit it big before you reach the Pacific, and find yourself with your back to the ocean, faced with everyone who has been chasing you since your corrupt journey began.

To be a confidence man you have to have confidence. It is what gives others confidence in you, and what allows you to go ahead and make believe you are something you are not, not stopping to worry about getting run out of town on a rail, thrown in the slammer, or being fitted for a pair of cement overshoes. Confident is what Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) is, and reinvention is what he is all about. The child of a failed Bronx businessman, he carries the scars from witnessing that failure into an adult life as con artist (or at least that is his excuse for what he does, and maybe he even believes it, after having told the story so many times). You get the impression all the fraud is more about identity than it is about real physical poverty, though. Even after his scams allow him to acquire some legitimate dry cleaning emporiums he is still always looking out for the main chance, the big score, the brass ring, the ultimate rip-off.

The opening of the movie establishes the vast distance between what he seems to be and what he is brilliantly, showing a pallid and overweight Rosenfeld doing a very meticulous combination comb-over and rug installation for his balding pate. He is going to try to entrap the Mayor of Camden, New Jersey, Carmine Polito (played by Jeremy Renner with an hysterical kind of mobbed up pompadour that belonged back in the ‘50s when he wore it in the ‘70s), into accepting a bribe from an Arab sheikh (an FBI agent with a Mexican background who knows no Arabic), as Polito peddles his political influence concerning the coming of gambling to Atlantic City to the ersatz King. Renner does a great job, convincing us that Polito is truly and utterly convinced that since some of his constituents will benefit from all this he is not a crook, but some kind of benefactor. It reminds one of the old saw about the guy from Tammany Hall who lectured about clean graft and dirty graft.

Then we flash back, and learn that Rosenfeld and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), a hardscrabble kid from Albuquerque who has reinvented herself as an Englishwoman named Lady Greensly, have been nailed for fraud by Richie DiMaso, an FBI agent and ostensible good guy who cons himself into thinking he is saving America from the jackals, but who in his darker moments ruthlessly climbs up the ladder at work (the FBI) while paying no attention to those he hurts, or scams, on the way up. Part of the fun of the movie is the way appearance and reality coalesce. Prosser tells both Rosenfeld and DiMaso that she is playing the other of the two, and you don’t know who she is really allied with, if it is either of them. One of the more poignant parts of the movie concerns the “love” the two con artists may feel for one another—both Rosenfeld and Prosser know anything can be faked, and yet both still want to believe in each other, in love. In the “real thing.” Whatever that is.

DiMaso tries to con them into thinking he will let them go after they help him catch some bigger fish. And as they go trolling, they begin to catch bigger and bigger ones. The mayor of Camden NJ is a small fry compared to some of these, and certainly to the creatures still lurking in the depths. And some of those monsters down there promise not to come docilely into the boat. Richie knows this, and warns DiMaso that soon they will be playing with people who play for keeps, but DiMaso, blinded by ambition (and who puts his hair in curlers, in hilarious counterpoint to Rosenfeld’s rug and comb-over routine), is hearing none of it.

The movie, which turns at some point into a pretty benign shaggy dog story (I never really thought anyone was going to get whacked, and they don’t) about who can pull off the biggest con, has great acting. It must be hard to act like someone who is acting, but Cooper and Bale and Adams pull it off. Each one tells him or herself that what he or she is doing is really for someone else. And of course, they are full of shit. But like a good televangelist, they manage to delude themselves as well as those they are duping. And when Rosenfeld tells DiMaso that everything is grey, not black and white, you realize, uncomfortably, that most of the time that is right. Everyone is selling something, and the best way to get something for nothing is to take advantage of someone who thinks they are getting something for nothing. And this kind of deception is not the sole province of criminals. Even if we are not breaking the law, we constantly, even if we don’t realize it, adjust our image to reflect back to people what we think they need to see in us, to have them see in us what will allow us to get what we want from them. And the late 70’s were nothing if not superficial and glitzy, all about appearances. Studio 54. The Bee Gees (thank God for the divine counterbalance the Ramones and the Sex Pistols provided). The coming of Ronald Reagan, movie star, to the White House. Style over substance.

So, is life really all about who you are inside, or what you look like on the outside? Take a look at who goes to jail and who gets off in this movie. There may be some answers to that question found there.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Spellbound

I don’t know how well Alfred Hitchcock’s murder mystery and psychological thriller SPELLBOUND (1945) portrays psychoanalysis, homicide and the detection of both murder and the motivation for it, but even if its ideas about all three are as nutty as a fruitcake, I had a great time watching it. The movie also explores the nature of love, but doesn’t realty solve that mystery, except perhaps to say that the heart wants what the heart wants and, in the words of psychoanalyst Constance Peterson (played by Ingrid Berman), “the heart can see sometimes better than the mind.”

Peterson is a well-respected psychoanalyst whose stated motivation for being one is to “drive away the devils of unreason from the human soul.” I say “stated motivation” because psychoanalysis assumes that we are not aware of what really motivates us. We have all kinds of forbidden desires that we must repress (like, for men, killing your father and marrying your mother—what unconscious things motivate women was more confusing to Freud, and to me) in order to function in society, in order for society itself to function, for if everyone let loose with their Dionysian selves, baying at the moon, copulating and killing and perhaps even neglecting to cough into their elbows, this rickety thing we call civilization would come tumbling down around our id-driven, libidinous ears. We manage to repress these things, but they force their way back to our consciousness in the form of dreams and guilt complexes and God knows what else. Exactly how and why this happens eludes me (maybe it did for Freud and Hitchcock too).

The idea that we are driven by what we are not aware of leads to some unexpected conclusions. One is that we may not really be responsible for what we do, being prisoners of our repressed desires. The other is that psychoanalysis becomes a kind of secular confession, whereby you confess to the priest/analyst that you always wanted to do such and such bad thing, and you are either told to say ten Hail Marys or that you couldn’t help but have those nasty impulses because we are first and foremost creatures of unreason, and it is OK to want really bad things as long as we don’t do really bad things.

So far, so good. Peterson is cool and detached, and sees love not as something to celebrate so much as to be investigated, not as the highest thing to which we can aspire, but as a symptom of the irrational self. For all her reserve, though, she can’t help but feel her heart go pitter patter when the new head of the hospital, Dr Edwardes (Gregory Peck) comes walking into the room. She denies it, but we know that she protests too much. Is Gregory Peck that adorable? I don’t know, but Bergman would make any man not a statue (and maybe even a statue) start spouting love sonnets and strumming his guitar outside her window.

But of course there has to be a block to their love, or we wouldn’t even get to act II. The small problem that crops up is that Edwardes is an impostor who may or may not have killed the real Dr Edwardes (who apparently was a pain in the ass). Peterson won’t believe that Edwardes is guilty, even though her mentor, Dr Brulov, points out that he very well could be, and then goes on to say “women make the best psychoanalysts until they fall in love, and then they make the best patients.” Brulov, by the way, is priceless as a little Viennese fellow with a Hamburg and a van dyke who speaks endearingly broken English.

Is Peterson right to trust Edwardes, whose real identity is a mystery? Does the heart know better than the head? If he didn’t do it, what is the source of his delusion that he did? Don’t worry, Dr Peterson is on the case. She vows to analyze the living crap out of Edwardes until she has the answers, in between bouts of smooching with him on the therapeutic couch, thereby violating the first rule psychoanalysis: don’t fall in love with the patient. We can assume, we students of psychoanalysis, that in addition to the hanky panky there is a lot of transference going on. Transference happens in analysis when you transfer the forbidden desire for, or rage against, the parent or someone else to the analyst. The analyst is supposed to recognize this as part of the process, and to never commit the sin of counter-transference, of falling in love with the patient (and it is actually against the law to consummate that love if the analyst does).

Edwardes runs away, filled with guilt and wanting to protect Peterson from his crazy self. What a hot fantasy—your analyst not only looks like Ingrid Bergman, she is willing to travel to the ends of the earth (or at least Rochester NY, which is almost the same thing—see the movie for an explanation) to save you, to be your savior and your lover all at once. It’s great stuff, and there is great tension too, as you really don’t know whether Bergman should trust him or not. If you are in therapy with a sexy therapist, you should not watch this movie—it’s just a tease.

I won’t reveal all the details. I just want to point out that Hitchcock, who has been accused of not liking women, portrays Peterson as a competent and courageous heroine. While the men around her accuse women of not being able to conquer their irrational selves, she outsmarts them all, and solves all the mysteries: of the death of the real Edwardes, of the identity of the faux Edwardes, and of the origin of John Ballantine’s (the real identity of the Peck character) guilt complex.

In one superb scene, she even cons a house detective into finding Ballantine for her in a NYC Hotel by playing the damsel in distress, letting him think he is the psychologically astute one, puffing himself up in that way men have while she is just so grateful, always having relied on the kindness of (male) strangers.

And what are the clues she uses to solve all the puzzles? Dreams, of course. The movie treats Ballantine’s recurrent dream like it is a treasure map written in a code that, once deciphered, will reveal all. I don’t think dreams in real life point to any definitive psychological answers, any more than clues to a crime might. Still, the way that Hitchcock utilizes the dream is ingenious. If this isn’t how dreams work, it should be.

The final scene is classic. Peterson confronts the real murderer and, having psychoanalyzed him to a “t” and in so doing solved the crime, goes on to tell him how and why he did it. He comes clean, then threatens to kill her, but she understands him so well that she knows he won’t. And he doesn’t. He kills himself instead. And Ballantine and Peterson live happily ever after, perhaps following the advice of Brulov, who tells them to “make babies, not phobias.”

© 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