PRISONERS took no prisoners, and paid the price

Back in September 2013, a challenging drama called Prisoners.  It was fairly well-reviewed and had reasonable commercial success, but by the time of the award season it had been swamped by such inferior material as American Hustle.  The only Academy nomination it received (and thoroughly deserved) was for Roger Deakins's cinematography, and although Aaron Guzikowski's sceenplay, written on spec, won a number of several script competitions, including The Black List and The Blue Cat, it got very little attention when prizes were dispensed for actual films.

What happened?

Before going any further, I need to say that you should see this film.  It is too visually and morally complex to adequately describe or summarize in a blog post like this, and it will repay your time.  Put it in your queue or get it from your library or borrow it from a friend, clear out an evening and watch this, preferably not alone.  And if you haven't seen director Denis Villeneuve's previous film, Incendies, go back and see that as well.  My guess is that like me, you will try and see all of Mr. Villeneuve's films in future.

Back to my question.  First, Prisoners is a godawful title.  Yes, it makes sense in a philosophical metaphorical way AFTER you've seen the film and had some time to think about it.  But most people don't want to see a movie about prisoners, unless they're American GIs breaking out of WWII prisoner camps.  Moreover, it is a confusing description in a literal level.  I am not going to exhibit hubris sufficient to propose alternate titles, but I know this one is absolutely terrible and had to have contributed to the general audience indifference.

Second, the film was marketed as a thriller.  In fact, it begins by employing thriller tropes, but by 45 minutes in, it is clear we are in deeper waters than the typical Liam Neeson movie.  (Admittedly there is a thriller-style twist ending, and the only hint I will give you is to pay close attention to the casting.)

Overall, Prisoners feels more like a neo-noir than a thriller, especially in its look, as in this clip.


More significantly, Prisoners shares the noir ethos that no one is in sole possession of the moral high ground, nor is any villain made of pure villainy; stylized as it is, noir recognizes that life is more mixed than melodrama would have it.

There are certainly allegorical or at least metaphorical aspects of the story, in that Jackman's character, a good guy who captures a boy-man suspected of kidnapping his daughter and brutally tortures him, is reminiscent of the United States succumbing to fear and cowardice and engaging in torture to combat terrorism.  But the allegory doesn't hold for long, because the film has more subtle and complex moral fish to fry.  (And that is a terrible use of idiom there.)

Next, as far as awards and nominations go, Prisoners does not end on a triumphal note (though the ending is not as ambiguous as a lot of obtuse people want to think), and the good guys and bad guys are all muddled up morally.  Moreover, the stellar cast is truly used as an ensemble, which makes handing out award nominations much harder.  (The National Board of Review actually nominated the cast AS an ensemble.)  If there is someone to be singled out, it has to be Jake Gyllenhall, with the best work of his I have seen yet.  Here's a little bit.



Prisoners is not a film that calls for a sequel, but I would like to see Gyllenhall play this character again.

If you're still on the fence about the rewards of seeing this film, I urge you in the strongest terms to click this link and look at this superb and detailed analysis, written by cinematographer Matthew Scott, of the look of the film and the depth of its craft.  As an example, here is the still I put at the top of this post, as de-constructed by Mr. Scott.

Hard as steel in Pittsburgh. And Cleveland.

This is from the opening sequence of Kill The Irishman (2011), a hard-nosed, hard-boiled, hard-knuckled semi-noir gangster picture set in, of all places Cleveland (because it is based on a true story that happened there). This is not an innovative or surprising movie. It has Paul Sorvino and Vincent D'Onofrio playing Italian mobsters, which is hardly a new idea. (I think you should be able to just buy ready-made clips of Paul Sorvino playing a big mafia don and just paste them into your movie without troubling Mr. Sorvino to come to your set or read your script, which seems hardly necessary in the circumstances.)

Irishman falls solidly in the category of "underdog union stiff who becomes union leader then becomes mad dog gangster who's nice to kids and old ladies." Jimmy Cagney would have been right at home here. But Cagney would also have to acknowledge that Ray Stevenson, who has been a big, solid, completely dependable, yet surprisingly nuanced actor in international film and television projects for a while is, in this film at least, a big fat movie star. He is utterly riveting, and makes all the contradictory parts of the character fit together. (Speaking of big and fat, Val Kilmer is becoming frightening. Doesn't he have any friends or family who will tell him what is happening to him? He is becoming so puffy, he is losing control of the facial muscles required for acting.)

Here's what you need to know about Kill the Irishman: a lot of big guys hit each other in the face hard, and an incredible number of bombs go off. Mostly car bombs (one of which provides Christopher Walken with perhaps his best movie death ever), but at one point the baddies take an entire house out. And as best as I can tell, it's neither a miniature, nor CG. This relatively low-budget movie blows a real house up. Or down, as the case may be. It's worth the price of admission. Other than the lack of nudity, Joe Bob Briggs would LOVE this movie. I appreciate that it stays hard and tough straight to the end. They don't round the edges off the protagonist, Danny Greene, nor even elevate him to a tragic hero. He gets a lot of people blown up until someone blows him up. To me, movie-wise, that's money in the bank.

Speaking of money in the bank, that's on the mind of Russell Crowe in The Next Three Days (2010), who, in one of the best sequences, does not rob a bank. Yes, yes, I know, the movies are filled with scenes of people not robbing banks. But this one is really fine, especially since there is not one word of dialogue about anybody robbing a bank. But his decision, his plan, and his reconsideration of that plan are all conveyed without a word. Bravo, director Paul Haggis, who as a writer, would have been expected to spew words at such an important point, only Mr. Haggis seems to understand how movies work.



No, I don't buy that Pittsburgh community college teacher Crowe can suddenly become a resourceful, lightning-reflexed commando-spy as he rescues his wife from a life sentence for murder. No, the idea that a couple running from the law would take along their 6-year-old child is a bit of a strain. And using Liam Neeson in a single scene to deliver some exposition is both insulting and a waste of natural resources. But the movie goes at a good clip, especially in the second half and Russell Crowe has the movie-star gift of being able to clearly represent what he is thinking without a word or a gesture, which is useful because the story does not give him anyone he can share his plans with (a pretty bold choice in itself). Much of the fun of the first half is just wondering, "what the devil is he doing that for?" and awaiting the pay-off you know, given the iron laws of film narrative, will be coming.

Here's another thing to like: Elizabeth Banks really seems as though she would be worth it. If your choice was whether or not to break the law, risk life and limb and go into permanent exile in order to save say, Sandra Bullock or even Katherine Heigl, from an unjust punishment, you might have to give it some thought. Maybe it's just me (and I don't even care for blondes much), but Elizabeth Banks, who has been such a loyal buddy in all those Judd Apatow movies, seems worth the risk. And I don't think that's a little thing, as movies go.

I do wish the movie had given us a more interesting head cop to chase Crowe, although perhaps casting a star in that role would have been cliche, and, with an ensemble of unknowns one can enjoy the illusion that these somewhat bumbling cops are a long-standing team who really know each other. Brian Dennehy, the tight-lipped father of the tight-lipped Crowe (good thing these actors are not paid by the word), has, unlike the universe, stopped expanding, and now looks ill, for the opposite reason that he used to look ill. Perhaps a completely healthy-looking Dennehy would be disturbing.

Neither film was very successful. I suspect Kill The Irishman didn't get the marketing to overcome the fact that it's star is not yet established as a leading man and the true story it is based on is neither well known, startling or heart-warming. The wrap-up of The Next Three Days was probably unsatisfying for American audiences; it is established that one smart cop has figured out what really happened and that Elizabeth Banks is innocent, but he fails to uncover the exculpatory evidence which is indeed yet to be found and we presume that Crowe, Banks and son will be forever on the run, which is sad-making for most people.

But they are both kick-ass movies that move and keep moving for most of their running times, and better yet, both feature generous authentic helpings of flyover country which is so rarely on display in mainstream American film. Maybe somehow people in the future will figure out that not everything in America happened in New York or Los Angeles.

Australian crime wave

Back in the 70s, Australian cinema emerged from a swamp of exploitation and earned a place in the international film community with films of serious artistic aspiration and merit, such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, Walkabout and Breaker Morant. Fine films they were, but not necessarily to be considered entertainment by the mainstream audience. It takes a confident culture to mingle fun and art, and Australia is clearly confident now, if the work of the loose association of filmmakers called Blue Tongue is any indicator. Members include Nash and Joey Edgerton, David Michod and Kieran Darcy-Smith, and although not formally united by any specific artistic credo, other than to make the kind of films they themselves would like to see, the collective result is a worldview as black as the blackest film noir of the 40s and 50s, spiced with a sexual honesty not possible at the time.

For our convenient study, they have made some short films that state their artistic ethos with a clarity and a concision that is admirable. Nash Edgerton, who brings one of the most unusual resumes to directing in film history, having previously established himself primarily as a stunt person and stunt coordinator (including work for the Matrix, Star Wars and Superman franchises), is the auteur of this nasty bit of business called Spider. Pay close attention to the epigram which begins the film:



The Square (2008) was Mr. Edgerton's feature debut, and it is built on the classic noir trope of the good man who needs to cover up an isolated bad act (specifically adultery) and gets sucked farther and farther down into a morass of evil. It might be described as the "circling the drain" structure. Here is the moment in the protagonist's story from which there is no turning back. This is the place where "someone loses an eye." The man in the first car is a friend of the protagonist has seen proof of his evil and is racing to escape.

I'm not sure how it's done, perhaps it's the murky weather throughout, but the whole film carries a brooding sense of worse things to come, that should install it as next classic neo-noir after Brick.

David Michod places his world of evil in the bright sunshine with a cheerful granny making birthday cakes and giving orders to the criminal gang she heads up. No need to look outside the family to find danger and death. Be advised that this short film below, Crossbow, which illustrates how treacherous family is in "Mondo Michod" is NSFW, for reasons of language.
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Animal Kingdom has been compared to Goodfellas, and they do share both an acceptance of the routine nature of most crime and a universe of betrayal and treachery, especially among those who claim to love each other. But Animal Kingdom is even better compared to Winter's Bone, in which an innocent 17-year-old is brought into knowledge of her own family's criminal undertakings. And in both cases, the performances of the neophyte actors, Jennifer Lawrence and James Frecheville, are stunning. And while Lawrence received an Oscar nomination, the Academy nomination for Animal Kingdom went to the actress playing that sweet loveable granny (nicknamed "Smurf"), Jackie Weaver, who we see in this clip ordering a hit on her adored grandson, who she fears is planning to betray the family to the police:



Even Barbara Stanwyck didn't put the Indian sign on her own grandson.

Both Blue Tongue films share a minimalistic aesthetic, but whereas The Square has a jittery hand-held look, the camera in Animal Kingdom is mostly locked down, classical style, lending an air of authority and reliability to the authorial style. Both Edgerton and Michod display complete command and seem likely poised for greater achievements.

I can't wait to see what kind of mayhem the Ozzies cook up next.

The sons of Norman Bates

The Killer Inside Me (2010) is entitled to film noir credentials due to its source material, a novel by Jim Thompson, perhaps the bleakest among celebrated hard-boiled writers. But the story takes place under a blistering Texas sun, and the film manages to feel like noir without ever looking like noir. Instead of moody shadows from overturned lamps or shiny wet pavements reflecting the streetlamps, we have the blank, affect-less face of Casey Affleck, an actor who, after Gone Baby Gone, is on his way to becoming his own hard-boiled genre.

Moreover, director Michael Winterbottom has a history of making films, most notably Tristram Shandy, which are about themselves. This may be more admirable than making films about other films; it is at least less derivative. So we are spelled the Brian DePalma-style quotes from better movies in favor of drilling deeper and deeper down into an empty man.

Is Lou Ford a sociopath or psychopath? Is he a seething volcano or a emptied-out husk? Neither Thompson nor Winterbottom seem to want to answer that question, but simply scatter random clues, especially about Lou's mother who apparently taught him to use women as punching bags. The film favors long takes with traveling cameras carefully displaying the spatial relationships among locations, and especially between cars and interiors, as if the film were being shot by a crime scene photographer. It is hard to make sense of the plot, for though it isn't complicated, the offered character motivations don't make much sense. And as if to throw up their hands in confusion with Affleck's polite and obsequious killer, a character A.O. Scott of the New York Times described as "Eddie Haskell on his way to strangle a puppy," the filmmakers do not let him escape as Thompson did, but leave him a self-started, but somewhat ambiguous housefire.

Lou Ford may just be the latest of nice young men who kill. I suppose the great-granddaddy of them all (aside from Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Gray) is probably Danny from Night Must Fall a twice-filmed Emlyn Williams play which feels in the theater as if it is two hours about nothing except whether or not there is a severed head in a hatbox. It set off a plethora of similar pleasant yet homicidal young men, culminating in Norman Bates (or was it his mother?). And Norman and his co-creator, Alfred Hitchcock established that most dangerous of rules of film in the post-Classical age: you can't trust anyone or anything.

Norman also set off some direct imitators in the first decade after his debut, such as Keir Dullea in Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing (1965). My feelings about Otto Preminger seemed to have been shaped more by the public persona he used in the 50s and 60s to promote his movies; the Prussian tyrant director, forever purchasing expensive literary properties, cramming them with stars and making glacially-paced superproductions such as Exodus and Hurry Sundown. Now that I examine his work without the baggage of his publicity, I see an interesting use of space and a respect for actors. His films are theatrical but in the good way. Not theatrical meaning given to overacting and static cameras, but in the sense of framing the action broadly (in this case using the 2:35 proportions well), giving actors distance and room to establish characters and relationships, rather than using close-ups and editing to create a performance, and the use of long takes both to enhance those performances and to delineate the space among them and between different loci of action. Look at this clip and how clearly Preminger sets the relative statuses of the characters, the jockeying for control between Keir Dullea and Laurence Olivier and the precise layout of the school from which Bunny has disappeared.



(Production of this film was undoubtedly the inspiration of the observation by Noel Coward - who plays a supporting role - "Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.")

Preminger's approach suggests a respect for his collaborators, especially the writers John and Penelope Mortimer (John Mortimer was most famous as the creator of Rumpole) and the actors; it contradicts the pose of the arrogant self-sufficient autocrat the Preminger projected. (Of course, the whole facade was a sham -- Preminger was not Teutonic, as he played in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17, but an Austrian Jew.) Bad manners or not, Preminger lets things unfold, and in a swift efficient manner unlike most of his 1960s epics. In fact, it goes swiftly enough for most of the audience to have overlooked nice young Keir as the possible culprit in Bunny's disappearance. Most of the film is engaged in trying to suggest that Carol Lynley is mad.

Speaking of madness, Anthony Perkins, the original Norman Bates himself, got the tables turned on him in the game of "Who is Crazier" in Pretty Poison (1968) a pitch-black comedy variant of Lolita. Like, Killer Inside Me, it is a sunlit noir, here in a sun-dappled early New England autumn. Perkins, freshly paroled, seeks to seduce Tuesday Weld, here at the tail end of a 10-year period of playing prom queen types, with tales of being a secret agent under cover as a criminal and hints of involving her in his dangerous escapades. Perkins adds the wonderful quality of appearing to very possibly believe his own stories. Weld appears to succumb to his fabrications, even offering her own innocence; but that gift becomes a weapon, and in this scene she suggests they push their relationship to the next stage -- flight.



The would-be predator becomes the tool of the real predator, especially as Weld convinces Perkins to participate in the murder of her mother, played by B-movie icon, Beverly Garland (still alluring at 50). Lolita becomes Double Indemnity and the madness keeps spiraling up.

Pretty Poison has some nice visual flourishes beside the healthy-looking all-American countryside. The factory Perkins works in produces a chemical waste the color of blood, presaging the violence to come and echoing the fears of the then-emerging environmental movement. There is a multiplicity of viewing devices and lenses - binoculars, windows, an industrial lens at the plant, amplifying the sense of the male gaze on Weld's character. And the denouement is perfect, with Perkins pulling the pin of the grenade on himself, and Weld seeking out her next victim. It both recalls the femmes fatale of the 40s and suggests that Norman Bates was never as great a threat as Norma.

Hard boiled in the cold mountains

Someone call Gaborey Sidibe and tell her that her year's over. This year it is Jennifer Lawrence, and once again a young actress demonstrates tremendous control of her instrument as an artist and performs a thoroughly convincing transformation. The film in question is the starkly poetic Winter's Bone. A mystery of unseen violence and unspoken threat, that despite its settings in the hills of Missouri is as hard-boiled as any tale of the city's mean streets.

This is as tough as film as you'll ever see, and at the center of it a pretty blond girl who could intimidate Lee Ermey with a glance. No, I'm not talking about the sexual intimidation of the attractive woman, but a person who catches and field-dresses her own food, ask any question and stare down a drug kingpin and a bounty hunter with equal, cold quiet ferocity.

That cold quiet is key, too. Because this is not a nostril-flaring, bark-chewing performance. This is a film of reticence, of the unsaid, and Lawrence is nothing if not a master of subtext. The film has been adapted from a book and the writers bemoaned the loss of the heroine's inner voice, which is a literary device. Instead, we have the film analog, the space between the words, a space fraught with tension and meaning for all the effort that has gone in speaking the words and in not speaking others. Michael Caine tells of the time early in his career, when an acting coach asked him what he was doing in a scene in which he had no lines. "Nothing," said the young drama student. "No," said the teacher, "You are thinking of dozens and dozens of brilliant and fascinating things to say, and then...choosing not to say them."

Only here what Ree doesn't say could get her killed. Even then, she won't stop asking questions, questions about her father, the meth lab cook who has disappeared and put the family in jeopardy of losing their home to the bail bondsmen. Like Phillip Marlowe, Ree will not stop asking questions, even if she gets beat up for it. The beating seems like a minor annoyance, no greater an annoyance than getting her beaten face cleaned up.

And as in Chandler (creator of Marlowe), some of the dialogue is terse modern poetry: "Never ask for what ought to be offered." To a threatening policeman, with whom the speaker has a history: "Is this going to be our time?" "I done told you to shut up once with my mouth." “I couldn’t live without the weight of the both of you on my back”

And there is the more vivid poetry of the music. There is an underscore, and it is understated, considering some of the gothic horrors at hand. But more memorable is the foreground old-timey music, much of it performed onscreen. And I have to admit, I am always a sucker for the old tune, "Tiny Sparrow." Best old-timey music since Brother Where Art Thou. Best of all, it's not pushed on us, nor forced to comment on the story or point up tortured ironies. It just sidles up and gives a context as thoroughly as the hand-made porch the family sits on in the final, satisfying scene.

There is a lot of hooey in the internet about how authentic the film may or may not be. Suffice it to say that the novelist is happy with the film, so everyone else can shut up. Besides, it's not about how accurately the Ozarks are depicted. It's not a documentary on crystal meth or country life or anything else. The setting is rather abstracted, frankly, and that's as it should be, because the narrative has been boiled down to absolute essentials, and the details are for anthropologists. The story is almost Shakespearean -- the forsaken child seeking to reclaim a legacy and take responsibility for the continuation of the line. If Jessup was a wayward king who'd died in battle without a plan of succession, rather than a criminal trying to save his own butt, the conclusion of the story wouldn't be much different. (Yes, obviously the atmosphere is different, but that's just for variety.) If anything, the story feels like a dark fairy-tale, a feeling only intensified by the talisman which is dredged up from a near-frozen pond, a talisman which, having been retrieved by passing through great trials and hardships, solves the heroine's problems and gives her some measure of peace.

Besides Lawrence, John Hawkes and Dale Dickey are going to be cited for acting honors. (Dickey is playing the obverse side of the comic toothless hick she plays on shows like My Name is Earl, and without a trace of detachment or condescension.) The film is nominated for 7 Independent Spirit Awards as I write this, and I am willing to bet that Lawrence and the screenwriters will be remembered in the Oscar nominations. But that is all extrinsic to the movie, which does what movies do so well, putting together pictures of people-- by themselves and against a landscape -- people talking to, listening to and looking at each other and turning that into an absorbing and compelling story.

Victim of the System

No, I'm not referring to the protagonist of The Racket (1951), whoever that might be. The film itself is the victim of a studio system which felt compelled to adhere to standardized story tropes and conventions. In this case, a crime film has good guys who catch the bad guys and bring them to justice. That's just the kind of thinking that's going to keep you from making an interesting film, and in hindsight, going to prevent you from creating a decent film noir, no matter how hard Warner Home Video wants to believe The Racket is one.

Sure, we have the two kings of noir at RKO in the postwar years, der zwei Roberten,* Ryan and Mitchum, not to mention the noirest of noir actresses, Lizabeth Scott. But there is no fatalistic outlook, no dark world of shadows (and no Nick Musaraca, brilliant cinematographer to make those shadows), no ambiguous moral universe. The only thing interesting about the piece is that Ryan the gangster and Mitchum the cop are both middle management types straining against the restrictions placed on them by their superiors. Unfortunately, they never have the type of encounter that would have developed their areas of commonality.

In fact they barely play together at all, which is a shame -- Ryan's tightly wound tough guy against Mitchum's laconic-to-the-point-of-sleepy cop. Or better yet, see the roles reversed. Ryan seems a lot more angry about not being allowed to beat people up than Mitchum is that he can't arrest them. In fact, Mitchum is scarcely believable as a cop at all, which is probably why they never show him in any kind of uniform, and his suit looks like he's getting ready go drinking rather than testify to the grand jury.

If only RKO (which put this movie through five different directors in its long labored production history) had stopped worrying about who did what and who should go to jail and just brought Mitchum and Ryan together, perhaps in a situation in which they were dependent on each other and got to see each other's humanity instead of just trading insults, maybe then there would have been a noir, or even a movie. Even Lizabeth Scott can't light it up. This is a case where mere professional competence isn't enough.
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* Yes, I know that's cod-German

Bald-faced killers with a toupee

I was so intrigued by the cult film Honeymoon Killers and its relationship to a real-life case in the late 1940s that I looked up two other films based on the same case. They could be interpreted as remakes or homages to Honeymoon Killers, or simply parallel films, one of which acknowledges its predecessor extensively and comes up with a rich robust re-interpretation of the story, following the earlier film sequence by sequence. The other turns its back on Leonard Kastle's film, and to some extent on the actual Beck-Fernandez murders, and takes a creative new tack with the story which ultimately fails, and renders the film inert. The question is whether that approach could ever have worked without discarding the central premise of the real-life material, and hence, the very reason to base a film on this particular case.

The actress who plays the Martha Beck character in Profundo Carmesi aka Deep Crimson (1996), Regina Orozco, is primarily known as an opera singer, which tells you something about the movie. Where the lovers Honeymoon Killers were joined in seediness, two con artists who recognized each other, in Deep Crimson they are both absorbed in a fantasy of passionate romance. Neither of them can deal with reality and are completely committed to the idea of the grand passion. Perhaps it is telling that this version of the story includes the fact in which Beck (here called Coral) abandoned her children in order to follow Fernandez. This signals that we are not going to see a gradual slide down the moral ladder, as in the earlier film, but a portrait of a grand obsession. She imagines her paramour to be Charles Boyer, or a reasonable facsimile thereof and frequently dresses in red. She is not nearly as interested in the swindle as she is in the thrill of being on the run with her lover.

Nicolas, who corresponds to the real-life Fernandez, also seems less interested in money than his counterpart in real life or in the Honeymoon Killers. He loves the sport of seduction, and his paramount concern is the condition of his toupee. (Actor Daniel Cacho looks alarmingly like David Margulies, the actor who played the mayor in Ghostbusters, not exactly the most seductive image.) In fact, he loses heart in the whole criminal conspiracy when his toupee becomes damaged beyond repair. On top of which, he seems to have inherited blinding migraines from Clyde Barrow, in a tribute to that other film about killers in love and on the run.

Where Honeymoon Killers unfolds in a clinical, almost judgmental black-and-white, Profondo's director Arturo Ripstein's camera prowls smoothly about (no handheld or even Steadicam is evident here) in the style of early Otto Preminger, with long, takes allowing the actors to move about the environment and interact with each other. Although it is Mexican, it seems much more like a Hollywood movie, reflecting the fantasy life of the two principals. In Leonard Kastle's film, Mahler seemed like an overstatement, but in Profondo, Verdi or Puccini would fit right in.

There are some interesting variations in the way the facts of the case are used. The querulous old widow who is killed with a hammer in Honeymoon gets clobbered with a religious statue in Profondo, after going through a grotesque mock wedding in a cemetery. Profondo makes more of Beck's knowledge as a nurse, although in this version she is a bad nurse, whereas in Honeymoon she was a supervisor. But when Coral promises to perform an abortion on Nicolas's girlfriend, it is clearly in order to bleed her death. But that fails and Nicolas has to do a messy job of stabbing her. And where Beck in Honeymoon does away with the surviving toddler in a cold, frozen manner, Coral does it choking back tears, angry for her inability to connect with the child who stills want her own mother, though she is now a bloody corpse in the room.

Profondo ends like a Western. Whereas the real killers and the ones in Honeymoon die separated on death row, the Profondo killers are gunned down on the plain, dying together in a spoon position, half immersed in water which might as well be blood. Finally, these lovers are victims of as big a delusion as the women they tricked and killed, and they somehow seem pathetic where the originals were repellent.

Lonely Hearts (2006) is almost a complete misfire from start to finish, beginning with its odd conceit to center the story around the investigating policemen (who barely appear at all in Profondo). It is a novel idea, and potentially compelling, given the contrast between the thriving and exciting romantic relationship of the criminal couple and the failing marriage of the policeman. But it has a couple of negative effects. First of all, it sends the film in the wrong direction. Yes, we like policeman to catch bad guys -- especially on television, where we need to see the moral order restored. But in movies, we only like it if they catch monsters, as in Silence of the Lambs. If the criminals are interested, complicated, conflicted, they are going to grab our interest and we will not want to see them caught, at least not until their story is worked out. So our sympathies work against the intended protagonist, John Travolta's cop character.

Second, it flattens Beck and Fernandez into any criminal couple on the run. Beyond the basic mistake of the story structure, writer-director Todd Robinson turns the overweight and homely Martha Beck into the glamorous and irresistible Salma Hayek, takes away her children and all her other problems, including lack of confidence. It makes Ray Fernandez pretty ordinary, too, for whereas the real man was obsessed with a very large woman who berated and dominated him, now he is in love with a sexy, hot babe. Beck and Fernandez become run-of-the-mill swindlers turned killers -- we never see their panic or sense of doom. They are scarcely individualized at all.

In addition to a suicidal wife and a girlfriend played by Laura Dern, Travolta is given a partner, played by James Gandolfini who seems to have no story function at all other than to prevent Travolta from talking to himself and to provide voiceover narration. Neither Travolta nor Gandolfini, nor Scott Caan, who performs a bad carbon copy of his father, is as believable as a cop as they are as criminals, which undermines the film. (Yes, there are films which suggest the kinship between cop and criminal, but this is not one.) It doesn't help that Jared Leto, as Ray Fernandez is so completely lacking in any distinctive personality or style, playing a generic con man when something really unusual and strange is called for.

The one thing Lonely Hearts does well is go to town on the late 40's atmosphere-- the wardrobe, music, lighting, settings. The idea is presumably to align the film with the tradition of film noir. But this story is not going to cooperate with that notion; in fact the writer has done a good deal to destroy any sort of noir structure. It could have been, but Robinson chose to write a police procedural, with some added angst for the cop. (And even here Robinson couldn't help himself changing the details of the real policeman's life -- ironic, given that the man was Robinson's grandfather.) Production design does not a film noir make.

The decision goes to the reigning champion, Honeymoon Killers, with Deep Crimson a worthy challenger. It's time for the governor to declare a moratorium on film versions of the Lonely Hearts Killers.

Shall a man be known by his deeds or by the fruits thereof?

This scene can serve as illustration of the ethos, though perhaps not the look (which is mostly darker), of Army of Shadows (1969), an eyewitness account of the French resistance, and an inspiration and source for Flame and Citron. Hannah Erendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" with reference to the bureaucratic and mundane way in which the Final Solution was carried out. Army of Darkness might be said to be about the banality of the resistance of evil.

There are no fabulous daring raids, no destruction of huge ball-bearing plants, no mass assassination of Nazi bigwigs, no examples of individual heroism really at all. This is a movement whose energies are almost entirely engaged in survival. Like Washington's army (and that of Ho-Chi-Minh), all it has to do is stay intact through the end of the war in order to win. But that is no simple task, and as the clip above illustrates, it requires a frigid and efficient cruelty which hardly exists in peacetime.

Director Melville was best known for his laconic noir gangster films. Army of Darkness is to war films as Goodfellas is to gangster films. Both are about grubby, workaday violence, the glamor and romance fairly well stripped from them, in constant fear and danger of discovery to the point where fending off discovery overtakes the original object. Lino Ventura, so brilliant as the cornered yet cool criminal of Melville's Classes tous risques and Le deuxieme souffle, is similarly cool and virtually with affect in this film, merely exchanging one state of violent criminality for another, i.e., one is "bad" and the other is "good," so long as the ends justify the means.

Back in the 60s, all the talk was about "anti-heros." This was meant to refer to actors like Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, who didn't look like Clark Gable or Gary Cooper and didn't have morally unambiguous triumphs. But in fact most "anti-heroes" didn't accomplish anything. Sure, Ben married the girl in The Graduate, but that marriage didn't appear to promise salvation or even success beyond a few months. The bad guys beat the cops, the investigative reporter got killed by the conspirators, the cops shot the hero, all the 70s heroes lost.

The heroes of Army of Shadows win without triumphant, without victory. To persist is to win. This is true anti-heroism.

The film also marks the beginning of the de-glamorization of Simone Signoret, who plays a brave and skillful but not alluring resistance member, so worried about maintaining her connection with her daughter, that she dies for the sin of carrying the child's photograph. In order to fight inhumanity, one must shed one's own humanity.

This sounds like a dark, brittle, cold film. Maybe it is. But it is exhilarating in its capacity to embrace good and evil together and trust the audience to sort it all out. See it and be surprised you hadn't heard of it before.

Where do ghosts go when they die?

Roman Polanski has never made a movie that is less than eminently watchable. I have taught Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown in my film courses, and lessons learned in those films are applied at times in The Ghost Writer (2010), Polanski's entry into the paranoid political thriller genre. (Although given Polanksi's origins and his life since, I suppose all his films are paranoid thrillers. Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean people aren't after you.)

The film's title outside the States is "the Ghost" and that's how Ewan MacGregor's character keeps introducing himself, most ominously in the scene pictured above, when he simply says, "I'm your ghost," announcing that Pierce Brosnan's Tony-Blair-like character is already dead, which politically speaking he is.

Polanski is the master of what is not shown. The most famous example is in Rosemary's Baby as Ruth Gordon, having a secretive telephone conversation leans just out of shot, which caused much of the audience during the first run to physically lean over, evidently hoping they could see around the corner on the movie screen. There is a bravura example in The Ghost Writer as a folded note is passed hand to hand within a crowd. Polanski chooses to show only the hands and the shoulders being tapped. The fact of a note being passed seems to excite surprise or consternation, but we have no faces to show us this, just body language. But over the course of this very long shot, our desire to know the content of the note ramps up until the pressure is almost unendurable. Too bad the actual note itself is sort of flat compared to the build-up.

Similarly the climax of the film and the final revelation takes place just off-screen, although what has happened is clear and does not need to be shown directly to be understood. If you haven't seen the film and you want to--and you might want to becuase there are rewards to be found--be advised that Polanski's ending (which is meant to be a shock) has returned to the ethos of "forget it Jake, it's Chinatown." In effect, Polanski says, all effort to discover the truth, to effect justice are feckless and almost ludicrous. The result is a highly unsatisfying, disappointing and perhaps even predictable downbeat 70s ending--albeit in a well-designed shot of which Hitchcock would be proud.*

Which solves the final mystery: why a film which for 127 minutes of its 128 minute length seems like a rattlingly good post-Hitchcock thriller with a major star and a raft of well-known supporting players should have disappeared at the box office this spring. You just can't tell an audience it's all hopeless and expect them to like it. At least not since the mid-70s, anyway.
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* We can't discount the possibility that Polanski may have come his conclusions about truth and justice because of his own personal history as a long-time fugitive, although I think there is no hidden mystery about the acts which are the substance of the charges against him. The only argument is as to the just punishment therefor.

Lights down, lights out

Fat City (1972) is not well remembered now, but it began the John Huston renaissance that continued--fitfully--through his final film, The Dead. It is a noirish little boxing film, sharing much with Robert Wise's The Set-Up: tank town, washed up fighter(s), the women who hang on for better or worse.

There's not much story. The film is all acting, atmosphere and cinematography. And if nothing else, Fat City nails down the relationship between Edward Hopper and film noir. For a boxing picture, little of importance takes place in the gym or the ring in comparison with the Eugene O'Neill-like barroom that forms the emotional center of the film. Here they share their dreams and disappointments, project future triumphs and spill their guts.

Cinematographer Conrad Hall, who made the definitive Hopper-influenced film in his final feature, Road to Perdition, doesn't seem want or need any front light at all. This is one of the darkest films this side of The Godfather Part II--it must have been a smeary mess on VHS tape. But it is only appropriate for a film made up of confessions that can only be made under the comfortable blanket of darkness.

It's also a great opportunity to see the young Jeff Bridges, fresh off The Last Picture Show and warming up for brilliant work to come in a line that has peaked lately with Crazy Heart. Here his somewhat soiled, but still innocent optimism is a great contrast with Stacy Keach's air of defeat--personae that are hard to from those of the actors themselves. But then, as a director who loved real locations and non-actors, Huston was the master of the cinematic found object.

Faux noir

Film noir, once an interesting mode of film analysis, has become such a potent marketing tool that desperate home video distributors are willing to slap the name onto any black-and-white film that has any character or activity which is slightly more hard-hitting than a Shirley Temple film. In the case of Bad For Each Other (1953), not only is there no sense of doom, no guilt, no sense of the world overcoming the protagonist, there is not even a crime of any kind. Don't let the title fool you: there is really nothing to recommend this film for any purposes, especially entertainment, except for the presence of the borderline sinister Lizabeth Scott, who managed to project the aura of a girl who was born to a good family but promptly got into bad--maybe even kinky--stuff. That's all kept pretty well offstage in this attempt at a Warners-style soap opera, directed by Warners journeyman Irving Rapper.

Two Of A Kind (1951) comes a bit closer to noir, given that there's a half-hearted attempt at a con, and that the head con is the weak-chinned and sort-of greasy Alexander Knox. (Yes, I know he's famous for playing Woodrow Wilson, but he was sort of a greasy prig himself, disguised as an upright college professor.) The con itself, like most long cons, has disappeared into the mists of time. Long cons require a fundamental lack of knowledge on the part of the mark, and it is hard to keep the marks in this state of extreme ignorance nowadays. Specifically, the cons try to pass off seedy, sweaty and burly Edmond O'Brien as the son they lost when he was a three-year old boy. (It's hard to imagine Edmond O'Brien was ever three years old. Could he have been that sweaty then?) The point is, one simple DNA test would end this con quick. As it is, they can't pull it off, even then sweaty Edmond has allowed the tip of his pinky to be hacked off to further the plot.

But honestly, the men are of no real interest in this movie, at least not in comparison with the good girl-bad girl dichotomy set up, as seen in the illustration above. The good girl is Terry Moore, who evidently learned from bad girl Lizabeth Scott, and switched over to being a bad girl later in the decade, especially in a sweater (very bad!).

But Lizabeth Scott is the whole show here. At first she seemed like a road company Lauren Bacall, all husky voice and sassy attitude. But where Bacall is insolent, Scott has the inherent superiority of just being better and smarter than her men, which makes her free to exhibit a sparkle and enthusiasm not available to the sullen sultry Bacall persona. Bacall had Howard Hawks to guide and shape her, but Scott had no such mentor. She had been discovered by producer Hal Wallis and followed him through Warners and Paramount, both home to heavy-breathing melodrama before she fetched up at Columbia, which really lacked a house style, taking what it could from the occasional A-list talent that went slumming in Gower Gulch. But Wallis was not a star-maker, but a star-finder and exploiter. Among his contractees were Kirk Douglas, Shirley MacLaine, Elvis Presley and Martin and Lewis. The filmographies of the latter stars should indicate that Hal Wallis mostly gave up on quality when he left Warners.

Oddly, though Bacall was a cool and a noir dame, she was never a femme fatale. She might think you were kind of a jerk, but she would never destroy you. Scott, on the other hand, might be completely head-over-heels about you, but she'd sell you out in a second. That splendid balance of enthusiasm about men and about money made a lot of her films and roles seem more interesting than they really were.

And you gotta like a gal whose big break in show business was understudying and appearing as Sabina in The Skin Of Our Teeth. It is said that at 81 she could still recite her first speech in the play from memory. I believe it. It's a really good speech.*
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* Oh, oh, oh! Six o’clock and the master not home yet. Pray God nothing serious has happened to him crossing the Hudson River. If anything happened to him, we would certainly be inconsolable and have to move into a less desirable district.

The fact is I don’t know what’ll become of us. Here it is the middle of August and the coldest day of the year. It’s simply freezing; the dogs are sticking to the sidewalks. Can anybody explain that?

But I’m not surprised. The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me. Every night this same anxiety as to whether the master will get home safely: whether he’ll bring home anything to eat. In the midst of life we are in the midst of death, a truer word was never said. ...

My advice to you is not to inquire into why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate; that’s my philosophy. Don’t forget that we got through the Depression by the skin of our teeth! One more tight squeeze like this and where will we be?

Real mean streets

The Killer That Stalked New York (1950) is a wonderful, jazzy title for a fairly pale rip-off of Panic In The Streets, a thrilling noir about the hunt for a killer with plague shot in the streets of New Orleans. Killer That Stalked is based on a real case of a smallpox scare in New York in 1947, which resulted in a mass wave of vaccination. Some smart producer and/or writer had the notion to graft the central premise of Panic in the Streets onto this true story--namely, that the source of the infection would be just the type of person unlikely to cooperate with the officials, being a criminal--and even better, a criminal in mid-crime, that is, waiting for the heat to blow over in order to get rid of stolen goods (in this case, jewelry).

Neither Panic nor Killer qualify as hard-core noir, since there is little element of doom, fate or evil. Panic has a couple of deaths and shootings early on which thicken the atmosphere, but its claim to noir cred mostly rests on the moody photography of Joe McDonald (a favorite of Frank Capra's) and the high-tension lead performance by Richard Widmark. Killer has none of that, being shot in a fairly flat, almost television style, with little point of view. The illustration above demonstrates some of the attitude of the film. All the cops are benevolent Irishmen, and the nurses are gentle and knowing. It is ankle-deep in early 50's Hollywood pap.

Killer has only two possible claims to noir status, one being the presence of Evelyn Keyes, who while not a significant noir figure, is a fairly consistent "bad girl" (perhaps mostly because she's a no-longer-young blonde and because of her long string of famous romances off-screen). She entered the pantheon as Scarlett O'Hara's pouty younger sister, but in Killer she's not especially pouty or especially bad. Just sort of flu-y and sweaty. The other, better claim is the use of New York location photography. Unfortunately, it doesn't amount to much more than some second-unit material, and some plates for Ms. Keyes to walk in front of on a rear-projection stage. Still, it's always fun to see New York 60 years ago, and those little slices here and there provide most of the entertainment value of The Killer That Stalked New York.

Much more extensive and enjoyable use of New York as a setting is found in The Glass Wall (1953). Like Killer, Glass Wall is not a noir, but a chase film and a suspense piece, but the person running is far more resourceful and determined than in the earlier film. He's a refugee from Communist Hungary without an immigration quota number, desperate to find the American, a jazz musician, who can tell the authorities that he aided the Allied cause during the war, and is entitled to entry. The film boasts excellent location photography by Joseph Biroc, who fought his way through the low-budget swamp of the 1950s, and became something of a specialist in comedy beginning in the 1960s.

Co-writer and producer Ivan Tors had to be a huge influence on the film, also being Hungarian (there is a striking encounter with a Hungarian family late in the film, who argue about their responsibility for the refugee), but also as the future creator of Sea Hunt and Flipper, a fellow who liked to take the camera out of the studio and into the outdoors. Much is shot with available light, and, I suspect, with hidden cameras, since most of the close-ups of star Vittorio Gassman are shot before rear-projection plates, which suggests that they did not want passing New Yorkers to see the cameras, and so kept them far away and under cover. How appropriate to have brought over an Italian actor (albeit playing a Hungarian) to recreate the feeling of Italian neorealism in the streets of New York.

But the element that truly brings Glass Wall closest to noir is the incandescent Gloria Grahame, who breathed guilty sexuality. Most filmgoers remember her as Violet, the girl who is no better than she should be in It's A Wonderful Life, to whom Jimmy Stewart lends money to get out of town away from the gossips, and whose flirty walk makes Ward Bond wonder what his wife is doing.

I don't suspect Gloria Grahame made many moviegoers think of their wives, but the irony is that her characters rarely project sense intentionally, nor even in the fake-innocent manner of a Marilyn Monroe. In Glass Wall, as in most of her films, she plays a lonely, damaged woman who has trusted some wrong men and suffered for it, and yet keeps hope alive, confident she will find a good one. In the illustration above, she is describing her life on the shoelace tip assembly line, part of her rough struggle for survival. The speech and scene is American screenwriting at its best, terse, heartfelt and hardboiled. Incidentally, the set decorators and director had the courage to make Grahame's slum apartment really look like a slum apartment. It may be the shabbiest living space seen in any film in the 1950's.

There's an exciting sequence which could only have been shot on a real New York subway platform (how little they've changed), and even more remarkable from a historical aspect is a brief chase through the still-new and apparently still uncompleted UN building, most strikingly when Gassman's character addresses an empty hearing room demanding justice--and this from a character who has spent ten years in concentration camps before stowing away to America. Perhaps not noir, but unafraid of harsh facts (and McCarthyites) and the reality of being an outsider in America, clawing for a way in.

It was a dark and stormy night...

The clip above contains numerous spoilers--it's really the denouement of the movie. But it also neatly demonstrates most of the virtues of The Spiral Staircase (1945) in one not-brief excerpt.

The film is a sort-of fusion between women's picture, 19th-century gaslight melodrama, early noir and Val Lewton-style horror, and old-dark-house thriller. What all of those genres boast is bravura black-and-white photography, which Spiral Staircase has in spades, as you can see in the clip. I wonder if this creepy staircase--which winds up being not as important as the title might suggest--remained lodged in Alfred Hitchcock's memory when he began working on Vertigo 12 or 13 years later.

Director Siodmak has great noir credits, but Spiral Staircase does not have the sense of fate, guilt or a hidden fretwork of evil that characterizes the best noir. It is a woman's melodrama, with a woman in jeopardy and a single evil man. Interestingly, the film changed the novel's original physically crippled heroine to a psychologically disturbed mute--a handicap which can (and is) overcome by the right circumstances. Still, it uses some excellent noir technique, especially the close-up on the killer's eyes before the killings we witness, which not only gives psychological focus but actually masks the identity of the killer. There is also a lot of dark and rain, which are noir tropes. The staircase could represent a place the heroine wants to go, but fears (such as marriage and sex). To get to the house with the staircase, you have to pass through a forest--with similar symbolic significances. And like noir, Spiral Staircase is less interested in mystery than it is in evil.

This film deserves to stay in the repertoire if only because of the fantasy sequence that begins at 0:51 minutes of the clip below. The music, the design and decoration, staging, camera placement and movement, sound treatment, all show the Hollywood machinery at full throttle (I can't help wondering if this house is made from bits of the sets for The Magnificent Ambersons) to convey a psychological crisis which precipitates the final resolution. Siodmak's work is fine, but one should not slight the dozens of crafts people who create such a richly detailed tapestry:

Loneliness of the long distance killer

When did consciousness of the idea of film noir begin to affect filmmakers? There is a photo of Robert Aldrich in 1955 clutching a copy of Panorama du Film Noir, the first book-length work to address the subject. Certainly, Touch of Evil, made in 1958, seems self-consciously about its own style, but that may have more to do with Orson Welles than it does with noir.

The question comes somewhere in the 1960's--what is part of the original creative thrust of noir, and what is a self-conscious revival. And then one must separate the threads of which films are noir because that is the prevailing style of black-and-white crime films, and which films show evidence of having drunk the noir Kool-Aid. And I suppose if it's in color, such as Point Blank, it's neo-noir.

Clearly actor-director Allen Baron, knew what kind of film he was making with Blast of Silence (1961): A cheap but competently professional crime film suitable to be a calling card in the feature film business. An independent film scene was developing in New York at the time, most famously culminating in the films of John Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke. The resulting films are mostly theatrical in origin (not based on plays, but using the personnel and techniques of theater, especially improvisation), self-conscious and relating to the edgier aspects of downtown New York life--jazz, interracial love, gangs, drug addiction.

Blast of Silence is not having any. In fact, Frank Bono (pronounced "bon-no") might like to be part of the downtown scene. He might like to be part of any scene. But he's from out-of-town, he's alone for the Christmas season, just here to execute a hit and split. Forget all those depressed hippies, Bono is the definition of alienated.

I haven't actually been hired to kill someone (yet), but I have been alone in a city for a number of days at a time, and the film captures the boredom and isolation of that situation. And when Bono does have the opportunity to reach out to someone else he fumbles it. Which makes his own death logically right. Zero minus zero, nothing lost, the universe is still in balance. Barron's non-acting suits this perfectly. (Peter Falk, originally cast, would have been terrible, too ingratiating, too needy. Barron is a cipher, albeit an unhappy one.) The overwritten second-person narration (reportedly by a blacklisted Waldo Salt) is irritating at first, but you learn to tune it out--I almost wish Criterion could issue a version of the film without it.

A great deal of the contemporary pleasure of this film is seeing the New York locations, the Village, 125th Street, Rockefeller Center as they looked in the very early 1960s--some recognizable, some not. Shooting quick and dirty on the streets of the city means you don't have to actually have a cinematographic style. Those brightly lit yet dingy streets give you a production design and a shooting style by themselves--foreground objects and low key lighting not necessary (as Sweet Smell of Success demonstrated). Although there is an awe-inspiring shot as Barron approaches us from a long perspective, tiny at first, then filling the frame (my guess is it's East 34th Street near that large diagonally-placed building that sits on the corner of 34th and Park.)

Barron doesn't seem to have a great psychological or sociological point. It's a simple tale, crisply told. The best-laid plans and all that. The points make themselves via the pictures. And this Blast of Silence might be the last pure blast of noir before self-consciousness sets in.

Requiem for lost innocence

Watched Brick (2005) again; ordinarily I see it as part of the syllabus of my film course, but we didn't get to it this year, more's the pity. But I had family members who really needed to catch up on their film knowledge and see this brilliant comment-pastiche of film noir, set in a Southern California high school and starring the always fine Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

There's a lot to be said about how it uses and plays with the conventions of the genre. But watching it this time, I was really struck by the music score. Because the film was made with a very low budget, and the composer is the director's cousin, I had not given the score sufficient attention or respect.

Listen to the first theme in the music video posted above, "Emily's Theme." The instrumentation is strange--the melody instrument, whatever it is, cannot sustain, so it substitutes rapidly repeated notes for sustained sound, like a mandolin, balalaika or xylophone. It is like Emily herself, who does not have lasting power. But she haunts, she reverberates, like the echoing notes of the melody. If you listen to the entire video, every piece of music is original, not imitated from anything, except perhaps the faintest traces of Morricone. Some of it is just pure texture, as is often true of film scores, but there is a high proportion of melody, higher than is usual in film, especially in contemporary and low-budget film.

I became a fan of Rian Johnson with Brick, and although his career has been slightly disappointing since, I still anticipate each new project and hope to be astonished again. Re-examining Brick, it is still a film of numerous pleasures, whether its compositions, its strange patois and wonderful dialogue rhythms, the nuanced and balanced performance of Gordon-Levitt and the cast; but now I am a fan of Rian Johnson, and I will definitely be following his career going forward.

Crumpets and bullets

Seeing such a rare thing as a "Brit noir" like They Made Me A Fugitive (1948) brings into relief what an American phenomenon classical film noir is. Perhaps it is because of its implicit denial of the American Dream. True, the British believe in "muddling through" and that "there'll always be an England." But there's no promise that you will be there to participate, or that you will come out all right. It's implied that in order for England to go on, you may have to take one for the team.

But the American Dream is an individual promise. Work hard, play by the rules, you will be taken care of. But that idea is on a collision course with the notion that Fate can always reach out, grab you, beat you to the pavement, and leave you there to face whatever comes. Non-Americans have always known this. The good thing about bad luck is that could always be worse. Maybe, perversely, that's why the happy ending of They Made Me A Fugitive is acceptable. Because in that culture, it's understood that all the endings are arbitrary.

Night and the City (1952) proves that it was possible to make an American film noir in Britain, simply substituting British actors, but maintaining the American outlook, style and pace. But They Made Me A Fugitive is thoroughly British, as demonstrated in both the black humor of the clip posted above and the class distinctions that riddle the story. Trevor Howard's character, Clem, is a "toff", a "swell." He is of better birth and background than his criminal pals, just slumming, in it for the money and likely to get out. That is intolerable to Narcy, the leader of the gang. The ironic thing is that Narcy is far more effete and fashionable than the rather gruff Clem. Trevor Howard was rather good at playing a man who, cultivated though he may be, is not to be trifled with. When people get hit in this movie, unlike those clean American fistfights--a swift "biff" to the chin and the fellow obligingly falls down--it's messy and people get hurt. There is a pervasive feel of danger, too--one senses that anything could happen, and that no character, even the comic relief, is safe.

The black humor mentioned above is also evidenced by a scene in which a woman harboring the fugitive Clem tries to entice him into doing her a favor by killing her husband. The humor and the rather good tough banter is attributable to screenwriter Noel Langley, best known for the basic script for The Wizard of Oz and the final scripts for the 1951 Alistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers, directed, like Fugitive, by Alberto Cavalcanti. Perhaps that's what leavens this surprisingly tough film, given the way we Americans think of the Brits.

Afternoon tea in this movie would have to be laced with whisky. Or poison.

You mean...it was all just a dream?

I don't know about you, but I hate that moment at the end of The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy realizes it was all "just a dream." L. Frank Baum never copped out that way--there never really was any explanation of Oz and how there could be such a weird world you could travel to and then come back. And I hate when characters are sent to dream or fantasy worlds and they spend all their time saying, "Hey! Everything is all crazy and mixed-up here!" Of course, it is, you idiot, it's a dream world! Weren't you paying attention? (George Bailey is particularly cement-brained in It's A Wonderful Life. Can't he understand that angel?)

On the other hand, the concept that the "real" world and "dream" world could be reversed dates back at least to Calderon's Life Is A Dream in 1636, if not before. This leads to endless discussions about whether or not what we are experiencing is someone else's dream, and that if they wake up, we'll be gone.

Happily, Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010) skips past all that boring nonsense and heads straight into the maze world of dreams. We're not bothered with explanations or rationalizations, so we can go straight to exploring the idea of shared, directed and lucid dreams. And Nolan has come up with a new structure for an action film. Memento is the famous backward movie. Inception is built like Russian nesting dolls, or like a 3-D chess game. Besides the delightful intricacy of the conception, you get the delicious sensation of cutting between three or four different James Bond movies at once. (And clearly, Mr. Nolan is paying tribute to the fabulous ski chase in On Her Majesty's Secret Service without the terrible rear screen projection inserts that mar the earlier work.) A couple of critics of my generation thought that was confusing. They probably missed something while drinking their Ensure and yelling at the kids to get off their lawn. A 5-year-old could understand this movie. Those critics have hardening of the brain cells.

I have never enjoyed CGI as much as the sequence in which Ellen Page's character starts monkeying with the dreamscape in a number of impossible ways. When she folds two views into a pair of echoing mirrors with DeCaprio in the middle of them, I couldn't help sensing a tip of the hat to Orson Welles, who uses that image in both Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai, not to mention the foreshadowing of having multiple versions of the characters operating in parallel dreams simultaneously.

While I love seeing Ellen Page playing a superbrain--is there anyone better at that?--I was disappointed in forcing the very cool Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play a plodding stick-in-the-mud. And as wonderful as Marion Cotillard is, she must not get caught in the trap of playing the mysterious wife of the big American film star. She needs to get back to films which are built around her, and not devolve into an interesting European extra attraction. She's too remarkable an actor for that. And before I leave the acting (DiCaprio was OK, didn't spoil the movie, still not a very interesting actor), Tom Hardy, who has been building a decent resume, really stepped out in this film as Eames, a man who plays hard but never loses sight of the stakes, ready to avoid a loss he doesn't need to incur. I suspect he will soon become a movie star. Incidentally, is Michael Caine in the movie as anything else than a good luck charm? Did he have a larger role that was cut from the film? Or is he simply required by law to be in every film ever made?

My only serious criticism of the film is the tenuous connection between the "top" story--the effort to get a young man to reject his father's legacy without rejecting his father--and the "bottom" story--DiCaprio's effort to reconcile himself to the responsibility he feels for his wife's death. Yes, both are linked to the idea of "inception," i.e., origination of ideas. But the two stories are emotionally unconnected, which makes for an overall chilly tone for the film. It is exciting, visually stimulating, remarkably suspenseful, considering the boxes it puts itself in, but it is not moving or touching. That could be said for most of Nolan's work--lots of head, little heart.

But you could say the same for Stanley Kubrick, and his stuff isn't too bad.

Open and shutter case

It's hard to tell whether the excessively artificial look and tone of the Shutter Island (2010) is a deliberate aesthetic choice by director Martin Scorsese, or a symptom of his distance from the material. At first, the artificiality, such as the opening depicted in this illustration, looks like a heightening, a evocation of film noir in modern color tones. Reportedly, as fake as this scene looks, it was not shot green-screen, but on an actual boat. Unfortunately, the effects supervisor monkeyed with the sky to make an impossible color and a background ambiance which is mis-matched with the foreground lighting of the principal characters. And that approach seems endemic to the film.

It is not so much that Scorsese is trying to emulate film noir with a more modern technique, but as though he is copying contemporary directors like Ridley Scott and the way they evoke film noir. It is style at two removes. The purported comedy After Hours felt more authentically noir (and more genuinely menacing) than Shutter Island. The script feels like an oddly uncommitted episode of The Twilight Zone and

Just checked around on-line and found out that Roger Ebert thought the film has a surprise ending. Screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis denies that intention, and says that by 15 minutes the audience should be aware that something is wrong with DiCaprio's character. For my part, I guessed the "twist" by about 20 minutes, and I could do that because it's exactly the same plot twist found in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a highly influential film produced in 1919. And if the twist isn't supposed to be a surprise, why is so much energy put into the red herrings. (In the above-alluded-to interview, the writer said the protagonist's conflict was between his love for his wife and his daughter. That was not made clear in the film as it exists.)

Scorsese's famous continuity errors go into overdrive in this film and there is some of the worst green-screen work scene since they stopped doing rear-projection--was that intentional, or did Scorsese really not care on this one? Surely no one seemed to care that Leonardo DiCaprio's German accent is far better than Max von Sydow's. And when, midway through the film, Patricia Clarkson gives a lucid explanation of what's "actually going on" and the camera is finally locked down and the colors manipulated into fake hues in post-production, which is supposed to make the whole scene feel more reliable, it just amps up the unbelievable quality of the scene (not to mention the whole film). And sadly, whereas the story might have been interpreted as metaphor for--I don't know, whatever you like--the ending reveals it to be a boring little mental health story, as if that boring psychiatrist at the end of Psycho had been put in touch of an entire movie.

There are pleasures to be had, mostly from Mark Ruffalo, one of our master actors working today, along with Spacey, Downey and Depp. Ruffalo is called upon throughout much of the film to be communicating two intentions at the same time (wise-cracking sidekick and concerned, observing doctor) and manages it perfectly. DiCaprio, on the other hand, still has squinty rat eyes and a flat thin voice typical of people brought up in Southern California, so it is not fair to put him next to an actual trained and expressive actor, like Ruffalo making him look like a well-intentioned amateur. Ben Kingsley has nothing to do, especially since they won't let him act creepy, which is what he should be doing, and Max von Sydow is clearly on hand merely to build up his grandchildren's trust fund. But nothing of this bears any relationship to acting in a Scorsese film, which used to be detailed, precise and reflective of real life.

The point is, if you're going to be deliberately artificial, like Hitchcock, Leone, Michael Powell (a favorite of Scorsese's) or Ken Russell, you have to be committed to it, you have to really believe in it. And Scorsese directs this film as if he doesn't believe one single frame of it, and it's all a silly lark, all quotes from stuff he teaches in film class. What I'm trying to say is that this appears to be a Brian DePalma picture.

This movie will confuse you or terrify you if you have never seen a movie before or if you only have five working brain cells. What attracted a first-class talent like Scorsese to this project (other than a pay check) is the real mystery.

She's not worth it

Among those films noir which include a femme fatale, there are two broad categories. The ones for whom you would gladly go to the electric chair: Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, Jane Greer as the woman in the white dress in Out of the Past. Then there's the ones who aren't: Ann Savage in Detour, Faith Domergue in Where Danger Lives, and Audrey Totter in Tension (1949).

She's greedy, faithless, manipulative and not very bright. But the great thing about manipulators, is they're often the easiest to manipulate, as demonstrated in this scene with detective Barry Sullivan. This has got to be one of the strangest interrogation techniques ever. Did we ever try this in Iraq?

Another remarkable aspect of this movie, especially as it originated at MGM is the normal human scale of the homes and furnishings. This is a recognizable post-war middle-class America, without the chintz and furbelows usually found in studio pictures of the 40s.

I suppose the strange thing about noir as a genre is that although the people creating the films did not know they were contributing to a genre, they are often reading from the same page in terms of design, light and overall mood. And once again, the film boasts the trope of the innocent man doing things a guilty man would do.

One last observation. Loews Theaters, the parent company of MGM, primarily owned large profitable downtown theaters. The postwar diaspora to the suburbs was more harmful to Loews than any other chain. Could this film's jaundiced view of the suburbs be influenced by the company's sympathy for the big city and its big theaters?