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

You say "prostitute" like it's a bad thing

Diary Of A Lost Girl (1929) has always been treated as the lesser younger sibling of the first collaboration between director G.W. Pabst and incandescent actress Louise Brooks, Pandora's Box. And certainly, it has nothing like the light, glancing touch or the existentialist amorality of the earlier film. Diary is a melodramatic fable, of how broken families breed corruption. Nonetheless, it still has the amazing Brooks and its share of iconic images and moments. For example, if you're in a rush (and why are you reading my blog when you're in a rush?), start the video above at around 1:35. There in a luminous close-up, Brooks enjoys her first trepidatious sip of champagne (translation: illicit sex) and finds she enjoys it. There is as good an example of silent film acting as you could see. (I wish I 'd known Brooks's work during my film course last year -- I used Lon Chaney as my exemplar of silent film acting, but he is too often unreliably stagy, whereas Brooks is Pure Film.)

This close-up contains almost the entire essence of the film -- that without a real sense of identity, as provided by a circle of loving people -- putting yourself for sale in the world, as represented by literal prostitution in this case, is as good a way as any for defining yourself and obtaining power over your circumstances as any. (Especially true when your family is ready to sell you and not even let you share in the profits!)

Late silent film reached an astonishing height of efficiency, compression and expressivity. Even today, screenwriters wrestle with backstory -- how to get the information out with an elegant and organic way, rather than the manner of the housekeeper in The Real Inspector Hound: "Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring...I hope nothing is amiss because we are completely cut off from the world..." etc.

Look at the first few minutes of the film, which get so much information across so quickly with the minimum of titles and the maximum of facial reaction, setting out not only the facts but the social context of those facts:



The film is both more explicit about sex and more conventionally moral than Pandora's Box (could this be because it's based on an actual memoir of a "fallen woman"?), and even contains the kind of message for the audience, satirized by the play and film Chicago: "My audience loves me. And I love them. And they love me for lovin' them and I love them for lovin' me. And we love each other. And that's cause none of us got enough love in our childhoods."

Never mind. There's not much to analyze in this film, and if I continue it will be only to describe and praise the subtextual clarity and precision of its storytelling, time better spent seeking out the movie and watching it from beginning to end.

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: