Quantcast
Channel: SUNDANCE NOW » Film Noir
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

VIVA MABUSE! #58: The Man with the Hat Did Something Terrible

0
0

The true noiriste is never satisfied. A hallowed genre absolutely tied to its time (from the WWII years to, oh, the release of Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss in 1964) and place (America, America), it is the greatest of organic genre manifestations, redolent with cultural dread and historical anxiety, a mass explosion of darkling will. Particularly rich and expert noirs like Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) tend to get singled out, but truly it is a genre without masterpieces—film noir constitutes an entirety of American identity, an aggregate statement that no one film does or could possibly make.

So, noiristes are never in possession of the whole thing—there are always more films, more dark corners and empty night alleys to discover. Some critics have endeavored to number and index all films qualifying as noir, but I tend to think that’s an impossible project. Not only are the parameters of the genre slippery and evanescent, but it seems there are always films to be rediscovered, appearing on video or cable or out of some cellar somewhere that no one remembered or knew about. Noir’s mysteries only begin with the unknowability of its true scale as a phenomenon.

I’d like VIVA MABUSE! to be as useful as possible, and so this week I’m doing pitchwork for noirs I’ve seen only recently, and mostly had never heard of before. I only notice now that most of them come courtesy of Olive Films, which has been vacuuming up the earthworm casings in the Paramount vault with abandon. The movies themselves germinated everywhere (Warner, PRC, Republic, Allied Artists, etc.), and some were, until now, lost bad memories from the mid-century no one held onto.

 

Cry Vengeance (1954)

Like Cornel Wilde drained of life force, low-rung half-star Mark Stevens directs himself as a scar-faced cop released from San Q and unstoppably bent on revenge. He ends up in Alaska, hunting down a fugitive crime boss and making everyone he knows worry that he’s going to kill the crook’s little daughter, too. In fact, it’s ironically bizarro—the murdering bottomfeeders are “normal” social pillars, while Stevens’ cop is an outcast scourge. The only noir shot in Ketchikan, with its famous array of ancient totem poles, Stevens’ movie is crude, awkward and uneasy—it’s like a hangover on a cross-country bus.

 

Man-Trap (1961)

A raving alcoholic swoon from director Edmund O’Brien (someone in need of auteurist attention), based an early John D. MacDonald book, about Korean War vets who get mixed up in a boondoggle heist. With Jeffrey Hunter as a plate-headed sucker and Stella Stevens as his gin blossom of a wife, and a third act that rewrites Sartre’s “No Exit” for head-trauma hallucinators.

 
 

Shack Out on 101 (1955)

The nuttiest espionage-noir ever made, set entirely in a seaside diner owned by splenetic Keenan Wynn, and staffed by innocent hottie Terry Moore and an absurd short-order chef-thug named Slob (Lee Marvin) who’s also a nuclear-secrets spy. There’s virtually no communicating the bizarre sitcom-for-madmen flavor of this film. (Maybe it echoed the strange domestic personality of co-scripting couple Edward and Mildred Dein?) Featuring a torrent of often ridiculous, at times Tarantinoesque banter, and an impenetrable all-talk skullduggery plot that sounds a lot like mental patient ravings. Too much fun.

 

The Red Menace (1949)

Forgotten missiles out of the smoke banks of the 20th century don’t come much more fascinating than this low-budget Republic flag-waver, officially the first Hollywood film to consider the creeping plague of Communist infiltration on American soil. Hare-brained, ideologically muddled and scared of its own totalitarian shadow, the film drops Marx and Hegel like horse racing tips, and pictures the American Communist Party as a paranoid-if-libertine clique of seven or so operatives hanging out in hip LA apartments. Written, directed and photographed by veterans of scores of Republic westerns, at something like governmental request.

 

Hell’s Half-Acre (1954)

A Honolulu noir that pits scarred mobster Wendell Corey against his old partners as well as annoying mainlander Evelyn Keyes, who’s convinced he’s her Pearl Harbor-dead husband. Littered with short-sleeve palm-frond shirts and tiki drinks, plus homicidal spite, anti-Asian xenophobia, and squalid urban decay where you’d least expect it. Republic hackman John Auer directed.

 

Ruthless (1948)

Possibly Edgar G. Ulmer’s biggest-budgeted film, this creepy morality tale/demi-noir harbors a payload of Citizen Kane DNA and a skullful of high finance, but remains strictly Ulmerian in its atomized compositions, opaque character motivations, and sense of doomed failure. Zachary Scott is the monstrously manipulative magnate-hero, but it’s hard to forget Sydney Greenstreet’s desperate and devastated utilities bigwig, or Lucille Bremer, on the edge of her brief career’s demise, as his self-loathing whore of a wife. Instead of a luxuriant Golden Age feeling of viewer omnipotence, we get from Ulmer a studio-bound experience that’s nervous, rash, close, halitosistic, and on the verge of dissipation.

 

Murder Is My Beat (1955)

Ulmer again—but this time with as low a budget as he ever had for an English-language film—limning a cop-turned-wrong-by-a-femme ditty centering on Barbara Payton, whose strangely neutral, childlike affect here only compounds the sense of her being the most chillingly dangerous of real-life noir actresses. With its dependence upon wall-to-wall back projection and stock footage, the movie seems to be continuously crossing vectors with other movies, unable to find its own way. Half disconnected found-footage daydream, half motel-room dirge, all glam as alley trash, it’s quintessential lowdown Ulmer.

 

Plunder Road (1957)

This is as lean as it gets: a silent bullion heist, five guys in three trucks, the endless unidirectional hopelessness of American highways. Istanbul-born near-nobody Hubert Cornfield directed, and it’s like a version of The Wages of Fear, except instead of nitro these boys (Gene Raymond, Wayne Morris, Elisha Cook Jr., Stafford Repp and sweat-maestro Steven Ritch) are carrying equal parts gold and bad luck. The tumbling-dominoes climax, on an overpass in a classic LA traffic snarl, is a killer.

 

The Enforcer (1951)

From director Bretaigne Windust—like I said, who made what noir just isn’t that important—this overnight procedural has Humphrey Bogart as a DA scrambling to collect a witness, any witness, for a morning call in the trial of a Murder Inc.-ish syndicate boss, and the flashback substories grow like weeds. Brooding and devil’s-food rich, with a perspirative supporting turn by Zero Mostel.  

 

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950)

James Cagney plays his final psychobeast gangster, a malicious homunculus of an escaped con putting the squeeze on everybody in his path, from corrupt inspector Ward Bond (one of his best and darkest roles) to shrugging radio whizz-kid Steve Brodie, and from just-hit-me lost girl Barbara Payton and trouble-seeking heiress Helena Carter (dreamy and cool as a cucumber) to slimy-foppish lawyer Luther Adler, who gets all the sharp lines. Based on a novel by Horace They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? McCoy, and bursting with strange nastiness.

 

Crashout (1955)

Just what it says: six guys break out of prison, and hide out in the countryside. They’re all varying admixtures of sociopathic belligerence and self-preservative fear—there’s William Bendix’s bleeding-out alpha male, Arthur Kennedy’s suspicious loner, William Talman’s gospel-spitting goon and Gene Evans’s homicidal menace. The film hews closely and carefully to their inevitable downward spiral, leaving only the question of how many innocent civilians they’ll take with them on their way to Endsville. Which is where, in mid-century, we were all going.

 

Michael Atkinson writes regularly for The Village Voice, Sight & Sound, In These Times, Time Out Chicago, Fandor, Turner Classic Movies and LA Weekly. His latest books include FLICKIPEDIA and the novel HEMINGWAY CUTTHROAT.

 


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images