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We Are Marshall

weston.robert — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

If you are hoping to see a movie that will uplift you and reaffirm your faith in the human spirit this holiday season, you should probably roll the dice on Rocky Balboa or Pursuit of Happyness. While at times a very moving film, We Are Marshall, directed by McG (Charlie’s Angels), never quite reaches the climax that moviegoers have come to expect in an inspirational sports movie. We Are Marshall is the true story of the 1970 Marshall University football team, who lost most of their team and coaches (along with some loyal fans) in a tragic plane crash. After a push by the handful of remaining players and students, the university reluctantly agrees to continue the football program the next season.
Enter eccentric, sometimes kooky coach Jack Lengyel (played by Mathew McConaughey), who volunteers for the impossible job of starting a Division 2 football team from scratch. With the help of Red Dawson (Mathew Fox), the assistant coach of the original team (who, by a twist of fate, wasn’t on the plane) and a university president with a heart of gold (David Strathairn from Good Night, and Good Luck), the new coach begins the task of rebuilding the team. The rest of the film aspires to be an inspirational account of how a team and a town “rise from the ashes” to rebuild a community and a football program. Unfortunately, We Are Marshall can’t compete with the fictional inspirational sports movies to which we have become accustomed. Although the audience wants to root for Marshall, the movie lacks the heart needed to get the ball across the goal line. Hampered by the real events and Marshall’s abysmal record during their comeback, the movie can’t overcome the letdown of reality.
The movie plays strong the first 45 minutes. You will find yourself fighting back tears within the first 20 minutes; the tragic loss of the town and university is shocking and emotional. The movie starts to unravel when the plotline changes from a team tragically taken before their time to a story about a coach and a school trying to rebuild a competitive team. What would be great as a fictional story about a man and a team who start from scratch and rebuild a team that miraculously comes together in the last hour to become winners is ruined by the often disappointing real-life element. In real life, things are seldom miraculous, no matter how hard we would like to believe otherwise. The truth is that coach Jack Langyel, with his noble intentions, manages to rebuild a mediocre football team that went on to win only two games in the 1971 season. To Langyel’s and the university president’s credit, for the first time in NCAA history, a college team was allowed to play freshman, allowing for Marshall to have an edge in recruiting new players. The freshman recruits come to Marshall for playing time more than they come to honor the memory of their fallen comrades, and this detracts from the unity needed to make this team the inspirational force the movie tries to portray. The central idea of the film in portraying the 1971 team as the heroes who rose from the ashes to honor the real tragic heroes who died on the plane becomes a bitter pill to swallow for some in the community and for the audience in the end. The reality of the situation becomes too real and gets in the way of the movie’s ultimate victory.
The much better story buried in this movie is how a town copes with facing life at all after so many of their loved ones are tragically taken in an instant. The real road to recovery likely had less to do with football and more to do with a town coming together to accept the unacceptable. Glimpses into this aspect of suffering are seen in some touching scenes with Ian McShane (Deadwood), who plays Paul Griffen, the father of one of the lost athletes. These few scenes make you wish the story revolved more around the people who lived in the town and actually felt the loss rather than a coach and players who arrive after the tragic incident who more believably saw an opportunity to get a foot in the door in Division 2 football than an opportunity to honor the memory of a team and a town. Mathew Fox does well as the assistant coach, who reluctantly returns despite being haunted by memories of his old team and suffering survivor’s guilt because he should have been on the plane with them.
The main problem with this film is that its hero is hard to get behind because he is not directly tied to the tragedy. At no point in the film do you buy that Coach Lengyel is sacrificing and working to honor the memory of a team he didn’t know and had no investment in. He seems more like an enthusiastic coach who relishes the challenge of building a winning team against impossible odds, which would be great except for the fact that he builds a losing team. Arguably, this could be a good premise for an inspirational sports movie, but there are no moments where the team who is internally struggling comes together and learns any valuable life lessons or overcomes the odds to become winners. Another major part of the film that is lacking is the character development of any of the new players. We see little to no scenes where the old players and the new players come together. You don’t get to know a single one of the new Freshman players who are brought into the film. When in reality the biggest inspiration of the football aspect of the story would be how 18 year old football players deal with the pressure of living up to the previous team and playing against players two years their senior. We Are Marshall pins its hopes on the fact that audiences will fall in love with Coach Lengyel and his story will be enough to carry the film but sadly it is not enough and what we are left with is a story that would make for a great read in a Sports Illustrated article but falls short on the big screen.
We go to the movies because things can be better than they are in real life. That is why the Rocky franchise accomplishes what We Are Marshall didn’t. We don’t really believe that a 60-year-old man could challenge the heavyweight champion of the world, but we wish he could, and movies are the only place where impossible dreams and wishes can come true.

China Moon

weston.robert — Wed, 24 Oct 2001 00:00:00 +0000

The term “noir” was first applied to the cinema when French critics wanted describe the “blackness” of the subject matter they saw in wartime American movies. Certainly, the classic noir period occurred circa the nineteen-forties, yet ever since Kathleen Turner drawled her predilection for feeble-witted men in 1981′s Body Heat, the “neo-noir” has proved itself an enduring and popular modern genre.
The upper echelons of the neo-noir is occupied by fully realized crime dramas like Body Heat (1981), Blue Velvet (1986), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Red Rock West (1993), The Last Seduction (1994), Heat (1995) Mona Lisa (1996) and L.A. Confidential (1997). The best neo-noir combines the original generic foundation with self-reflexive irony, greater complexity or outright reversals of elements invented in the classic era. The majority of neo-noir shares a common constraint of a having a relatively low budget, especially when compared to the simultaneous tendency toward commercial blockbusters. At the same time, the film noir made such a strong resurgence in the 1980′s that it spawned its own sub-genre: “Industrial Neo-Noirs” were films made on the cheap by independent companies that hoped to profit from lurid film noir storylines. Industrial neo-noirs have basic settings, feature a handful of lesser-known actors and are filled with customary dollops of sex and corruption.
Today you can find these sorts of films piling up on the direct-to-video shelves of your local rental shop, often in an embarrassing section called “erotic thrillers.” Even though “industrial” features of this sort are mostly a waste of ninety minutes, there is more than one diamond hidden in the rough. Lying somewhere in between the fully realized neo-noir and their direct-to-video cousins is 1994′s China Moon, a consummate example of a neo-noir. The film stars a young Ed Harris, the recurring femme fatale, Madeleine Stowe and features an early appearance of Benicio Del Toro as a wide-eyed rookie cop.
Harris plays a Kyle Bodine, a meticulous Florida cop who falls hard for Rachel Monro (Stowe), a wealthy, unhappily married woman with a reputation for promiscuity. Kyle, a straight-shooting career policeman, has no clue about the local gossip that surrounds Rachel. On the other hand, who can blame her for cheating on an abusive husband who spends most of his time away on business trips and is sleeping with his secretary? Despite Rachel’s reputation, she professes sincere love for Kyle. But this is film noir, and no matter how the strong love it rarely withstands murderous hidden agendas.
Like Body Heat, China Moon employs a sweaty Florida setting and follows the most traditional film noir narrative: An irresistible woman seduces a marginally innocent man and leads him to ruin. Unfortunately, the seduction itself is the film’s weak point. The cloying love sequence between Kyle and Rachel is difficult to watch, if only because it comes off as incredibly contrived and syrupy. Depending on your love life, you might find the courting scenes so cheesy that they end up romantically honest or just so cheesy they stink. I’m of the latter camp.
Once the relationship between Kyle and Rachel is established, however, the story heads toward some decent potboiler suspense. The last half of China Moon is in line with the neo-noir trend for twisty double-crosses. Likely because crime and corruption on its own was covered extensively in the classic era, modern audiences crave the addition of an intelligent mystery–which is not to say that every neo-noir can deliver the goods. For true blue fans of the genre, China Moon is a must-see; for anyone else, stick to Body Heat and the early work of John Dahl.

Born to Kill

weston.robert — Tue, 02 Oct 2001 00:00:00 +0000

“As you grow older, you’ll discover that life is very much like coffee–the aroma is always better than the actuality.”
- Detective Arnett
The working title for Born to Kill was Deadlier Than The Male (from the pulp novel by James Gunn). It’s a title that’s easily applied to most of the ‘black films’ of the forties. This was the first and the nastiest of the noirs directed by Robert Wise, who would also give us The Set-Up (1949), The Captive City (1952), and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). Wise came to genre with a background in the Val Lewton horror team and the expressionistic films of Orson Welles, so he was the right tool for the job when it came to film noir.
The story begins in Reno with Laury Palmer, a less-than-innocent young woman bragging to her landlady about the newest man in her life, a mysterious brooder named Sam (Lawrence Tierney). Unfortunately, Sam turns out to be a lot darker than Laury ever imagined. When he spots her out with another man, Sam kills them both with his bare hands. Another tenant at the rooming house is Helen (Claire Trevor), a worldly brunette on her way to San Francisco to marry Fred (Phillip Terry), her wealthy fiancé. Helen discovers the bodies, but decides not to report the murder because it might hinder her trip down gold-digger row.
En route to San Francisco, Helen runs into Sam, who left town at the same time in hopes of avoiding arrest. Helen and Sam are instantly attracted to each other, sexually and by an irresistible criminal magnetism. Sam’s keen eye spies something sinister under Helen’s dignified façade, and despite herself, Helen reciprocates with admiration for Sam’s cold-blooded willfulness. In San Francisco, Sam meets Helen’s fiancé and her half-sister Georgia (who is heir to the family fortune). Sam gets the idea to marry Georgia for money and power. Helen hates the idea, but its clear her disapproval is partly out of jealousy. Meanwhile, back in Reno, a devious private detective named Arnett (Walter Slezak) is hot on Sam’s heels, while Sam’s only friend tries desperately to cover the trail.
Evil and corruption are measured by small degrees in Born to Kill. The film offers not just one antihero, but an entire cast of nastiness. Each principal character can be divided into two camps: Those who are irreversibly corrupt or those who admire–even lust after–crime and corruption. Everyone revolves around Sam, a man of such virulent evil that he barely comprehends human virtue. Disturbingly, Sam has various supporters: there’s his loyal friend Marty (Elisha Cook Jr.), the foolish Laury Palmer, and Helen and Georgia who go helplessly doe-eyed in his presence. Even when Georgia, whose only real flaw is naïveté, learns Sam is a murderer, she vows nevertheless to protect him in his darkest hour. Finally, there’s Arnett, the closest the film comes to a representative of law and order–he’s so desperate to accept a bribe, he makes a personal call to beg for one.
The only characters with a spec of integrity are the landlady Mrs. Kraft (played with cackling zeal by Esther Howard) and Fred, Helen’s misguided fiancé. Unfortunately, Mrs. Kraft is a haggard drunk and Fred, similar the young women in the film, foolishly adores a woman who is clearly a light-fingered villain.
Happily, the familiar hand of Fate ultimately steps in and takes everyone down a notch–but that’s not to say they go down easy. As the title suggests, Born to Kill is a film about the grimmest corners of the human condition, the wicked place where sex, corruption and violence join hands and rumba round in darkness. Director Robert Wise suggests that we all share a collective dark side, that one way or another we are all ‘born to kill,’ and in the final throw of the dice, only the incontrovertible laws of chance can set the record straight.

Berlin Express

weston.robert — Sat, 01 Sep 2001 00:00:00 +0000

France is still licking its wounds of war and occupation. At the base of the Eiffel Tower, a pigeon is mysteriously shot from the sky. A group of schoolboys take the dead bird to Sacre Coeur for a dignified burial; but one of the boys’ mothers decides it will make a better meal than funeral service. As she prepares dinner, she finds a message strapped to the pigeon’s leg. The message reads: “21:45 D 9850 Sulzbach.” News of the note is relayed to the Douzieme Bureau (the French Secret Service) but they can make nothing of it. What they don’t realize is that the most important train in Europe–the Berlin Express–will be traveling through Sulzbach, Germany later that night.
The Berlin Express: The high-security military train running direct from Paris to occupied Berlin immediately following the War. The train transports supplies, personnel, soldiers and diplomats to the capital city. The train is carrying people from every Allied nation. American agriculture specialist Robert Lindley (Robert Ryan); French diplomatic secretary and benign femme fatale, Lucienne Mirbeau (Merle Oberon); James Sterling (Robert Coote), a British school teacher assigned to ‘re-education’; Henri Perot (Charles Korvin), former member of the French resistance; and Lieutenant Maxim Kiroshilov (Roman Toporow), a gruff Russian soldier. The most important passenger of all is Dr. Heinrich Bernhardt, a German diplomat who longs for peace and reconciliation in Germany. He alone holds the critical plans to unify a Germany split by four occupying nations. Nazi loyalists will stop at nothing to see that Bernhardt’s plan fails; a divided Germany offers a hospitable environment for an active Nazi underground.
As the Berlin Express glides into a town called ‘Sulzbach’, a horse and cart block the rails. The way is cleared and no sooner is the train back on course that a bomb explodes in Dr. Bernhardt’s cabin. It’s a debilitating blow to Allied hopes for a revived Europe–Dr. Heinrich Bernhardt is dead. Or is he?
Jacques Tourneur is known as a director of atmospheric horror films like Cat People (1942), but he was no stranger to black thrillers. Preceding Berlin Express, Tourneur made what could be called the perfect noir with Out of the Past (1947) and returned to the genre in 1956 with Nightfall. Berlin Express may not be Tourneur’s best noir, but it might be his best film…period. With a flawless ensemble cast, suspense by the bucketful, and more twists and turns than a Jayne Mansfield pinup, Berlin Express is exceptional. Certainly, however, all great noir shares these same characteristics. What sets this film apart is its peculiar educational value, its astounding authenticity and its surprisingly uplifting narrative.
The film opens in Paris shortly after liberation. A narrator explains the political chaos that followed the war, and the humanist drive to reintegrate Germany into the international community. Initially, the didactic narrator is a necessary but distracting guide, who thankfully recedes into the background when the real action begins, but not before letting the audience in on historical tidbits about post-war Europe. Specifically, the narrator explains the comings and goings of Frankfurt, a city in appalling ruin. Following the war, Frankfurt was a central hub for the provisional government shared by the occupying forces of France, Britain, Russia and the United States.
We are told about Frankfurt because the Berlin Express never reaches Berlin, where Dr. Bernhardt is scheduled to deliver his thesis for reunification. After the bomb explodes on the train, everyone is put under ‘technical arrest’ by U.S. military police and seconded to the defeated city.
Jacques Tourneur and his crew traveled to Frankfurt and shot the film under the auspices of the four occupying nations. The result is extraordinary location work that lays bare a city of rubble and despair. Adding to the film’s authenticity is the casting–the Russians are played by Russians, the Germans by Germans and so on. Moreover, every actor is given brief opportunities to act in their first language without subtitles. It appears that this was what prompted RKO to add a narrator–because the film opens in Paris, the first page of dialogue is in French.
These alone are reasons to see the film, but what I enjoy most about Berlin Express is the film’s enriching humanism. Although Lindley, the American, is roughly set up as the protagonist, no character really takes precedence over another. Everyone–German, French, American, British and Russian–must put aside their biases and prejudices to work against a Nazi resurgence. Screenwriter Harold Medford’s democratic approach to narrative is fully expressed in Dr. Bernhardt, a diplomat who believes so strongly in unification and peace he is willing to risk everything to bring it to a disillusioned Europe. Without a doubt, Berlin Express, for all its shadows and subterfuge, is the most uplifting film noir you’re likely to find. Highly recommended.

Niagara

weston.robert — Fri, 24 Aug 2001 00:00:00 +0000

Released in 1953, Niagara is one of a handful of noir movies that were exclusively intended as a star vehicle for a single personality–oddly enough in this case, Marilyn Monroe. The majority of A-list noirs of the classic period were packed with characters, especially in cases of urban detective stories. A jungle of characters and subplots is one of the genre’s strengths, resulting in consistently complex plot lines unheard of in other genre films. At the same time, the intricacies of film noir are sometimes an Achilles heel, serving only to confuse even the most attentive audience (John Huston’s The Big Sleep is notorious for its various ‘inexplicables,’ due more to editing-under-pressure than anything else). That being said, Niagara is the exception to the rule; though produced by 20th Century Fox, it appears that the studio didn’t care much for having a Byzantine story or a large cast–the film is strictly meant to be an eye-popping, figure-hugging, titillating introduction to a gal named Marilyn Monroe.
As the film opens, Ray and Polly Cutler (Max Showalter and Jean Peters) are headed for a belated honeymoon in Niagara Falls. Ray is a saccharine-sweet husband and a wide-eyed upstart in the breakfast cereal business (think Ward Cleaver as a naïve young man). When the couple arrives at the resort, they find that another couple, George and Rose Loomis, is occupying their cabin. George (Joseph Cotton, who appeared in several noir movies including Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Welles’ Touch of Evil) and Rose (Marilyn Monroe) appear to be a dismal mismatch. Rose is a voluptuous sexpot and George is a nervous wreck; he’s also a distant senior to his wayward wife.
When the Loomis couple doesn’t immediately check out, Ray and Polly accept the cabin next door, giving up a view of the falls. Rose apologizes, explaining that her husband was recently released from a war-veterans hospital and he is still in the midst of a slow recovery from shell shock.
On their first day in town, Ray and Polly go sightseeing together, where Polly spots Rose kissing another man. It’s hardly the first clue that something is amiss in the Loomis marriage, and it’s soon revealed that Rose and her young lover are planning to murder George and collect on his life insurance policy. George, however, has other plans…
Where some examples of noir are progressive–arguably feminist–Niagara falls far short of the mark. The film plays heavily to the masculine paranoia that divided the sexes in post-war America. During the War, with most of America’s young men away in Europe, U.S. employers dug into the home front’s female workforce. Businesses offered women jobs that previously were reserved only for those with oak-tree arms and testosterone by the bucketful. Besides factory work and physical labour, women also began to hold positions of influence in corporate and managerial circles. Following the war, the enlarged female workforce was understandably reluctant to give up their new positions to returning soldiers–especially to men who were jangled by the psychological effects of war.
On the big screen, the film noir femme fatale expressed everything men feared from this new, upwardly mobile woman. It comes as no surprise that the genre chose curvy, hyper-feminine women to portray a bevy of sinful sirens–it was pure femininity being demonized up there on the screen, and in the nineteen-fifties who was more feminine that Marilyn Monroe?
Prior to Niagara, Monroe had only been offered small roles as background window-dressing in films like The Asphalt Jungle (1950), All About Eve (1950) and Monkey Business (1952). Niagara–a classically crafted, if somewhat simplistic, noir–was her first real starring role. It’s clear that the studio intended the film to be a crucial star-maker for Monroe. The preview and the poster for the film were emblazoned with superlative slogans like: “A raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control!” or “When a man took her loveliness in his arms, he took his life in his hands!” or how about “Niagara and Marilyn Monroe: The two most electrifying sights in the world!” Hollywood was creating the ‘figure’ that would become its most enduring personality. Unfortunately, based on the film’s publicity, it appears that the audience should be more worried about the real-life Monroe rather than the fictional Rose Loomis. Of course, a statement like that assumes ‘Marilyn Monroe’ was a real person rather than a beguiling Hollywood invention.
Niagara is a good movie for noir fans who crave something a little different. Be warned, the film was shot in glorious Technicolor, not black and white, but still boasts an ample share of shadows and style. Keep in mind that although he lacks the posthumous reputation enjoyed by some of his contemporaries, Henry Hathaway, the film’s director, made some strong, naturalistic contributions to film noir with the likes of Kiss of Death (1947) and Call Northside 777 (1948). Undoubtedly, the best reason to see Niagara is just as trailer promised: for the scenery. There’s some terrific location work that showcases the breathtaking aspects of the Falls before the city evolved into a tawdry Canadian answer to Atlantic City; and of course, there’s a gal named Marilyn Monroe, burgeoning at her humble beginnings.

Crack-Up

weston.robert — Sun, 12 Aug 2001 00:00:00 +0000

“Odd, isn’t it, that truth should be a byproduct of war? Only in the recent war did we perfect a direct method of communication with a man’s true self. It’s called ‘narcosynthesis’…One small injection of this and the brain is illuminated with accuracy…the subconscious mind takes over.”
- Dr. Lowell
Crack-Up was shot between December 1945 and February 1946; just half a year after the Allies dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it’s no surprise that the film is so closely tied to–and clearly inspired by–World War II. Sure, the vast majority of all film noir released in the classic cycle between 1941 and 1958 was in some way related to WWII, but Crack-Up has a special resonance with those ominous times. The entire narrative presents an argument that the American urban elite share disturbing similarities with Nazi Germany.
The hero of Crack-Up is George Steele (Pat O’Brien) and like most film noir ‘heroes,’ he has few heroic qualities. George is a middle-aged art historian who believes art is meant for all people to enjoy, not only a wealthy minority who can afford to buy it or an academic minority who possess some imaginary power to appreciate it. However, George’s ideas are not welcome at the Metropolitan Museum, and he becomes the target of an elaborate smear campaign. In the process, George begins to suspect that someone at the museum is substituting forgeries for the classical masterworks. As he tries to uncover the culprits, playing at amateur art detective, George carries the convoluted mystery along to its solution.
In the opening sequence, George is frantically breaking into the museum. When the night guard catches him, George collapses. He awakes on a couch in the plush museum office, surrounded by his colleagues. He asks if there were any other survivors of the train wreck. Huh? -There hasn’t been a train wreck in months, a policeman informs him.
George tries to retrace his steps. He recounts his day leading up to the ‘wreck,’ beginning with a lecture in which he argued for greater accessibility to fine art. Later, while on a date with his girlfriend (Claire Trevor), he receives a call from the hospital. His mother is sick, he must take a train to visit her. Aboard the train, George watches another train approach, traveling in the opposite direction. He becomes mesmerized in the approaching headlight. The oncoming train draws closer and closer until…WHAM! That’s all he remembers. He certainly can’t remember trying to break into the museum…or why.
George soon figures someone is trying to discredit him, perhaps because they object to his egalitarian ideas about art. He suspects the culprit is someone inside the privileged upper echelons of the New York art world. Even worse: George begins to suspect an elaborate conspiracy to hoard classic masterworks of art and replace them with forgeries…perhaps that was why he was breaking into the museum–for proof!
Things are made all the more disquieting when George realizes there are troubling similarities between this New York forgery scheme and identical crimes committed by the Nazis. We learn that during the war, the Allied forces employed George’s skills to identify similar forgeries (there is documented evidence that when German forces captured European cities and seized artistic booty, copies are made so as to hoard the originals for private display or black market sale. There is even speculation that some of the forgeries were so convincing, they still hang on museum walls today). So the War may have ended, but it appears Nazi hoarding had taken a trip across the Atlantic and landed in the hearts of America’s urbane elite.
In the character of George Steele, Crack-Up combines noir ideas of urban alienation, ineffectual post-war masculinity, and psychoanalysis gone terribly wrong. Despite being surrounded by colleagues, police officers and honest confederates, it’s clear that George acts alone. After all, nobody–not even his fiancée–believes his story. There really was no train wreck, so why would a sane man fabricate such a disaster? To top things off, George is hardly a competent amateur detective. He spends most of film mystified by the few clues he can gather, dazed with partial amnesia or simply knocked unconscious. Even the international police force on the forgers’ trail leaves George in the dark. It’s as if is own brain doesn’t belong to him–as indeed it doesn’t. The villains easily manipulate his mind and his body is made a puppet for the authorities. This lack of self-consciousness comes to a head when the evil psychiatrist Dr. Lowell (noticeably similar to Dr. Soberin in Kiss Me Deadly) uses a truth serum called ‘narcosynthesis’ to surgically extract truth and fiction from George’s mind.
Crack-Up is a hearty example of the genre because it contains so many of the genre’s recurring motifs–too many perhaps, which makes the story a little difficult to follow. But isn’t that the central idea behind all film noir? A spiraling urban jungle; the blurred lined between legitimate life and the criminal underworld, each sliced up by the doubled-edged nausea of post-war hangover and post-war economic boom; all pulped together to keep us off balance, apprehensive and estranged from others. If so, then Crack-Up is a great way to inject that old-fashioned film noir malaise directly into the mind of the viewer…Sort of like a cinematic ‘narcosynthesis.’

This Gun for Hire

weston.robert — Thu, 02 Aug 2001 00:00:00 +0000

“I read somewhere about a kind of doctor, a psycho-something–you tell him your dream, and you don’t have to dream it anymore.”
- Philip Raven
There’s something satisfying in seeing the old-time Hollywood machine produce a film that transcends its gristmill origin. In the case of This Gun for Hire, the film was produced in typical “dream-factory” fashion, but the result is entirely unique, even when compared to the groundbreaking movies made in the initial wave of American noir. Sure the film may pale somewhat when compared to the grim fatalism of Detour, the more detailed characterization of In a Lonely Place, the visual mastery of The Killing or the bone-cracking intensity of Rififi. Yet here’s a film that nevertheless is great–made great by three unexpected measures: faithfulness to the original work, historical providence and brief moments of unintentional weirdness.
The 1940s was the bustling heyday of the Hollywood dream-factory. It was a time when movies shared less in common with paintings then they did with widgets; a place where filmmaking was less an art form than a consumer product (has much changed?). So an interesting way to look at This Gun for Hire is as an example of classic Hollywood product.
American studio films of the Golden Age and before were usually based on outside material that had already established an audience. To boot, an already-existing novel, radio broadcast, serialized magazine or comic strip is a less chancy investment than a wholly original script. It was often cheaper to for studios buy the rights to newly-published novels for pittance, keep an extensive library housed in “the writing building’ and then pay sweatshop-like screenwriters to scribble adaptations after the original work became established hit.
Such was the case with This Gun for Hire, based on the novel A Gun for Sale by renowned British novelist Graham Greene. A Gun for Sale (published two years prior to Brighton Rock, the author’s masterwork of criminal malice and malaise) is considered a minor novel for Greene and as such, makes an ideal vehicle for adaptation–whoever said “bad books make great movies” might have been dead right. In Greene’s novel, Philip Raven, a young contract killer, takes on a job to kill a British diplomat who is bucking for peace in Europe; the businessmen who hire Raven stand to reap a fortune if Britain goes to war. To keep all the strings neatly tied off, the men pay Raven off with counterfeit bills so he is easy to trace.
This Gun for Hire remains relatively faithful to Greene’s novel. The setting is transplanted to the United States and Raven, the assassin is hired by powerful but underhanded men. One of the only significant changes in the adaptation has Raven hired to kill is a blackmailer, not a peaceful diplomat. In the film version, Nitro Chemical Corporation has manufactured a nerve gas that it intends to sell to “the enemy.” The film opens with Nitro insider Will Gates (played with jiggling squeamishness by Laird Cregar) hiring Raven to kill the blackmailer who has acquired a copy of the weapon’s chemical formula.
Paramount used journeyman director Frank Tuttle to helm the film. Tuttle came from a career that stretched all the way back to the early twenties silent era, but his body of work contained few bright points or memorable films. From Paramount’s perspective, Tuttle was a perfect fit for a film that was just one more end product from the studio’s mechanized movie mill.
When it came to casting, Paramount again based its decision on tried-and-true methods. Forties Hollywood was a time and place when the selection of the cast was no less mercantile that the process of adaptation. Veronica Lake was cast to play Ellen Graham, a showgirl hired by a mysterious senator to seduce the suspected traitors. At the time of the film’s release, Lake was on the upswing of a meteoric rise and fall during the nineteen-forties. Paramount executives knew that Lake was burgeoning star (not to mention a popular pinup girl for G.I.s overseas), and they needed male costars who would not upstage the fledging starlet.
They chose Robert Preston to play Lieutenant Michael Crane, Ellen’s fiancée and the top cop on Raven’s trail. Preston had been an accomplished musical stage actor as a young man and starred in numerous but mostly small roles in 1930′s Hollywood. The highpoints in Preston’s film career came while working under Cecil B. DeMille (Union Pacific, Reap the Wind), before a successful return to the stage in the 1950′s.
The final casting ingredient came with the part of Raven. Because the film is faithful to Greene’s novel, the role of the tragic hit man is one of the most compelling of its kind. In 1942, Alan Ladd had already been acting on stage and more frequently in nationally broadcast radio drama; he had only a smattering of experience in the movies. Nevertheless, the press was optimistically touting him as a future star of the silver screen. In the role of Raven, the lost young assassin, Ladd began a climb to become a certified movie star. Despite abbreviated dialogue and a stiff, half-dead acting style (which became his trademark), the audience loved him.
This Gun for Hire did well at the box office and established Lake and Ladd not only as big-name stars in their own right, but also made them a hit as a team, practically on par with Bogart/Bacall or Tracey/Hepburn. Lake and Ladd would go on to star together in a string of noir classics like The Glass Key (1942) and The Blue Dahlia (1946). In short, Paramount covered all the studio bases to produce an inexpensive hit and more importantly, produce a franchise duo out of Lake and Ladd.
So what then of the film itself? What happened when elements chosen for industrial efficiency and cost-benefit return came together? In the same way that Paramount’s line of attack was to pick and choose from a storehouse of stock elements, This Gun For Hire owes its originality to a mishmash of aspects that converge, giving the film a distinctive punch. First, much is owed to A Gun for Sale. Although he produced a more compelling criminal in Brighton Rock‘s misguided delinquent Pinky, in A Gun for Sale Greene clearly shows a keen eye for mingling sympathy with malevolence. In the novel, Raven is a cold-hearted killer, but he’s a killer formed by his environment, produced by a destitute upbringing and the regimented cruelty he encounters at the bottom of the regimented British class system. This compassion extends to the film version with Raven being a brutal, impulsive killer and also an improbably patriotic hero. The real question is how a film like This Gun for Hire was even conceived of in 1942. Only a decade before, the much-derided Hays Code of 1930 explicitly declared: “[murder] shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime…or to inspire others with a desire for imitation”–sentiments of motion picture censorship that were still in favour when This Gun for Hire was released. So how could such a compassionate portrayal of a hired killer managed to pass under the strict noses of 1942 censors? The answer: World War II.
The United States entered the war late, at the tail end of 1941 and more than two years after the first acts of Nazi aggression in Europe. Consequently, 1942 was a year when American review boards welcomed patriotic films. The patriotic bent in This Gun for Hire comes late in the film, when Ellen miraculously deduces Nitro’s plans for its nerve gas. She tells Raven that his revenge on Will Gates should also be extended to the whole corporation as an act of American patriotism. After all, it is every American’s duty to support the war effort–from hit man to milkman. Strangely, this admission is enough to justify Raven’s pointblank killing spree. Combined with the influence of Greene’s novel, the result is an astoundingly sympathetic portrayal of a hardened criminal.
Right up until the final frames, Raven is portrayed as a good guy. The real criminals are Nitro Chemical with their callously capitalist designs on undermining the American war effort. While all film noir (anti)heroes are flawed in some way, when compared his contemporaries, Raven is one of the only characters that openly murders people with almost reckless abandon. Astonishingly, as evidenced in the film’s compassionate final scene, Raven even manages to end up with the audience’s mark of approval.
What makes This Gun for Hire all the more remarkable, is that following armistice, as Hollywood crept toward the nineteen-fifties, conservative censorship–riding on the backs of Joe McCarthy and a “better dead than Red” mentality–would return to Hollywood with a vengeance. It was the inconsistencies of American wartime cultural policy that created a mysterious bubble in which greater thematic freedom was allowed, even with a film like This Gun for Hire, made almost exclusively with the studio profit margin in mind.
Another compelling aspect the film owes to Greene’s novel is a surprisingly intricate plot. Because the film was made in a studio system that favoured hasty, assembly line production, the craft of adaptation was downplayed. It almost appears that the Paramount screenwriters were reading from the novel and asking “…and what happened next?” over and over until the screenplay was finished. Happily, the result is a complex opening in which Raven’s assassination/double-cross plotline is introduced independently of the corporate conspiracy/government plotline and the romantic showgirl/cop plotline; all three are eventually interlaced, but it creates a progressively complex first twenty minutes.
On top of influences from Greene and the WWII timeframe, This Gun for Hire displays a few bizarre but inspired touches that can only be attributed to the cast and crew. First, the film has its obligatory song and dance numbers featuring Veronica Lake. But Lake doesn’t just sing and dance–she does magic too! In a pair of diverting numbers, Lake performs impressive sleight of hand, vanishes behind a oversized fan and magically fills an empty tank with live goldfish, all while singing “Now You See It, Now You Don’t”!
The strangest moment of the film comes during the climatic sequence inside the cloistered walls of Nitro Chemical Corporation. Tommy, Will Gates’ hapless lackey is striding down Nitro’s marble hallways wearing, of all things, a military gasmask. Apparently, there is a test of Nitro’s nerve gas and Tommy liked the mask so much he decided to make it part of his work wear. Unfortunately for Tommy, this offers Raven a ludicrously convenient disguise and it offers a contemporary audience a moment of unintentional humour that eerily enhances the ending.
If you care to do the math, This Gun for Hire lacks certain aspects of a classic film noir that picky aficionados may miss. Notably, the film lacks at least a bit of voice-over flashback narration that links past and present (although a dream sequence of Raven’s childhood was filmed but cut from the theatrical release). The film is also missing a solid femme fatale; Lake’s character is so agreeable she might be called a femme sympathique. Nevertheless, This Gun for Hire is a compelling noir thanks to the faithful influence of Greene novel, the peculiarities of wartime censorship and a handful of unexpectedly nutty moments.
To some observers, the film noir genre did not reach its prototypical peak until Jacques Tourneur-directed Out of the Past in 1947. Perhaps in the same way that Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale was leading up to the superior Brighton Rock, This Gun for Hire was breaking new ground and broadening movie subject matter in order to pave the way for even greater examples of American noir.
Notes:

Watch for what I suspect was the inspiration behind The Simpsons‘ Mr. Burns and Smithers in the characters of Alvin Brewster, President of Nitro Chemical Corp, and Drew, his disgruntled nurse (played by Tully Marshall and Victor Kilian, respectively).

This Gun for Hire was remade as Short Cut to Hell in 1957, which was the only film directed by Jimmy Cagney.

Out of the Past

weston.robert — Thu, 31 May 2001 00:00:00 +0000

“Near the plaza was a café called La Mar Azul, next to a movie house. I sat there in the afternoons and drank beer. I used to sit there half asleep with the beer and the darkness, only that music from the movie next door kept jarring me awake. And then I saw her, coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit didn’t care about that forty grand.”
- Jeff Markham
As a young boy in 1913, Jacques Tourneur came to America from Paris with his father, silent film director Maurice Tourneur. While still a young man, Tourneur went to work for his father as a script clerk and editor; eventually graduating to directing shorts and features. His first real hit was the atmospheric Cat People in 1942. It is the film most famous for an “it’s-even-scarier-if-you-don’t-see-it” brand of horror. Cat People was followed by a short string of horror films for Val Lewton, then head of horror at RKO. From Tourneur’s moody, stylish horror films it was a short leap to the smoke and shadows of film noir.
Out of the Past, a film Tourneur directed in 1947, may not be the best-known example of the classic noirs, but looking at it again with more than half a century between the film and the viewer, it emerges as an archetypical model for the genre. If we pare down the nuances, the occasional flares and deviations, the various sub-genres, there is a common narrative arc that all film noir customarily follows…
The (invariably male) hero is on a quest, but possesses an only tenuous grasp of what he is searching for. He meets a woman who leads him down a dangerous, winding path. She may be evil, hoping to lead the hero to ruin, or helpful, trying to reveal some truth that can only be seen in the dark. Sometimes, a single woman fulfills both roles. Whichever the case, the grasping hero never knows if he is dealing with the benign guide or the malicious siren until the last possible moment. As the hero leaves his initial sphere and tumbles into the underworld, he is alienated from above and below. Those below him, the dredges of society, are fearful or indifferent, lest they too are dragged into darkness. Above him are those powerful enough to keep the swirl of deceit at arms length. Only the woman remains close. Sometimes escape is possible and the hero emerges injured but enlightened. More often, he is drowned and forgotten in the underworld.
Such a “hero” is Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum), the protagonist of Out of the Past. Jeff was once a private detective working in New York City with his crooked partner, Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie). There, he was hired by Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), a suave professional gambler. Jeff was hired to locate Sterling’s jilted lover, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), who disappeared after shooting Sterling in the belly and stealing forty thousand dollars in ill-gotten gains. Jeff tracks Kathie to Mexico, where they fall in love, vowing never to return to Sterling.
All of this is “out of the past.” After returning from Mexico, Kathie disappeared and Jeff changed his name to Bailey and peacefully runs a countryside gas station. He is now romancing Ann Miller (Virginia Huston), a wide-eyed local girl–much to the chagrin of her former beau, Jimmy. Everything is running smoothly in Jeff’s new life until Sterling’s right-hand man discovers Jeff pumping gas. In an instant, Jeff’s lofty designs on “happily-ever-after” begin to crumble.
With respect to the basic, underlying narrative of film noir, Out of the Past is a dead ringer. At every juncture, the film moves Jeff in a prototypical film noir pattern. Surprisingly, however, the most remarkable aspect of the film is not it’s perfectly noir story, but its juxtaposition of opposing forces: light and dark, city and country, blond and brunette. Because the film jumbles its chronology and throws a multitude of characters and settings at the viewer, it is at first difficult to see how perfectly these aspects of the film line up in an almost mathematically perfect arrangement. Nevertheless, the film sets up dualisms all the way through as if to make the noir underworld all the more dire by comparison to Jeff’s idyllic life in the present.
In fact, beyond fitting perfectly into the film noir mold, Out of the Past also fits flawlessly into the anthropological model known as “structuralism,” a mode of thought founded by French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Structuralism is based on the notion that human beings are meaning-seeking animals who use arbitrary symbols and languages to give significance to all aspects of life. The way in which we do this is by classifying all objects and phenomenon into groups, most commonly binary oppositions such as black/white or good/evil.
If Saussure and Levi-Strauss are correct, then Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past is a structuralist’s wet dream.
First, there is light and dark: During Jeff’s romance with Kathie, she will only allow them to meet at night, so that Jeff spends the bright Mexican days milling about the local bars. What Kathie is doing by day in Mexico is never revealed; she is immediately established as a creature of darkness. There is also the opposition of city and country (or as Levi-Strauss puts it, culture/nature). In his past, Jeff was a cynical private dick working the two-fisted mean streets of New York City. In his present, he is a rural handyman, living in an anonymous small town along the California highway. This opposition also operates as “east versus west,” playing on the traditional stereotypes of regionalism.
Although they do not share screen-time, there is an obvious opposition between Sterling and Jimmy, Ann’s ex-boyfriend. Sterling is wealthy and threatening and while Jimmy is considerate and down-to-earth. Respectively, Sterling and Jimmy are pursuing the conniving brunette, Kathie and the angelic blond, Ann. Finally, there are the conflicting forces that overarch everything in the film: past and present.
Jeff, the hero of Out of the Past, is torn between these worlds. He wants to live a simple, legitimate life with Ann, but he is inexorably drawn toward his shadowy past. Yet Jeff does not rightly belong in either world. His questionable past makes his small town neighbors suspicious. At the same time, he is not dishonest enough to exist in Sterling’s sphere of urban crime. He loves Ann for her purity of spirit, but he harbours a dark fascination for Kathie. He is neither a criminal nor a saint. He defies categorization.
With respect to structuralism–a cultural theory based on the interpretation of how we use signs and symbols–it is interesting to note that Jeff’s assistant at the gas station is a deaf mute who communicates in a sign language only Jeff understands. It is also interesting to note that Jeff changes his name to escape his past. In doing so, he signifies himself by two separate symbols: “Markham” and “Bailey,” and that’s exactly his problem: He represents two meanings in a single body. Sadly, his resistance to be pigeonholed inevitably leads to his doom.
In his competing worlds, Jeff is man who straddles an ambiguous middle ground between light and dark, good and evil. Despite wanting to lead a quiet life, a small part of his character craves darkness. He wants and needs both worlds. So when the time comes for him to choose one over the other, he desperately fights to maintain the façade of a dual identity–an effort that is impossible in a world structured into hard-line oppositions.
With its persistent use of binary oppositions, Out of the Past holds a mirror to human affairs, showing us the folly of our predilection for categories. For Jeff Markham, it is less important to for a thing to be good rather than evil (or vice versa), just so long everything fits neatly into a category. In the film, as is too often the case in our everyday lives, people and things that defy classification are ignored or destroyed.
Notes: Out of the Past was remade in 1984 as the mediocre Against All Odds, notable for casting an older Jane Greer as the mother of the character she played in the original film. Many VHS copies of Out of the Past have fallen prey to Ted Turner’s distracting colourization juggernaut–look for it on DVD.

Detour

weston.robert — Thu, 31 May 2001 00:00:00 +0000

“I keep trying to forget what happened and wonder what my life might have been like if that car of Haskel’s hadn’t stopped. But one thing I don’t have to wonder about, I know. Someday a car will stop to pick me up that I never thumbed. Yes, Fate or some mysterious force can put the finger on you or me, for no good reason at all.”
- Al Roberts
In my final undergraduate year I enrolled in a tiny history course. With only a handful of students Dr. Baker, the professor, developed a close relationship with each student. She was a historian first and a “film freak” second. One Sunday a month, Dr. Baker invited a number of her students to her home for a Sunday Night Film Salon, featuring booze, finger-food and a movie. Baker’s only stipulation was that no one in attendance could have already seen the film she selected. Late in the year, Dr. Baker and I were discussing the finer points of the Golden Age. She mentioned that she hadn’t screened any of the old film noir lately.
“How about Key Largo?” I gushed, “The Big Sleep?”
“You know Bogart isn’t a necessary prerequisite.”
“The Blue Dahlia then.”
“Have you ever seen Detour?” she asked me.
“Never heard of it.”
“Well then, we’ll see you Sunday.”
Detour is one of the blackest film noir ever produced during the classic 1935 to 1955 period. The film’s darkness in both style and content owes much to its fabled director, Edgar G. Ulmer. Ulmer got his start as a set and production designer at the heart of German expressionism. He worked on all the most important contributions to the silent expressionist cannon: Paul Wegener’s The Golem, F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang’s M, to name a few.
Ulmer came to Hollywood in 1923, where he began work at Universal working with the likes of Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmark, and William Wyler. In 1934, he reached the highpoint of his career at Universal with The Black Cat, which boasts a rare screen appearance of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in the same film. During his time at Universal, Ulmer began a love affair with Shirley Kassler Alexander, wife of Max Alexander (who in turn was nephew to Universal top executive Carl Laemmle). Shirley divorced Kassler and remarried Ulmer, a turn of events that led to a severe blackballing; Laemmle used his considerable influence to turn Ulmer into an industry pariah. Ulmer and Shirley moved to New York, where Ulmer began making small films for specialized, ethnic audiences. Included in this group are little-known films such as the Yiddish film The Light Ahead, the Ukrainian Cossacks In Exile and the African-American Moon Over Harlem, all made around 1939.
In the early 1940′s, when some of Laemmle’s heat had subsided, Ulmer was able to return to Hollywood and take advantage of a more established filmmaking infrastructure. Unfortunately, he was relegated to working on “Poverty Row,” an area of Hollywood where impoverished independent studios churned out short-run, super-cheap, B-grade material in the crushing shadow of the “Big Five” studios. It was here that Ulmer shined, producing the films for which he is most remembered including Strange Illusion (1945), an odd adaptation of Hamlet, and Detour. Films such as these have since prompted fellow director Peter Bogdonavitch to praise, “Nobody has ever made good pictures faster or for less money than Edgar Ulmer,” and film critic Michael Wilson to call Ulmer, “the patron saint of all film pirates.”
Detour is no exception. The film is closer to a simple stage play than a movie, with little more than three actors and two principal sets: a wayward convertible and a two-bit hotel room. Detour spins the forbidding tale of Al Roberts (Tom Neal), a piano-player in a smoky New York nightclub. His fiancée Sue (Claudia Drake) also performs at the club but wants to try her luck in Hollywood. Roberts is reluctant to let her go, but has faith his ladylove can make it the land of broken dreams. Later, Roberts quits his job and begins a lonely trip to California to start a new life with Sue. With no money, he hitchhikes cross-country eventually getting a lucky break when Charles Haskell (Edmund McDonald) picks him up–Haskell is headed all the way to Los Angeles.
As he drives, Haskell is popping pills from the glove compartment. Roberts notices some nasty scratches on the back of Haskell’s hand. Haskell tells his passenger he “was tussling with the most dangerous animal in the world–a woman.” When Haskell accidentally conks himself on the head and succumbs to his unnamed illness, Roberts is the obvious man to pin with a murder rap. Although innocent of any crime, Roberts buries the body and takes Haskell’s car in an effort to escape the inevitable suspicion.
Further down the road, Roberts takes pity on Vera, a fellow hitchhiker (Ann Savage). Unfortunately, Vera is same woman Haskell “tussled” with earlier. She recognizes Haskell’s car and doesn’t believe of word of Roberts’ outlandish but true story. Vera is one of the nastiest femme fatales in all of film noir and the monumentally luckless Roberts is in for a world of vindictive, claustrophobic blackmail.
Principal photography for Detour lasted only three days on a budget that set the low point on the measuring rod for shoestring. Nevertheless, Ulmer wrung as much atmosphere from this Poverty Row picture as seen in some of the best examples of the genre. In fact, the film is often so formally “noir” that it is in danger of coming off as satirical. In the opening sequence in New York, the city streets are so dark and foggy that the actors are little more than anomalous blurs. In the café where Roberts recounts his story in a cynical monologue, close-ups abound on his world-weary eyes and steamy cup of Joe. You can practically taste the grim dregs of coffee grounds at the bottom of the mug.
When we had finished watching Detour in Dr. Baker’s living room, everyone was impressed. Then, to discover the severely limited resources Ulmer had at his disposal made the film all the more remarkable. Baker’s husband mentioned that he thought the film was the most existential film he’d ever seen. Baker’s husband suggested the Roberts character was similar to Mersault, the detached protagonist of Albert Camus’ existential novel The Stranger. Mersault is an average, perhaps even boring man who murders an Algerian Arab in a twist of fate. He is found guilty and sentenced to death in a trial that employs absurd and irrelevant evidence against him. All the while Mersault does little to defend himself, impassively accepting his fate until the very end of the novel.
Certainly, there are similarities between Roberts and Mersault. They are both involved with an ambiguous death. They are both victims of a cruel and inexplicable fate, against which they are altogether impotent. They both come to an unfortunate and inescapable end, which they accept with eerie detachment. Yet there is nothing existential about Detour. To claim that the film is an existential document is to negate the most important part of the philosophy and to be caught in the common misconception that existentialism is identical to fatalism.
While they are related, the idea that fate is predetermined is only one possible facet of existentialism. Depending on whom you talk to, it isn’t even necessary to an existential way of seeing the world. There are two important things in the existential view: 1) the universe is objectively meaningless and 2) it remains meaningless until an individual develops his/her own personal set of beliefs. By comparison, fatalism is a gloomier view of the world in which everything–values, society, the universe itself–is predetermined. Existentialism, on the other hand, places high value on free will, especially in the face of insurmountable odds. There is even a surprisingly optimistic group of existential theists who believe the universe has significant meaning but human beings are incapable of understanding it, so we are forced to produce up our own value systems.
Al Roberts is trapped smack-dab in the middle of a fatalistic world. He is a hapless pawn of fate and all his decisions are made in reaction to his haphazard state of affairs. Unlike the (anti) heroes of other film noir movies, Roberts does not make objective decisions of how to run his life. There is never a clear system of beliefs by which he lives.
Yet this pessimism does not take anything away for the viewer. In fact, the combination of hard-core fatalism and the claustrophobia created by Ulmer’s severe budgetary constraints is what makes Detour such an undeniable cult favourite. Nowhere else is the hapless film noir hero so unrelentingly pushed and pulled and torn apart by chance. Certainly, a lot of the classic film noir movies draw their themes from existential ideas, but a good noir doesn’t need existentialism to be great. After all, it is fatalism, not existentialism that makes Detour the delightfully blackest of the noir.
Notes: Detour was faithfully remade (also on a zero budget) in 1992 with Tom Neal Jr. playing the lead role originally portrayed by his father. The remake was directed by Wade Williams, an eccentric collector and distributor of science fiction films.

Kiss Me Deadly

weston.robert — Fri, 04 May 2001 00:00:00 +0000

In 1955, Robert Aldrich, a director whose career is filled with genre films, produced what is arguably the greatest example of American noir cinema. Film historian Steven Scheuer called Kiss Me Deadly “the apotheosis” of the classic film noir period. More than once, the film has been called the best film noir ever made. Certainly the film was decades ahead of its time.
Aldrich is best known as the director of the campy horror film, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and the classic war film, The Dirty Dozen (1967). This is not to imply that Aldrich did not have a sense of film form or that his films did not have prevailing stylistic motifs. A look at Vera Cruz (1954), and The Big Knife (1956–his follow-up to Kiss Me Deadly), with their persistent use of heavy shadow as well as high and low angles, reveal a composition style ideally suited to film noir. So it comes as no surprise that he would produce one of the more most important contributions to genre filmmaking.
Based on Mickey Spillane’s novel of the same title, Kiss Me Deadly follows the hard-fisted exploits of Mike Hammer, a character with the dubious distinction of being the harshest, least sympathetic of the seminal hard-boiled detectives. In the film version of Kiss Me Deadly Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is searching for a mysterious box he knows nothing about, save for the fact that it contains something more valuable than anything he has ever chased in the past.
The film opens along a dark California highway. A young woman (Cloris Leachman), barefoot, clad only in an ill-fitted raincoat, scampers along the asphalt. She frantically tries to flag down a number of uncaring drivers. Desperate, she runs out in front of a handsome roadster. Mike Hammer is behind the wheel. He offers her a lift, but not before chastising her for nearly wrecking his car. She tells him her name is Christina Baily; she is named after the English Victorian poet, Christina Georgina Rossetti. They stop at a gas station and the woman mails an ambiguous letter (we later discover the letter is destined for Mike himself–Christina read his address off his automobile registration).
A police roadblock stops them. The cops ask Mike if he has seen a woman who fits Christina’s description. He doesn’t let on, pretending Christina is his wife. They drive on.
“If we don’t make that bus stop,” she tells him, “Remember me.”
Of course, they never get to the bus station. A black limousine runs them off the road. Faceless men in dark suits spirit them away to a secluded cabin. Mike is beaten senseless and left for dead. Christina is tortured to death with a pair of pliers.
So begins Mike’s quest for the great whatzit.
This is heavy stuff, even for a film produced amid the height—or depths—of the violent, amoral B-noir pictures of the 1950′s. And here we are only a few minutes into the film. From this point on, Mike and his smoldering assistant Velda (Maxine Cooper) are drawn into a convoluted network of murder, shadowy deceit and military conspiracy.
So what makes Kiss Me Deadly the paramount of the film noir tradition? Frankly, it’s got everything. The predominance of darkness and nighttime? Check. Morally ambiguous protagonists? Check. Existential underpinnings? Check. Dramatic compositions influenced by German Expressionist artists and filmmakers? Check, check, check.
If you’re looking for morally ambiguous characters, Kiss Me Deadly is the place to be. Everyone, right down to the most minor characters, have crippling character flaws. Mike and Velda run a private investigation service that specializes in divorce cases. More to the point, Mike seduces the wives while Velda seduces the husbands. Then they help the poorer of the two sue the other for adultery, taking a fat cut of the proceeds. It is almost as if the requisite femme fatale—of which, the film has many—is not enough for Kiss Me Deadly. Mike Hammer himself is something of an homme fatale, leading desirous women, Velda included, into danger and ruin.
Beyond the two principal characters, there is the local policeman Pat Chambers (Wesley Addy), who is introduced as an amiable acquaintance of Mike and Velda. Brad turns out, however, to be a puppet for the FBI, who does nothing to help Velda when she is caught in the clutches of the same men who murdered Christina and countless others. Then there is Nick (Nick Dennis), Mike’s cartoonish Greek mechanic, whose material greed leads to a nasty demise. Even the clerk at the Hollywood Athletic Club is craven and pompous—and ends up dead.
The only redeemable character is Christina. She is educated, she has a progressive view of men and women as evidenced in her initial dialogue with Mike, and she possessed the ingenuity to escape her bullied incarceration. She also reads classical Victorian poetry; when Mike tours her apartment, he finds it is stocked wall-to-wall with similar volumes. But Christina does not survive past the opening moments of the film. Kiss Me Deadly seems to make the argument that only the cynical, the corrupt or the criminal can survive in the ethical wasteland of post-bomb L.A.
At the same time, it is a line from one of Rossetti’s sonnets that holds the muddled key to the mystery of the great whatzit. So the film has a thread of redemption—a sensitive, expressive work of art leads the way to truth. Yet as the film’s ending reveals, truth in turn leads only to destruction.
This is an appealing segue to the film’s existential theme. The way in which a film noir deals with its existential influences and similarities is always interesting. If an existentialist narrative can be summed up as dealing with characters that make up their own rules and live by them in a meaningless universe, then in a sticky situation, Mike Hammer would be Sartre’s investigator of choice. By this measure, Kiss Me Deadly makes an interesting example of existential film noir, as the characters do not appear to realize they inhabit an existential universe. Such a universe is not good or evil, it simply is. An individual must make his/her own set of laws and live by them. There is no objective truth.
But the great whatzit is clearly a symbol of truth. The idea that all will be revealed once it is found is each character’s fundamental motivation. Everyone is desperately fighting to find the mysterious box because it represents an answer to something they can’t explain, a desire for the ultimate; a divine explanation for everything. They have no idea that such an object is unattainable in an existential world. Each character, even Mike, who for most of the film does not even know what he’s looking for, rationalize the great whatzit into something they want or need. For Christina, it might have been truth or beauty. For Mike, it appears to be money, or perhaps redemption. For Dr. Soberin and the FBI agents, it is power. The only character that seems to realize such a “whatzit” is nothing more than a destructive myth is Velda, who muses:
“They. A wonderful word. And who are they? They are the nameless ones who kill people for the great whatzit. Does it exist? Who cares? Everyone everywhere is so involved in the fruitless search for what?”
So what is the great whatzit? The film implies its nature, but never makes the details explicitly clear. To do so would betray the film, especially a film in the noir tradition. The final “discovery” of the great whatzit inevitably leads not just to destruction of the central characters, but to a destruction so ferocious it threatens civilization itself. In the world of Kiss Me Deadly, the objective truth that the whazit represents is a wholly untenable concept.
Perhaps the most compelling fact of Kiss Me Deadly is that this is not the last we see of the great whatzit. A number of films that followed (notably Repo Man in 1984 and Pulp Fiction in 1994) use disarmingly similar objects as their pivotal motifs. Certainly, such films owe much to the mystifying whatzit’s original appearance in 1955′s Kiss Me Deadly.
For more information, click here.
Note: Some editions of the film on video feature a slightly shortened, alternate ending. According to the film notes, the original release featured an even grimmer ending than the one intended by the screenwriter and director.