Author: Keith Humphreys

Categories
Action/Adventure Mystery/Noir

Cotton Comes to Harlem

Cotton Comes to Harlem (novel & film) – www.detnovel.com

When you steal from white people, that’s your business. But when you steal from Black people, that’s my business!

So growls badass but ethical Police Detective Ed Coffin (Raymond St. Jacques), who along with his more laid back but equally badass partner Grave Digger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) protects the Black community in the most successful effort to bring the work of legendary novelist Chester Himes to the big screen: Cotton Comes to Harlem.

The plot: A charismatic, slick, con artist/preacher (Calvin Lockhart) is bilking the good people of Harlem with a phony Back to Africa scheme when gun toting bandits steal the contents of the hefty collection plate. But the hiding place for the missing $87,000 remains unknown, requiring Coffin and Jones to track down the loot while battling with mobsters, Black nationalists, and a femme fatale for the ages (Judy Pace).

Though best known as an actor (see, e.g., my recommendation of The Hill) and civil rights advocate, Ossie Davis occasionally ventured into directing. This 1970 movie was his first effort (he also co-wrote the script with Arnold Perl) and it’s a worthy effort indeed. Davis does a fine job both as a storyteller and an extractor of good performances from the actors. What comes through most of all is his feeling for Himes’ work and even moreso for the raffish, complex, dynamic, down but never out place that is Harlem. Watching this movie feels like walking through a neighborhood that is alive, and that’s a credit to Davis.

Vudu - Cotton Comes to Harlem Ossie Davis, Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St Jacques, Judy Pace, Watch Movies & TV Online

Himes, like Elmore Leonard, was a master of tough, thrilling, action scenes, and Davis nails that aspect of the books as well. Exciting car crashes, gun battles, and fist fights abound as Himes’ plot unfolds. Laurels also to costume designer Anna Hill Johnstone for the colorful, stylish, outfits, which jazz up the movie visually and also do right by Himes, who loved to describe in detail how his characters were decked out.

This film is sometimes categorized as a comedy as well as an action film. Himes’ books definitely have funny moments, but I think Ossie Davis’ only mistake was overdoing that aspect of the story. Some of the attempts at provoking mirth are so broad/slapsticky that they undermine the tone set by the hard-edged action scenes. Other comic elements work better: The scenes where the black characters outsmart white characters in symbolic triumphs over oppression, the protest at the police station which satirizes 1970s politics as well as Python did with the People’s Front of Judea, and, of course, every scene with Redd Foxx because he’s constitutionally incapable of being less than funny, even when he’s not speaking.

But mainly, I would classify this as an excellent action-filled crime melodrama. Hollywood has lately been virtue-signalling about wanting to film more stories about and starring Blacks. I wish they’d put their money where their mouth is and make movies or a prestige television series about Chester Himes’ immortal recurring characters, Harlem detectives Ed Coffin and Gravedigger Jones.

p.s. Hollywood’s only other effort to adapt Himes’ work, A Rage in Harlem, is an above-average film you might like, but I’d rate it a notch below this one.

Categories
Horror/Suspense Mystery/Noir Science Fiction / Fantasy

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 Version)

BLACK HOLE REVIEWS: INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978) - creepy, paranoid, body horror

When I recommend multiple adaptations of the same story, I typically package them as double or triple features. But in this case, the remake of a classic film I have recommended is so well-made and so distinctly its own work of art that I grant it an essay of its own: the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Like the 1956 classic original, Philip Kaufman’s remake is based on Jack Finney’s popular novel The Body Snatchers, in which seed pods from another planet drift to earth and begin replacing humanity with soulless replicas. But Kaufman added his own twist, which was to move the story from a California backwater to modern day San Francisco, a city he knows very well. In doing so, he preserved the suspense and chills of the original story while also getting to show off the gorgeous City by the Bay while also gently parodying some of its self-consciously hip and alternative residents.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) Movie Review on MHM

Our likable and believable heroes this time around are Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams as dedicated public health department employees (Back when such people could afford lovely homes in San Francisco). W.D. Richter’s screenplay wisely never explains if they once were lovers, but the actors convey the romantic undertone of their relationship, even though she is, awkwardly, living with a guy who doesn’t quite seem to be himself lately.

There’s always a character in paranoia films who explains to the anxious protagonist why nothing is really amiss, it’s all in your head, and why not lie down and get some rest? Here that part is a San Francisco archetype, a psychological growth-touting guru, played perfectly by Leonard Nimoy. If you are going to be typecast, Spock is a fabulous role to have, but Nimoy didn’t get as much chance as he deserved to try other things.

As for the extraterrestrial nasties, kudos to the special effects and makeup teams for creating some unnerving aliens with gut churning reproductive habits. One wonders if the makers of the Alien films were inspired by this movie’s parasitic menaces. Combined with terrific pacing (something lacking in some of Kaufman’s other movies), the heroes’ battle to resist the invaders is edge of your seat stuff.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Another thing I cherish about this movie is that while it’s mainly in the sci-fi/horror genre, it has noir elements and cinematographer Michael Chapman shot it as such. As has been shown in many classic noirs, San Francisco was made for shadowy lighting, unusual camera angles, and lonely compositions, all of which Chapman artfully employs here.

Last but certainly not least, this film breaks away from its classic predecessor in many respects, but at the same time stays reverent to it. Most notably, both the star (Kevin McCarthy) and director (Don Siegel) of the 1956 version have cameo roles that are both fun and scary. Put it all together and you have in my opinion both the best movie in Kaufman’s impressive ouevre and one of Hollywood’s freshest remakes ever.

p.s. Look fast in the opening scenes for a creepy looking priest on a swing played by Robert Duvall! As Kaufman tells it, he thought every horror movie should have priest in it so he asked his friend Duvall to do the wordless cameo.

Categories
Action/Adventure Romance

Captain Blood

Swashbuckler: Lessons in Morality From Peter Blood, the Pirate

An intelligent, dashing, apolitical doctor tends to a wounded rebel during the English Civil War and finds himself branded a criminal and sold into slavery. But his courage, leadership ability, and swordsmanship enable him to reverse his fortunes by becoming the greatest outlaw pirate of the high seas!: Captain Blood. This 1935 movie was a mega-hit adaptation of a mega-hit novel by Rafael Sabatini. Many a wildly popular film has had minimal artistic merit, but in this case craft and entertainment value go hand in hand.

Warner Brothers gambled big financially on Captain Blood but even moreso by resting the movie on the shoulders of two little-known actors, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland. Thus was born a screen pairing of which audiences could not get enough, leading to seven more films together that were rich in adventure, romance, and some comedy too. As the heroic Peter Blood, Flynn is passionate and athletic but also thoughtful and at times — particularly in his scenes with de Haviland — even vulnerable. This being the 1930s, de Haviland was given less to do, but she makes the most of it with charm, teasing humor, and a remarkable ability to non-verbally convey disabling sexual desire.

The film also benefits enormously from the literate dialogue in the adapted screenplay of Casey Robinson, and, the presence of a first rank director, Michael Curtiz, in the first of the 11 films he made starring Flynn. Curtiz handles so much so well in this movie, ranging from intimate romantic moments to epic battles with complex sets and hundreds of actors, that Captain Blood should be more often mentioned alongside Casablanca among his most significant achievements.

And though his character comes and goes a bit too quickly, Basil Rathbone delivers the goods as Blood’s frenemy, pirate captain Levasseur. He overacts zee Franch rrrrogue stuff a bit, but all sins are forgiven when he picks up a sword. Rathbone was a champion fencer in real life, and to the extent Flynn is credible as a duelist here, the credit goes to his coaching. Kudos to the rest of the supporting players as well, who are all credible in parts large and small.

Movies! TV Network | The Making of a Swashbuckler: Captain Blood

The action scenes, especially the closing sea battle in Jamaica, are completely credible and thrilling (props to George Amy for outstanding editing). Even though special effects have come a long way since 1935 (e.g., in the magnificent Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World) the cannon shots, swordplay, wooden ships, and iron men in Captain Blood are as vivid and vital as any Hollywood has ever portrayed.

Captain Blood would rank on any list of Hollywood’s greatest swashbuckling pirate movies, and has connections to another Sabatini novel whose adaptations would appear the same roll of honor twice: The Sea Hawk. The 1924 silent version included battle scenes filmed with massive sea-going models that were so astonishing that footage from them was recycled (with added sound of course) in subsequent films, including Captain Blood. The other connection is more obvious, namely that without Captain Blood lifting Flynn from obscurity in 1935, there would never have been the equally good 1940 Flynn version of The Sea Hawk.

p.s. If you like this movie, you will almost certainly enjoy two other movies I recommend: The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

p.p.s. Dame Olivia de Haviland, incredibly, was with us until July of 2020. Late in her long life, she said that she and Flynn were in love but never consummated their relationship. It’s easy to imagine that the genuine, aching desire they experienced in real life was part of what made them such an irresistible pairing on screen.

Categories
Documentaries and Books

Unseen

Unseen (2016)

One of my formative professional experiences was clinically assessing individuals entering addiction treatment in Detroit at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic. I follow each patient up many months later to see how their lives were going and whether they had benefited from treatment. In the low-income, predominately Black neighborhoods of an industrial city in steep decline I witnessed and heard about horrifying things, but also came away impressed by the resilience and decency human beings can summon in extreme circumstances. No film brought me back to those experiences more than Laura Paglin’s powerhouse 2016 documentary Unseen.

The subject matter of the movie could at one level not be more grim: the serial rape and murder of 11 African-American women in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Cleveland. Though the sociopathic killer behind the crimes committed them over a series of years, almost no inquiries were made by the police until a brave woman survived his attack, went to the police, and was believed (I emphasize this last point because the police had done little or nothing when presented with similar complaints by other women in the past). Unseen asks why so little notice was taken for years of multiple human beings being assaulted, tormented, and murdered.

To answer this question, Paglin takes an approach unlike most documentaries about serial killers: putting the focus on the victims rather than the perpetrator. Multiple women who survived terrifying assaults tell their shattering stories directly to the camera with courage and insight.

Why did no one intervene? The victims were all low-income Black women who were addicted to crack cocaine, engaged in sex work, or both. Many were already estranged from their families or anyone else who could have noticed and reported their disappearance. They had no worth in the eyes of the killer of course, but the film makes clear that this was a disturbingly widely held sentiment. A local shopkeeper says the killer did a service by cleaning up the neighborhood’s “garbage” and many of the police clearly could not be bothered to investigate complaints of sexual assault filed by drug using prostitutes. The women themselves sometimes took this devaluation into their own hearts and therefore lacked the self-respect to demand better treatment from the world around them.

The film’s great achievement is humanizing the victims. It does this via moving interviews of those women who survived and of the friends and family of those who did not. Several interviewees are particularly skillful as well at humanizing the neighborhood as a whole, illuminating how the loss of jobs, prosocial cultural institutions, and hope for the future, ground down almost everyone in Mount Pleasant. The interviews are interspersed with scenes of the neighborhood, from the court trial, and from the police interrogation of the killer, making the movie even more compelling.

I also respect the way this movie dismantles myths (some conservative, some liberal) that many people who have never been in neighborhoods like Mount Pleasant propagate. The bigoted stereotype of inner city immorality cannot survive the love for family and community that the interviewees evince. The trope that crack cocaine was just another drug about which there was an overblown moral panic (which my friend David Kennedy, who worked in the same sorts of neighborhoods I did, eloquently refers to as “bullshit”) is also deservedly left in ruins by addicted women describing its uniquely destructive effect on their lives. And the currently fashionable idea that getting rid of police would help low-income African-Americans looks both naive and dangerous in light of the monster that stalked and murdered so many. These women needed more and better police, not a perpetual absence of protection from law enforcement. The latter would be the ultimate fantasy of the man who raped and murdered them.

Can material this dark be uplifting? I think it can. You weep with the victims and share their pain and rage, but also come away in awe of their grit, honesty, and desire for justice.

Categories
Action/Adventure Science Fiction / Fantasy

War of the Worlds **Double “Feature”**

Did the 1938 Radio Broadcast of 'War of the Worlds' Cause a Nationwide Panic?

I often recommend multiple movie adaptations of the same story (e.g., The Lodger, Dracula, The Hands of Orlac) for the enjoyment and education that comes from comparing how the same material has been filmed by different artists in different eras. H.G. Well’s classic novel War of the Worlds presents an opportunity to make a different type of comparison, namely between strong adaptations in two different media: radio and film.

I’ll begin by recommending the 1938 radio adaptation (click here to listen). To the extent people have heard of it at all, they know it as the show that allegedly drove America into a national panic about invading Martians (in truth, very few people actually listened to the broadcast). What it ought to be remembered for is its high level of artistic achievement.

Too Much Johnson Is Never Enough Orson: The 'Lost Film' of Orson Welles | lokke heiss

The radio play was performed by the Mercury Theater troupe founded by two wildly talented people: Orson Welles and John Houseman. Howard Koch, who later became justly famous as the co-scripter of Casablanca, gets the credit for brilliantly adapting H.G. Wells’ novel to radio in a fashion that took advantage of everything the medium and the Mercury Theater company could do. The novel’s rather lengthy set-up chapters and some of its clunky plot development (i.e., having the narrator run into someone who provides crucial information) were a function of the book being told through the eyes of a single narrator. In contrast, staged as a fake news broadcast with scattered, breathless, reports coming in as the Martians wreak havoc, the radio play grips the audience by the lapels immediately, giving a range of details from different geographic locations in an utterly realistic fashion.

Radio also of course opens up opportunities to accentuate the power of sound — the screams and footfalls of panicked crowds, the horrible, metallic, unscrewing of the Martian cylinders, and the terrifying zzzaaapppp of those heat rays! It’s high craftmanship that still leaves us the fun of imagining how it all looked

Last, but not least, what an explosion of talent this troupe of actors represented! Not just the big names, but also people like Ray Collins, Dan Seymour, Kenny Delmar, and Frank Readick. They are all masterful at creating characters with voice alone, each of whom seems like a real human being responding to out of this world events. Some New York theater fans were disappointed when talented, stage-trained actors they admired began transferring to new, middle brow, media like radio and film, but the upside was that the whole country and indeed the whole world got to enjoy the dramatic gifts and skills of companies like the Mercury Theater.

Orson Welles - War Of The Worlds (1969, Gatefold, Vinyl) | Discogs

I loved listening to radio play as a kid (the image here is of the record album of it my parents owned) and it’s just as suspenseful and exciting for me today. The radio adaptation of War of the Worlds is in the public domain so you can give it a listen anytime.

The most widely known cinematic version of the same story is probably the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise mega-buck 2005 adaptation. But the sci-fi magic that duo summoned in the superb Minority Report was nowhere in evidence in their dreary, weirdly lifeless, take on H.G. Wells. You’d be far better off revisiting the work of another talented pair of frequent collaborators, producer George Pal and Director Byron Haskin, who made a groundbreaking version of War of the Worlds in 1953.

Tuesday Movie: The War of the Worlds (1953) - DeKalb County Convention and Visitors Bureau

Barré Lyndon, like Orson Welles, took creative license with the original material to create a story telling style that worked well in a new medium. The film opens with two set up narrations, the longer of which, by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, is coupled with an imaginative tour of the planets in our solar system (at least as understood long ago). We then get straight into the action, with the crash landing of a mysterious meteor near an all-American small town (this time, in California). The townspeople are curious, the aliens are aggressive, the military is helpless, but luckily a sturdy Gene Barry as the heroic scientist and a believable Ann Robinson as his love interest and fellow crusader against Martians, are on the job. The quick-moving plot has many parallels with the original work, with the addition of some religious themes that likely played well in the 1950s America.

In addition to the exciting story, what wowed audiences about this movie were the trend-setting, Oscar-winning, special effects. Force fields, laser guns, exploding landmarks, devastated cities, and creepy Martians are among the sights on which to feast your eyes and ears. Of course modern computer-created effects are slicker, but for 1953, this was gobsmacking stuff that showed what movie magic could add to a Victorian English novel.

Categories
Drama Mystery/Noir

Witness for the Prosecution

The Ace Black Blog: Movie Review: Witness For The Prosecution (1957)

Agatha Christie’s popular blend of mysterious murders, eccentric characters, droll humor, and surprise endings have translated smoothly into many entertaining movies, including some all time-classics. In that glittering club along with another of my recommendation (And Then There Were None) is Billy Wilder’s 1957 gem Witness for the Prosecution.

Plot: While recovering from a heart attack, the brilliant and caustic Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Charles Laughton) is presented a murder case that tempts him back to the Old Bailey, despite the risks to his health. A charming ne’er do well named Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power) stands accused of murdering an older, well-heeled, widow named Emily Jane French (Norma Varden), who had fallen under his spell. Vole’s glamorous, enigmatic, German wife (Marlene Dietrich) at first seems willing and able to provide an alibi…but the audience shares Sir Wilfrid’s suspicion that the case will be nowhere near that simple.

Christie was comfortable with liberal adaptations of her work. Indeed, she herself changed the ending of her story Traitor’s Hands when turning into a play called Witness for the Prosecution. And she countenanced a number of further changes in the film version, as scripted by Wilder, Larry Marcus, and Harry Kurnitz. Their most brilliant innovations were enlarging the part of Sir Wilfred to give Laughton a showcase role and inventing outright the character of Miss Plimsoll, his long suffering nurse. Casting Laughton’s real-life wife, that shamelessly funny ham Elsa Lanchester, as Miss Plimsoll was another stroke of genius. The first quarter of the film could have stood on its feet just as a comedy, as Plimsoll mothers and badgers Sir Wilfrid to follow his health regime and he schemes and wheedles to obtain his treasured cigars and brandy.

Reviewing performances: Best Actress in a Supporting Role 1957 ...

But of course it’s not primarily a comedy, but a murder mystery and courtroom drama. It’s very strong on those terms, with articulate jousting in the courtroom and engrossing plot twists outside of it. The ending, which I will not ruin (and the post-credits ask audiences to abide by the same silence), is a bit contrived but still satisfying.

The smaller roles are also very well essayed, include Una O’Connor as the hilariously crotchety maid of the victim and Henry Daniell, whom I loved in multiple Rathbone-Bruce Sherlock Holmes films, as another lawyer. But even in this strong cast, Laughton towers over them all with one of signature performances of his stellar career. His Sir Wilfrid is a complete character: insufferable at times, dazzling at others, and always, at the core, honorable.

Tyrone Power was an intriguing choice as the accused. Entering middle age (and tragically, to die of a heart attack after this picture was released) , his handsomeness is still visible, but at a less godlike level that in the 1940s. He looks, appropriately, like a chancer who knows his looks will fade soon but are still impressive enough to spark fantasies in a lonely older woman. Marlene is as beguiling as ever, and it doesn’t really bother us that despite her penury, she wears a series of smashing outfits designed by Edith Head.

WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (1957) • Frame Rated

The movie is of course also another triumph for Billy Wilder, and one that at moments echoes some of his other movies. Leonard’s relationship with Mrs. French brings to mind Sunset Boulevard and a scene in post-war Germany with Dietrich and Power recalls A Foreign Affair. Resonant grace notes for fans of the legendary director.

Categories
Blogs on Film

Black Actors Break the Oscar Ceiling

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, African-American actors had a boomlet of Academy Award acting nominations. Many predicted at the time that the civil rights era had finally come to Hollywood, and that Black nominees and winners would become a fixture at the Oscar ceremony.

It was a false dawn. Nomination droughts set in for Best Actor (1972 to 1986), Best Actress (1974 to 1985), Best Supporting Actor (1969 to 1981) and Best Supporting Actress (1967 to 1983). Black actors were rarely given good opportunities to showcase their talents, and when they did, the Academy ignored them.

Basic Black: Oscar Goes to Halle Berry and Denzel Washington

In 2001, Halle Berry won the Oscar for Best Actress and Denzel Washington won for Best Actor. Again, many predicted that Hollywood had changed forever. Enough time has gone by to evaluate whether 2001 was a turning point or a blip on the radar.

The second time was the charm. Since the Academy’s creation in 1929, African-Americans have been nominated for acting awards a total of 88 times. Most (59%) of those nominations occurred from 2001 onward. The change is even more impressive if the analysis is restricted to winners: 16 Oscars in the 21st century, versus only 6 over the preceding 72 years.

Categories
Blogs on Film

My Favorite Line in Casablanca

Everyone has their favorite quote from Casablanca – so many to choose from: “Round up the usual suspects!”, “I’m shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on in this establishment”, “Are my eyes really brown?” etc. After about 10 or 15 viewings, my favorite switched to a lesser known line. I love it because of how it’s said, how it’s the key to the love story, and most of all how it’s untrue.

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As in a Shakespearean romance, there’s a young couple who are a foil to the central romance (between Rick and Ilsa). Jan and Annina Brandel are just-married Bulgarian refugees, desperate to get to America. Annina Brandel (Joy Page) comes to Rick for advice.

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She is considering prostituting herself for exit visas but worries about her husband’s reaction. She asks Rick “If someone loved you very much and your happiness was the only thing she wanted in the world and she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her?”.

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Whence comes my favorite line. Rick says “Nobody ever loved me that much”. Bogart delivers it with a perfect mixture of hurt, bitterness, and vulnerability. Underneath his cynical shell, Rick’s still standing at that train station with a comical look on his face because his insides have just been kicked out, thinking that Ilsa never really loved him.

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And of course he’s wrong! Casablanca’s love story is fundamentally about Rick realizing that Ilsa did indeed “love him that much”, so that they both “get Paris back”. Casablanca in many stories at once, but at least for the love story, this is the line upon which it turns.

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p.s. This as you might have guessed was originally a Twitter thread, and one of the nice things about putting it there is that I got a kind comment from Monika Henreid, daughter of Paul, who played Victor Laszlo.

Categories
Drama Featured Film Mystery/Noir

Nightmare Alley

Tyrone Power was one of most dashing leading men in Hollywood history and became a massive box office draw beginning in the mid-1930s. However, after many swashbuckling Saturday matinees, musicals, and romantic dramas, he longed to do something more weighty. He used his star power to convince a skeptical Daryl Zanuck to produce a film based on a dark, disturbing, debut novel by a dark, disturbing guy named William Lindsay Gresham. The resulting film was a most atypical one both from the point of view of Power’s career and the film noir genre: 1947’s Nightmare Alley.

The plot is long and twisty, but Jules Furthman of The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not fame knew as well as any screenwriter how to keep an audience from becoming lost. Stanton Carlisle (Power) works at a carnival, assisting a couple with their low rent mind-reading act. Zeena (Joan Blondell, whose performance stands out even in this strong cast) has become the brains of the outfit due to her husband Pete’s decline into alcoholism (A sympathetic Ian Keith). Once Zeena and Peter were the toast of high society, due to a sophisticated code they developed to create the illusion of extra-sensory perception. Stanton turns his magnetic charm towards getting Zeena to teach him the code and simultaneously seducing a young beauty named Molly who also works at the carnival (Coleen Gray). He gets what he wants from both women, and he and Molly flee to the big city. They revive Zeena and Pete’s old act with tremendous success. But soon an alluring and devious psychiatrist (a delicious part deliciously played by Helen Walker) tempts Stanton into an even bigger con, which leads him to places many a film noir protagonist knows far too well.

Tyrone Power and Helen Walker in Nightmare Alley (1947)

Nightmare Alley is a punchy exploration of how ambition and greed translate into cruelty and deceit. Although not generally known as a noir director, Edmund Goulding has firm grasp of the material, and deserves credit for the uniformly strong acting. He and Power had just collaborated on the excellent The Razor’s Edge and they continue to thrive together here, making Stanton appealing and vulnerable enough that we keep caring about him even as his morality corrodes. The film also offers an unusually large array of complex, strong, women characters, all of which are well-played.

Nightmare Alley is unlike most noirs of the period, for two reasons. First, Power doesn’t look the part of the noir protagonist: he’s too handsome, too smooth, and too poised. He looks out of place in the carny scenes, but at home in the swanky scenes where he wears a tuxedo in a plush hotel ballroom. And yet, it works, because this is perhaps the best performance of Power’s career, stretching his range unlike anything he’d been in before. The fall of his character is that much more devastating precisely because he starts out looking like he has success oozing out of every pore.

The other atypical aspect of the film is that it’s one of very few big budget noirs of the period (Leave Her To Heaven being a better known example) Noirs were usually cheaply made, and indeed some of their conventions (e.g., minimal lighting) emerged in part to hide their low budgets. In contrast, this is a gorgeous looking film shot by Lee Garmes and stuffed with authentic sets, varied locations, and perfect outfits for the characters.

Tyrone Power and Taylor Holmes in Nightmare Alley (1947)

The only thing that bothered me about the film is that the perfect, sock you in the gut final scene became the penultimate one when Zanuck saw the rushes. The film closes instead on a more hopeful (though still dark) scene that has less psychic weight. Studio-imposed, punch pulling, final scene are commercially understandable but artistically barren (I had the same complaint about 99 River Street), particularly here when “I was made for it” is an all time noir classic line that should have closed out the story. But that’s a small complaint to have about such an accomplished piece of cinema.

Nightmare Alley didn’t do good business at release because Zanuck didn’t believe in it and because it violated audience expectations for Power and for film noir. But in the years since, it has been deservedly rediscovered as a classic of the genre and a high point of the tragically short career of Tyrone Power.

Categories
Documentaries and Books Drama Mystery/Noir

In a Lonely Place

To hell with happiness. More important was excitement and power and the hot stir of lust. Those made you forget.

Dorothy Hughes’ bewitching and disturbing novel In a Lonely Place was thankfully re-issued by New York Review of Books in 2017. It very much recalls some of Jim Thompson’s darkest works, though she’s arguably an even better writer than he was. Hughes’ stylish evocation of a psychopathic psychology is like one of those sweetened Russian cocktails that tastes wonderful going down even though you know it’s burning out your insides and will leave you full of the blackest regret in the morning. I can’t recommend the book strongly enough, though not for the faint-hearted.

Once you have read it, consider watching the unforgettable film adaptation, which I review below.

I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.

Amazingly, there are people who consider themselves Humphrey Bogart fans who have never seen the brooding, powerful 1950 film In a Lonely Place. In one of his greatest roles, Bogart plays bitter, hard-drinking Hollywood screenwriter Dixon Steele, whose best days seem to be behind him. After being tasked with adapting a dreadful novel for the silver screen, he asks a ditzy hat check girl who loves the book to come to his apartment and tell him the plot. The next morning, the police inform Dix that the girl has been murdered and dumped by the side of the road. As the audience, we do not know what really happened. Steele is initially alibied by sultry neighbor Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame, all eyebrows, curves and nimbly masked emotional turmoil), who promptly yields to his romantic advances. They fall in love and Dix is able to regain his gifts as a writer. But as Laurel sees Dix continue to be volatile and aggressive, she begins to wonder, Suspicion-style, whether Dix is a murderer after all.

This movie is cynical about fame, Hollywood, and human relationships, but tantalizes us with the possibility that new love can redeem it all. The suspense emerges less from the murder mystery than from the warring internal emotions of the characters. Director Nicholas Ray knew life’s dark places and how to get actors to go there. His marriage to the volatile Grahame ended in the most sordid way imaginable while they were making this movie, and the anguish and anger on the set comes out in the electric performances of the cast. The film is also remarkable for its opening five minutes, which are a clinic in how a great director and actor can establish a character with ruthless economy (incidentally, the bar in the opening scene was modeled after Romanoff’s, Bogart’s favorite watering hole).

There are countless movies told from the man’s point of view in which a beautiful, younger woman falls in love with the protagonist (indeed, Bogart himself made a number of such films). The women in those movies are flat characters and we aren’t told why they go for the hero. He wants her, the story needs them to fall in love, so they do. What is truly remarkable about this movie’s structure is that it follows this formula about half-way through and then flips the perspective to the woman’s point of view.

Continue reading “In a Lonely Place”