Tag Archives: film noir

by | March 23, 2019 · 4:09 pm

Vera from Detour

“She was young,” narrates the driver. “Not more than 24. Man, she looked like she’d just been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world.” That’s a line from the pulp classic Detour, released by the Poverty Row outfit PRC in 1945. Sad sack Al Roberts is describing the hitchhiker he just picked up, a woman with drastic brows and windblown hair. During her half-hour of screen time, she’s going to pose as his wife and die by his hand. Her name is Vera.

I loved Detour when I was 17. I mused about it as a fledgling critic: “Roberts certainly isn’t a hero—the closest he comes to performing a virtuous action is seeking a normal married life with [his girlfriend] Sue—but he isn’t much of an anti-hero either. He’s almost a neutral force in the film and in his own life.” By that time I’d read Roger Ebert’s essay on it, from his first Great Movies collection. He dubs the film’s stars, Tom Neal and Ann Savage, “a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer.” Vera, he writes, is “a venomous castrator,” and Al and Vera between them embody “two pure types: the submissive man and the female hellion.” At 17, I saw myself in Al’s cosmic impotence. I lived in a body clenched with dysphoria.

Back then, the fact that Vera (like Savage) was 24 meant nothing to me. She was an older woman. Now I find it startling that this iconic femme fatale is only a few years out of her teens. As an ostensibly male viewer, I only saw her beauty and her spite; now I see that she’s bruised, worn out, and despondent. Riding cross-country with strange men, why wouldn’t she be prickly? She never lays out a back story, but drops hints here and there. “The cops are no friends of mine,” remarks this hard-bitten nihilist whose fantasies evoke years of hunger and hustle. “No more worrying about the rent!” she cries. “No sweating, scheming, wondering where your next meal’s coming from!” She’s an alcoholic with a terminal cough. Hardly a pure type.

Edgar G. Ulmer, a Jewish émigré from Austria, directed Detour during the last days of World War II. As with many genre films set on the home front, the war itself goes unmentioned, its horrors transmuted into a pall of Death. (Vera herself is like the fatal women in the films Val Lewton was producing at RKO.) In the decades since, the film’s become a cult object. Its spartan aesthetic invites the viewer to linger, like I did as a teen, like I’m doing now, and Savage’s Vera—with her glower and her bitter quips—has always been the key. She is the detour. Her counterfeit marriage to Al diverts him away from Sue. But he’s her detour, too. Without him, she wouldn’t be dead at 24. A femme is only fatale relative to the men around her. Alone, she’s a tragedy.

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by | October 12, 2015 · 9:00 am

What is one to do?

“I did write for a while in spite of them,” says the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “but it does exhaust me a good deal — having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.” Writing as a woman is a dangerous act. Gilman knew it, and I suspect Lucy Beatrice Malleson knew it, too. Malleson’s breakthrough as a writer came in her late twenties, when she began publishing mysteries under the pen name “Anthony Gilbert.” Ostensibly this was done to maintain her privacy and avoid the appearance of capitalizing on her uncle Miles’ recent fame. But it’s hard to imagine that the financial and professional advantages of a man’s name didn’t factor into this decision.

1941 saw the release of the “Anthony Gilbert” novel The Woman in Red. A few years later, under the auspices of Columbia Pictures, screenwriter Muriel Roy Bolton adapted it into what director Joseph H. Lewis would later call “a damn near perfect script.” My Name Is Julia Ross premiered in November of 1945. The film opens in rain-soaked London, Malleson’s lifelong home. Nina Foch plays Julia Ross, an unmarried woman behind on her rent and desperate for a job. Tipped off by a newspaper ad, she nabs a plum secretarial position with a rich widow and her grown son. But overnight, this dream job becomes a nightmare: the family and their servants drug her, kidnap her, and install her in a locked bedroom at the rear of a country mansion overlooking the sea.

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by | May 8, 2013 · 12:30 am

Punch Drunk

John Larch in The Phenix City Story | Brian Keith in 5 Against the House

Modern Gothic vehemence… a chilling documentary exactness and an exciting shot-scattering belligerence.

That’s Manny Farber in his essay “Underground Movies,” describing some tendencies found within Phil Karlson’s filmography. I think I’ll add abrasiveness and angularity to his pool of nouns as well. Each one of them is immediately apparent in The Phenix City Story (1955), which may be Karlson’s magnum opus and which is also the subject of my most recent column over at Movie Mezzanine. I’m especially fond of that “modern Gothic vehemence”: Karlson’s movies are forceful, like a boxer’s glove coming toward your face in 3D, the full power of a heavyweight artist behind them. (They’re kin to the films of Samuel Fuller, whose own novel The Dark Page was actually filmed by Karlson as the 1952 newspaper noir Scandal Sheet.)

Alleyways in Phenix City and 5 Against the House’s Reno

In addition to The Phenix City Story, I recently watched Karlson’s 5 Against the House (also 1955) which is thankfully much milder. No child murders or bloody mass beatings here; just four college buddies goofing around, two of whom served together in the Korean War, and one of whom was psychologically damaged by the experience. As a prank, the friends plot a brilliant heist on a Reno casino, intending to return the money later—but Brick (Brian Keith) is slipping into psychosis due to his post-traumatic stress, and he has other plans. 5 Against the House starts out as a lightweight comedy of Eisenhower-era male bonding, which makes its descent into mental illness and very real noir danger that much more gripping. Brick’s a reluctant villain, and his friends are reluctant heroes; no one thinks they’re in a crime thriller. The normal turns into the abnormal so quickly that you hardly notice at first.

Richard Kiley in The Phenix City Story | 5 Against the House’s parking garage climax

This, I think, speaks to one of Karlson’s greatest directorial strengths: he seems to coax brutality out of the everyday. His are blue-collar movies; sloppy, smudged, fashioning a world you can imagine living in before he blows it all to hell. John Payne’s ex-prizefighter in 99 River Street (1953), for example, has real relationships that he needs to balance with the bitterness seething inside him. The residents of Phenix City have homes and families they don’t want to endanger. Maybe this is the “chilling documentary exactness” Farber spoke of. His movies reek of tabloid sensationalism, but that never keeps them from being uncomfortably plausible. They’re like a full-page spread of crime scene photos snapped right in your own backyard.

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by | May 2, 2013 · 1:30 am

Straight Down the Line

Inviting me to select my favorite image from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), as The Film Experience’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” series has done this week, is a little like asking that I single out my favorite limb. I’ll make the choice eventually, sure, but it’ll be a reluctant one and involve lots of nervous glances from hand to foot and back again. What I’m trying to say is that Double Indemnity is an unusually beautiful film noir, shot by cinematographer John Seitz as a tapestry of shadows and key lights—a lustrous labyrinth of insurance offices and Venetian blinds leading “straight down the line,” as Barbara Stanwyck’s femme fatale repeatedly puts it.

But, well, the challenge is to pick one shot, so I picked one, and it’s at least pretty emblematic of Wilder and Seitz’s technique throughout the whole of the film. See, for example, the inventive patterns in which they’ve scattered light across the frame, drawing our eyes straight to the space between Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. The lighting supplements the actors’ already white-hot chemistry, suggesting a downward sloping line from his face to hers and a region of the screen that’s buzzing with sexual magnetism. Mere seconds before this, MacMurray was pacing the room, going on and on in voiceover about how “the hook” (read: his own cock) was pulling him toward her,

so at 8 o’ clock the bell would ring and I’d know who it was without even having to think, as if it was the most natural thing in the world…

And there she is, lit up like a vision from heaven (or elsewhere). The curls of her blond wig are shimmering and her body assumes an irresistible pose beneath that heavy trench coat. This is her about to cross the threshold into his dark bachelor pad, about to make the relationship between them more than just one of flirtatious salesman and client. It’s the seed of her anklet blossoming into adultery, and murder.

I suppose that’s why this shot—which, incidentally, lasts a full minute and fifteen seconds, this image emerging roughly in the middle—calls out to me: it’s so tentative, so teeming with potential. Double Indemnity is like the tale of the scorpion and the frog if it were about two scorpions trying to ferry one another across a river, and this is a shot of those deadly predators, each sizing the other up, separated only by a doorway. A couple other details I enjoy here: the shadow of the rain outside, barely visible on the seat of MacMurray’s pants; and that picture of a bare-knuckle boxer just to the right of the door.

Three more similarly framed prints grace the wall above his couch, and while I’ve never been able to fully integrate them into my reading of the film, they suggest to me an antiquated notion of brawny masculinity. Perhaps they hint at a kind of visceral thrill that MacMurray’s Walter Neff, this bundle of machismo and libido stuffed into a white-collar job, is pursuing whether through his relationship with a married woman or his attempt to “crook the house.” Those boxers, always lurking in the background, could signify the primal man lurking inside the skin of a mild-mannered insurance salesman.

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by | February 18, 2013 · 1:30 pm

Under the Gun

Edward Dmytryk was fresh from the Hollywood Ten when he made The Sniper (1952), which I wrote about over at Movie Mezzanine. It’s an especially intense little noir, lingering as it does over the pained face of its title character, who’s played by Arthur Franz in what I swear is one of the 1950s’ most underrated performances. Rarely have I seen an actor capture psychosis so vividly, yet with surprising subtlety. The closest thing Franz has to a co-star is Adolphe Menjou—a leader of the Hollywood witchhunts, as a matter of fact—as police detective “Frank Kafka.” Yeah, it’s a surprisingly literate thriller!

Incidentally, in that piece I mention Dmytryk’s “bisected compositions,” and I’d like to briefly expand on that. I’m consistently impressed by the mise-en-scène in this movie, as Franz is pressed to one side of the frame and something about the world he loathes (stranger, coworker, dunk tank woman, smokestack painter, landlady) occupies the other. It’s such an economical use of screen space, such a visceral way of visualizing misanthropy, and thanks to Dmytryk’s bold use of lines and angles, it also results in some beautiful compositions. The Sniper is top-shelf noir in an pulpy, unassuming package.

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